The Greatship (37 page)

The hamlet was forbidden to wear any name, and by decree, its population and borders were never allowed to grow.  Tucked inside a high valley, the tiny community was flanked on three sides by dense, ancient rock—walls of black rock flecked with white and dubbed “granite” because of a passing resemblance to the bones of Old Earth.  Stunted forests of cold-adapted, light-starved trees grew wild on the slopes, while the caldera’s rim was reserved for native life forms.  Visiting the rim required special permission from the Luckies, and without exception, one of the hamlet’s permanent citizens had to act as an Honored Guide.

Twenty-five hundred humans, aliens, and AIs lived permanently in the nameless hamlet.  On the strength of an address, even the laziest among them made excellent livings.  Passengers came from the far reaches of the Great Ship to walk the high rim and gaze into the caldera’s magnificent lake.  But when the prolonged winter was finished—when the signs pointed at catastrophic change—the fattest of the fat times began.  When the lake began to simmer and bubble, news quickly spread among the wealthy.  Tens of thousands of strangers would ride the tram into the high valley, dressed for the brutal cold, happily paying insane fees for the chance to sleep in somebody’s cellar or attic, or be stacked like logs in the back of a little closet.  The hamlet was transformed by bright cheery souls who sang drinking songs and spent fortunes on the overpriced food, all while watching vapor rising from behind the towering rim.  Guests were constantly searching out the natives, asking them when the caldera would finally erupt.  “Soon,” was a safe reply, but these decisions were made entirely by the Luckies.  Ten Ship-days was the average length of an eruption—time enough for the entire lake to boil skyward and freeze solid.  And how big and beautiful would the new mountain be?  “It will be enormous and gorgeous,” the residents promised.  And that wasn’t just because they wanted to peel more money from these prosperous souls; even the most jaded, sun-starved citizen looked forward to the spectacle of fragile, moon-washed ice hanging over their drab little home.

Narrow trails crisscrossed the valley walls, eventually leading to the rim.  But hiking was thankless work and a considerable investment of time.  Antique cable cars offered quicker, easier journeys.  For thousands of years, tourists had gathered inside the spacious, overheated station, and locals who wanted work sat with their backs to the caldera, gossiping with one another, patiently waiting for the first worthwhile offer.

Crockett had planned to do nothing that day but sleep.  The lake had been steaming for weeks, and he’d made plenty already.  But a friend mentioned that today and today only, a certain pair of security officers was patrolling in and around the station grounds.

As it happened, those officers were very beautiful and wonderfully human.

When the hamlet was jammed with strangers, outsiders were hired to fill critical jobs.  Included in their ranks was a platoon of security officers, human and otherwise.  Judging the age of immortals was difficult; but those two women carried a palpable, delicious sense of youth.  They smiled constantly—weightless, untroubled grins common to barely grown people.  In their walks and the secure tilt of their heads, they looked unaffected by responsibility.  Another clue was their skin, as smooth and clear as any Crockett had ever seen:  After centuries of life, most humans cultivated artful wrinkles near the eyes, hinting at wisdoms that might or might not exist.  If appearances could be believed, the duo was thrilled to be living in the hamlet, however briefly.  They patrolled together and whispered to each other constantly, sharing giggles and various knowing looks; and several times, Crockett had spied them standing in the middle of a crowded street, ignoring the shoving bodies and lustful glances while they held gloved hands, gazing up at the distant rim of the caldera and the curtain of fresh steam that rose into the gloom and then froze, falling where the winds let it fall as this spring’s first snow.

Those girls were the reason Crockett walked to the cable car station and sat with his neighbors, making small talk while deflecting the tourists:  He was waiting for to see the objects of his affection.

“Is my offer not enough?” asked a lumbering Tamias.

“Your offer is most generous,” Crockett replied, examining the alien’s rodent-like face with an appropriately indirect gaze.  “But my ass is comfortable, and I will leave it where it is for now.”

Soon a Hippocamus shuffled forwards—a pregnant male, by the looks of its belly.  The creature took a deep breath and held the rich air inside his long neck, assessing the captured odors.  Then he bowed to Crockett, but before he could speak, the human warned, “I am claimed by others, my friend.  At present, I am helpless to help you.”

