The Greatship (24 page)

Sometimes the subject wormed its way to the surface.

During those periodic lectures, a crewmember might pose an innocent query that brushed against Chaos.  Then everyone found himself thinking about that untouchable place, and perhaps a second hand would lift, and a second voice would ask about that mysterious, increasingly hostile realm.  With concern, perhaps even a measure of sadness, they would refer to their hosts, wondering aloud if maybe the Scypha were intentionally strangling their cradle world to death.

But Chaos was not dying.  The ranking diplomat had made that salient point enough times to convince ten million people of its veracity.  Borrowing from the exobiologists’ manual, Krill reminded audiences how the spores represented every lineage, and how they would remain for eons to come, waiting patiently inside the planet-wide dust.  In some locations, more spores than dust were lying on and inside the ground.  And while there was no way to know the future, it was easy to envision a different day when the Scypha would loosen their grip on the Rings, allowing a fire-shower of rock and ice to trigger another rebirth.

“It’s not as if our hosts are fighting the other lineages,” she pointed out, her tone reasonable and responsible, her young-girl face glowing with infectious confidence.  “We aren’t visiting a war zone here.  We haven’t seen extinctions, and we won’t.  I promise.  If struggles are happening, they’re between the little lineages, all which is rigorously natural, since the inhabitants of Chaos have always fought for resources, for water and warmth.  If you look at these circumstances as I do, you see a thousand failed lineages unable to make peace with one another, much less find any lasting prosperity.

“The Scypha are something else entirely.

“I won’t concede them to be innately superior to their sister lineages.  Frankly, I don’t have the expertise to make judgment.  But it’s not a small point to remind ourselves that the Scypha have accomplished wonders.  On their own, they have escaped their limited beginnings.  And in exchange for allowing a tiny population of their infinitely plastic bodies to come onboard the Great Ship, humanity will be given three empty worlds, which is a spectacular gesture on their part, the gift delivering new homes to millions of humans, complete with happiness and prosperity and the promise of long, luminous futures.”

Krill could afford to be effusive; she was a very different beast than any exobiologist.  But Chaos was descending into a long hard sleep, and the ultimate results depended on the viability of the spores, which was hard to determine from a range of a hundred million kilometers.  Who knew what ten million years of unbroken drought and ice would do to the tiny dormant bodies?  In their darkest moods, the experts liked to point out that these weren’t simple bacteria buried beneath Martian permafrost.  Spores produced by the Scypha were substantial bodies, visible to the eye and covered in a hard, jewel-like cuticle.  In principle, it was a magnificent and enduring system.  But on the other hand—a grim, obstinate second hand—Chaos had never known dormancies as long as this one promised to be.  Asteroid impacts had been uneven but inevitable events, and at most, the coldest driest deadest times had probably lasted not much longer the present drought.

One day an old friend asked Aasleen, “Does it concern you?”

“Does what concern me?”

“Our part in what is happening to that world.  And what isn’t happening to it.  Do these events make you uneasy?”

The AI technician was drifting beside her.  “Help me,” she said.  “Define your subject a little more clearly.”

The machine said, “Chaos.”

“I know,” Aasleen said.  “But since when does that world concern you?”

“In the last few moments, the idea struck me.”  The rubber face put on a tight, worried expression.  “I suddenly found myself dwelling on my critical role in this horrible business.”

Aasleen had built this machine thousands of years ago.  It had helped her erect the short-lived terraforming tent, and later, it had gladly accompanied her to the Olympus Peregrine and eventually to the Great Ship.  And now they were together again, finishing the retrofitting of the last nuclear engine.  It wasn’t unfair to claim that this thoughtful, talented machine was Aasleen’s oldest and possibly dearest friend, and there were even lonely moments when it was much more than that.  But the machine was not sentient, not in any legal or compelling way, it wasn’t.

“Someone been talking to you,” Aasleen guessed.  “Somebody brought up the subject in your presence.”

The machine said, “No.”

Then it said, “Perhaps.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Rococo?”

With confidence, the AI said, “I haven’t shared time with your brother, not since several days before he and the other diplomats disembarked from the Peregrine.”

Aasleen nodded, considering possibilities.  “What bothers you most?”

“I am doing nothing,” it said.

“About that world, you mean.”

The machine nodded.  “If I was a moral entity, and if the galaxy was watching my inactions, then a million worlds would be entitled to ask, ‘Should we entrust our bodies and minds to the care of this lucky but exceptionally young species?  That AI might be able to maintain the Great Ship, but can it maintain a proper ethical climate for its diverse passengers?’”

