The Greatship (25 page)

Two centuries later, the Olympus Peregrine returned.

Its minimal crew was made up of facsimiles—machines wearing uniforms and sacks of water draped over a network of false bones.  Only one of the Peregrine’s big engines was still operational, but that was no problem.  The necessary momentum had already been won; nothing more was required but tweaks of the final course.  At half-light speed, the much-traveled asteroid plunged out of the darkness, streaking above the green Rings of Ice and Stone and then over the Iron Ring and past the orange sun.  Then the engine let loose one last long burst of plasma.  Chaos was a tiny gray dot, undistinguished and soon left behind.  The final hour of the voyage began with the swift passage over the Rings again, then a quick plunge into the yellowish light of the sister sun—a realm now partly owned and controlled by the human species.

“Here’s a question worth asking,” said the Rococo facsimile.  “Why didn’t the Scypha ever colonize this neighboring solar system?”

Standing beside him was a machine strongly resembling his sister.  With a nod, she admitted, “That always puzzled me too.  Those three moons shouldn’t be too difficult to adapt to or rebuild.  Even if they had still room to grow in the Rings, I think they’d want to hedge their bets with fresh colonies elsewhere.”

“And they could have easily built a fleet of slow starships,” said Rococo’s voice.  “How difficult would that have been, traveling out to all the worlds within five or ten light-years?”

“It is a big old conundrum,” Aasleen’s voice replied.

The facsimiles were simple in design—little more than likenesses with embedded personalities and cherry-picked memories.  It would have been immoral to send sentient organisms, machine or otherwise, on a mission like this.  That’s why the two of them had enjoyed this conversation at least a thousand times:  This was based on a recording made by Rococo’s journal, back when the Peregrine was still chasing after the Great Ship.

“Aliens are peculiar people,” the Aasleen facsimile mentioned.  “Who knows what makes sense to them?”

“But I know why,” her brother promised.

Racing toward them was the jovian world and its family of tightly bound moons.  Staring at the crescents, Aasleen said, “So explain it all to me.”

“Simple ordinary fear,” he offered.  “That’s what held them back from attempting colonies.”

“And what were they scared of?”

“If they had populated some new world—a large environment radically different from their home Rings—there’s a good chance, a certainty, that little variations would have taken hold.  In genetics, in culture.  A fissure of their great lineage was possible, not unlike how they split away from the Dun ten million years ago.”

The inner two moons were strongly volcanic and washed by the jovian’s radiation belts.  But magma was a resource, and there wasn’t so much radiation that shields and artificial magnetic fields couldn’t protect a human population.  By contrast, the outer moon was relatively unscathed by toxins, and it was smaller and less volcanic—a quieter realm not too unlike the unterraformed Mars.

“Ten million years have passed,” said Rococo, “and that wound still aches.”

“I can appreciate that,” she replied, laughing gravely.

“Which is the same reason why they never sent asteroids to the stars,” he continued.  “Colonists would surely form new lineages, and perhaps someday they would return here and raise hell.”

“What about the Scypha onboard the Great Ship?  Isn’t their goal to spread their lineage across the galaxy?”

“They’ll be a thousand light-years from here, or twenty thousand.”

Out of reach, lost forever.

“My impression,” Rococo said.  Then he hesitated for a moment, staring at the worlds before them.  “My impression is that the Scypha were utterly thrilled to give these worlds to us.  They wanted that temptation gone.  More than anything, they see humans as a chance to cut old bonds with their past, to slowly find new directions and a fresh sense of purpose.”

Aasleen’s facsimile nodded.  Fixed to the wall beside her was a small hyperfiber bubble, and she touched it gently now, some tiny portion of her recorded thoughts dwelling on its contents.

“So you understand the aliens,” she said.

“What I understand is fear and family,” Rococo said.

The belted, beautiful jovian world was the largest object in their sky, but the smaller moon was growing swiftly.  It looked cold and dirty, ruddy dust gathered around extinct volcanoes, little caps of frozen water clinging to both poles.

“What I appreciate most is how the past shapes what we are,” he said, “and how weak the future is whenever it tries to change us.”

