The Greatship (15 page)

“You made the right choice three times, madam.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“In thanks,” he said.  “And because you guessed correctly, madam, we can give you this gift of thanks.”

Against Mere’s wishes, they set her onboard the refurbished starship.  Ignoring every argument, they showed her how to use the simple controls they had grafted into the remaining steering mechanisms.  A minimal shield of battered hyperfiber was bolstered with aerogel and low-grade lasers.  The engines had worked well enough on separate trials, and with the tanks filled to bursting with liquid hydrogen, there was just enough fuel to catch the Great Ship—finally—and with help from the captains, perhaps she would survive.

“You don’t want to do this,” Mere said.

Yet the Tila knew their minds exactly.  Without the barest doubt, they said, “All paths are inevitable.  This path is yours, madam.”

“But you can save yourselves,” she said.  “These engines could carry thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of citizens out to the new colonies, and then they could push and pull the asteroids wherever they need to be.”

The rebuilt cabin was tiny, and with her company, quite crowded.  Mere’s supplies and a simple recycling system would keep her alive for the next few centuries, ship-time.  Her luggage consisted of a few heirlooms and important trinkets, plus endless files containing the history and complete works of the Tila.  In another few minutes, she would be underway, and by every conceivable means, they had assured Mere that she had no choice in this matter.

The original AI had been recovered, its shredded remains given a voice.  In Tilan, the ship said to its single passenger, “It is time, Mere.  This is the moment to resume our inevitable voyage.”

She said, “No.”

Enraged, she slapped and kicked at the Tila.

With just enough force, they restrained her.  But she struggled again, and they worked together to break her arms and legs, shattering each bone badly enough that they wouldn’t heal until after the long burn had begun.

“You cannot!” she said.

“Without this ship, you’ll die!” she wailed.

One of the Tila—a large woman blessed with poise; a creature destined to be a truth-seeker in another age—made a careful final study of the alien.  Then she laid her hand on the strange-boned face and with her own patience exhausted, she asked, “Has it occurred to you, madam?  Have you ever considered this improbability?  If somehow all of your threads die here, and if you never complete this journey of yours…that there is some destiny greater than ours that you will miss…a future will be cheated, madam…stolen away by little fears and tiny, tiny selfishness…?”

The animals were perched on the narrowest circumstances.  Friable, weak and short-lived, they drank water and breathed oxygen and feasted on almost any digestible object.  One sex was relatively tall and strong, while the other was taller and more powerful.  They spoke and hollered and sometimes sang and occasionally sang well.  They made wealth using hands and slave-animals and slave-machines.  They wandered widely and upon their return spun lies about what they had seen and done.  They fashioned tiny charms full of power, and they painted magical figures on sacred walls, and whenever those animal eyes looked skyward, they saw nothing but spectacular versions of themselves striding free across the unreachable stars.

They acted like social beasts, gathering into blood clans and tribes and nation-states, and sometimes an empire would rise, conquering some little portion of the dry land.  But their world was mostly ocean, and the sturdiest, wisest empires proved as fragile as the citizens.  The animals were social, but bonds were tenuous, conflicted.  They told stories and every story was about them, and the oldest tales involved the Creation and fertile, milk-heavy mothers giving birth to wild sons who disowned good fathers and brothers who happily murdered brothers.

Families always fell apart in a few generations.  Every society was young enough to recall its humble birth and could see Death looming.  No glorious mountain or sweet green river held the same name for long, and while everything in the world was in an uproar, the animal produced new tools and the first farms, and it invented cities and steel and radios and then slivers of magic electrified rock that began to think for themselves.

Turmoil was everywhere, but the beast clung to its nature.

Then a civilized voice found them

Speaking from a sky that wasn’t filled with heroic humans, the voice sang out with laser light; and for the first time in their history, human beings fell silent, listening to the stark, elegant truths about the universe and their minuscule place inside the All.

* * *

The modern human still carries wet flesh on wet bone, and her voice is barely improved from the old voice, and she often talks in the same tireless gossipy fashion common to every marginally social, status-compulsive hierarchal beast.  But living inside her old-fashioned flesh are machines:  Ancient designs already proven in a multitude of unrelated species.  The machines come in fleets, in multitudes.  They provide her with strength and biochemical adaptability, quick healing and emergency healing and invulnerability to disease, plus a fabulous capacity to survive heat and pressure and violent, unexpected insults.  Her soul is a vast sane mind that can memorize thousands of years and find the pleasure in most every moment.  Little features and personal touches are attuned to the human species, but she still depends on the same trickery used by harum-scarums and Janusians and other species, common and rare.  The woman will never age and never misplace an important thought, and if she is just a little bit careful, she will survive this elegant voyage around the Milky Way.

For a human—for any species—she is a beautiful creature.

