The Greatship (32 page)

The Great Ship was safer than any other starship, but it was also far larger and substantially more complicated.  There were fine districts and wondrous, important neighborhoods, and there were poverty wards famous for crime and novel forms of madness.  Samara had taken an apartment in the most notorious ward.  Pamir learned that from the chip and from his own research.  Yet the newcomer was a relatively wealthy passenger, offering more than just a wooden starship to the local markets.  He had brought vials of giant molecules, intricate and irreproducible, considered high art by various species.  He also brought the mummified feet of another alien, collected on the home world and sold to grieving, grateful relatives.  Plus Samara was the reputed author of a billion-word novel meant for the AI readers, already purchased by an onboard publisher and released to lukewarm reviews.

Whatever Samara was, he was distinctive.

A minor captain had interviewed him.  His humanness was a central question.  There were oddities in the bioscans, and shown the details, Samara nodded and smiled, tiny teeth flashing in a small, thin-lipped mouth.  Then a voice more suitable for a bird said, “Yes, yes.  A consequence of my home world.  But those bodies are inert.  Take all you want and watch them.  Feed them.  Torture them, if you wish.  Nothing will happen because they aren’t alive.”  The bodies were organic, convoluted and holding a passing resemblance to mitochondria.  “They’re produced by the natives.  They get inside us, and there’s no ridding of them.  Unless you want to endure a cell-by-cell scrubbing, which I’m willing to do if you believe this grit might pose some kind of threat…”

Samara was small and almost pretty, attempting charm but not quite succeeding.  If Pamir had been the interviewer, knowing nothing, he would have pressed the man for more information.  Why leave the home world?  What was his ultimate destination?  There was ample reason to delay, pulling new tests from the bottomless bag that every captain possessed.  But that little captain had avoided any ugliness, moving toward short-term issues.  “How will you live here?” he had asked.

“How will I pay my way?”  A songful laugh.  A human hand swept through hair that seemed blond until it was touched, then for an instant, at certain angles, became a bright golden-green.  “I’ve done my research, and believe me, I plan to live cheaply.  Without complaints.”

Captains like to hear promises of compliance.

“You’ve seen my ship,” said Samara, using another grin.  “To have come this far, and in such a vessel…doesn’t that prove sincerity?”

It proved desperation, but the interviewer had seemed impressed with the logic, nodding and smiling in turn.

Pamir made a note to reprimand the officer, if he could do so without being noticed by anyone higher up.  Then he hunted through every shipboard record in his grasp.  A thousand-year passage was paid off.  The cramped apartment was rented and then left empty.  After a long search of security digitals—and several turf wars with security troops—Pamir pieced together portions of the man’s last few days, including a talkative lunch with a familiar face.

“Perri,” said the captain.  “Out of everyone, and he finds you.”

Several hours later, he was inside a wealthy human district, at the front door of what passed for a modest local apartment.  Long ago, Perri had been a member of the crew, but he quit for the high life of a gigolo, eventually fooling an ancient lady into marriage.

The wife met him at the door.

Pamir had several excuses at the ready, but Quee Lee just smiled at the unexpected captain.  “You probably need to see my husband.  Am I right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

In the same moment, she and the apartment called for Perri.  But there were hectares of rooms behind her, and she had enough time to invite him into the stone hallway, and reading his public nexus, she said his name.  She said, “The Pamir Mountains are one of the earth’s backbones.  Unless they were torn down since I left, I suppose.”

“I wouldn’t know, ma’am.”

“I climbed several of the peaks, but that was ages ago.”

The captain didn’t know what to say.

“I am such a humdrum creature anymore,” she said, amusement working within the words.

Pamir was thankful when the husband finally appeared, and the wife kissed him and whispered a few words before retreating out of sight.

With the natural smile of a charmer, Perri asked, “What do you want, friend?”

Friend
was an insult.  Showing a digital, he said, “Samara.”

“I remember his name.”

