The Greatship (22 page)

The experts that hatched this mission had been of one mind:  Olympus Peregrine—the retrofitted asteroid that helped carry the first humans to the Great Ship—would astonish their primitive hosts.  The Scypha often rebuilt bolides, some even larger than the Peregrine.  But their work was primitive by every standard, including mass-drivers and crude fusion engines that could barely nudge the little worlds into new orbits.  The aliens didn’t possess high-grade hyperfiber, nor did they know any of the big cheats necessary to build a functional star-drive.  Even as an elderly machine, the Peregrine possessed its burnished beauty, and it didn’t hurt that the enduring symbol of everything good and noble about human achievement was built inside a common piece of stone.

But Aasleen didn’t share the optimism.  With a rather different estimate of her aging starship, she knew that good fortune was at least as important as good engineering when the Peregrine made its famous journey out to the Great Ship.  Yes, the tiny voyage to the Scypha consumed only sixty years, but for the chief engineer, this mission felt like one intense, unbroken day jammed with work and major crises, plus three genuine disasters involving the ship’s increasingly problematic engines.

To reach the goal, the Peregrine needed to race ahead of the Great Ship while dropping through the plane of the Milky Way.  Making this possible meant pushing hard enough so they could afford to slow down again, lingering in one location for three lazy years.  And assuming that humans and the Scypha achieved some workable understanding, then the Peregrine wouldn’t just have to make the return voyage, but it would also have to bring home a few thousand adults—enough bodies and grown minds to build a functional colony somewhere onboard the Great Ship.

But return voyages weren’t guaranteed.  While still inbound, Aasleen met with Hazz and his immediate staff, showing them projections and models, hard numbers and soft gloomy numbers.  Then as a final touch, she set a worn valve-fiber in front of her captain.  It had been poured from what was once the finest hyperfiber made by humans, but that was thousands of years ago.  The telltale darkening was obvious, revealing fractures deep inside the normally invincible material.  Pointblank, she explained that only two of their main engines were reliable.  What’s more, the trustworthy two were divided among the five present engines.  “In other words, I’m going to cannibalize all five just to make a good pair, which leaves me needing to build three new engines just to give us a ninety percent chance of returning home.”

Hazz’s face grew soft and sorry.  “What exactly are you proposing?”

She explained.  The challenge wasn’t a surprise, and her solutions shouldn’t have been either.  But it took Hazz half an hour to study the concepts, and several more hours to embrace what she wanted to do with their museum-worthy machine.  A complete renovation of the starship was called for.  Hyperfiber factories and fresh reactors would have to be built wherever there was room, and work had to be accomplished on the proverbial fly, using the inadequate tools on hand.  Boast all they wanted about human genius, but the grim, inglorious truth was that their species was close to drowning.

Aasleen rarely saw her brother during those next months and years.  But it seemed as if every twenty-four hours, she would talk to a person or two who mentioned Rococo.  The diplomat/exobiologist often gave briefings to the crew, and he ate frequently with Hazz; and most likely, the affable fellow would pass someone in a hallway, and just to be pleasant, he would strike up a brief but undeniably memorable conversation.

Unlike his sister, Rococo was an intensely social organism, and better than most, he had the gift.  Bring up his name, and faces would smile.  Ask why, and the most retiring engineer or simplest AI-worker would replay a conversation word for word, catching some joy that nobody else could see.  Of course nothing important was ever said.  Aasleen noted that Rococo could speak buoyantly about the shallowest subjects.  He was amusing at times but never more than that.  And he told a good story, but not a great one.  Yet her brother had some kind of chokehold on the hundreds of people they were traveling with—people she knew by name and face, some counted among her friends.  But none of those people were so thrilled by her attentions that they would run to her brother, stopping him in the middle of his important work, distracting him by saying, “Oh, I saw your sister today.  What a fun, good person Aasleen is!”

Rococo was fun, and he was good.  He was also exceptionally skilled at managing his sister’s emotions—knowing how often to meet with her, and for how long, and somehow finding the sweetest way to orchestrate the event so that both of them felt as close to comfortable as possible.

