The Greatship (3 page)

A solitary wanderer could slip inside the Ship and never be seen.  Clearly and simply, Wune explained how that might be accomplished, and more important, which mistakes to avoid.  Hours had passed.  She grew drowsy again, and with yawns and rolling motions of her hands, the Remora wished her chameleon friend rich luck and endless patience.  “I hope you find what you are hunting and avoid whatever it is that you are fleeing.”

Alone offered thanks but had no intention of accepting advice.  Once Wune was asleep, he picked a fresh direction and walked away, and for several centuries he wandered the increasingly smooth hull, watching lasers slash and auroras swirl while the galaxy—majestic and warm and bright—rose slowly to meet the Great Ship.

Sometimes he was forced to hide in the open.  Techniques and his confidence improved, but always weighed down by the sense that the Remoras were watching him, despite his tricks and endless caution.  And he certainly eavesdropped on them, especially when Wune’s name was mentioned.  Her frank smart voice never found him again, but others spoke of the woman with admiration and love.  Wune had visited this bubble city or that repair station.  Serving the Great Ship was an honor and a joyous, dangerous burden, she preached.  And to her loyal people, she exalted the strength that comes from mastering the evolution of your own mortal body.  And then Wune was killed, evaporated by a shard of ice that slipped past every laser.  The news had to be absorbed slowly.  He didn’t understand his emotions but discovered that he couldn’t walk any farther, and he hid where he happened to be, for a full year doing nothing.  Wune was the only entity with whom he had ever spoken, and he was deeply shocked, and then he saw that he was sad, but what wore hardest was the keen pleasure when he realized that she was dead but he was still alive.

Eventually he followed a line leading back to Ship’s trailing face, slipping past the bubble cities and into the realm of giant engines.  Standing before one towering nozzle, Alone recalled Wune’s promise of small, unmonitored hatches.  Careless technicians often left them unsecured.  With a gentle touch, Alone tried to lift the first hatch, and then he tried to shove it inwards.  But it was locked.  Working his way along the base of the nozzle, he tested another fifty hatches before deciding that Wune was mistaken.  Or perhaps the technicians had learned to do their work properly.  But having nothing else to do, he invested the next twenty months walking a piece of one great circle, toying with every hatch and tiny doorway that he came across, persistence rewarded when what passed for his hand suddenly dislodged a narrow doorway.

Darkness waited, and the palpable sense of great distance.

He crawled down, slowly at first, and then the sides of the nearly vertical tunnel pulled away from his grip.

Falling was floating.  There was no atmosphere, no resistance to his gathering momentum.  Fearing someone would notice, he left the darkness intact.  Soon he was plunging at a fantastic rate, and he recalled Wune’s voice and words:  “Those vents and access tubes run straight down, sometimes for hundreds of kilometers.”

His tube dropped sixty kilometers before making a sharp turn.

There was no warning.  One moment, he was mildly concerned about prospects that he couldn’t measure, and the next moment saw pure misery and flashes of senseless light as his neural net absorbed the abuse.  But he never lost consciousness.  His shattered pieces flowed together.  Wounds were healed slowly, drenched in pain.  And he was still broken and helpless when a familiar voice found him.

Lying in the dark, unable to move, something quiet came very close and said, “The cold,” before falling silent again.

He didn’t try to speak.

After a long while, the voice said, “Forever, the cold.”

“What is cold?” Alone whispered.

“And dark,” said the voice.

“Who are you?”

The voice said, “Listen.”

Alone remained silent, straining to hear any kind of sound, no matter how soft or fleeting.  But nothing else was offered.  Silence lay upon silence, chilled and black, and he spent the next long while trying to decipher which language was used.  No human tongue, clearly.  Yet those few words had been as transparent and simple as anything he had ever heard.

Once healed, he seeped light.

