The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  He would remember that difficult visit again, much later, when a boy came to find him.

  As time passed, the Elders withdrew from the crew. They requisitioned their own sealed-off living area. It was close to the Ship’s axis where the artificial gravity was a little lower than farther out, a sop to muscles and bones expected to weaken with the centuries. Ruul humorously called this refuge the “Cloister.” And the Elders were spared the routine chores, even the cleaning, to which the rest of the crew were subject. Soon it was hard to avoid the feeling that the crew were only there to serve the Elders.

  Of course it was all part of Andres’ grand social design that there should eventually be an “awe gap,” as she put it, between Elders and transients. But Rusel wondered if a certain distancing was inevitable anyhow. The differential ageing of transients and Elders became apparent surprisingly quickly. When an Elder met a transient she saw a face that would soon crumble with age and vanish, while the transient saw a mysteriously unchanging figure who would see events that transpired long after the transient was dead. Rusel watched as friendships dissolved, even love affairs evaporated, under this stress.

  However the increasingly isolated Elders, thrown on each other’s company, were no chummy club. They were all bright, ambitious people; they wouldn’t have been filtered out for Andres’ inner circle otherwise, and there was always a certain tension and bickering. Doctor Selur remarked sourly that it was like being stuck with a bunch of jealous academics, forever.

  But the Elders were also cautious of each other, Rusel thought. Always at the back of his mind was the thought that he would have to live with these people for a long time. So he strove not to make any enemies – and conversely not to get too close to anyone. Eternity with a lover was one thing, but with an ex-lover it would be hellish. Better that things were insipid, but tolerable.

  Life settled down. In the calm of the Cloister, time passed smoothly, painlessly.

  One day a boy came knocking timorously on the Cloister’s door, asking for Rusel. He was aged about sixteen.

  Rusel thought he recognized him. He had spent a long time on his own, and his social skills were rusty, but he tried to focus and greet the boy warmly. “Tomi! It’s so long since I saw you.”

  The boy’s eyes were round. “My name is Poro, sir.”

  Rusel frowned. “But that day I came to visit – you made us all a meal, me and Diluc and Tila, while little Rus played . . .” But that was long ago, he told himself, he wasn’t sure how long, and he fell silent.

  The boy seemed to have been prepared for this. “My name is Poro,” he said firmly. “Tomi was – ”

  “Your father.”

  “My grandfather.”

  So this was Diluc’s great-grandson. Lethe, how long have I spent inside this box?

  The boy was looking around the Cloister. His eyes were unblinking, his mouth pulled back in a kind of nervous grin. None of the Elders was hot on empathy, especially with transients, but suddenly Rusel felt as if he saw this place through this child’s eyes.

  The Cloister was like a library, perhaps. Or a hospital room. The Elders sat in their chairs or walked slowly through the silence of the room, their every step calculated to reduce the risk of harm to their fragile, precious bodies. It had been this way since long before Poro had been born, these musty creatures pursuing their cold interests. And I, who once loved Lora when she wasn’t much older than this child, am part of this dusty stillness.

  “What do you want, Poro?”

  “Diluc is ill. He is asking for you.”

  “Diluc? . . .”

  “Your brother.”

  It turned out that Diluc was more than ill; he was dying.

  So Rusel went with the boy, stepping outside the confines of the Cloister for the first time in years.

  He wasn’t at home out here any more. The transients among the original crew had died off steadily, following a demographic curve not terribly different to that they would have endured had they been able to remain on Port Sol. Rusel grew used to seeing faces he had known since childhood crumple with age and disappear before him. Still, it had been a shock when that first generation reached old age – and, since many of them had been around the same age at launch, the deaths came in a flood.

  Meanwhile, everything about the new sort was different, the way they rebuilt the Ship’s internal architecture, their manner with each other, the way they wore their hair – even their language, which was full of a guttural slang.

