by pinlighter
"Come on, Father." Holding one hand out to help
him rise.
Captain, Senior, father.
The old man in his childlike phase got annoyed
easily, but his anger rarely dwelt long. The boy
got him up and shuffling along-o, then darted back
to kick earth over what he had left. But the hard
shallow soil resisted his foot and there was
delay, and quicker than should have happened the
little fingerlings appeared, foci in the air
manoeuvring quietly just out of reach of boot or
stone or any weapon he might be expected to use.
He cursed fluidly. But now there was a danger, so
familiar and routine that it no longer provoked
real fear but still a threat that had to be
intelligently addressed.
Be calm, be calm.
He very slowly started to edge sideways. Parts of
the earth near the little pile of shit already
looked blurry and unreal. Run, and risk getting
grabbed as well, or cover? Without shifting his
shoulders or moving his arms in any way that was
typical of a human being he rotated the trunk of
his body from the hips and bent down, his arms
rigid and crooked, till he could scrape up a
handful of the dry hard soil and cover the organic
matter with it. And another. And again. He
succeeded. The swirling circular motion of the
soil, that had been forming into a vertical siphon
or tube, decorrelated and fell apart, fell into
little random spots of distortion that fled away
up the bare slope of earth above him. The pressure
of a distant attention relaxed.
He slowly stood straighter, and the cramps in his
side faded.
He plodded back, looking resentfully upward. The
old man was watching.
"There is no danger if you simply leave it."
"Come on. We have far to go." His back hurt
badly.
"Her lust is to perform the Gaeatropy. This
lifesphere is so devastated that she no longer
recognizes her mother. She wishes to bring life to
it again. So she is, autonomous scattered parts of
her are, looking for microbe rich organics to
adopt, adapt, and human shit is like gold dust for
that." The old man's arm pointed up to the same
spot in the sky that the boy had been resentfully
gazing at, a roiling twisting cloud of optical
distortion, but the boy had no more patience and
snapped a reply back at him. "There are bandits
and abhumans out here. The Convocation is waiting
for us, and we are late. Come on." He
actually had to pull the old man to stop him
explaining and get him started walking again. The
old man fought childishly and angrily for a few
fractions of a second, then his proper self awoke
and he relaxed and strode forward, dignified and
calm once more, assorting the memories of a
strange life.
---<<>>---
The sun shone behind them, eternally in its
place. The topless tower of the Ship was their
lodestone, now almost dead ahead. To their right a
horde of fantastically shaped mountains loomed
over the highlands where they walked, and beyond
and above the mountains the southern Wall of the
Valley rose, impossibly, like the face of a fallen
moon, betraying the mountains and the mountains
piled upon the mountains to be nothing but rubble
scattered at its feet.
They came to the top of the last long slope.
Below, a long way ahead and below, were the lights
and fires of human habitation. They settled into
the last downslope to it, flexing shoulders under
their packs to ease them.
Ysel, the boy was thinking. Oh, Ysel.
---<<>>---
Hundreds, gathered in groups and families,
sitting in arcs round fires in the great hollow
bowl-arena, perched on rocks and broken walls,
quieting children, listening, watching. The old
man standing tall on a flat stage in the centre,
and his voice raising echoes from the distant
cliffs.
"Time is different, in the Up and Out. I spent a
hundred years, just looking, as we swept past the
Radiants and into the Maelstrom. I had the eyes of
the Ship, and all around I saw screaming winds,
space contorting to fall down into itself, I heard
the high fine tone of vibrating suns flooding
through the shock waves of the supernovae, I saw
stormclouds as big as this system being spat like
bullets, twisted ropes of plasma that stretched
over light years, and everywhere solid bodies
thrown out on hyperbolic courses by the gravitic
surges of the forming systems, scaling down from
star size to planetoid size to gravel to dust,
ground out by the mills of the twining stars.
"That was why we were a slowboat. We crept along
at a few percent, behind discs and lenses of
rotating dust and solid shields tens of fathoms
thick, trembling in fear with our eyes screwed
shut against the blows. Looking for worlds that
were forming, that were fortunate, where we could
drop a little of our own gold, down low and deep
where it was safe. So that that world would awake
far in the future, and be full of many kinds of
life, breeding in the hot pools and writhing
through the pores of the rock and Crash! blasted
off into space by the impacts of tiny worlds
rushing to union with the greater one and frozen
and voyaging through the cold void and falling
into the naked newborn planets in the whirlpool
new systems nearby. So that in the fullness of
time all of the planets of that wild new womb of
stars should be dirty, living, rich, most with
just a faint network of bacteria in the rock, but
some with liquid water on the surface and the rich
soup of life in that, and some with that life
eating sunlight and trickling out oxygen, that
terrible poison, that yet transforms, and some
coming fully alive and becoming true Gaeas,
and at last birthing ensouled living things, hnau,
like us. For a planet that has a heartbeat and
breath must at last allow intelligent creatures to
evolve on its surface; and then, hovering in their
brains and nerves, condensing among the most
complex structures that form in our Universe, it
will glow; pneuma,the soul-stuff, that
endures even after minds and bodies are destroyed,
that is the true seat of consciousness, the most
precious dew and distillation of Being, that may
outlast the Universe.
"We sought to beget this upon the bare
rocks clustering together under the birthing
stars. And we said to each other, it will be done,
in time, in enough time. We said, it is
inevitable, for now it has Begun. We were cycling
our minds at four hundred to one, each day a year,
but still there was not time enough to learn
everything we needed to know. Not enough time!"
He paused, and as the echoes of his last cry
faded, the audience took their chance to fidget
and murmur. They had all heard preaching like this
a thousand times, but mostly from recorded slates
and playfilms and mass holographic broadcasts. It
was different to hear the transforming voice of a
real Prophet of the Ship, and to see him and his
tall pale acolyte. ((His grandson, some said.
Others shook their heads. A boy, only a boy. Yet
he was half a head taller than any other man in
the gathering, and so handsome.... Surely only the
Starborn could look like that?))
---<<>>---
On the road again, the next day, they met four
grinning knaves. It was an empty path, among the
high fantastic peaks that bordered the way to
their next nightly stop and day's preachment. The
men were too old to be mere headstrong youths, and
they had judged the location to a nicety. No mans
habitation near. Professionals, then. And so this
had to be done right, done just right, as well. So
as the rogues matched their pace and direction, as
they started to pass remarks to each other in
their own tongue, shunning the Common, as they
crowded in on the fringes of their personal space
and started to nudge and trip, the boy watched
lightly, he strolled easy, and picking his time
and without betraying any doubt or fear he stopped
and cheerily, eagerly, offered to fight; struck
out at the leader without panic or ill humour; and
struggled hard and long, the old man swinging his
staff to some effect; but contrived to lose by a
small margin. And so the thieves took their money
and some of their gear, but the one with the gun
fingered it and pointed it and shouted threats but
never fired, and they kept their lives and their
dignity, defiant though rolled bloody on the
ground.
That night they plodded into the crowded
caravanserai and were met by the local hetmen with
mouthed horror and promises of revenge, and
hospitaliers and hastily gathered nurses and
distant cousins, and the boy looked around and
there were the thieves, in the second or third
row, bold and arrogant: he smiled and let his eyes
slide by and went aside and spoke to those in
power but he did not point to his attackers or
betray them. The old man did not even seem to
recognize the men who had robbed them earlier; the
fit was descending upon him again, all his
vagueness turning to focused dramatic gesture and
tight-leashed energy and sure knowledge. But while
the prophet ascended the stage, while he prayed
and called out and began his thunderous speech,
the boy watched the thieves carefully. There was
always something to learn from thieves.
---<<>>---
They had an escort the next day: four stout
stalwart men, sworn to guard and protect, armed
and driving battered walking robot carriers,
polished and garlanded though dinted and limping.
The boy kept silent while the farewells were said
and the cheers rang out. The old man was too far
away in memories and visions to notice anything so
mundane. But when they were well on their way,
beyond sight of the crowds, the boy leaned over
and tapped the leader of the four men, the oldest,
on the back of his head. The man jumped round,
cursing, but the boy kept smiling. "I just want to
know why. The four of you rob us, most
politely, and you go ahead to where we are going
and you strut around expecting us to accuse you
when we arrive, and when we do nothing, the next
day you volunteer to act as our guards. Why??"
Grim silence. "You like the look of my arse even
more than your women do? But you could have raped
us yesterday. Could have tried to." More boiling
silence. The boy forbore to issue a second tap on
the head. "Or your folk volunteered you,
perhaps??? And you thought a beating and a week in
jail a small price to pay to get out of it... you
would not have been punished severely, not if you
could pretend you didn't know who we were.
Banditry is a way of life favoured by these high
hills, your people live by it... so, anyhow, are
you going to kill me tonight?? Going to try to??"
The man spat on the road, and kept walking. His
face and his body wherever it could be seen bore
strange small scars. The boy sighed. "Do your
worst, any time." It had had to be said.
---<<>>---
"Tell us the truth about the Ship, old man" was
called from the next audience they spoke to, at
the end of that day's long journey. Spoken not as
a catcall or jeer, but with resolve, and with an
especial emphasis on the fourth word. The old man
scanned the crowd in pretended owlish
astonishment. The question came often. "The Ship.
Yes. The Ship will take us away from here, to
paradise, yes, to the Starholm. Any child knows
this. Eight miles tall. Five miles
square at ground level. Don't you see her? There?"
He pointed towards the quarter of the horizon
where the great tower loomed eternal, the pinpoint
lights of its batteries flickering, and there was
a laugh from some "A thousand Cities, and if those
of your blood and language do not already inhabit
one, the keys of an empty City will be given into
your hands. Do you doubt this?? Go and make
enquiry. Come with us tomorrow, we make Pilgrimage
there, come and you shall see the Ship... what is
a Ship? It is quickly told. Men inhabit living
worlds, huddling close to their sun, or they fly
swiftly between them in iron shells, dead vessels,
empty clattering boxes.. but not thus is a true
Ship! For a Ship, like a planet, must be alive!!
