The Greatship (11 page)

Starships are always exhausted on arrival, their fuel spent, every system crying out for repairs.  And a good portion of the ships are damaged during the voyage, some mangled to the point where one more insult will collapse them to dust and bone.  This is because the slowest vessel has to move fast enough to match velocities with the Great Ship, and the Great Ship plunges forward at one-third light speed.  This is because the emptiest space is not empty.  A hundred thousand kilometers of vacuum must be crossed every second.  Place one cold stone on that path, or a lump of ice or someone’s misplaced tooth, and the collision will transform that fleck of nothing into a fierce plasmatic bomb.  Hyperfiber is formidable.  Every starship wears at least a slathering of hyperfiber as armor.  But quality varies and there are strict limits to its depth and mass, and even the premier grades will evaporate under a billion degree torch.  Frailty is a fundamental truth of star travel.  Passengers and crew can be ageless, but every sane traveler recognizes that one anonymous chunk of stone can strike without warning, erasing the Forever.

The typical starship is spun from high technologies that predate most of the species presently using them.  But these vessels struggle to move significantly faster than the Great Ship, which is why the captains fire up the engines on occasion, tweaking their velocity just enough that decades later the Ship will fall under the spell of a muscular, compliant gravity well.  Approached at the proper angle, at the perfect distance, a smoldering white dwarf star will throw the giant vessel into a fresh, profitable vector.  Like a serpent happily wandering in tall grass, the Great Ship weaves and wobbles its way through the best portions of the galaxy, and if a sluggish transport is clever, following an exceptionally straight line, it will catch its goal before too many centuries pass.

But certain passengers demand a superior machine.  Great wealth can buy long, arrow-shaped wonders called streakships.  Streakships are tipped with the best hyperfiber and powered by supercharged engines, using fusion fire and antimatter spiking and strangelet tricks and hyperfiber endowments to shove against the possible, driving them across dangerous skies at better than two-thirds light speed.

Streakships and their slow cousins don’t arrive at the Ship every day.  But transports are always approaching, hundreds of them scattered across the light years and all begging for landing instructions—a steady rain of machines and old souls that is coming faster as the galaxy begins to appreciate the marvel that is snaking its way through the civilized realms.

The Great Ship is like nothing else.

Reliable and comfortable, luxurious and deliciously strange, it is a supremely safe mode of travel:  Gravel and snowballs are nothing to its ocean-deep armor.  Mountains and comets are trivial hazards.  One fat asteroid could slam down on the Ship’s bow, but the passengers would have no reason for fear.  Maybe their luxurious homes would shake for a moment.  Maybe they would awaken from some luscious dream.  But afterwards the immortal travelers would journey to the hull—if permitted—standing on the lip of a broad crater that soon would be filled and patched, and gone.

Even little ships will be greeted with pageantry.  Powerful aliens deserve spectacle and elaborate diplomatic receptions.  Each new species is met by captains who have worked hard to understand them.  This is critical.  The average captain makes plans and more plans, making ready for the most unlikely guests.  Parades and parties and elaborate banquets will stretch on for days and months, unless the newcomers prefer to be ignored, or they appreciate insults, or they cannot find any comfort unless one exceptional captain climbs inside a cavernous mouth, the ceremony demanding that she will be swallowed up whole and then ceremonially vomited back out again.

And sometimes, too many times, an approaching ship vanishes.

Disasters don’t happen every day.  A full year can pass between tragedies.  But a big space liner might fail to report its progress and nothing more is heard, or an emergency beacon will flicker to life and then fall silent again, marking the death of a streakship.

There are ceremonies for every arriving ship and ceremonies to honor the dead as well.

Every approaching ship is logged on its first day, its passengers and crewmembers named and known.  And there are a few captains who do little with their days but plan for every ship’s death.  Just in case.  They compose speeches meant to honor lost souls, honoring all as friends, and they wrap their words around rituals designed to satisfy the species involved.  Then all the surviving ships are warned about the loss and its location.  Debris fields have formed, and they will keep charging ahead at some fraction of light-speed, spreading out and slashing at everything in their way.  And the captains always share elaborate maps showing where the danger is greatest, and they always wish their future passengers safe travel, but even when odds are poor, they never tell anyone, “Change your course.  Please, steer clear of us and save yourselves, please.”

