Every morning, Washen slipped free of her clothes and abandoned the little schooner, swimming until she reached the point where there was nothing to see but the jade-colored sky and the smooth, empty, and utterly flat face of the ocean. Except for the occasional faint cloud, the sky was empty, and besides her body and its resident microbes, the water was nearly devoid of life. Waste heat from factories and reactors warmed the surface waters. For the last hundred millennia, these deep caverns had been left immersed in darkness. The illusory sun was an enormous expense, and building it for a single person was
extraordinary, and of course she had fought the entire concept. For five months, practically from the day that the emissary died, Washen dismissed every suggestion of a holiday. But it wasn’t only Pamir who had pushed her into this empty time. The Master Captain argued, “You’ve worn yourself to dust, darling.” Speaking at the last banquet, gazing out at every captain, the Master shook her head soberly, reminding her audience, “We need to make ourselves fresh and ready for what comes. But a few of us, I’m afraid, are working our finite souls into a frail, stupid, and useless kind of numbness.” Then she pointed an accusing finger at her First Chair, adding, “I order you to take time off. Now. Turn off your nexuses, darling. Peel away that uniform. And for the sake of the ship and yourself, get some rest!”
It was an order that Washen simply couldn’t accept.
Pamir repeated the argument on several occasions. He was stubbornly persuasive, and she was charmingly evasive. “I’m coping. I’m sane. Test me, darling. Any way you wish, and I promise, you’ll go away pleased.”
Then he turned blunt, bordering on defiant, and Washen leaned against good rational arguments. “I can’t leave my job now,” she professed. “Just today, another fifteen polypond nurseries are moving. And those are the ones we can optically resolve. At last count, fifty thousand buds are on a rendezvous course with us.”
“A rendezvous that won’t happen for years,” Pamir mentioned.
“While the grown polyponds have stopped talking to us,” she continued, nothing about her voice or manner betraying the true depth of her worries. “And while the Blue World and several dozen other adults are on the move, too.”
“Listen to your own propaganda,” he countered. “We’re dealing with an isolated species of committed hermits who have no choice but to deal with us, and who have done everything they promised to help our voyage.”
She shook her head. “What happened to the famous Pamir paranoia?”
“When I need it, I’ll bring it out to dance.”
Washen laughed for a long moment.
“Are you done?”
“Hardly,” she promised.
Pamir bristled, saying nothing.
Then Washen continued laying out the obvious dangers as well as her meaty fears. “Most of this is conjecture. We know nothing, and so everything is possible. And we’re doing just about everything we can do, preparing ourselves for whatever we can imagine.”
“We’ll win any war,” Pamir muttered.
“But doing just about everything isn’t doing everything, and don’t even pretend that we can imagine all the possibilities—”
“I’m not talking,” he grumbled.
“Thank you,” she snarled.
“When did you sleep last?”
“Fifty minutes ago,” she reported.
“For how long?”
Washen felt a knife in her stomach. But she kept smiling, and with only the barest tension, she added, “Ten-minute naps can accomplish worlds. If you know how to space them.”
“If you know,” he echoed.
She couldn’t linger and debate. Washen had intelligence reports begging to be digested, half a dozen mood campaigns to launch, and a huge proposal from Aasleen to study. At her prompting, the chief engineer had devised the means to make the ship’s enormous rocket nozzles into telescopes. Thin mirrors would be applied after every burn, focusing mechanisms eating the starlight and correcting the clumsy reflections until they could be trusted. As many as five engines might be employed, each vast and capable of being tilted at relatively steep angles, and working with the existing telescope fields on the
ship’s trailing face, they could theoretically peer farther into the cosmos than any other array in the galaxy.
“Of course every time we fire an engine, we’ll have to rebuild the telescope,” Aasleen mentioned, skepticism mixed with the occasional damning figures. “And we don’t dare try this now, since we’re shooting off little burns every few weeks.”
The tunnel through the Inkwell was open and empty. The polyponds weren’t speaking to them anymore, but the forward-facing telescopes saw a clean, well-scrubbed path through the center of the Satin Sack. Little burns meant they were on course. The barest nudge today meant falling down the middle of the path, not glancing against any edge.
“But still,” the chief engineer continued. “This has me wondering. Why invest time and energy to look back at where we’ve been? What are you thinking? That someone is following us?”
“I have no idea.”
“But you do have an idea,” Aasleen pressed. “I lived on Marrow. For a good long while, that was my home. And, Madam First Chair, I know exactly what this obsession is about.”
“Whatever is true,” Washen began. Then her voice lost its way, and her eyes closed, and after a moment, she asked, “Wouldn’t you want to know what’s out there?”
“No, I don’t think I would like to know.”
The women shared a grim little laugh. Then the meeting ended with an obligatory discussion about the polyponds and motives. Aasleen offered one fresh and incredible suggestion, but before Washen could take it seriously, she dismissed her proposal for a hundred thorough reasons. Then she repeated what had always been the official hypothesis. “We’re talking about children,” she reminded Washen. “The buds just want a close look at us. That’s all.”
Except the Blue World, and the several of the other full-grown polyponds, were climbing after them, too.
“Old doesn’t mean incurious,” the chief engineer joked.
“Yes it does,” Washen joked, then sent her friend away, skipping her next scheduled sleep, preferring to use her scarce time to study a tangle of social projections and poll results and crew reports and rumor studies. Then it was suddenly tomorrow, and one of her nagging nexuses reminded her of another key appointment. She couldn’t be late. In a tiny swift and unmarked cap-car, she arrived at the correct apartment in a matter of minutes. The door greeted her warmly and explained that her son had been detained. “But breakfast is ready in the Marrow room,” the voice added. “Locke says to go and make yourself comfortable.”
She went there, but comfort was nearly impossible.