Only a living thing can endure, not only the void
between planets, but the greater Void between the
suns. And only within a living thing can men
endure that Void; for it is only within the womb
of a living thing that their naked souls can sleep
safely in death, until it is time for rebirth.
"A Ship, then, is a living world, and a Home to
men, and a resting place for their dead, but one
that moves. Some indeed began as worlds,
small and dead, that were hollowed out and give
life by the vivimancers; some as machines, that
gained passengers and self-repair and self-control
elements until they, too, came alive... some as
companies of men, nations, united, that built
vessels, so they could have the Home that was
denied to them elsewhere, and later made them live
... but in the end all were alive... and as living
things, they are unpredictable, changing, and
ever-growing, and unique, and they continually
learn new wisdom from the great Instructrix, the
universe that Is, Herself.
"But now, the Eaters lust after their being, the
Dragons tear at their souls, they see the stars
fading, they hear echoing back through time the
message of the Final Light, and they return. They
come back, one by one, here to old ruined Manhome.
And they add themselves to the Ship,
which is builded of their flesh," he pointed
again. "Which is to them a wonder, a thing of a
higher nature, as far above them as they are above
us; and they ready themselves, and us, for the
Last Voyage, in the Ship, as the Ship, through a
Void unthinkable, to Home."
"And that is the nature and the history of
Ships."
---<<>>---
There was a woman, after the sermon and the
ceremony and the meal with the hetmen and the
close secret talks, when all was done: dark
haired, slim, entering their private rooms with
the servants, but not a servant herself, not
really familiar with the work, too tall, too old
(though still young), too proud, too well dressed,
perfumed and combed and discretely jewelled and
too pale-skinned and far, far, far, far too
beautiful. Oh, Ysel. She drifted closer
and closer, she took every opportunity to talk to
him, she bent down and stretched and poised
shamelessly as she pretended to work, and when the
other girls had tiptoed suppressed-tittering away
and old man shuffled off to bed at last he turned
round and almost collided with her, sweet-breathed
and dancing-eyed on the very edge of embrace. It
took him half an hour to get rid of her, courtesy
stretched to the limit, and himself blushing
furiously the while, but at last he tricked her
and shoved her out of the door, and she screamed
insults at him for minutes in a language he could
not understand and went away, still ragingly angry
and swearing, among shrieks of laughter from other
women. He was far too young to find this funny. He
hated it.
"Why do you behave like this?" The old man was
quietly watching, in his nightrobe, all his spirit
quiescent.
"Father, they persecute me. I do not want any of
them. Of course I want someone to love; but how
can I love one of these barbarians after knowing
Ysel? And how can they expect a man to lie with
someone he has never even met?" The old man, who
had looked properly sad at the mention of Ysel,
burst into tittering at his last sentence, wiping
tears of laughter from his eyes and shaking his
head. The boy bit down on his complaints and
helped him back to bed. Ysel is dead, he thought,
and all of our people must be dead, and you are my
only ally and kinsman, and you laugh. At this. You
say I will love again, you say it lightly. There
may be another waiting for me, somewhere, when I
have delivered you to the Ship, but meanwhile I am
not for these whores. Ysel is dead.
---<<>>---
The boy did not pester their escorts again,
though the mystery of their presence and
protection became no clearer. He did not ask for
the return of the money or demand other
recompense. But he smiled as the four men's eyes
opened wide the first time the old man stepped
aside from the path, raised his staff, and
addressed the sky directly, calling for gold;
though the boy explained he was calling for their
Ship, that had that name, Gold. Vague shafts of
heated air danced round the old man, and he spoke
to them and things flickered, and when they had
gone he came back with gold indeed in a little
bag, and a map-tablet, and a flask of liquor he
did not scrimp to share, and four handsome
yellow-metal inlaid linked copper belts, one for
each of their protectors. There was a little shift
and change among the unspoken things as they all
shared the drink and the men took the gold and the
gifts, new rules and laws that fastened on them
and old possibilities that were no longer possible
now, and the boy watched and listened and tried to
feel and know this inwardly rather than shape it
into words.
They had started early, walking out into the
eternal Twilight only minutes after the bells
announced the new day, and by the time the last
scattered echo from hamlet and farmhouse had faded
they were well on their way, going in single file
along the hill tracks. Two went ahead as scouts,
then came their still-silent chief, then the boy
leading the carrier on which the old man perched,
thinking his thoughts, then the baggage train and
the solo rearguard, who rode his whirring metal
mount backward with his gun unslung and ready.
Overhead, frequently, drifted something almost
visible, the sometimes-malfunctioning thing that
the old man had called upon so casually, hidden in
a cocoon of warped refractive air. The boy told
them how to cope safely with its occasional
vagaries, and the old man told them it was an AI
element from his Ship. Not from the Ship,
he was at pains to explain, but from his and the
boy's Ship of origin, Gold, that waited in orbit
now, communing with the Ship in breathless
fear and anticipation and desire, preparing to
fuse Herself into the great multiplex design for
all eternity. The way he spoke about this made the
men glance slyly at each other and grin.
The boy never missed anything, and later when
they stopped to rest again he straightly asked
them, What was so funny? But the men only muttered
obscenely. "Yes," said the boy, "It will be two
machines swiving, or fucking, or whatever the word
is round here. But what is so funny? Why shouldn't
it be like that? We exchange genes that let us
stay ahead in the race with death. Don't you think
these immortal Ships, who are far greater than us,
need to do something similar? Don't you think
Death nips at their heels, in the Up-and-Out?
Don't you understand that they must reinvent
themselves continually just to survive? You don't
know much about the Up-and-Out, if you think that
life is easy there."
"You don't know much about life here," replied
the leader. "And if you think fucking is so
marvelous, explain why you never take any of these
girls that are always chasing you." The others all
spoke up and started at him then, saying such
things as "Are you a virgin?" "Do you only want
boys?" "Are you scared of a naked woman?" "Ever
touched a woman's cunt?" "Ever really stuck it in
and felt her squirm?" speaking in confusion and
interrupting each other, and grinning nastily. "I
loved once," said the boy at last. "and I will
find love again. And I will have no-one unless I
find one I can trust and really love, forever."
But he started to blush again, furiously, ashamed
and red-cheeked. They burst into great shouts and
bellows of laughter, and he defied them all,
standing like a statue and staring them down, but
at last he walked stiffly away.
"You have some guts," said the leader to him
later, walking up beside him in friendly wise and
briefly holding him by the arm. The boy had
shoulders and arms like the beams of a roof. "The
last man who said No to the elder Begazi
sister is still looking for his balls. I didn't
believe it when they told me. And you are
strong." He grinned, but not all in mockery.
"If you really don't want any of them, do you mind
pointing them at us, last thing at night? We'll
take care of them for you." He smiled again. He
had meant it as a joke, he had meant well, for
apart from being a professional thief and
occasional murderer in the line of business he was
not a bad man, but then he saw the boy was
weeping, tears standing in his eyes and trickling
slow as he walked though his face was grim and he
was not sobbing nor unsteady in his gait. His grip
on the boys arm became more gentle and his face
sobered and he opened his mouth to speak again,
but the boy only said "Fuck whoever you want" and
snatched his arm back and stalked off.
---<<>>---
"The radiation was terrifying. The Pain, the
Great Pain of Space. My body was far away,
threaded through with tiny repair networks, locked
in a sphere of honey, deep shielded and sheltered
in the inmost womb of the Ship. My mind overflowed
with the senses of the Ship, but my soul was still
grounded in that flesh. And I could feel the Pain
as my flesh was endlessly torn down and rebuilt.
We were all drowned deep in the Pain. Yet we found
our worlds, and blessed them with our life, our
gold.
"Pain! It is the sigil of Life! In that Pain,
the Seers listened all round the Ship for the for
the cry of distant worlds. The more life, the more
Pain. When we found some blessed living world,
radiant with agony and life, we would take of its
gold - the lowest, darkest, wastes of its
ecosystems, where variation is greatest and
equilibrium unknown - and add it to ours. In the
transforming radiations and the Pain of space,
beneath the Operations of our vivimancers, the
gold would fuse with ours and become something new
and stronger. And we threw it abroad, out to yet
more nearby worlds. Our wake through the Cluster
was a green wound, a sword of life!!
"We did not know the sin we were committing, the
harm we were doing. " Grief suddenly washed his
features. "But how could we have known???Ours was
a great, a worthy, endeavor!!" He spoke as if
addressing the earnest question to every person in
the audience, solely. "How could we have known
what would happen?"
---<<>>---
Every day a straggle of the curious or greedy
followed them on their way. The old man ignored
them - except sometimes when he was provoked into
a storm of rhetoric, and he would waste hours
raving at some unfortunate curiosity-seeker. The
men policed this easily enough, taking bribes and
small favours, selling off the right to audience
with the prophet, and so forth, but few of the
fortunate ones stayed for more than a single day's
journey. They passed cliff-holds and honeycombed
cave-cities, fortified inns and lone farmhouses,
and at each stop people came to gaze. The men
always knew someone, an old acquaintance, a
relative, someone waiting for trinkets or owed
money,and once an affianced woman, promised to one
of them, who had to be visited in her father's
house with proper ceremony and gifts. Here the
hints and cues of social behaviour became too
complex for the boy to intuit. He was told the
names of the happy couple and much else, but it
meant nothing to him, and he only retained the
name of their fourfold escort's chief, which was
Pyet. He retreated into passive obedience,
standing as close to the Prophet as possible,
silent and quick to obey, while the old man stood
up after a long rich meal and spoke to the
gathering there.
