Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

Do you know why? So
that grandmothers could help their daughters raise the next
generation. And that is how we overcame the other animals, and came
to own the Earth - through longevity. Immortality is good for the
species, even if the species doesn’t know it. You must hide, Faya.
But you must not be ashamed of what you are.’
    ’I don’t want to hide.’
    ’You don’t have a choice. The Coalition are planning a new future
for mankind, an expansion to the stars that will sweep on, for ever.
There will be no place for the old. But of course that’s just the
latest rationalisation. People have always burned witches.’
    Faya didn’t know what a witch was.
    And then a Virtual of Faya’s mother’s face congealed in the air
before her, the bearer of bad news about Lieta.
     
    Faya and Spina held each other, sitting side by side. For now they
were done with weeping, and they had readmitted Ank Sool, the
Commissary.
    ’I don’t understand,’ Faya said. It was the brevity that was
impossible to bear - a handful of Dances, a flash of beauty and joy,
and then dust. And why should her sister die so suddenly now, why was
her life cut short, just as the prospect of eternity opened up for
Faya? ’Why Lieta? Why now?’
    Sool said, ’Blame the Qax. The pharaohs never bred true. Many of
their offspring died young, or their development stopped at an
unsuitable age, so that immortality remained in the gift of the
occupiers. The Qax were always in control, you see.’
    Faya said carefully, ’Commissary, I think I will always suspect,
in a corner of my heart, that you allowed this death to happen, in
order to bring me under control.’
    His eyes were blank. ’The Commission for Historical Truth has no
need of such devices.’
    Spina grasped her daughter’s hands. ’Take the mortality treatment,
dear. It’s painless. Get it over, and you will be safe.’
    ’You could have sent me to the Commission as a child. I could have
been cured then. I need never have even known.’
    Sool said dryly, ’So you would blame your mother rather than the
Qax. How - human.’
    Spina’s face crumpled. ’Oh, love, how could I take such a gift
away from you - even to protect you?’
    ’It’s your decision,’ said Sool.
    ’It always had to be,’ said her mother.
     
    Again she swept into orbit with Luru Parz, seeking privacy.
    This is how it will be for me from now on, she thought: hiding
from people. I will be one of a handful of immortal companions, like
crabbed, folded-over Luru here, standing like unchanging rocks in a
landscape of evanescent flowers.
    That or mortality.
    ’I can’t stand the thought of seeing them all growing old and
dying around me. For ever.’
    Luru nodded. ’I know. But you aren’t thinking big enough, child.
On a long enough timescale, everything is as transient as one of your
Halo Dances. Why, perhaps we will even live to see the stars
themselves sputter to life, fade and die.’ She smiled. ’Stars are
like people. Even stars come and go, you see. They die all in a
blaze, or fade like the last light of the sun - but you’ve never seen
a sunset, have you? The glory is always brief - but it is worth
having, even so. And you will remember the glory, and make it live
on. It’s your purpose, Faya.’
    ’My burden,’ she said bleakly.
    ’We have great projects, long ambitions, beyond the imagination of
these others. Come with me.’
    Tentatively Faya reached out her hand, Luru took it. Her flesh was
cold.
    ’I will have to say farewell - ’
    ’Not farewell. Goodbye. Get used to it.’
    Before they left she visited the amphitheatre, one last time. And
- though she knew she could never let anybody watch her, ever again -
she Danced and Danced, as the waiting stars blazed.
     
    Even as the Coalition hardened its grip on mankind, and continued
its hideous cleansing of Sol system, it launched a new thrust to the
stars.
    The Third Expansion of mankind was the most vigorous yet and,
driven by the new ideology of Hama Druz, the most purposeful.
    I and those like me tried to stay out of the way of the engines of
history.
    As the Expansion unfolded humanity once more encountered alien
kinds, and re-engaged in wider Galactic history. It was only a little
more than eighty years after the liberation from the Qax that a first
contact of devastating significance was made.

 
     
     
PART TWO
     
     
THE WAR WITH THE GHOSTS

 
SILVER GHOST
AD 5499
     
     
    Minda didn’t even see the volcanic plume before it