She should have been born with a fuller, richer name—a loving name bestowed by helplessly adoring parents—and she should have grown up happy and smug inside their loving grasp.  Blessed with her native talents as well as the inherited wealth, all things good would have been inevitable.  Life would have brought long years of trusted pleasure punctuated by tame adventures and the occasional romance, and as often happens in these cases, the daughter would have eventually fallen short of her family’s lofty ambitions.  But that wouldn’t have prevented her from becoming a delightfully ordinary soul, raising her own little family or perhaps a series of families; and as the aeons mounted, that happy creature would have achieved the heavenly state that comes to the typical immortal:  Entire centuries of existence would quietly escape her grasp, her mind reaching its natural limits, her snug and ordinary and generally untested existence shared with faces very much like hers and stories as eternal and as bland as her own little self.

But for a knob of black ice, that would have been the child’s destiny.  Her fate.  She should have become someone else or she never would have been in the first place.  But if you are one of the rare souls who both understand and believe as the Tila understand and believe, then you have no choice but accept the premise that your existence is a single thread, insubstantial to the brink of being unreal, and every thread is woven together by a universe of shadow and possibility, and buried among all those infinitely forgettable women is a strange and precious rope of pain and gold known as Mere.

* * *

Mere’s parents were the wealthiest citizens on a distant colony world.  Their piece of the universe wasn’t as developed as some, and the available streakships were small and relatively short-ranged.  But the Great Ship and its long voyage around the galaxy were too much of a temptation.  How could they not take part in history?  Husband and wife purchased the five best ships, then chopped them apart and cobbled together the finest pieces.  In the end, there was no more powerful human-built vessel anywhere.  The new streakship had efficient engines and redundant life-support systems, a talent for self-repair and just enough cabin space to house two people along with an entourage of twenty-three giddy friends.  A slab of high-grade hyperfiber rode ahead of the bow and a few lasers clung to the armor, primed to attack every hazard.  But the Great Ship was nearly out of range by then.  Velocity was the critical need, and hard decisions had to be made.  Studying projections of risk laid over time, the couple massaged the numbers until the numbers told a comforting story, and then they made themselves laugh, saying, “We’ll just have to drag a little sweet luck along with us, and what is the mass of luck?  Nothing, that’s all.”

Accelerating to a fat fraction of light-speed, they swung close to a quiescent black hole, and the AI pilot found the perfect course that would intercept the Great Ship in another nine hundred years, ship-time.  Enough fuel was in reserve to kill half of their terrific momentum, allowing them to match velocities with their target and then dock.  There was little margin for maneuvering, but for the next six hundred years, maneuvering didn’t matter.  The conscientious AI continually updated its charts, and then one morning, using a voice that was always sober and small, it announced they would soon pass through the outskirts of a diffuse and poorly charted Oort cloud.

By then, every woman and two of the men were pregnant.  It was a colonist’s tradition:  Life begun as a promise to the future while every blastula was kept in arrested development, waiting more spacious quarters onboard the Great Ship.  With everything at risk, their ship dove into the cloud.  There was a series of little impacts and endurable damage.  The armor was left pocked but structurally intact.  Then they emerged from the cloud, slicing through a sharper vacuum, and the ship began repairing holes and refurbishing its exhausted lasers.

No warning was given.  In the middle of spoken sentences, in the midst of pleasant little dreams, life ended with a flash of plasma and an abrupt, endless silence.

A knob of black cometary ice slipped through a temporary blind spot in the early-warning system, and at two-thirds the speed of light, it plowed through the armor and into the unprotected body of the ship.

Modern humans have tenacious, enduring bodies.  But certain kinds of mayhem always prove fatal.

Every passenger was shattered and boiled and dead.

Only the ship survived, and only in the most limited sense.  The AI was barely able to recover its identity and a few hints about its ultimate purpose.  With insufficient resources, it managed to identify a single piece of still-viable tissue.  A crude cabin was hurriedly fashioned out of hyperfiber shards and diamond panes, sealing the tiny volume and filling it with an atmosphere that could be breathed.  Then the battered remains of the last autodoc realized that what was saved was the scorched chest and belly and upper left leg of a once wealthy woman.  Everything else was stripped away, including her head and proud mind.  The only complete nervous system was inside the corpse’s uterus:  A glistening bag of totipotent cells and salty water little bigger than a tear.