These were fair questions, regardless of the source.

“If I was a free citizen,” the AI continued, “I would argue that the Scypha are morally reprehensible, and the only just, reasonable action on our part is to break off negotiations and refuse them entry to the Great Ship.”

How would somebody tinker with the machine’s mind?  Aasleen considered that question more as a friend than an engineer.  “But you aren’t a free citizen,” she said.

“For which I am thankful.”

With one hand, Aasleen began to pull off the warm rubber face.  “Why are you thankful?”

“The galaxy cannot despise me,” the entity responded.  Then one of its many hands touched her hand fondly, asking, “What are you doing, darling?”

“I want to examine your mind,” Aasleen said.

“But we have our engine to finish.”

The chief engineer hesitated.

“And now I’m thinking about tertiary pumps and accentor chambers,” the machine reported.  “Nothing else is in my mind.  That spell, whatever it was, seems to be finished.”

The Dun territory ended with a slow climb onto an old crater wall.  The Rococo facsimile led the way, offering little doses of information about the terrain and its long history.  At least twenty different lineages were mentioned, most too obscure to be given a human name like Scypha or Dun.  But each had ruled some portion of the crater, its sea or the once-young walls.  Her brother’s voice described violet forests and oily black forests and towering gray spires with roots reaching deep into the still-hot interior, living off chemical energies that were spent long ago.  “Each lineage creates its own biosphere,” said the machine, its face and the music of the voice the same as Rococo’s.  A wry smile was flashed back at her, the mud features giving an impressed shake of the head.  “Each lineage has its own physiology and its culture and a personal history and a tenacious, gorgeous will to survive.”

They were being followed, at a distance, by perhaps a hundred of the bipedal Dun.  But when the facsimile entered a deep gully high on the crater slope, the Dun hesitated, gathering together in a green mass, their stance and silence implying caution falling short of genuine concern.

Aasleen followed her guide.

The air was as thin as it would taste on the highest earthly mountains.  An impoverished frost had formed in the shadows and survived through the long day.  The gully turned north, ending with a flat slab of wind-polished rock that felt the full brunt of the sun’s weak light; and from the rock’s base came a weak flow of water—a spring barely strong enough to be considered a trickle, and judging by the vivid orange stains, severely contaminated with metals and salts.

Around that spring grew a forest, each tree no taller than a thumb.  The oily black color was a giveaway.  Aasleen attempted to name the lineage, amusing her companion in the process.

He laughed, and then he wasn’t laughing.

Kneeling beside the tiny woods, he said, “There are thousands of places like this.  Lineages huddled around oases too insignificant for names.  The most successful lineages might have a hundred homes.  But not this one, no.”  Despite the machine’s heat, its mud face was beginning to freeze, a bright white frost appearing along the chin and cheeks and across the tall forehead.  “According to the Dun, this lineage has no other sanctuary.  Except for some spores left behind on the wind, it exists this close to total annihilation.”

Aasleen nodded, asking, “Have you spoken to the Dun?”

“They have spoken to me, yes.”

“I’m talking about Rococo.  Did he make forbidden contacts?”

The icebound face gave a cracking sound as the smile grew.  “He did not associate with them, no.”

“Then where did he find the help to come here?”

Her companion waited a moment.  “You know where.  And I don’t have to be your brother to see that you know.”

She breathed the thin air, nodding.  “How many Scypha don’t agree with the present policy?”

“There are one million and nine dissenters, or fifty billion and six.”  The facsimile shrugged its shoulders.  “Numbers are guesses…except that one or two members of the official delegation are maintaining opinions far outside what is considered normal.”

“Families,” said Aasleen.

“Pardon?”

“When you mentioned our parents and showed me the difference between fury and pride, you weren’t talking only about our family.”

Yellow teeth shone at her.

“It’s a muddled familial mess, and the Scypha are pretty much helpless when it comes to finding an easy way out.  That’s what you’ve been telling me.  Probably from the beginning, I suppose.”

The facsimile rose to its feet.

“Do you want to put an end to our mission?”  She shook her head.  “It must sicken you, sensing what’s being lost—the lineages, the unmet potentials.  We have an opportunity to accomplish good works, yet the rest of the galaxy will see…the story that will be told…is that you and I and every other human took possession of three worlds, and in return we promised one lineage a long ride while ignoring their neighbors’ quiet murder.”

