Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

half-electrons, coming from the same source, are forever
entangled. Put another way, if the bubbles are separated and the wave
function collapsed, an electron can leap from one bubble to
another…’
    Raoul fought his way through that fog of words. ’Oh,’ he said.
’Teleportation. You’re talking about a new kind of teleportation.
Right? And that’s what you used to get me out of my cell.’
    ’Yes. Time was short, Jack Raoul. Your conspecifics were closing
in.’
    So they were, and so they had been for decades.
    Still they rose through the crowded tangle. That all-consuming
light seemed, if anything, to be growing brighter. He could sense
deep vibrations passing through the ship’s structure, the booming
low-frequency calls of Silver Ghosts. Here and there he saw denser
concentrations - nurseries, perhaps, or control centres, or simply
areas where Ghosts lived and played - little more than patches of
silvery shadow, like birds’ nests in the branches of some vast tree.
It was characteristic Ghost architecture, vibrant, complex,
beautiful, alive - and totally inhuman.
    It had always seemed to Jack Raoul that humans and Ghosts were
different enough that everybody could get along. Their goals were
utterly unlike humanity’s, after all. That had been the motivation
behind the patchwork of treaties eventually known as the Raoul
Accords. But times changed.
    When Raoul was a boy, the human colonisation programme was still
piecemeal, driven by individual initiative. The leading edge of the
Third Expansion had been too remote from the centre, Earth, to be
tightly controlled. Players like Jack Raoul had freedom of movement.
But gradually the Coalition - especially its executive arm the
Commission for Historical Truth - had infiltrated all mankind’s power
centres. The ideologues of the Coalition had provided the species
with a unity of purpose, belief, even language. The Third Expansion
became purposeful, a powerful engine of conquest.
    But from Jack Raoul’s point of view, it was all downside. The
pro-human ideology grew ferocious. Soon even longevity, like Raoul’s,
was seen as a crime against the interests of the species. As the
short generations had ticked by, and as the worlds of humanity filled
up with fifteen-year-old soldiers, Raoul had come to feel like a
monument left standing from an earlier, misunderstood era.
    And it got worse.
    Raoul had been summoned back to Earth, to appear before the
Commission for Historical Truth. It was part of the great cleansing
that had been pursued ever since the days after the fall of the Qax
Occupation of Earth, when collaborators had been hunted down and
judged. After a curt hearing, Raoul’s life’s work had been
retrospectively labelled as counter to the evolutionary interests of
mankind.
    His advisers had urged him to appeal. Everything he had done had
been under the specific direction of legally constituted governments
and inter-governmental bodies of the time. But he wasn’t about to
justify himself to a bunch of children. He knew the true value of his
legacy. After all, it had cost him his own humanity.
    And so sentence had been passed.
    ’How did you and I get to be the bad guys, Ambassador?’
    The Ambassador’s perfect hide cast glimmering highlights from the
tangle sliding past them. ’We are old, Jack Raoul. Old and out of our
time.’
    ’That we are, my friend.’
    ’Nevertheless, Jack Raoul, you have been a valuable interface
between our species. Many sentient beings were saved from unhappiness
and premature termination by your actions. This >punishment< is
absurd and disproportionate. It is probably not even legal in your
own terms.’
    ’You’re storing up trouble,’ Raoul said. ’Like it or not, I was
tried by humanity’s highest court. If you intervene it will surely go
badly for you; the Coalition is not noted for its forgiveness. As for
me, maybe it’s my duty to sit tight and take my punishment. I will be
the greater martyr for it.’
    ’See what we offer you, Jack Raoul, before you turn it down for
the sake of martyrdom.’
    At last, Raoul saw, their steady rise was slowing, the tangle of
silver cables thinning out, as if they were reaching the top of a
vast metallic tree. But there was still no sign of black,
star-studded sky above; rather he made out swathes of light, glowing
brightly, bright as the sun. Maybe the ship was actually sailing
through the outer layers of a sun; it wouldn’t be the first time the
Ghosts had pulled such