The Greatship (17 page)

Perri didn’t return for several more weeks.

“I was rafting Cloud Canyon and didn’t get your five thousand messages,” he said.  “What’s so very important, my love?”

Just then Quee Lee realized that she wasn’t going to tell him about her adventure, nor the money.  And having decided on secrecy, she crafted a worthy reason:  She would wait for the better time, that weak moment, when Perri’s guard was down for repairs.

The messages were nothing.  She said that she had missed him and been worried about him, and how was the rafting, and who went with him?

“Lovely and Tweewits,” said Perri, chuckling softly.  “The rafting was lovely, but Tweewits are big hulking baboons and not particularly pretty.”  He smiled until she smiled.  He looked thin and tired; but that night, without prompting, he made love to her twice.  And the second time was special enough that she was left wondering how she could so willingly live without sex for long spells.  It could be the most amazing pleasure.

Perri slept, dreaming of artificial rivers roaring through artificial canyons, and Quee Lee sat up in bed, in the dark, whispering for her apartment to show her the view from Port Beta.  The images were projected on her ceiling, twenty meters overhead, the shimmering aurora changing from crimson to purple, then gold and green—force fields wrestling with every kind of spaceborn hazard.

“What are you thinking, Quee Lee?”

Standing on the hull, Orleans had asked the question, and she answered it once again, in a soft awed voice.  “Lovely.”  Then she shut her eyes, remembering the hull itself had stretched into the distance, flat and gray, bland yet somehow serene.  “It is lovely.”

“And the view is more impressive on the bow,” her companion had said.  “The fields are thicker, stronger.  The big lasers pound the comets that are ten million kilometers in front of us, softening them up.”  His voice was slow and soft when he told her, “You can feel the Ship moving when you look up from the bow.  You honestly can.”

She had shivered inside her lifesuit, out of pleasure more than fear.  The passengers who walked on the hull had permission.  She did not.  No doubt rules were being broken, which was another unexpected pleasure.  On the hull she had felt exposed, profoundly naked.  And maybe Orleans had measured her mood, watching her unremarkable face lit up by the flickering pulses.  “Do you know the story of the first Remora?” he asked.

Did she?  She wasn’t certain.

“Wune,” he said with his voice smooth and quiet.  “She came to the Ship as a registered criminal, a habitual repeat offender who could escape prison by signing on as a crew member.”

“What crimes?”

“Do the details matter?”  The round orange head shook off the question.  “Bad deeds were responsible.  But the point is that Wune arrived without rank, glad for the opportunity, and like any good mate, she took her turns working on the exposed hull.”

Quee Lee had nodded, staring at the far horizon.

“She was pretty, like you.  Maybe prettier.  Between shifts, she did typical typicals, exploring the Ship and having affairs of the heart and then grieving those affairs when they went badly.  Like you, Quee Lee, she was smart.  And after just a few centuries, Wune saw the trends:  Captains were avoiding their shifts on the hull.  Meanwhile certain people, guilty of small offenses, were pushed into double-shifts in their stead.”

Status.  Rank.  Privilege.  She could understand these things too well.

“Wune led the rebellion,” Orleans said with pride.  “But instead of overthrowing the system, she conquered it with an embrace.  She built a lifesuit with its semi-forever seals and the hyperefficient recycke systems.  She created a machine that she would never have to leave, and then she began to live on the hull, in the open, sometimes alone for years and for decades.”

“Alone?”

“The prophet’s contemplative life.”  He glanced fondly at the smooth gray terrain.  “Wune stopped purging her body of cancers and other damage.  She let her face—her beautiful face—become speckled and scabbed with dead tissues.  Then she taught herself to manage the mutations, with discipline and strength.  And once she was the master of her body, she selected friends equally without status, teaching them tricks while explaining the peace and purpose she found while living in the open, contemplating the universe without clutter, without obstructions.”

Without instructions indeed!

“A few hundred became the First Generation.  Attrition convinced our great captains to allow children, and the Second Generation numbered in the thousands.  By the Third, we were officially responsible for the Ship’s exterior and the deadliest parts of its engines.  A quiet conquest had claimed a world-size realm, and today we number in the millions.”

She had sighed and said, “I would like to meet Wune.”

