The Well of Stars (12 page)

Read The Well of Stars Online

Authors: Robert Reed

Built for fefs, the cap-car felt tiny to Washen, and its air was thick with carbon dioxide and water vapor. Every breath was warm enough to remind her of every sauna that she had ever endured. And the car was swift, plunging to its destination, time passing too quickly to allow an overworked captain to steal more than a moment or two of sleep.
With a hiss, the hatch dissolved.
The air beyond was thinner and very dry. What might have been a narrow fissure had been enlarged, several meters of wounded hyperfiber removed to build a passageway as well as stripping away everything that was even a little weak. What remained was a long half-lit tunnel, gray walls looking like mirrors where they had already been prepared for the final repair. In time, the atmosphere would be yanked away and millions of liters of fresh, high-grade hyperfiber would pour into the emptiness. What was new would effortlessly merge with the rest of the hull, and once cured, only the most persistent expert armed with delicate sensors would notice the seams left behind.
That was one of the miracles of hyperfiber—its endless capacity to accept every tiny graft and every giant patch.
Washen walked patiently if not quite slowly. After a long lazy turn to the left, the passageway twisted to the right again, and with that turn she began to hear the quiet, smooth, and occasionally human sound of voices.
Short of the chamber, she paused.
“But if you consider,” said a voice. What followed was one of the dense AI languages, rapid and efficient and invented for no other purpose than to plumb the high realms of mathematics.
“Consider this,” a second voice responded.
The next dose of machine talk was louder and even quicker. A nexus translated for Washen, and three other nexuses did their best to explain what she was hearing. But one after another, her devices reached the limits of their ability. They apologized, or they simply fell silent, too embarrassed to speak.
A third voice said, “Thank you.”
And then a fourth voice, very familiar, said, “Why won’t you come the rest of the way, Mother? Don’t worry, you aren’t interrupting.”
The First Chair stepped into the chamber.
What was tiny on every official map was surprisingly large to the eye. The chamber was a hundred meters across, and someone other than the fef had positioned the bright lights and changed the air to approximate earthly tastes. Wearing rubber bodies and archaic clothes, the AIs sat on convenient rises and knolls, ignoring the sharp, mirror-bright edges. Locke was the only figure sitting on a flat surface, legs crossed and the remains of a dried hammerwing in his lap. With a charming little smile, he asked, “Are they growing impatient?”
“A little,” his mother allowed. “They have their hyperfiber ready to pour. In case you want to be entombed here for all time.”
Some of the more literal-minded AIs did the lightspeed equivalent of a flinch. Then everyone was laughing, and with an easy amiability, one of the rubber bodies jumped to its feet.
“We shall leave,” the AI announced.
“But first,” said Washen. And when everyone was staring at her, she asked, “Why here? What does this place tell you?”
“It was my idea,” Locke confessed.
She wasn’t surprised.
“A different realm to jog our creativity,” reported the standing AI. The face was female and wrinkled, like the sages in ancient times. But the voice was young like a child’s. “We have questions to consider, puzzles to solve.”
“New questions?” Washen inquired.
“From a new vantage point,” the machine replied, “every question is new and intriguing.”
Locke was climbing to his feet. A tiny Wayward pouch lay beside him, and as he reached for the leather straps, his mother saw something familiar.
“May I?” she asked.
He pretended not to understand. And then he considered refusing her request, or at least asking her if he possessed that freedom. But no, he decided to hand over the
tightly folded copperwing. And like every son sensitive to a mother’s opinion, he mentioned again, “These are simple, obvious questions.”
“I know.”
“Things to consider.”
“Quiet,” Washen advised.
When she held the copperwing in her hands, her hands shook. Washen noticed the shaking with amusement, and she found herself taking a couple deep breaths before unfolding what had already become old and threadbare.
By hand, Locke had written his questions, starting at one edge of the rounded wing and working down.
