The Greatship (29 page)

Her neighbors let her live alone for the next few years, enduring her shame.  Her embarrassment.  The shocking notoriety.  Then a gradual, relentless process began.  They began to invent ways to cross paths with Quee Lee.  She might be shopping in a market or walking in one of the local parks, and one of her human acquaintances from a nearby apartment would appear without warning, wearing a benign smile, muttering, “Hello,” before mentioning in the same breath, “We haven’t seen nearly enough of you lately.”

Even alone, they always spoke for the “We.”  The tiny word implied that each person stood among many, many like-minded souls.  “We’ve worried about you,” they might say.  Or, “We miss you, Quee Lee.  Come visit us, when you have the strength.”

Strength wasn’t a limiting issue.  She couldn’t remember when she last felt this strong.  And their worry was genuine, but only to a point.  No, there were other fine reasons to be alone.  Quee Lee let her old friends speak among themselves, and gossip, and out-and-out spy.  Only when it felt right did she begin walking the neighborhood again, visiting one or two of the wealthy souls who lived along her particular avenue.  About her troubles, no one said a word.  About her adventures…well, nobody could stop thinking about what had happened.  She saw it in their staring faces.  There was wondering and outrage and the almost comical fear that blossomed whenever they remembered that their dear friend had been involved in things illegal, violent, and strange.

About Quee Lee’s husband, nobody asked.  Fifty years had to pass before a woman-friend felt bold enough to look at the ancient woman with a mixture of concern and simple nosiness, and then risk saying the name.

“Perri.”

“What about my husband?” Quee Lee asked.

“How is he?” the woman inquired.  Then fearing that she had overstepped her bounds, she foolishly said, “Is he comfortable, where he is?”

What could she say?  The truth?

Never that, no.

Instead, Quee Lee shrugged and remarked, “He’s comfortable enough.  And he looks reasonably contented.”

“How often do you see him?”

“Every three weeks, for twenty-one minutes per visit,” Quee Lee said.  “Those are the terms of his sentence.  One visitor every twenty-one days, and the rest of his time is spent among the general population.”

“You poor soul,” the friend moaned.  “We’re all so sorry for you.”

“Don’t be,” was Quee Lee’s advice.  “Really, it’s not that awful.  It’s not even that unpleasant, considering.”

The wicked truth was that Perri adored prison.  Surrounded by strange aliens and dangerous people, he was in his element.  The Ship’s enormous brig was an entirely new wilderness open for his explorations.  He spoke in whispers and code while Quee Lee was visiting, offering hints of great new stories that would have to wait for another century to be told.

In principle, they were supposed to be alone in the visitation chamber, but you could never feel secure about your solitude.  The chamber was a hyperfiber balloon.  A molecule-thick screen stood between them.  Permeable to light and sound, but not touch, the screen allowed them to undress and perform for each other, and sometimes that’s what they did.  Sometimes Quee Lee didn’t care who might be watching them.  And with an honest longing, she always told her husband, “I miss you.  I want you.  Make the years hurry up, would you?”

“I will,” he always said, the perpetual laugh quiet and sweet.

Perri’s sentence was one hundred and one years.  An excellent attorney and a surprisingly law-abiding record had helped reduce his punishment.  What hadn’t helped was his stubborn refusal to implicate any other player or players in that very peculiar crime.

Sixty years before any neighbor dared mention the crime.

It was another good friend who finally bit into the topic.  He was sitting with Quee Lee, sitting in her little jungle and helping her drink some of her more exotic liquors, and when the drugs and silence got too much, he blurted out the words, “What in hell were you thinking?”

She knew what he meant.  But to be stubborn, she asked, “When?”

“Because you had to know all about it,” he said.  “You went off with Perri on that little vacation of yours, and ship security claims that you were with him and those two Dawsheen—”

“They weren’t Dawsheen,” she interrupted.  “They were sentient genetic repositories.”

