Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

regularity at all. And all of them sported
gaudy features every bit as spectacular as Politely’s. There were
immense scoop mouths and gigantic flaring exhaust nozzles, spindly
spines and fat booms, and articulating arms that worked delicately
back and forth like insect legs. Some of the ships even sported
streamlined wings and fins and smooth noses, though none of them
looked as if they could survive an entry into an atmosphere. These
glimmering sculptures drifted all around the sky.
    Poole said, ’Quite a carnival. Look at all that crap, the spines
and spikes and nets and fins. It looks like it’s been stuck on by
some giant kid making toy spaceships. I can’t believe there’s any
utility in most of those features.’
    Futurity said, ’It’s also ugly. What a mess!’
    ’Yes,’ said Poole. ’But I have the feeling we’re not the ones this
stuff is supposed to impress.’ He pointed. ’And that one looks as if
it wants to get a bit more intimate than the rest.’
    A huge ship loomed from the crowd and approached the Ask Politely.
It was a rough sphere, but its geometry was almost obscured by a
fantastic hull-forest of metal, ceramics and polymers. Moving with an
immense slow grace, it bore down on the Ask Politely, which waited
passively.
    At last the big sphere’s complex bulk shadowed most of the
observation lounge’s blister. A jungle of nozzles and booms slid
across the window. Futurity wondered vaguely how close it would come
before it stopped.
    And then he realised it wasn’t going to stop at all.
    Captain Tahget murmured, ’Brace for impact.’ Futurity grabbed a
rail.
    The collision of the two vast ships was slow, almost gentle.
Futurity, cupped in the Ask Politely’s inertial-control field, barely
felt it, but he could hear a groan of stressed metal, transmitted
through the ship’s hull. Two tangles of superstructure scraped past
each other; dishes were crashed and spines broken, before the ships
came to rest, locked together.
    Translucent access tubes sprouted from the hulls of both ships,
and snaked across space like questing pseudopodia, looking for
purchase. Futurity thought he saw someone, or something, scuttling
through the tubes, but it was too far away to see clearly.
    Poole gazed out with his mouth open. ’Look - here’s another ship
coming to join the party.’
    So it was, Futurity saw. It was a relative dwarf compared to the
monster that had first reached Ask Politely. But with more metallic
grinding it snuggled close against the hulls of the two locked
ships.
    Poole laughed. ’Boy, space travel has sure changed a lot since my
day!’
    Captain Tahget said, ’Show’s over. We’ll be here two days, maybe
three, before the swarming is done.’
    Poole glanced at Futurity questioningly. The swarming?
    Tahget said, ’Until then we maintain our systems and wait. Let me
remind you it’s the night watch; you passengers might want to get
some sleep.’ He glanced at Poole. ’Or whatever.’
    Futurity returned to his cabin, and tried to sleep. But there were
more encounters in the night, more subtle shudderings, more groans of
stressed materials so deep they were almost subsonic.
    This experience seemed to him to have nothing to do with
spaceflight. I am in the belly of a fish, he thought, a huge fish of
space that has come to this place of scattered stars to seek others
of its kind. And it doesn’t even know I am here, embedded within
it.

 
V
     
     
    During the 3-Kilo lay-off Captain Tahget had his crew scour
through the ship’s habitable areas, cleaning, refurbishing and
repairing. It was make-work to keep the crew and passengers busy, but
after a few hours Futurity conceded he welcomed the replacement of
the ship’s accumulated pale stink of sweat, urine and adrenaline with
antisepsis.
    But the continuing refusal of Mara, reluctant terrorist, to come
out of her cabin caused a crisis.
    ’She has to leave her cabin, at least for a while,’ Tahget
thundered. ’That’s the company’s rules, not mine.’
    ’Why?’ Poole asked evenly. ’You recycle her air, provide her with
water and food. Give her clean sheets and she’ll change her own bed,
I’m sure.’
    ’This is a starship, Michael Poole, an artificial environment. In
a closed, small space like that cabin there can be build-ups of
toxins, pathogens. And I remind you she is sharing her cabin with a
monopole bomb, a nasty bit of crud at least two thousand years old,
and Lethe knows what’s leaking out of that. We