Rococo’s white-rimmed face seemed pleased.  But the voice was measured, even grim.  “All that I want is for our mission to be an enormous success, for all of the lineages, including humans.”

“Good,” she whispered.

“Which is exactly what Krill and my other associates want.  The trouble is, they have a rather different assessment of events and consequences.”

“And why am I here?” Aasleen asked.

“You’re smarter than I am,” Rococo assured her.  “I think you can piece together my fondest hopes.”

She had never hated her brother more.  But this collection of mud and machine wasn’t Rococo, and her rage would only waste time.

“I’m going to climb on top,” she said.

“To contact Hazz?”

“Piece that together for yourself.”  She pulled her kit along as she climbed the less steep face of the gully.  Finally in the open, standing in the raw dry wind, she pulled out a portable com-link, letting it acquire a signal and aim itself, pulling in a constant transmission that was updated according to changes and looped when there was no change.

“Our shuttle reaches Chaos in eight days,” Hazz reported, his expression stern and vaguely disgusted.  “The Scypha have agreed to let us drop as close to you as low orbit, and they claim that the Dun will lift you to the shuttle once your mission is finished.  This is in exchange for several hundred kilos of enriched uranium, which is a relatively cheap price for a good engineer.”  Her captain sucked on his teeth, gathering himself.  “Will you finish soon?  Our gracious good and very persistent hosts very much wish to see justice done.”

That was when Aasleen understood all of it.

She began to laugh in relief, and she wept for a few moments.  Then a new sound bounced up along the gully walls, and looking into the shadows and the bitterest cold, she saw the Rococo facsimile smashing tiny black trees under its frozen feet.  The entity was walking back and forth, calmly and efficiently destroying the ancient forest, finishing what the Scypha had begun.

Aasleen reached into her kit dragging out the plasma torch.

But she hesitated.  The torch had to build a charge, and she needed to set up a transmission, showing her audience what they wanted to see.  Then to the sky, she said, “In eight days, I’ll be back with the Dun.  Or I’ll be coming back.  I might get lost on this desert once or twice.”

She aimed her weapon at a shape that was identical to her missing brother.

It was easy, letting loose that blue bolt of energy.  Mud and machine never looked at her, exploding with a crack of thunder.  Then she let torch charge again, and again, and she etched a crater into the forest floor, and she dug into soggy rock of the spring, water slowly, slowly pouring into the clean raw hole, warm enough to steam, turning what had been a tragedy for an ancient lineage into a blessing born from above.

With fifteen hours to spare, the shuttle slid into the berth where it would sleep for the next three decades.  Aasleen disembarked to find Hazz was waiting, accompanied by Krill and the Scypha delegation as well as the few AI technicians that weren’t making final preparations for the Peregrine’s return voyage.  Long meetings had been held to orchestrate these next few minutes.  The delegates had insisted on personally thanking the human for undertaking this critical mission, and with a quick dry voice, their leader referred to Aasleen as being a courageous warrior, duty-blooded and honorable enough to be a Scypha, and most astonishing, she had survived her journey to a world as cruel as any.

“Your entire lineage has been strengthened by your strength,” it said.  “And as a consequence, one grave failure has been diminished.”  Then it extended a bony olive-colored hand, and Aasleen accepted it in the required fashion—her hands sandwiched above and below, squeezing as hard as she could for a ridiculously long time.

Drifting nearby was the Scypha with extra joints in its arms—the same delegate that once spoke to her about the variability of minds.  Like its peers, it remained silent, watching the ceremony with bright calcite eyes.  Did it know what actually happened on Chaos?  And did it agree with what Aasleen had done?  Staring at the alien face, she wondered if perhaps every Scypha understood what had happened:  This great adventure was nothing more, or less, than an elaborate means by which more than a trillion entities could find what they wanted to find in the human lineage, whatever that happened to be.

Once the Scypha reclaimed its hand, humans and machines were free to greet one of their own.  Smiling in a sad, almost pained fashion, Hazz said, “Good to have you back.”  Then dropping the captainly façade, he added, “I know, I know.  This was an awful to ask of you.”

“It was,” she agreed.

Shamed, Hazz retreated.

Krill kicked in close.  That youthful face was sorry and thrilled, in equal measures.  She might be crying for both reasons, and with a voice not unlike the alien’s, she repeated most of what the Scypha had just said, pale pink hands claiming Aasleen’s hand, proving that this woman had invested too much time with her alien friends.

