Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

would be three days’ travel to 3-Kilo, said
Tahget, with much delay at border posts as they cut across the
territories of various squabbling statelets.
    Futurity spent most of the first day alone. The bare corridors
echoed; a ship meant to carry a hundred passengers seemed empty with
just the three of them, counting Poole.
    He quickly found his range of movement was limited. He had access
to corridors and rooms only over two decks, confined to a
lozenge-shaped volume near one end of the ship’s rough cylinder. The
corridors were bleak, panelled with bare blue-grey polymer, with not
a bit of artwork or personalisation in sight. Even within the lozenge
many rooms were closed to him, such as the bridge, or just plain
uninteresting, such as the refectory, the nano-food banks and the air
cycling gear.
    The lozenge of access spanned no more than fifty metres, on a
craft a kilometre long. In fact this whole pod of habitation was like
an afterthought, he started to see, an add-on bolted onto Ask
Politely, as if these corridors and the people in them were not the
point of the ship at all.
    And nobody would speak to him. Tahget and his crew were busy, and
as a mere earthworm, as they called him, they just ignored Futurity
anyhow. The woman Mara slept throughout the day. Michael Poole stayed
in the Captain’s office. He appeared to sit still for hours on end,
immersed in his own deep Virtual reflections. Futurity didn’t dare
disturb him.
    Futurity thought of himself as disciplined. He wasn’t without
inner resource. He had been assigned a cabin, and he had brought a
data desk and other materials. So he sat down, faced his data desk,
and tried to pursue his seminary studies - as it happened, into the
divine nature of Michael Poole.
    The Wignerian faith was based on the comforting notion that all
history was partial, a mere rough draft. It was all based on quantum
physics, of course, the old notion that reality is a thing of
probabilities and might-bes, that collapses into the real only when a
conscious mind makes an observation. But that conscious mind, with
all its observations, in turn wasn’t realised until a second mind
observed it - but that second in turn needed a third observer to
become real, who needed a fourth…
    This paradoxical muddle would be resolved at the end of time, said
the Wignerians, when the Ultimate Observer, the final Mind, would
make the last Observation of all, terminating chains of possibilities
that reached back to the birth of the universe. In that mighty
instant the sad history of the present, with its pain and war,
suffering and brief lives and death, would be wiped away, and
everybody who ever lived would find themselves embedded in a shining,
optimal history.
    This was the kernel of a faith that had offered profound hope
during the last days of the Coalition, when the whole Galaxy had been
infested with human soldiers, many of them not much more than
children. The faith had always been illegal, but it was blind-eye
tolerated by authorities and commanders who saw the comfort it
brought to their warriors.
    And when the Coalition fell, the faith was liberated.
    The Ecclesia of Base 478 had its origins in the Guild of
Engineers, an ancient agency that had itself participated in the
founding of the Coalition. The Guild had survived many political
discontinuities in the past. Now it survived the fall of the
Coalition and proved its adaptability again. The Guild took over an
abandoned Coalition training base, 478, and set up an independent
government. Like many others, it fully accepted the newly liberated
Wignerian faith, seeing in the religion a short cut to power and
legitimacy. Soon its Master of Guild-Masters proclaimed herself
Supreme Ecclesiarch, announcing that she alone owned the truth about
the faith - again, like many others.
    The Guild-Masters, following their old intellectual inclinations,
developed an interest in the theological underpinnings of their new
faith. Their Colleges on Base 478 quickly developed a reputation even
among rival orthodoxies as hosting the best Wignerian thinkers in the
Galaxy.
    But in those heady early days of theological freedom, there had
been constant schisms and splits, heresy and counter-heresy, as the
scholars debated one of the religion’s most fascinating and difficult
elements: the strange career of Michael Poole. This entrepreneur,
engineer and adventurer of humanity’s remote history had, it was
said, projected himself into the far future