“Does the Great Ship have a destination?” he had written. “And if so, did human beings screw things up when they took it for themselves?”
Washen’s face went rigid, showing the tiniest nod.
“Is the ship supposed to be going somewhere specific?” Locke asked aloud, with a quiet little voice.
“What could be its destination?” she read aloud. “And does it involve the prisoner at the center of Marrow?”
She read, “Or is the ship making a flight of escape instead? And if so, have humans screwed that up?”
She looked at her son.
Locke said nothing, a wary grin trying to hide.
She read more questions. There were dozens of them, and as promised, nothing was authentically new here. How many times had she rolled these same matters around in her head? But in the course of a busy year, Washen didn’t invest more than the occasional dreamy moment considering these impregnable, unmanageable mysteries.
“What if the Great Ship began its voyage on course?” Locke had written on a later date. The letters were clearer, the ink showing a hint of shine that was peculiar to the juice of a berryblack. “And what if its trajectory had been distorted by the moon-sized bolide?”
She looked up again.
“Good question,” was her verdict. “Is that why you’re down here? For inspiration?”
Locke flashed a smile.
“There’s more,” he mentioned. “Flip the wing over.”
With respect for the long-dead appendage, she turned the wing with careful hands.
“If the Great Ship was off course,” she read aloud, “could we humans and the Wayward War be part of some grand plan? And what if this grand plan has managed to put the ship back on the right road again?”
She nodded, and breathed.
Then she read the final lines, twice:
“And what if the Great Ship has spent the last billions of years fleeing someone or something?
“What if that something has been pursuing it all this time?
“And if there is a pursuer out there—if, if, if—then how much harm have we humans done, forcing the Ship to change its trajectory, forcing it to follow a lazy, looping course through the milky waters of our galaxy?”
A multitude of specialists have tailored my newest voice. Utilizing oceans of experience as well as some considerable guesswork, they make me sound humble yet competent, harmless but enduring. In a hard whisper of microwave noise and infrared light, I show the nebula that I am very nearly nothing. A fleck. A dot. Little more than a mathematical point occupying an endlessly shifting position in space, passing quietly without complaint or important needs. My trajectory is nothing but a mistake, and I confess to being an inconvenience for whoever lives inside the cold black nebula. For this, I am sorry. Using images and the languages of the nearby worlds, I build a vocabulary I display a grammatical logic and then libraries of elaborate and honest explanations. I am a ship. A civilian vessel, I carry passengers and nothing else. Not mentioning Marrow or my ill-defined cargo is not a lie so much as a reasonable omission. How can I know exactly what resides inside my own belly? In countless ways, I am apologetic. This detour is not my plan, and I wish to make amends. In the course of traversing a great portion of our galaxy, I have managed to learn a few things. If I must pay some fee to cross their space, I will. Gladly, I will. Knowledge is my first and best currency. The cumulative experience of many thousands of species rides inside my halls and great rooms. For any distraction and discomfort brought my passage, I will be generous. “What do you wish?” I ask the darkness. “I am listening, I am here. Tell me what you need and what you deserve, and I will happily give these good things to you, in exchange for my unavoidable presence.”
It is a whimpering voice and hopefully useful. But there are moments and days when I change the tenor of my speech. Following a carefully prepared script, I show hints of other faces. Other moods. I seem tiny compared to the universe, yes, but I am also ancient and uncommonly strong. The dust and ice of the nebula are not hazards
for me. Not only will I cross the blackness in a matter of decades. I will come out the other side enriched My shields can gather whatever raw material serves me. My lasers will obliterate whatever cold objects lie in my path. And if need be, I can ignite my glorious engines, changing my trajectory with power enough to move entire worlds.
Quietly, I ask the nebula for help in making my passage.
Less quietly I imply that I need little help. My requests are out of politeness and according to the standard laws of the galaxy. I am a citizen of something infinitely larger than any little cloud of gas and ash. I don’t say it in words, in images or mathematics, but brazen implications swim beneath some of my communications.