Pamir said, “You ate with him.”

“I guess I remember that too.”  Something here was quite funny.  “And you want to know what we talked about.”

“I know what you said.”

The gigolo was weighing Pamir’s mood.

“Samara learned that you are a traveler, that you know the Ship better than anyone else.”

“Not better than the captains, of course.”

Pamir ignored that noise.  A lip-reading AI had prepared the transcript, and while parts of conversation were invisible, the gist of the luncheon was easy to see.  “Samara asked about secret places, private wildernesses, and any quiet location that never quite makes the public maps.”

“The intriguing rooms in our house, yes.”

“What does he want?” asked the captain.

“He seems to be a traveler in his own right.  But he didn’t name any specific goal.”

“Can you guess?”

“Conjectures are light.  It doesn’t take much to throw one.”

“Where does our sewage go?”

“Down,” said Perri, laughing quietly and shrugging his shoulders.  “Yes, he asked about sewage, and you already know that.”

“There are treatment plants, and they are off-limits.  Just a jumble of machines, you told him.”  Pamir was breathing in ragged, wet gulps.  “Big facilities as old as the Ship, doing nothing but scrubbing the water clean.  And there’s nothing interesting to see in any of them.”

Perri leaned against the polished stone wall, waiting.

“You told him there’s no point in visiting the treatment plants, then you claimed that you’ve never been there.”

“Because I haven’t been.”

Pamir took him by the throat, squeezing for emphasis.  It was an ancient gesture, useless today and yet woven into every human’s innate fear.  A choking hand remained an effective crudeness, and so did a low angry voice.  “Lie and I’ll hurt you,” said the captain.  “If I don’t believe you, I will ruin you.”

“I didn’t tell him.”  Perri’s face was red and wet.  With both hands, he tried to punish Pamir’s forearm.  “I told him…nothing…!”

“Because you knew I was watching.”

Perri gave him a hard kick to the groin.

The pain was savage, and it was nothing.  “You met with him later, in secret,” said Pamir.  “That’s when you told Samara what you saw.”

“I saw nothing,” the smaller man said.  “And we didn’t meet later.  I saw that man just once.”  Then Perri wrapped both of his hands around Pamir’s choking hand, and a sly odd and almost mischievous look came into his bulging eyes.  He started to squeeze, adding to the pressure, and a major bone inside his neck shattered with a quiet snap.

Pamir let go.

Leaning against the wall, Perri felt his neck healing, and he coughed in pain and then in less pain.  Blood came up with the spit.  Both men looked at the mess on the back of the small hand, and then a thick, slow voice said, “I promised not to tell, and I didn’t tell, and I wouldn’t know what to say if I had the urge, since I barely saw the place.”

“Samara offered to pay you handsomely.”

The gigolo charms had been set aside.  Lucid fury filled the eyes.  “Maybe you didn’t notice, but I don’t need money.  And I paid for my own damn lunch.”  Massaging the broken neck, he said, “Besides, I like Samara even less than I like you.”

Pamir was surprised.  “Oh, what don’t you like?”

No easy answer was waiting.  “There’s something wrong with Samara, and there’s not enough that’s right.”  The coughed-up blood was retreating into his skin.  He swallowed twice, the pain lessening, and then he said, “The entity is deep water.  Whatever he is, he’s mostly hidden.”

Pamir’s surprise had doubled.  He believed the man, despite all odds, and he felt utter pleasure in the fact that two people didn’t approve of this new immigrant.

“Darling?”

The hapless wife was emerging from the shadows, walking with a deliberative gait, looking at Pamir while she asked her husband:

“Are you all right, sweetness?”

Another cough, and Perri said, “Absolutely fine.”

Quee Lee stopped just short of them.  She was small and pretty, and the pretty face was set.  “Sir, I think you should leave now.”  With a chilled voice, she said, “Captain or not, I want you out of my home.”

As if Pamir was the villain here.

