Authors: Robert Reed
The Well of Stars (15 page)
Because he didn’t know when the chance would come again, Pamir climbed into his cabin and tethered himself inside his crush-web mattress, and with an ease that came from considerable practice as well as simple need, he closed his eyes and relaxed his long body as his mind collapsed into a deep black slumber. When dreams came, they were his own. Wild impossible things happened; routine elements yanked from recent days repeated themselves with tireless abandon. Again and again, Pamir found himself staring through a diamond port, doing nothing while watching nothing, nothing to see but a boundless darkness punctuated with the rare burst and glimmer of ruddy light. And always, there was the deep rumbling of his little ship, both in his dreams and in reality. The main engines continued to blaze away, firing through slots opened up in the hyperfiber umbrella, killing any dusty hazards as well as the last of their enormous momentum, while the maneuvering rockets had continued firing, relentlessly nudging them along a chaotic, bug-wiggling course that had proved safe enough up to the present moment.
Since the business with the V-elbow, everything had been a little bit too perfect. Pamir wasn’t the kind of person who believed in the flawless, but for the last months he had been pressed to find anything to complain about. The streakship was diving down a narrow tunnel—a clearly defined avenue swept free of most of the large debris and much of its gravel and ice. The Inkwell was laced with thousands of similar transit zones. The only difference was that theirs had been built specifically for them, and with a patient regularity, the polyponds repeated their promise to complete a wider, longer avenue through which the Great Ship could pass with ease.
Pamir slept easily, and deeply, and after ten uninterrupted hours, he consciously triggered one of his favorite dreams.
In an instant, he found himself sitting in a little boat drifting down the Canyon of Ten Thousand Falls. Artists had produced this imagery, but Pamir was free to pluck what he wished from his own life. Did he want company? Yes. Washen appeared, sitting with her back to the bow, her elegant body dressed in nothing but a billowy soft gown. With her smile, she said, “Naughty boy.” With a tilt of her head, she warned him, “I won’t let things go where you want them.”
But what did he want?
On the Great Ship, there were many places that were considered among the most scenic, the most spectacular. Passengers had actually fought about which corner and what cave were superior to every other, to the eye and nose, and sometimes to the tough tip of a sensitive tendril. Some fights had turned violent enough to kill, if only temporarily. But whenever someone took a bloodless poll, the Canyon ended near the top hundred sights that every passenger and crew member was obligated to see and smell, and to the best of his ability, embrace.
A deep warm river pushed down the Canyon’s floor. Steep walls of pale pink granite soared high on both sides; then the slope diminished, changing to calcite and magnesite generated by beds of reef-forming species. Numerous springs burst into the cavern from just beneath its ceiling, nearly ten kilometers overhead. Ten thousand waterfalls was a low estimate, or high. Because there were really only two falls, one covering each shoreline, and each was woven into tens of thousands of individual braids and ropes of bright silvery water that slid off the bottom edge of reefs, making the granite shine a sweet candy red in a false sunlight designed to tease out the beauty and soothing perfection of this place.
“Remember our first trip down,” said the woman in the bow.
Quee Lee had replaced Washen. Dressed in a conservative sarong, she was speaking to her husband. Uninvited, Perri had placed himself on the seat between Pamir and herself.
Perri said something just to her.
The plunging water roared as it struck the river on both sides of them. Voices had to be loud, and a mouth had to point at its intended audience.
Quee Lee chuckled amiably.
“He’s tired of us,” she said, motioning at Pamir.
Pamir just shook his head. Too much time living with the same few people, and not even his dreams were private anymore.
What could he do?
Laugh, he decided.
But then the roaring stopped abruptly. He took a deep breath and looked high. The falls had stopped flowing. Every spring had been choked off, and except for a last shimmer of moisture up on the green-and-gold reefs, there was nothing to see. The reefs were dying. Who had screwed this up? He began to look at his companions, but they were gone. Washen had returned, but she was dressed as the First Chair, complete with an officious expression of worthy concern.
“Be careful,” she said to him.
His eyes jumped open. For a little moment, Pamir wondered how he had gotten trapped inside this odd little closet. Then he remembered this was his cabin and his mission, and everything about the dream was swept away … except for realization that after years of constant firing, the maneuvering rockets had abruptly fallen silent.
“THERE IS NOTHING before us,” the ship’s AI reported. “Except for the Blue World, that is. This region has been scrupulously cleaned of dust and gas. Except for a thin veil of hydrogen atoms, and that veil is only slightly above interstellar norms—”
“Understood,” Pamir interrupted.
