The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  Rusel would never leave the Cloister again.

  Some time after that, there was a decimating plague.

  It was brought about by a combination of factors: a slow unmonitored buildup of irritants and allergens in the Ship’s environment, and then the sudden emergence of a latent virus in a population already weakened. It was a multiple accident, impossible for the Pharaoh designers of the Ship to plan away, for all their ingenuity. But given enough time – more than five thousand years – such events were inevitable.

  The surviving population crashed to close to a threshold of viability. For a few decades Rusel was forced to intervene, through booming commands, to ensure that the Ship was maintained at a base level, and that genetic-health protocols were observed and breeding matches planned even more carefully than usually.

  The low numbers brought benefits, though. The Ship’s systems were now producing a large surplus of supplies, and there was no possibility of any more water empires. Rusel considered, in his glacial way, establishing a final population at a lower level than before.

  It intrigued him that the occurrence of the plague mirrored the restructuring of his own mental processes. The day-to-day affairs of the Ship, and the clattering of the transient generations, barely distracted him now. Instead he became aware of slower pulses, deeper rhythms beyond any transients’ horizon of awareness. It fascinated him to follow the million-year turning of the Galaxy, whose brilliant face continued to open up behind the fleeing Ship.

  And his perception of risk changed. His endless analysis of the Ship’s systems uncovered obscure failure modes: certain parameter combinations that could disrupt the governing software, interacting failures among the nanomachines that still labored over the Ship’s fabric inside and out. Such failures were highly unlikely; he estimated the Ship might suffer significant damage once every ten thousand years or so. On Earth, whole civilizations had risen and fallen with greater alacrity than that. But he had to plan for such things, to prepare the Ship’s defenses and recovery strategies. The plague, after all, was just such a low-risk event, but given enough time it had come about.

  The transients’ behavior, meanwhile, adjusted on its own timescales.

  Once every decade or so the inhabitants of Diluc’s corridor-village would approach the shrine of the Elder, where the flickering Virtual still showed. One of them would dress up in a long robe and walk behind a frame with exaggerated slowness, while the rest cowered. And then they would fall on a manikin and tear it to pieces. Rusel had watched such displays several times before he had realized what was going on: it was, of course, a ritualized re-enactment of his own last manifestation. Sometimes the bit of theater would culminate in the flaying of a living human, which they must imagine he demanded; when such savage generations arose, Rusel would avert his cold gaze.

  Meanwhile, in the village in which Hilin’s doomed lover Sale had been born, the local transients were trying another tactic to win his favor. Perhaps it was another outcome of Hilin’s clever exploits, or perhaps it had been inherent in the situation all along.

  Girls, tall slim girls with dark elusive eyes: as the generations ticked by, he seemed to see more of them running in the corridors, making eyes at muscular wall-scrubbing boys, dandling children on their knees. They were like cartoon versions of Lora: tall Loras and short, thin Loras and fat, happy Loras and sad.

  It was selective breeding, if presumably unconscious, people turning themselves into replicas of the images in the Virtual. They were appealing directly to his own cold heart: if the Elder loved this woman so much, then choose a wife that looks like her, if only a little, and hope to have daughters with her elfin looks, and so win favor.

  Rusel was simultaneously touched and appalled. They could do what they liked, he told himself, as long as they got their jobs done.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the barricade he had erected, the Autarchs and their long-lived families had not died out as Rusel had hoped. They had lived on. And as they inbred ferociously, their lives were stretched out longer and longer.

  Again this made sense in terms of their heredity, he thought. In their cordoned-off compartment there was simply no room to expand their population. So the genes’ best bet of propagating themselves into the future, always their only objective, was to stretch out the lives of their carriers. Adults lived for centuries, and for the vanishingly few children born, childhood lasted decades. Rusel found these creatures, with their blank eyes and wizened-faced children, peculiarly creepy. On the other hand, he still couldn’t bring himself to kill them off. Perhaps in them he saw a distorted reflection of himself.

  There was one constant throughout the Ship. On both sides of the barrier the transients were clearly getting dumber.

  As generations passed – and, for fear of repeating Hilin’s fate, potential mates were repelled by any signs of higher-than-average intelligence – it was obvious that the transients were breeding themselves into stupidity. If anything the Autarchs’ environment was less stimulating than that of their cousins in the rest of the Ship, and despite their slower generational cycle they were shedding their unnecessary intelligence with even more alacrity, perhaps from sheer boredom.

  The transients kept the Ship working, however, and in their increasingly brutish liaisons followed the genetic-health mandates scrupulously. This puzzled Rusel: surely by now they could have no real understanding of why they were doing these peculiar things.

  But he observed that when it came time to attract a mate the most vigorous deck-swabbers and cousin-deniers stood out from the crowd. It made sense: after all, a propensity to please the undeniable reality of the Elder was a survival characteristic, and therefore worth displaying if you had it, and worth preserving in your children’s heredity.

  He filed away such observations and insights. By now, nothing that happened inside the Ship’s hull interested him as much as what happened outside.