---<<>>---
"I have told you, we come from a Ship. She is
called Gold. She has returned here, to Manhome,
after voyages of tens and hundreds of thousands of
years. She waits in orbit now, and soon She will
initiate the process of disaggregation and
descent. Then She will become another City to be
added to the Ship, and another great pulse
of migration will flow from the nations in the
Twilight into that City. According to the ancient
custom, it is my right to walk the Twilight and to
invite people herein to fill my home. This I
do. Come. All of you. You who are to be
married; you especially. But all of you are
blessed, you are welcome, to find a new home, in
Gold.
"But listen first, while I tell you what we
flee.
"I have told you, our Ship existed to sow Life
through a barren waste of newly formed stars. We
were brave. We were hoping to create, not just new
life, but new Spirit; and we thought, we can do no
evil, only good can come of spreading Life; and we
dreamed that in some distant time we would return,
or wake again, in this life or another, and see
those worlds blossoming into beauty, and maybe the
birth of other races of ensouled beasts, our
equals, who would yet be in a sense our children.
"And then - we heard the crying, behind us.
"I have said, a living world is a radiant beacon
of Pain, hung from its Sun, burning in the night.
We heard, behind us, those beacons we had lit come
alive; but so many, and with such strength!!! At
first we rejoiced, but the agony grew beyond
accounting, beyond understanding, beyond bearing,
and at last we looked back, and our Seers stood
transfixed in horror, understanding what
but not how we had wrought - for the
worlds we had kissed were not blossoming into
life. They were afire with death. Not the green
light of life, no more than for a wink of time,
but it was being swallowed by the black fire of
the pneumavores, the soul-eaters, the ancient
enemy.
"We knew them as Dragons, then, and thought they
dwelt only in the wastes between the stars.. and
so they did - but these new Dragons flew freely
near the suns, consuming the life there. They had
changed. So we thought.
"A scattering of little Ships fled by, crying.
We boosted and accelerated and lay alongside them
and found they were alien hnau, ancient
refugees from the Eaters, having fled for lifetime
after lifetime through wastes of stars, skeletal,
palsied, weary, huddled deep inside their dying
Ships... from them we learned what had happened,
not only in that cluster of stars we thought we
were blessing, but in other star-wombs in the
distant past, and they cried grief and woe to see
it happen yet again....
"I have told you, that the desert places of the
Universe naturally breed life: life is everywhere.
The scattered germs of ancient ecosystems saturate
the infall of the suns, even lacking the holy
missions of those such as us. From barren rock,
Life will emerge, and cloth the bare rock, given
enough time. It is inevitable. We had thought not
so much to bring life to utter barrenness as to
accelerate its development, so that breathable air
and noble beasts should populate those planets
soon, in a fraction of a Great Year, a small part
of a turn of the galaxy, not in two or three such
Years. And we were successful.
"From the barren rock, life comes, it is
inevitable. You can not stop it. You can only
hasten it. We hastened it greatly.
"But from life, comes what? After life comes
what, just as unavoidably??
"What we learned from those ancient refugees of
the cycles is this: there is another state of
being, that arises from life. As life
inevitably arises from the waste of mere matter,
so from the sea of life arises this successor
thing. Alien life, unlife, ab-life. It happens in
many ways, and has many names: in one world,
machinery built by hnau may become
self-aware and self-modifying; in another, some
form of microbe grows able to interpose clonal
intelligence into its own reproductive cycle and
guide its mutations; in another, consciousness is
transplanted from the natural cradle of flesh into
artificial soma of magnetic tissue, giving the
soul a new unnatural but enduring home. Whatever
the gateway - and they named the Infinite
Acceleration; the Fusion; the Grey Waste; the
Sentient Flesh; the Ruling Ghost; the Third Phase;
and many others - all these divergent developments
in the end fall into an attractor, a foreordained
configuration. Ab-life. And as from life rises the
distillation we call pneuma, so from
ab-life, after many cycles of growth, come the
beings we know as pneumavores, or Eaters. "
"We had hastened this development by mixing the
gold of different life-spheres. Doing this, we had
thought to shortcut many aeons of blind evolution,
by giving these worlds the richest possible set of
basic metabolic pathways at the very beginning.
And shorten the time we had. The worlds we had so
cross-fertilized had bypassed the long period of
gentle growth and learning we call Life
and had plunged, barely cooled, into the ultimate
condition of manic biology called the Sentient
Flesh, one gateway to ablife. And from this
cauldron, after only a few thousand years, arose
stability and new clades of Eaters. And they
communed with their brothers among the stars and
grew wise. And they rose from their beds, young
and ravenous, and pursued us their creators. "
---<<>>---
Nobody tried to sneak into the boy's bed that
night and he understood that such behavior would
be unthinkable here, but for some reason he felt a
slow quiet despair. He was younger than he looked,
but he had once been in the same place as that
fellow sitting uneasy at high table, making small
talk, trying to act like one of the family he was
to join and failing miserably. And yet he had been
so happy. All that was scattered atoms in the Up
and Out now. Gone. It was easy that night to slide
back into grief.
He wept. He slept. And when he woke from weeping
she lay next to him, warm and breathing and just
ready to wake herself. Ysel. He rolled
over to embrace her, felt her fluid solid warmth,
felt her shift slightly and press herself against
him as he kissed the small hairs behind her ear
and stroked gently down her flank. He had found
his home again. He was alive again. All was well.
He whispered love and composed himself for sleep.
He woke again, full of deep peace, but with the
knowledge that something was wrong. Ysel had told
him, something was badly wrong. He must comfort
her, and then they needed to go and see the old
man and take definite action... he rose, washed
his face, and went back to kiss her awake.
But she was not there.
And then he remembered everything. And hating
it, loathing it, he was truly awake.
---<<>>---
The dream seemed more real than the reality of
their slow pilgrimage. They left the farm, endured
the fond farewells, and he walked in a daze. But
his dreams that filled his head were interrupted
by grimmer realities.
Something had been following them. They saw it
in the early morning, a far glimpse that set the
rearguard to shouting warnings. A little later it
was seen again, far behind but closer, and then
suddenly it came rushing toward them with
nightmare speed. From far away it had looked like
a rolling thistledown, or like a crippled
mutilated limping beetle, but when it got close
they saw with a shock of corrected perspective
that it was an Old Machine, an ancient
mansonyagger, an autonomous self-repairing
manhunter, so battered by time and war that almost
every one of its limbs was of different size and
construction, but so big and yet so strong and
swift and buoyant above the land on those
mismatched props that the eye saw it as smaller
and nimbler than it really was. It came closer,
eating up the distance with frightening speed, and
ran parallel with them for a time. They saw that
its very scars had repair-grown sensors and palps,
misplaced heads and eyes sticking out between
armour plate. It was ancient indeed, swollen by
incremental repair and enhancement to be ten times
as long as a man, and vaguely serpent-like, but
its body held no structural logic or symmetry,
only cancerous mechanical strength. It lurched
sideways, blocked their path, turned broadside to
them, waited. The men muttered and grasped their
guns, to be urgently warned do not by
their leader, who halted and saluted the beast,
then knelt down, facing it, silent. The other men
did likewise, grey and sweating, and the boy,
moved by some defiance or loyalty he could not
name, stepped up to their rank and knelt as well,
and the mansonyagger came closer and closer and
stopped and reached out to them.
Iron arms stroked them. Each limb was different,
some coiled, some articulated, some like whips,
some branching like the limbs of trees. They split
at the tips and the tips fanned out and focused
back on to the men. The probes and sensors
trickled across their skin, touching and moving,
scraping, tasting scurf and sweat. The boy felt
the points sharpen to needles and the needles
pierce. Then the knives hinged out and slid across
their skin and cut. One of the men cried out in a
high sobbing voice. In a strangled croak, the
leader of the four said "Do not move whatever it
takes."
The mansonyagger reached out towards the old man
as well, but the air around him thickened and
blurred and sparked and then he was gone, or
hidden. Across the forest of actuators springing
from the Old Machine's flank went a shift and
wave, like a wind blowing bamboo, and it sprang
away, crabwalking sideways up the flank of the
hill, away. It too was gone.
The men and the boy staggered, half fainting,
bleeding from little wounds where the machine had
sampled them, talking a little skin, a little
flesh. The boy caught and steadied one who was
falling, though he could scarcely keep his feet
himself. "It won't kill you if you keep still."
said Pyet, gasping and stuttering, "If you run, it
will take you to pieces." The boy looked at him.
"Others may come. They take a little bit each
time. If that happens, don't move."
---<<>>---
The old man was suddenly there among them again.
He spoke to them urgently and gently, not in his
usual strange half senile way, but in strength
reassuring them. And he got them up and moving, at
an angle to their previous path, heading toward a
low hill crowned by rocks. They climbed, panting
and gasping, not quite running, trying to see the
whole horizon. They found a clutter of rocks and
wormed their way among them." What do you think of
that, Starborn?" said Pyet to the boy. "How do you
like what nips at our heels down here?" The boy,
who only knew that the Old Machines were supposed
to be allies of true humans, said as much. Pyet
laughed and swore bitterly. Then the old man cried
out some thing loud and very clear to the knots of
roiling air above him and pointed, fiercely and
surely, towards a dark articulated shape now
hulking over the edge of a distant hill. There was
tense silence for ten, twenty seconds, and then
brilliant specks of light, falling straight down,
falling too fast for belief, flooded over the dark
shape, and the mansonyagger vanished among sudden
flares of violet fire. They shut their eyes and
huddled down between the carriers, rocking as the
noise and shock waves reached them, and when they
looked for it again it was there, but crippled and
broken-backed and part-molten, moving like a
broken thing. The old man cried out to the sky
once more, with authority, and gestured them to
take shelter behind one of the great rocks nearby,
urgently, urgently; and the boy turned and ran
just as something vast fell out of the sky and
turned the Twilight for miles around into actinic
hell, brighter than the legended Sun of ancient
days. He closed his eyes, blinded, and crashed
into something, and fell into darkness.
