The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  The bulkhead was a composite of metal and polymer, extremely tough, and a meter thick; the hole was a neat tunnel, not regular but smooth-walled, drilled right through it. “I can’t believe they have tools,” he said. “So how did they get through?”

  “Teeth,” Andres said. “Teeth and nails – and time, of which they have plenty. Remember what you’re dealing with. Even if the bulkhead was made of diamond they’d have got through eventually.”

  “I hoped they were dead.”

  “Hope! Wishful thinking! That always was your weakness, Rusel. I always said you should have killed them off in the first place. They’re just a drain on the Ship’s resources.”

  “I’m no killer.”

  “Yes, you are – ”

  “And they are human, no less than the transients.”

  “No, they’re not. And now, it seems, they are eating our transients.”

  His viewpoint drifted before the hole in the wall. Andres seemed to sense his dread; she didn’t say anything.

  He passed through the barrier.

  He emerged in the big upended chamber he still thought of as the amphitheater, right at the base of the Ship. This was a big, bare volume, a cylinder set on its side. After the spin-up it had been used to pursue larger-scale reconstruction projects necessary to prepare the Ship for its long intergalactic voyage, and mounted on its floor and walls were the relics of heavy engineering, long abandoned: gantries, platforms of metal, immense low-gravity cranes like vast skeletons. Globe lights hovered everywhere, casting a yellow-white, complex light. It was an oddly magnificent sight, Rusel thought, and its stirred fond memories of brighter, more purposeful days. On the wall of the chamber, which had been its floor, he could even make out the brackets that had held the acceleration couches on launch day.

  Now, every exposed surface was corroded. Nothing moved. And that upturned floor, which Andres had turned transparent a mere year after the launch, was caked by what looked like rock. It was a hardened pack of feces and cloth scraps and dirt, a wall of shit to block out the Galaxy.

  At first, in this jungle of engineering, he couldn’t make out anything living. Then, as he watched and allowed the worn-out ambience of the place to wash over him, he learned to see.

  They were like shadows, he thought, slim, upright shadows that flitted through the gantries, furtive, cautious. At times they looked human – clearly upright, bipedal, purposeful – though their limbs were spindly, their bellies distended. But then they would collapse to all fours and lope away with a bent gait, and that impression of humanity vanished. They didn’t seem to be wearing clothes, any more than the transients did. But unlike the transients, their bodies were coated with a kind of thick hair, dark brown, a fur.

  Here and there hovering drones trailed the shambling creatures, carrying food and water. The creatures ignored these emissaries of the Ship that kept them alive.

  Andres said grimly. “I know you haven’t wanted to think about these relics, Rusel. But the Ship has watched over them. They are provided with food, of course. Clothing, blankets, and the like – they rip all that up to serve as nesting material, like the transients. They won’t go to the supply hoppers as the transients will; drones have to bring them the stuff they need, and take out their waste. But they’re really quite passive. They don’t mind the drones, even when the drones clean them, or tend to wounds or sicknesses. They are used to being cared for by machines.”

  “But what do they do all day?”

  Andres laughed. “Why, nothing. Nothing but eat the food we give them. Climb around the gantries a little, perhaps.”

  “They must have some spark of curiosity, of awareness. The transients do! They’re people.”

  “Their ancestors used to be. Now they’re quite mindless . . . There. Look. They are gathering at one of their feeding places. Perhaps we’ll be able to see what they do.”

  The feeding site was just a shallow depression, worn into a floor of steel. Its base was smeared green and brown. A drone had delivered a cache of food to the center of the pit, a pile of spheres and cylinders and discs, all sized for human hands, all brightly colored.

  From around the amphitheater the animals came walking, loping, moving with the slow clumsiness of low gravity – and yet with an exaggerated care, Rusel thought, as if they were very fragile, very old. They gathered around the food pile. But they did not reach for the food; they just slumped down on the ground, as if exhausted.

