The Greatship (31 page)

After giving him fair warning, Ash began to leave the historian.  “The final probes still need to disengage themselves,” he said.  Then with a careful tone, he asked, “Should I bring your assistant to you?  Would you like to see him now?”

“Please.”

“Very well.”  Ash pretended to step outside, turning in the darkened hallway, centuries of practice telling him where to step.  Entering the secondary chamber, he used a casual voice, mentioning to Shadow, “By the way, I think I know what you are.”

“What I am?”

With sudden fierceness, Ash asked, “Did you really believe that you could fool me?”

The alien said nothing, and by every physical means, he acted puzzled but unworried.

Ash knew better.

“Your body is mostly Aaback, but there’s something else.  If I hadn’t suspected it, I wouldn’t have found it.  But what seems to be your brain serves as an elaborate camouflage for a quiet, nearly invisible neural network.”

The alien reached with both hands, yanking one of the cables free from his forehead.  Then a long tongue reached high, wiping the gray blood from the wound.  A halfway choked voice asked, “What do you see inside me?”

“Dinners,” Ash reported.  “Dinners reaching back for billions of years.”

Silence.

“Do you belong to one of the first five species?”

The alien continued tearing out the cables, but he was powerless to void the drifters inside his double-mind.

“No,” said Ash.  With a sly smile, he said, “I don’t think you’re one of the five.  I can tell.  You’re even older than that, aren’t you?”

The tongue retreated into the mouth.  A clear, sorry voice said, “I am not sure, no.”

“And that’s why,” said Ash.

“Why?”

“The woman asked the question about the oldest species, and you picked that moment because of her.”  He laughed, nodded.  “What did you use?  How did you slice a few minutes out of a Vozzen’s perfect memory?”

“With a small disruptive device–”

“I want to see it.”

“No.”

Ash kept laughing.  “Oh, yes.  You are going to show me the tool.”

Silence.

“Master doesn’t even suspect,” Ash said.  “You were the one who wanted to visit me.  You simply gave the Vozzen a good excuse.  You heard about me somehow, and you wanted me to peer inside his soul, and yours.  You were hoping that I would piece together the clues and tell you what I was seeing inside your peculiar mind.”

“What do you see?” Shadow asked.

“Two basic elements.”  A thought severed every link with Shadow, and with professional poise, Ash said, “Your soul might be ten or twelve billion years old.  I don’t know how that could be, but I can imagine:  In the earliest days of the universe, when stars were young and metal-poor, life found some other way to evolve.  A completely separate path.  Structured plasmas, maybe.  Maybe.  Whatever the route, your ancestors evolved and spread and then died away as the universe turned cold and empty.  Except on occasion, when they managed to adapt.  Using organic bodies as hosts, from what I can see.”

“I am the only survivor,” Shadow said.  “Whatever the reason, I cannot remember anyone else like me.”

“You are genuinely ancient, and I think you are smarter than you pretend to be.  But this ghost mind is limited, unsophisticated.  Vozzens are far smarter, and most humans too.  But when I was watching your thoughts, when you were contemplating crunch cakes, I saw other dinners, secret dinners, reaching back for a billion years, at least.  And that kind of vista begs for an explanation.”

Ash took a deep breath.  “Your mind is limited, but your memory has help.  Quantum help.  And this isn’t on any scale that I’ve ever come across, or even imagined possible.  I can gather the collective conscience from a trillion Masters, but with you, I can’t pick a number than looks sane.”

The alien showed his pink teeth, saying nothing.

“Are you pleased?” Ash asked.

“Pleased by what?”

“You are probably the most common entity in Creation,” said Ash.  “I have never seen such a signal.  This clear.  This deep and dramatic.  In one form or another, you exist in a fat, astonishing portion of all the possible realities.”

Shadow said, “Yes.”

“Yes what?”

With a tiny nod, a human nod, he said, “Yes, I am pleased.”

The sun always held its position in the fictional sky.  And always, the same wind blew with relentless calm.  In such a world, it was easy to believe there was no such monster as time, and the day would never end, and a man with old and exceptionally sad memories could convince himself, on occasion, that there would never be another night.

Ash was last to leave the shop.

“Again, thank you for your considerable help,” said the historian.

“Thank you for your generous gift.”  Ash found another cup of tea waiting for him, and he sipped down a full mouthful, watching Shadow untether the floating pack.  “Where next?”

“I have more lectures to give,” Master said.

“Good.”

“And I will interview the newest passengers onboard the Ship.”

“As research, I presume.”

“And as a pleasure, yes.”

Shadow was placing a tiny object beside one of the bristlecone’s roots.  “If you don’t lend me the disruptor,” Ash had threatened, “I’ll explain a few deep secrets to the Vozzen.”

