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Authors: Robert Reed

BOOK: The Well of Stars
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There had been just this one voyage in her very long life. Gazing at the sum of her existence, Mere saw her little soul as a point, mathematical and spare, that wandered in every dimension, covering a genuinely tiny portion of
Creation, absorbing a little of everything that it brushed up against. She saw herself as fortunate, and as blessed—which were somewhat different qualities. Alone, she was happiest. But she had been alone for too long now. “Too long,” she whispered. Then with a voice that didn’t quite sound convinced, she said, “This will work.” She examined the apparatus one last time before crawling inside, and with a Tilan’s voice, she said, “What will happen is everything.” Then with a human voice, soft and sober, she added, “Hopefully, I’ll get lucky.”
After months of fighting against her own terrific momentum, making hard burns and delicate maneuvers, Mere had done what was possible. She had acquired a suitable target, and if nothing important changed, there was better than a ninety-seven percent likelihood of a remarkably close rendezvous. But the target was a tiny thing in its own right, barely ten kilometers in diameter and still shriveling as it accelerated toward the Great Ship. A collision was a virtual impossibility. And even if the implausible happened, Mere would simply die for the final time. Her trajectory was too different; the kinetic energies would not only boil her blood, but the mind would scorch, splinter, and explode into a foolish plasma. And the bud itself would probably boil, inside and out, ripped to the core by a fleck of matter roaring into its watery face.
What Mere needed was a final enormous course correction. And after taking a thorough inventory, counting every gram of mass and every sliver of hyperfiber, she had found just one barely workable solution.
During these last months, between the bums and her little dashes of sleep, she had outfitted the
Osmium
with the simplest, slenderest tail imaginable. A hair would have seemed thick beside the structure. Proteins stripped from her own hair as well as her skin and deep tissues had been woven into a single, almost invisible thread—a thread doped with superconductive materials and strengthened with whispers of hyperfiber.
A slight but relentless current could be induced within the new tail.
A small body jacketed in iron could ride that tail, and if every adjustment were made in a timely fashion, the body would come off the invisible tip with a new, rather more useful trajectory.
When finished, the
Osmium’s
tail measured more than twenty thousand kilometers in length, with a mass slightly greater than a dozen human hearts.
Such a thin road could accept only a minimal cargo. When Mere finished her calculations for the final time, she saw what was possible and what wasn’t, and when the time came, she very nearly failed to do what was possible. Why not continue on her way, riding inside the battered remains of her ship? In some faraway future, she would emerge from the Inkwell, and a sentient and talented race would come upon her, and against very long odds, she would again find herself saved.
Surrendering her little body was almost too much.
It was a wasted, anemic human body, decidedly unappealing and insubstantial and sad. But as the autodoc began cutting away at the neck, Mere nearly said, “Stop.”
Even when her throat was severed, she could have pleaded, “No,” by speaking through a nexus. “I want to think this through again.”
Why didn’t she?
Because she was too scared to think anything through again. That was the simple, ugly truth. When the critical moment arrived, this little human found herself terrified by many things, but worst of all was the possibility that when she thought again—looking at the numbers and geometries and odds—she wouldn’t know what to do. Indecision would grab her and pull her under, and then time and the relentless trajectories would have made their choice for her.
“This is my choice,” she reminded herself.
Then she went blind, her eyes were boiled away with a soft, unfelt laser, and her mouth was a vapor of bone
shards and dim echoes bouncing inside the tiny, almost poisonous cabin.
Her skull was evaporated.
Her bioceramic brain lay exposed.
But even her small old mind was too massive, too cumbersome. What the autodoc took away next required several days and a fine touch that was only possible in deep space and nearly perfect zero gee. With a laser chisel and a nanoscopic precision, the machine removed the bulk of what was extra and what was standard. Half of Mere’s soul was surrendered to the oblivion, and what was left—hopefully the most learned, wisest half—was placed into a thin iron envelope and eased out of the
Osmium
, riding that fine long tail as it twisted and curled, slowing her still-terrific momentum until she fell into the path of the oncoming alien.