  Now smaller creatures emerged from the forest of gantries. They moved nervously, but just as cautiously as the larger forms. They must be children, Rusel thought, but they moved with no spontaneity or energy. They were like little old people themselves. There were far fewer children than adults, just a handful among perhaps fifty individuals.

  It was the children who went to the food pile, broke off pieces of the brightly colored fodder, and carried it to the adults. The adults greeted this service with indifference, or at best a snarl, a light blow on the head or shoulder. Each child servant went doggedly back to the pile for more.

  “They’re not particularly hygienic,” Rusel observed.

  “No. But they don’t have to be. Compared to the transients they have much tougher immune systems. And the Ship’s systems keep the place roughly in order.”

  Rusel said, “Why don’t the adults get the food themselves? It would be quicker.”

  Andres shrugged. “This is their way. And it is their way to eat another sort of food, too.”

  At the very center of the depression was a broad scar stained a deep crimson brown, littered with lumpy white shapes.

  “That’s blood,” Rusel said, wondering. “Dried blood. And those white things – ”

  “Bones,” said Andres evenly. Rusel thought she seemed oddly excited, stirred by the degraded spectacle before her. “But there’s too much debris here to be accounted for by their occasional raids into transient country.”

  Rusel shuddered. “So they eat each other too.”

  “No. Not quite. The old eat the young; mothers eat their children. It is their way.”

  “Oh, Lethe – ” Andres was right; Rusel couldn’t throw up. But he was briefly aware of his body, cradled by the concerned Ship, thrashing feebly in distress.

  Andres said dispassionately, “I don’t understand your reaction.”

  “I didn’t know –”

  “You should have thought it through – thought through the consequences of your decision to let these creatures live.”

  “You are a monster, Andres.”

  She laughed without humor.

  Of course he knew what these animals were. They were the Autarchs – or the distant descendants of the long-lived, inbred clan that had once ruled over the transients. Over nearly twenty thousand years selection pressure had worked relentlessly, and the gene complex that had given them their advantage over the transients in the first place – genes for longevity, a propensity injected into the human genome by the Qax – had found full expression. And meanwhile, in the sterile nurture of this place, they had had even less reason to waste precious energy on large brains.

  As time had passed they had lived longer and longer, but thought less and less. Now these Autarchs were all but immortal, and all but mindless.

  “They’re actually rather fascinating,” Andres said cheerfully. “I’ve been trying to understand their ecology, if you will.”

  “Ecology? Then maybe you can explain how it can benefit a creature to treat its children so. Those young seem to be farmed. Life is about the preservation of genes: even in this artificial little world of ours, that remains true. So how does eating your kids help achieve that? . . . Ah.” He gazed at the hairy creatures before him. “But these Autarchs are not mortal.”

  “Exactly. They lost their minds, but they stayed immortal. And when mind had gone, natural selection worked with what it found.”

  Even for these strange creatures, the interests of the genes were paramount. But now a new strategy had to be work
ed out. It had been foreshadowed in the lives of the first Autarchs. There was no room to spread the genes by expanding the population – but if individuals could become effectively immortal, the genes could survive through them.

  Andres said, “But simple longevity wasn’t enough. Even the longest-lived will die through some accident eventually. The genes themselves can be damaged, through radiation exposure for instance. Copying is safer! For their own safety the genes need to see some children produced, and for some, the smartest and strongest, to survive.

  “But, you see, living space is restricted here. The parents must compete for space against their own children. They don’t care about the children. They use them as workers – or even, when there’s an excess, as a cannibalistic resource . . . But there are always one or two children who fight their way through to adulthood, enough to keep the stock numbers up. In a way the pressure from the adults is a mechanism to ensure that only the smartest and strongest of the kids survive. From the genes’ point of view it’s a mixed strategy.”

  “It’s a redundancy mechanism,” Rusel said. “That’s the way an engineer would put it. The children are just a fail-safe.”

  “Precisely,” Andres said.

  It was biology, evolution: the destiny of the Mayflower had come down to this.

  Rusel had brooded on the fate of his charges. And he had decided it was all a question of timescales.

