Salvation Lost

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “I know. I’m happy at the prospect of advancing our technology base with Neána knowledge, but I was also expecting to engage the Olyix. Even so, killing yourself…It seems…disproportionate.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what are we going to do about it?”

  “I…don’t know. Keep a closer watch on people?”

  “There’s only so much that people give away. Have you ever met an alcoholic?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “I did, once. A friend back on Juloss. I’d known hir for twenty-five years, and for twenty of them sie’d been an alcoholic, no matter which gender sie was cycled in. Saints, it came as a real shock when we found out, especially thinking back and realizing sie was clinically drunk for most of the time I was with hir. Two decades! A genuine alcoholic is almost impossible to spot outside real-time blood monitoring. They’re skilled at hiding their problem. But at least blood monitoring can help if they’re under suspicion. Unfortunately there’s no technology that can spot depression at the depths Rello must have experienced. After the first two suicides, I was hoping the combat cores would realize when their humans were suffering and alert us. Clearly that didn’t happen. Some people attempt suicide as a cry for help, though it’s not genuine, but the Saints know real suicidal thoughts have no external symptoms. Unlike people who have frustration-rooted anger issues and find their own way to neutralize that particular problem.”

  Hir finger pointed directly at Dellian’s swollen eye.

  “What are you saying?” Dellian asked, knowing he was blushing.

  “I think we have a serious situation on our hands. I’m starting to worry about morale and maintaining crew motivation.”

  “Give us an Olyix arkship, and I promise you my squad will be motivated like you won’t believe.”

  “Yes, exactly. And that’s the problem. This Saints’ cursed wait. I’ve been reading a lot of military history. The whole structure of the military, pre–quantum entanglement, was based on the principal of ‘hurry up and wait.’ That’s why regiments were constantly being given different tasks to perform during peacetime, from training maneuvers to moving base to civilian disaster assistance. Boredom really is a killer for humans, especially if their life is designed around the expectation that combat is inevitable. Now, it seems, inevitability is measured in decades, or longer. It’s starting to bite.”

  “I don’t think it can be decades. If the Neána fell for the lure, the Olyix can’t be far behind.”

  “I have to believe you’re right. But still, I’m left with the problem of what to do during the wait. How to keep our edge? I’m not exactly in a unique position here. Commanders have been facing it for millennia. We like to think we’re like the Saints, dedicated, smarter and better educated than our ancestors, so the old problems don’t apply, but as today has regrettably shown, we’re not. ‘Only human, after all’ seems to be terribly applicable.”

  “I’ll keep a better watch.”

  “Good, but we need more. A better distraction—especially for the squads, because the three suicides have all been squad members. I can’t afford any more. Discipline will become progressively harder to maintain after each one.”

  “You’ve obviously got an idea. That’s why you’re here talking to me.”

  “Almost. I need to get to the root of this, and find—for want of a better word—a cure. I need to know about outbreaks of dissatisfaction before this gets out of control, and not through official channels. It has to be dealt with subtly.”

  “I’ll do whatever I can, obviously.”

  “I know, Dellian. So talk to people, keep me informed.”

  * * *

  —

  “Sie means me, doesn’t sie?” Yirella said as they were getting ready for bed that night in their quarters. “Talk to me.”

  “That’s the way I read it,” Dellian admitted. “But subtlety isn’t my strong point. Someone I know keeps pointing that out.”

  “Can’t think who.” She stood in the bathroom doorway, wearing a toweling robe and watching him closely as he took his shirt off. Hands went onto hips, a disapproving frown appearing as she took in the bruises—still livid purple and brown despite the medical tissuegel. “Saints’ sake!”

  He didn’t quite hang his head with shame, but—“I can do without the criticism today, thanks.”

  “Sorry. He was my friend, too, you know.”

  “Yeah.”

  Dellian slipped his trousers off and watched impassively as a remote carried them away. In a minute it would have fed them into the cabin’s deconstituter, ready for the extruders to re-form the mass into tomorrow’s clothes. “I wonder if I should keep this uniform?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because I wore it today, for the funeral. That makes it…significant?”

  She came over as he sat on the edge of the bed and put her arms around him. “If you want to, then do it. If it helps. I hate seeing you like this.”

  “I hate being like this.” Having her so close would usually be highly arousing. Tonight, not so much.

  “How depressed are you?”

  “Oh, Saints, right now I feel like shit. I’m not sure it’s depression, though. Just sadness. I’ll get over it.”

  “Good.” She flashed him an impish smile. “I might know something that’ll help.”

  He took a breath as his eyes followed the way the robe hugged the outline of her body; it wasn’t long enough to cover half her legs. Normally the sight of those perfect lean thighs would be enough to send him helplessly onto his knees in worship, offering tongue and fingers and cock in praise. For she was what he lived for—her genius, beauty, complexity, fragility. She was his Saint, because she was the most human of all. “Yeah, about that—”

  “Okay, Del, before you say you just want a hug tonight…” She closed her eyes, dropping into an enchanting thinker pose to access some file through her databud.