Captain had their preferred districts, usually just beneath the hull, and in this one slender case, Pamir had obeyed the tradition.  His apartment was relatively small, set away from the traffic areas, in a portion of a catacomb that nobody entered by mistake.  The private realm had several hundred meters of tunnels, rooms of a hectare or two, and a whirlpool pond with bronze-colored orfes swimming endlessly in the spinning water, beds of blackpot mussels fixed to the bottom, preventing erosion for the last ten thousand years.

Before the mussels, Pamir had used hypersaline corals and wise-squids from Karta’s World.

Before corals, he just let the water gnaw at its basin, sculpting the greenish olivine however it wished.

Staring at the unkempt surroundings, the rare visitor might mention that cleaning your home wasn’t a crime.  After all, nobody knew who the Ship’s builders had been, and what if one of them returned suddenly:  Wouldn’t you want to keep their property presentable?

But Pamir relished the slumping, oxidized walls.  He loved the palpable sense of titanic age, the possibilities of history.  In the early centuries, he had spent every off-duty moment inside his largest room, staring a wall covered with crosshatched scratches, trying to decipher meanings that might not exist.  It was another delicious, unanswerable mystery inside a machine with more mysteries than inhabitants.  In the same room, Pamir began culturing the delicate llano-vibra plants, mastering their byzantine genetics to create songs of fragile, surreal beauty.  But then the hobby drifted away from him, and the plants went wild, crossbreeding at will while losing all sense of pitch and rhythm.

A harsh, incoherent wail rose when Pamir entered the room.  Barely noticing, he halfway ran through the tangled growth, bending to touch a certain knob of damp green stone.

The floor beside him neatly dropped out of sight.

The cap-car waiting below didn’t exist, and it used nothing but energy stolen from nonessential machinery.  The hatch sealed with a hiss.  As Pamir sat, the car accelerated, taking him through a network of empty tubes and passageways, never repeating any previous course.

Sensors watched for any fool trying to follow him.

Nobody ever did.

But he imagined Samara hunched over an identical panel, watching him with a cool, amoral malevolence.  The image made him anxious when he was awake, and then its way into his dreams while he slept; and only in the last thousand kilometer fall could Pamir genuinely rest, shaken awake with the berthing.

Pamir undressed, his uniform left hanging in the car.  Stepping through a second camouflaged doorway, he was attacked by a screaming mist, gray and toxic.  Hands to the mouth, he pushed ahead slowly, eyes tearing and sinuses catching fire, his naked feet splashing through caustic puddles and over a slope of badly eroded, diamond-sharp hyperfibers—a last line of defense to dissuade the curious and the feeble.

A thousand sewers fed into the district’s purification center.  Spent water, industrial wastes and the byproducts of alien biologies came roaring from orifices on all sides.  The nearest sewer flowed from human places, and it was a genuine river, swift and familiarly rancid, beaten white by the ceaseless turbulence.

Years ago, Perri had ridden with that filth, his body encased in a hyperfiber suit, both hidden inside a whale’s rotting carcass.  The self-styled adventurer evaded every security system and survived the maelstrom, expecting to find great machines at work—filters and distillers and atom-cracking wonders older than vertebrates, and more durable.

But to his amazement, he found the Child instead, and with it one naked and enraged captain.

Breathing between his fingers, Pamir felt his throat swell and bleed.  There was a thin and wobbly trail beneath him that he could feel more than see, and he avoided it, preferring the thin carpet of mock-fungi, gray and bristly, thriving on a diet of toxins.  The sewer’s roar was vast, uncomplicated.  Other fluids were moving underground, the air reverberating with thunderous swallowing sounds.  Eventually the mists thinned and then vanished, leaving him on the shelf where he always stopped.  He lowered his burned hands.  The flesh was already healing.  Eyes blinked and dripped for a few moments, reclaiming their superior vision, and he lifted his gaze, turning in a slow circle, absorbing his surroundings.