Shadow had relented, of course.

Sipping tea, Ash quietly said, “Master.  What can you tell me about the future?”

“About what is to come–?”

“I never met a historian who didn’t have opinions on that subject,” Ash said.  “Consider my species, for instance.  What will happen to us in the next twenty million years?”

Master launched into an abbreviated but dense lecture, explaining to his tiny audience what was possible about forecasting the future and what was unknowable, and how every bridge between the two was an illusion.

His audience wasn’t listening.

With a whisper, Ash asked Shadow, “But why do you live this way?  With him, in this kind of role?”

In an Aaback fashion, the creature grinned.  Then Shadow peered over the edge of the canyon, speaking to no one in particular when he explained, “He needs me so much.  This is why.”

“As a servant?”

“And as a friend, and a confidant.”  With a very human shrug, he asked Ash, “How could anyone survive even a single day, if he didn’t feel as if he was, in some little great way, needed?”

Ruling the skin of one living world are the bacteria and the bugs, giant megaplegs marching through forests of gaul-trees and scurrying heart roaches, and gilled wanderers and quirks and the atolls of rhom-clams that speckle the face of the Twin Seas.  That skin, that fierce light-washed biosphere, has a mass.  Every physical attribute can be measured precisely, to the nearest microgram and milliliter, and that is for a single planet of no great significance but for its perfect lack of all significance.

Now repeat the study with a thousand other worlds.

Gas giants can be sterilized by exploding stars and their own internal furnaces, and cosmic accidents along with grand oversights will strip away the self-replicating and self-improving from uncounted terrestrial worlds.  But where life exists, bacteria and viruses dominate.  Buried oceans are ubiquitous, common inside large comets and the sunless planets cast into the interstellar silence.  Each ocean has its thin population of mindless tenacious slow life.  Wet stony crust and cold slurries of methane and rock-hard ice hold their own multitudes.  Apply any kind of lasting energy to one of those bodies—sunlight or tides or radionuclides, and everything else arises:  Communal cells and elaborate organisms and organs that produce nothing but thought.  Intelligence arises.  Societies and grand histories emerge.  Machines will be built from carved plastics and titanium and quilts of silicon that think for others and then for themselves, and then machines become another mass of viable, measurable life.

This is all to say that the galaxy is rich with life.

Measured as mass and as volume, a staggering quantity of material can live happily somewhere and survive in many other places.  The galaxy is thick with naturally made starships, and even the poorest inhabited world is a wondrous vessel, loyally following its sun or wandering free in the dark, carrying far too much possibility to be measured, to be calculated, to be known.

The Great Ship is so very small by comparison.

A fleck of simple, sterile rock and pure hyperfiber, reactors and rockets, it carries assorted chambers filled with haphazard examples of life—slivers of great biospheres bound for other places, or nowhere.

Each planet is a ship that never stops moving.

The Ship is merely swifter than the rest, and odder.  But no grand authority seems able to give the true compelling reason why the Great Ship should be considered valuable, or even notable.

Ignore me, the voice pleads.

Get off me and forget me and I promise, I will vanish, into the smothering gloom, with the barest fuss.

Pamir was a captain of consequence.  His ageless frame was tall and strong, partly because passengers seemed to expect both from the ship’s officers, and a large, pleasantly homely face conveyed confidence and a burdensome wisdom.  In uniform, he drew long looks, whether from humans or sighted aliens.  And unlike most captains, he had risen in the Ship’s hierarchy without depending on friendships or flattery.  It was said in his presence, with all the best intentions, that Pamir could have become a Submaster by now, earning a seat at the Master Captain’s table, if only he would attempt to play the game.

“Give gifts,” Washen advised.  “Memorable gifts, and durable.  Gifts that will say, ‘Pamir,’ for ten thousand years.”

He knew the game but feigned ignorance.  “What would I give that could impress a Submaster?”

“There’s that alien weed you like to grow.  The one that sings.”

“The llano-vibra.”

“Is that its name?”

He nodded, removing his mirrored captain’s cap and setting it on one of the obsidian busts fixed to the table’s corners.  “You think I should be giving away weeds.”

“Pretty ones,” she said.  “Why not?  Offer a reason.”

Disgusted, he said, “People would see the unmistakable calculations.”

“Then again, maybe you don’t deserve any promotion.”  Washen was tall and strong—a captain of roughly equal rank—and she was pretty in a smooth, unconscious way.  They were lovers once, but that was so long ago that the details had evaporated.  Friend to friend, she argued, “A captain must believe in calculations.  How else can he do his job?  Formulas for acceleration, for stress loads.  For managing passengers, for ass-kissing.  If you don’t respect your equations, maybe you don’t belong at the Master Captain’s table.”