To the blackness, I chatter.
I brag.
I pretend a dialogue, answering all the likely questions from voices that I haven’t quite heard yet.
And then after many years of fruitless noise, I fall silent. Sometimes there is no better way to speak. Every one of my channels collapses to an empty hum, and I keep falling on and on toward what has been dubbed the Inkwell.
Thirty years to fall.
Twenty-five.
And now, little more than twenty.
Perhaps nobody has heard me. Among the captains and other informed parties, that possibility makes itself plain. The assumption is that life is plying its way through that darkness. But really, why is life reasonable? The slow ships could be stupid machines left behind by some lost species. The rivers of ionized water vapor might have natural origins, as do the warm little worlds. What do we know about the dark nebula? Not enough, plainly. And even if there are intelligent species lurking within, what does the evidence show? The neighboring worlds describe a multitude of forms and designs. Perhaps it is exactly
that simple. A titanic volume of space and matter has enough room for hundreds of species. But unlike the Great Ship, they aren’t united under a single golden hand. They could be a rabble, happy or otherwise, and for reasons that haven’t yet been imagined, none of these species are able or willing to answer the calls from the hot bright universe beyond.
Without evidence, that idea blossoms.
And then just as the new possibility begins to generate strategies and benefits—just as the experts start to craft a menu of new voices for me, perhaps to be used in one great chorus—the answer finally arrives.
Brief, it is. Compressed, and elegant, and thorough, and in every way, reassuring. The face that first shows itself is smiling. The face seems altogether human. Handsome and male, he is. And the voice is smooth and happy, and warm, the smiling mouth producing a smooth rain of greetings wrapped around the simple and unlikely admission:
“My name is O’Layle. 1 was a passenger on the Great Ship. When things looked very bad for us, I fled.” He pauses long enough to laugh at his own cowardice. “I probably would have died, like most of the scared bats. But I was lucky. One of the polypond scout ships was far from home, and it heard my beacon, and luckily it was able to track me down. It caught me and saved me, and you can imagine how pleased I was.”
This is the first time that a name is heard.
Polypond.
Explaining the name, O’Layle admitted, “I’m not a linguist. But the name seems to do a fair job of capturing what they call themselves.”
The image widens.
The one-time passenger sits lightly in a web-chair. A thousand cues show that the resident gravity is barely ten percent of one gee. “This is my home,” says the lucky man. “As it happens, this is where they’d like you to send a mission. Diplomats. Crew members. Passengers like
myself. They want a good fair cross section of humans from every part of the ship.”
A knowing twinkle passes through the man’s pale yellow eyes.
“It’s my fault, I suppose. Their stock in humans, I mean. I explained how we found the ship and won control, and that matters to them. They take great stock in ownership, it seems.”
Again, the eyes twinkle.
Behind O’Layle is his present home. Visual cues and easy conjecture point to a floating structure drifting on the surface of a watery body. Walls are defined by dark ribs and arching panes of some transparent material. The panes aren’t diamond, probably Nor glass. But the refractory properties and the available materials hint at some flavor of plastic, very strong and easily manufactured. There are a few scattered furnishings, and to one side stands a round platform, flat on top except for a few tidy lumps. A bed, in other words. Beyond the farthest walls is open water, reassuringly blue under a high cloud-blotted sky. The horizon is close. The world seems to be Martian in size but considerably less massive—not unlike a ball of water wrapped around a small core of stone and common metals. The atmosphere has to be very deep and warm, and it is lit by an array of circular lights fixed to some kind of ceiling. The human says as much, explaining, “The Blue World has a roof to keep in the heat, to keep in the atmosphere. The daylight is for my sake. Most of the time, this is how things appear …”
With those words, the lights in the sky are quenched.