In a few moments, Olympus Peregrine would dive out of the sky, colliding with that sleepy outer moon.  A substantial bolide moving at half the speed of light, its enormous mass would be converted into light and heat, pumping energy into a mantle that had been close to dead for the past billion years.

In another century, a second, much smaller vessel would streak into a close orbit, waiting for the molten crust to stiffen.  Then the atmosphere would be doctored and the spores that Aasleen had stolen from Chaos would be strewn across the surface, and whatever lineages survived would have a new world to fight for—a world owned and maintained by a benefactor called Man.

Again, the Aasleen facsimile touched the bubble.  The hyperfiber was the very finest grade available, and it was thick enough to survive the coming impact.  Inside its tiny center was a small plaque with her name and her bother’s name and several important dates.  Nothing more, but that seemed like a wonderful gesture, even if you were nothing more than a simple machine acting along narrow parameters.

After today, the Scypha would continue to slowly strangle their cradle world.  Though who could say what would happen in another ten million years?

Meanwhile human colonists on the other two moons would watch over New Chaos, perhaps flinging down the occasional spent starship or thousand-megaton bomb…just be the good neighbor…

The Aasleen facsimile laughed quietly.

“What is it?” asked her brother’s facsimile.

“Something just occurred to me.”  A thousand times before, she had said those words, and as always, she looked at him now, smiling for a long happy moment.  Just before the Peregrine plunged to its death, she asked, “How do we know the Scypha left their world willingly?  That’s what they claim, I know, but maybe…maybe the other lineages simply got tired of them and booted them off into space…?”

Rococo laughed.  “Certainly that would explain things, wouldn’t it?” he always replied.

But he didn’t offer those words, not this time.

Both of the machines hesitated, big eyes brilliant and wonderstruck, gazing down at a blank, utterly drab landscape that in another instant would be entirely and forever remade.

Life is the living fire.

Inventive and relentless, life feeds by burning sugar and fat, or it burns acetylene, or it eats electrical sparks, or it squeezes a whiff of hydrogen until the atoms fuse, creating helium ash and scorching heat as well as a swift mist of neutrinos.

Life is the cautious, thoughtful fire that can plan and can move.  When conditions are ripe, fire creates little sparks and embers that fly away with their own faces and identities and stories.  The most complicated of these blazes are self-aware:  They never stop measuring the fuel in hand and the fuel in easy reach, and every moment is spent guessing the next moment, and a portion of these individual flames have the capacity—the capacity and the urge—to burn without interruption for millions of happy years.

Immortality shapes the galaxy.

Only so much fuel exists, and there are only so many hearths, and flickering beside an eternity, each flame quickly appreciates the stark, infinite limitations before them.

Offspring can be produced and loved and sometimes loved dearly, but the children must be nourished, and if they live forever, then they become competitors of the worst sort—rough mirrors of their parents and grandparents and every other generation that sips sunlight and fusion light, dreaming of how they will fill the next ten billion years.

Every sentient fire understands:  If each of them runs wild, the galaxy would be consumed in a million-year moment—a grand doomed inferno that would leave nothing but ravaged suns and cold sorry worlds.

This is why the galaxy is laced with powerful, ancient regulations.  Ownership of worlds and every fleck of dust are subject to strict, unimpeachable property rights.  Fertility and willingness barely matter.  There are few opportunities to spread across the sky, even if the fires are tiny and mortal.  And when immortals spawn, the capital demands are enormous, and even the brightest, wealthiest blazes are slow to make children, and many of them use every means to avoid even that possibility.

But there are incidents and odd circumstances where rapid growth is possible.  The cool wet human fire claims an empty starship as salvage, legally taking full and eternal ownership, and enriched by the luck, a conflagration is set loose on the galaxy.

But when they think hard, humans are not fools.  They would be within their legal rights to kick every other species off the Great Ship and breed like plankton inside their home, filling every cavern and obscure crevice with their kin.  But they can understand what Forever means, and what Forever demands, and this is why most of the Ship remains empty—countless volumes set aside for future needs—while they cede most of the inhabited corners to obedient alien flames.

