Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (8 page)

What remained was grim.

"I should kill you too," he said.

"Can you fly this ship alone?"

"It's an experiment that I am willing to try."

Tailor had fewer options, and only one was reasonable. "Secure me," he said. "Each day, please, you can tie me to one place. I'll work where you trap me. If I can go nowhere, what harm do I pose?"

"What if you talk to the sovereigns? You could turn them against me."

"Or you can separate their influences from the ship," the Kajjas said. "Feed them power, of course. But please, let this conundrum have its way with me."

"No."

The three eyes went opaque, blind.

"No," Pamir repeated.

"You once said something important," Tailor said.

"Once?"

"I overheard you. When you came back to life the last time, you were talking to the children. You claimed that there was a reason why youthful souls interested me."

"Young minds can't hide secrets," Pamir said.

"But that isn't their major benefit." Iron knives struck one another inside that long throat. "Just finding the treasure may not be enough. A young mind, unburnished and willing, often proves more receptive to mystery."

"And to madness," Pamir said.

Tailor let one eye clear. "Whoever you are, you hold a strong mind."

"Thank you," Pamir said.

"On the whole," said the Kajjas, "I believe that strength is our universe's most overprized trait."

Of course there were sovereigns. Pamir always knew that. The sovereigns were vast and relentless, and they were immortal, and he knew their faces: The kings of vacuum and energy, and their invincible children, time and distance. Those were the masters of everything. Their stubborn uncharitable sense of the possible and the never-can-be was what ruled the Creation. All the rest of the players were little souls and grand thoughts, and that was the way it would always be.

The Great Ship was obeying the kings. It remained no better than a point, a conjecture, crossing one hundred thousand kilometers every second. Reaching the Ship was life's only purpose. Pamir thought of little else. The human-made AIs thought of nothing else. The hydrogen had been consumed until only a thin reserve remained, and then the streakship's corpse was thrown to oblivion, each bit unique in shape and composition. Calculations demanded to be made. Adjustments never ended. Slivers of a cabin wall exploded differently than the plumbing ripped out of a fuel pump, and while the Kajjas engine ate each gladly, there was sloppiness, and sometimes the magic would fail, leading to silence as the nameless ship once again began to drift.

Every day had its sick machines.

No week was finished without the engine dying unexpectedly, ruining the latest trajectory.

Anyone less competent than Pamir would have been defeated. Anyone more talented would have known better and given up in this idiot venture on the first day. A soul less proud or more clear-headed would have happily aimed for one of the solar systems on the Kajjas' charts—a living place that would accept the relic starship and two alien species of peculiar backgrounds. But Pamir clung to his stations, and the AIs found new solutions after every hiccup, while Tailor filled his lucid moments moving from platform to cubbyhole, talking to the madness.

Several decades of furious work brought them halfway home.

And then the engine was silenced on purpose, and their ship was given half a roll, preparing to slow its momentum before intercepting the Great Ship.

"You have to pay attention to me," said Tailor.

Pamir was in earshot, barely. But his companion was talking to himself, or nobody.

"I see your stares," the Kajjas said.

Pamir ignored him. From this point on, they had even less play in their trajectories and the remaining time. The Great Ship was swift, but the Kajjas ship had acquired nearly twice its velocity. Very few equations would gently drop them into the berth at Port Beta, while trillions of others shot them ahead of the Great Ship, or behind.

"Do you hear me?" Tailor asked.

Yes, but Pamir pressed on. His companion was another one of the thousand tasks that he could avoid for the time being, and maybe always. What the captain needed to do next was prepare a test-firing of the hyperfiber fuel, and the fuel feeds begged to be recalibrated, and one of his AIs had developed an aversion to an essential algorithm, and he hadn't eaten his fill in three days, and meanwhile the small, inadequate telescopes riding the prow had to be physically carried to the stern and fixed to new positions so that they could look ahead, eating the photons and neutrinos that never stopped raining and never told him enough.

Eating was the first priority.

Pamir was finishing a huge meal when the first note of a warning bell arrived, followed immediately by two others.