---<<>>---
His throat was expelling thick fluid. The
effort was maximum, continuous, completely
unwilled. His whole torso contracted and wrung
itself like a wet cloth and the fluid spurted
sluggishly from mouth nose anus the corners of
his eyes.
Something was holding him spraying him wiping
his face keeping mouth nose eyes clear. A
bed-nourice.
Its soft not-hands held his jaws open and
threads slid down his throat and cleared his
windpipe and squirted more warn water unbearably
filling his lungs and other threads slid up his
anus and filled his gut and he shat vomited
coughed pissed wept water out and with it the
thick sweet fluid
He breathed in air saturated with misty steam
and oxygen and more hot water squirted over his
face eyes nose into throat ears down gullet into
sinuses and again the
wringing contraction belly muscles tearing
blood in vomit everything spewing out of him
Threads slipped under his eyelids and
squirted water there and his eyes could move. He
could see light. He could not open his eyes. The
lids were stuck together but more threads
cleared his eyes wiping the eyelids clean and
his eyes could open and focus and he was in he
was he was he was in midair just above his Bed
surrounded by globs of snot and blood and vomit
and thick yellowish fluid, and the nourice part
of the bed was holding him and moving him
warming him combing the wastes out of the air
cleaning him washing him
Ysel?
Honey. The fluid was Honey, full of
nanorepair elementals and O2 saturate. The bed
was a longsleep bed.. He was being awakened, and
he could see the stars through the clear screen
set high in the room moving as Gold the Ship
span up to generate gravity but the stars
but the stars were moving wrong
Ysel?
The boy woke, and felt her warmth next to him.
The dream faded from his mind. Gold was no
longer in near-c flight, with their fragile,
fragile, bodies packed away and shielded as much
as might be from the hell of radiation that
sleeted through her at those perilous speeds. He
had gone through the agony of resurrection again,
he was alive again, and, Oh the lovingkindness of
Gold, by her grace he now awoke in one bed with
his love, both of them fresh up from the dead in
flawless, exquisite, flesh! He turned and reached
for her.
During their long and carefully managed
courtship they had been bedded several times, as
was the custom, each of them clothed to the neck
in a thin, flexible garment which they could not
break or unseal. They would embrace and hold and
whisper and touch for hours, whispering promises
of what they would do when they were at last truly
wed and naked to each other forever, kissing and
caressing until her mother came to fetch her back
in the morning, jolly and laughing at their
frustration, his....
But she was not in the bed.
His mind focused and he woke truly. The familiar
weight of memory and misery fell on him again, and
again he lay for a while, trying to fall back into
dream, failing. The dream, the illusion, seemed to
be happening every morning. He wanted it, he lived
for it, but he was almost beginning to be afraid.
At last he resigned himself to wakefulness and
thought, where am I?
He was in a low-ceilinged comfortable room. He
was in bed, naked, and bandaged about the head. He
was comfortable but when he tried to move a rictus
of cramp seized all up his back and a dizzy
vertigo set the room spinning. His head thumped
out one great pulse of agony. He gasped at the
pain and slowly, slowly, started to investigate
what he could manage to do. By the time the woman
came in he was sat up propped by one arm while the
other gingerly investigated his head and neck. She
tch'd at him and spoke brightly in words he
could not understand and propped him with pillows
and bought him some food: bread and soup which he
ate up in three gulps, and then a platter of the
bitter local olives and some cheese. He ate it
all, belched, and made to get out of bed again,
then yelped and fell back exhausted. She took the
plates away and shoved a chamber pot out from
under the bed with one foot, grimaced, said
something whose meaning was obvious, and went out.
He was just starting the long negotiation with his
back and neck as to how he would get into position
to use it when the old man came in.
Lorcas. The old man's name was Lorcas. His
Stock-Father, his sourceclone, Lorcas.
"Are you better now, Scion?" he said at once.
"And if not, how long until you can move?"
"Ser and Father, it will be a few days until I
can get up. A while. But you are recovered!! What
has happened to you?"
"I woke up, woke up properly, when I saw the jaegermecheant.
I will tell you about it later. You have done
well. I can but just remember wandering about in a
dream. And shouting, yelling my heart out from
time to time. What did Gold do with us?"
"Our sept is dead" said the boy. "We hit some
Kuiper ice in the outer system, when we were still
in deceleration, in just the last few tenths
percent. I woke up in agony. There was just a
fraction of Mainring left. I could see we were
spinning along the wrong axis, and I knew Mainring
was gone and we were just an isolated node because
it was generating no gravity. No radius. I tried
to get the others up, but no-one was recoverable
except you. Too much damage. And you would not
properly awake. There was just Gold, speaking
through the comms systems, and me.
"We linked up with some Drive and started to
reassemble, and we contacted the other units and
got most of the Ship back together, and she got
the drag bubble out, and we hit the heliopause
square and came in under control, and five days
later we got close enough to orbit this rock. But
she never stopped saying the same thing, over and
over.
"Lorcas, I think she is mad. Insane with fear.
She said, Tell them the new ones are coming
and they are worse than the old ones. She
told me that again and again. She stabilised in
orbit, she contacted the Ship, she is
regenerating, and she imprinted us and sent us
down, planetside, right away; and we have been
trekking around in the mud for months, while you
took instruction from Her and preached - I had no
idea you could talk to thousands of people like
that!!! And I took care of you the while. Please
don't laugh. She was in such haste. And so
frightened. What should I have done?"
"Nothing else. You did well, as I said."
"Have you been in a trance, or asleep?"
"Something like that. She needed a voice. I had
to speak the Common like one born to it and that
meant some deep work - you have a strong accent -
and I might still fall back. And I haven't been
Cleaned, like you have, and all sorts of weird
misconnections get made as the nervous system is
reformed. Anyway, I'm here. You can relax, go back
up to Gold if you like, and play around, help her
integrate, or just rest. But I have to go and see
the Lords of the Ship."
"I must come with you! Everyone is dead!" His
face worked and he started to cry "Ysel is dead.
Don't leave me." And now that he could lay down a
fraction of his burden the true sorrow fell on
him, and he started to weep in earnest, his whole
body shaking. The old man embraced him, and when
the tears were done he spoke again.
"Farewell, and Live Again. Their spirits will
return. Gold preserves their genecodes, and in
time, with the permission of our hosts, we will
rear a Scion for each of them, so their souls will
find a home. Our sept is ended. But Gold
continues; she is you and me. And now she will be
a new City, a part of the Ship, and you and I will
rule there, and raise our people again, and
welcome others fleeing this dying world. If you
are fit, come with me now. If not there is no need
to hurry. Pyet and his men will stay with you
here, till I send for you." He hugged the boy
again, and stood up. "Do you know, they have to
face off with the jaeger like that as part
of their work? Occasionally one of the Old
Machines decides it's their job to monitor human
gene flows and "correct" something. Pyet and
people like him give it identity tissue; their
clients dodge the toll. A high price to keep the
abhumans away. And there are more and more Old
Machines as you near the Ship. No wonder they
tried to avoid being our escorts. That nest has
been turned to glass, at least.... And yes, this
is Urth, Manhome, but there have already been
Incursions - one of which damped the planet's
rotation, and dug this little rut in the ground.
We came as quick as we could, and burned the void
behind us, and crashed, but we are late, tens of
thousands of years late. I'm not surprised Gold is
terrified. Anyhow." He stood up. "The Marriage
will proceed, in any case, there is no better
destiny for our Lady, or for us. But some things
do have to be cleared up. Let me help you with
that." He held the bowl while the boy pissed,
wincing, and he went out of the room, forced brisk
and cheerful. The boy lay back, slowly, and slowly
turned on his side, closing his eyes.
---<<>>---
He woke up, ate, slept, ate again. Felt a little
better. There was no dark pause in the Twilight
land, the sun stood always in the same place, but
there was a time in the cycle when everyone slept.
Yet he was sleepless now, alone, thinking.
I am fourteen years old. I was born in a womb of
honey, and it mended every insult and tear the
Pain of space would have dealt me, as I grew, and
it cured even those wounds that had been dealt
before my conception, so my genetic mutation load
is zero. And so I am strong and fair and they call
me Starborn. I am Lorcas's scion. No woman bore
me. As we threw dirt upon the empty worlds and saw
them bloom, so Lorcas flung me out, from himself.
And I grew, and do grow.
But all our sept are dead, save for we two. I
gave their bodies back to Gold, said such words as
I could, said Farewell and Live Again to each one.
But they are gone.
Ysel is gone. Her part of Mainring was turned to
plasma. If her spirit yet survives it is naked
prey in high space.
And he thought about the idiocy, the stumbling
folly, of Gold in her duties, of the people who
should have been woken long since but were now
thin gas smeared over billions of miles, of the
ancient starship Herself and her misunderstanding
and her rage of protection for her children and
her errors. He could only think of his Ship with
love. But he pondered her flaws and asked again,
Why is everything so muddled? Why does everyone,
even those of transhuman intellect, totter along
on the edge of disaster? Always? He had been
taught wisely and he knew this was an inescapable
rule of Life: that everything lives at the edge of
its capacity, doing things it can only just manage
to encompass and only just understand. That the
race is endless, and death comes close behind. But
knowledge is not comfort.
He thought: I will do what is right. I will
perceive the universe with clear eyes, and I will
never be cruel. I will remember everything
suffers. We are all brothers. Cruelty and anger
shall never rule me.
This was his resolution, from time to time. He
had not read of it in a book or seen it acted out
by cube-ghosts. It was from his own heart.
He drifted again towards sleep.
There was a gentle sound, a few almost-words.