Wisely, Rococo never brought up their parents or the distant home world.  That duty was left in Aasleen’s lap.

And when she asked about his childhood—how could she not?—the man sitting before her always put on a careful face, measuring his words and muting their tone before offering the narrowest response.

The world Aasleen remembered was gone; Rococo described a planet transformed by human hands.  Her gossamer smart-tent proved to be just a brief step on the way to larger adventures.  By the time he emigrated, the entire atmosphere was fully oxygenated, the continents covered with soil made from comet crusts and ocean muck, and the latest crop of engineers were busily draping a tough monomolecular curtain over the entire world—a much larger version of Aasleen’s tent, its central purpose filtering out the blistering UV light.

Aasleen was disappointed, and she didn’t mind saying so.

“We weren’t born on the Earth,” she said.  “And we always had the means on hand to adapt to these hazards.  UV is something we can easily tolerate.”

“That’s absolutely true,” he said without hesitation.

“And our engineered flora and fauna were going to depend on the hard radiation, that rich free abundant energy bolstering the biosphere’s productivity.”  She looked at her hands, ancient feelings emerging.  “We agreed.  Before I left, votes were taken, and the colonists decided to let the planet stay as alien as possible…to force us to meet it at some good and worthy middle point.”

Her brother nodded amiably, his face sharing her disgust.  But later, replaying the conversation, she noticed that Rococo avoided the opportunity to come out and say, “Yes, you are right, sister.  I’m on your side here.”

Because he didn’t agree with her, she realized.  Nor did he agree with the vote, either.

“What about my tent?” she asked.

His eyes widened while his mouth pulled into a small knot.

“Is anything left of it?”

Rococo shook his head.  Then with another expression of diplomatic disgust, he admitted, “The entire structure was dismantled for scrap.”

Aasleen wasn’t vain by nature.  But this was a pivotal event in her life, which was why she asked, “Yes, but is there some little statue, maybe?  Is there a monument or plaque, just to let people know?”

“People know,” he said.  “It’s part of our history.”

“History,” she echoed.  Then with a scorn that took both of them by surprise, she said, “I was hoping for a little more than some cryptic notes in a dusty historical file…as forgotten as everything else…”

Rococo was charming and soothing, and in ways few souls could match, he could deftly step into difficult circumstances, creating a false but welcome peace.  But he had an even more unusual gift:  With his sister and perhaps other difficult souls, he knew that it was best sometimes not to attempt peace.  These were very old feelings for Aasleen’s, making them exceptionally stubborn.  And even at their worst, the feelings were harmless, and by their nature silly, and if he let her spout on, they quickly lost their teeth and fury.

The siblings’ last social engagement was a late night meal for the entire crew.  The Peregrine was halfway rebuilt, the most difficult jobs already completed.  By chance or by someone else’s planning, Aasleen was sitting next to her brother, sharing the back corner of the ship’s largest galley.  His journal was beside him—a portable slab of plastic encased in a diamond sleeve.  He never touched it, but he didn’t put it inside the satchel, either.  Much later, replaying the moment, Aasleen could appreciate how her little brother had played her.  Very softly, he mentioned receiving a note from their mother.  The woman was constantly sending digitals and little messages to her much-loved son, and that unfailingly bothered Aasleen.  She bristled at the news.  As he knew she would, she began to offer disparaging words about being dead to her home world.  But this time, for the first time, Rococo interrupted the pity-play.  “But you are doing enormous work now,” he said with feeling.  “These things you’re involved in…these are adventures far more important than terraforming an obscure colony world.  For instance, the future history of an entire species is being determined here.  And you, Aasleen…you are playing a pivotal role in the drama…”

She saw the mistake.  But instead of correcting him, she shrugged and stabbed her grilled eland.

“You know,” Rococo said.  Then he fell silent.

“What do I know?”

Throwing a wink at her, he warned, “I won’t be here much longer.  The diplomatic corps will come and go as necessary.  But until our last couple months, I plan to live among the Scypha.  Full-time, on various worlds.”