The ceiling was an inverted bowl, a peach-colored sun strung from the apex, both sun and ceiling obscured by banks of water-fat clouds.  The floor was like a shattered plate—a ten thousand square kilometer plate—its shards loosely reassembled, every gap a canyon where a different sewer flowed.  In the center was an ocean of sand—countless grains of scrap hyperfiber and catalytic metals—and on top of the sand lay a shallow lake being perpetually drained, its overflow bound for reservoirs that would slake millions of thirsts.

The old machines and every surface were built of hyperfiber, yet little of the wonderstuff was visible.

Life covered every surface.

Dense and vibrant.

Noisy.

Tireless.

Kilometer-long mock-vines.  Mock-trees taller than starships.  Mock-fungi wearing elegant shapes and vivid fluorescent colors.  And all were linked, roots and fleshy tendrils locked together, a perfect biological embrace extending into the sewers, absorbing and lifting the tainted water, xylem pulling it through filtering gills and kidneys and more gills.  Everything of value was harvested.  Everything else—the filth of modern technology—was destroyed, if not on the first try then on the next, or the thousandth.  However long the work took, it took; the Child was nothing if not tenacious, doing its job without failure or complaint.

As was the custom, Pamir whispered, “Hello.”

The reply was diffuse and immediate.  Millions of mouths and other orifices exhaled as one, mangling the words, “Hello,” and “Captain,” and “Friend Pamir.”

The ground shook under the Child’s voice.

Pamir moved, head down, stepping wherever the vegetation looked soft and sturdy.  His footprints didn’t linger.  Every trace of him was erased.  Bacterium and viral bodies, skin flakes and dislodged hairs were caught and digested.  Everything but the captain became the Child, incorporated and annihilated, then refashioned to serve some critical task.

Several times each year, during off-duty time, Pamir visited the Child.

Their relationship was centuries old.

Yet even now he had to remind himself that here was one inhabitant, one organism—a multitude of forms but all linked, like the cells inside his own durable body.

Only better.

Mock-animals appeared, and mock-insects and mock-rodents and sharp little bodies that looked more like tools than organisms.  A herd of mock-okapi grazed on poisoned foliage, shitting sweet treasures as they moved closer.  Then a mock-angel arrived, shaped like a winged human female, gliding into a meadow of mock-grass, its umbilical linking with the grass and the Child, the gesture as automatic as breathing.

Neural bodies spoke through the angel.  A feminine voice observed, “You are early, friend, and by a long measure.”

Pamir tried to speak and then stopped himself, unsure how to proceed.

Cloud-colored wings lashed at the air, causing the dew to leap from the gold-green blades—a clean chill rain in reverse—and with concern on its human face, the angel asked:

“What is wrong, friend Pamir?”

Pure, raw fear made him shiver and hold himself.

The Child tasted fear compounds boiling from him, and each body sobbed the same question from whatever passed for a mouth:

“What is wrong?”

Then again, in a thunderblast:

“WHAT IS WRONG?”

Pamir cupped his hands to his dampened face, legs buckling, knees diving into a mat of sweet-scented mushrooms.  Beneath them was a solvent, gray and alien.  Suddenly exposed to the air, its rank odor made him cough, tasting blood again.  He wished he could fall unconscious but he didn’t.  He had no choice but to say, “The Monster.”  His voice was quick, almost soundless.  “The Monster’s here, and I’m sorry.  Sorry.”

But the Child had already guessed as much; what else could be so awful?

The mock-okapi came forward, placid herbivorous faces dropping, big cobalt tongues lapping at the solvent as the eyes gazed through him; and the angel spoke, a small pitiful voice asking, “Will you help me?”

Spores exploded into the air, tasting of cinnamon and things unnamed.

“Please, friend Pamir, will you help me?”

Even before he answered, Pamir wondered why the Child would have to ask.  After everything he had risked, staking so much on the survival of this one organism…why did he still have to prove his devotion, and with something as thin as words…?