The Greatship (38 page)

Regardless of origins and no matter the vagaries of physiologies, trees adapted to severe cold and darkness often shared physical traits.  Large, almost weightless leaves, mirrored and spread wide in the daylight, gathered the glow of the weak illusionary sun, bouncing it into a central bud or vein that was always black or purplish—a spherical receptor encased within an organic crystal, transparent but heavily insulated, clinging to every trace of useable heat.  What was living inside any tree was tiny.  Think of a man’s dead body with a busy heart still beating in the chest; those were the normal proportions.  Trees growing in the hamlet had the richest, easiest environment.  Warmth leaked from the homes, and the streetlamps were blessings.  But it took a hundred years for even the most vigorous Ganymede pine to expand as much as a good heart filling with hot, living blood.

Perhaps there were other ways to build cold trees.  But Crockett had no experience with them.  He came to the hamlet as a young boy and never left.  He couldn’t afford to go anywhere, since that meant losing his cherished residence status.   But he was free to travel by virtual routes, which he did on occasion—witnessing habitats inside the Great Ship and across the galaxy.  In general, Crockett favored hot bright places where trees grew tall as hills, leaving behind beautiful wood that he would buy with a tiny portion of his savings, using it to add accents and warmth to the walls of his own tiny house.

Beneath the cable car, the meager local forest was vanishing, and a moment later, it was gone.

Half a dozen cable cars were sliding past, and with a rough calculation, Crockett decided that only one or two more remained above.  The security officers hadn’t given up.  Smiling, he let himself imagine the girls waiting for him.  He pictured them standing side-by-side, pretty faces obscured by the layers of heated clothing, but their breath coming quickly with anticipation, emerging into the gloom before mixing with the rising steam and the falling snows.

The eruption would come today, or next week.  Or after several more months of patient bubbling, the heat would dissipate, the artificial magma allowed to cool until this carefully regulated hazard was past.

Eruptions were much the same on the Luckies’ home world.  Quakes followed chaotic logic.  Rising plumes were relentlessly fickle.  But a new volcano would always build somewhere and then explode, leaving a gaping wound.  Heated groundwater would percolate through the fractured crust, filling every hole with a fresh young lake.  The first colonists to arrive inside a new caldera were the fortunate ones.  They and their descendants ruled until the next eruption.  Hence the name:  Luckies.

Most cold worlds were marginal for life, or at best had stunted forests incapable of feeding the slowest bug.  But the Luckies’ home world enjoyed its own good fortune.  The soggy, constantly shifting crust was filled with microbes using every metabolic trick, dancing with energetic irons and sodiums, carbon monoxides and nitrates.  But the real producers were root-like giants—underground forests that choked every crevice, every pore, feasting on piezoelectric reactions and the physical flexing of the ground.  Some of them even pumped water into the magma pools, creating steam that powered elaborate, turbine-like organs.

Every eruption was preceded by a season of rapid, joyous growth.

The Luckies riding the Great Ship had just this one caldera.  Cataclysmic eruptions weren’t possible, much less desirable, but the general rhythms of their old life held sway.  The lake simmered and then boiled.  The tiny crystalline bodies separated from one another, growing tough spore-like shells.  Then the volcano erupted, flinging the water skyward as a scalding cloud, and trillions of tiny bodies were flung high by that carefully calibrated blast.  Most of the tiny aliens fell outside the caldera, and they were dead.  But those that found their way home again were blessed and knew it, and within a few months, they would be well on their way to rebuilding the society from Before.

Even the hamlet’s residents referred to the rim community as a forest.  But except for a passing resemblance to dead, leafless trees, the landscape had more in common with leaf litter, or better, with compost.  The pale gray remains of dead roots had been pushed out of every hole, expelled by what was still living underground.  Unlike the mirror-forests below, this realm had animal life—small crawlies and bigger crawlies, everything cloaked in fur and fat and tough genetics and variable metabolisms.  But instead of the usual chirps and drummings, Crockett heard only silence.  This was new and probably important.  Yesterday the forest was still jabbering away; but now, for the first time, he found himself wondering if the eruption was imminent.

The cable car slid into its empty berth.

Only one other berth was filled, its passengers presumably on the far side of the ridge, gazing down at the bubbling, seemingly bottomless lake.

Their car stopped, a polite voice warning everyone about the cold to come, and then the main door slid open.

But the chill wasn’t awful.  Crockett guessed the air wasn’t worse than seventy below—much warmer than the hamlet on any sun-scorched day.  He stepped out onto the wide porch where tourists normally paused to acclimatize themselves, investing a few moments thinking of the witty things that he might say.

His client remained in the car.

Puzzled, Crockett stepped back inside.  Doom was standing where he had always stood, but now his eyes were closed.

“Have you changed your mind?” asked Crockett.

The alien didn’t speak.

“You’re worried about the eruption,” Crockett said.  “Well, you shouldn’t.  It’s a surprisingly peaceful event.  I’ve known plenty who stayed up here while it happened.  Keep inside the shelters, or find a likely hole, and your body won’t die for more than a few hours.”

There was a brief silence.  Then with a quiet rattle, his friend said, “I will not be returning.”

Crockett blinked.  “What was that?”