“According to the Dawsheen, they were criminals.”  Sixty years of waiting was erased.  The man was too drunk and self-consumed to let this issue pass for another moment.  “I saw those security digitals, Quee Lee.  Everybody has watched them.”

“Well, that isn’t legal,” she said.  “Those are confidential recordings.”

“Well, then I am a criminal too,” he said.  “Call the Master Captain, if you want.”

She fell silent.

“I saw the digitals,” he said again.  “From twenty angles, I watched your husband and that Dawsheen criminal.  Sorry, I mean that sentient genetic repository criminal.  Dressed up to look human, and walking with Perri and that storage trunk with the Queen stuffed inside.”

“Is that what happened?” she said.  “I never knew.”

The sarcasm made him angrier.  “Your husband was trying to slip them onboard that star-taxi.  He got them past security…I don’t know how…and then he waved good-bye and turned just as someone noticed a detail that was wrong…”

Quee Lee said nothing.

“That alien with the plasma gun.  He was a real Dawsheen.”

“One of their police officers, named Lastborn.  Yes.”

“The trunk was floating beside that human-looking repository, the Other, and then the trunk was gone.  Destroyed.  The Queen was dead.”

“I know.”

“It was public place, for goodness sake.  Some innocent could have been killed.”

She held her tongue.

“Such a scream, that Other gave.  It roared and exposed that weapon and dropped to its knees, and…”  His voice failed him.  Immortal memories can seem new for aeons, and the will danger of that scene still bothered him after all these years.  “He shot himself.  I mean, it shot itself.”

“I know what happened.”

“A thousand innocent travelers running everywhere, screaming in well-deserved terror.”

“I saw it happening,” Quee Lee confessed.  “I know.”

Eyes widened.  “So you really were there?”

She didn’t answer him.

“Were you the woman walking the pet leopard?  Or maybe you were disguised as one of the Blue Passions.”

With a little finger, she wiped at one eye and then the other.

“We understand that your husband refused to implicate anyone else.  He was protecting your good name, I suppose.”

“Maybe.”

“Protecting his sweet money tit,” the man said.

A cold moment passed.  Then with a black, hard voice, Quee Lee said to her long-time friend, “Really, it would be best if you left.  Now, this moment.  And if you can, I think you should run.  Because in another moment, or two, I’m going to find a very long knife, and I’m going to cut out your ugly heart.”

A century and a year had passed.

Perri strolled out of the Ship’s main brig, and before anything else, hugged his wife.  Then they left together on a very long journey.  Like honeymooners, they enjoyed resorts and beaches and odd, out-of-the-way hotels that specialized in supplying fun to people who were accustomed to nothing else.  In the middle of their travels, in full view of any watchful eyes, they rented a private suite in one of the deepest districts.  For a full week, as far as any eavesdroppers could assume, they didn’t leave those luxurious confines.

A hidden passageway and an unlicensed cap-car allowed two people to travel a thousand kilometers, reaching an empty corner of the Great Ship.

A second, equally anonymous cap-car carried them a little farther.

Pressed together, Perri and Quee Lee crawled up the narrow confines of a nameless fissure.  He didn’t know their precise destination.  He relied on his wife to say, “Stop,” and then, “There.  That wall.”

A hidden doorway let them pass.

The cold was abrupt, and brutal, and wonderful.  The tilted floor of the cavern wore a river of blue ice.  Above them, hidden in the rocks and snow, was a tiny redoubt; and fifty kilometers downstream was a brief, deep lake with just enough room for a single creature to swim in the dark, waiting for the inevitable spring.

“Another few years,” Perri mentioned.

The Queen would awaken and ride the spring floods, following her own little river to its mouth.

Inside this tiny volume, the two Dawsheen repositories would merge into one, reshuffling and reformulating their genetics, creating an entirely new lineage of species and phyla.  The basis for a new world would blossom inside several dozen square kilometers; and later, when the time was ripe, another new Queen and her Other would be born.

That was when Perri would finally slip them off the Ship, bound for an empty young world.