Aasleen’s kit and Rococo’s satchel drifted beside them.

Krill reached for the satchel, but Aasleen grabbed one ruby-rope strap and pulled it to her belly.  Locks and seal were in place again.  Nobody but her could easily open the pouch.

“These are my brother’s ashes,” she said.

But the diplomat reached again for the prize, at which point Aasleen added, “I’m carrying him back to the Great Ship.  My rights and duties include giving Rococo a proper burial.”

Every human fell silent.

Most of the Scypha acted uninterested in their enemy’s corpse.  Already turning away, they were making for the vessel that would soon lift them free of the Peregrine.  None of them would travel to the Great Ship.  Their colonists were onboard elsewhere, safely sealed away inside specially prepared cabins.  Only the many-jointed Scypha bothered to look at the satchel, and then an AI pushed in front of it, unable to wait any longer.

“Welcome home, madam!”

“Thank you,” she said.

“And will you help me, please?  One of our new accentor chambers has confessed a minor flaw, and we don’t think it’s worry-worthy but we require the ranking officer to sign off.”

“And she will,” Aasleen said.  The abrupt intrusion of normal life was a joy, a blessing.  “Except first let me look at the analysis, my friend…”

* * *

The first ten seconds of the burn were critical.  Problems might betray themselves as sputtering plumes or one catastrophic blast, and if anything substantial went wrong in any one of ten thousand critical systems, it would take centuries to return home to the Great Ship.  Unless of course the blast cracked the Peregrine open, hopefully killing its chief engineer quickly enough that she wouldn’t feel embarrassed by her mistakes.

But the three new engines ignited without incident, matching the output and harmonics of their rebuilt sisters.  The next thousand seconds would lift their acceleration well past a full gee, and the circumstances were tense enough to make the most confident human forget to breathe.  But every system was operating within the narrow blue zone dubbed “Perfect”.   Save for two minor failures on the outskirts of the Scypha system, the same perfection held sway past every other critical juncture.

The familiar life fell across Aasleen’s shoulders.

But there was more here than the old life she had inspired her for thousands of years.  Human engineers regarded her with new fondness:  A dangerous duty had been foisted upon her, and she’d done what was asked of her.  In the process, she visited a world like none other, walking its surface for almost nine unbroken days.  And because there was no other choice, she had executed her only brother—a dangerous criminal who had broken rules and ignored smart laws, acting out of pure selfishness while putting their mission at risk.

Other humans—crewmembers who didn’t know Aasleen—were far less understanding about the dead brother.  Nobody said it to her face, at least not with words.  But there were looks offered in the galley and averted eyes in the hallway, and sometimes a faraway person would point in her general direction, giving a hard opinion or two to whichever allies were standing close.

Everyone onboard the Peregrine had enjoyed Rococo’s company, and very few could understand just how dicey the situation had been.

Aasleen kept her brother’s satchel inside her cabin, locked away in a hyperfiber bubble.  If a superior officer asked to see the ashes, she was prepared to tell the truth.  She had incinerated nothing but a facsimile of the criminal, and she had lied convincingly about everything that happened.  And no, she would admit that she never came across Rococo while wandering on the barren, nearly dead surface of Chaos.

About his whereabouts, she could shrug her shoulders, honestly admitting, “I don’t know where he is.  But abandoned on an alien world seems a lot like death, if you want my opinion.”

Yet nobody asked about the satchel’s contents or her point-of-view.

Not even Hazz.

After three years and few days of constant acceleration, they began throttling back to where every engine was comfortable, where the chance of meltdowns and magnetic hiccups became deliciously small.

Aasleen gathered up diagrams of the Peregrine’s interior, every recent plan laid over everything ancient and nearly forgotten.  For good reasons, she assumed she would be searching walled-off hallways and locked closets for the next twenty years.  But the sweetest, most logical answer occurred to her after less than a minute’s consideration.

Not far from the central fuel tank was a tiny cabin cut off by a series of violent renovations.  To reach that unnamed place, she had to walk through an inoperative pump and down an empty fuel line, and then chisel through a diamond wall that had to be patched before continuing—in the remote chance that the main fuel line would fail and somebody would push the hydrogen through here.  Afterward that were a series of little hallways, each more familiar than the last, and she ended up standing before a locked doorway that still recalled the touch of her hand.  Ages ago, when this starship was new and outbound to the Great Ship, Aasleen had slept in these quarters nearly four hours every night.