  The basic infrastructure of the Ship itself, of course, remained unchanged. In a way he came to identify with that level of reality much more than with the flickering, fast-paced changes wrought by the transients. Though his senses were slowly dulling – the Qax treatment had slowed his ageing but not stopped it entirely – he felt he was becoming more attuned to the Ship’s subtle vibrations and noises, its mechanical moods and joys. Transients came and went, and the other Elders were awkward old cusses, but the Ship itself was his constant friend, demanding only his care.

  But the transients knew him, of course. They stared at him with curiosity, or irreverence – or, worst of all, awe.

  As they walked he saw that the boy had a bruise on his forehead. “What happened to you?”

  “Punishment.” Poro averted his eyes, ashamed. One of his teachers had whacked him with a ruler for “impudence,” which turned out to mean asking too-deep questions.

  There was a paradox in the philosophy of education aboard the Ship. The students had to be bright enough to be able to understand and maintain the Ship’s systems. But there was no room for expansion or innovation. There was unusually only one way to do things: you learned it that way, and you did not tinker. It had been quickly found that education needed to be restrictive, and that curiosity couldn’t be allowed to go unchecked; you learned only what you needed to know, and were taught not to ask any more, not to explore.

  It was necessary, Rusel knew. But he didn’t like the idea of battering students into submission. Perhaps he would have a word with Andres about it, get a new policy formulated.

  They reached Diluc’s corridor-village and came to a familiar doorway.

  Tila was still alive, though she was bent, her hair exploded to white, and her face crushed to a wrinkled mask. “Thank you for coming,” she whispered, and she took Rusel’s hands in her own. “There are so few of us left, you know, so few not Shipborn. And he did keep asking for you.”

  Rusel pressed her hand, reserved, awkward. He felt out of practice with people, with emotions; before this broken-hearted woman he felt utterly inadequate.

  Before he could see his brother he had to be met by a series of tribe worthies. Burly men and women in drab Ship’s-issue clothing, they gathered with solemn expressions. The greetings were lengthy and complicated. The transients were evolving elaborate rituals to be used on every social occasion: meeting, parting, taking meals. Rusel could see the value of such rituals, which used up time, and reduced social friction. But it was hard to keep up with the ever-changing rules. The only constant was that these politeness games always got more elaborate – and it was very easy to get something wrong and give offense.

  The worthies looked concerned at the prospective loss of Diluc, as well they might.

  Andres’s imposition of “rule-by-consensus” had been less than effective. In some of the Ship’s dozen or so tribes, there was endless jaw-jaw that paralyzed decision-making. Elsewhere strong individuals had begun to grasp power, more or less overtly. Andres wasn’t too concerned as long as the job got done, the basic rules obeyed: whoever was in command had to get the approval of the Elders, and so Andres and her team were still able to exert a moderating influence.

  The situation in Diluc’s tribe had been more subtle, though. As the brother of an Elder he had a unique charisma, and he had used that power subtly to push his peers to conclusions they might not otherwise have reached. He had been a leader, but of the best sort, Rusel thought, leading from the back, invisibly. Now
he was about to be taken away, and his people knew they would miss him.

  With the worthies out of the way, the Elder was presented to Diluc’s children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. All of them went through more elaborate transient-to-Elder rituals, even the smallest children, with an unsmiling intensity Rusel found disturbing.

  At last, with reluctance, he entered Diluc’s apartment.

  The rooms were much as he remembered them, though the tapestries on the wall had changed. Diluc lay on a bed, covered by a worn blanket. Rusel was shocked by how his brother had imploded with age. And he could see, even through the blanket, the swelling of the stomach tumor that was killing him.

  He had thought Diluc was sleeping. But his brother opened one eye. “Hello, Rusel,” he said, his voice a croak. “You bastard.”

  “I’m sorry – ”

  “You haven’t been here in fifty years.”

  “Not that long.”

  “Fifty years! Fifty years! It’s not as if – ” He broke up in coughing. “As if it’s that big a Ship . . .”