  Dellian stared around with mild interest as the cabin walls morphed. He’d never really bothered with the interior of their shared quarters, happy to go along with whatever environment she liked. Which was currently an apartment in Cape Town, circa 2185, when the city was clean and all the garden towers that the South Africans had built over the previous thirty years looked truly spectacular as their foliage had grown to cover every square meter of concrete. But now the cabin walls flexed their texture, colors swirled, and the Milton Beach panorama vanished. He was inside a fancy water bungalow at the end of a jetty that jutted out from a sun-saturated tropical island, with a glass floor revealing the warm sea a couple of meters below, swarmed by delightful fish zipping between bright coral fans.

  “Remember this?” Yirella asked demurely.

  “Uh, is it the Maldives Island where Saint Alik was trying to find who murdered the two New York gangs?”

  “Oh, Del!”

  “What?”

  “It’s the resort on Juloss where we had the senior year vacation, the one where they simulated a flyer crash afterward for our graduation trial.”

  “Oh.”

  “This is your cabin.”

  “Riiight.”

  She stood and slipped out of the robe. Underneath she was wearing a small white bikini in vivid contrast to her lustrous skin.

  Now Dellian remembered.

  “You were so cross that I wouldn’t have sex with you,” she taunted. “I walked about in this tiny little bikini the whole time, and took lots of the other boys back to my cabin. That was really bad of me, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he croaked.

  “So now you finally get to have all those teenage kicks right through the night.” With a flourish, she produced a bottle of oil. “What was it you were always pleading to—”

  He plucked the bottle from her fingers. “Scalp massage. To start with.�
��

  * * *

  —

  If Dellian thought about it too deeply, he’d have been scared by how much Yirella understood him, how open he was to her. That kind of self-examination wasn’t a good route to travel. It might start a man to thinking why she, a goddess walking among them, was bothering with someone as irrelevant as he was. Besides, the sex had been good. Not that it wasn’t always good, but lately it had been getting kind of routine. So now his teenage self was smirking up at the reed thatch ceiling, marveling at how diabolically gifted Yirella was at edging.

  Would everything be different if we’d done this back then?

  She wiggled up against him, spooning ever closer—one body, eight limbs. “See? That was a lot more joyful than any wake.”

  “You saying we should’ve had an orgy instead?”

  “New times, new traditions. We’re not pre-galactic savages offering up our souls to fantasy deities. We don’t have their hang-ups.”

  “Except maybe we do.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “We certainly seem to have their failings. Our brains are still the same naked ape cells, trying to make sense of the universe.”

  “We’ll never do that. The universe doesn’t make any sense.”

  He felt her smile behind him.

  “We could always ask the God at the end of time. If we could stand the wait. Trouble is, we can’t. I guess Rello realized that.”

  Dellian slowly turned himself inside her embrace until they were nose to nose. Always so far behind. But I do get there in the end. “You knew. You worked it out, didn’t you? Just after this.” He gestured around the solid memory of the water bungalow. “After our senior year graduation trial, that’s when you…sent Uma and Doony away. That’s why, isn’t it?”

  “Sent them away! I killed them, Del. My own muncs. Tonight is not euphemism night.”

  “Sorry,” he said meekly.

  Her mouth scrunched up in concern. “I freed them, Del. That’s what I thought at the time, when I realized just how great the odds are against us. That was everything to me, Del. Our lives, they’re not our own. Our ancestors are our Gods. They brought us into existence for one reason, which our own decency and desperation makes us conform to. They created this disastrous everlasting rut the whole human race is lost in.”

  “What rut?”

  “Come on, Del. A generation ship bioforms a planet. That planet sends out a couple of hundred new generation ships, then we abandon it. Each ship repeats and repeats and repeats, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. There is no change. We are locked into a Möbius cage we cannot escape from because our cage is our escape. Great Saints, what could we achieve if we didn’t have to run from everything? We built a fake world, Del; fake life, fake culture. Just how incredible is that? We don’t realize what we have, because we haven’t lived a life without our abilities. But think yourself back to before the Olyix invaded and then look at what we are now. Vayan is a whole planet inhabited by a civilization that doesn’t even exist. What if we’d devoted that energy and ability to building something for ourselves? Think what we would be!”

  “No,” he said earnestly. “You’re wrong. We—the Strike mission—are the escape. Each human planet produces fighters like us as well as seeding the new generation worlds. We’re going to join up into the final armada one day and take down the Olyix. We can break the human race out of this cycle.”

  “Can we? We’ve had ten thousand years, Del. And we’re still here, still running in fear. If we truly haven’t all been caught and cocooned by the Olyix.”

  “Don’t even think that. They haven’t caught us, because Juloss was founded by a generation ship. And we sent out a whole batch more.”

  “Okay, then; my second problem with this flight-then-fight strategy. Did you see the way Fintox reacted to our expansion?”

  “Well…my databud said the genten couldn’t translate his outburst.”

