Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

ahead the more distant stars merged into a band of
light that streaked across the sky, a stellar horizon, but if he
looked up or down, the stars scattered to thinness, and he could see
through the veil of light to a sky that was noticeably empty - and
black.
    Futurity had never seen a black sky before. He felt as if his own
mind was crumbling, as if the bright surface of reality was breaking
down, to reveal an abyssal darkness beneath. He longed to be back on
478, where the whole sky was always drenched with light.
    But Poole was animated. ’What a tremendous sky! You know, from Sol
system you can make out only a few thousand stars, and the Galaxy is
just a ragged band of mushy light. The Core ought to be visible from
Earth - it should be as bright as the Moon - but the spiral-arm dust
clouds get in the way, and it’s invisible. Futurity, it was only a
few decades before the first human spaceflight that people figured
out they lived in a Galaxy at all! It was as if we lived in a shack
buried in the woods, while all around us the bright lights of the
city were hidden by the trees.’
    Poole had a kindly streak, and was empathetic. He sensed
Futurity’s discomfort, and to distract him he brought the acolyte to
the Captain’s office, and encouraged him to talk about himself.
Futurity was flattered by his interest - this was Michael Poole! -
and he responded with a torrent of words.
    Futurity had always been cursed with a lively, inquisitive mind.
As a young boy on the family farm, surrounded by the lowering ruins
of war, he had laboured to tease healthy plants from soil illuminated
by pale Galaxy-centre light. It had been fulfilling in its way, and
Futurity saw with retrospect that to spend his time on the processes
of life itself had satisfied some of his own inner spiritual
yearnings. But the unchanging rhythms of the farm weren’t sufficient
to sustain his intellect.
    The only libraries on Base 478 were deep underground, where
Ecclesiast scholars and scribes toiled over obscure aspects of
Wignerian theology, and the only academic career available to
Futurity was in a seminary. In fact, on a priest-run world, to become
an Ecclesiast of some rank or other was the only way to build any
kind of career. ’On 478 even the tax collectors are priests,’ as
Futurity’s father had said ruefully.
    So the boy said goodbye to the farm, and donned the cassock of a
novice. He gave up his childhood name for a visionary Wignerian
slogan: Futurity’s Dream.
    The study was hard, the rule of the Hierocrats and tutors
imperious and arbitrary, but life wasn’t so bad. His intellect had
been fully satisfied by his immersion in the Ecclesia’s endless and
increasingly baroque studies of the historical, philosophical and
theological roots of its faith. He recoiled with humility from the
pastoral side of his work, though. It mortified him to hear the
confession of citizens older and wiser than he was. But that very
humility, one discerning Hierocrat had once told him, might mark him
out as having the potential to be a fine priest.
    Anyhow now, seven years later, his seemingly inevitable career
choices had led him to this extraordinary situation.
    ’And who are these >Kards    ’The Kardish Imperium is a new power that has risen in the Core,’
Futurity told Poole. ’Named after a famous admiral of the Core wars.
Expansive, aggressive, intolerant, ambitious - ’
    ’I know the type.’
    The Kards were on the march. There was only one state, in a Galaxy
quilted with petty statelets, capable of resisting the Kards - and
that was the Ideocracy, the rump of the collapsed Coalition.
    So far the Ideocracy had been as aloof concerning the Kardish as
it was about all the successor states, which it regarded as illegal
and temporary secessions from its own authority. But the Kards’
challenge was profound. Earth, base of the Ideocracy, was the home of
mankind. But the Galaxy Core had been the centre of the war, and more
humans had died there, by an order of magnitude, than all those who
had lived and died on Earth before the age of spaceflight. The Core
was the moral and spiritual capital of Homo galacticus, said the new
Kard. The question was, who was the true heir to the Coalition’s
mantle, Imperium or Ideocracy? The reputation of the Coalition still
towered, and its name burned brightly in human imaginations; whoever
won that argument might inherit a Galaxy.
    This was the terrible friction that had rubbed away the