The engine’s interior was complex and redundant, and most of its facilities were never used.  Except for the occasional crackling whisper, radio talk never reached him.  This was a realm where he could wander.  Happily he discovered a series of nameless places where the slightest frosting of dust lay over every surface—a dust never disturbed by limb or by breath.  Billions of years of benign neglect promised seclusion.  No one would find him in this vastness, and if nothing else happened in his life, all would be well.

Ages passed.

Technicians and their machines traveled through these places, but always bound for more important locations.

Hiding was easy inside the catacombs.

Sometimes the overhead engine was fired, but there were always warnings.  Great valves were opened and closed.  Vibrations traveled along the sleeping tubes.  A deeper chill could be felt as lakes of liquid hydrogen were prepared for fusion.  Alone always knew three sites where he could quickly find shelter.  His planning worked well, and he saw no reason to change what was flawless.

Then one day, nothing was the same again.  Sitting inside a minor conduit, Alone was happily basking in a pool of golden light leaking from his inexplicable body.  He was thinking about nothing, which was his favorite state of mind.  And then the perfect instant was in the past, lost.  A deep rumble announced dense fluids on the move, and before he could react, he was picked up and carried away by a hot viscous and irresistible liquid.  Not hydrogen, and not water either.  This was some species of oil dirtied up with odd metals and peculiar structures.  He was trapped inside juices and passion, life and more life, and he responded with a desperate radio scream.

Tendrils touched him, trying to weave their way inside him.

He panicked, kicked and spun hard, pulling his body into the first disguise that occurred to him.

Electric voices jabbered.

A language was found, and what surrounded him said in the human tongue, “It is a Remora.”

“Down here?”

“Tastes wrong,” a third voice complained.

“Not hyperfiber, this shell isn’t,” said a fourth.

No voice ever repeated.  This oily body contained a multitude of independent, deeply communal entities.

“The face is,” one said.

“Look at the face,” said another.

“Can you hear us, Remora?”

“I do,” Alone allowed.

“Are you lost?”

Alone understood the word, but it seemed too full of implications.  So with as much authority as possible, he said simply, “I am not lost.  No.”

An alien language erupted, the multitude debating what to do with this conundrum.

Then a final voice announced, “Whatever you are, we will leave you now in a safe place.  For this favor, you will pay us with your praise and thanks.  Do this and win our respect.  Otherwise, we will speak badly of you, today and for the eternity to come.”

“Yes,” he said.  “Thank you, yes.”

He was spat into a new tunnel—a brief broad hole capped with a massive door and filled with magnetic filters, meshed filters, and powerful mechanical limbs.  The limbs gathered him up, and Alone transformed his body again, struggling to slide free.  But the machines tied themselves into an enormous knot, trapping him.  Alone felt helpless.  Maybe something good would have happened, but he panicked.  Wild with terror, fresh talents were unleashed, and he discovered that when he did nothing except consciously gather up his energies, he could eventually let loose a burst of coherent light—an ultraviolet flash that jumped out of his skin, scorching the smothering limbs—and he tumbled back onto the mesh floor.

A second set of limbs emerged, stronger and more careful.

Alone tried to adapt.  A longer rest produced an intense magnetic pulse.   The mechanical arms flinched and died, and he changed his shape and flowed out from between them.  The chamber walls and overhead door were high-grade hyperfiber.  With bursts of light, he attacked the door’s narrow seams.  He attacked the floor and vaporized the dead arms and focused on the seams again.  Security AIs made no attempt to hide their presence, calmly studying the ongoing struggle.  Then an auxiliary door opened, revealing a pair of humans clad in armored lifesuits, complete with massive hyperfiber helmets that showed no faces, only cameras, giving extra protection to their tough, fearful minds.

The technicians held busy instruments, but mostly they used their shielded eyes.

One man asked, “What is that thing?”

“I don’t damn well know,” said the other.

“Think it’s the Remoras’ ghost?”

“Who cares?” he said.  “Call the boss, let her think.”

