Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

life of
Mara, and countless other refugees.
    ’And now,’ Futurity said, ’they are cleaning out the last
Ideocracy enclaves in the Core.’
    ’Ah. Like Mara’s world.’
    ’Yes. There isn’t much the Ideocracy can do, short of all-out war.
As for us,’ Futurity went on, ’the Ecclesia is just trying to keep
the peace.’ Through their faith the Ecclesia’s acolytes and academics
had links that crossed the new, shifting political boundaries.
’Michael Poole, the Wignerian faith was never legal under the
Coalition, but it spanned the Galaxy, and in its way unified mankind.
It survived the Coalition’s fall. Now, despite our fractured
politics, and even though the faith itself has schismed and schismed
again, it still unites us - or at least gives us something to talk to
each other about. And it provides a moral, civilising centre to our
affairs. If not for the faith’s moderating influence, the fall of the
Coalition would have been much worse for most of humanity.’
    Mara’s fate was an example. Wignerian diplomatic links had been
used to set up a reasonably safe passage for Ideocracy refugees from
the Core. Thus at places like Base 478 refugees like Mara were passed
off from one authority to another, following a chain of sanctuaries
out of the Core to their new homes in the remote gloom of the
rim.
    Poole seemed cynical about this. ’A service for which you charge a
handsome fee, no doubt.’
    Futurity was stung. ’We’re not a rich world, Michael Poole. We
rely mostly on donations from pilgrims to keep us going. We have to
charge the refugees or their governments for transit and passage;
we’d fall into poverty ourselves otherwise.’
    But Poole didn’t seem convinced. ’Pilgrims? And what is it those
pilgrims come to see on Base 478? Is it the shrine of the great
messiah? Is it me? Have you dug up my bones? Do you have some
gibbering manikin of me capering on a monument, begging for
cash?’
    Futurity tried to deny this: not literally. But there was truth in
Poole’s charge, he thought uncomfortably. Of course Poole’s body had
been lost when he fell into the wormhole to Timelike Infinity, and so
he had been saved from the indignity of becoming a relic. But as the
Wignerian religion had developed the Ecclesia had mounted several
expeditions to Earth, and had returned with such treasures as the
bones of Poole’s father Harry…
    Poole seemed to know all this. He laughed at Futurity’s
discomfiture.
    The Captain called them. They had arrived at 3-Kilo, and Tahget,
in his blunt, testing way, said his passengers might enjoy the
view.
     
    Poole was charmed by the clustering stars of 3-Kilo. To Futurity
these spiral-arm stars, scattered and old, were a thin veil that
barely distracted him from the horror of the underlying darkness
beyond.
    But it wasn’t stars they were here to see.
    Poole pointed. ’What in Lethe is that?’
    An object shifted rapidly against the stars of 3-Kilo.
Silhouetted, it was dark, its form complex and irregular.
    Poole was fascinated. ’An asteroid, maybe - no, too spiky for
that. A comet nucleus, then? I spent some time in the Kuiper Belt,
the ice moon belt at the fringe of Sol system. I was building
starships out there. Big job, long story, and all vanished now, I
imagine. But a lot of those Kuiper objects were like that: billions
of years of sculptures of frost and ice, all piled up in the dark.
Pointlessly beautiful. So is this a Kuiper object detached from some
system or other? But it looks too small for that.’
    Futurity was struck again by the liveliness of Poole’s mind, the
openness of his curiosity - and this was only an incomplete Virtual.
He wondered wistfully how it might have been to have met the real
Michael Poole.
    Then Poole saw it. ’It’s a ship,’ he said. ’A ship covered with
spires and spines and buttresses and carvings, just like our own Ask
Politely. A ship like a bit of a baroque cathedral. I think it’s
approaching us! Or we’re approaching it.’
    He was right, Futurity saw immediately. He felt obscurely excited.
’And - oh! There’s another.’ He pointed. ’And another.’
    Suddenly there were ships all over the sky, cautiously converging.
Every one of them was unique. Though it was hard to judge distances
and sizes, Futurity could see that some were larger than the Ask
Politely, some smaller; some were roughly cylindrical like the
Politely, others were spheres, cubes, tetrahedrons, even toroids, and
some had no discernible