  He was thoroughly wired into the Ship, its electromagnetic and other equipment taking the place of his own failed biological senses. He cruised with it through the intergalactic gulf, feeling the tingle of dark matter particles as they were swept into the Ship’s gut, sensing the subtle caress of magnetic fields. The space between the galaxies was much more interesting than he had ever imagined. It wasn’t a void at all. There was structure here, he saw, a complex webbing of the dark stuff that spanned the universe, a webbing in which galaxies were trapped like glowing flies. He learned to follow the currents and reefs of the dark matter which the Ship’s gravitational maw greedily devoured.

  He was alone with the galaxies, then, and with his own mind.

  Once, just once, as he drifted in the dark, he heard a strange signal. It was cold and clear, like the peal of a trumpet, far off in the echoing intergalactic night. It wasn’t human at all.

  He listened for a thousand years. He never heard it again.

  Andres came to him.

  “Leave me alone, you nagging old witch,” he grumbled.

  “Believe me, that would be my choice,” said Andres fervently. “But there’s a problem, Rusel. And you need to come out of your damn shell and sort it out.”

  He could see her face clearly, that worn-smooth expressionless skin. The rest of her body was a blur, a suggestion. None of that mattered, of course.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “With the transients. What else? They are all that matters. You need to take a look.”

  “I don’t want to. It hurts.”

  “I know it hurts. But it’s your duty.”

  Duty? Had she said that, or had he? Was he awake, or dreaming? With time, everything blurred, every category, every boundary.

  He was far beyond biology now, of course. The decay of his central nervous system had proceeded so far that he wasn’t sure if it returned any signals at all to the hardening nugget of his brain. It was only technology that kept him alive. With time, the Ship had infiltrated its treatments and systems deeper into the shell of what had been hi
s body. It was as if he had become just another of the Ship’s systems, like the air-cycling system or the water purifiers, just as old and balky, and just as much in need of endless tender loving care.

  Even the walls of his consciousness were wearing away. He thought of his mind as a dark hall filled with drifting forms, like zero-gravity sculptures. These were his memories – or perhaps memories of memories, recycled, reiterated, edited, and processed.

  And he was here, a pinpoint awareness that flitted and flew between the drifting reefs of memory. At times, as he sailed through the abstraction of emptiness, free of memory or anticipation, indeed free of any conscious thought save only a primal sense of self, he felt oddly free – light, unburdened, even young again. But whenever that innocent point settled into the dark tangle of a memory reef, the guilt came back, a deep muddy shame whose origins he had half forgotten, and whose resolution he could no longer imagine.

  He wasn’t alone, however, in this cavernous awareness. Sometimes voices called from the dark. Sometimes there were even faces, their features softened, their ages indeterminate. Here was Diluc, his brother, or Andres, or Ruul, or Selur, or one of the others. He knew they were all long dead save for him, who lived on and on. He had vague memories of setting up some of these Virtual personas as therapy for himself, or as ways for the Ship to attract his attention – Lethe, even as company. But by now he wasn’t sure what was Virtual and what was a dream, a schizoid fantasy of his rickety mind.

  Lora was never there, however.

  And Andres, the cold Pharaoh who had become his longest-enduring companion, was his most persistent visitant.

  She said, “Nobody ever said this would be easy, Rusel.”

  “You said that before.”

  “Yes. And I’ll keep on saying it until we get to Canis Major.”

  “Canis Major? . . .” The destination. He’d forgotten about it again, forgotten that an end to all this even as a theoretical possibility might exist. The trouble was, thinking about such things as a beginning and an end made him aware of time, and that was always a mistake.

  How long? The answer came to him like a whisper. Round numbers? Twenty thousand years gone. Some five thousand left. Twenty thousand years. It was ridiculous, of course.

  “Rusel,” Andres snapped. “You need to focus.”

  “You’re not even Andres,” he grumbled.

  Her mouth was round with mock horror. “Oh, no! What an existential disaster. Just do it, Rus.”

  So, reluctantly, he gathered his scattered concentration, and sent his viewpoint out into the body of the Ship. He was faintly aware of Andres riding alongside him, a ghost at his shoulder.

  He found the place he still thought of as Diluc’s village. The framework of corridors and cabins hadn’t changed, of course; it was impossible that it should. But even the nonpermanent partitions that had once been built up and torn down by each successive generation of transients had been left unmoved since the last time he was here. Building things wasn’t what people did anymore.

  He wandered into the little suite of rooms that had once been Diluc’s home. There was no furniture. Nests were crammed into each corner of the room, disorderly heaps of cloth and polymer scraps. He had seen the transients take standard-issue clothing from the Ship’s recycler systems and immediately start tearing it up with hands or teeth to make their coarse bedding. There was a strong stink of piss and shit, of blood and milk, sweat and sex, the most basic human biology. But the crew remained scrupulously clean. Every few days all this stuff would be swept up and carted off to the recycler bins.

  This was the way people lived now.

  Outside, the walls and partitions were clean, gleaming and sterile, as was every surface he could see, the floor and ceiling. One partition had been rubbed until it was worn so thin the light shone through it: another couple of generations and it would wear away altogether, he thought. The crew still kept up their basic duties; that had remained, while so much else had vanished.

