Mallow (5 page)

Since the Phoenixes, no one had tried to invade the Great Ship. But in a voyage that would circumnavigate the Milky Way, it didn't pay to throw away any tool that might, in some unexpected way, help the Master's hand.

What if the unforeseen had happened?

Miocene was sitting in a tiny cafe, safely disguised, when she noticed a dozen black-clad security officers interviewing the local foot traffic. A standard business in this kind of district, yes. But it made her wonder about the other captains. How many besides her had been called away by the Master's explicit orders?

There was a temptation to use secret tools to count the missing. But her probes might be noticed and tracked, and ignorance was infinitely more seemly than being caught in someone's clumsy net-Half of the security team was working its way toward the cafe. They were perhaps two hundred meters away when a dose of paranoia took hold of Miocene. She left her sausage cakes and iced coffee unfinished, but she rose to her feet with a casual grace, then chose the most anonymous direction before slipping out of sight. In this district, every avenue was a touch less than a hundred kilometers long, and it was exactly one thousandth as wide and one ten-thousandth as tall. There were a thousand identical avenues set
carved into the local rock, aligned with a clean geometric precision.

The original guess, formulated by the first survey teams, was that these geometric relationships were fat with meaning. The ship's builders were at least as clever as the people who had discovered it, and an accurate map of every room and avenue, fuel tank and rocket nozzle, would reveal an ocean of mathematical clues. Perhaps a genuine language could be built from all those intricate proportions. In simple terms, the Great Ship supplied its own explanation
...
if only enough data and enough cunning could be applied to this wondrous and slippery problem . . .

Miocene had always doubted that logic.

Cleverness was an uneven talent at best. Imagination, she believed, was something that would fool its owner, luring her to waste her time chasing every wishful possibility. That's why she long ago predicted that no AI and no human, or any other sentient soul, would find anything particularly important in the ship's architecture. This was one of those circumstances where the boring and the unclever provided the best answers. These thousand avenues, plus every other hollow place within the Great Ship, had been chiseled out by sterile machines following equally sterile plans. That woul
d explain the repetitive, insect-l
ike patterns.And more importantly, it offered a telling clue as to why no expedition had ever found the tiniest trace of
left-behind life.

Not one alien corpse.

Or unexplained microbe.

Or even a molecular knot that was once someone's once-dear protein.

Where imagination saw mystery, Miocene saw simplicity. Obviously, this ship was built not to travel between the stars, but to cross from galaxy to galaxy. Its designers, whoever they were, had employed sterile mach
ines at every stage of construct
ion. Then for reasons unknown, the builders never stepped on board their creation.

The easy guess was that some natural catastrophe had struck. Most likely it would be something vast, and horrific.

When the universe was young, and quite a bit denser, galaxies had the nagging habit of exploding. Seyferts. Quasars. Cascading series of supernovae. All were symptoms of a dangerous youth. There was ample evidence showing the Milky Way had a similar history. Life born in its youth was extinguished by the amoral pulse of gamma radiation: once, twice, or a thousand times.

What the dullest, most credible experts proposed — and what Miocene believed today without question - was that an intelligent species arose in the past, in some peaceful and extremely remote backwater.The species predicted the coming storm. A crash program of self-replicating machines were sent- to a jovian-class world, probably a world drifting inside a dusty nebula, far from any sun. Following simple, buglike programs, that world was rebuilt. Its hydrogen atmosphere was burned to give it velocity. Slingshot flybys added still more. But by the time it came streaking past the homeworld, there was no one left to save. Empty avenues waited for humanoids already killed by a Seyfert's fire, and for the next several billion years, the ship waited, empty and patient, plying a blind course between galaxies, slowly degrading but managing to endure until it reached the Milky Way.

No one had ever indentified the parent galaxy.

Looking back along the ship's trajectory, one couldn't find so much as a dim dwarf galaxy that seemed a likely mother.

And there was also that nagging issue about the ship's age.

Five billion years was the official verdict. A huge span, but comfortably huge, demanding no great rewriting of the universe's early history.

The trouble was that the parent rock could be older than five billion years. Before it solidified, the granite and basalt were doctored. The telltale radionuclides had been harvested by some hyper
-
efficient means. To mask its age, or for some less conspiratorial purpose? Either way, it left the rock cold and hard, and it was just one means by which the ship's builders had left behind a hard puzzle for today's scientists.

Earnest, imaginative people, filled with cocktails and braver drugs, liked to claim that eight or ten or twelve billion years was a more likely age for the ship. And twelve billion years wasn't the upper estimate, either. Enjoying the imponderables, they argued that this derelict had come from that fine distant sprinkle of little blue galaxies which covered the most distant skies, all born at the beginnings of time. How humanoids, or anything, could have evolved so early was left unanswered. But since mystery was their passion, they found this entire business more intoxicating than any drink.

Miocene didn't enjoy vast questions or ludicrous answers, particularly when neither were necessary.

She saw a simpler explanation: the ship was a youthful five billion years old, and somewhere between galaxies, probably soon after its birth, its course was deflected by an invisible black hole or some unmapped dark-matter mass. That explained why it was an orphan in every sense.

Thinking otherwise was to think too much and to do it in the wrong places.

This had been an orphan and a derelict, and then human beings had found it.

And now it was theirs; was Miocenes, at least in part.

