The Greatship (57 page)

In the end what was saved was too small and far too mutilated to reconstitute itself.  Peregrine was a lump of caramelized tissue surrounding a fractured skull that held a bioceramic brain cut through by EM surges and furious rains of charged particles.  The damage was so severe that every memory and tendency and each of his precious personal biases had to migrate into special shelters, and life had ceased completely for a timeless span covering almost eighteen days.  Death held sway—longer than he had ever known, Nothingness ruled—and then after a series of quick tickling sensations and flashes of meaningless light, the raider found himself recovered enough that his soul migrated out of its hiding places and his newest eyes opened, gazing at a face that was not entirely unexpected.

“The streakship,” he blurted with his new mouth.  “Where?”

A limb touched his mouth and both cheeks, and then another limb touched his chest, feeling his heart.  The limbs were soft strong and human—a woman’s two hands—and then he heard her voice saying, “Gone,” with finality.  “Gone now.  Gone.”

“It got away safely?”

She said, “Yes,” with a nod, then with her eyes, and finally with a whisper.  And she leaned closer, adding, “The streakship has escaped, yes.  Eighteen days, and it’s still accelerating.  Faster than you would ever guess, it is racing toward the Milky Way.”

Peregrine tried to move, and failed.  His legs and arms were only half-grown, wearing wraps filled with blood and amino acids.  But he could breathe deeply, enjoying that sensation quite a lot.  “What about my crew?”

“Degraded, but alive.”  The woman’s face was pleased and a little astonished, telling him, “At the end, when you were rescued…when that other raider plucked you out of the mayhem…the AIs were flying what was really just a toy glider, barely as big as me, with one tenth of my mass…”

Peregrine tried to absorb his good fortune.  How could you even calculate the long odds that he had crossed?

The ancient woman sat back, bidding her time.

“Did the streakship ever talk?” he asked.

“Yes.”  She nodded and smiled wistfully, and then with a matter-of-fact shrug, she added, “As soon as it got above us, we were hit with a narrow-beam broadcast.  Yes.”

“What did it say?”

“Life survives inside the Great Ship,” she reported.  “But our old leaders, the wise and powerful captains…they’re gone now.  All of them.  Either dead or in hiding somewhere.”

“Who is in charge?”

“Nobody.”

“What does that mean?”

“From what the streakship told us, passengers are fending for themselves.”  The woman studied his new face.  “However, there is one exceptionally obscure species that’s come into some prominence.  In fact, at the end of the Polypond War, they took control of the Great Ship’s helm.”  She offered a flickering wink, and then added, “And oh…now that I mentioned that…guess who else has gone away…

“Somebody you know…

“Even before your body arrived home, he picked up his shell, and by the looks of it, scuttled away…”

Peregrine was perfectly healthy and profoundly poor.  The raider who saved him had acquired most of his assets, while his debts to the hospital remained substantial, possibly eternal.  He had no ship, and his crew was repaired and working with others.  Several investors came forward, offering to pay for a new ship in return for a fat percentage of all future gains.  But the only fair offer was a brief contract from his father, and for a variety of reasons, personal and otherwise, the young man decided to send it back unsigned and then follow an entirely new course.

If you live cheaply and patiently, it takes astonishingly little money to keep you breathing and content.

For most of a century, Peregrine stalked the deep tunnels and access ports that laced the Ship’s central nozzle.  Armed with maps left behind by his mother and sister, he hunted for routes they might have missed.  He managed to find two or three every year, but each passageway was inevitably plugged with the high-grade hyperfiber.  It was easy to see why no one kept up this kind of search for long.  Yet Peregrine refused to quit, if only because the idea of failure gave his mouth such an awful taste.

New lovers drifted in and out of his life.

He occasionally saw the old lady engineer, meeting her for a meal and conversation.  They hadn’t slept together in decades, but they remained friendly enough.  Besides, she had a sharp mind and important connections, and sometimes, when she was in the mood, she gave him special knowledge.

“You knew a big hatch was coming,” Peregrine accused her.  “That’s why you seduced me when you did.  Somehow, you and your founder friends pieced together clues that the rest of us don’t ever get to see.”

“Yet the hatch, big as it was, was only a secondary phenomena,” she said.  “Like blood from a fresh cut.  I won’t tell exactly how we knew, but we did.  What was more important was that someone or something had emerged from one of the old ports.  We had reasons to believe that an armored vessel was pushing through the Polypond ocean, heading our way…presumably to get into a useful position before jumping free of the Ship.”

“And you suspected Hawking?”

“For thousands of years, I did.  We did.”  Fusilade nodded, and then she said, “This isn’t official.  But in the final seconds of the War, a few messages arrived from the interior.  They were heavily coded military broadcasts, which is why they aren’t common knowledge.  They describe the creatures that were taking over the battered Ship.  The !eech, the broadcasts called them.  And not wanting to alert the spy in our midst, we decided to keep those secrets to ourselves.”

“But he’s gone,” Peregrine countered.  “Why not make a public announcement?”

“Because we don’t want to panic our children, of course.”

“Am I panicking?”

“In slow motion, you are.  Yes.”  The ancient engineer sat back in her chair, tapping at the heart nestled between her unequal breasts.  “Spending your life searching for a way into the Ship, when we are as certain as we can be that there is no way inside…yes, I think that’s genuinely panicked behavior…”

“Hawking disappeared, and that means there’s at least one route out of this nozzle.”

“If he did slip back into the Great Ship, perhaps.  But for all we know, he’s walking today across a living cloud off on some distant piece of the Polypond’s body.”