Comfortably wealthy, she is free to sit where she wants and talk to friends all day and make new acquaintances when it suits her.  Her company is usually human.  Why wouldn’t it be?  The woman is beautifully ordinary.  She is gorgeous and tirelessly pleasant, and perhaps this voyage and the Great Ship are not quite what she had imagined when she left the earth, but this immortal woman won’t waste two moments of existence complaining to anyone about her tiny, trivial disappointments.

Sometimes she will be sitting at a large table, surrounded by her oldest finest loudest friends, and she will abruptly look away.

A lost expression comes to her, and someone notices.

Touching her hand, the man-friend says, “Quee Lee.”

She does not hear him.

“Quee Lee,” says a woman friend.

The pretty face tilts, and black eyes catch the fake sunlight while a deep clear voice asks, “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

But she realizes that the sound, the sensation, vanished some time ago.  And looking at these faces that she knows as well as her own, she discovers a larger, more dangerous question waiting.

“Why am I wasting my time here?”

But the lady has all the time in Creation, and she is far too polite to give that thought breath enough to live by.

Quee Lee’s apartment covered several hectares within one of the human districts, some thousand kilometers beneath the Ship’s hull.  By no measure was it the most luxurious unit.  Some of her friends owned as much as a cubic kilometer for themselves and their entourages.  But it had been her home since she came onboard, quite a few centuries ago, and its hallways and cavernous rooms were as comfortable to her as her own body.

The garden room was a favorite.  She was enjoying its charms one afternoon, lying nude beneath the false sky and sun, eyes closed and nothing to hear but the splash of fountains and the prattle of little birds.  Suddenly her apartment interrupted the peace, announcing a visitor.  “He has come for Perri, miss.  He claims this is urgent.”

“Perri isn’t here,” she said, soft black eyes opening.  “Unless he’s hiding from both of us, I suppose.”

The apartment was momentarily silent, searching every crevice inside her property.  Then it returned to say, “Perri is absent, and I have explained this to the man.  But he refuses to leave.  His name is Orleans, and he claims that he is owed a considerable sum of money.”

What had her husband done now?  Quee Lee made a guess and put on a bittersweet smile, and she sat up. 
Oh, darling…won’t you learn…?
  She would have to dismiss this Orleans fellow herself, spooking him with a hard little stare.  She rose and let an emerald sarong clothe her, and she walked the length of her apartment, never hurrying, commanding the front door to open at the last moment but leaving the security screen intact.  And she was expecting someone odd.  Even someone sordid, knowing Perri.  Yet she didn’t anticipate a bright lifesuit more than two meters tall and nearly half as wide, and she could never have imagined such a face gazing down at her with mismatched eyes.  It took a moment to realize this was a Remora.  An authentic Remora was standing in the public walkway, his fantastic round face watching her.  The flesh was orange with diffuse black blotches that might or might not be cancers, and a lipless, toothless mouth seemed to flow into a grin.  What would bring a Remora down here?  They never, ever came below the hull.

“I’m Orleans.”  The voice was sudden and deep, slightly muted by the security screen.  A speaker hidden somewhere on the thick neck told her, “Dear lady, I need help.  I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’m desperate.  I don’t know where else to turn.”

Quee Lee had seen Remoras and even spoken to a few, although those conversations were aeons ago and their substance was buried deep, beyond her immediate reach.  They were such strange creatures, stranger than most aliens, even if they possessed human souls.

“Dear lady?”

A good person would be welcoming.  Yet Quee Lee couldn’t help but feel repelled, the floor rolling under her and her breath stopping short.  Orleans was a human being, one of her own distant brothers.  True, his genetics had been transformed by hard radiations.  And yes, he normally lived apart from ordinary people.  But inside the orange flesh and cancers was a tough, potentially immortal mind.  Quee Lee wanted to have compassion for everyone, even aliens, and she managed to find her wits before saying, “Come inside.”  She said, “If you wish, please do,” and with her invitation her apartment deactivated the invisible screen.

“Thank you, dear lady.”  The Remora walked slowly, almost clumsily, his lifesuit producing harsh grinding noises that rose up from the knees and hips.  That was not normal; Orleans should be graceful, his suit dancing with power, serving him as an elaborate exoskeleton.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked out of habit.

“No, thank you,” he replied, his voice perfectly pleasant.

The question was foolish.  Remoras ate and drank only suit-made concoctions.  They were permanently encased in their shell, functioning as perfectly self-contained organisms.  Food was synthesized, water recycled, and they were possessed by dreams of purity and independence.

“I don’t wish to bother you, dear lady.  I’ll be brief.”