He began to study the unbroken blackness.
The entire crew was inside the galley, pushed together at the bottom end by the smooth decelerating thrust of the main engines. The floor had been stripped of all but the minimum number of low-backed chairs. Even without tables, there was barely enough room for all. Everyone stared at images piped in through an array of lenses and radio dishes, reading what could be seen as well as weighing the telltale echoes produced by bursts of laser light. To a soul, they were disappointed. The Blue World—their host and grand benefactor—was within 10 million kilometers, but the only trace was a dull red ember showing heat seeping out of a deeply insulated sky.
“We knew we wouldn’t see much,” Quee Lee offered.
The main engines continued to labor, their smooth braking blaze indistinguishable from a high-terran gravity.
“But think what we are seeing,” Perri added.
That brought a sober long silence.
With a secure nexus, Pamir told the AI to squirt updates back to the Great Ship, and buried within that roar would be a second, much condensed version of the same transmission—for an audience that was much closer, and hopefully, still completely invisible.
“Repeat every three minutes,” he ordered. “Once in orbit, every ninety seconds.”
If anything went wrong, Washen and Mere would see it happen.
To everyone, he pointed out, “We have jobs to work. Before we can drop into orbit, we should get ourselves ready. For whatever’s going to be.”
Whatever’s going to be.
Pamir meant to sound suspicious, and he probably succeeded a little too well. He saw it in the faces, in the tight lips and downcast eyes. For a moment, he let the warning sink home, then he grinned and offered a different tone, admitting, “Whatever happens, it’s going to be spectacular. No doubts at all.”
THE MAIN ENGINES fired until the ship’s momentum was almost drained away, then, following detailed instructions delivered over the last several weeks, every rocket was buttoned down and put to sleep. The ship’s body rearranged itself again. The hyperfiber armor pulled apart like a blossom. Empty fuel tanks were pushed to one side, valves opened wide to the hard vacuum. Exactly as promised, a simple tug appeared from the blackness—a blunt cold machine spinning thousands of fullerene webs tipped with tiny robots that quickly and expertly connected their web to the armor and the entire ship.
Moments later, the tug set to work, nudging them with a brute authority, inserting them into a high circular orbit around the Blue World.
Afterward, it detached the lines and ate them.
With tiny bursts of secondary rockets, the alien ship came closer. Umbilicals built for this single occasion were deployed. Radar and lasers made elaborate measurements of the streakship, presumably to make certain that every system was compatible. And Pamir’s crew examined the tug with the same thoroughness. How good were its engines? How efficient was its reactor? A chamber was riding inside the tug’s nose. Three different crew members noticed either the emptiness of that space or the heat radiating from it, and at the same instant, they pointed it out to Pamir.
In another moment, he spotted it for himself.
“Opinions?” he muttered.
No one responded.
With a different voice, Pamir said, “Opinions.”
This was an order now.
The AI replied first. As the umbilicals eased in closer, it described what it saw inside the heavily shielded chamber.
“It is a sack of dirty water,” was the expert answer. “No more than two meters long and less than half a meter wide, at the most.”
Two answers offered themselves.
In the Great Ship’s own language, the umbilicals asked permission to link with the empty fuel tanks.
Pamir studied the infrared images again, and, with the barest nod, said, “Permission given.”
Moments later, the streakship began receiving a small ocean of liquid hydrogen, hyperfiber-faced compressors squeezing down on the fluid, producing bricks of metallic hydrogen stabilized with diamond exoskeletons. Even with the best pumps and compressors in the galaxy, the fueling would take fifty hours. Without hydrogen, there was no quick return home. For at least the next two days, they were going to dance in the dark with a thoroughly unique alien.
“Hello?”
Pamir blinked and shook his head.
“Hello?” the voice said once again.
The Blue World was a perfect black orb no bigger than a thumbnail held at arm’s length. The voice came from much closer, and wrapped around it was a thin little laugh and a genuine nervousness.
“Do you hear me?”
“No,” Pamir kidded. “We cannot hear you.”
The voice was riding the telemetry signal from the tug. With a deep sigh, it told its audience, “I’m here.”
“Are you a pond?” Pamir asked, already knowing better.
But the voice laughed, declaring, “Of course I’m a pond. We’re all ponds. Didn’t you realize that?”
The voice was O’Layle’s.