“Except there was a heroic death,” Orleans had said.  “A comet swarm was approaching.  A repair team was caught on the bow, their shuttle dead and useless.”

“Why were they there if a swarm was coming?”

“Patching a previous crater, of course.  Remember.  The bow can withstand most any blow, but if comets struck one on top of the other, unlikely as that sounds—”

“Disaster,” she had said.

“For the passengers below, yes.”  A strange smile tried to cut the orange face in two.  “Wune died bringing out a fresh shuttle.  She was vaporized when ice and rock turned to plasmas.”

“I’m sorry,” Quee Lee had whispered.

“Wune was my great-great-grandmother, which makes me Fifth Generation,” said Orleans.  “And no, she didn’t name us Remoras.  That began as an insult, some captain happily responsible.  You’re from the earth, perhaps you know this already.  Remoras are ugly fish that cling to sharks and eat their scraps.  Not a pleasing image, yet Wune embraced the word.  To us being Remora means spiritual fulfillment, independence and a powerful sense of self.”

She had nodded, listening to each word.

“Do you know what I am, Quee Lee?  I am a god ruling the universe that fills this suit.  In ways you cannot appreciate, I am the ultimate authority over my body, over my own self.”

Staring at him, she could not move.

A glove and hand lifted, placing thick fingers against his faceplate.  “My eyes.  You’re fascinated by my eyes, aren’t you?”

A tiny nod.  “Yes.”

“Do you know I sculpted them?”

“No.”

“Tell me, Quee Lee.  How do you close your hand?”

She had made a fist, as if to show him.

“Neurons fire and muscles contract, and how can you manage something that complex without being able to describe it in full?”

“Habit,” she had said, suddenly proud of the word.

Orleans had used a large, engaging laugh.  “And I have thousands of years of stubborn habit helping me sort through my mutations, spreading my favorite metastasized cells to where they can do the most good—as naturally as you make fists and walk across new ground.”

Opening her hand, she had said nothing.

“Transformation is my every day, and this is why my life is so much richer than yours,” Orleans had said.  Then with a final wink, he had told her, “I cannot count the times that I have reinvented vision.”

Again Quee Lee looked at her bedroom ceiling, at a curtain of indigo dissolving into salmon and blush.

“You think Remoras are vile, ugly monsters,” Orleans had said.  “Don’t deny it.  I won’t let you deny it.”

She hadn’t made a sound.

“I know:  When you saw me standing at your front door, all of that ordinary blood of yours drained out of your face.  You were so pale, so terribly weak, Quee Lee.  By any measure, horrified.”

She couldn’t deny it.  Not then or now.

“Which of us carries the richest life, Quee Lee?  And be objective.  Is it you or is it me?”

She pulled the bed sheets over herself, shaking.

“You or me?”

“Me,” she whispered, but with doubt in that word.  Just the flavor of uncertainty.  Then Perri stirred and rolled toward her with his face trying to waken.  Quee Lee enjoyed a last glance at the projected sky and then had it quelched.  Then Perri was grinning, blinking and reaching for her.

“Can’t you sleep, love?”

“No,” she said.

Then she said, “Come here, darling.”

“Well, well.  Aren’t you in a mood?”

Absolutely.  A feverish mood, her mind leaping from subject to sensation to wild ideas, every thought intense and abrupt, Perri on top and her old-fashioned eyes gazing up at the darkened ceiling, still seeing the powerful surges of changing color that obscured the bright dusting of stars.

* * *

They took a honeymoon-of-renewal, Quee Lee’s treat.  Halfway around the Ship was a famous resort beside a small tropical sea, and for several months they enjoyed scenery and beaches, floury sands dropping into azure waters where fancy corals and fancier fish lived.  Every night brought a different sky, the Ship supplying images of nebulas and strange suns; and they made love in the oddest locations, in odd manners, strangers coming upon them on occasion, humans and various aliens sometimes pausing to watch.