  They talked, as they had talked before. Diluc told rambling anecdotes about his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all properly genetically selected, all wonderful kids.

  Rusel spoke of a cull of the Elders.

  Diluc grimaced. “So even immortals die.” He reached out his hand. Rusel took it; the bones were frail, the flesh almost vanished. “Look after them,” Diluc said.

  “Who?”

  “Everybody. You know. And look after yourself.” He looked up at his brother, and Rusel saw pity in his brother’s eyes – pity for him, from a withered, dying man.

  He could bear to stay only a few minutes more.

  The cull of Elders had had a variety of causes, according to Doctor Selur, but Andres had sniffed at that. “I’ve seen it before. Call it a death wish,” she had said. “You reach an age where your body knows it’s time to die. You accept it. Maybe it’s some kind of neural programming, a comfort as we face the inevitable.” She cackled; she was ageing too, and was now toothless. “The Qax treatments don’t do anything about it. And it carries away more would-be immortals than you’d imagine. Strange, isn’t it? That longevity should turn out to be a matter of the mind as much as the body.”

  Rusel had spent some years in faint trepidation, wondering if and when his own dark-seeking mental programming might kick in. But it never did, and he wondered if he had some unsuspected strength – or, perhaps, a deficiency.

  Rusel tried to talk over his feelings about Diluc’s death. But Andres was dismissive. “Diluc was a coward who shunned his duty,” she said. “Anyhow, better when the first crew have all gone. They always saw us as peers, to some extent. So they resisted our ideas, our leadership; it was natural. We’re totally alien to the new sort, and that will make them more malleable.

  “And the new lot never suffered the trauma of seeing Port Sol trashed before their eyes. The psychological trauma ran deep, Rusel; you aren’t the only one . . . This new batch are healthy, adjusted to the environment of the Ship, because they’ve known nothing else. When there’s only them left, we’ll be able to get things shaken down properly around here at last. You’ll see.”

  With relief Rusel returned to his studies, away from the complications of humanity. Once more time flowed smoothly past him, and that difficult day receded down the dimming corridors of his memory.

  No more relatives came to see him, ever again.

  “. . . Rusel. Rusel!” The voice was harsh – Andres’ voice.

  Sleep was deep these days, and it took him an age to emerge. And as he struggled into the light he swam up through layers of dream and memory, until he became confused about what was real and what wasn’t. He always knew where he was, of course, even in his deepest sleep. He was on the Ship, his drifting tomb. But he could never remember when he was.

  He tried to sit up. The Couch responded to his feeble movements, and its back smoothly lifted him upright. He peered around in the dim, golden light of the Cloister. There were three Couches, great bulky mechanical devices half bed and half medical support system: only three, because only three of the Elders stayed alive.

  Somebody was moving around him. It was a transient, of course, a young woman. She kept her eyes averted, and her hands fluttered through an elaborate greetings-with-apology ritual. He dismissed her with a curt gesture; you could eat up your entire day with such flim-flam.

  Andres was watching him, her eyes sharp in her ruin of a face. She looked like a huge bug in her cocoon of blankets.

  “Well?” he snapped.

  “You are drooling,” she said mildly. “Not in front of the transients, Rusel.”

  Irritated, he wiped his chin with his sleeve.

  “Oh,” she said, her tone unchanged, “and Selur died.”

  That news, so casually delivered, was like a punch in the throat. He turned clumsily, weighed down by blankets and life-sustaining equipment. The doctor’s Couch was surrounded by transients who were removing her mummylike body. They worked in silence, cautiously, reverently. They were trembling, he saw dimly.

  “I never did like her much,” Rusel said.

  “You’ve said that before. Many times.”

  “I’ll miss her, though.”

  “Yes. And then there were two. Rusel, we need to talk. We need a new strategy to deal with the transients. We’re supposed to be figures of awe. Look at us. Look at poor Selur! We can’t let them see us like this again.”

