Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

Conurbation domes were a complex of vast,
glistening blisters. Rala had been up here only a handful of times in
her life. She tried not to flinch from the open sky.
    Today this dome roof was full of people. The Conurbation
inhabitants, with their shaven heads and long robes, had been
gathered into queues that snaked everywhere. Each queue led to a
table, behind which sat an exotic-looking individual in a gold
skinsuit.
    Ingre whispered, ’Which line shall we join?’
    Rala glanced around. ’That one. Look who’s behind the table.’ It
was the man who had come to their cell.
    ’He frightened me.’
    ’But at least we know him. Come on.’
    They queued in silence. Rala felt calmer. Living in a Conurbation,
you did a lot of queuing; this felt normal.
    Around the Conurbation the land was a plain that shone
silver-grey, like a geometric abstraction. Canals snaked away to the
horizon, full of glistening blue water. Human bodies drifted down the
canals, away from the Conurbation to the sea. That wasn’t unusual,
just routine waste management. But there did seem to be many bodies
today.
    At last Rala reached the front of the queue.
    The stranger probably wasn’t much older than she was, she
realised, no more than thirty. ’It’s you,’ he said. ’The drone who
understands the nature of power.’
    She bristled. ’I am not a drone.’
    ’You are what I say you are.’ He had a data slate before him,
obviously purloined from a Conurbation workstation. He worked it
slowly, as if unfamiliar with the technology. ’Tell me your
name.’
    ’Rala.’
    ’Rala, my name is Pash. From now on you report to me.’
    She didn’t understand. ’Are you a jasoft?’ The jasofts were human
servants of the Qax who, it was said, were granted freedom from death
in return for their service.
    He said, ’The jasofts are gone.’
    ’The Qax - ’
    ’Are gone too.’ He glanced upwards. ’At night you can see their
mighty Spline ships, peeling out of orbit. Where they are going, I
don’t know. But we will go after them one day.’
    Could it be true - could the centuries-old Occupation be over,
could Luru Parz and the other jasofts really have melted away, could
the framework of her whole world have vanished? Rala felt like a lost
child, separated from her cadre. She tried not to let this show in
her face.
    ’What was your sin?’ It turned out he was asking what job she
did.
    She had spent her working life in vocabulary deletion. The goal
had been to replace the old human tongues with a fully artificial
language. It would have taken a few more generations, but at last a
great cornerstone of the Extirpation, the Qax’s methodical
elimination of the human past, would have been completed. It was
intellectually fascinating.
    He nodded. ’Your complicity with the great crime committed against
humanity - ’
    ’I committed no crime,’ she snapped.
    ’You could have refused your assignments.’
    ’I would have been punished.’
    ’Punished? Many will die before we are free.’
    The word shocked her. It was hard to believe this was happening.
’Are you going to punish me now?’
    ’No,’ he said, tiredly. ’Listen to me, Rala. It’s obvious you are
smart, you have a high degree of literacy. We were the crew of a
starship. A trading vessel, called Port Sol. While you toiled in this
bubble-town, I hid up there.’ He glanced at the sky.
    ’You are bandits.’
    He laughed. ’No. But we are not bureaucrats either. We need people
like you to help run this place.’
    ’Why should I work for you?’
    ’You know why.’
    ’Because food is power.’
    ’Very good.’
     
    The traders tried to rule their new empire by lists. They kept
lists of ’drones’, and of their ’sins’, and tables of things that
needed to be done to keep the Conurbation functioning, like food
distribution and waste removal.
    For Rala it wasn’t so bad. It was just work. But compared to the
sophisticated linguistic analysis she had been asked to perform under
the Occupation, this simple clerical stuff was dull, routine.
    Once she suggested a better way to devise a task allocation. She
was punished, by the docking of her food ration. That was how it
went. If you cooperated you were fed. If not, not.
    Her food was the same pale yellow tablets she had grown up with,
the tablets produced by the food holes, though less of them. They
came from a sector at the heart of the Conurbation where the food
holes had been left intact - the only such place, in fact.