Moments later, the unseen camera adjusts its eye, and what has been brilliantly bright becomes a different kind of brilliant. The world that was lit from above is now illuminated from below, from just beneath the surface and from realms considerably deeper. The high wet clouds manage to glow with an occasional lick of lightning, and their bellies reflect the glow of the endless sea. But most interesting is the water. What was just visible before becomes
obvious now. Objects are moving beneath the surface. Careful eyes make out the hints of fins and tentacles and fleshy appendages with no clear shape. Something vast swims close enough to make the house roll on the sudden waves, and afterward, O’Layle laughs gamely while remarking, “I have many neighbors.”
His own floor is transparent. Probably plastic like the walls, and with darkness above, it turns perfectly clear.
He looks between his bare feet, watching some great shape swim away. Except for a small swatch of fabric around his groin, the human is naked. By every visible measure, he looks healthy. Well fed and rested. He looks like a man near the end of a wonderful long holiday, and with a matching voice, he says, “The polyponds are rather different from us.”
He is happy, but more than one human observer makes the same comment: it is an ageless, enduring happiness. The smile and hearty voice are too steady and certain, if that is possible. The accounts supplied by O’Layle’s old friends, plus the volumes of recorded moments from his various public lives, show a man who has never been so easily blissful, nor as thoroughly satisfied as he seems now.
“Polyponds are very large creatures,” he announces.
Somehow the smile brightens, and he adds. “They are patient and thorough, and from what I gather, they’re very well organized. I know they haven’t shown it, but they heard your broadcasts. They’ve been analyzing them. They’ve shown them to me, inviting my comments. My help. And because their ocean … what you call the Inkwell … is a big place, their response has been slow in coming.”
Again, the happy laugh interrupts the monologue, stealing away some of its slight momentum.
“Polyponds don’t have a Master Captain,” he explains. “Decisions require time and some measure of consensus. But their leaders, their most important voices … they want you to come visit us here. A meeting between emissaries. And as I said, they’d prefer a human entourage.
Since our species has control of the ship, we have won the honor.”
A new motion grabs the careful eye.
O’Layle straightens his back for a moment, and with a voice meant to sound casual, he mentions, “They aren’t a genuine species, by the way. Not like we think of species.”
Behind and to the right of O’Layle, something moves. From among the pillows of his large round bed, a figure sits up and gives a lazy, long stretch. With the light coming up from below, the area above the bed is in shadow. A long limb stretches, but details are scarce. But then the sleepy body turns just enough to supply a silhouette, and every human notices the rounded form of a breast and the meaty nipple riding on the tip.
“They aren’t a species,” he repeats, facing the unseen camera. “Not so much as they are all species. Whatever they wish to be, I guess you’d say.”
Again, he says the name.
“Polyponds.”
The alien slides out of the bed. She is long and well proportioned. She is perfectly naked and absolutely unperturbed by her appearance. To the eye, she looks as if she is the end product of a billion years of life on a terran world. And as far as any eye can tell, she is human.
“Their name comes from their origins, I believe,” says O’Layle. “Although they don’t seem quite sure about where they came from. And from what I gather, they don’t seem to care much about the subject.”
O’Layle hesitates, probably feeling his house rocking on the water as she approaches.
She kneels behind him, and with a warm strong voice tells her distant audience, “Welcome to you, my friends.”
Her long legs straighten, stretching forward, one lying on each side of the little web-chair.
With an ease that looks utterly natural, O’Layle climbs off the chair and leaps backward, his swatch of clothing clinging tight as the woman’s broad pale belly absorbs his impact. Stretched out as far as possible, his bare feet
lie near her hips. And when he throws back his head, flashing a smile at the universe, he uses one of the vast breasts as a pillow.
 
“What do you make of this?” the Master Captain asks her nearest officers. “Tell me. First impressions.”
I try to speak, but no one hears me.
Washen glances at the others, and then her eyes return to the rest of the brief, dense message. The only Submaster who actually gives an opinion is a harum-scarum. With an easy paranoia, Osmium pointed out, “This is simple biology. Make yourself bigger than your rivals, and you win every fight.”

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