Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

through a collapsing
chain of wormholes. He had done this in order to save mankind. Poole,
a redeemer who had confronted Timelike Infinity, came to embody and
humanise the chilly quantum abstractions of the faith. He was a Son
of that aloof Mother that was the Ultimate Observer.
    There seemed no doubt that Poole really had existed as an
historical figure. The question was: what was his relationship to the
Ultimate Observer? Was Poole just another supplicant, if an
extraordinary one, his life just one more thread in the tapestry
contemplated by the Wignerian godhead? Or, some argued further,
perhaps Poole and the Observer ought to be identified: perhaps
Michael Poole was the Observer. The trouble with that argument was
that Poole was undoubtedly human, whatever else he was, though his
achievements had been anything but ordinary. So could a god be made
incarnate?
    It was an issue that had always fascinated Futurity. Indeed, it
had so intrigued some of his predecessors that they had commissioned
the Virtual Poole from the Idealists so they could ask him about it:
it was a rough-and-ready engineer’s approach to a deep theological
question.
    But oddly, with the real thing - or at least a disturbing
simulacrum - just down the corridor of this ship, Futurity’s dry
scholarship seemed pointless. He found it hard to believe Poole
himself would have any time for this dusty stuff.
    After a couple of hours Futurity gave up. He left his cabin and
went exploring again.
    As he roamed the corridors he watched the crew at work. They all
seemed to be command staff, aside from a few orderlies who performed
such chores as serving the Captain his meals and shifting furniture
around to set up passengers’ cabins. It was puzzling. Futurity had no
experience of life aboard starships, but he could not see how the
crew’s complicated discussions and endless meetings related to the
ship’s actual operations. And he never spotted an engineer, a person
who might be in charge of the systems that actually made the ship
go.
    He was probably reading the situation all wrong. But Michael
Poole, who had once built starships himself, also concluded that
there was something very odd about this ship.
    On the second day he talked it over with Futurity. Tahget had
given Poole some limited access over where he could ’pop up’, as he
put it, and he had been able to roam a bit wider than Futurity had.
But not much further. His own internal-consistency protocols,
designed to give him some anchoring in humanity, made it impossible
for him to roam into areas that would have been hazardous for humans.
And when the Captain had spotted that Poole was hacking into
access-denied areas, such privileges had quickly been locked out.
    ’I saw a few sights before they shut me down, though,’ Poole said,
and he winked. ’We’re not alone on this ship. It’s a big place, and
we’re confined to this little box. But in the longer corridors on the
fringe of our cage, I saw things: shadows, furtive movements. Like
ghosts. And if you look too closely what you see disappears into the
shade.’
    Futurity frowned. ’You’re not saying the ship is haunted?’
    ’No. But I think there is, um, a second crew, a crew beneath the
crew, who are actually flying the damn ship. And it’s presumably to
serve their needs that we’re all jaunting out to 3-Kilo, because for
sure it isn’t for us. What I haven’t yet figured out is who those
people are, why they’re hiding from us, and what their relationship
is to Tahget and his bunch of pirates. But I’ll get there,’ he said
cheerfully. ’I’ll tell you something even odder. I’m not convinced
that the squat little folk I glimpsed were even wearing clothes!’
    Futurity never ceased to marvel at Poole. He was a tourist in this
twenty-eighth millennium, a revenant from the deepest past. And yet
he was finding his way around what must be a very strange future with
far more confidence than Futurity felt he could muster in a hundred
lifetimes.
     
    By the morning of the third day the Ask Politely had swum out of
the Core, and Futurity was growing disturbed by the sky.
    They were still only a few thousand light years from the centre of
the Galaxy, and behind the ship the Core was a mass of light, too
bright to be viewed by a naked human eye. But Futurity could already
tell he was in the plane of a galactic disc: there were stars all
around, but they were more crowded in some directions than others. If
he looked straight