Those bells were announcing intruders.

Pamir made himself enjoy his dessert, a slab of buttery janusian baklava, and then, keeping his paranoia in check, he examined the data and first interpretations. The half-roll had revealed a different sky. The telescopes had spotted three distinct objects traversing local space. None were going to collide with Pamir, yet each could well have been aimed at this ship while it moved on an earlier tangent. Each was plainly artificial. The smaller two were the most distant, plunging from different directions, visible only because they were using their star-drives. Measuring masses and those fires, Pamir guessed about likely owners. An enormous coincidence was at hand, three strangers appearing at the perfect place for an attack. The roll-over left him predictable, exposed. It would be smart to conjure up a useful dose of fear. But the fear didn't come. Pamir wasn't calm, and he couldn't recall the last time when he was happy. But he wasn't properly worried either. A thousand ships could be lurking nearby, each with their engines off—invisible midges following his every possible course. But that possibility didn't scare him. His heartbeat refused to spike, right up until the nearest vessel suddenly unleashed a long burn.

Their neighbor was a huge, top-of-the-line streakship, and if Pamir followed the best available trajectory, that luxury ship and his own thumping heart would soon pass within twenty million kilometers of one another.

But the heart was quiet, and Pamir knew why: The universe did not care about him, or this relic, or even crazy old Tailor.

A loud transmission arrived thirteen hours later, straight from the streakship. In various languages and in data, its owners were named as well as the noble species onboard, both by number and their accumulated wealth. Then a synthetic voice asked for Pamir's identity, and with words designed to sound friendly to as many species as possible, it asked if the two of them were perhaps heading toward the same destination? "Are we joining on the Great Ship together, my lovely friend?"

Pamir invented new lies, but he didn't use them. Instead, he identified himself as Human Jon. With his own weary voice, he explained that this was a salvage operation and he was alone, and his ship was little better than a bomb. That's why he kept trying to maneuver out from the path of others. Invoking decency, he decided to delay his test firings, watching the interloper, wondering what it would do in response.

Devoted to its own course, the other voice wished him nothing but the best and soon blasted into the lead.

And three weeks later, the streakship's central engine went wrong. Containment failed or some piece of interstellar trash pierced the various armors. Either way, the universe was suddenly filled with one spectacular light, piercing and relentless, along with the wistful glow from a million distant suns.

Pamir knew a thousand sentient species well enough to gather with them, drinking and eating with them, absorbing natures and histories and the good jokes while sharing just enough of his blood and carefully crafted past. Bioceramic minds didn't merely absorb memories. They organized the past well enough that sixty thousand years later, a bored man doing routine work could hear the song from a right-talisman harp and the clink of heavy glasses kissing each other, and with the mind's eye he saw the face of the most peculiar creature sitting across from him: A withered face defined by crooked teeth and scars, fissures where the skin sagged and sharp bones where muscle had once lived.

Pamir was younger than many captains, while his companion was a fraction his age and probably no more than ten years from death. She was as human as Pamir, though he had trouble seeing her that way. Archaics living on the stormy shore of the Holiday Seas had sent delegates to meet with this captain. These citizens were to come to terms on tiny matters of babies and fees paid for those babies, and where their people could travel, and where the other passengers could not.

Pamir already possessed the famous snarl.

"You're stranger to me than most aliens," said the novice captain, finishing his first Mist-of-Tears. "If I try, I understand an extraterrestrial's thought process. But if I look at you and try to figure you out, I get tangled. I end up wanting to scream."

The archaic was drinking rum. Maybe it was the taste in the old woman's mouth, or maybe it was his words. Or perhaps she enjoyed the music coming from an exotic instrument. Whatever the reason, she offered a smile, and then looking down at the swirling dark liquor, she told the glass, "Scream. You won't hurt my feelings."

"You're dying. Right in front of me, you are dying."

The grin lifted. "And you feel for me, how dear."

"A hundred years isn't enough time." Pamir wouldn't scream, but he couldn't sit comfortably either. "I know what you people believe, and it's crazy. Religious, scared, mad, foolish, shit-for-brains crazy."