She touched the door, and a voice beyond said, “Wait.  I’m not dressed.”

“I’m tired of waiting,” she said.  “Hurry up.”

“All right.  Enter.”

Rococo was sitting on a hard cot.  He looked rested and a little soft, his body unaccustomed to exercise of any kind.  His face seemed thinner, eyes brighter.  His personal journal was opened on the desk beside him, waiting for whatever thoughts he wanted to transcribe next.  Stolen monitors and narrowband connections allowed him to secretly watch happenings and nonhappenings around the ship.  His most recent meal lay half-finished on a grimy plate—rations synthesized in a portable field kitchen—and the tiny volume of air smelled of sweat and subtle decay and too little oxygen.

“Your recycke system is in trouble,” Aasleen said.

Then a wide, joyous grin broke out, and with her voice cracking, she said, “You miserable dog.”

Laughing, Rococo said, “You were worried about me.”

She wouldn’t admit it.  Instead she tossed his satchel to the floor between them, admitting, “This is yours.”

“When did you figure me out?”

“I don’t think I’m done picking apart your mind,” she said.  “But when I first stood up on Chaos—when I saw your face drawn with mud—I realized just how long you’d been planning this adventure.  For decades, probably.  And of course if a person brings one fancy stand-in for himself, then it’s not much of a jump to imagine two facsimiles.  Each meant to do a different job, of course.”

“Of course.”

“You never stole that shuttle,” she said.  “At least, you weren’t the creature piloting it.  That was the first facsimile’s job, and it flew into the asteroid and then walked up onto the mountaintop and leaped to the sky.”

“After leaving this behind,” Rococo said, referring to the satchel.

“You assumed I’d be chosen to follow, which was an obvious guess.  And you’d hoped I would get your left-behind possession.  Working out the vectors and timetable had to press you, I’m guessing.”

“But I had help,” he said, smiling with that eternal charm.

“Among the Scypha.”  She nodded.  “I once had a chat with one of your coconspirators.”

“I know.  I was watching.”

Of course.

“You never left this room.  Did you, Rococo?”

He shook his head.

“Which means that you never broke the Scypha quarantine.  Not according to them, and not according to our Krill’s orders either.”

“The facsimile is a gray area,” he conceded.

“But as you say, you enjoyed official help.  You didn’t deal with the Dun or any other out-of-bounds lineage.  One of the Scypha delegates was your contact, which gives this scheme its scent of legality.  In the end only one human walked the surface of Chaos, and she had full permission granted by all of the Scypha.”

“And what was my scheme?”

She hesitated, smiled.  Then she kicked the hyperfiber satchel to him, saying, “It’s jammed full of dust.”

“Just dust?”

“Dust mixed with a peculiar grit that looks like tiny, tiny jewels.”  She could say from experience, “On Chaos, there are hollows and dry valleys where the prevailing winds brings dust from every corner of the world.  Where a woman can use her bare hands and scoop up a remarkably full sampling of the lineages, alive and dead.”

“I knew you’d see my madness,” he said.

“But why does this matter?  You can hide here until we make it home, but you have to emerge.  There has to be a board of inquiry.  Maybe you’re cleared of any wrongdoing.  But after that, what are we supposed to do with the spores inside this silly sack?”

“I see at least two worthy answers,” Rococo said.  “First, we need to recognize that a multitude of species—richer, older species than ours—are watching us.  Our actions and inactions are establishing our reputation throughout the Milky Way.  We own the Great Ship, but that isn’t enough to make us great.  Others will wonder:  Are humans wise enough to be trusted?  Are they gracious enough to endear?”  He set a foot on top of the satchel, pointing out, “Whatever we do with this pregnant grit, it must be a noble and worthy gesture, respectful by almost every measure.”

“Granted,” she said.

“And second, what I’ll tell the Master Captain—what I will argue using rational reason as well as every gram of charm—is that there is one simple, even obvious solution waits for us.  And when you think about the consequences, the cost won’t be all that steep.”

Aasleen offered her guess.

And with a wink, Rococo told her that she was right.

Then he stood and stepped close enough to gently place his arms about her shoulders—he smelled sour and warm and very brotherly—and with a genuine scorn, he said, “Families.”

Shaking his head, he asked, “Can you imagine, Aasleen…how wonderful the universe would be if we could simply jump from one family to the next until we found happiness…?”