Unburdened by clear instructions, the AI did its imperfect best.  It retrofitted the tiny cabin before coaxing the blastula to grow.  What remained of the mother was nursed back into a state of mindless good health—in part to give the unborn child a functioning womb, but also because if the child survived, the living corpse would provide a storehouse of edible organics.  As for the rest of the ship:  Every communication system was shattered or stripped away, leaving the ship without any voice that could beg for help and no ears to hear its pleas left unanswered.  Engines and fuel tanks had survived, but every control system was trash.  There was no way to change course much less steer towards any safe port.  Repairs could be made, but slowly, and since protecting the blastula was the central, the laser array and battered armor had to be rebuilt before any over system.  And what would happen next?  Using its tattered, very narrow intellect, the AI imagined an arrow-straight trajectory, leaving the local arm of stars and civilizations, passing closer to the galaxy’s core before climbing into the next great arm—a bright wilderness where many thousands of years from now, according to a very tentative flight plan, the Great Ship was scheduled to pass.

Mere was born inside a warm, nourishing night.  Her body came blessed with a multitude of genetic materials—old-style DNA, plus data reservoirs considerably more enduring and adaptable.  Faint blue-shifted starlight was the only illumination.  Her only companions were the heart-sized autodoc, her cold diamond walls, and the filthy food and several tiny waste ports.  Growth was achingly slow, the ship recycling just enough matter to keep her uncomfortably alive.  On occasion, it tried to speak to the child, moving the autodoc in a suggestive fashion or venting stale air to mimic a human voice.  But the girl gave no sign of noticing, and other jobs were more important.  Critical systems had been destroyed, and to keep both the ship and its holy cargo alive, the remaining systems were reconfigured every few moments.  Relentless work and constant inspiration maintained an extraordinarily marginal existence.  In one sense, the passenger was wrapped inside a vastness of pure nonexistence.  She should never have been born.  If a single fleck of shrapnel had followed a modestly different trajectory, she would have died.  That she survived any given day was a minor miracle.  The battered ship was far more vulnerable to impacts than ever, and when the little blows didn’t kill the passenger, they were causing new damage, steadily eroding a deep poverty of bad, pathetic choices.

Happiness was quite impossible.

The girl’s life lay cloaked in ethical ugliness.  Trapped inside a suffocating blackness, she saw nothing but the slowly changing stars, and there was nothing to hear but the whine of air and her own miserable wailing.  Only a monster or some pathological optimist would allow any organism to endure such relentless suffering.  Perhaps both qualities played into the AI’s nature.  But it was motivated mostly by helpless—an injured machine controlled by a knot of simple, compelling instructions, no choice left but to do everything, by whatever means, to carry out its sole purpose.

Mere was born alone, and she lived that way for a very long while.

Ten thousand and eleven years can feel like forever—even if you are a tough, enduring little immortal.

Twin suns kissed as they danced around their mutual center of gravity.

Theirs was an unusual astronomical relationship, but not entirely rare.  Many stars were born close together, and as their orbits decayed, their atmospheres began to touch—a precursor to another, more intimate embrace.

Four planets removed from the suns was a living world—yellow-green land and brown land and an ocean of soft blue partly shrouded in clouds.  After centuries of relentless preparation, the AI could imagine no better option.  Slide past the twins suns, and it would survive.  But its lone passenger—a tiny unresponsive and mostly silent wisp of tissue and bone—would soon perish.  The ad hoc recycling system was bleeding organics and air.  Any moment, some crumb of ice might shatter a critical diamond pane or an irreplaceable wisp of machinery would fail.  The best choice was to finish the voyage here, by whatever means, and perhaps enough luck was being dragged along to finally save the final passenger.

Blasted by ice and dust, the ship had eroded away quite a lot, and as a consequence, it was significantly less massive.  With ad hoc controls, the AI managed to turn and fire the old engines, exhausting its fuel and draining away most of its velocity.  But to kill the rest of the nagging momentum required a second brake.  The pilot had wrestled with that problem for the last thousand years.  What it had achieved unwrapped itself now:  A portion of the hyperfiber armor laboriously rewoven, creating a low-mass and almost perfect mirror that was larger than most worlds, pulled taut by the light of two stars.