The wall beside them wore images harvested from the approaching solar system.  The Rings were highlighted, the largest and most important asteroids glowing green.  She glanced at them and the simple gray speck that was Chaos.  Nodding, she asked, “Are you giving tonight’s briefing?”

That was the reason for this gathering.  All but a skeleton staff was sitting in the galley, waiting to hear the latest news about their mission.

“I’ll generate a few words,” Rococo said.

“Because I can’t stay,” she admitted.  “I’ve got a rocket nozzle to inspect.  And there’s a diagnostic that’s turning up new problems.”

“Are we in trouble?”

“No worse than usual.”  She set down her knives and dabbed her lips with a piece of sticky ice.  “It’s just that we’re going to being asking a lot out of engines that are either well past their prime or too new to trust…”

Her voice trailed away.

Rococo nodded with compassion, as if her burdens were riding his shoulders too.  Then he touched the wall—touched it low and brought up the menu—and without a word of explanation, he asked for an image of Chaos.

Aasleen was thinking about slipping away.  Had she shown her face long enough?  Would Hazz or his staff put a black mark on her record?  Then a flash struck the corner of her eye—a soundless, brilliant, and enduring light—and she turned in time to watch a blister of plasma rising from the shore of an alien sea.

The image was ancient, or it was invented.  Either way, she was witnessing an event that had happened perhaps a billion times in the past.  An asteroid or lost comet had plunged onto that battered world, vaporizing the entire sea and melting a portion of the crust, producing shockwaves that burned up every organic body that happened to be trapped on the surface.

Four billion years ago, this was the Earth.

She and her brother had spoken about this many times.  Or rather, Rococo had made the noise, and she had listened, interested in what he was saying even when she already knew the details.

Nobody knew for sure how many times life evolved on the Earth.

But in the early eons, when hundred-kilometer bolides were falling like rain, the ancient ocean was repeatedly boiled off and the crust turned to magma, and even the toughest little bugs were killed.  Only later, when nothing bigger than fifty kilometers was crashing down, life survived, if barely.  Microbes found places to survive—usually in porous rock deep underground.  The best guess was that by the bombardment’s end, a single line of
Archaea
—the thermophilic bacteria—had endured the worst abuse, and that plucky survivor was grandmother to every crawling, talking organic beast that managed to spring up on their cradle world.

But the bombardment had never ceased on Chaos.

Grind up an earthly sponge into mush, and the individual cells would gradually migrate back together again, slowly forming another adult organism.

On a much grander scale, Chaos took that course.  Many lines of life developed during its early history, and most of them evolved multicellular forms.  But there were critical differences in their genetics and physiology as well as the makeup of individual cells.  Far tougher than Precambrian worms, each of those early lineages left behind spores that would wait for the heat and fire to fade away.  Then they would come alive again, growing in the wreckage and the warm springs.  Eventually those tiny children would come together, killing and eating those that didn’t belong to their lineage, while joining with the cells that did.  Inside each viable nucleus was enough genetic information to put together a wide array of body plans.  Usually the creatures were photosynthetic, and occasionally they looked like clumsy animals.  Successful lineages left the most spores.  And since there was no way to know when the next asteroid would fall, or where, natural selection continued to move in a most jerky, gloriously unpredictable fashion.

Watching Chaos endure the gigantic blast, Aasleen asked, “Is this what I’m going to miss?  Are you briefing us about old history?”

Rococo shook his head.  “No, not at all.”

“Then why show this to me?”

“Because I think it is interesting,” he allowed.  “Of all the places I’m going to visit, all the wondrous sights I’ll witness…there’s no way for me to embrace the most interesting and important world of all.”

Of course he couldn’t visit Chaos.  That cradle world was under a strict quarantine, and Aasleen could appreciate their hosts’ reasons:  Each lineage was embroiled in a constant against every other lineage.  This was not war.  This was older and much vaster than any battle of armies, and there was no chance of lasting forgiveness.  The Scypha had been lucky to escape their home world, and it was only natural for them to keep their enemies out of reach.