“May I come on board?” asked the long-lost refugee. “Please let me on board, would you please?”
Conjecture. Surmise. Interpret and hypothesize. Thousands of years of experience brought to bear on the moment’s problem. A long life of little successes and glorious failures had produced an intellect peculiarly fitted
to an impossible task. Understand. Gaze at the body of evidence, and more importantly, note the cavernous gaps in fact and data. What was truly known? Nothing. But there was never such a creature as nothing. Wasn’t every modern soul taught that basic physics lesson? Absence should never be confused with emptiness. The hardest, purest vacuum bubbled with energies and raw potentials. To piece together the mind of any species, what mattered was the shape of its nothing. The lies it told to strangers and the myths it recited to its own good self.
to an impossible task. Understand. Gaze at the body of evidence, and more importantly, note the cavernous gaps in fact and data. What was truly known? Nothing. But there was never such a creature as nothing. Wasn’t every modern soul taught that basic physics lesson? Absence should never be confused with emptiness. The hardest, purest vacuum bubbled with energies and raw potentials. To piece together the mind of any species, what mattered was the shape of its nothing. The lies it told to strangers and the myths it recited to its own good self.
“Where did you first evolve?”
On numerous occasions, xenobiologists aboard the Great Ship had asked that critical question. With a natural curiosity, they inquired, “Where did you begin? And where was your first home?”
It was only reasonable. Only natural. What species didn’t want to point to its lowly cradle and boast? But if the polyponds knew their origins, they didn’t share the story. Time after time, they answered almost every question, but in that one rootstock realm they remained conspicuously silent.
The Master Captain finally threw up what she thought was an irresistible lure. “If you tell us about your beginnings,” she said in one late broadcast, “then I will tell you everything I know about ours. Our entire recorded history, from dust to stars!”
When a response finally came, it was nothing anticipated.
“All the pasts are genuine,” read the thoroughly translated text. “Do not talk about choosing any one.”
Yet there had to be some place and moment where the polyponds began. Genetics might hold clues, but no samples had been analyzed. And what would their flesh tell us? Perhaps an aquatic beginning, judging by how they lived today. Perhaps they had appeared on some cold world, their ancestors clinging to the occasional hot
spring, surviving in some cooperative huddle, the oases scattered across an otherwise icebound landscape. There were plenty of examples in the xenobiologic literature. Snowball worlds tended to concentrate life in the tiniest of patches, and inside one of the richer patches, the various species would manage to unite into an elaborate, purposeful symbiosis. When the climate moderated, they spread rapidly. One oasis excelled, racing across the seas and ice-chewed continents, and in a geologic heartbeat, a Gaian was born—a sophisticated single entity masquerading as a world’s entire biosphere.
spring, surviving in some cooperative huddle, the oases scattered across an otherwise icebound landscape. There were plenty of examples in the xenobiologic literature. Snowball worlds tended to concentrate life in the tiniest of patches, and inside one of the richer patches, the various species would manage to unite into an elaborate, purposeful symbiosis. When the climate moderated, they spread rapidly. One oasis excelled, racing across the seas and ice-chewed continents, and in a geologic heartbeat, a Gaian was born—a sophisticated single entity masquerading as a world’s entire biosphere.
There were Gaians in the literature—depending on the most rigorous definitions, less than one hundred examples, or at most, several thousand. And a few of those giant entities had produced starships, eventually seeding distant worlds with their vast daughters.
Perhaps that explained the polyponds’ beginnings: A Gaian world enters a black cloud of gas and wet dust, finding resources enough to make new worlds where it and its million daughters could thrive. But in every other example, the sentient offspring had hoarded their memories about their origins and great parent. They were proud, slow, and decidedly independent souls, and they seemed unable to organize with anyone, including their own equally proud sisters.
A synthetic creation made for a cleaner explanation. On some forgotten world, biosculptors could have assembled a cocktail of organisms, using their creation to seed icy moons or wandering comets. Terraforming would have been the noble goal. Add heat and light to the watery bodies, and the artificial Gaian would rebuild the world around it. If some of those cocktails had slipped free, or if their makers had strewn them about a little too indiscriminately … well, some combination of circumstances and blunders might have brought them into the Inkwell, and then in some distant past, set them free …
But that again explained very little.