Yet she felt detached throughout the vacation, as if hovering over the scene as an observer.  In the afternoon, Perri would dress in fins and gills and leave her alone on the powdery sand, allowing her to use her nexuses to do research, learning whatever she could about Remoras.  But their faith and history existed only as sketches, full of holes and often self-contradictory.  Sex proved to be a richer, odder subject.  Coitus involved electrical stimulation through the suits, and reproduction meant pulling totipotent cells from each partner, children conceived in vitro and grown inside a hyperfiber envelope.  The envelope was expanded as needed.  Birth came with the first independent fusion reactor.  Remoras thrived in the oddest circumstances, but then again, many human societies seemed bizarre.  Some refused immortality.  Some married AIs or lived in a narcotic haze.  Spiritual groups and splinter factions were normal, and why was it so difficult to learn anything certain about Wune’s children?

And the better question:  Why had Quee Lee been allowed a glimpse of Orlean’s private world?

The resort had to be a suffocating trap for an adventurer like Perri.  Everything about the place was clean and predictable.  Yet he remained pleasant and attentive, and if he ever said a negative word about the burdens, he saved them for when he was drifting under the sea.

“I know this is work for you,” Quee Lee said one evening, greeting her husband as he climbed out of the surf.  “But old women appreciate winks and smiles.”

“Winks and smiles to the young lady,” Perri said, kneeling at her feet.

They returned home soon afterward, and Quee Lee was disappointed with her apartment.  It was the same as she remembered, and the sameness was depressing.  Even the large garden room failed to brighten her spirits, and she found herself wondering if she had ever lived anywhere but here, the stone walls cold and closing in on her.

“What’s the matter, love?”

She didn’t answer her husband’s question.

“Because something is wrong,” he said.

“I forgot to tell you something,” she began.  “A friend of yours visited…oh, it was nearly a year ago.”

The roguish charm surfaced, reliable and nonplussed.  “I have ten million friends.  Which one?”

“Orleans.”

Perri didn’t respond at first, hearing the name but not allowing his expression to change.  Was that what he was doing?  He stood motionless, not quite looking at her; and Quee Lee noticed a weakness in the mouth and something glassy about the smiling eyes.  Uneasy, she almost asked Perri what was wrong.  Then Perri asked, “What did Orleans want?”  His voice was too soft, almost a whisper.  A sideways glance seemed to steal away his balance, and then he muttered, “Orleans came here?”  None of these words were making sense.

“You owed him some money,” she said.

Perri didn’t speak, didn’t seem to hear anything.

She said, “Darling, I paid him.”

“But…but what happened…?”

She told him and she didn’t.  She mentioned the old seals and some other salient details, and then in the middle of her account, all at once, what was obvious and awful finally occurred to her.  What if there hadn’t been any debt?  She gasped, asking, “You did owe him the money, didn’t you?”

“How much did you say it was?”

She repeated the figure.

He nodded.  He swallowed and straightened his back, and with the most solemn voice that she had ever heard from him, he said, “I’ll pay you back…as soon as possible…”

“Is there any hurry?”  She took his hand, telling him, “I haven’t made noise until now, have I?  Stop worrying.”  Pause.  “I just wonder how you could owe the man so much.”

Perri shook his head.  “I’ll give you five thousand now, or six…and I’ll raise the rest.  Soon as I can, I promise.”

She said, “Fine.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Orleans is one of your ten million friends,” she said, trying for a joking tone.

“I’d nearly forgotten, it was so long ago.”  He summoned a smile which engaged his old charm.  “You should know, love.  The Remoras aren’t anything like you or even like me.  Be very careful with them, please.”

She made appreciative sounds yet never mentioned her jaunt to the hull.  The incident was past anyway, and why had she brought it up at all?  Perri announced he was leaving immediately, needing to find some nameless creatures that owed him quite a lot.  The best he could manage today was fifteen hundred hectos, admitting, “That is a very weak down payment, I know.

Quee Lee felt a decision take hold, and the decision put her in such a fierce mood that she could tell him, “Have a good trip, and come home whenever you want.  I will always be waiting.”

Perri was the most darling man when vulnerable.  “Soon,” he promised, kissing her hard before walking out the front door.

Quee Lee was leaving an hour later, convinced she was going to the hull to confront her husband’s old friend.  What was this mysterious debt?  Why did it bother him so much?  But the long cap-car ride diluted her resolve, and by the time she reached Port Beta, she had realized that a confrontation would accomplish nothing but further embarrass Perri, and that wasn’t what she wanted.