Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

image. Captured at the centre of the
frame, clearly visible through an access tube’s translucent wall, a
figure gazed out at Futurity. Though this one’s limbs looked as
well-muscled as the others, it was a female, he saw; small breasts
pushed out of a tangle of fur. Her face, turned to Futurity, was very
human, with a pointed chin, a small nose, and piercing blue eyes. But
her brow was a low ridge of bone, above which her skull was flat.
    ’A post-human,’ Futurity breathed.
    ’Oh, certainly,’ said Poole. ’Evidently adapted to micro-gravity.
That even-proportioned frame is built for climbing, not for walking.
Interesting; they seem to have reverted to a body plan from way back
in our own hominid line, when our ancestors lived in the trees of
Earth. The forests have vanished now, as have those ancestors or
anything that looked like them. But a sort of echo has returned, here
at the centre of the Galaxy. How strange! Of course these creatures
would have been illegal under the Coalition, as I understand it.
Evolutionary divergence wasn’t the done thing in those days. But the
Galaxy is a big place, and evidently it happened anyhow. She doesn’t
look so interested in the finer points of the law, does she?’
    Futurity said, ’Captain, why do you allow these creatures to run
around your ship?’
    Poole laughed. ’Captain, I’m afraid he doesn’t understand.’
    Tahget growled, ’Acolyte, we call these creatures
>shipbuilders<. And I do not allow them to do anything - it’s
rather the other way around.’
    Poole said cheerfully, ’Hence the ship’s name - Ask Politely!’
    ’But you’re the Captain,’ Futurity said, bewildered.
    Poole said, ’Tahget is Captain of the small pod which sustains
you, acolyte, which I can see very clearly stuck in the tangle of the
hull superstructure. But he’s not in command of the ship. All he does
is a bit of negotiating. You are all less than passengers, really.
You are like lice in a child’s hair.’
    Tahget shrugged. ’You insult me, Poole, but I don’t mind the
truth.’
    Futurity still didn’t get it. ’The ships belong to these Builders?
And they let you hitch a ride?’
    ’For a fee. They still need material from the ground - food, air,
water - no recycling system is a hundred per cent efficient. And
that’s what we use to buy passage.’
    Poole grinned. ’I pay you in credits. You pay them in
bananas!’
    The Captain ignored him. ’We have ways of letting the Builders
know where we want them to take us.’
    ’How?’ Poole asked, interested.
    Tahget shuddered. ’The Shipbuilders are nearly mindless. I leave
that to specialists.’
    Futurity stared at Poole’s images of swarming apes, his dread
growing. ’Nearly mindless. But who maintains the Ask Politely? Who
runs the engines? Captain, who’s steering this ship?’
    ’The Hairy Folk,’ Poole said.
     
    It was all a question of time, said Michael Poole.
    ’In this strange future of yours, it’s more than twenty thousand
years since humans first left Sol system. Twenty thousand years!
Maybe you’re used to thinking about periods like that, but I’m a sort
of involuntary time traveller, and it appals me - because that
monstrous interval is a good fraction of the age of the human species
itself.
    ’And it’s more than enough time for natural selection to have
shaped us, if we had given it the chance. The frozen imagination of
the Coalition kept most of humanity in a bubble of stasis. But out in
the dark, sliding between those islands of rock, it was a different
matter: nobody could have controlled what was happening out there.
And with time, we diverged.
    ’After the first humans had left Earth, most of them plunged
straight into another gravity well, like amphibious creatures hopping
between ponds. But there were some, just a fraction, who found it
preferable to stay out in the smoother spaces between the worlds.
They lived in bubble-colonies dug out of ice moons or comets, or
blown from asteroid rock. Others travelled on generation starships,
unsurprisingly finding that their ship-home became much more
congenial than any destination planned for them by well-meaning but
long-dead ancestors. Some of them just stayed on their ships, making
their living from trading.’
    ’My own people did that,’ Futurity said. ’So it’s believed. The
first Engineers were stranded on a clutch of ships, out in space,
when Earth was occupied. They couldn’t go home. They survived on
trade for