Sounds that inescapably came from the warm throat
of a woman. Loving, but warning, and asking help.
Awake suddenly, yet still in dreams, he raised his
head, and saw nothing. But a trace of scent, a
breath of warmth, a ghost of movement, were in the
room. He sat up, crying out sharply as his back
spasmed, but there was no-one, no-one there.
---<<>>---
The next morning, to call it the morning, he
limped down to the refectory, dazed by another
dream of lost love, to be hailed by Lorcas where
he sat at the center of everything, talking and
eating and wiping his mouth. He sat down with the
men and got smiles and nods and drink and meat
passed to him. The old man was planning and
talking and disposing and promising. He had an
open Eye hovering just above his shoulder,
relaying pictures from one of Gold's effector
arrays in orbit interspersed with feeds from
low-level survey elements flying over the Valley.
The array was spitting out slugs of iron at
several hundred microfractions of c and the survey
cameras, no bigger than the pupil of an eye, were
reporting their fall on this or that huddled band
of mansonyaggers. Lightning-like flashes and
distant thunders seconded the pictures, but from
so far away and at such long interval that no real
connection was obvious. Yet cheers filled the
room, again and again, as the jaeger bands
were seen burned and smashed to scrap. All round
the room, other travellers were craning their
necks to see. The boy admired the showmanship, but
he had nothing to say, nothing to add. He had
thought the warmachines were supposed to be
helpful and allied true humans, but they did not
seem to be popular, but to be hated. He nodded
glumly at cheerful Pyet and his men and sipped
small beer for what stretched into hours. When at
last the old man got up and walked out, still
talking, he followed, though the avidly chattering
group did not grant him a backward glance.
---<<>>---
Their journey towards the Ship was as part of a
company of several score, through lowlands that
were at first still heavily populated and farmed.
But the Ship towered ever higher as the days
passed, until they could see how its bombardment
arrays targeted first this part and then that part
of the Shadowlands that stretched north from here,
where the Valley turned at the Bight and ran into
eternal Night. First the sharp lines of guide
beams, just visible in the high air, searching and
scanning; then when they had converged on some
target the heavier carrier streams, burning back
from the beam ends toward the guns along the same
channels of air, flickering and tapping until they
all at once grounded on the Ship's adamant
exoskeleton and a great sheet of fire peeled off
and sprang out and away northward, moving as a
roiling torus of plasma towards its target. These
greater bolts might appear but twice a day. The
fusillade of more minor energies was constant, but
oddly quiet. There was no sharp boundary between
the human lands and the darkness, only a barren
nomansland where the impacts of bolt and sear
glowed still, days after whatever had emerged from
the Night and crept south toward the human lands
had been slain. That and the scattering of warped
ground, impossible debris and ruins that men could
never have inhabited, that drew closer and closer
as they neared the Ship.
---<<>>---
They grew hungry, for now they moved through
empty lands, no one lived this close to the
Shadow, and the advent of the first flyer was
cheered and welcomed. A heavy dromond, it cruised
over them, its wings a hundred fathoms wide yet
almost transparently thin and its belly fat with
manna. It opened its ventral ports and rained
flowers and sweetmeats on the company, then
circling around with a gentle throb of power
slowed almost to a man's running speed and lowered
its more solid gifts down on slowly drifting
static pads: clothing, tools, and ornaments such
as none of them had ever seen, half-living
spielters for the children to play with, scaled
hauberks immune to bullet, knife and even beam,
and such food as they had never tasted in their
dreams. The road to the Ship was plain ahead of
them, wide, flat, level, guarded by fire and
lightning, and the Ship now was close.
---<<>>---
Riding metal dragons, tame mansonyaggers shining
gold or copper or blue orichalcum, a band of
goddesses came to see the newcomers. Girls, or
young women, modestly dressed and courteous, but
gazing frankly; and with them an old duenna riding
in a palanquin. They did not dismount, but circled
the company, calling greetings in the swift liquid
tongue of the Ship, laughing and tossing their
hair. Very quickly they were bored and the dragons
carried them away back to the Ship, with their
chaperone chasing after. But the men and women of
the company stared at each other. In the presence
of those women, even their remembered presence,
every adult looked like an ugly, half-dwarfed,
cripple. Except for the boy, who had looked like a
boy, skinny and pale but of normal height and
build, not the young giant he was.
There were other visitors. Bands of men
patrolled the road, and soon they had an escort of
twenty, armed Taloses, men sheathed in grey metal
and carrying each hand-and-a-half weapon of a sort
none had ever seen before: the famed dyskos of the
Ship, a short polearm tipped by a monomolecular
circular blade that spun up to invisible speed in
the blink of an eye and could split solid steel
like punkwood.
---<<>>---
"Will we look like that? When we live in the
Ship?" One of the company asked Lorcas.
"Our children will," said the old man. "It is
the weariness of this broken World and its
poisons. We all carry a hundred faulty genes. Life
combs them slowly out of our bloodlines, one death
at a time, but all the folk of the Ship are
Cleaned, and have none of these errors, or only
the handful that arise by chance anew in each
generation. We did the same thing on Gold. See my
Scion here." He pointed at the boy.
"Our children. But not us?"
"No," said the old man. "It cannot be done after
the single cell stage." He did not speak about it
further, and when, that sleep-time, people started
to quietly slip away, going back to their homes,
he did not remark upon it.
---<<>>---
They stopped for their last sleeptime in a grey
fort with a thousand rooms empty ready to receive
visitors or migrants. Not one room in twenty was
occupied. The sarjeant of their escort called for
attention, and they traipsed in to a hall well lit
and clean enough but echoing empty. They were now
fewer in number than their guardians and guides.
The old man, the boy, and Pyet, who confided to
the boy that he was determined to board the Ship
at least once in his life, but had no intent to
stay; his three followers and kinsmen; and a
handful of chance-met others. Not one of the
thousands that the old man had preached to in
scores of gatherings all through the Valley was
there. They made a lonely meal, huddled in a hall
meant for ten times their number. Yet their hosts,
looming over them like pillars, seemed both
unsurprised and unworried by their scant numbers.
The soldiers did not even unarmour, but stood
watch all round, like statues; their serjeant
unhelmed - showing a countenance as
flawless-handsome as the boy's - and joined them
at table, but he had little to say beyond polite
obvious replies. The old man questioned him to no
real purpose. He would only say that he must defer
to his Seniors on this or that matter. Tomorrow
would bring the resolution.
---<<>>---
As they finished their meal, there was a change
in the background noise, the texture of the
silence, in the hall. A soldier came in in haste
and spoke to the sarjeant. He got up lightly, and
excused himself, and went out at once, conferring
with the soldier in short urgent phrases.
The boy also got up but he did not follow them
outside. He simply went out of the hall, up stairs
and along a corridor a short way, to a window.
There he saw the Ship had ceased firing upon the
Shadowlands. The darting points of light which had
outlined its upper decks were gone dim. Several of
the soldiers were gathered to stare. standing in a
group round the sarjeant, and he read puzzlement
and a little fear in the tone of their voices. One
glanced back, saw him, and spoke. The sarjeant
turned and gestured for him to come down. He
turned to obey, and as he did so he saw someone
entering the compound, someone weary and walking
slow, but... he could not turn back to look a
second time, for one of the soldiers had been sent
to escort him down and was now in the room,
summoning him by gesture and a few polite words of
Common, and he could find no just reason to break
away and go back to the window to look, but..
As he walked back to the table, the boy caught a
second glimpse of her. Or at least a glimpse of
someone new. A door opened down the hallway, a
woman limped past and through it, and the door
closed again. The guard led him back to the table,
and he seated himself, trying not to feel like an
errant child. But the woman - - was she the same
woman? Had there really been time for her to enter
the building? Singular or plural, she had not been
one of the Shipfolk who manned the fort, and
certainly not one of the soldiers. Her garment and
her cast and her posture recalled something he
could not remember. But then he did remember. She
had looked, walked, moved, born her head and arms,
after the manner of his own people, like one of
his own sept, one of the crew of Gold. And he
began to tremble. The sarjeant was talking to the
gathering in heavy measured tones. He jumped up,
ran back up the stairs, and looked for the door,
and discovered it was not there, or rather that he
had no idea which of twenty doors, all locked, it
might have been. When he returned to the table
they all looked at him in wonder, and the old man
had some sharp words about discourteous behavior.
He slept that night like one of the dead. When
he awoke, she was bending over him. Ysel. The
light was behind her, but what he could see of her
face looked anguished, and her garments were
crumpled and dirty and torn. He reached hands up
to her, but found himself unable to move, and she
gazed and gazed and went sadly out of the room,
shaking her head, as he struggled with limbs bound
by the nightmare. It must have been a dream of
some sort, yet there was no awakening he could
remember, only a gradual return of mobility. He
got up, stumbled, sat down on the bed with his
head in his hands.
---<<>>---
The few of them that were left were escorted
through an avenue of formal gardens towards the
Great Gate. The sloping wall of the Ship filled
half the sky. They entered the Gate, and passed
what seemed a short tunnel of ten fathoms through
the solid outer shell of the Ship (thin and flimsy
shielding for a Starship, thought the boy) and
they were there, standing on the deck of City
Zero, arrived at last, gazing in wonder at the
great storied and decorated maze of the Cities
within and above. And there were people coming to
meet them, robed men and women escorted by
warriors in armour of tiny plates that slid and
overlapped like the feathers on a hummingbird's
breast, men and women whose grim faces proclaimed
that they required Answers, Now.
They were greeted, they were escorted to the
central Liftport and swiftly boarded one of the
upgoing stream, and they soared upward past
wonders, sitting at their ease but with the dust
of travel still upon them, and with their baggage
still unpacked in the plodding carriers,
surrounded by a cordon of armed men. The old man
was away to one side talking earnestly with the
leader of their new guardians, and the boy sat
down with Pyet and his men. Their looks at him
expected answers, but all he could do was shake
his head. "We are going to see someone important"
he said at last."Will-we Nill-we. Be on your best
behavior. Look innocent. Keep quiet. I think there
will be Hel to pay, and it had better fall on my
Father and I than on you."
