The Well of Stars (27 page)
Authors: Robert Reed
Armed and armored, the skimmer sat on a magnetized rail, temporarily at rest in the middle of a barren and gray and perfectly smooth stretch of the hull. Inside its tiny cabin, three passengers watched the farthest shields brighten and swirl, EM curtains grabbing hold of charged ions, hydrogen and hydroxyls and carbon monoxides and phenols dragged bodily toward filters and collection bunkers that were already choked with gaseous treasures. But the shields kept finding the strength and integrity, surging to meet each onslaught; wild purple flashes and blistering UV bolts made the five eyes blink and tear up. Then in another instant, ten thousand columns of laser light punched upward through the shields, each bolt calibrated to boil away an ocean, exposing an enemy’s organic heart. Lasers were followed with tritium bombs and experimental toxins. Explosives and poisons were followed by a second wave of lasers, and the next ten thousand polypond buds were cooked and splattered into hot clouds of vapor, all dead but still plunging, inert and mindless but still bearing down on the fierce ship.
Oddly, it was Osmium who finally admitted, “This is lovely, this mess.”
Conrad agreed grudgingly. With his giant eye pressed against his faceplate, the Remora said, “Gorgeous.”
Pamir shook his head, checking instruments and a series of nexuses. Various simulations had predicted the same failure point, shields and weapons finally saturated by the deluge. That point had been reached thirty-three minutes ago, yet every system seemed to absorb the withering abuse without complaint. Engineers were liars, he reminded himself. They always, always, built better than they ever admitted to outsiders.
In another ten minutes, Conrad wondered aloud, “What if our defenses manage to hold?”
The deluge would continue, yes. But it would remain sterile, the buds’ life boiled out of each of them. Water would collect on the hull, dirtied with roasted proteins and the molten slag left by dead machines and breached biovaults; but so long as the lasers could fire up out of the deepening soup, whether for another day or two, or for twenty—
“No,” Osmium muttered.
Within Pamir, a critical nexus began to shout at him.
“South,” Osmium said, hearing the same warning. “A breach—”
Above the horizon came a string of rapid silent flashes, a secondary bank of lasers and railguns punishing a swarm of watery bodies. But there were too many falling in too small of a volume, and the next flash marked the first of a hundred impacts on a point not far removed from the ship’s prow.
“Go,” ordered Pamir.
The skimmer instantly accelerated, letting the narrow black rail yank it toward Port Alpha. One breach meant another, then dozens more, and all at once the ship’s leading face was being peppered with impacts. The next wave of polyponds was already arriving, and sensing victory, its leaders ignited their fat engines, accelerating toward
key stations and laser beds and mirror fields. As big as asteroids but moving only a little slower than the ship, they didn’t utterly obliterate themselves on impact. There were no plasma fountains or molten craters of hyperfiber. The temperatures were scorching, proteins cooked and every large structure destroyed, but the bulk of their water remained behind as a coherent steam swirling above a slick gray landscape that was just beginning to glisten, to shine.
key stations and laser beds and mirror fields. As big as asteroids but moving only a little slower than the ship, they didn’t utterly obliterate themselves on impact. There were no plasma fountains or molten craters of hyperfiber. The temperatures were scorching, proteins cooked and every large structure destroyed, but the bulk of their water remained behind as a coherent steam swirling above a slick gray landscape that was just beginning to glisten, to shine.
To the skimmer’s left, there was an enormous flash.
There was no sound, and both the hull and smart rail deadened the vibrations. But Pamir heard a thousand curses as he linked to the bridge.
Washen’s voice was loudest.
“—you hear me?” she asked.
He said, “No.”
“Forget Alpha,” she advised. “You won’t make it.”
He had already discounted most of his escape routes. The shields were failing in quick succession. The lasers would fire for another hour or ninety minutes, unless they were struck hard by a fifty-kilometer-wide puddle. Thinking aloud, he asked, “Why did I come up here?”
“I already asked you that,” Washen replied.
To Osmium, he said, “Here,” and pointed at a projected map. “This radio field’s got an access tunnel.”
The harum-scarum took the helm. With a lurch, the skimmer left the rail, rising for a moment, then plunging onto the hull, its speed falling off, nothing powering it but its own panicked engine.
