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  Of course there was nobody to discuss this with—certainly not the Commissary, and they hadn’t even seen the crew. The ensigns had nobody but each other.

  And so, naturally, on the fourth day they turned on each other.

  By the fifth day, after hours of screaming rows, they were exhausted and regretful. In their striving to hurt each other they had both said many things they hadn’t meant, the most hurtful for Pirius being the charge that he had ruined Torec’s life, for it held a grain of truth.

  They came back to each other for comfort. The day became a good day, a day of tenderness. Having endured the storm, Pirius sensed they had moved to some new level in their relationship. Perhaps, he began to wonder, eventually they really would find love.

  But then the sixth day came, just another day in this unwelcome luxury, and still the journey dragged on.

  At the end of the sixth day Torec escaped into sleep. But Pirius was restless. He slipped out of bed, sponged down with a clean-cloth, and pulled on a uniform. Torec stayed asleep, or at any rate pretended to.

  Pirius found Nilis sitting in a chair before the transparent hull, working at a data desk propped on his knee. The Commissary smiled at Pirius and waved him to another chair.

  Pirius sat stiffly, and gazed at the panorama out of the window.

  The corvette’s FTL drive, working smoothly and silently, was making many jumps per second, and it seemed to Pirius that the scattered stars were sliding past his field of view. But after each jump the corvette was briefly stationary relative to the Galaxy’s frame of reference. So there were none of the effects of velocity you’d expect from a sublight drive, no redshift or blueshift, no aberration; they crossed the Galaxy in a series of still frames.

  For Pirius it was a strange sky. Far from the Core now, they were moving out through the Galaxy’s plane. They were passing through the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy, one of its richest regions outside of the Core itself. There were plenty of stars, but they seemed scattered and remote—and, remarkably, not one of them was close enough to show a disc. Even between the stars the sky was odd, black, and empty. It seemed a quiet, dull, low-energy sort of environment to Pirius.

  Not only that, you could actually tell you were embedded in a sheet of stars. If Pirius looked straight ahead his eyes met a kind of horizon, a faint band of gray-white light that marked the position of the Galactic equator: the light of millions of stars muddled up together. Away from the plane, overhead or down below, there were only scattered handfuls of nearby stars—you could immediately see how thin this disc was—and beyond that there was only blackness, the gulf, he supposed, of intergalactic space.

  The corvette wasn’t alone. It was one of a stream of ships, a great thread of swimming sparks that slid across the face of the Galaxy. If he looked around the sky he could see more streams of light, all more or less parallel to this one, some of them passing back to the center, others running out to the periphery. Occasionally a companion ship passed close enough to make out detail. These were usually Spline vessels, vast meaty spheres pocked with glistening weapons.

  Nilis was watching him. Pirius started to feel self-conscious.

  Nilis waved a hand. “Marvelous, isn’t it—all this? A human Galaxy! Of course, if you were to drop at random into the plane of the Galaxy, chances are you’d see little enough evidence of human presence. We’re following a recognized lane, Ensign, a path where ships huddle together in convoys for mutual protection—this convoy alone is hundreds of light-years long. And you can see the Navy Splines assigned to guide and shield us. We’ve driven the Xeelee back to their Prime Radiant in the Core, but they are still out there—in the galactic halo, even in other galaxies—and they are not averse to plunging down from out of the disc to mount raids.”

  Pirius glanced up uneasily at the dark dome of the sky.

  Nilis went on, “But even so, even on a galactic scale, you can see the workings of mankind. Think of it! On hundreds of millions of worlds right across the Galaxy’s disc, resources are mined, worked, poured into the endless convoys that flow into the Core—and there on the factory worlds they are transformed to weaponry and fighting ships, to be hurled inward and burned up, erased by the endless friction of the Front itself. Of course, after so long, many worlds are dead, used up, exhausted and abandoned. But there are always more to be exploited. So it goes on, it seems, until the Galaxy itself is drained to feed the war, every bit of it devoted to a single purpose.”