The humans retreated.  Fresh arms were generated, slow and massive but designed just moments ago to capture this peculiar prize.  Alone was herded into a corner and grabbed up, and an oxygen wind blew into the chamber, bringing a caustic mist of aerosols designed to weaken any normal machine.  Through the dense air and across the radio spectrum, humans spoke to him.  “We don’t know if you can understand us,” they admitted.  “But please try to remain still.  Pretend to be calm.  We don’t want you hurt, we want you to feel safe, but if you insist on fighting, mistakes are going to be made.”

Alone struggled.

Then something was with him—a close, familiar presence—and the voice said, “The animals.”

Alone stopped fighting.

“They have us,” said the voice.

He listened to the air, to the empty static.

But whatever just spoke to him was gone again, and that’s when a low whistling noise began to leak out of the prisoner—a steady sad moaning that stopped only when the ranking engineer arrived.

“I think you understand me.”

He stared at the woman.  Except for a plain white garment, she wore nothing.  No armor, no helmet.

“My name is Aasleen.”

Aasleen’s face and open hands were the color of starless space.  She was speaking into the air and into an invisible microphone, her radio words finding him an instant before their mirroring sound.

The woman said, “Alone.”

He wasn’t struggling.  Doing nothing, he allowed his power to swell, and he wondered what he might accomplish if held this pose for a long time.

“That’s your name, isn’t it?  Alone.”

He had never embraced any name and saw no reason to do so now.

With her black eyes, Aasleen studied the prisoner.  And as she stood before him, coded threads of EM noise pushed into her head.  Buried in her organic flesh were tiny machines, each speaking with an urgent, complex voice.  She listened to those voices, and she watched him.  Then she said one secret word, silencing the chatter as she approached, walking forward slowly until he couldn’t endure her presence anymore.

He made himself invisible.

She stopped moving toward him but she didn’t retreat either, speaking quietly to the smear of nothing defined by the giant clinging limbs.

“Twisting ambient light,” she said.  “I know that trick.  Metamaterials and a lot of energy.  You do it quite well, but it’s nothing new.”

Alone remained translucent.

“And I understand how you can shift shapes and colors so easily.  You’re liquid, of course.  You only pretend to be solid.”  She paused for a moment, smiling.  “I had a pet octopus once.  He had an augmented brain.  To make me laugh, he used to pull himself into the most amazing shapes.”

Alone let his body become visible again.

“Step away,” he pleaded.

Aasleen stared at him for another moment.  Then she backed off slowly, saying nothing until she had doubled the distance between them.

“Do you know what puzzleboys are?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

“Puzzleboys build these wonderful, beautiful machines—hard cores clothed with liquid exteriors.  Their devices are durable and inventive.  The best of them are designed to survive for ages while crossing deep space.”

Aasleen paused, perhaps hoping for a reaction.

Growing tired of the quiet, she explained, “Puzzleboys are like a lot of sentient species.  They wanted the Great Ship for themselves.  Thousands of worlds sent intergalactic missions, but my species won the race.  I rode out here on one of the early starships.  Among my happiest days is that morning when I first stood on the Ship’s battered hull, gazing down at the Milky Way.”

He said, “Yes.”

“You know the view?”

“Yes.”

She smiled, teeth shining.  “A couple thousand years ago, as we were bringing the Great Ship into the galaxy, the puzzleboys started singing lies.  They claimed that they had sent a quick stealthy mission up here.  The laws of salvage are ancient—far older than my baby species.  Insentient machines can’t grab so much as a lump of ice for their builders.  But the aliens claimed that they had shoved one of their own citizen’s minds inside a suitable probe.  Like all respectable lies, their story had dates and convincing details.  It’s easy to conclude that their one brave explorer might have reached the Great Ship first.  If he had, this prize would be theirs, at least according to these old laws.  The only trouble with that story is that their mission never arrived.  I know that.  I never saw signs of a squatter, and they haven’t produced corroborating evidence.  Which is why we have made a point of insulting that entire species, and that’s why the legal machinery of this cranky old galaxy has convincingly backed our claim of ownership.”