They were still in the open, not a feature visible for a hundred kilometers in any direction. Above them, the last of the main shields were failing, and the newest wave of polyponds appeared now as granules of red light strewn across the blackness. Countless bodies formed a strange enormous rain that plunged toward a world that had never felt water, never even imagined the possibility. Sometimes two or more buds would bump and merge, the impact producing a clear infrared signature as their sky skins shattered
and the warm interiors bled into the surrounding space. Then as they dropped farther, more slammed together, accomplishing the kind of carnage against one another that the ship couldn’t manage anymore.
and the warm interiors bled into the surrounding space. Then as they dropped farther, more slammed together, accomplishing the kind of carnage against one another that the ship couldn’t manage anymore.
Without the braking shove of engines, polyponds fell at better than fifty thousand kilometers an hour. The ship’s mass did the work, and the kinetic energy made the rest inevitable. Skins ruptured. Water boiled. But as the elaborate simulations had predicted, each polypond heart contained a biovault just durable enough to survive—a multitude of organic armors dissolving, but the neurological center left only battered and numbed.
They splashed down in clusters, the first wave creating a sudden hot atmosphere that resembled evening clouds, crimson and gold, standing off in the remote distance.
Pamir counted three clouds.
Minutes later, twelve.
Osmium laughed in his fashion, asking, “Why did we come here?”
“To stand witness,” Conrad replied.
Each man quietly laughed at himself.
A fresh assault of polyponds appeared in the sky. The first few accelerated toward the surviving lasers. Most fired their rockets in tandem, effectively cutting their velocity in half, and then half of that.
“We are close,” Osmium offered.
Pamir felt relief followed by a nagging sense that he shouldn’t feel that way. They weren’t in genuine danger. Not like walking on the hull of a streakship is dangerous, no. The skimmer was clinging to places where the polyponds weren’t falling. And if that changed, they could slide right or left, avoiding any hard blows. And even if the great sacks of water swept over them, the skimmer was adapted to withstand, at least for a little while, the most brutal conditions.
Hopefully.
They had come here to stand witness. But more to the
point, they came because sitting at the last Master Captain’s dinner, Pamir had professed, “We can’t just hide away under the hull.” Because it would matter to an assortment of species, not to mention a fair number of angry humans, he argued, “Someone has to go above and throw some curses at these shits.”
point, they came because sitting at the last Master Captain’s dinner, Pamir had professed, “We can’t just hide away under the hull.” Because it would matter to an assortment of species, not to mention a fair number of angry humans, he argued, “Someone has to go above and throw some curses at these shits.”
He did his cursing now, in a string of rich languages.
Osmium joined in, then Conrad, and while they were accusing the polyponds of every sort of unnatural mating and scatological crime, their skimmer passed into a large field of radio dishes—giant bowls of upturned webs balancing like the most talented of gymnasts upon the very tall, very narrow diamond pedestals.
Through the webbing, they could still see the deluge. A handful of polyponds were diving into the nearest plume of superheated steam, their skins peeled away in an instant, their bodies heated before the final impact. According to simulations, after another six waves the atmosphere would be deep enough and high enough to act like a meaningful brake, and from then on, each of the falling polyponds would splash into the atmosphere first, then into the new sea, never touching the hull lying beneath.
“A kilometer ahead,” Osmium promised.
Their skimmer slowed with a bone-rattling jolt, its course shifting right and back again, dancing around one of the tall pedestals.
Pamir stared at the carnage overhead, then gradually noticed the dish itself. Almost a kilometer across, its body was finer than a spiderweb and strong as any gemstone. And it was moving. Even as they streaked beneath it, heading for its pedestal and a narrow passageway leading down, he watched the dish respond to something of interest, something it could hear coming from a point very near the horizon.
Before he could ask, Washen called him.
“Busy?” she joked.
Every dish in the field was being realigned. He saw that
with one nexus, and with another, he told Washen, “Rather.”
with one nexus, and with another, he told Washen, “Rather.”
“It’ll wait,” she mentioned.
Overhead, a scant ten thousand kilometers away, an ocean’s worth of water was falling toward Pamir’s head. One last time, he cursed the polyponds. Then the skimmer came to a final stop, and throwing on a helmet, he followed Conrad and Osmium out into the vacuum, walking to a doorway that abruptly pulled open for them.
But like every man ever born, they couldn’t just leave the storm.