Without complaint, the alien stepped down the line and took another defining breath, and after a few moments of conversation, hired a little Janusian couple to be his Guide.

Human tourists noticed the rebuff.  They looked like a married couple, and married for a very long time.  The wife was less pretty than her husband, carrying quite a few millennia on her bones.  Both of them had stepped off a cable car that just returned from the rim, wearing smiles and heavy, self-heating coats and tall boots that had recently walked in the snow.  The pretty man approached Crockett.  “We wish we could have stayed longer,” he confessed.  “But our guide was tired, and we had to ride back with her.”

Crockett shrugged.  “The Luckies won’t let you stay up there alone.”

The old woman mentioned a respectable fee.  “For a second peek.  Would that be all right?”

Crockett was tempted, but only to a point.

“Not enough, is it?” asked her husband.

“I’m a little nervous.”  Crockett threw a dramatic glance over his shoulder.  “This eruption is late.  It could come any time now.”

“Are you being honest?” the woman asked, plainly suspicious.

“There’s honesty in my noise,” Crockett conceded with an amiable laugh.  “Our lake‘s been simmering longer than usual, and eventually, all that warm water has to leap into the sky.”

He had no predictive skills.  Only the Luckies knew when a full eruption was imminent, and they never gave clues.

“Warning away the fools,” said the pretty man.  “That seems like a good career.”

“It would be noble work,” Crockett said.

Then the wife tugged on her husband’s elbow.  “Maybe we should go back to our room, dear.”

Crockett liked to believe that he understood women.  One of the attractions of living in this nameless place was the parade of wealthy, carefree ladies.  This particular old woman gave every sign of wanting attention, and Crockett imagined that he was her husband.  She seemed like an elegant creature, accustomed to wealth but not spoiled by the stuff.  He appreciated that old-fashioned face and build, and maybe there was an old-fashioned address in her past.  Could she have come from the Old Earth?  That was a fascinating prospect, and watching the amorous couple stroll off into the darkness, he promised himself that he would find them tomorrow.  For a modest fee, he would offer his valuable services as an Honored Guide, testing his guesses against whatever they revealed about their cultivated lives.

Besides Crockett, the only Guides were a pair of rubber-faced AIs and a fiery little vesper.  But the little sun had just set, and as often happened when night began, tourists grew more interested in dinner than a walk through the cold.  The vesper soon rose and danced his way home.  The AIs plugged into each other, vanishing in their own unimaginable ways.  Crockett was alone, and the two objects of interest—those delightful security officers—had yet to pass through the station.  Were they delayed?  Did some criminal business ruin their timetable?  Crockett turned in his chair, watching the banks of steam illuminated by moonlight; and then he heard a sound and looked forward again, exactly at the moment when the two lovelies strode into the almost empty room.

He offered a smile and soft sigh.

Effervescent as always, the officers responded with as much of a glance as he could have hoped for.  They were delightful young ladies, each lovely in her way.  The shorter one was muscular, with meaty breasts and a buoyant ass.  By contrast, her companion was tall and elegant, blessed with a lip-rich mouth and eyes that couldn’t have been brighter.

“Hello,” Crockett managed.

Giggling, their hands met for a moment.

That they were lovers seemed self-evident.  But Crockett’s favorite rumor was that while they were passionate toward one another, they left the room and grace to invite a third party into their passion.

“Everybody else is home or on the rim,” he said.

Really, couldn’t he find anything more memorable to offer?

“We should visit the rim sometime,” said the taller girl.  With a flip of that pretty head, she declared, “You know, we could make it up there and back again before our dinner break is done.”

They must have a very long break, Crockett thought.

Since the officers weren’t permanent residents, the Luckies—the aliens who owned this realm—wouldn’t allow them close without a Guide.  Seeing his opportunity, Crockett came up with an amount that would make him the perfect companion:  Not too much, but then again, not so cheap that they’d think he was begging for the honor.

For a long, delightful moment, two lovely faces stared at him.