  But these latter transients were not crewing this Ship as his generation had. They were doing it for deeper reasons.

  Those selection pressures, as the transients competed in how well they did their chores in order to attract mates, had, given time, sculpted the population. By now, he understood, the transients were maintaining a starship’s systems as bees had once danced, stags had locked antlers, and peacocks had spread their useless tails: they were doing it for sex, and the chance to procreate. As mind receded, Rusel thought, biology had taken over.

  As long as they were doing it in the first place, Rusel didn’t care. Besides, it worked. Sexual drivers seemed very effective in locking in behavior with the precision required to keep the Ship’s systems functioning: you could fix a ceiling ventilation grill with a show-off flourish or not, but you had to do it exactly right to impress the opposite sex, even if you didn’t understand what it was for. Even when mind was gone, you had to do it right.

  He heard weeping, not far away.

  He let his viewpoint follow the weeping, just drifting along the corridor. He turned a corner, and came on the villagers.

  There were perhaps twenty-five of them, adults and children. They were all naked, of course; nobody had worn clothes for millennia. Some of them had infants in their arms or on their backs. Squatting in the corridor, they huddled around a central figure, the woman who was doing the weeping. Surrounded by bare backs and folded limbs, she was cradling something, a bloody scrap. The others reached out and stroked her back and scalp; some of them were weeping too, Rusel saw.

  Andres said dryly, “Their empathy is obvious.”

  “Yes. They’ve lost so much else, but not that – ”

  Suddenly their heads turned, all of them save the weeping woman, faces swivelling like antennae. Something had disturbed them – perhaps the tiny hovering drone that was Rusel’s physical manifestation. Their brows were low, but their faces were still human, with straight noses and delicate chins. It was like a flower bed of faces, Rusel thought, turned up to his light. Their eyes were wide, their mouths pulled back in fear-grins.

  And every one of them looked like Lora, more or less, with that delicate, elfin face, even something of her elusive eyes. Of course they did: the blind filter of natural selection, operating for generations on this hapless stock, had long determined that though mind was no longer necessary, to look this way might soften the heart of the wizened creature who ruled the world.

  The strange tableau of upturned Lora-faces lasted only a moment. Then the transients took flight. They poured away down the corridor, running, knuckle-walking, bounding off the walls and ceiling.

  Andres growled, “I’ll swear they get more like chimps with every generation.”

  In a few seconds they had gone, all save the weeping woman.

  Rusel allowed his viewpoint to swim toward the woman. He moved cautiously, not wishing to alarm her. She was young – twenty, twenty-one? It was increasingly hard to tell the age of these transients; they seemed to reach puberty later each generation. This girl had clearly passed her menarche – in fact she had given birth, and recently: her belly was slack, her breasts heavy with milk. But her chest was smeared with blood, shocking bright crimson in the drab, worn background of the corridor. And the thing she was cradling was no child.

  “Lethe,” said Rusel. “It’s a hand. A child’s hand. I think I’m going to throw up.”

  “You no longer have the equipment. Take a closer look.”

  A white stump of bone stuck out of a bloody mass of flesh. The hand had been severed at the wrist. And two tiny fingers had been almost stripped of flesh, ligament and muscle, leaving only tiny bones.

  “That wrist,” Andres said pitilessly, “has been bitten through. By teeth, Rusel. And teeth have been at work on those fingers as well. Think about it. With a bit of practice, you could take one of those little morsels between your incisors and just strip off the flesh and muscle – ”

  “Shut up! Lethe, Andres, I can see for mys
elf. We always avoided cannibalism. I thought we beat that into their shrinking skulls hard enough.”

  “So we did. But I don’t think this is cannibalism – or rather, whatever did this wasn’t her kind.”

  Rusel elevated the viewpoint and cast around. He saw a trail of blood leading away from the woman, smeared along the walls and floor, quite unmistakeable, as if something had been dragged away.

  Andres said, “I think our transients suddenly have a predator.”

  “Not so suddenly,” Rusel said. A part of his scattered consciousness was checking over the Ship’s logs, long ignored. This kind of incident had been going on for a couple of centuries. “It’s been rare before, once or twice a generation. Mostly it was the old, or the very young – dispensable, or replaceable. But now they seem to be upping the rate.”

  “And making a dent in the transients’ numbers.”

  “Yes. You were right to bring me here.” This had to be resolved. But to do it, he thought with a deepening dread, he was going to have to confront a horror he had shut out of his awareness for millennia.

  “I’m here with you,” Andres said gently.

  “No, you’re not,” he snapped. “But I have to deal with this anyhow.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  His viewpoint followed the bloody trail as it wound through the corridor-villages of the transients. Broken in places, the trail slinked through shadows or through holes worn in the walls. It was the furtive trail of a hunter, he thought.

  At last Rusel came to the bulkhead that cut the Ship in two, marking the limit of his transients’ domain. He had long put out of his mind what lay beyond this wall: in fact, if he could have cut away the Ship’s aft compartment and let the whole mess float away into space he would long ago have done so.

  But there was a hole in the bulkhead, just wide enough to admit a slim body.