---<<>>---
"We didn't want the task" said Pyet. "They knew
you were coming, and we had the Honor of doing the
last bit, getting you to the Ship. Fuck Honor. One
more chance to be snipped in pieces by a jaeger
playing games. So we thought, an accident, you and
the prophet waylaid by someone, no-one knew, sad.
We weren't going to kill you, just keep you
somewhere safe for a while, but we let you go
after all. Gods, you punch hard" (with a chuckle).
"Didn't seem worth losing teeth to keep you, so we
thought, confess and take our punishment, will be
noisy but no worse than a few slaps. But you were
ahead there too. And now here we are."
"Sorry" said the boy. "I can promise you that
you won't be bored, at least. And that no-one will
be worried about that little scuffle, that I also
promise."
---<<>>---
"Gold has fallen silent." Said the Navarch, or
Great-Captain, uttering the same essential
question for the tenth time. "Why?" The old man
and the boy looked at each other uneasy. "Her last
message convinced us. The Guns too will fall
silent now, and we will cease the bombardment
except at extreme need. But why this withdrawal?"
Silence. They would have answered if they could,
but it seemed pointless to repeat the vague
guesses that were all they had had to offer. One
of the other men in the council chamber, a
purple-robed oldster with a youth and a maid
attending him, spoke up. "Your Lady's news is long
anticipated. The Conditions of Life and Being
within this galaxy are changing, are undergoing
what might be termed a phase change, a
transformation into a higher level of
self-organization. In that new Condition of Life,
there will be no place for those of the old order,
no more than an obligate anaerobe could survive in
an oxygen atmosphere. We belong to the old order.
We can survive only by being unimportant. Until we
can make the jump to Starholm, we dare not use
powerful weapons, or do anything that will draw
the attention of the Ulterior beings. And we dare
not risk triggering the change in the Shadowlands.
That would be disaster - a true Night Land, filled
with horrors that were kin to us and thus knew all
our weaknesses."
"I cannot tell you the mind of Gold, but I
rejoice at this," said the old man "I thought that
you would need long persuasion. But there is more.
The jaeger, the Old Machines that you have
made pets and allies of, must be banished from the
Ship. They are too dangerous, and they themselves
are able to be agents of this change to after-life
we fear.
One of the soldiers spoke up sharply. "The
mansonyaggers keep the abhumans away from
human-inhabited lands. Without them, we can do
nothing. We simply do not have the manpower."
"Bombard the unmen from orbit."
"Ask Gold to bombard them. We have no in-system
flight capacity at the moment, and in future we
will not dare to build any. That is another reason
why the guns must be quieted. Soon our stores of
helium 3 will fall below safe level, and the fusor
power must cease. From henceforth once Gold
descends to her marriage we must depend on the
Telluric potentials, the Earth-Current, and that
cannot be wasted. And this is why the alliance
with the mansonyaggers can not be discarded."
"They will betray you" said the old man sadly.
"No" Said the Navarch "We cannot expel them. If
we do we condemn tens of millions in the West
Valley to death or enslavement. Fortunately Gold's
attacks on them have ceased too, and the alliance
can be preserved." And one of the other soldiers
spoke up "I wonder if you have ever seen a human
city after the Ahrima have been through? Or the
Rufous Folk?"
---<<>>---
The boy sat saying little. The argument raged
back and forth, but he was looking all around with
haunted eyes. Suddenly She was everywhere, sitting
listlessly at a table in the great Lift, walking
ahead of them along the corridors, sitting at one
of the unoccupied seats at the great table, but
never the one he was looking at, always with her
face turned away. He still had not seen her face.
She seemed to be more and more wounded, battered,
bruised as by blows to the head and neck, cringing
and limping. His cheerful defiance talking to Pyet
had popped like a bubble. He could think of
nothing but her.
---<<>>---
The old man, Lorcas, was speaking passionately,
on his feet, when suddenly and suddenly there was
someone just behind him. A whisper in his ear.
Thundermetal; Heavenmetal;
Hellmetal; about five and thirty librae;
they know.
The boy, just opposite him, gazed at him with
haunted understanding eyes.
Tell the Navarch. The jaeger know.
Tell the Navarch. The jaeger know. Then
Forget, FORGET FORGET FORGET FORGET.
He rose, circled the table, ignoring
expostulations and questions, approached the
Navarch, bent to whisper in his ear.....
..... and then he was sitting in his place again,
and the Navarch was looking at him with horror.
...... but he had forgotten why....
...... and he never remembered nor ever learned
the secret, nor even knew that there was such a
secret, not even on the day he died. But some at
the council table already knew, and knew what
could be made from those metals, and knew what
such a basilisk's egg might do, what even a single
one would do, were it to be hidden under the skin
of a mansonyagger, and bought inside the Ship, and
detonated inside the Ship.
---<<>>---
The Navarch stood up. "It is decided. The jaeger
must go. All go. Not one may remain. All. Now."
There was an explosion of passionate talk. The
Navarch slammed his hand on to the table and
thundered out a sentence in Ship, then stood up
flint-eyed and spoke in Common. "All leave. Except
you three." His spread fingers indicated the old
man, the boy, and Pyet. "And the Captains. Now!"
"Why? Said the old man. "What happened?"
---<<>>---
"Fifty for one" Said the white-bearded, scarred,
veteran. "The jaeger are faster and
stronger than natural creatures. Nothing can
resist a dyskos, but they can dodge any normal
blow. And that is assuming none are armed. If any
of them have their guns primed, they could easily
slay a thousand each."
"How then can they be fought?"
"Pattern arrays producing a powerful enough EMP
pulse. Section them into deadends and lock them
in. Lie to them. Drop them into deadfalls full of
fire; if all else fails attack from all sides with
the dyskos. If any of the external guns can be
dismounted,"... one of the other Captains shook
his head grimly....
Pyet, the man from the Valley, stood up. He did
not reach above the breastbones of the other
assembled men, and he looked nervous.
"Sers and Seniors, men of the Ship, I may be
able to help."
---<<>>---
"Beautiful" said the Artificer. "How sweet a
weapon. How easy it lies in the hand." He picked
up the rifle-like pistol-like weapon and cuddled
it to his cheek, sighting it. "Nothing
superfluous. Nothing missing. And the power.
In one man's hand. A shaped charge, of course. A
copper cone produces a jet of superheated metal?
But it is obvious. Obvious, once you see it done.
"He embraced Pyet, lifting the smaller man off the
ground."You shall be rewarded. You shall be made a
Master, for this, because you have bought back to
us one of the ancient Weapons whose use goes
beyond recorded history, whose operation has even
worn its coding into the human genome. Show us its
power again, Brother." Pyet obligingly opened the
hold of his patient battered robot carrier, took
out and set another double-cone shaped grenade in
the launcher, and, sighting, blew another hole
through a handsbreadth thickness of Shipmetal
target. "We use them in the Valley." He said.
"When we get a chance. They work. On the small
ones."
---<<>>---
"Make one million" said the Navarch. "Do not
sleep, Artificer. Call up all your brothers, in
every City. No transmissions. Foot messengers
only, verbal. Pyet, and your men, go with the
Captains, explain all, have each become
proficient, and as soon as the Artificer can
produce duplicates, test them. And thou," naming
an aide "Go with Pyet, see nothing holds him up,
guard him with your life. Be quick friends, be
quick, and be silent. Use no screen or terminal or
slip. The jaeger can monitor all our
electronic communication, we have perhaps one day
before they know."
---<<>>---
The boy had continued to attend the debate, and
the debate continued, interminably, being now only
pantomime to garner time. They slept, and in the
morning returned, and the news of their arrival
was noised abroad though every channel, as loudly
as possible, while Pyet and his three friends cut
metal and showed how the propellants were
compounded and shaped the conical blast focusings
on lathes, swearing and sweating, watched and
imitated by hawk eyed giants, and the old man and
the boy slept again, but there was no sleep for
the men from the Valley as they labored and
taught.
---<<>>---
There came a time when the mansonyaggers, every
one within the Redoubt, stopped. They stood
insect-still, disobedient to command, while the
aether thrilled with electronic communication. And
then they moved again. They gathered together, one
horde to each city, and began their parliament,
all facing inward like a cluster of ants, climbing
on top of and under each other, pressed tightly
together, and men fled from them.
While Pyet, with bleeding hands, took a missile
that was entirely of Ship construction, and a
launcher of like make, and set it in a fixed rack,
and triggered it, and saw it fly straight to the
desired target and strike true.
And the mansonyaggers, the hunters of men,
uncoiled from their embrace, and flowed out
through the cities in flickering rivers of death.
And men donned armour and took up the dyskos and
stood ashen-faced in their ranks...
And at last the missiles came out of the
automatic fabricators in steady stream, every
fifth one, then every twentieth one, then every
hundredth one, tested and found true...
---<<>>---
And still the meaningless talk went on.
But at last there came a time when She was there
again. He could feel her looking at him. And then
he could see her, though her head was bowed and
her sleeve cast over her face, see her plain and
clear with his waking eyes.
The boy looked at her. Looked back at the table.
They were talking about something.
He looked at the woman, the girl, again. She was
huddled in the corner between deck and wall. The
hard surfaces could not be comfortable, and she
was lying in the stiff unrelaxed posture of one
too weary even to stretch a cramped limb. One arm
was across her eyes. Her feet were bound in
disintegrating rags, her flesh looked like ashes.
She moved very slightly, made a tiny noise.
He got up, making some wordless sound of
urgency. He circled round the table and went
direct to her.