Then together, without one word being said, they approached the twin AIs, using pointed fingers and sparks of static electricity to alert their Guides.

Moments later, a cable car pulled out of the station, four passengers rising silently into the darkness.

Well, this hadn’t worked out at all.  Dignity demanded that Crockett wait for a few moments, as if the next action wasn’t connected to the past; and then he stood, putting on his hood, preparing for the sad walk home.

A lone figure stepped into the vacant station.

Countless aliens were passengers on the Great Ship.  According to official counts, thousands of species were among the wealthy, exceptionally important souls onboard, and some aliens took a multitude of physical forms.  Of course not every entity visited the Caldera of Good Fortune, but Crockett had never met the species standing before him.  Even a rapid search of reliable databases came up with nothing but a few similar creatures.  The entity was humanoid and small, with a tiny sucking mouth and smoky white eyes large enough to nearly fill its elliptical face.  Those odd eyes regarded Crockett for a contemplative moment, and then through its translator, the creature asked, “What would be a fair price to ride with me to the top…?”

Crockett sliced what was fair in half.

He would have done it for free, happily.  But then again, he was still a little upset that his girlfriends had so brazenly ignored him.

During those years and decades while the caldera slept, tourists arriving at the hamlet were as likely to gaze at the sky as to stare down at the Luckies.  Habitats onboard the Great Ship wore elaborate disguises—scented atmospheres and precise climates, false horizons painted on cavern walls and a simplified cosmos projected on what was only rock and timeless hyperfiber.  But most illusions demanded pragmatism over accuracy.  Modest telescopes focusing on any of those stars would reveal the fiction:  This artificial universe was composed of simple, bland specks of light.  Only the brightest few mock-suns pretended to spit out flares and gas, and only the nearest were accompanied by the faint glows of pretend worlds.  Point the same telescope at the blackness between any two stars, and a thousand dimmer suns might be waiting to be found.  But if you built even larger mirrors out of polished glass and photon traps and then peered out toward some galaxy floating on the edge of Creation, there always came a point—that well-defined and inevitable line of exhaustion—where the dimmest stars and oldest galaxies were missing, were not.

The Luckies had their own limits.  But their ceiling was managed by an army of dedicated AIs working with the best available squidskin—an intricate medium that produced light and darkness on an atomic scale.  The illusions eventually broke down, but that kind of telescope was far beyond what most tourists could carry or drag up to the hamlet, much less all the way to the high ridge.

“I love this view,” Crockett allowed, hoping to generate conversation.  Or even just a neutral comment.

But the alien seemed to cherish its silence.

Luckies loved their sky, and with reason.  Their home world was tucked inside a thick bright arm of the Milky Way, not far from an active star nursery.  Gaze north, away from the ridge, and the false sky had beauty and majesty that even the shallowest soul would notice.  But the local space was even richer:  Five massive moons orbited a substantial brown dwarf, and the brown dwarf was dancing with a quiet little K-class sun.  The Luckies’ lived on the third moon, tidally locked and constantly massaged by its hefty neighbors.  The inner neighbors were volcanic superstars, baked in radiation and their own fierce internal heat, while the outer moons were originally ice-clad and exceptionally cold, but with deep seas waiting beneath their surface.

Crockett preferred the illusionary sky to the illusionary landscape.  Distant cavern walls were decorated with images of a frigid, bleak and deceptively bland terrain—a slow-moving chimera showcasing volcanoes and stubborn glaciers and wide expanses of lifeless, inert stone.

The Honored Guide turned, and not quite looking at those enormous white eyes, he introduced himself by name.

His companion offered no sound or visible motion.

“Luckies have rules,” Crockett said.  “I’m allowed to live here because ages ago, I won a lottery.  I’m exceptionally lucky, for a human.  And with my address comes the understanding that I can bring only my friends to the ridge.”

The alien offered a soft, metallic chirp.

“Let’s go through the motions,” Crockett suggested.  “For the sake of law and custom, tell me your name.”

A moment passed, and another.  Then the alien chirped again, and its translator said, “Doom.”

“Doom?”