Quietly, he said, “Puzzleboys.”

“That’s a human name.  A translation, and like most approximations, grossly inadequate.”

An EM squeal offered the species’ name.

“Do you recognize it?” asked Aasleen.

He admitted, “I don’t, no.”

“All right then.”  She nodded, a thin smile breaking and then vanishing again.  “Let’s have some fun.  Try to imagine that somebody we know, some familiar civilization, dreamed you up and sent you to the Great Ship.  Maybe they borrowed puzzleboy technology.  Maybe you’ve sprung from a different engineering history.  Right now, I’m looking at oceans of data.  But despite everything I see, my experience and intuitions, I can’t pick one answer over the others.  Which is why this so fascinating, sir.  And why you are so fun.”

Alone said nothing.

She laughed briefly, softly.  “That leaves us with a tangle of questions.  For instance, do you know what scares me about you?”

“What scares you?”

“Your power supply does.”

“Why?”

Aasleen didn’t seem to hear the question.  “And I’m not the only person sick with worry,” she admitted, closing one of her eyes and opening it again abruptly.  “Miocene,” she said, and sighed.  “Miocene is an important captain.  And you’re considered a large enough problem that right now, that powerful captain is sitting inside a hyperfiber bunker three kilometers behind me.  Three kilometers is probably far enough.  If the worst happens, that is.  But of course nothing will go bad now.  As I explained to Miocene and the other captains, you seem to have survived quite nicely and without mishap, possible for thousands years.  What are the odds that your guts are going to fail today, in my face?”

He considered his nature.

“Do you have any idea what’s inside you?”

“No,” he admitted.

“A single speck of degenerated matter.  A miniature black hole, perhaps, although you’re more likely the house for a quark assemblage of one or another sort.”  Aasleen sighed and shrugged.  “Regardless of your engine design, it is novel.  It’s possible, yes, and I have a few colleagues who have done quite a lot of work proving that this kind of system might be used safely.  But to see something like you in action and to realize that you’ve existed for who-knows-how-long, and apparently without demanding any significant repair…”

She paused.  “I am a very good engineer,” she said.  “One of the best I’ve ever met, regardless of the species.  And I just can’t believe in you.  Honestly, it is impossible for me to accept that you are even a little bit real.”

“Then release me,” he begged.

She laughed.

He watched her face, her nervous fingers.

“In essence,” she continued, “you are a lucid entity carrying a tiny quasar in its core.  The quasar is smaller than an atom and enclosed within a magnetic envelope, but massive and exceptionally dense.”

“Quasar,” he repeated.

“Matter, any matter, can be thrown inside you, and if only a fraction of the resulting energy is captured, you will generate shocking amounts of power.”

He considered her explanation.  Then with a quiet tone, he mentioned, “I have seen the Ship’s engines firing.”

“Have you?”

“Next to them, I am nothing.”

“That is true.  In fact, I have a few happy machines sitting near us that can outstrip your capacities, and by a wide margin.  But as Submaster Miocene has reminded me, if that magnetic stomach is breached and if you can digest just your own body mass, the resulting fireworks will probably obliterate several cubic kilometers of the Ship, and who knows how many innocent souls.”

The words felt true, and Alone believed her.  But then he remembered that good lies have believable details and he didn’t feel as certain.

Aasleen smiled in a sad fashion.  “Of course I don’t know exactly what would happen, if your stomach failed.  Maybe it has safety mechanisms that I can’t see.  Or maybe its fire would reach out and grab my body and everything else in this room and as far away as Miocene…and with that, the Great Ship would be short one engine, and the survivors would find an enormous hole in the hull, spewing poisons and nuclear fire.”

“I won’t fail,” he promised.

She nodded.  “I think that’s an accurate statement.  I know I want to believe that both of us are perfectly safe.”

“I won’t hurt the Ship.”

