Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  His work continued to be absorbing, and when he had spare time he immersed himself in studies. All the crew were generalists to some degree, but the ten new Elders were expected to be a repository of memory and wisdom far beyond a human lifespan. So they all studied everything, and they learned from each other.

  Rusel began with the disciplines he imagined would be most essential in the future. He studied medicine; anthropology, sociology and ethics; ecosynthesis and all aspects of the Ship’s life-support machinery; the workings of the Ship’s propulsion systems; techniques of colonisation; and the geography of the Galaxy and its satellites. He also buttonholed Andres herself and soaked up her knowledge of human history. Meanwhile, Qax-derived nano-systems were so prevalent throughout the Ship that Rusel’s own expertise was much in demand.

  His days passed in a dream, as if time itself flowed differently for him now. His major goal continued to be to use up as much of his conscious time as possible with work. The studying was infinitely expandable, and very satisfying to his naturally acquisitive mind. He found he was able to immerse himself in esoteric aspects of one discipline or another for days on end, as if he was an abstract intellect, almost forgetting who he was.

  The Elders’ placid lives were not without disturbance, however. The Qax biotechnology was far from perfect. In the first year of treatment one man suffered kidney failure; he survived, but had to be taken out of the programme.

  And it was a great shock to all the Elders when geneticist Ruul himself succumbed to a ferocious cancer, as the technological rebuilding of his cells went awry.

  The day after Ruul’s death, as the Elders adjusted to the loss of his competence and dry humour, Rusel decided he needed a break. He walked out of the Elders’ huddled quarters and through the body of the Ship, heading for the area where his brother had set up his own home with Tila.

  On all the Ship’s cylindrical decks, the interior geography had been filled by corridors and cabins, clustered in concentric circles around little open plazas - ‘village squares’. Rusel knew the social theory: the Ship was supposed to be loosely partitioned into village-sized communities, but he quickly got lost in the detail; the layout of walls and floors and false ceilings was changed again and again as the crew sorted out their environment.

  At last he came to the right doorway on the right corridor. He was about to knock when a boy, aged about five with a shock of thick black hair, rocketed out of the open door and ran between Rusel’s legs. The kid wore a bland Ship’s-issue coverall, long overdue for recycling judging by its grime.

  This must be Tomi, Rusel thought, Diluc’s eldest. Child and Elder silently appraised each other. Then the kid stuck out his tongue and ran back into the cabin.

  In a moment Diluc came bustling out of the door, wiping his hands on a towel. ‘Look, what in Lethe’s going on—Rusel! It’s you. Welcome, welcome!’

  Rusel embraced his brother. Diluc smelt of baby sick, cooking and sweat, and Rusel was shocked to see a streak of grey in his brother’s hair. Perhaps Rusel had been locked away in his studies longer than he had realised.

  Diluc led Rusel into his home. It was a complex of five small interconnected cabins, including a kitchen and bathroom. Somebody had been weaving tapestries; gaudy, space-filling abstract patterns filled one wall.

  Rusel sat on a sofa adapted from an acceleration couch, and accepted a slug of some kind of liquor. He said, ‘I’m sorry I frightened Tomi. I suppose I’ve let myself become a stranger.’

  Diluc raised an eyebrow. ‘Two things about that. Not so much “stranger” as “strange”.’ He brushed his hand over his scalp.

  Rusel involuntarily copied the gesture, and felt bare skin. He had long forgotten that the first side-effect of the pharaoh treatment had been the loss of his hair; his head was as bald as Andres’s. Surrounded all day by the other Elders, Rusel had got used to it, he supposed. He said dryly, ‘Next time I’ll wear a wig. What’s the second thing I got wrong?’

  ‘That isn’t Tomi. Tomi was our first. He’s eight now. That was little Rus, as we call him. He’s five.’

  ‘Five?’ But Rusel had attended the baby Rusel’s naming ceremony. It seemed like yesterday.

  ‘And now we’re due for another naming. We’ve missed you, Rus.’

  Rusel felt as if his life was slipping away. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Tila came bustling in, with an awestruck little Rus in tow, and an infant in her arms. She too seemed suddenly to have aged; she had put on weight, and her face was lined by fine wrinkles. She said that Tomi was preparing a meal - of course Uncle Rusel would stay to eat, wouldn’t he? - and she sat down with the men and accepted a drink.

  They talked of inconsequentials, and of their lives.

  Diluc, having stormed out of Andres’s informal council, had become something of a leader in his own new community. Andres had ordered that the two-hundred-strong crew should be dispersed to live in close-knit ‘tribes’ of twenty or so, each lodged in a ‘village’ of corridors and cabins. There were to be looser links between the tribes, for such purposes as finding marriage or breeding partners. Thus the Ship was united in a single ‘clan’. Andres said this social structure was the most common form encountered among humans ‘in the wild’, as she put it, all the way back to pretechnological days on Earth, and was the most likely to be stable in the long run. Whether or not that was true, things had stayed stable so far.

  Andres had also specified the kind of government each tribe should aspire to. In such a small world each individual should be cherished for her unique skills, and for the value of the education invested in her. People were interdependent, said Andres, and the way they governed themselves should reflect that. Even democracy wouldn’t do, as in a society of valued individuals the subjection of a minority to the will of a majority must be a bad thing. So Diluc’s tribe ran by consensus.

  ‘We talk and talk,’ Diluc said with a rueful grin, ‘until we all agree. Takes hours, sometimes. Once, the whole of the night watch.’

