“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 parents 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…”