  The conscious purpose of the Ship had sustained its crew’s focus for a century or so, until the first couple of generations, and the direct memory of Port Sol, had vanished into the past.

  Millennia, though, were the timescale of historical epochs on Earth, over which empires rose and fell. His studies suggested that to sustain a purpose over such periods required the engagement of a deeper level of the human psyche: the idea of Rome, say, or a devotion to Christ. If the first century of the voyage had been an arena for the conscious, over longer periods the unconscious took over. Rusel had seen it himself, as the transients had become devoted to the idea of the Ship and its mission, as embodied by his own Virtual. Even Hilin’s rebellion had been an expression of that cult of ideas. Call it mysticism: whatever, it worked for thousands of years.

  That far, he believed, Andres and the other Pharaohs had been able to foresee and plan for. But beyond that even they hadn’t been able to imagine; Rusel had sailed uncharted waters. And as time heaped up into tens of millennia, he had crossed a span of time comparable to the rise and fall, not just of empires, but of whole species.

  A continuity of the kind that kept the transients cleaning the walls over such periods could only come about, not through even the deepest layers of mind, but through much more basic biological drivers, like sexual selection: the transients cleaned for sex, not for any reason to do with the Ship’s goals, for they could no longer comprehend such abstractions. And meanwhile natural selection had shaped his cradled populations, of transients and Autarchs alike. Of course, if biology were replacing even the deepest layers of mind as the shaping element in the mission’s destiny, Rusel’s own role became still more important, as the only surviving element of continuity, indeed of consciousness.

  Sometimes he felt queasy, perhaps even guilty, at the distorted fate to which generation upon generation had been subjected, all for the sake of a long-dead Pharaoh and her selfish, hubristic dream. But individual transients were soon gone, their tiny motes of joy or pain soon vanishing into the dark. Their very brevity was comforting.

  Whatever, there was no going back, for any of them.

  Andres was still watching the Autarchs. These frail, cautious animals were like a dark reflection of himself, Rusel thought reluctantly. And how strange it was for the transients to be caged in by the undying: his own attenuated consciousness guiding the Ship from above, while these fallen Autarchs preyed on them from below.

  Andres said, “You know, immortality, the defeat of death, is one of mankind’s oldest dreams. But immortality doesn’t make you a god. You have immortality, Rusel, but, save for your crutch the Ship, you have no power. And these – animals – have immortality, but nothing else.”

  “It’s monstrous.”

  “Of course! Isn’t life always? But the genes don’t care. And in the Autarchs’ mindless capering, you can see the ultimate logic of immortality: for an immortal, to survive, must in the end eat her own children.”

  But everybody on this Ship was a child of this monstrous mother, Rusel thought, whose hubris and twisted longings had impelled this mission in the first place. “Is that some kind of confession, Pharaoh?”

  Andres didn’t reply. Perhaps she couldn’t. After all, this wasn’t Andres but a Virtual, a software-generated crutch for Rusel’s fading consciousness, at the limit of its programming. And any guilt he saw in her could only be a reflection of himself.

  With an effort of will he dismissed her.

  One of the adults, a male, sat up, scratched his chest, and loped to the center of the feeding pit. The young fled at his approach. The male scattered the last bits of primary-color food, and picked up something small and white. It was a skull, Rusel saw, the skull of a child. The adult crushed it, dropped the fragments, and wandered off, aimless, immortal, mindless.

  Rusel withdrew, and sealed up the gnawed-through bulkhead. After that he set up a new barrier spanning the Ship parallel to the bulkhead, and opened up the thin slice of the vessel between the walls to intergalactic vacuum. He never again gave any thought to what lay on the other side of that barrier.

  Twenty-five thousand years after the end of his world, Rusel heard that he was to be saved.

  “Rusel. Rusel . . .”

  Rusel wanted the voices to go away. He didn’t need voices now – not Diluc’s, not even Andres’. He had no body, no belly, no heart; he had no need of people at all. His memories were scattered in emptiness, like the faint smudges that were the remote galaxies all around the Ship. And like the Ship he forged on steadily, pointlessly into the future, his life empty of meaning.