  He glanced cautiously at the transients.

  “Don’t worry,” Andres said. “They can’t understand. Linguistic drift.”

  “We have to deal with them. We’re the top of their pyramid of authority – that’s what you’ve always said.”

  “So we are, and it has to stay that way. But I don’t think we should allow transients in here any more. The machines can sustain us. Lethe knows there are enough spare parts, now we have so many empty Couches! What I suggest is – ”

  “Stow it,” he said crossly. “You’re always the same, you old witch. You always want to jam a solution down my throat before I even know what the problem is. Let me gather my thoughts.”

  “Stow it, stow it,” she parroted, grotesquely.

  “Shut up.” He closed his eyes to exclude her, and lay back in his couch.

  Through the implant in the back of his skull he allowed data from his body, the Ship, and the universe beyond filter into his sensorium.

  His body first, of course, the slowly failing biomachinery that had become his prison. The good news was that, more than two centuries after his brother’s death, his slow ageing had bottomed out. Since he had last checked – Lethe, all of a month ago, it seemed like yesterday, how long had he slept this time? – nothing had got significantly worse. But he was stuck in the body of a ninety-year-old man, and a frail old man at that. He slept almost all the time, his intervals of lucidity ever more widely separated, while the Couch fed him, removed his waste, gently turned him to and fro and manipulated his stick-thin limbs. Oh, and every few weeks he received a blood transfusion, an offering to the Elders from the grateful transients outside the Cloister. He may as well have been a coma victim, he thought grumpily.

  His age was meaningless, his condition boring. Briskly he moved on.

  His Virtual viewpoint roamed through the Ship. Despite the passage of centuries, the physical layout of the corridor-village that had been Diluc’s was the same, save for detail, the same knots of corridors around the “village square.” But the people had changed, as they always did, youth blossoming, old age crumbling.

  The Autarch he remembered from his last inspection was still in place. He was a big bruiser who called himself Ruul, in subtle defiance of various inhibitions against taking the name of an Elder, even one long dead. He at least didn’t look to have aged much. Flanked by two of his wives, Ruul received a queue of supplicants, all seeking the Autarch’s “wisdom” concerning some petty problem or other. Ruul was brisk and efficient, and
as Rusel listened – though the time-drifted language was hard to decipher – he couldn’t spot any immediate errors of doctrine in the Autarch’s summary harshness.

  He allowed his point of view to drift on.

  He watched the villagers go about their business. Four of them were scrubbing the walls clean of dirt, as they took turns to do every day. Two plump-looking worthies were discussing a matter of etiquette, their mannerisms complex and time-consuming. There were some new bits of artwork on the walls, many of them fool-the-eye depth-perspective paintings, designed to make the Ship’s corridors look bigger than they were. One woman was tending a “garden” of bits of waste polymer, combing elaborate formations into it with a small metal rake. These transients, Shipborn for generations, had never heard of Zen gardens; they had rediscovered this small-world art form for themselves.

  A little group of children was being taught to disassemble and maintain an air-duct fan; they chanted the names of its parts, learning by rote. They would be taught nothing more, Rusel knew. There was no element of principle here: nothing about how the fan as a machine worked, or how it fitted into the greater systems of the Ship itself. You only learned what you needed to know.

  Everybody was busy, intent on their affairs. Some even seemed happy. But it all looked drab to Rusel, all the villagers dressed in colorless Ship’s-issue clothing, their lives bounded by the polished-smooth bulkheads of the Ship. Even their language was dull, and becoming duller. The transients had no words for horizon or sky – but as if in compensation they had over forty words describing degrees of love.

  As he surveyed the village, statistics rolled past his vision in a shining column. Everything was nominal, if you took a wider perspective. Maintenance routines were being kept up satisfactorily. Reproduction rules, enforced by the Autarch and his peers in the other villages, were largely being adhered to, and there was a reasonable genetic mix.