“I agree with you.”  Their drinks rose from the table’s center.  Claiming his rain-of-tears, Pamir said, “I don’t deserve anything, and we can move to other business.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know.  You wanted to see me, as I recall.”

“And I can’t linger,” she complained.  “I’m greeting a shuttle full of Y’uy’uy.  Have you heard of them?”  No, he hadn’t.  “A social species, and tiny.  A couple million of them are arriving, and if I don’t wiggle my fingers at each one, in the proper way, the entire nest is my enemy.”

As if practicing, Washen curled and uncurled a ring finger.

Pamir looked across the lounge, through the long transparent wall.  The shallow black surf sloshed against the rocks below.  Poisonous to earth life, alien plankton were rapidly consuming the false sunlight and water, and a host of little fish were growing swiftly.  In another few months the lake would become a stiff coal-colored gelatin—the only food for the ten thousand Bloom onboard.  Arriving in force, the Bloom would throw a celebration, and the lounge would be jammed with onlookers, watching their fellow passengers chop out feasts and snacks and the trapped succulent fish.

“But hey,” said Washen.  “Speaking of newcomers…”

Pamir turned.  Puzzled, alert.

“I found one for you.  And he fits most of your parameters.”  With a sweeping, overly dramatic gesture, she handed him a memo chip.  “The odd bioscan.  A very peculiar ship.  And a port of origin that doesn’t quite seem real.”

The chip was a giant snowflake worn simple by countless hands, its whiteness magnified by the tired black stone of the tabletop.

“A peculiar ship,” she repeated.  “Wooden, but not like any wood I know.  He sold it for scrap.  I’ve got the recyke reports.  How many times have you seen a starship built from lumber?”

Pamir reached across the table, making a fist.  “Who is he?”

“Don’t you know?  You asked me to watch for him.”

Loudly, he asked, “How long has he been here?”

“You should see yourself,” said Washen.  Then she laughed, shaking her drink and inhaling the gases that rose out of solution.  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite that face on you.”

“When did this passenger come onboard?”

She tapped the snowflake, as if answers would spring forth.  “More than a week ago.  But I was too busy to handle the case, and you were off-duty somewhere, and besides, you never offered any reason to sound alarms.”

Pamir wrestled with adrenaline, feigning self-control.

“Wood,” she repeated.  “Tough, weird wood.  Cellulose laced with non-terran proteins configured for strength and durability.  Except it doesn’t give much protection from radiation, or from impacts, and I’m surprised how fit the passenger seemed to be.”

“An organic ship,” he said.

“In places, yes.”  She sniffed her drink again, enjoying the temporary corrosion of her nervous system.  “The engines had metals where you need them, and ceramics, and the guts were good-enough diamond.  But there wasn’t anything like hyperfiber, and the scrap value was nil.”

“A starfaring tree.”  Pamir consumed the rest of his drink, barely tasting the salt, wishing all the while that this was some enormous, curious coincidence.

“I did some research for you.”  Again she tapped the chip.  “There’s a report of another ship like this one.  Organic and sloppy.  But it didn’t stay with us, as it happens.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“A sketchy, misfiled report.”  Washen was staring at a point behind his eyes.  “I don’t even know who wrote it.”

Pamir lifted his cap with both hands, placing it on his head, at an angle calculated to give the passengers confidence in him.  At least the human passengers.  Again, he said, “Thank you.”

“The man calls himself Samara.”

He barely heard the voice.

“Human, but not completely.  From a colony world that exists, only we didn’t pass within five hundred light-years of it.”

What should happen next?  It was centuries since Pamir had considered this scenario, and he felt lost, cold and ill, fears building between those gaping weaknesses.

“Samara qualified as primarily-human.”  Another tap at the snowflake.  “If you need his address, it’s waiting for you.”

Washen was a close friend, and she was doing him a great favor.  Yet he was so consumed by his troubles that when he looked at the captain he felt anger—a blistering, sloppy, unfair rage.  He wanted to ask how such a creature could get onboard.  But instead of speaking, he tugged on the violet-black epaulets, thick fingers struggling to remain gentle.

“Some advice,” said Washen.  “Come to the Master Captain’s dinner this year.  Bring your singing weeds, call them calculations, and smile until your face hurts.”  She showed him a gracious smile and two flirtatious winks, all framed by her mirrored uniform and cap.  “Sit beside me, if you’d like.”

Pamir could think of nothing to say except, “I don’t raise llano-vibra anymore.”

“No?”

“Not in ages,” he said, claiming the memo chip and again looking through the transparent wall, gazing at the strange black lake while struggling not to think about death.