Every voice spoke of the Queen.  “Where is She?  Ascending!  Do you see Her?  In my dreams, yes!  Do you smell Her?  Absolutely, yes!  The All ends, the new All walking in its tracks!  Praise the Queen!  Bring us the Queen!  Where is She now?  Ascending!”  Stirred among the voices were animal grunts and hollers; better than any words, they captured the wild anticipation—a chorus of piercing, wordless roars that almost obscured the tumbling thunder of the great river.  And behind the voices and roars were the percussive clack of nervous limbs and the extruded symphonies of pheromones, a giddy sense of celebration laid so thick across the setting that even a pair of human beings—mere tourists—could appreciate the unfolding of great, glorious things.

Quee Lee shivered beneath her robe, purring, “This is wonderful.  Remarkable.  And really, it hasn’t even begun yet.”

Perri nodded and smiled, peering over the edge.

“Can you see Her?” she joked.

“But I see the entourage,” he said.  “Down in the mists.  Can you make them out?”

The railing was created from thick old vines grown into elaborate knots, golden leaves withered, dried spore-pods ready to burst.  Quee Lee leaned against the top vine.  A beautiful woman in a thousand ways, she gazed into the mayhem of plunging water and endless snowstorms, her smile widening when a few wisps of black appeared for the briefest instant.  Long albatross-style wings were resting inside bubbles of calm air; a few of the Queen’s devoted attendants had to gather themselves before resuming their long climb.

“Will the wind-masters reach us?” she asked.

“Most won’t.”  Perri still wore a young, almost pretty face, fine features amplifying a pair of clear bright eyes that could only be described as sweet.  He had turned to the right, watching the main lane, watching thousands of Dawsheen wrestling for position.  “The last time I was here, barely a handful of those big flyers survived the climb.”

“Is it too far?”

The cliff was more than eleven kilometers tall.

“It’s more the cold and snow, I think.  And not just the wind-masters suffer.  Most of Her entourage dies along the way.”  Then in the next breath, with an easy conviction, he said, “But still, this is the best place to be.  This is Her final gathering point.  Being here is an enormous honor.”

“I know,” Quee Lee sang.  “I know.”

Perri didn’t mention costs.  His wife had donated a substantial sum to the Dawsheen, and nothing would come from it but this brief opportunity to endure the glacial cold, standing among the alien throngs, every kind of eye trying to catch a glimpse of the fabled Queen.  Their private vantage point was an ice-polished knob of black basalt.  The river was to their left—a shrunken but still impressive body of water hugging the cavern wall, flowing hard and flat until it reached the neatly curled lip of the towering cliff.  The city lay to their right, perched on the higher ground.  Beneath the city, where the cliff was a dry black wall, a single zigzagging staircase had been etched into the stone.  By custom and for every good reason, the Queen never took a step upwards.  Her assistants carried her beautiful bulk, using the honored old ways.  On foot and with the fading strength of their limbs, they were bringing her up the final eleven kilometers of a grand parade that began centuries ago, in the warm blue surf of the Dawsheen Sea.

“She won’t arrive for a little while,” Perri cautioned.  Then touching Quee Lee with a fond hand, he added, “This is our ground.  Nobody can take it from us.  So why don’t we go somewhere warm, and sit?”

“I don’t want to miss—“

“‘Any little thing.’”  One of his sweet eyes winked.  “But remember.  This is a wonderful city in its own right, and in another week or two, there won’t be anything left to see.”

“We should walk around,” she agreed.

Stepping back from the dying vines, he said, “And maybe we can treat ourselves…”

“‘To a little drink or two,’” she said, doing a seamless imitation of her husband’s voice.

“‘To be social,’” he said, imitating his wife’s voice and mannerly sense.  “‘To be polite.’”

Then together, inside the same moment, they thought of the city’s fate.  In another two weeks, it was dead and buried under the relentless blizzards; and with that thought, a sudden respectful silence waked with them as they moved hand in hand down their own little set of carved stone stairs.