  Pirius wasn’t sure what to say. “It’s remarkable, sir.”

  Nilis raised an eyebrow. “Remarkable? Is that all?” He sighed. “The Coalition discourages the study of history, you know. That’s according to the Druz Doctrines, in their strictest form. There is no past, no future: there is only now. And it is a now of eternal war. But I have looked back into the past. I have consulted records, libraries, some official, some not, some even illegal. And I have learned that we have been devoted to this single cause, to expansion or war, for twenty thousand years. Why, the human species itself is only some hundred thousand years old!

  “It’s been too long. We have become rigid, ossified. There is no development in our politics, our social structures, even our technology. Science is moribund, save for the science of weaponry. We live out lives identical in every respect to those of our forebears. You know, there used to be more innovation in a decade than you see in a thousand years now.

  “In a way, the Xeelee themselves don’t matter anymore—no, don’t look so shocked, it’s true! You could replace the Xeelee with another foe and it would make no difference; they are a mere token. We have forgotten who we are, where we came from. All we remember, all we know, is the war. It defines mankind. We are the species that makes war on the Xeelee, nothing else.”

  “Sir—is that such a bad thing?”

  “Yes!” Nilis slammed his fist onto the arm of his chair. “Yes, it is. You know why? Because of the waste.” He reeled off statistics.

  Around the Front there were a hundred human bases, which supported a billion people each, on average. And the turnover of population in those bases was about ten years.

  “That means that ten billion people a year are sacrificed on the Front, Pirius. The number itself is beyond comprehension, beyond empathy. Ten billion. That’s more than three hundred every single second. It is estimated that, in all, some thirty trillion humans have given their lives to the war: a number orders of magnitude higher than the number of stars in this wretched Galaxy we’re fighting over. What a waste of human lives!

  “But there is hope—and it lies with the young, as it always did.” Nilis leaned forward with a kind of aged eagerness. “You see, at Sag A East, despite a lifetime of conditioning, when it came to your crisis you—or at least your future self—threw off the dead imperative of the Doctrines. You improvised and innovated, you showed initiative, imagination, courage… . And yet, such is the static nature of this old people’s war, you are seen as a threat, not a treasure.”

  Pirius didn’t like the sound of that “conditioning.”

  “That is why I asked for you, Ensign.” Nilis looked out at the swimming stars, the silent, ominous forms of the Spline escorts. “I reject this war, and I have spent most of my life seeking ways to end it. That doesn’t mean I seek defeat, or an accommodation with the Xeelee, for I believe none is possible. I seek a way to win—but that means I must overturn the status quo, and that is enough to have earned me enemies throughout the hierarchies of the Coalition. It is a lonely battle, and I grow old, tired—and, yes, afraid. I need your youth, your courage—and your imagination. Now, what do you think?”

  Pirius frowned. “I don’t want to be anybody’s crutch, sir.”

  Nilis flinched. But he said, “That brutal honesty of yours! Very well, very well. You will be no crutch, but a collaborator.”

  Pirius said uneasily, “And I don’t see why you’re alone. What of your—family? You said something about a brother.”

  Nilis turned away. “My pare
nts were both senior Commissaries, who made the unpardonable error of falling in love. My family, and it was a family of the ancient kind, was as illegal on Earth as it would have been on Arches Base. The family was broken up when I was small—I was taken away.

  “Of course my background is the key to me; any psychologist will tell you that. Why, the Doctrines deny women the right to experience giving birth! What a dreadful distortion that is. You yourself, Pirius, you were hatched, not born. You grew up in a sort of school, not a home. You have emerged socialized, highly educated. But—forgive me!—you are nothing but a product of your background. You have no roots. My background is, well, more primitive. So perhaps I feel the pain of the war’s brutal waste more than some of my colleagues.”

  This made little sense to Pirius. On Arches, there was contraceptive in the very water. Men could get women pregnant—the old biology still worked—but it would be a pathology, a mistake. A pregnancy was like a cancer, to be cut out. The only way to pass on your genes was through the birthing tanks, and you only got to contribute to them if you performed well.

