Sering

Sering is the volunteer chosen to ride the Brin 2 Sentry Pod alone. He is an agent of the Non Ultra Natura movement. His sabotage destroys Brin 2, but Kern escapes in the Sentry Pod. The text never gives his first name.

The post he volunteered for

Kern calls on him over an open channel, for everyone’s benefit, and asks whether he is in position. The crew are going to leave him behind. He was to orbit the station as the long years turned, locked in cold sleep until the time came for him to become mentor to a new race of sentient primates. Kern thinks of him as the new Hanuman, “the monkey god”, and almost envies him.

His voice is “always slightly mournful”. In the Mind’s Eye displays his image shows the collar of his bright orange environment suit done up high to the chin.

The speech

He answers that he is not in position, on the general channel, so the whole crew hears it. Asked privately why, he says he was hoping to say a few words. Kern lets him speak, keeps a delay of a few seconds on the master comms in case he became maudlin, and works out that a good showing would only add to her legend.

The speech starts as a tribute and turns. He tells the crew that they stand with the universe in their grasp and instead “connive at our own obsolescence”. Kern only takes in what he has said after the words have already passed to the crew. Doctor Mercian then reports that Sering is in the engine core.

Sabotage

Kern cuts him off from the crew. He answers that he has cut her off in turn and that he will speak without being interrupted. He had locked her out of parts of the facility’s systems, and the control computer would not admit that those parts existed. None of them was mission critical, so none was among the systems she checked every day. They were facility critical. He disabled the reactor safeties.

She reads his place in the engine core as a man arranging a death that will be instant and total, and probably painless. He names his movement over the open channel, “Non Ultra Natura! No greater than nature”, and says that on Earth and across the colonies his allies will have made their move already. He claims the movement will take power with the consent of the majority, and fight if it must.

He rigged the escape pods so that nobody could avoid the fate he had chosen for himself. The Sentry Pod is the one piece of equipment that stays free of his meddling, and even there Kern has to find a release path around the parts of the process he had erased from the computer’s direct notice. She suspects that the mechanical release for the Barrel and the Flask was his first and most careful job, because that release was beneath her own notice. The Barrel comes down off its planned course.

He dies when Brin 2 comes apart. Kern sees the end only through the damage reports, in which her colleagues, the facility, “Sering the traitor” and all her work become a cloud of fragments and escaping atmosphere. She wonders whether he would have counted the burning monkeys as proof that he was right.

After the sabotage

Kern sleeps for fourteen years and seventy two days, then wakes to a silence where the signals from Earth used to be. At first she assumes that his status as a NUN agent had been uncovered long ago, when the uprising failed. The missing signals lead her to conclude that his war had broken out, the NUNs and their allies had risen up, and the lights went out across the solar system.

The uploaded Kern that speaks through the Sentry Habitat much later asks the arrivals from the Gilgamesh whose Earth they come from, “Sering’s Earth or my Earth”, and whether they are Sering’s people who came to finish what he started. In the same broken message she insists that Sering will not win. The crew of the Gilgamesh have never heard the name, and Vitas asks whether Sering was a warship.

Unanswered questions

• His first name, age and build are not given. His image shows him in an orange environment suit with the collar done up high to his chin, and his voice is described as slightly mournful.
• How he came to be chosen for the Sentry Pod, and whether anyone suspected him before the launch.
• What became of the agents he promised on the colonies, and of the movement after the war.
• Whether he knew that the Barrel had launched before he died.