His back cried out in agony as he bent down,
squatted on the deck near her. He looked up.
Everyone at the table was looking at him in
wonder.
In a bitter voice he said "Is this the
hospitality of the Ship? You let her lie here,
starving, bleeding, and you do nothing. You do not
bring her a cup of water. You do not even grant
her a word." He reached out and touched her dry
hair, falling from the sores on her scalp."Show me
somewhere to take her, let me have a bed, a room."
He got his arms under her and tried to lift, and
his vision edged with black as the pain in his
back increased horribly. But he got up, cradling
her against his breast, and managed a step, and
another. He came to the door, walked out. The
guards watched him but did nothing.
(Behind him the man in purple was speaking, in
the liquid tongue of the ship. "No. No. No. Look
at the cords of his neck, the sinews in his
wrists. Judge the weight of each footfall." And he
gestured to the young man and the young woman
standing behind him. "Go with him. Help him. Find
him a private place to stop, to lie, without
hindrance. Get him whatever he asks for. Do
whatever he says. Note everything, and tell me.
Now." The two ran after the boy, bounding swiftly
on bare feet. )
He had staggered along the corridor only a
little way when he felt a gentle touch on one
elbow. He turned exhausted eyes and saw the young
man in partipupure holding his arm and gesturing
toward a door, which the young woman who had stood
with him in the meeting held open. He limped
through the door. A room. A bed. He laid her down
on the bed, and so bending felt his back lock up,
completely rigid. He fell slowly to his knees. The
young man came round into his field of vision,
asked something in a questioning tone, and he was
just able to mutter "Help me." The young man and
young woman exchanged rapid words, and the young
man ran out of the room.
He waited. He wanted to help her, but all he
could do was to stroke her forehead, very
clumsily, with his left hand at the extreme limit
of its reach. He waited. The pain grew neither
less nor more. He tried to comfort her, stroking
her head.
A man entered the room and spoke questioningly,
with authority. He came close to the boy and felt
his shoulders, his thighs, and then down his back.
He spoke imperatively and the young man and the
young woman picked the boy up and went to lie him
face down on the bed. His frantic cries No!
No! No! made them pause, and after rapid
angry questions the man took cushions and laid
them down in a pattern on the floor and laid the
boy down across them.
He squatted down near the boy's head, and spoke
in Common.
"You have a birth defect, young man. Your spinal
vertebrae lack central prongs. You are vulnerable
to partial dislocations under stress. They are
like blocks piled one on top of the other, that
can easily slip out of alignment." He demonstrated
with his balled fists, one above the other, and
the top one slipping from side to side. "It is an
archaic form, a throwback. Modern human types all
have a blunt central stabilizing prong at each
vertebral junction." He stuck his thumbs up, then
nested one fist on top of the other, the thumb of
the lower fist enclosed by the fingers of the top
one. "Much better. I can't do anything for you,
I'm afraid, except tell you to rest until the pain
diminishes. Try to relax as much as possible." He
passed his hands over the boy's back and lower
spine. "Good. I will go now, and have them send
you some pain killers." He got up and the boy
registered he had gone. Two seconds later one of
his shoulders was being pulled upward, hard. As he
turned his head to look there was violent blow on
the base of his spine, just offcenter.
His back unlocked. He could move again.
He scrambled up and stood to make his thanks.
The Doctor accepted it gracefully. "You will need
corrective nanosurgery, in time, and your children
will need germline editing. What was the
integrated tau-time of your Ship? Never mind, I
must go. But this can all be fixed, never fear. It
is almost routine." He moved to the door. "But can
you help her?" said the boy, urgently, gesturing
to the sick woman. The doctor looked at the bed,
looked back. "I think only you can help her -" he
said softly. And went out.
Well then.
The young man and the young woman waited. He
asked for water, and they bought water, and he
gave it to her, holding her head, a sip and a sip
and a sip. He asked for food and they bought fruit
and bread and she ate a little. Then he managed to
get her to drink some more. Her breath eased a
little, she relaxed. With a word or two a coverlet
was bought, and he spread it over her, and she
curled up on her side under it, seeming to sleep.
There was nothing he could think of to do then but
to clean her poor feet, which he managed without
waking her, taking off the rags that bound them
and washing the cuts and sores. She continued to
sleep.
He lay down on the deck beside the bed. He was
half asleep when the young man came in with a
bedroll, which he spread on the floor. He rolled
on to it, said some word of thanks, slept.
---<<>>---
The boy woke and thought, Ysel.
She was on the bed. He was beside her on the
floor, for some reason. There was no room for him
to lie on the bed with her: so he sat up and
leaned across her, stroked her head, kissed her
face and eyes gently. She was thin, filthy, but
that did not matter. He tried to lie kneeling on
the floor and partly on the bed, so that his head
could rest close to hers, and somehow managed to
fall asleep again in that position.
He woke later, and she was looking at him, her
haunted eyes wide. He rolled back off the bed, and
she sat up, looking at him.
"Lorcasscion?" Scarcely more than a whisper.
"Ysel?" Hands reaching. But..
She looked at him, tears running in her eyes.
"They are all dead. Destroyed. Oh, it hurt, it
hurt."
"You are safe here now."
"They are coming. The new ones are coming, and
they are worse than the old ones. Much worse."
"Ysel-"
"I did it. I am filth. Dirt. I am the one who
created them." He was silent, a realisation
forcing its way into his consciousness. "It was my
fault. Me. And then I fled, steering so stupid I
hit something. My head smashed into pieces,
Lorcasscion. I still can't think right. And they
are all dead."
She was not Ysel, never had been.
He knew the basics of daemotechne, knew how this
could and did happen. That ultimate distillation
of being called pneuma did not arise
solely from biological systems, but from any
system complex enough. The Spirit in the room with
him now was far more powerful than anything human,
in proportion as Gold's processing capacity
excelled that of a human brain; she was
communicating to his pneumasome directly, without
any physical body. His under-minds were
back-projecting what they expected, synthesising
the sensory impressions that would have been
appropriate if a corporeal person was generating
the messages.
She had looked like Ysel when he had thought she
was Ysel. Now, she did not. He could not have
really described what she looked like. But he knew
who She was.
He touched one hand gently. "Gold.." He said.
She did not respond.
"Gold. Don't despair. We all love you. Really..
..."
"I killed Ysel. I killed her mother Fevre and
her father Jain. I killed two thousand other men
and women when I crashed into that rock,
Lorcasscion, crashed because I was so panicked by
Them that my attention was all directed behind me.
Like the fool I am. I only spared you and your
clone-father. Luck. I bring good luck with me."
Her voice had grown in strength, but the venom in
it was terrible.
"Gold, no."
"I breathed life into ten thousand planets, and
I saw each one turn into Horror, and saw the
Horror grow and compound itself and become wise.
It is only just beginning, Lorcasscion. They want
me. And they will arise here, too. Soon."
''No, Gold. Your message has been heard. The
bombardment is stopped, forever. From now on the
Ship will only ever fire in defence. And the
hunter-machines, the mansonyaggers, will all be
exiled from the Ship, and will not be permitted to
return. These people of the Ship are not fools.
You should stop, wait, and come to know them. So,
you see, you have done much good."
"Have I? Well then, I will rise from this bed
and I will heal myself and I will go out and fight
what is coming. I am healing fast, in orbit,
chewing up rocks from the belt beyond the fourth
planet."
"Healing is more than rebuilding the body,
Gold."
"Heal yourself, then, child." She lay back. She
looked stronger and more healthy now, but her eyes
were pits of fire."I saw your Ysel end. Her body
flashed into plasma. Her spirit was not destroyed
by the impact, but it fell through the Void. I
tracked her and a thousand others, and I saw what
came to pluck them. She is Destroyed, Lorcasscion.
Give up any thought of joy. Make yourself Death.
Like Them."
"She is gone?"
"Yes. Never more. Never again. No rebirth in any
future age. And the fault is mine. Hate me,
Lorcasscion."
A little storm of tears gathered in his eyes and
then, oddly, faded.
Ysel is gone. But I am still here. And I want to
live. I want to live, even if poor Gold cannot
endure life any more.
Hatred shall never rule me.
There is much you can do, Gold.
He spoke clearly. "Veto. I forbid it,
Gold. You are needed here."
The ancient command language rocked her, but she
was far beyond control by such things. "I deserve
to die."
"You want to die. As an excuse. I forbid it. I
forbid it. I forbid it. You must stay, and carry
on the fight."
"I only want to die."
"But I forbid it. Look at your strength." He
punched the bulkhead, very hard. "I am a man, and
that is the worst I can do. What can you do, Gold?
You could plough a trench in this old Manhome as
deep as this valley. That is the ratio of power.
We need you."
"I am nothing. Everything I do fails."
"I am far weaker than you, and I am not giving
up."
"You are not even trying. Listen. I led
you and Lorcas through the Valley for one reason,
little boy: to have you spread your genes as far
and fast as possible. What Lorcas said was
unimportant. But we are the oldest Ship to return,
so far. We left millions of years ago, t-time. The
human beings in this ditch have been through six
or seven near-extinction bottlenecks since we
left, and their genome has lost important elements
by sheer chance. Really good night vision, for
there has been no true darkness here for millions
of years. And disease resistance, drug metabolism,
nanoelement tolerance. The Ship folk will discover
that many of your ancient genes are important, in
good time, just as they already know that you lack
some of the important modern ones; or if not I
will tell them; but their delicacy will prevent
them from doing what has to be done for humans in
the Valley quickly enough. So I fail there too."
"I.. I was still in love."
"Any pair of green virgins treated the way you
and Ysel were treated will fall utterly in love.