  Nilis went on, “Since I lost my family, I have been neither one thing nor the other, neither rooted in a family nor comfortable in a world of birthing houses and cadres.” He glanced at Pirius. “Rather like you, Pirius, I have been punished for a crime I never committed.”

  Pirius heard a soft sigh. Glancing back he saw Torec, standing behind a half-open door. She was wearing a shapeless sleeping gown, and her face was puffy with too much sleep.

  Nilis looked away, visibly embarrassed.

  She said, “You’re teaching him to talk like you do, Commissary. Pretty soon he won’t sound like Navy at all. Is that what you want?”

  Pirius held his breath. Back at Arches, Torec would already have earned herself a week in the can.

  But Nilis just said, flustered, “No. Of course not.”

  “Then what? Six days we’ve been on this stupid toy ship. And still you haven’t said what we’re doing here.”

  Pirius stood up, between Torec and the Commissary. “Sir, she just woke up… .”

  She shook him off. She seemed infuriated. She hitched up her gown, showing her thighs. “Is this what you want? Or him? Do you want to get into our bed with us, Commissary?”

  Pirius used main force to shove her back into the cabin and pushed the door shut. He turned uncertainly. “Commissary, I’m sorry—”

  Nilis waved tiredly. Pirius saw that the skin on the back of his hand was paper-thin. “Oh, it’s all right, Ensign. I do understand. I was young once, too, you know.”

  “Young?”

  Nilis looked up at him. “Perhaps you don’t think of yourself that way. The human societies of the Core really are very young, you know, Pirius—those bases are swarms of children. The only adults you see are your instructors, I imagine. But I see you with a bit more perspective, perhaps. You have the bodies of adults, you are old enough to love and hate—and more than old enough to fight, to kill, and to die. And yet you will suddenly throw a tantrum, like Torec’s; suddenly a spike of childhood comes sticking up through the still-forming strata of adulthood. I do understand, I think.

  “And besides, she’s right to ask such questions. After all, I have turned your lives upside down, haven’t I?” He smiled.

  Yes, you have, Pirius thought uncomfortably. And he wondered if Torec had seen through to the truth. Maybe all these words about the philosophy of war were meaningless: maybe the truth was, this was just a silly old man who needed company.

  Two days out from Earth, the corvette burst out of the crowded lanes of the Sagittarius Arm and passed into the still emptier spaces beyond.

  Pirius looked back at Sagittarius. It was a place of young stars and glowing clouds, hot and rich. The outer edge of this spiral arm was the famous Orion Line, where an alien species called the Silver Ghosts had resisted humanity, and the Third Expansion had stalled for centuries. The storming of the Line had been a turning point in human history. Since then, like an unquenchable fire, humanity had roared on, consuming all in its path, to the center of the Galaxy itself.

  But they were leaving all that behind. The corvette was approaching the Galaxy’s ragged outer edge now, and the stars were scattered thin. Earth’s sun, he learned, wasn’t even in a proper spiral arm at all, but in a curtailed arc of dim, unspectacular stars.

  Their last stop before Earth would be at a system called 51 Pegasi.

  As the corvette cruised toward the system’s central star, Torec came out of their room to stand before the transparent hull. Since her outburst, or maybe breakdown, Torec had been subdued. But the Commissary made no comment: it was as if the incident had never happened.

  “There.” Nilis pointed. “Can you see? The sailing ships …”

  The planetary system here was dominated by one massive world, a bloated Jovian that swept close to the sun, a world so huge its gravity pulled its parent star around. It was that jiggling, in fact, which had led to the world’s discovery from Earth, one of the first extrasolar planets to be discovered. Humans had come here in their crude slower-than-light starships, in the first tentative exodus called, retrospectively, the First Expansion.