 
A FEW DAYS later, the polypond sensed the heat and saw the flash of something piercing her sky-skin. At first, she assumed that the object had been nothing but the usual detritus. But then one of her stomachs began to digest the free iron, and what lay inside was too intricate and lovely to be natural.
By a thousand means, she attempted to reconstitute the creature that must have belonged to this odd, battered mind.
Then she found instructions etched into the mind itself.
In the polypond language, as it happened.
Tiny symbols written with single atoms told the creature where to begin and how to proceed, and after some lengthy but relatively straightforward work, a newly reconstituted creature lay on the surface of the living sea.
“Who are you?” her savior inquired.
The woman kicked and lay back, and after a long pause and some very deep breaths, she said, “You. That’s who. I am you.”
Riding inside a tissue-thin jacket of hyperfiber, guided by electrostatic charges and a practiced hand, the black hole had been nudged into position and fixed in space. Stripped of every eye and its minimal power to maneuver, the Great Ship had plunged into the waiting hazard at one-third lightspeed. The entire event barely filled an entire second. The jacket collapsed like a balloon, and freed of containment, the black hole burrowed its way through the hull, entering at a point some eight thousand kilometers east of the bow. Hyperfiber parted around the tiny, asteroid-mass body. A fingerwide channel was born, fiercely hot and sloppy wet. Then the weapon passed through rock and lesser grades of hyperfiber, and the channel grew larger. But the worst damage came inside the open places, the apartments and long avenues and four little seas that were trapped in its path. A fleck of infinite matter dove through water and living tissue, and everyone nearby died from the heat and the wallop of hard radiations. Bodies and pieces of bodies from ten thousand passengers and crew were stolen away. Two first-line fuel pumps were taken off-line, plus half a dozen subsidiary reactors. The worst damage came to a deep sea inside the ship’s trailing hemisphere: A blue bolt of Cherenkov light erupted on the sea’s floor, and the only city built by a species of slow chemoautotrophs was obliterated. The Worms-of-heaven lived beside deep vents, and if the Master hadn’t ordered them to disperse, they would have gone extinct. But nearly half had remained at home—sometimes illegally—and in a fraction of a microsecond, they were torn apart by the tide and the light and a fierce heat that left their bodies stripped of their shells, a soulless gray-white fluid drifting at the
edges of what was now a red-hot lake of molten basalt and superheated seawater.
“No closer, madam.”
In a battle zone, security troops held first authority.
“Madam,” the harum-scarum said once more. Then with a tight, impatient voice, she asked, “What if this is what our enemy wants? Create a lead hole, then kill the curious and the compassionate with an even larger infinity?”
“Infinity” was a literal translation of the harum-scarum’s name for a “black hole.”
Washen intended to respond. But Aasleen spoke first, reminding the cautious officer, “That would be a very difficult shot, at best.”
The infinity’s trajectory had been anything but perfect. Even with gigatons of mass and a terrific velocity, it had changed course while slicing through the ship. Hyperfiber was to blame. To thank. Even as the hull melted away in the assault, the ancient bonds had fought to retain their hold. Chaotic interactions between the severed bonds gave birth to intense EM pulses. The infinity had acquired an intense charge of its own, and as it continued slicing through the hull, it twisted in response to the opposing and entirely unpredictable charges that burst into life around it.
A half-degree deflection, in the end.
And critical.
But neither captain discussed the good news. This was a tour of the damage, critical for a multitude of reasons, most of which were wrapped around simple decency. After fifty thousand years on board the ship, a species of passenger had suffered an enormous disaster, and standing here was the right thing to do.
Again, the security officer said, “No closer, madam.”
Washen stopped and knelt.
The chief engineer knelt next to her, watching the cooling stone, then the lightless water above. Then after a
respectful silence, they stood again and began walking across the seafloor, surrounded by a platoon of soldiers.
“When I was a girl.”
Aasleen blinked. “What was that?”