Walking that long, long avenue, Miocene smelled a hundred worlds. Humanoids and aliens of other shapes were enjoying the false blue sky, and most were enjoying one another. She heard words and songs and sniffed the potent musks of pheromonal gossips, and occasionally, as the mood struck, she would wander into one of the tiny shops, browsing like anyone with nowhere else to be.

No, she wasn't as imaginative as some people.

In most circumstances, Miocene would make that confession, without hesitation. Yet in the next breath, always, she would add that she had imagination enough to revel in the ship's majesty, and its cosmopolitan appeal, and sufficient creativity to help rule this very original and precious society.

Nursing a well-deserved pride, she worked her way along the avenue.

Alien wares outnumbered human wares, even in human shops. Entering a likely doorway, she could always expect to be noticed. And when she wasn't, Miocene would recall that she wasn't a Submaster now. Out of uniform, free of responsibilities, she possessed an anonymity that seemed an endless surprise.

From a spidery machine intelligence, she purchased an encyclopedia written entirely about the Great Ship.

In a tiny grocery, she bought a harum-scarum's sin-fruit, its proteins and odd sugars reconfigured for human stomachs.

Eating one purchase, she skimmed over the other. There was a slender hundred-tetrabit entry about
Miocene. She read portions, smiling more than not, making mental notes about half a hundred points that the author needed to correct.

From a monkeyish Yik Yik clerk, she bought a mild drug.

Then later, reconsidering this indulgence, she sold it at a profit to a human male who referred to her as 'lady' and left her with the advice, 'You look tired. Get laid, then get yourself some good sleep*

He seemed to be offering a service, which she chose to ignore.

Afterward, Miocene spotted another security team. Humans and harum-scarums were disguised as passengers. But what's more obvious than a police officer on the job? No passenger is that watchful, ever. Yet they never saw Miocene as she slipped into one of the very narrow, very dark passageways leading to a parallel avenue.

Invisible demon doors made the skin tingle. She strolled into a colder climate, the air having a delicious mountain thinness about it.

Another spidery machine was renting dreams and the rooms to use them. Miocene took one of each, then slept for twelve straight hours, dreaming about the ship when it was first discovered, and empty, her dream-self strolling along these darkened avenues, her eyes first to see the polished green olivine walls that would soon be laced with rooms that would become, in a geologic blink, thriving shops.

It was the rented dream, at first.

Then Miocene's own memories were building images. How many tunnels and rooms had she seen first? No one knew. Not the encyclopedia's author, or even Miocene herself. And that brought a lingering joy that made her smile the next morning while she sipped icy coffee and ate spiced blubbercakes for breakfast.

Her secret orders had included a destination. And a loose timetable.

Presumably her questions would be answered. But sometimes, particularly in quiedy happy moments like now, Miocene wondered if this business was nothing but the Master's clever way of giving her favorite Submaster a good rest.

A vacation: that was a simple, boring explanation.

And compelling.

Of course this was a vacation!

Miocene rose to her feet, a thousand faces in easy view, and she began to hunt for yesterday's boy, reasoning:

My first vacation after a thousand centuries of devotion.

Why not . . . ?

Three

I
t was an
expensive vegetable, particularly when you paid for quality. But Washen knew her audience. She was certain that her old friend would appreciate the voices rising from the plant's many mouths, the voices filling the empty, almost darkened cavity with a serene, deepest-space melody that his particular ear would find lovely. Her friend wasn't here just now.

But wherever he was, he would hear the llano-vibra singing about blackness and emptiness and the glorious cold between the galaxies.

In anoth
er life, her friend raised the ll
ano-vibra as a hobby, mastering the species' complex genetics, twisting its elaborate genes to where it sang melodies even more serene than this specimen, and on the open market, infinitely more precious.

But he would never sell his companions.

Then his life and peculiar interests moved in even stranger directions, and he lost interest in his once precious hobby.

Eventually, he lost his post as a rising captain.

Crimes had occurred. Charges were filed. Using the escape route that the Master herself ordered her captains to create, the man went into hiding. The only contact Washen had had with him since was a cryptic note telling her that if she ever wanted to reach him, she should plant a llano-vibra in this empty and very dark corner of the ship, then plant herself in a comfortable seat in the nearest human tavern.

Which for the next two days was what Washen did.

The tavern was dark and mostl
y empty, but considerably warmer than deep space. She sat in back, in a booth carved from a single petrified oak, and she drank an ocean of various cocktails, thinking about everything, and nothing, finally concluding that it was too much to expect anyone to remember you after this many centuries . . . deciding that it was time to get on with her mission . . .

A man appeared, squinting into the cheap darkness, and Washen knew it was him. He was large, just as she remembered. The face was changed, but it was still pleasantly homely. His bearing had lost that captainly arrogance, and he wore civilian clothes with an ease that Washen could only envy. Who knew what name he went by? But ignoring the risks, she cupped a hand against her mouth, shouting across the gloom:

'Hey, Pamir! Over here!'

They had been
lovers, but they weren't well suited as a couple. Captains rarely were. The man was headstrong and confident, and he was smart, and in mo
st circumstances, he was perfectl
y self-reliant. Yet those qualities that made him a successful captain had also weighed down his career. Pamir had no skill or interest in saying the proper words or giving little gifts to people in higher stations. If it hadn't been for his considerable talent for being right more than most, the Master would have cut off his professional legs at the beginning, leaving him with a minimal rank and next to no responsibilities. Which might have been for the best, as it turned out.

The big man sat and ordered a pain-of-tears, and staring at the homely face, Washen replayed his tragic fall.