  “I used to come here for vacations,” Nilis murmured. “The sky was always full of sails. I used to watch them at night, schooners with sails hundreds of kilometers wide, tacking this way and that in the light. You know, systems like this are a relic of the history of human advance. Technology tends to get simpler as you approach the source, Earth. It took so long to get to more remote regions that humanity had advanced by the time they got there; each colonizing push was overtaken by waves of greater sophistication. The Xeelee are different, though. All over the Galaxy, their technology is at the same stage of development. So they must have arrived all at once: they must be extragalactic… .”

  “Commissary,” Pirius asked hesitantly, “where is Earth?”

  The Commissary glanced around the sky, blinking to clear his rheumy eyes. Then he pointed to a nondescript star hanging in the dark, barely visible. “There.”

  Pirius looked up. For the first time the light of humanity’s original sun entered his eyes.

  Chapter 7

  Pirius Blue and the crew of the Claw, stranded in their own indifferent past, were taken away from Arches Base.

  The transport was a heap of junk, a battered old scow whose best days were long past. They had to keep their skinsuits sealed the whole time, and the Higgs field inertial control had hiccups, making the gravity flicker queasily. You couldn’t even see out through the hull.

  But then this wasn’t a Navy boat, as Enduring Hope had pointed out as they had dragged themselves aboard. Its hull was painted Army green, making it even uglier. “And,” said Hope the engineer gloomily, “everybody knows how good the Army is at running spaceships.”

  Cohl wriggled on a heap of sacking, trying to get comfortable enough to sleep. “Welcome to your new timeline,” she said.

  Pirius was still consumed with guilt for having landed them in this—Cohl and Hope, and their younger selves, including his own. He had no idea how he was going to find the strength to endure what was to come. He could think of nothing to say to his crew.

  After two days of living in their skinsuits, two days of sucking emergency rations through straws and stretching their suits’ relief systems to their stinking limit, the scow lumbered to a landing. The ship’s inertial field switched off, plunging them into microgravity, but their training had prepared them for such things, and they all grabbed handholds before they went drifting off.

  Without warning, the hull popped open, to reveal gray, trampled ground, a sky crowded with stars.

  An Army private in a scuffed green skinsuit appeared at the door. He was wearing a bulky inertial-control belt. “Out,” he ordered.

  Pirius led the way. He picked up his bag and loped out of the broad hatchway, letting himself drift to the ground. He looked around. He was on a Rock—a small one by the feel of its gravity. He
was standing in a crater, a walled plain, its surface heavily pitted by footsteps, and broader scars where the bellies of ships had touched. The sky was crowded with massive stars, and behind that speckled veil the center of the Galaxy was a wall of light, too diffuse to cast a sharp shadow.

  Cohl asked, “Where do you think we are? Those stars are dense enough for it to be a cluster.”

  “Not Arches,” said Enduring Hope bleakly. “I suspect we’re a long way from there.”

  “Shut up,” the Army private said without emotion. He went along their little line, handed them inertial belts like his own, and took away their bags. “You won’t be needing that shit anymore.”

  Pirius knew this was likely the last they would see of their gear, all he had left of his life at Arches. Everybody had heard the scuttlebutt that buck privates believed Navy flyers were well-off compared to them, and he had expected theft, but not to lose his kit so quickly; it was shocking, denuding. But perhaps that was the idea.

  An Army officer stood before them—a captain, according to the stripes on her shoulder. Her skinsuit was battered and much repaired, and through its translucent sheen Pirius saw the gleam of metal down her left side, her leg and torso and arm. She had her hands behind her back, and her face was shadowed, but brown eyes regarded them somberly—and, Pirius saw, startled, a fleck of silver gleamed in each pupil. “Put on your belts,” she said.

  Pirius snapped to attention. “Sir, I am Pilot Officer Pirius of—”

  “I don’t care who you are. Put on your belts.” They hesitated for one heartbeat, and she yelled. “Do it.”

  Pirius’s inertial belt was battered, and the fabric was stained dark, perhaps with blood, though the color was indistinct in the pale Galaxy light. As he snapped it on, weight clutched at him, dragging him to the asteroid dirt. It had been preset to what felt like more than a standard gravity. He reached for the clasp.