“I was a girl,” Washen said again. In her diamond glove was a rounded lump of warm basalt. “Around my house, everywhere I looked … were these intricate models of the ship …”
“Life with engineers,” her friend said with an appreciative nod.
“Not every model was theirs.” Washen offered the stone to her friend. “But the best ones were. And if they were digital, and if I enlarged little portions—key portions—I’d find the ancient scars. The same kinds of scar that this will leave, if we don’t repair it everywhere.”
Even in the emptiest depths of space, Creation had produced trillions of tiny black holes. On occasion, the ship had collided with those natural hazards. But the hull had always repaired itself. Hyperfiber had that talent, that passion. Severed bonds continued to fight for purchase, and across the width of a single finger, the bonds always found one another again. The shiny gray material spent a fraction of its latent energies, and before it lost its wetness, it flowed inward, linking and rebuilding until it was merely ten thousand times stronger than diamond.
Rock showed more damage. But even then, the pressure of kilometers of stone pressing on all sides would soon close up the wounds. And of course atmospheres and various liquids would shrug the damage aside soon enough. Even the Worms-of-heaven would eventually recover, in numbers and vigor. The only genuine relic of this impact might be the black hole itself, drifting and highly charged, its new trajectory eventually carrying it out of the Inkwell.
“I had this idea,” Washen confessed. “When I was girl, I thought that if we could count the scars, we could better guess the age of the Great Ship.”
“That was your idea?” her friend teased.
“I thought of it,” she said. “But I didn’t know hundreds of others had already imagined it and tried it.”
The concept was sound, but there were too many problems. The hyperfiber hid its oldest wounds best, and no one was sure of the true density of microholes in the distant universe. Looking back along the ship’s course helped only to a point. Like the estimates arrived at by twenty other means, the Great Ship was definitely older than the Earth and presumably younger than the Creation. “At least that’s what my father told me,” said Washen. “But he did it sweetly, if I remember. Then and a hundred other times, he had to break it to me that my exceptionally clever idea wasn’t really my own.”
The water around them had again grown dark and cold. Besides a thin carpet of black sediment, there was no trace of life, and where they didn’t pass, nothing moved. At this moment, the Master Captain was speaking to the ship, openly describing the damage while accenting all that had been spared. What was the mood of the passengers? The crew? Washen consciously ignored a multitude of tools, walking steadily toward an armored cap-car guarded by a second platoon of troops.
“Are they yours?” Aasleen inquired.
“Is who mine?”
“The Worms-of-heaven. Did you welcome them on board the ship?”
Washen began to answer, then hesitated. Finally, with a quiet tone, she admitted, “No. But I had to look hard to be sure.”
“We’re two very old women,” Aasleen said with amusement. “Too many memories tucked into too small of a space.”
Washen nodded, casting her mind back to the beginning again.
Finally, she asked, “Who invented hyperfiber?”
In an instant, the engineer beside her gave the same answer that her father had delivered many centuries ago. The
ancient Sag A aliens had received the miracle stuff from one of the galaxy’s oldest species, now long extinct …
Aasleen hesitated.
“But that isn’t what you want,” she guessed.
“I don’t know what I want,” Washen confessed.
The soldiers from both platoons began to board the armored cap-car. Behind it, tucked into a small crevice, was a second, much smaller and infinitely less impressive car that had slipped in here by another route.
The harum-scarum officer entered the smaller vehicle. Then with a crisp command delivered by one finger, she beckoned the Submasters to join her.
“Whoever built the Great Ship was first,” Aasleen conceded.
Probably so.
“Is that what you were talking about? When you were telling me about the models that you played with when you were a girl?”
“No,” Washen admitted.
The women cut away each other’s pressure suits and discarded the pieces.
“No,” Washen said again. Then as she sat—as the cap-car began to slip away into the cold murk—she said with a grim voice, “I was going to tell you how proud I was. All those times that the awful little black holes had cut through my ship … the most terrible monstrous force in the universe … and my wonderful ship had weathered the damage with barely a trace of damage.”