Alone, she sat at the edge of the lava field. To re-create the life cycles of the Marrow creatures, Locke had flooded one corner of the big room with liquid iron. The succession process had barely begun. Beneath a dim gray sky, Washen claimed a simple chair woven from fire-weeds and jeweled beetles, and she ate most of a hammerwing while her mind leaped from nexus to nexus, dealing with a hundred little jobs before a voice—a distinct and quite familiar voice—declared, “Here is something that you need to understand, dear.”
Washen looked up to find a dead woman standing before her.
The narrow face grinned, enjoying her surprise. Then Miocene stepped closer, looking like a suffering woman or an exceptionally vigorous ghost. Her flesh was gray and smoky. Her uniform was composed of Marrow materials, lacking the brilliance and endurance of Washen’s clothes. The only First Chairs that the ship had ever known stared at one another in the evening glare, and the standing woman said, “I worked hard, always. Everything I earned came from my strength and my deep determination, and all that endless work.”
The sitting woman flinched.
“Since you’re the best at a thousand jobs,” the dead woman continued, “you are smart to do them all for yourself.”
Washen struggled to stand.
“What do you think?” Miocene continued. “That I was an insufferable bitch through the whole of my life?”
Washen woke, finding a hand upon her shoulder and Locke saying, “Sorry. I let you sleep, and our time’s done.”
“What time is it?” she muttered, momentarily confused.
Through a hundred nexuses, she learned the name of this particular moment. And then the moment was gone, left behind and lost, and that’s when she finally talked herself into taking the vacation.
IT WASN’T ENOUGH just to silence her buried nexuses. Pamir had agreed, and with a calm insistence, he added, “You also need to be somewhere without people. Without crew or passengers, or me.”
“I’ll miss you,” she mentioned.
“We barely see each other,” he reminded her, just enough of a barb in the words to make his disgust plain. Then he proposed an itinerary for an unusual, one-of-a-kind holiday.
“The Grand Ocean,” he began.
An image took hold of her. She laughed, interrupting him to ask, “Why not just a little pond in an unlit room? Wouldn’t that be just as dark and alone?”
“We’ll light the sky for you,” he promised.
The waste made her queasy.
“And while the cavern’s lit,” he continued, “Osmium’s troops can search for secret colonies and illegal adventurers. So there is a good purpose in this business, other than keeping the ship’s head sane.”
The Grand Ocean was not a single cavern; it was a vast array of linked caves that happened to lie at the same depths inside the ship. The first humans mapped the great volume, and then flooded it with melted ice from a hundred
higher caverns. The Ocean’s surface area was larger than the Earth’s. Reaching more than a hundred kilometers deep, it was the biggest body of water on the ship and bigger than most of the galaxy’s other oceans, too. And it was empty. Except for a tiny quantity of dissolved minerals and salt, it was nothing but pure, cold, and unlit water, kept in reserve for the homeward leg of the ship’s voyage. Except for the rare autotrophic bacteria, nothing lived in this realm. Just with her presence, Washen had nearly doubled the bioload of the entire sea.
She hadn’t swum so much since childhood. Every morning for the last thirty mornings, Washen had practiced a variety of strokes, muscles gradually relearning the rhythm and feel of pressing against the water. Then the swimming became unconscious, and she could push her ageless long body to its limits, steady hard strokes eventually making her gasp and giggle.
Thinking about the Great Ship wasn’t allowed—at least not until the long swim home. And when she did think of large subjects, she kept her mind fixed on the broadest matters, no little jobs or urgent timetables nipping at her now. In that seemingly infinite span of water, Washen kept finding a sweet comfort: the ship’s size and age, and the unimaginable distances that it had crossed, always on its own. She loved this glorious orb of high technology and simple stone, and how could she not feel a little foolish to worry about threats, real or imagined?
Her schooner called to her with the only nexus she allowed herself—a simple navigational beacon whispering, “This way, yes. This way.” Back on her temporary home, she prepared a huge meal and ate all of it, and she raised the sails with her increasingly strong back and arms. The artificial sun had darkened her limbs. A steady wind always rose by midday, carrying her for another few kilometers before the sun dropped and darkness descended. But it wasn’t the perfect black that ruled here normally. Pamir had painted a starscape both
odd and familiar. Without nexuses, Washen couldn’t feel sure about its origins; but when she looked at the smears of light and occasional feeble star, she realized that she was gazing at the galaxies of the Virgo cluster—a vast realm of suns and unnamed worlds, gas clouds and raw energy that might, in many millions of years, meet the Great Ship.
Alone, Washen would hold long, elaborate conversations with herself, enjoying the sound of her own voice and the quick well-rested thoughts that slipped between the words.
She slept hard for six or even seven hours at a stretch—the longest uninterrupted sleep she could remember—and she woke rested, alert eyes gazing across an emptiness of quiet water that couldn’t seem more lovely.
On the thirty-first morning, she swam again.
At first, Washen lay on her back, one arm after the other reaching over her head, swift hands cutting into the water and yanking hard. When she felt warm and loose, she turned over onto her belly, and like a happy porpoise, she did a rolling stroke, browned arms reaching together as the body bent like a wave, every muscle working with an instinctive grace, pointed feet delivering the final hard kick.
It was an expensive stroke for a human body. Eventually she collapsed into a simple crawl, from time to time pausing, looking back over her shoulder. The horizons were far away, but her boat was a little thing, and she had only good human eyes to look across all that bright smooth water.
Once the masts and folded sails had vanished, she turned for home.
With a simple patient breaststroke, Washen made the return voyage, her tanned face held out of the water and her long black hair streaming behind her. Quietly, she talked to herself. About nothing, usually. She spoke to
dead people and lost lovers, and sometimes she imagined the grandchildren whom she had left down below, fighting for their lives on Marrow.