The translator spoke for itself.  “That is my best approximation.  But it is imperfect, and I apologize.”

“What language does the creature use?”

“I cannot say.”

“You aren’t free to name it?”

“Perhaps I am.  But my expertise feels incomplete.”

The cable car had been accelerating since leaving the station, riding on a nanowhisker too small to be seen.  Once and then twice again, descending cars sped past them, brightly lit, filled with visitors and their newfound friends.  Crockett waved at his neighbors.  Then he shut down his car’s lights, allowing the full effect of the sky to work on odd, silent Doom.

The brown dwarf was a flattened disk barely visible through the vaporous clouds.  But an inner moon lay far enough to one side to be visible—a rough orange and black blister of a world, chunks of its crust melting and exploding outwards with a violence that only looked impressive.

“You know,” Crockett said.  “The amount of computing power goes into these stars, the brown dwarf, and every major and minor moon…”

Then he intentionally stopped talking.

After a long pause, his companion said, “I am listening.”

“The Luckies have peculiar personalities,” said Crockett.  “And a rather unique biology, as I understand it.  They’re an old species, yet it took them forever—a billion years, nearly—to build starships.  Not that they weren’t interested in the stars.  The sky means more to them than almost anything.  You see, their preferred habitat are these hot caldera lakes.  Each caldera had its vantage point, its unique view of the heavens.  And whenever different populations spoke, they spent most of their time explaining what they could see—star for star; moon for moon.”

Doom did not speak.  But the big eyes were gazing upward, at least accidently showing interest.

“You probably know all of this,” Crockett continued, “but during their entire history, the Luckies have built only a handful of starships.  These were elaborate ships and very reliable, but exceptionally difficult to piece together.”  He held up his hand, squeezing two fingers close together.  “A single Lucky is only this big.”

The size of a dust mite, in essence.

“Autochemotrophic metabolisms.  Low energy, minimal complexity.  Not only aren’t they particularly bright creatures, when taken alone, but they’re pretty much helpless too.”

Was he interesting his client, or boring it?  Either way, Crockett was enjoying his impromptu lecture.

“A few million Luckies are about as sharp as one average human brain,” he said.  “But they don’t feel at home until they number in the hundreds of trillions.  That’s what lives on the other side of this mountain.  A nation of tiny entities all tied together.  Together, they build giant eyes that float on their lake home, catching every wandering photon.  And when enough of the Luckies think hard on one subject, they can dream up the greatest thoughts imaginable.”

Crockett shrugged.  “So what if it took millions of years to accrete a workable starship out of hot ores and salty, acidic water?  They had time, and the patience.  Really, if you want my opinion, they’re incredible, wonderful organisms.”

Several more cable cars passed by, looking like gaudy balloons being dragged down to a lower altitude.  Without exception, the faces inside the balloons were happy, either glad for their adventure or glad to be returning home again.

“Wonderful creatures,” he said.

Doom was certainly alien, but Crockett sensed emotion.  The eyes were jumping inside their sockets, and the mouth was cocked in a way that didn’t look comfortable.  It was nervous. 
He
was nervous.  Plenty of species lacked a sense of gender, but Crockett had spent most of his life riding inside these cars with aliens, and that gave him a healthy respect for his own intuitions.

“Luckies have a weird, interesting model of reality,” Crockett continued.  “I’m sure you know this too.  But the idea enjoys repetition.”

A tight little breath was audible over the cold hum of the wind.

“Our universe is nothing more, or less, than a very pretty and intensely busy picture.  The Creation is an illustration that hangs on the wall of someone else’s living room.  If only we had some eye that could reach out far enough—out into those realms hidden by the Grand Inflation—then the stars would cease to be.  The galaxies and quasars and dark-matter masses…all those magnificent illusions would vanish…”

“Nothing is real,” Crockett said.

Then he sad, “To the Luckies, everything and everyone is a fiction.  And existence is simply the oldest, finest illusion.”

Crockett’s new friend whimpered.  That was the best description for the mournful little sound.  Then the big eyes closed, the lids rising from below, and he chirped and his translator said, “Well, perhaps we should hope these little creatures are correct.”