  “That’s because it wasn’t language. It was a cry of shock. A scream of horror. Fair enough, because we’ve ruined the galaxy, Del. In another hundred thousand years we’ll have swept through every star system and left our DNA behind in all of them. Nothing new and fresh will ever evolve. Because if life can thrive, it will be our life. Terrestrial DNA has become that invasive and insidious. We’re a plague, a curse on the universe.”

  “Well, duh. So we’ve taken it from the Olyix! We’re winning.”

  “Are we?”

  “If all that’s left in the galaxy after this time is us, then their God will be us, too.”

  “For Saint’s sake, Del. There is no God at the end of time, even if we are in a cyclic universe. And worse, if it is cyclic and the God does arise, it’s billions of years away in a big-ass universe. It’ll mean nothing. Nothing!”

  “This is what you saw, isn’t it? This is what you realized at our graduation test?”

  “Yes. Utter futility. And it broke me, Del. I was completely broken. Still am, basically. All I’m doing now is surviving in the ruins.”

  “The Saint’s Signal—”

  “Oh, don’t, Del. It’s a legend, a bedtime story the adults used to tell us so we’d sleep better when we were kids. Well, we’re all grown up now.”

  “The Saints will not fail us,” he said stubbornly.

  “Then where’s their Signal? We’ve been waiting ten thousand years. They probably never made it. Everybody knows it, deep down. It’s just not something you say out loud. But here we are, trying to find the gateway location like all the other Strike missions. Why are we all doing that if all we have to do is wait for the Saints?”

  “Because we’re the backup. Because the galaxy is vast. That’s what they taught us right from the start; Sol is effectively outside the main bulk of the galaxy, we were on the edge. So statistically the Olyix enclave is in front of the human expansion wavefront. If the Saints triggered their Signal, we haven’t detected it yet because it’s still ahead of us. We’re flying toward them, Yi, we are.”

  She stroked his face, smiling wistfully. “And this is why I’m still here and clinging on to sanity: you, Del. You’re my rock, my world. I live for you. Not the cause, not the pointless academic intellectual projects I’ve been devoting myself to. You. I love you, Del.”

  He held her big round head between his hands and kissed her. “I love you, too. And I’m going to prove you wrong.”

  “I want that more than anything.”

  But the doubt in her voice was a stab to the heart. “So do you think that’s what happened to Rello? He had the same revelation you did?”

  “I do. And I don’t think he had a connection back to the world through Mallot the way I have with you.”

  “Saints! So it’s going to hit all of us the same way eventually, when our dumb boy-brains finally catch up with yours?”

  “Hey.” She bobbed his nose with her finger. “You’re not that far behind. Besides, you’re completely different; you truly believe we will face the Olyix. I think you’re crazy for it; space and time are too big. But it’s the right sort of crazy. You’re never going to suffer this shattering skepticism that I have.”

  “We’re not all the same, after all.”

  “No. And maybe we are diverse enough after all, too. I’ve been thinking about it lately. Sometimes, when I’m optimistic or blue, I allow myself the hope that maybe not all the Strike warships we’ve churned out over the millennia are filled with binary soldiers born without choice. If some of our cousins among the stars haven’t broken the cycle, they might at least have pushed the envelope against it. I have faith that among us, somewhere out there in all our diversity and vastness, a strand of humans has achieved something different with themselves. There were enough different cultures that escaped Sol at the end. That’s the trouble with us coming from a Utopial cultural background, it’s very static, even Saint Callum thought that. Maybe a generation ship
with another ethos evolved in a very different direction, which gave them fresh ideas of how to confront the Olyix, so they’ve left the generation-and-fight imperative behind. You know this whole cycle paradigm was determined by Emilja Jurich and the Zangari family council, and encouraged by Saint Jessika? So we treat it as gospel, which is a mistake. It is obsolete, born of its time and necessity, and it shackles us still.”

  “You sound very radical,” he said, impressed as ever.

  “I’m very logical and playing the statistics game with it, that’s all.”

  “You’re talking about Sanctuary, aren’t you? You think someone, some generation ship in our past, actually set off to build it, or find it—whatever.”

  “I wish. The more I research the Sanctuary legend, the more elusive it is. As best I can tell, it blended into our mythology six planets ago. There’s no record of where the concept originated from—an ideological movement, a signal, Saints, it could have been a visitor from another generation ship lineage. I don’t know. The Morgan’s records are deliberately small, and lacking specifics in case we ever get captured. We don’t know what planets are in our lineage, nor where they are. You know we don’t even carry Juloss’s stellar coordinates? Captain Kenelm and the senior crew probably know where it is, but they won’t let themselves get captured. Not alive.”

  “All right, so if this problem of the squads being susceptible to depression isn’t going to go away, what we should be doing is looking for people who don’t have my level of commitment to the cause.”

  “Not a bad idea. Well done.”

  “You already thought of that, didn’t you?”

  “Yep!”

  “And what’s your way of doing that?”

  “We need to give them what they want.”

  “Huh?”

  “Del, the last thing the Morgan needs right now is a witch hunt. Morale is bad enough without the captain imposing ideological purity requirements on people.”