The politeness was another surprise.  Remoras were famously distant, even arrogant.  But Orleans continued to smile, watching her.  One eye was a muscular it filled with thick black hairs, and she assumed the hairs were light sensitive.  Like an insect’s compound eye, each one might build a piece of an image.  But contrast, its mate was ordinary, white and fishy with a foggy blue center.  Mutations could do astonishing tricks.  An accelerated, halfway planned evolution was occurring inside that suit, even while Orleans stood before her, boots stomping on the stone floor, a single spark arcing toward her.

“I know this is embarrassing for you,” said Orleans.

“No, no,” she lied.

“And it makes me uncomfortable too.  I wouldn’t have made this trip for any small reason.”

“Perri is gone,” she said again, “and I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“But that is what I was hoping for.”

“You were?”

“Though I would have come either way.”

The apartment, loyal and vigilant, wouldn’t let anything nasty happen to Quee Lee.  She took one step forward, then another.  “This is about some money being owed.  Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Owed for what exactly?”

“Think of it as an old gambling debt.”  Orleans didn’t want to offer clear descriptions; it was better to imply much and then press on.  “This is a very old debt, I’m afraid.  And Perri has refused me a thousand times.”

She could imagine that.  Her husband had his share of failings, incompetence and a self-serving attitude among them.  But she loved the man in a disciplined fashion, and she accepted the flaws that he wore so easily and openly—unlike other men that she preferred not to think about now.

“I am sorry, sir,” she said.  “But I am not responsible for his debts.”

The odd eyes continued to stare at her.

Making her voice sound hard was best.  “I hope you didn’t come all this way because you heard that he married well.”

“No, no, no!”  The grotesque face seemed injured.  Both eyes became larger, and a thin tongue, white as dry ice, licked at the lipless edge of the mouth.  “Honestly, we don’t follow the news about passengers.  I assumed Perri was living with someone.  He usually does.  My hope was to come and make my case to whomever I found, winning a comrade.  An ally.  Someone who might become my advocate.”  There was a hopeful pause, and then he said, “When Perri appears, will you explain to him what’s right and what is not?  Would you, please?”  Another pause, and then he added, “Even a lowly Remora knows the difference between right and wrong, miss.”

That was an ugly trick, calling himself lowly, and he was painting her to be some flavor of bigot, which she wasn’t.  Besides, she felt that their souls were linked in a profound fashion—joined together by a charming and handsome, manipulative user…by her darling husband…and Quee Lee discovered a sudden anger directed at the man who should be standing between them.

“Dear lady?”

“How much does he owe you, and how soon will you need it?”

Orleans answered the second question first, lifting an arm with a sickly whine coming from his shoulder.  “The sound is my seals begging to be replaced, or at least refurbished.  Yesterday, if possible.”  The arm bent and the elbow whined.  “I had savings, but they vanished when I rebuilt my reactor.”

Quee Lee appreciated his circumstances.  Remoras lived on the open hull, standing on the most dangerous places for hours and days at a time.  One split seal was a disaster.  Any opening would kill most of his body, and even when his mind was safe inside a protective coma, Orleans would be at the mercy of radiation storms and comet showers.  A balky suit was an unacceptable hazard on top of the normal dangers, and what could she say?

She felt deep empathy for the man.

Orleans appeared to take a breath.  “Perri owes me fifty-two thousand hectos, dear lady.”

“I see.”  She swallowed.  “My name is Quee Lee.”

“Quee Lee,” he said.  “Yes, dear lady.”

“He and I will have a painful conversation, as soon as he comes home.”

“I would be grateful if you did.”

“I promise.”

The ugly mouth opened, revealing blotches of green and gray-blue against a milky throat.  Those could be cancers or pigments or perhaps strange new organs.  The strangest sort of human was standing before her, and despite every myth, despite tales of courage and reckless sacrifice, Orleans appeared fragile.  He even looked scared, that wet orange face shaking in despair as he turned away.  His suit made an awful grinding noise, and his voice said, “Thank you, Quee Lee.  For your time and patience, and for everything.”

Fifty-two thousand hectos!  More than that and she would have screamed.  She promised herself to scream as soon as she was alone.  Perri had done this man a great disservice, and he would hear about it.  Fifty thousand wasn’t a grand fortune, even for a woman raised by a family of misers, but it would allow Orleans to refurbish his lifesuit, which was as much a part of his body as that furry eye or the five hearts beating inside his belly.

Orleans was through her front door, turning around to say good-bye.  False sunshine made his suit shine, and his faceplate darkened until she couldn’t see his features anymore.  He might have any face, and what did a face mean?  Waving at the visitor, sick to her stomach, Quee Lee considered giving him the sum now, erasing the old debt.

But no, that wouldn’t happen.  She was suspicious and a little angry, and worst of all, she lacked the required compassion.  And having made up her mind, she ordered the security screen to reengage, helping mute the horrid grinding of joints as the Remora shuffled off for home.