  The last thing he wanted was voices. But they wouldn’t go away. With deep reluctance, he forced his scattered attention to gather.

  The voices were coming from Diluc’s corridor-village. Vaguely, he saw people there, near a door – the door where he had once been barrelled into by little Rus, he remembered, in a shard of bright warm memory blown from the past – two people, by that same door.

  People standing upright. People wearing clothes.

  They were not transients. And they were calling his name into the air. With a mighty effort he pulled himself to full awareness.

  They stood side by side, a man and a woman – both young, in their twenties, perhaps. They wore smart orange uniforms and boots. The man was clean-shaven, and the woman bore a baby in her arms.

  Transients had clustered around them. Naked, pale, eyes wide with curiosity, they squatted on their haunches and reached up with their long arms to the smiling newcomers. Some of them were scrubbing frantically at the floor and walls, teeth bared in rictus grins. They were trying to impress the newcomers with their prowess at cleaning, the only way they knew how.

  The woman allowed the transients to stroke her child. But she watched them with hard eyes and a fixed smile. And the man’s hand was never far away from the weapon at his belt.

  It took Rusel a great deal of effort to find the circuits that would allow him to speak. He said, “Rusel. I am Rusel.”

  As the disembodied voice boomed out of the air the man and woman looked up, startled, and the transients cowered. The newcomers looked at each other with delight. “It’s true,” said the man. “It really is the Mayflower!” A translation whispered to Rusel.

  The woman scoffed. “Of course it’s the Mayflower. What else could it be?”

  Rusel said, “Who are you?”

  The man’s name was Pirius, the woman’s Torec.

  “Are we at Canis Major?”

  “No,” Pirius said gently.

  These two had come from the home Galaxy �
�� from Sol system itself, they said.

  They had come in a faster-than-light ship; it had overtaken the Mayflower’s painful crawl in a few weeks. “You have come thirteen thousand light-years from Port Sol,” Pirius said. “And it took you more than twenty-five thousand years. It is a record for a generation starship! An astonishing feat.”

  Thirteen thousand light-years? Even now, only half way. It seemed impossible.

  Torec cupped the face of a transient girl in her hand – cupped Lora’s face. “And,” Torec said, “we came to find you.”

  “Yes,” said Pirius, smiling. “And your floating museum!”

  Rusel thought that over. “Then mankind lives on?”

  Oh, yes, Pirius told him. The mighty Expansion from which the Mayflower’s crew had fled had burned its way right across the Galaxy. It had been an age of war; trillions had gone into the dark. But mankind had endured.

  “And we won!” Pirius said brightly. Pirius and Torec themselves had been involved in some kind of exotic combat to win the center of the Galaxy. “It’s a human Galaxy now, Rusel.”

  “Human? But how are you still human?”

  They seemed to understand the question. “We were at war,” Pirius said. “We couldn’t afford to evolve.”

  “The Coalition – ”

  “Fallen. Vanished. Gone. They can’t harm you now.”

  “And my crew – ”

  “We will take them home. There are places where they can be cared for. But, ah – ”

  Torec said, “But the Ship itself is too big to turn around. I’m not sure we can bring you.”

  Once he had seen himself, a stiff ageless man, through the eyes of Diluc’s great-grandson Poro, through the eyes of a child. Now, just for an instant, he saw himself through the eyes of Pirius and Torec. A wizened, charred thing suspended in a webbing of wires and tubes.

  That didn’t matter, of course. “Have I fulfilled my mission?”

  “Yes,” Pirius said gently. “You fulfilled it very well.”

  He wasn’t aware of Pirius and Torec shepherding the transients and Autarchs out of the Ship and into their own absurdly small craft. He wasn’t aware of Pirius’ farewell call as they shot away, back toward the bright lights of the human Galaxy, leaving him alone. He was only aware of the Ship now, the patient, stolid Ship.