"I'm one hundred and forty years old," she said with her slow, careful voice. Then, after a weirdly flirtatious wink, she added, "I personally believe in modest genetic engineering, ensuring good health and a swift decline at the end."

"Good for you," he said.

She sipped and said nothing.

The young captain ordered another round. Their bartender was a harum-scarum, gigantic, covered with scales and spines and a sour temper, ready to battle any patron who gave her any excuse. Pamir felt closer and much warmer toward that creature than he did to the frail beast beside him.

"There is another way for you," he told her.

A little curious, the old woman looked at him.

"Employ limited bioceramic hardware. A single thread is all that you'd need. Thinner than a hair, planted deep inside that fatty organ of yours, and you could spend one hundred and forty years learning everything quickly and remembering all of it. Then you'd die, just like you want, and your family could have their funeral. A ceremony, an ornate spectacle, and your grandchildren could chop the implant out of your skull. Maybe they could pretend it was a treasure. Wouldn't that be nice? They can drop your intellect into a special bottle and set it on some noble high shelf, and if they ever needed your opinion, about anything, they could bring you down for a chat. That's the better way to live like a primitive."

Cheerfully, almost giggling, the old woman said, "I am not a Luddite."

Pamir hadn't used the word, and he didn't intend to use it now.

" 'Archaic' isn't an adequate word either," she said.

"What's the best word?" he asked.

"Human," she said instantly, without hesitation or doubt.

Pamir snorted and leaned forward, wondering if this unfriendly back-and-forth was going to help their negotiations. Probably not, he decided. Oh well, he decided. "If that's what you are, what am I?" he asked.

"A machine," she said.

He leaned back, hard. "Bullshit."

The old woman shrugged and smiled wistfully.

"Is that the word you use? When we're not present, do you call us cyborgs?"

With a constant, unnerving cheeriness, she said, "Cyborgs are partly human, and you are not. Your minds, and your flesh, and the basic nature of your bones and brains: Everything about you is an elaborate manifestation of gears and electrical currents with just enough masquerading in place to keep you ignorant of your own nature."

"I don't like you," said the young captain.

"Try the rum," she said.

He played with the mirrored hat on his head.

Then she said, "But as you helpfully pointed out, I shouldn't be around much longer. So really, what can my opinion weigh?"

Theory claimed that hyperfiber would make a potent fuel. But every theory involved modeling and various flavors of mathematics and usually a fair share of hope. Truth demanded tests, which was why Pamir dropped a single blade of fuel into the ship's mouth. And when the engine survived that experiment, he sent in three others, followed by a hundred more closely packed slivers.

The old model proved wildly pessimistic.

Yields were at the high end of predictions, and more importantly, each explosion was set inside a tiny piece of time. Brutal kicks passed through the Kajjas ship. Plasmas were spewed ahead, velocities pushing against light-speed, and Pamir let himself breathe while the AIs celebrated with party paradoxes and new models of annihilation, plus fresh crops of trajectories that took into account this unexpected power.

Pamir began slowing the ship with high-gee burns, randomly spaced, and despite premonitions for the worst, the old engine never complained.

Was this how the vanished Kajjas explored the far galaxies? Building hyperfiber only to burn it again?

Three months into the deceleration, the ship was in a coasting phase. Glass strands were pulled to the round cabin walls while Pamir worked on another recalibration. Space appeared normal, benign and cold and vast, and then suddenly an adjacent portion of space became hot. Distant lasers were firing on wandering comets and dust, and the nameless grit responded by boiling, turning to gas and wild ions. Within minutes, a billion cubic kilometers had been engulfed by a bright cobalt glow that looked lovely to the scared human eye.

The Kajjas was wearing smart-manacles and three watchdog sensors. The nearest display panel was busy, gold and mauve wrapped around symbols that looked like a genuine language. But Tailor was standing apart from every machine, closely watching something in one hand, something quite small. Pamir had to call his name several times to be noticed.