One day later, the light-sail was set loose and the attached cabin was jettisoned.

Luck as much as calculation provided the near-perfect trajectory.  The passenger and her little home dove through the upper atmosphere—a glancing aerobraking blow that slowed her further—and then she swung out and swung back again, dropping onto the world’s largest continent.

Moments before plunging past the twin suns, the AI assured itself that it had done its duty to the best of its ability.  Looking back along a life well-lived, it nourished a cool, measured pride.  And then for just a moment, it wondered what would happen to the tiny woman now:  A tiny soul ten thousand years old, yet helplessly newborn.  A human creature without name or history, lacking tools or the simplest training, trapped many thousands of light-years from every good human home.

* * *

The big male gypsum wing circled the burning forest, hunting for wounded meat.  The still-warm wreck of the cabin lay where the wildfire began.  Diamond panes glittered, drawing the eyes.  The gypsum wing dropped and landed, one clawed foot clinging to the shattered hull until the residual heat was too much to bear, and then the other foot would take over the duty.  That was why the great creature rocked slowly as he perched above the body.  With deep black eyes, he studied burnt flesh and the oddly shaped limbs, some curious element inside him wondering what kind of creature this might be.  Surely not like any he had ever seen, or imagined.  It took courage to move closer, and as soon as he found the courage—as he set himself in a position to eat—the corpse jerked and made an abrupt sound, wet and sloppy.

His legs gave a start.

And the corpse jerked again, harder this time, the blackened skin splitting lengthwise, the fresh gash exposing what looked like a shockingly bright and smooth strip of newborn skin.

The gypsum wing returned to his perch and waited.

By nightfall, the corpse had been replaced with a thin and decidedly fragile body.  The strange narrow face was drawn around big and sad and exceptionally empty eyes.  There were no claws evident, no long teeth, and the gypsum wing was pleased.  As soon as the creature was well enough to sit up, he flapped his wings once and leaped, landing on the bare head, grabbing hold and flapping again to spin his body, deftly shattering the slender neck.  Then he dropped to the ground and jabbed at the big eyes, expecting a delicacy as a reward for his patience, but instead tasting something rancid—wet tissue laced with odd proteins and pseudoproteins, creating a toxic mouthful.

He spit up the poison and flew off.

Emergency genes continued working with the injured body, making inventories of the available tissues while organizing a hundred separate repairs.  When she had eyes again, it was night.  When she opened her eyes, she was on her back, gazing up at a wilderness of stars—a familiar sight, yet not.  The lingering haze of smoke softened the starlight.  Ten millennia of slow, placid change left her unsuited for this sort of novelty.  She breathed, smelling smoke.  She screamed, a low ugly wail bubbling out of her.  Lifting her arms, tiny half-finished hands reached for the eternal walls of her cabin.  But there were no walls.  And just as strange, some crushing force pulled at her hands and the stick-thin arms, forcing them to collapse on top of her.

She screamed until she was exhausted.

Then for a brief while, she slept.

When she opened her new eyes, an enormous face was staring down at her.  She had never seen a face before or even imagined the existence of another, but she had touched her own features countless times, which made her a little less fearful.  Bright black eyes and a wide mouth lay in the midst of a huge oval.  The mouth opened, revealing a furry gray tongue and a wealth of orange teeth.  Once more, she lifted her arms, fighting their titanic weight while trying to touch the staring eyes.  Fingers stretched until they were agonizingly close.  And then a polished stone club was driven down into her face and her frail neck, and for the third time in less than a day, she was dead.

* * *

She was alive.

Death was sweeter, she sensed.  Death existed free of time and pain and every fear.  Alive again, her little limbs were too heavy to move, and she was surrounded by a treacherous wealth of sensations.  She saw oval faces and the muscled bodies attached to the faces and simple woven furniture, and there were walls of bleached wood fixed against a wall of vertical rock, and through a long open window she saw a patch of sky wrapped around a pair of brilliant suns, each clinging desperately to the other.  Winged worms were singing, and the nut groves were singing, and the wind soughed through branches and the open window.  With every breath, she nearly choked on the smell of fires burning inside stone stoves and meals cooking and the lingering stink of happy farts.  With every twitch, she felt the prickly brush piled beneath her, and the air was constantly moving across her bare flesh, and without pause, the gravity of an entire world pushed down on her laboring chest, trying to crush her sketch-like bones.