Lingering in the open, they stood exposed while a single polypond struck the far end of this dish field, the brilliant flash of light washing over them, followed by the faint first traces of a wind, and with the wind, the soft, almost inaudible scream of a titanic explosion.
And still, they lingered.
Within minutes, the wind had a push about it. A genuine muscle. Dishes built for a hard vacuum began to quiver and sing, a multitude of tiny flexes giving the moment another unexpected, utterly eerie beauty. Bubbling out of the maimed polypond were gases as well as steam. Nitrogen. Oxygen. The noble gases, and carbon dioxide. Not for the first time but surely for the last, Pamir wondered if this was nothing important. Could it be? Were the polyponds following in the tradition of millions of other sentient souls, wanting nothing but the simple privilege of riding on the Great Ship, at least for a little while?
Perhaps, he thought.
On the horizon toward the bow, then to Ports Alpha and Beta, a hundred polyponds hit in rapid succession.
A sound like thunder rippled first through the hull, then the air.
When the three men finally stepped into the open door, that alien air had to be pumped out and discarded with a clinical care. Then their suits were cleaned a thousand ways, and they were ushered below, the shaft that they had used rapidly plugged by a team of fefs.
And still, Pamir could hear the rain falling above—a comforting rumbling that he had enjoyed since he was a boy—and with the faint beginnings of a smile, he realized that he was too old and far too set in his nature to think much differently now.
A woman was waiting behind Locke’s door, and for a long instant, Washen didn’t know the face. She was so preoccupied that her eyes registered only its beauty. When did her son start seeing this stranger? Then the woman spoke, and Washen didn’t recognize the voice. The First Chair was looking down again, watching the little square tablet dancing with her own long hands. The voice asked, “How deep?” And then, “And how much more will fall?” And then a soft ageless hand touched her on a wrist, the voice saying, “Washen?” with a familiar tone.
Quee Lee?
“Are you all right, madam?”
Not in the slightest. But she found enough poise to straighten her back, and with a dry soft voice asked, “Where are they?”
“In the Marrow room, as always. Chattering.”
The women walked together. One respected the other’s silence, and once Washen finally closed down the majority of her nexuses, she mentioned, “We have five kilometers of boiling water sitting on the hull, in places.”
“Places?”
“Not on the trailing face, yet.” The Master Captain was calling to Washen again, demanding to know her whereabouts. She closed that nexus, too, then reported to her companion, “Imagine pouring water on one end of a wide pan. A fragile hill forms under the flow, then spreads across what is still dry.”
Quee Lee nodded soberly. With both hands, she stroked the fabric of her purple-and-cream sari, then a tight sorry voice asked again, “How much more will fall?”
“I do not know.” The only sound was the steady click of shoes on the stone floor. Too many kilometers of hyperfiber and stone lay between them and the torrents, the false silence magnified by strained nerves. “But we have projections and simulations,” Washen allowed, smelling a dampness that must have slipped out through a demon door. “And the simulations are uniformly awful, if you want my frank opinion …”
THE HALLWAY DARKENED and widened, and then vanished.
Like the genuine Marrow, this vast room was drifting into a strange deep night. The familiar trees were absent, hibernating as seeds or tough, deeply buried roots. Pseudoinsects and other tiny animals either slept in secure niches, or they exhibited entirely new morphologies and habits. A sky that was still evening-bright when Washen left the world had darkened considerably over the last two-plus centuries, coaxing obscure species into a brief dominion. And the room did its best to mirror that transformation: pale soft blisters and cylinders, puffballs and fuzzy tangles rising out of the light-starved forest, digesting wood and the last little shreds of stored fat while new roots burrowed down to where an artificial bed of iron-rich magma supported an array of chemoautotrophic bacteria, which in turn fed this new forest.
In the shadows, fungi glowed.
Beneath a canopy of dead umbra trees and young bleach-hair, the glow was bright enough to read by—a lemon yellow light emerging from the ground as well as above. Two men were sitting on separate stumps. One lay on his back, saying nothing. The other sat up while staring in a random distance, his smooth voice explaining how it had been to live as an important, well-regarded Wayward.
Unnoticed, Washen paused, using a hand to hold Quee Lee beside her.