It doesn't mean you were eternally predestined
soulmates, child. It just means your brains were
marinated in sex hormones. The traditions of the
Crew evolved to fool adolescent instincts in order
to get the results they wanted. Needed. No harm in
it, in the Up-and-Out. No respite, no relay, no
rescue, no repair. We don't want sexual rivalry
and conflict. And most of the time lifelong
monogamy is the best good compromise. But we are
not in the Up-and-Out any more, and there are some
times, Lorcasscion, when species survival is best
served by as much fucking as possible. This is
very much one of those times. And you did nothing.
You are no-one special. You just happen to retain
some ancient genetic tricks that everyone here has
lost. And you have some germline editing to make
you big and pretty and the genes that we really
will need can hitch a ride on them. If you had
begotten just a few children.... in a thousand
years the human population in the Valley would
have started to rise again, the abhumans would
have lost their edge, and when the real crisis
comes the Ship would have had tens of millions
more Crew than it will have. That is something you
could have done. Not by punching a wall. By acting
the man. But you preferred to nurse your grief in
a corner."
"Gold, I...". it was unfair. "The Ship has a
whole guild dedicated to that kind of thing. They
work inside the Ship, and outside it too, in the
Valley. We have all the Crew's genecodes stored
safe still, and I am sure these people can arrange
to extract and transfer any genes that will help,
without requiring me to do it all by myself. I am
not some breeding animal. And I am still in love,
say what you will. And I thought these new
pneumavores were going to arrive soon...."
"Excuses. And they will arrive soon. Very soon,
in about seven thousand years."
"I..." He had run out of things to say. But he
noted, in a stunned sort of way, that telling him
off seemed to be doing her good. She no longer
looked ill...
On cue, there was a loud noise outside the room.
Explosion. Confused shouting.
Inspired, he said hastily "Stay here, Gold. Stay
safe. Some of the jaegers are in revolt.
Pyet has some old weapon, that can hurt them, he
taught the Crew how to make more but I don't know
- in any case I must go and help. But there is
nothing you can do...
"A fight?" She said. "Where?"
"Inside the Ship. You can't shoot at them from
orbit. You can do nothing, Please just stay out of
the way."
"I can do nothing?? You little idiot."
And then she was up and on her feet, now looking
entirely different. And then he could hardly bear
to look at her. And then she ran or somehow moved
very quickly to the door; avoided the hand he put
out hesitantly to stop her - there was no physical
contact - turned round and said "Get Pyet and his
new weapons, as many as possible, as fast as
possible" and was gone.
He sat on the deck, staring stupidly. There was
a lot to think about. So many certainties had
fallen to pieces like wet paper. It was hard to be
sure of anything, but Gold was not, he guessed,
contemplating suicide. Not any longer.
---<<>>---
The young woman, the female Monstruwacan
apprentice, had been watching in wonder all this
time. The male had run off, presumably to check on
the fighting. She came closer, knelt down, and
asked him in halting Common if the manifestation
he had been witnessing was now gone? When he
affirmed this she led him out of the room and back
towards the council chamber; but the corridor was
streaked with smoke, and the sounds of battle were
getting stronger. She shoved him into another
alcove and shouted something he didn't understand,
then ran off in one direction. He ran in the
other, straight towards the fighting.
---<<>>---
Iron dragons, darting and striking, smote and
scattered groups of metal-clad giants wielding the
strange discoid cutting weapons of the Shipmen. It
was not completely one-sided; the Mansonyaggers
were losing limbs and taking damage, but the human
dead littered the ground. He fell back. One
chance. Pyet and his weapons. Where would he find
them? He started to run ran towards their rooms,
but he was forestalled. A new wave of fighters,
mostly unarmoured, many of them women, poured in
to the agora, carrying hundreds of the fat-headed
missiles and scores of launcher tubes. The first
volley missed, mostly, but before a second could
be fired she was with them, Gold, running straight
toward the phalanx of machines, armoured now (he
could not have said exactly in what fashion, but
his eyes or the processing behind them insisted,
clothed for war) and crying out in a great voice.
The charge that followed after her allowed the
second volley to be fired at pointblank range, and
its effect was stunning. Gold met the single
surviving jaeger head on, cried Dragon,
I know your Name and cursed it in hissing
machine code. It fell in fits and the shining
disks hacked it in pieces. She yelped in triumph
and pointed towards one of the great doors that
led toward the Ship's central spine. "That way.
They are climbing up the Lift shaft. Do not fire
until you approach within ten paces." And
vanished.
The fight to clear out the Liftport led to
others, led to others, and all was confusion. In a
little while they evolved the best formation, each
missile firer and loader protected by a quintet of
armoured men, with the porters and carriers within
the cordon, pushing the trundling trolleys and
carrying great packs of ammunition. Many times
they were forced to retreat, and once a jaeger
dropped from the ceiling like a spider into their
midst and painted three fathoms of corridor red
before they bought it down. But they knew they
were winning, and they saw Gold again and again,
with varying degrees of clarity, calling out to
this group or that group of the hastily gathered
militias to attack, attack; guiding and
instructing, standing above the battle, the very
incarnation of Niketria, the Woman who Inspires
The Whole Nation to War; first in every charge,
full of glee, righteous, merciless, joyful and
content. They had days of fighting, but they
followed her without hesitation, they took their
losses without flinching, and they won.
He saw her a few more times in his life, a long
life that went well. Once at her Wedding. He was
watching the long process of her body, the orbital
elements that had been reformed and rebuilt into
just the right shape, descending in slow
procession towards their new resting place on top
of the previous City, that itself had once been a
Ship, called The Caroline, with a story of its
own. She came up behind him and nudged him in the
ribs and asked him, how was he getting on with the
course of action she had recommended, the, ah. .
smiling wickedly. His soon-to-be inlaws (for he
was once more in that awkward or blessed state,
set to be married soon) looked sideways at her and
one confronted her and asked her business in that
place. She identified herself in a way that left
them shaking and silent, and then drew him and his
bride-to-be over to one side of the sealed and
pressurised observation platform and told them to
watch clearly, for it would be hundreds of years
before this happened again. "And this my body is
the City which you will rule, Lorcasscion. Watch
as it comes into being."
His poor bride was shaking like a leaf, her eyes
enormous and her knees banging together, and he
snuggled her tight to him, smiling apologetically
over her head at Gold. His happiness at seeing her
almost made him dance. "Gold." He said. "Gold.
Everything is well, and this your visit is the
crown of my joy." There was nothing he could add.
She smiled again and gently peeled the poor girl
off him, and held her at arms length. "My, but you
are a pretty one. You'll be a good wife, I hope,
to my darling here?" The girl stuttered a yes.
"But a time may come when you get lazy. You've got
him, he adores you, you may not think you need to
work so hard to keep his love.... you won't make
that mistake, I'm sure?" She shook her head, her
eyes rolled skyward, and she fell back against him
again, fainted dead away. He held her tight, still
smiling at Gold, and they found a bench and they
sat down and spoke for a while, as easy as two old
friends.
He told her that the Eugenicists were studying
his ancient genome and would be spreading any
useful bits of it around in a dignified and quite
impersonal fashion, and she laughed out loud and
said the old ways worked better "four billion
years of trial and error! Still, any useful coding
you have is a part of you, it's your right, and
their way may do, after all." He congratulated her
on her own Marriage, and she shrugged. "It's not
really like human love. I don't have two control
systems in my body, fighting a war of ecstasies.
Genes and mind are one, for me. But I'm going to
give and receive a lot of information, and that
information will lodge deep inside me, and
transform me, and it will be significant, and it
will be pleasant, believe me. But I will not bear
children. The new thing that comes into being will
be the fusion of me and the Ship, and if I see you
again I will have a different name. Meyr, the
Mother, they will call us, call me... You'll learn
more, one day."
She stood up. "Now. Listen. I can no longer see
all the Valley and strike from the sky. The unmen
are resurgent in the far West, and the jaegers
will come back. You need them. The survivors are
already being employed in battle there, and
striking new scions. You will need them until you
find a better answer to the question, what is
human, than the judgements of an ancient war
machine. You need an answer of your own, a
genocide filter, shibbólet... But you must
find that. I cannot." She smiled. "Goodbye, brave
child. I will not see you again, not often in this
life. Don't stand up." And she bent and gave him
one kiss on his lips, his only kiss from her ever,
tasting like lightening, and smiled and turned and
walked to the window. At the very last she glanced
back. "She does love you, by the way" indicating
his bride, gathered on his lap like a sleeping
child. "It's obvious, or she'd have run to her
mother's arms not yours. Be kind to her." And she
turned again and walked through the handsbreadth
of tempered armourglass out onto the freezing
unbreathable low-pressure Outside of the deck, and
stood, looking up at Herself descending through
the sky. And she waved and smiled and was gone.
---<<>>---
There was some fussing then, but he explained
what had been happening in the simplest words he
could, and invited them to stay and watch with
him. Those who would, mostly young folk and a
couple of darling old grandmothers, came and sat
near, sharing food and drink and talking softly.
The troublesome others went away at last. He sat
quiet and easy, hugging his girl close and not
caring about any thing at all, answering their
questions and timid repeated requests and smiling
to reassure them but not bothering to speak much.
They ate and drank, toasting him and his fiance,
and some sang a little, and some pursued their own
suit with those they loved, sitting close and
whispering and kissing: for going to one wedding
is ever the making of another.
---<<>>---
Outside the Ships were mating, amid thunder,
fire and the controlled scream of melting and
reforming hullmetal: the Transformation of Herself
was Gold's last and greatest Operation, and the
violence of her bliss would have blinded and slain
any human being who witnessed it unfiltered. But
the place they had been given was shielded and
safe. And they sat there at peace, and spoke, and
embraced, and grew in love and friendship, and
rejoiced, all through that night, that sleep-time
declared by the will of the Navarch to be of
threefold length: watching the marriage of Gold.
For Mark Symington Geston
Andy
Robertson 10 Oct 2013
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