Peregrine had wasted decades haunting empty hallways and dangling from soft glass ropes.  He could have wasted a thousand centuries before finding the relevant clue, but he was a lucky individual, and he had the good fortune of becoming lost at the proper moment.  After two wrong turns, he found himself standing beside a tiny chute exactly like ten thousand other chutes.  Except, that is, for the marks left behind by a delicate limb that had been dipped in paint.  No, in blood.  A blackish alien blood with a distinctive flavor, and the writing was a familiar script, showing the simple word, “HAWKING,” followed by a simple yet elegant arrow pointing straight down.

The chute ended with a vast airless room built for no discernible purpose.  Its walls were half a kilometer tall, and the floor was a circular plain covering perhaps ten square kilometers of featureless hyperfiber—stuff as old as the Ship, far better than any grade that could be chiseled through today.  The only obvious doorway led out into the dormant rocket nozzle.  Peregrine set up a torch in the room’s center, and then he kneeled, searching that expanse with a powerful night scope.  He should have missed the second doorway.  If anyone else had ever visited this nameless place, they surely would have ignored what looked like a crevice, horizontal and brief.  But someone was standing in front of the opening—a distinctive alien wearing a gossamer lifesuit, his long jointed legs locked into a comfortable position, the body motionless now and perhaps for a very long while.

Peregrine walked a few steps before breaking into a hard run.

On their private channel, Hawking said, “You look fit, my friend.  And rather troubled too, I see.”

“What are you doing here?” Peregrine asked.

“Waiting for you,” was the reply.

“Why?”

“Because you are my friend.”

“I don’t particularly believe that,” said the human.  “From what I’ve heard, the !eech are my enemies…”

“I have injured you how many times?”

“Never,” he thought, saying nothing.

“My friend,” said Hawking.  “What precise treacheries am I guilty of?”

“I don’t know.  You tell me.”

Silence.

Peregrine had invested years wondering what he would say, should this moment arrive.  “Why live with us?” seemed like a small, inadequate question, yet he asked it anyway.  “Were you some kind of spy?  Were you sent here to watch over us?”

There was a pause, then a cryptic comment.  “You know, I saw you entering this place.  I saw that quite easily.”

“I’ve been climbing toward you for several hours,” Peregrine complained.  “Of course you saw me…”

Then he hesitated, rolling the alien’s confession around in his head.

With relentless patience, Hawking waited.

Peregrine slowed his gait, asking, “How long have you been watching my approach?”

“Since your birth,” the !eech said.

Peregrine stopped now.

After a few minutes of reflection, he said, “Those eyes of yours…they see into the future…?”

Silence.

“Do they see everything that’s going to happen?”

“What eye absorbs everything there is to see?”

Peregrine shook his head.  “A limited sight, is that it?”

One of the distant legs lifted high, signaling agreement.

“What else can you see, Hawking?”

“That I have never hurt you,” the alien repeated.

“My half-sister…the one who died in the plasma blast…did you arrange that accident?”

“No.”

“But did you see the accident approaching?”

Silence.

“And why did you come up on the hull, Hawking?  The only reason I can think of is to spy on us.”

“That is an obvious answer, and your imagination is richer than that, my friend.”

Hard as it was to believe, the compliment forced Peregrine to smile.  “Okay,” he muttered.  “You wanted to spy on our future.  We’re an independent society, free of the !eech, and maybe you’re scared of us.”

“That is an interesting assessment, but mistaken.”

“I don’t understand then.”

“In time, you will,” the !eech promised.

Then every one of its limbs was moving, carrying the creature backward into the narrow, almost invisible crevice.  Peregrine began to run again, in a full sprint; but he was still half a kilometer from his goal when a warm gooey stew of fresh hyperfiber flowed into view, filling the crevice and pushing across the slick floor, glowing in the infrared as it swiftly and foever cured.

The final doorway had been opened just enough for a small human wearing a minimal lifesuit to slip through, and walking alone, he stepped onto a frigid, utterly flat plain.  During the War, portions of the Polypond had splashed into the giant nozzle, dying here or at least freezing into a useless hibernation.  Peregrine strode out to where he found a modest telescope as well as a set of telltale marks.  His friend once stood here, those powerful eyes of his linked to the light-hungry mirror.  By measuring the marks in the ice, and with conservative estimates of the heat lost by Hawking’s lifesuit, Peregrine guessed that the creature had stood here for many years, pulling up his many feet when they had melted to uncomfortable depth and then dancing over to a fresh place before reclaiming his watchful pose.

Peregrine lay on his back now, slowly melting into the dead ice, and he fixed the same telescope to his eyes and purposefully stared at the sky.

The little city was barely visible—a sprinkling of tiny lights and heat signatures threatening to vanish against the vast bulk of the timeless, utterly useless nozzle.  Millions of souls were up there, breeding and spreading out farther in a profoundly impoverished realm.  Yet despite all of their successes, they seemed to have no impact on a scene that dwarfed all men and their small brief urges.

What wasn’t the nozzle was the galaxy.

Here was what the !eech had been watching.  Hawking had lived for thousands of years in a place that offered him comfort and the occasional companionship.  But once the streakship had left, carrying its important news to the universe beyond, the creature’s work had begun:  Sitting on this bitter wasteland, those great eyes had been fixed on three hundred billion suns.  Peregrine studied the maelstrom of stars and worlds, dust and busy minds; and perhaps for the first time in his life, he appreciated that this was something greater than any silly Polypond.  Here lay an ocean beyond any other, and someday, in one fashion or another, a great hatch would rise from it—furious bodies riding upon a trillion, trillion wings, reaching for this prize that has been lost.

This Greatship.