“It is going to be lovely,” said Quee Lee.  “Whatever they make here, I’m sure it will be wonderful.”

Perri looked across the rugged ice and snows, and then he turned, smiling happily at his wife.

“Let’s walk around,” he suggested.

She shivered under her robe, asking, “Now?  What could we possibly find here now?”

“I don’t know,” he said with a boyish giggle.  “And that’s why it’s worth walking around.”

As sound, as scent, as florid bursts of EM or the crudest, roughest marks riven in the most ordinary stone, voices are everywhere.  They are everywhere and growing larger by the year, the day, the breath.  The loudest of them are never truly loud, despite what their important owners might believe, and none are constant and certainly none are eternal.  But the accumulation of pheromones and vocalizations and holo images and flat images and shared dreams and private, secret dreams—that grand wild mounting of thought and expression—long ago erased every silence onboard this machine.  The Ship shivers with the wild, undisciplined racket.  Two and five and twenty voices together can use the same formulas, the same shared intents, but there are thousands of species and each individual can employ tongues, and between the rivers of words and every attached concept lay a multitude of understandings.  A second species or even an creature from the same ranks will fail to hear what is said.  True intents will be lost.  No matter how simple or profane the fact, it can escape in an instant, escape without notice, and the orators play into the ignorance, which is another reason why voices will only grow louder with the passage of time.

Ignorance is a wound, and its victims fight to dispel what is misunderstood and what has never been known.

From birth to her ultimate end, every entity shouts, sings, wails, and whispers, and some of the finest thoughts are shared with soft touches and hard blows from fists and claws.  Yet no one understands the other.  This is a fundamental quality embedded in the universe, this monstrous incompetence welcoming every moment of existence.

If each beast knew the meaning behind every roar, then the Ship would press on through a much quieter Creation.

But the roars are dipped in mystery, in confusion, and this is perhaps the universe’s finest, oldest hope:  In the midst of foolishness and misdirection, in unexpected places and times, lost entities will understand one another perfectly, and the grandeur of those shared voices will cause the rest of the nonsense fall away, like the cold white sound that one hears when listening to the edges of the sky.

Ash drank a bitter tea while sitting in the shade outside his shop, comfortable on a little seat that he had carved for himself in the trunk of a massive, immortal bristlecone pine.  The wind was tireless, dense and dry and pleasantly warm.  The sun was a convincing illusion—a small K-class star perpetually locked at an early-morning angle, the false sky narrow and pink, an artful haze of dust pretending to have been blown from some faraway hell.  At his feet lay a narrow, phenomenally deep canyon, glass roads anchored to the granite walls, with hundreds of narrow glass bridges stretched from one side to the other, making the air below glisten and glitter.  Busier shops and markets are set beside the important roads, and scattered between were the hivelike mansions and mating halls, and elaborate fractal statues, and the vertical groves of cling-trees that lifted water from the distant river:  The basics of life for the local species, the 31-3s.

The Ash, business was presently slow and it had been for some years.  But he was a patient man and a pragmatist, and when you had a narrow skill tied to a well-earned reputation, it was only a matter of time before the desperate or those with too much money came searching for you.

“This will be the year,” he said with a practiced, confident tone.  “And maybe, this will be the day.”

Any coincidence was minimal.  It was his habit to say those words and then lean forward in his seat, watching the only road that happened to lead past his shop.  If someone were coming, Ash would see him now.  And as it happened, two figures were ascending the long glass ribbon, one leading the other, both fighting the steep grade as well as the thick endless wind.

The leader was large and simply shaped—a cylindrical body, black and smooth, held off the ground by six jointed limbs.  Ash instantly recognized the species.  And he decided that the other entity was human—a creature like himself, and at this distance, entirely familiar.