 
THE SECURITY OFFICER was right in one awful way. The next infinity was more massive by a factor of five, and worse, it had been given its own momentum, bearing down on its target at almost ten percent lightspeed. There was no effective warning, even for the highest officers. Five days after the first impact, Washen was sitting in one of the auxiliary bridges, speaking to holos of other Submasters and picked captains and representatives from an assortment of species and crew. She was saying nothing
at that moment, but she happened to glance up the length of the table, the corner of an eye picking up the flash as one of her colleagues was turned into plasma and light.
In reflex, a hundred other holo projections turned toward the flash.
Countless alarms were blaring, and as many captains and automated systems were begging for information.
In less than half a second, the black hole had cut through the ship. Endowed with its own momentum, it did a better job of resisting the hyperfiber’s tug. And worse, the black hole missed the bow by less than twenty kilometers, tracing out a perfectly perpendicular trajectory. It was close to a dead-on shot, and the damage was spectacular. The Janusian Submaster was dead. Reactors were pierced, and the plunging black hole had traveled through Fall-Away—a vertical chamber hundreds of kilometers tall and filled with some of the most expensive homes on the ship. This time there was genuine carnage. Every two seconds, new casualty lists were generated, while AIs predicted a final count approaching fifty thousand. All dead. Then after the Fall-Away, the black hole had cut through the ship’s core, and then the trailing hemisphere, missing twelve cities by nothing before it finally burst back into empty space through the ship’s central rocket, increasing the damage to the mangled and still-powerless motor.
But inside that wealth of data and cold conjecture was a notable gap.
Marrow.
Washen rose to her feet.
The image of Pamir stood beside her. With a knowing look, he told her to stay where she was. With a hand composed of compliant photons, he touched her real hand, as if he could hold her in this place.
She sat again, her energies spent.
Pamir took control of the meeting. On Washen’s authority, he gave orders and set priorities, then turning toward Aasleen, he asked, “When are we ready?”
The chief engineer flinched.
“Which one?”
“Endeavor,” he said, naming the ship’s port.
“Eight days,” she offered. “And an hour.”
The fef Submaster bent his body as far as possible, the raised face declaring, “We have extra hands.”
“Hands aren’t the trouble,” Aasleen explained. “Unless it’s too many hands, which is where I am now.”
Crash projects were always ugly and inspired, and nothing the engineers could do now would complete the impossible work any sooner. Pamir nodded and moved on. More orders became necessary. In the chaos at Fall-Away, looters were at work, and he ordered Osmium to pull troops out of the reserves. “Whatever you need to bring order and not kill anyone. Understand?”
“Agreed,” said a mouth.
Soon everyone in attendance had better places to be, and some new purpose, and that was when Washen took over again. Barely three minutes had passed, but the span felt enormous and eventful. Again, the Master was speaking to the entire ship. Again, Washen peered down the length of the table, long hands pressed with authority against polished olivine, and with a voice that sounded more flat than unperturbed, she told her audience, “Go and do your work. Nothing else.” And then a premonition took her, and with a menace that was easy to generate, she said, “This isn’t going to be a long war. From here on, everything the polypond has, she’s going to be pushing at us now.”
 
THEN THEY WERE back inside Washen’s apartment.
Except neither dared come close to a ripe and well-known target like this. What if the polypond sent a spray of tiny black holes at this one place, trying to murder the captains who had always lived in this district? No, they weren’t inside Washen’s apartment, and they certainly weren’t naked in her bedroom. They were at opposite ends of the ship, and the image of hands being held was nothing but a bit of pretend. Yet there was no other place
in the ship where a special immersion eye sent its encoded feed. Only in her bedroom, under the olivine sky, could Washen gaze down on Marrow.
In the blackness, iron glowed red and fires burned. But the world was quieter than she had ever seen it, and it was darker, and that despite the passage of the black hole—a nearly perfect shot that had missed the center of its core by less than a hundred kilometers.

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