Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

air of the black hole. He tried to convince himself
he could see more structure: new textures, a deeper richness. Perhaps
Michael Poole really was in there, with Sharn. Or perhaps Michael
Poole had already gone on to his next destination, or the next after
that. It was impossible to tell.
    He gave up, turned to his data desk, and began to work out how he
was going to explain all this to the Hierocrat.
    With the Shipbuilders swarming through their corridors and access
tubes, the ship lifted out of the accretion disc of Chandra, and
sailed for Base 478, and then for Earth.
     
    In the end the Ideocracy and the Kardish Imperium inevitably fell
on each other.
    Such wars of succession consumed millennia and countless lives. It
was not a noble age, though it threw up plenty of heroes.
    But time exerted its power. The wars burned themselves out. Soon
the Coalition with all its works and its legacies was forgotten.
    As for the Wignerian religion, it developed into the mightiest and
deepest of all mankind’s religions, and brought consolation to
trillions. But in another moment it too was quite forgotten.
    And humans, flung upon a million alien shores, morphed and
adapted.
    This was the Bifurcation of Mankind. How it would have horrified
that dry old stick Hama Druz! There were still wars, of course. But
now different human species confronted each other, and a fundamental
xenophobia fuelled genocides.
    As poor Rusel on the Mayflower II had understood, human destiny
works itself out on overlapping timescales. An empire typically lasts
a thousand years - the Coalition was a pathology. A religion may
linger five or ten thousand years. Even a human subspecies will alter
unrecognisably after fifty or a hundred thousand years. So on the
longest of timescales human history is a complex dissonance, with
notes sounding at a multitude of frequencies from the purposeful to
the evolutionary, and only the broadest patterns are discernible in
its fractal churning.
    You learn this if you live long enough, like Rusel, like me.
     
    The age of Bifurcation ended abruptly.
    Sixty-five thousand years after the conquest of the Galaxy,
genetic randomness threw up a new conqueror. Charismatic, monstrous,
carelessly spending human life on a vast scale, the self-styled
Unifier used one human type as a weapon against another, before one
of his many enemies took his life, and his empire disintegrated,
evanescent as all those before.
    And yet the Unifier planted the seeds of a deeper unity. Not since
the collapse of the Coalition had the successors of mankind recalled
that their ancestors had shared the same warm pond. After ten
thousand more years that unity found a common cause.
    Mankind’s hard-won Galaxy was a mere tidal pool of muddy light,
while all around alien cultures commanded a wider ocean. Now those
immense spaces became an arena for a new war. As in the time of the
Unifier, disparate human types were thrown into the conflict; new
sub-species were even bred specifically to serve as weapons.
    This war continued in various forms for a hundred thousand years.
In the end, like the Unifier, mankind was defeated by the sheer scale
of the arena - and by time, which erodes all human purposes.
    But mankind didn’t return to complete fragmentation, not quite.
For now a new force began to emerge in human politics.
    The undying. Us. Me.
     
    Since the time of Michael Poole, there had been undying among the
ranks of mankind. Some of us were engineered to be so, and others
were the children of the engineered. We emerged and died in our own
slow generations, a subset of mankind.
    The hostility of mortals was relentless. It pushed us together -
even if, often, in mutual loathing. But we were always dependent on
the mass of mankind. Undying or not, we were still human; we needed
our short-lived cousins. We spent most of our long lives hiding,
though.
    We undying had rather enjoyed the long noon of the Coalition, for
all that authority’s persecution of us. Stability and central control
was what we sought above all else. To us the Coalition’s collapse,
and the churning ages that followed, were a catastrophe.
    When, two hundred thousand years after the time of Hama Druz, the
storm of extragalactic war at last blew itself out, we decided enough
was enough. We had always worked covertly, tweaking history here and
there - as I had meddled in the destiny of the Exultants. Now it was
different. In this moment of human fragmentation and weakness, we
emerged