They weren’t going to be clients.  Most likely, they were sightseers.  Perhaps they didn’t even know one another.  The two entities happened to be marching in the same direction.  But as always, Ash summoned a seductive premonition.  Then he finished his tea and ate the drowned ii-link beetle on the cup’s bottom, relishing the acrid taste as he listened to the world, and after a little while, despite the heavy wind, he heard the quick dense voice of the alien—an endless blur of words and old stories and lofty abstract concepts born from one of the galaxy’s great natural intellects.

When the speaker was close, Ash called out, “Wisdom passes.”

A Vozzen couldn’t resist such a compliment.

The road had finally flattened out.  Jointed legs turned the long body, every eye focusing on the tall, rust-colored human sitting inside the craggy tree.  The Vozzen continued walking sideways, but slowly, fatigued by the long march.  His only garment was a fabric tube, black like his carapace and with the same slick texture.  “Wisdom shall not pass,” said a thin, shrill voice.  Then the alien’s translator made adjustments, and the voice softened.  “If you are a man named Ash, this Wisdom intends to linger.”

“I am Ash.”  He immediately dropped to his knees.  The ground was rocky but acting like a supplicant would impress the species.  “May I serve your Wisdom in some time way, sir?”

“Ash,” the creature said.  “The name is Old English.  Is that correct?”

Genuine surprise brought laughter.  Ash said, “Honestly, I am not quite sure.”

“English,” the creature repeated.  The translator was extremely adept, creating an unnervingly human voice—mature and male, and pleasantly arrogant.  “There was a tiny nation-state, and an island, and as I recall from my studies, England and its confederate tribes acquired a rather considerable empire that briefly covered the face of your cradle world.”

“Fascinating,” said Ash.  The second figure was climbing the last long grade, pulling an enormous float-pack, and despite his initial verdict, Ash realized that the creature wasn’t human at all.

“But you were not born on the Earth,” the Vozzen continued.  “Your flesh and your narrow build are revealing some very old augmentations.”

“Mars,” Ash said.  “I was born there.”

“Mars,” the voice repeated.  That simple word triggered a cascade of memories, facts and telling stories.  Dipping into the flood, the Vozzen selected his next offering.  “Old Mars was home to some fascinating political experiments.  From your earliest terraforming societies to the Night of the Dust—“

“I remember,” Ash interrupted, trying to gain control over the conversation.  “Are you a historian, sir?”

“I am conversant in the past, yes.”

“Then perhaps I shouldn’t be too impressed.  You seem to have been looking for me, and for all I know you’ve already researched whatever little history is wrapped around my life.”

“It would be impolite not to study your existence,” said the Vozzen.

“Granted.”  With another deep bow, Ash asked, “What can this old Martian do for a wise Vozzen?”

The alien fell silent.

Ash glanced at the second creature.  Its skeleton and muscle were much like a man’s, and the head wore a cap of what could have been dense brown hair.  There was one mouth and two eyes but no visible nose, and the mouth was full of heavy pink teeth.  Many humans had novel genetics, but this creature was not human.  Ash sensed it, and using a private nexus, he asked his shop for a list of likely candidates.

“Ash,” the Vozzen said.  “Yes, I have made a rather full study of your considerable life.”

Dipping his head, Ash drove his knees into the rough ground.  “I am honored, sir.  Thank you.”

“I understand that you possess some exotic machinery.”

“Quite novel.  Yes, sir.”

“And talents.  You wield talents even rarer than your machinery.”

“Unique talents,” Ash said with effortless confidence.  Lifting his gaze, he smiled, and wanting the advantage in his court, he rose to his feet, brushing the grit from his bloodied knees as he told his potential client, “I help those whom I can help.”

“You help them for a fee,” the alien remarked, disdain in the voice.

Ash approached the Vozzen.  “My fee is a fair wage,” he said.  “A wage determined by the amoral marketplace.”

“But I am an impoverished historian.”

Ash gazed at the many bright black eyes, and with a voice tinged with careful menace, he said, “It must seem awful, I would think.  Being a historian, and being Vozzen, and feeling your precious memories slowly and inexorably leaking away.”