“We were harsh, certain, strong, bright, busy people,” Locke reported. “We died, you know. Often, and not in small numbers, either. Marrow was always dangerous. The iron could boil up anywhere. For centuries, we didn’t have the medical tricks to reculture a body around its comatose mind. But we were happy. I was very happy. Risk made each day precious, and since it was Marrow, we only had that one long day.”
He laughed at the old joke.
Washen felt offended, but not because her son spoke fondly of that time. She was offended because the ship was under attack, and that wasn’t a worthy subject. She was genuinely angry because she had put these two people together for reasons—they could do important work, she had believed—yet how could Locke’s dreamy childhood recollections help that work, even in the most passing fashion—?
“Are you joining us, or not?” Perri inquired.
Then he sat up, calmly glancing at the two women, a broad easy smile filling up his face.
Quee Lee approached.
Then Washen.
Locke kept staring off into the distance. With a deep sigh, he explained, “You were right, Mother. Perri knows the ship better than anyone. But he’s never been to Marrow, and he’s curious.”
“What’s the latest?” Perri asked.
“As we thought,” his wife reported.
He nodded, the smile fading into a grim resolve. Taking Quee Lee by the hand, he pointed out, “I didn’t expect to see the First Chair just now. Shouldn’t you be pacing the bridge, madam?”
Locke continued to stare off into the gloom. His expression was distracted but focused, pained but not to the ragged point where he couldn’t function. With a faint pride, he remarked, “I think we’ve accomplished a few little things, Mother.”
“I should be on the bridge,” Washen confessed to Perri. Then she asked Locke, “What have you accomplished?”
“Well.” The small face glanced over a shoulder, not quite looking at her. “Do you know how many species officially have come on board the ship?”
From a nexus, a massive five-digit number offered itself to Washen. But she ignored it, sensing that her son was merely setting the stage.
“And how many have gone extinct? Officially, of course.”
“By the last count,” Perri volunteered, “311.”
Washen glanced at her tablet again. Again she fended off an attempt by the Master Captain to speak with her. Then with a sharp tone, she told Locke, “For the time being, we’re all living like Waywards.”
Every day was precious, in other words.
But her son barely noticed the warning. “Perri mentioned something to me. I’d never noticed it for myself. Did you know? There’s a continuum among the passengers and crew. Not a hard-and-fast continuum, and there are qualifiers. But in general, the captains and crew live up near the hull, but as you drop deeper into the ship’s body, the passengers separate along a gradient—”
“What gradient?” she prompted.
“Captains and engineers, plus the harum-scarums are among the highest souls,” he said. With a nexus, he sent her a complete list of species. “The most pragmatic species and jobs, as a rough rule. Of course the Remoras live even higher, outside the ship entirely, and they do sing a spiritual song … but the ones that I’ve actually met … well, they seem unconcerned by spiritual matters …”
“Spiritual?” Washen interrupted.
“Possessed of a mystical nature,” Perri offered. “In some ways, and it’s never a hard-and-fast condition.”
The First Chair had arrived here with one clear task in
mind, and she was being ambushed by something else entirely. “You’re claiming that the deeper you move inside the ship, the more mystical its residents tend to be?”
mind, and she was being ambushed by something else entirely. “You’re claiming that the deeper you move inside the ship, the more mystical its residents tend to be?”
“It’s a little something that I first noticed long ago,” Perri said, defending himself with a shrug. “Long ago, and now and again, ever since.”
Washen didn’t dredge up any of the voluminous research. Studies and census figures and the scholarly work by armies of xenobiologists had found only the slightest tendency, probably negligible.
“Mysticism is an inadequate word,” Locke warned.
“And there’s a lot of mud in any measurements,” Perri added. “Species have to be married to habitats, but the pragmatic captains decide which volume is going to be terraformed in what way. Plus there are gravitational needs, and economic constraints. And just because one species talks endlessly about gods and visions, you can’t accept the fact that they genuinely believe their own words—”
“Or that a pragmatic, concrete species is genuinely that way,” Quee Lee offered, finishing her husband’s thought.
Perri laughed.
And then Locke looked straight at his mother, saying the word, “!eech,” with a masterly voice. The exclamation point was a clicking sound, bright and loud, and the following “eech” was over in an instant.