“Which is a fine sentiment.  But why do you feel certain?”

“Because I am,” he said.

Aasleen closed her eyes, once again concentrating on the machines inside her head.

“Please,” said Alone.  “Let me go.”

“I can’t.”

His shape began changing.

Aasleen’s eyes opened.  “I know the story about you and Wune meeting.  My hope?  You take my appearance like you did hers.  That might be fun.”

But he didn’t.  There were no limbs now, nothing resembling a face.  To the eye he resembled a ball of hyperfiber with giant rockets on one hemisphere, thick armor on the other.  Using a hidden mouth, he promised, “I won’t do any harm.  I won’t hurt anyone and I will never injure the Ship.”

“You just want to be left by yourself,” Aasleen said.

“Everything else hurts.”

“And why?”

He had no response.

“Which leads us to another area of deep concern,” Aasleen said.  “A machine built by unknown minds is found wandering inside a second machine built by unknown minds.  There seems to be two mysteries, there might be only one.  Do you understand what I mean?”

He said, “No.”

“Two machines but only one builder.”

He didn’t react.

She shook her head.  “We don’t know how old the Great Ship is.  We have informed guesses but no precision.  And no matter how well engineered you appear to be, I don’t think you’re several billion years old.”

He remained silent.

Aasleen took one step closer.  “And here is a third terror that involves you:  A captain’s nightmare.  Maybe you are the puzzleboys’ machine.  Or you’re somebody else’s representative.  Either way, if you arrived here on the Ship before any human did, and if there’s a lost soul inside whatever passes for your mind…well, then it’s conceivable that a different species might legally claim possession over the wealth and impossibilities that the Great Ship offers.  And at that point, no matter how sweet your engineering is, your fate is out my hands…”

Her voice trailed away.

She took a tiny step forward.

“I have no idea,” said Alone.  “I don’t know what I am.  I know nothing.”

The tiny machines inside Aasleen were speaking rapidly again.

“I’m watching your mind,” she said.  “But I’m not familiar with its neural network.  It’s a sloppy design, or it is revolutionary.  I don’t know enough to offer opinions.”

“I wish to leave now,” he said.

“In the universe, there are two kinds of unlikely,” said Aasleen.  “The Great Ship is the grand type—never attempted or even imagined, but achievable, provided someone has time and the relentless muscle to make it real.  And then there’s the implausible that you imagine will come true, and one day your worst fears turn real.  If the Great Ship belongs to someone else, then my species has to surrender our claim.  And even though I have convinced myself that I am a good charitable soul, I don’t want that to happen.  In fact, I would likely go to war in order to keep that from happening.”

Alone did nothing, gathering strength.

“And suppose you are safe as rain,” she said.  “I don’t relish the idea of you wandering wherever you like.  Not onboard my ship, and certainly not until we can coax out the answers to all these puzzles.”

With no warning, Alone lost his shape, turning into a hot broth that tried to flow around the grasping arms.

The arms seemed to expect his trick, quickly creating one deep bowl that held him in place.

“I promise,” said Aasleen.  “You’ll be somewhere safe.  We will keep you comfortable, and as much as possible, you’ll be left alone.  Not even Miocene wants to torment you, which is why a special chamber is being prepared—”

A new talent emerged.

The liquid body suddenly compressed itself, collapsing into a tiny dense and radiant drop hotter than any sun.  And as the bowl-shaped limbs struggled to keep hold of this fleck of fire, Alone stole a portion of the surrounding mass, turning it into energy, shaping a ball of white-hot plasma.

Then he shrank into an even tinier, hotter bit of existence.

Aasleen turned and ran.

The arms were pierced.  Alone fell to the floor.  The hyperfiber bubbled and burst into plasmas that he pulled close and pushed downward, using the fire as a drill, and he sank out of view, sank slowly until the hyperfiber turned into a bed of pale pink granite, and then much as a ship passes between the stars, he was flying quickly through what felt like nothing.