intimidating, like it was supposed to. Even from a few metres away, it gave the impression of towering over her. Vyr was suddenly aware of how very un-military her jacket was; it had an image emblazoned on it of a dung- chomp/smutter band she’d played electric volupt for, years ago. The Lords of Excrement — complete with their colourful if wince-inducing logo — had seemed a dubious, going-on-childish name even twenty years ago, yet the jacket had remained a favourite because it reminded her of a good time in her life. It was one of the few she’d had altered to accommodate her new set of arms.
“Citizen,” the arbite said, then must have identified her from some processing she had with her — probably her earbud. “Reserve Lieutenant Commander,” it corrected itself, and saluted.
“Just taking a stroll, arbite,” she told the machine.
It remained motionless, seemed to think about this, then without another word folded itself back into its resting sphere-shape with a sort of metallically oiled grace. Compacted, it looked like a piece of sculpture.
She wandered on, and encountered the family by the side of another great drop, where a broad roadway hung over one of the hundred-metre-wide open-work tunnels that threaded their way through the Girdlecity. The man and the woman were huddled round a little fire, its light reflecting off the wall of diamond-film wall lining the roadway.
“Good evening,” she said to them, looking quizzically at the fire, which was just a small stack of burning logs. More cut lengths of tree were heaped just beyond where they sat. Both looked up at her, unsmiling. They were dressed for outdoors and looked slightly unkempt. Cossont couldn’t see anything to identify them. Her implants were unable to sense anything electronic on them either, which was most unusual. Their faces were smudged. She wanted to march them both off to the nearest working shower and get them cleaned up.
“Evening,” the man said, then looked away and poked at the fire with a stick. The woman seemed to be muttering something to herself, talking down into her voluminous hiking jacket. Perhaps she was just on the phone to somebody, Cossont thought, though somehow it didn’t feel like she was, not if her own implants couldn’t find anything to hand-shake with.
Cossont was about to ask them whether they were wanderers, locals out for a stroll, or what, when a little face peeked out from within the woman’s jacket, stared up wide-eyed at her, and then disappeared again with a rustle of clothing. The woman looked up at Cossont with an expression at once wary and defiant.
It took Cossont a moment or two to realise.
She was so used to thinking of herself as part of the Last Generation, the last people to be born before people stopped having babies, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at initially.
“You have a child!” she said, taking a step closer to the woman and going down on her haunches, her face level with the other woman’s, her hand going out towards her, then withdrawing again.
The woman smiled, seemed to talk into her jacket again. “Chuje,” she said softly, “say hello to the lady.”
The little face peeked out again. A child; a real child — as far as she could tell — maybe four or five years old. A girl. She looked very serious as she stared at Cossont, who said, “Hello, Chuje.”
“Allo,” the child said, then bit her lip and hid away again within the folds of the woman’s jacket.
Cossont stared at the woman. The man was sitting closer now, looking over both of them. “She’s—” Cossont began.
“Ours,” the woman said. “Three and a half.” Pride, this time, as well as suspicion and defiance. The girl looked out at Cossont again, then, still watching Cossont, cuddled into her mother, and was cuddled back.
Cossont sat back, her mouth open. She tore her gaze away from the deep, dark eyes of the little girl, looked at both her parents. “So, you’re not…”
“We’re not going,” the man said.
Not going. Not Subliming when the time came in twenty-three days from now, when the Stored all over Xown and Zyse and throughout every other planet and moon and habitat and ship of the Gzilt were roused for their pre- waking, and the last few hours before the Subliming itself.
Cossont knew there were people like these, people determined for whatever reason not to Sublime along with everybody else, and she had even met one or two — though she’d always thought that they would change their minds when the time came — but she had never met anyone who had had a child as well.
The convention — it was not quite a law, but it was close to one — was that you did not take a child into the Sublime. It had to be a mature, considered, final action for a civilisation and the individuals within it who were ready to go, who had thought about it fully and had decided they were ready to make the transition. The Gzilt considered children to be unable to give their informed consent on something so important, which meant they regarded taking a child with you as something close to abuse.
So, generally, people had stopped having children. A few, a very few, were born, nevertheless, to parents who still intended to Sublime, but those making that choice, especially with young children, were widely treated as pariahs; most had retreated to communities of the similarly inclined in distant habs.
Cossont found herself staring at the young couple. They were very young, she thought. Maybe ten years younger than her — they must have been barely more than children themselves when the child had been born. “It’ll be lonely,” she told them.
“It’s already lonely,” the man said.
The woman said, “We know,” at the same time.
“Yes,” Cossont said, feeling foolish. “I suppose you know that.” She smiled apologetically at them.
“She’s our future,” the man said, nodding down towards the child.
Cossont nodded, wondering what sort of future it would be. No other species/civ would accept that the few per cent of the Gzilt who remained after the Sublimation would constitute a continuance of that civilisation. All the Gzilt’s deserted living places, from the home planet of Zyse itself to the smallest hab and ship, would be regarded as fair game for takeover, absorption, appropriation. Xown itself, due to the fact it was home to the Girdlecity, was earmarked for pan-cultural monument status under the care of one of the Galactic Council’s Neutral Foundations. Nobody would get expelled or thrown out of any habitat airlocks, but their worlds would fill up, sooner or later, with others; some humanoid, some not, but all aliens, all outsiders.
You couldn’t even delay very long if you did change your mind and decide to go after everybody else. The rate of subjective/absolute change within the first few hours that people spent inside the Sublime was such that leaving it much more than an hour or so was risky; you’d get there and be isolated, those who had made the transition just hours before — whether they’d been close friends, lovers, family, identical twins, clones, whatever — would already have become so changed, so ascended in complexity, that you would have virtually nothing in common. You’d be on your own, or part of a hopelessly small group, effectively contextless, unanchored to anything greater than yourself, and so likely just to evaporate, dissolving into the generality of the fabric of the Sublime, meaningless.
It was unknown whether this phenomenon was something intrinsic to the exotic physics and other fundamental natural laws of the Sublime itself, or a rule imposed by those who inhabited the realm and helped enable the transition of people and civilisations. Various civs had conducted research into the subject and confirmed the effect without pinning down the cause. Perhaps a little of each, seemed to be the tentative consensus, which was not entirely helpful.
“We’re not Resist or anything,” the woman said suddenly. She was staring at the flashes on Cossont’s jacket collar. Resist were the people who were militant Stay-behinders, holding demonstrations, instigating civil disobedience and even now arguing before the Galactic Council that the Sublime was illegal, improperly mandated. A few groups on the fringe of the Resist movement had used violence to try to make their point.
“Just civilians,” the man said.
Cossont nodded again. The couple had resigned their ranks, whatever they had been. It happened. It made you poor — it was tantamount to taking a religious vow of poverty — though being poor in a post-scarcity society that only retained money as a sort of ceremonial formality was not so terrible; it took only one person of nominally average means to support any number of those requiring alms. It also tended to make you an object of either grumbling suspicion or grudging admiration, depending.
The little girl had come further out from her mother’s jacket and was staring at Cossont now, her wide eyes reflecting the flickering orange firelight, her hands playing with a small toy, turning it over and over in her chubby, grubby hands.
“Can I hold her?” Cossont said suddenly, looking first at the woman, then the man.