  Tila snorted. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t like it that way. You always did like the sound of your own voice!’

  The most important and difficult decisions the tribe had to make concerned reproduction, Most adults settled down into more-or-less monogamous marriages. But there had to be a separation between marriages for companionship and liaisons for reproduction; the gene pool was too small to allow matings for such trivial reasons as love.

  Diluc showed Rusel a draft of a ‘social contract’ he was preparing to capture all this. ‘First, on reaching adulthood you submit yourself to the needs of the group as a whole. For instance your choice of career depends on what we need as much as what you want to do. Second, you agree to have kids only as the need allows. If we’re short of the optimum population level, you might have three or four or five, whether you want them or not, to bring up the numbers; if we’re over the target, you might have none at all and die childless. Third, you agree to postpone parenthood for as long as possible, and to keep working as long as possible. That way you maximise the investment the tribe has made in educating you. Fourth, you can select your own breeding-spouse, who may be the same as your companionship-spouse—’

  ‘We were lucky,’ Tila said fervently.

  ‘But she can’t be closer than a second cousin. And you have to submit to having your choice approved by the Elders. That’s you.’ He grinned at Rusel. ‘Your match will be screened for genetic desirability, and to maximise the freshness of the gene pool - all of that. And finally, if despite everything you’re unlucky enough to have been born with some inheritable defect that might, if propagated, damage the Ship’s chances of completing its mission, you agree not to breed at all. Your genetic line stops with you.’

  Rusel frowned. ‘That’s eugenics.’

  Diluc shrugged. ‘What else can we do?’

  Diluc hadn’t studied Earth history, as Elder-educated Rusel now had, and without that perspective, Rusel realised, that word carried for him none of the horrif
ic connotations it had once borne. As Diluc had implied, they had little choice anyhow given the situation they were in. Besides, eugenics through arranged couplings was lower-tech than genetic engineering: more future-proofing.

  Rusel studied the draft contract. ‘And what happens if somebody breaks the rules?’

  Diluc was uncomfortable; suddenly Rusel was aware that he was an Elder, as well as this man’s brother. ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ Diluc said. ‘Look, Rus, we don’t have police here, and we don’t have room for jails. Besides, everybody really is essential to the community as a whole. We can’t coerce. We work by persuasion; we hope that such situations will be easily resolved.’

  Diluc talked of personal things too: of the progress of his boys at school, how Tomi had always hated the hour’s wall-cleaning he had to put in each day, while little Rus loved it for the friends he was making.

  ‘They are good kids,’ Rusel said.

  ‘Yes. And you need to see more of them,’ Diluc said pointedly. ‘But, you know, Rus, they’re not like us. They are the first Shipborn generation. They are different. To them, all our stories of Port Sol and Canis Major are so many legends of places they will never see. This Ship is their world, not ours: we, born elsewhere, are aliens here. You know, I keep thinking we’ve bitten off more than we can chew. For all Andres’s planning, already things are drifting. No wonder generation starships always fail!’

  Rusel tried to respond to their openness by giving them something of himself. But he found he had little to say. His mind was full of studying, but there was very little human incident in his life. It was if he hadn’t been alive at all, he thought with dismay.

  Diluc was appalled to hear of Ruul’s death. ‘That pompous geneticist - I suppose in a way it’s fitting he should be the first to go. But don’t let it take you, brother.’ Impulsively he crossed to Rusel and rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder. ‘You know, all this is enough for me: Tila, the kids, the home we’re building together. It’s good to know that our lives serve a higher goal, but this is all I need to make me happy. Maybe I don’t have much imagination, you think?’

  Or maybe you’re more human than I am, Rusel thought. ‘We must all make our choices,’ he said.

  Diluc said carefully, ‘But you can still make a different choice.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He leaned forward. ‘Why don’t you give it up, Rus? This crappy old Qax nano-medicine, this dreadful anti-ageing - you’re still young; you could come out of there, flush the shit out of your system, grow your hair back, find some nice woman to make you happy again . . .’

  Rusel tried to keep his face expressionless, but he failed.

  Diluc backed off. ‘Sorry. You still remember Lora.’

  ‘I always will. I can’t help it.’

  ‘We’ve all been through an extraordinary experience,’ Tila said. ‘I suppose we all react differently.’

  ‘Yes.’ Tila, he remembered, had left behind a child.

  Diluc looked into his eyes. ‘You never will come out, will you? Because you’ll never be able to cast off that big sack of guilt on your back.’

  Rusel smiled. ‘Is it that obvious?’

  Tila was a gracious hostess. She perceived his discomfort, and they began to talk of old times, of the days on Port Sol. But Rusel was relieved when Tomi came in to announce that the meal was ready, relieved to hurry through the food and get away, relieved to shut himself away once more in the bloodless monastic calm of his studying.

  V

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

  As time passed, the Elders withdrew further 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 further out, a sop to muscles and bones expected to weaken with the centuries. Andres 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’s 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’s 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, for ever.

  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, asking for Rusel. He was aged about sixteen.

  Rusel thought he recognised 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 original crew had died off steadily, following a demographic curve not terribly different to that they would have endured had they remained on Port Sol. Rusel had grown 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, their deaths came in a flood.

  He knew none of the faces of the younger transients. Everything about the new generations 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 transients knew him, though, even the youngest. They stared at him with curiosity, or irreverence - or, worst of all, awe.

  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, fiddling with the partitions, and the other Elders were awkward old cusses, but the Ship itself was his constant friend, demanding only his care.