No species had lived deeper inside the Ship than the !eech. Their habitat was inside one of the main fuel tanks, then it was abandoned. The captains had used their old home as their base before they journeyed to Marrow. As a species, the !eech had been xenophobes and deeply odd, and for the last many thousands of years, they had occupied one of those three hundred-plus positions on the official list of extinct species.
“It’s an interesting tendency,” Locke offered. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“What exactly are you working on?” Washen snapped.
Her son seemed very much like a young boy when he
nodded, smiling shyly. “Species, present and lost. Interesting and unnoticed qualities about the ship. All those things Perri brings, and thank you, Mother. For putting us together.”
nodded, smiling shyly. “Species, present and lost. Interesting and unnoticed qualities about the ship. All those things Perri brings, and thank you, Mother. For putting us together.”
“Hyperfiber,” Perri blurted.
“What about hyperfiber?” Washen asked.
Locke nodded, focusing on some internal point that no one else could imagine. “Very possibly, the Great Ship is the largest single piece of hyperfiber in existence. Which is fascinating in its own right. But more important, I think … the hyperfiber surrounding us is billions of years older than any other example that we can envision …”
Washen felt her heart quickening. Why?
“Hyperfiber is hyperfiber because it reaches deep into hidden dimensions and shadow realities. That’s where it gains its strength, its nobility. Its perfection, and its quantum peculiarities.”
Quietly, Washen said, “I realize that.”
“But do you realize that the older it is, the greater its reach? According to certain mathematics, at least.” Locke lifted his hands, drawing nonsensical shapes in the dim yellow air. “This one great lump of hyperfiber … the majority of our hull and the supportive structures beneath, and the shell that surrounds Marrow … all of this has existed for twelve billion years, or more, each year of reality allowing its reach to expand into more shadow realms and other intellectual artifacts …”
“It isn’t any stronger because of that,” Washen pointed out.
“I’m not talking about strength,” her son replied, a hint of testiness in the voice. “I mean reach. And if the Great Ship was built when the universe was newly born … as you proposed, Mother, standing in the temple on Marrow … well, perhaps these hidden dimensions weren’t quite as well hidden back then. At the beginning of Creation, I mean. Which again makes for some interesting ideas.”
Washen knew enough to shiver but not enough to offer so much as a tiny suggestion. All she could do was stare at the yellowy glow of a bristle mold, and with a firm and pragmatic voice—a captain’s voice—she remarked, “Conjecture only gets us so far, darling. And if you don’t realize it, let me tell you: There may not be many more days before the ship isn’t ours.”
Three faces grew even more sober, sad and quiet.
It was Quee Lee who finally asked, “Why now, madam? Why are you here when so much else needs you?”
Washen lifted the tablet, piercing several deep encryptions before legible words finally began to form. “Just as the attack began,” she reported, “we received a short, repeating message. In an extinct language called Tilan, by the way. Which helps us authenticate the author. Who is Mere.”
The name was enough. No one breathed, not so much as a fingertip moved.
“It’s a brief message, and we managed to hear it repeated fifty-seven times. I don’t think she was certain that we’d hear her at all, and so …”For a moment, Washen lost her way. Then she smiled abruptly, surprising everyone, including herself. “I’m tired,” she confessed. Then after a deep sigh, she began to read the translation from the tablet. “‘once pond, only. No buds, only countless fingers.’”
Quee Lee glanced at her own soft hands. “Oh, goodness.”
“The Inkwell,” Locke muttered. “Is it a single Gaian?”
“Which makes sense,” Washen reported. “A lot of our evidence, some of which was sent home by Mere, points in that direction.”
“The slow ships moving neural matter from place to place,” Perri recalled. “They could be physical transfers of a shared mind, like electrical pulses between the cells in a brain.” He paused. “If the nebula is a single Gaian and it wants to function as so many little warm worlds, then it has to keep its bodies spread thin. Because if the pieces gather together—”
“Stars would form,” Quee Lee answered.
“Killing it,” her husband concluded.
Locke read his mother’s face. “But there is more. Am I right?”
Washen lowered the tablet.
“What else did Mere tell us, Mother?”
Stepping forward, she showed him the full text. With an appreciative expression, he studied the third, final line.
“What?” Quee Lee asked.
“It’s a tiny piece of a much larger equation,” Washen confessed. “By implication, I think Mere is telling us that this is what the polypond, the Inkwell, the one mind … this is what it believes.”
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