Dark nebulae were too cold and far too dangerous to appeal to most sentient life-forms. Whatever the polyponds had accomplished inside the Inkwell, this was not the sort of home where most species went first or willingly. Besides, despite decades of hard searches, both in the sky and through the available histories, there was no trace of polyponds or anything bearing any resemblance to them in the surrounding districts. No potential cradle worlds. No watery colonies drifting among the comets. Polyponds lived where they lived and nowhere else: Not so much as one warm puddle drifted on the fringes of the cloud, in full view of a universe infinitely vaster and more amazing than anything that could be found in the darkness.
Better than most, Mere understood darkness.
She was born inside a crippled starship, after all. For what seemed like forever, her entire world was barely any bigger than her own stunted body and her starving little mind. For centuries, the only voice she heard was her own, and the only sound she made was a pained wail broken up with weak little sobs. Existence was miserable and fearful, and, by a hundred different criteria, Mere would have seemed perfectly insane. But even at her worst, that half-born creature had an enduring sense of identity—a concept of self and place, of events that strung together to form a sloppy history. Even in that eternal hell, there was a dust-blasted pane of scrap diamond that afforded her a view of the universe. Squinting, she could make out a few hundred blue-shifted stars, and with the sluggish passage of time, those stars would move. They shifted positions relative to each other, and the stars on the fringe sometimes drifted toward the edge of the window; and then despite all of her pressing and digging, forcing her big eyes flush to the cold diamond, each star would silently and bravely pass out of view.
Whenever Mere thought about the polyponds—and she thought about little else—her mind inevitably fell
back to the darkness of her youth. Even in those narrow circumstances, change had proved to be a genuine force. Little happened to her, and nothing obvious changed with her ship. But at least the sky taught her that certain things were not meant to be forever and always, and maybe there were moments when she derived hope, if not exactly joy, from that starved little insight.
back to the darkness of her youth. Even in those narrow circumstances, change had proved to be a genuine force. Little happened to her, and nothing obvious changed with her ship. But at least the sky taught her that certain things were not meant to be forever and always, and maybe there were moments when she derived hope, if not exactly joy, from that starved little insight.
MERE’S SHIP WAS an ensemble of tiny pieces. Minus fuel, the entire machine didn’t possess even a thousand metric tons of hyperfiber and aerogel, diamond and patient flesh.
Yet in another sense, it was vaster than the Great Ship.
Through the long voyage, her engines and fuel tanks, mirrors and twin habitats moved with the same precise trajectory, each piece wearing an entirely different set of disguises. Some components were connected to their neighbors with fullerenes or feeble com-lasers. But most were fully independent, obeying a series of sophisticated strategies while keeping themselves in reasonable repair. A casual eye would see debris left over from Pamir’s original boost cone. A thorough examination would identify shards of diamond and several masses of water ice, plus what seemed to be pieces of machinery halfway melted by the giant lasers. The two identical habitats were barely visible, even with the best instruments. Each was smaller than a comfortable room, and both used a shifting set of tricks to appear even tinier than that. One habitat served as Mere’s home, the other held in reserve. Like the rest of the mock debris, the habitats drifted along in the wake of the streakship, slower by a wide margin and gradually spreading out, currently scattered across a volume better than a hundred thousand kilometers in radius.
The heart of her habitat was a padded cavity barely two meters long and half as wide. Yet even that seemed like a tremendous waste of space. Before her mission began, Mere’s body was carefully frozen, tissues and bone
plunged into a rigid state on the brink of absolute zero. Only her mind lived, and then only through a series of tricks and cheats, its heat signature diminished to a manageable flicker. Given any choice, other humans would never tolerate this kind of existence. This endless abuse. But Mere had experienced miseries worse than this inconvenience, and really, she was exceptionally good at keeping her cold mind busy.
plunged into a rigid state on the brink of absolute zero. Only her mind lived, and then only through a series of tricks and cheats, its heat signature diminished to a manageable flicker. Given any choice, other humans would never tolerate this kind of existence. This endless abuse. But Mere had experienced miseries worse than this inconvenience, and really, she was exceptionally good at keeping her cold mind busy.
Breakfast was a few gentle sips of electrical energy. Lunch and dinner were the same, delivered directly from a finger-sized reactor through a cable implanted into the back of her neck, the current translated into compounds suitable for an anaerobic crisis-metabolism. But Mere always took the trouble to select a menu, letting her mind experience the flavors and textures of whatever she would have prepared inside her little kitchen at home. Sometimes she ate Tilan food, or at least what she remembered to have eaten on the world of her youth. Outside her mind, no such cuisine existed. No such world existed. Which lent every imaginary bite a uniqueness and importance—feasting at the table of a billion ghosts, in a sense.