The Tila studied her, and more importantly, they studied the glimmering gray aura that surrounded her.  The grayness told them as much as the creature herself could.  She was small in the universe, and unlikely, but where she existed, she carried the mark of something that was plainly exceptional.

After a while, they began to discuss what they could see, voices soft and quick, whistles mixed with guttural syllables, their speculations making no sense to the tiny and exceptionally ill god.

No matter how weak it appeared, the creature had to be a god.  Everyone had seen the mirrored sail filling the night sky, and that sign was followed by her plunge into the forest, igniting a blaze that burned two villages and killed hundreds of Tila.  Yet she had survived both the fire and a determined blow from a blessed club, and how could she be anything but divine?

The local truth-seeker was curious and pragmatic.  Using a sharp obsidian knife, she sliced off one of the god’s big toes, and with the other village leaders watching over her shoulder, she studied the new toe erupting from the fresh stub.  Then wielding a hard flint axe and most of her strength, she removed the left leg beneath the knee, and again, with an intoxicating astonishment, she watched the very peculiar blood clot, turning from red into black before the thick scab began to sprout new tissues, and over the next half-day, the crippled god managed to grow a new shin and ankle and foot nearly equal to what lay dead on the ground beside it.

Stealing flesh made the tiny god grow smaller.  The truth-seeker made careful measurements.  She dissected the severed leg, and then with strong people holding onto the god, she cut into the living right hand and reborn leg, studying the intricate bones and the soggy, quick-healing tissues wrapped around them.  Both eyes and simple mathematics described what was happening:  The god was reconstituting herself from whatever remained of her body.  If they kept carving away at the creature, she would eventually perish, or more likely, shrivel to a state where she was too small to be seen.

Some answers were obvious.

At one time, this entity must have been enormous.  Thinking of the vast light-sail, the truth-seeker described a creature as vast as their world and powerful beyond measure.  But judging by her horrible fate, she must have angered the other gods.  What lay here with the Tila was just a shard of the original deity.  Yet perhaps they could make her large again.  The truth-seeker saw the possibility, and despite the worries of others ordered the god’s severed leg to be fed to her.  A raw wet meal was pushed into the minuscule mouth, one bite at a time.  And as predicted, every swallow led to a matching enlargement of her entire body—minus the demands of energy and the little inefficiencies of metabolism.

“Now let us feed her our own good food,” the truth-seeker demanded.  “Let’s see if we can stack muscle on this soul.”

But there were unsuspected difficulties.  The native amino acids were unique to their world.  The Tila succeeded only in making the nameless god violently sick.  But after a few days, they learned what treats wouldn’t cause her to vomit.  They used the juices of certain fruits and clean water and small doses of nuts that had been crushed and partly chewed by their own mouths.  Then they learned to season the meals with ash from old fires and let her suck on orange bones and a powerful lodestone.

A few weeks later, with much fanfare, the god had her first normal bowel movement.  Then the Tila did what was natural for them:  They fed the little god her own wastes.  A second passage through the intestines could be a good thing for vegetarians.  But not for a god, it seemed.  The results weren’t at all encouraging, and after long meetings and several important dreams, it was decided to set each day’s feces in the temple for the public to observe and admire.

As promised, the god began to grow, if rather slowly.  Plans were made.  One village would never provide enough food to make her the size of a world, but perhaps she could gain the bulk of a respectable hill.  Yet that meant food had to be brought from all lands.  With this in mind, emissaries were dispatched to neighboring villages and far flung tribes, inviting diplomats and traders to visit.  Every important visitor was shown the god.  Some were impressed, others simply puzzled.  There were questions about how fast the god was growing.  With a quiet voice, the truth-seeker admitted that changes were rare.  For whatever reason, no matter how much she was fed, this particular god stubbornly refused to become any larger.

Hearing that sad assessment, one foreign dignitary gave the Tilan equivalent of a shrug.  And with a voice that couldn’t have sounded more condescending, he announced, “This is the merest sort of god.”

He said, “Really, she is scarcely worth anyone’s trouble.”