Mere’s large brown eyes had been eased out of their sockets and frozen, a pair of superconductive taps lending her a larger vision. At any moment, she could look everywhere. Immersion eyes fixed to the scattered pieces of her ship shared input, fabricating a vividly detailed and constantly changing set of images: the last stars passing beside her; the Milky Way strewn out behind her, bright and chill; and the Inkwell directly in her path, black and seemingly endless and very nearly perfect—save for a minuscule tunnel through which Pamir and the others had already vanished.
Slowly, patiently, Mere followed after them.
Each day had its schedules and goals, responsibilities and perfect freedoms. In the past, friends and lost lovers had asked Mere, “How do you live that way? How do you survive the day in that kind of solitude?”
But it wasn’t difficult. She reminded them about her first long voyage—the toxic food and the absolute lack of even the slightest stimulation—which made this an infinitely better existence. Whenever she wished, she read. Whenever she needed conversation, she woke one of the tiny AIs that rode with her. Each had a familiar voice and a distinct personality. Each was a friend, and in careful terms, Mere hinted that they might serve as occasional lovers, too.
She read alien works, mostly. Quirky texts and difficult texts. Sometimes in their original language.
She also read about the polyponds, digesting the fresh reports as well as dipping into the oldest for the hundredth time.
Every day, Pamir sent home his latest data and recorded discussions from among his crew. He was a thorough captain, smart and determined, and certainly better than most when it came to understanding alien species. But he wasn’t nearly as talented as Washen could be on her good days; and without a shred of self-consciousness and very little pleasure, Mere knew that nobody on board the streakship or the Great Ship brought to bear half as much talent as she possessed.
Each day, without fail, Mere consumed and examined the latest report. There were always a few missteps. Errors of decision; errors of pure bias. The crew knew they were on an important mission, and that’s why they were quick to embrace anything that might be a clue, applying it like wet lumps of clay to the most recent models. The polyponds were born here, were born there. They intended this, and they wanted that. Obviously, they were friends to the human species. Or they were scared of the Great Ship. Or the aliens were brazenly hiding critical secrets, and as the emissaries dove deeper into the Inkwell, their paranoia was growing. Accelerating. Threatening to take wing.
Every day, Mere translated a very human account of the expedition, reshaping it into a form with which she might work.
If she had any secret, this was it. Mere was not truly human. Or Tilan, either. Or anything else to which any accepted name could be affixed. She was a species of one. Alone, yet unlonely because of it. Freed because of it. At least that was what she always told her lovers, explaining how they might consider themselves lucky, enjoying this rare, almost singular chance to copulate with what only appeared to be an Earth-made primate.
“I don’t think as other people do.”
“You seem more like one of us,” a long-ago husband observed. From his breathing hole, he joked, “If I was blind and my pricks were numb, I would swear that I was screwing a very tiny harum-scarum.”
“A good screw, I would hope.”
“Hope all you want. You are barely better than my hand.”
“You’re joking,” she told him.
Human beings almost never recognized when harum-scarums were having fun. To humans, everything about Osmium’s species looked like bluster and insults and a thousand battles barely averted.
“My oddness makes you drunk,” Mere told him.
Osmium had to agree.
“My secret,” she began. And then with remarkably little pain, she removed herself from him and pulled his severed prick from her vagina, staunching both of their bloods with a casual hand while a smooth warm and impenetrable voice admitted, “My secret is in my head. And I don’t know what it is.”
THE SCATTERED SHIP continued its long, long plunge.
A thousand times, by various means and with varying levels of intensity, Mere was examined. Light and microwaves danced off the various pieces, and perhaps most of the echoes went unnoticed. Several times, elaborate pulses of energy emerged from the Inkwell, joined with the streakship’s daily signal. Plainly, something
was sitting near the ship’s wake, looking back along its trajectory. Hunting for stragglers? Perhaps. But a human conclusion was too tempting, and she firmly resisted the urge. Really, after all of these years of constant work and practiced thought, the polyponds were still a deep mystery, and they were a source of constant, studied pleasure.
was sitting near the ship’s wake, looking back along its trajectory. Hunting for stragglers? Perhaps. But a human conclusion was too tempting, and she firmly resisted the urge. Really, after all of these years of constant work and practiced thought, the polyponds were still a deep mystery, and they were a source of constant, studied pleasure.
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