“You are welcome to go, if you wish.”

“I can’t.  Not and leave you here.”

“But I need to be here,” Doom said.  “And besides, I do not require your presence.  Since I have their permission.”

“Whose permission?  The Luckies?”

“Yes.”

“Then why bring me at all?” Crockett asked.

Doom had six fingers on each hand, arranged three-and-three.  One of his hands had just reached inside his heavy coat, digging deep while white eyes scanned the Luckies’ false-forest.

“Maybe I should go home,” Crockett allowed.

“But you will have to walk,” Doom warned.  “Neither cable car is operational.  I am certain they will have seen to that detail.”

“Who saw to what?”

The creature’s gaze fixed on a distant point.

Crockett asked the car door to close, but nothing happened.

Then Doom began to retrieve his hand, and with a firm, half-loud voice, he said, “My good friend, I am sorry for your involvement in this.”

“Sorry–?” Crockett began.

And then the world turned to fire and a searing golden light.

Drifting back into consciousness—in that instant when misery and clarity were roughly balanced—Crockett decided that the caldera had erupted.  Where else would the flash of light come from?  How else could his body have been flung hard against the floor?  But then he gently set his gloved hand against his worst ache—the top of his head—and discovered that the insulated hood was missing, and his long golden hair was missing, and a palm-sized patch of the scalp had been burnt down to the hard bone.

A thousand emergency systems were awake, throwing their talents into protecting the brain and knitting new flesh.  Adrenalin and fancier stimulants enlarged his senses, slowing time to a contemplative crawl.  Crockett wasn’t scared, much less panicked.  He felt alert and focused and incapable of fear, absorbing his surroundings with curiosity and a powerful, intoxicating detachment.  One focused blast had punctured the cable car, destroying the door and then the far end.  The wind blowing up the valley was drifting through the gutted vehicle and then out again, carrying away the final traces of smoke and burnt flesh.  Doom lay in a corner, limp and headless.  Whatever had knocked Crockett to the floor had struck the alien with its full force, evaporating tough tissues and the skull, and whatever lay beneath.

Was the brain lost?

Was his client dead?

A pragmatic voice asked how this was possible.  The slow wet eruption of the caldera couldn’t produce the energies necessary to kill.  Maybe the rising steam and falling snow had produced some exotic species of ball lightning.  But even the most murderous example of meteorology couldn’t produce this kind of disaster, which left him with a much-worse explanation.

A military-grade weapon was at work here.

Someone higher on the ridge could have taken the shot, and a plasma gun would have gutted the car.  Except who would own such a device, and why would they, and for what conceivable reason would make anyone shoot at Crockett?

But of course he wasn’t the target.

If he were, he would be dead.  Plainly.

At long last, useful terror emerged.  Crockett managed one deep breath and dropped down, throwing both arms over his wounded head.  Except a second blast wouldn’t be impressed with a few obscuring limbs.  He needed to move, to hide.  But his terror had swollen out of control suddenly.  He couldn’t move, even to save himself.  He lay there like a scared, whimpering boy, waiting for another flash and the sudden removal of his existence.

Then the corpse sat up.

The six-fingered hand continued the motion begun before death, revealing some kind of ballistic weapon with a wide stubby barrel that lifted now, the blind hand aiming by memory or by unsuspected senses.  A soft, almost musical report could be heard.  An object flew out of the shattered car, followed by a muscular blast that rolled across the slope above them.

The corpse stood and began to walk, its free hand digging into a new pocket while the first gun fell on the floor beside Crockett.  Brandishing a second weapon, the blind corpse fired twice again and ran through the open door.  The next blasts shook the ridge and knocked it off its feet, but it was a determined apparition, rising once more and breaking into a run.

Crockett sat up for no other reason than to keep watch on what seemed to be the most unexpected, incredible sight of his sheltered little life.

Then from behind, a small sorry voice said, “Help me, my friend.  My Crockett.”

He turned, and the fighting corpse was forgotten.

A spider as wide as a dinner plate rose high as it could, on six jointed black legs.  The body was thick and solid, fashioned from some tough species of bioceramic alloy.  A mouth built only for speech was in front, and with a familiar voice, it said, “I will pay you…all I have left…”

“Doom?” the human muttered.

“All that remains of my wealth, it is yours.”

Crockett had heard about such tricks:  Organisms in the most dangerous circumstances would peel off their bodies, and sometimes even the bone or gelatin surrounding their living minds.  Then their minds were secured inside a lifeboat, tough and temporary, able to weather all but the worst abuses.

“What do you want?” Crockett asked.

More blasts peppered the slope, followed by the sizzle of a second plasmatic bolt.

“I must reach the lake.”

“You want to get to the Luckies,” he assumed.

“I have no help but yours,” said the spider.

“And if I don’t?”

“I apologize, but these ladies are professional murderers,” Doom warned.  “And since you are a witness to their attempted crime–”

Another blast was unleashed, higher up the slope this time.

Crockett snatched the alien gun and stood.

“My friend–?”

“We aren’t friends,” Crockett said.

“But you will help me?”

“Yeah, that too,” he promised.  “I’ll help both of us, if I can.”

Some visitors to the hamlet didn’t require local guides.  Diplomats representing various distant worlds had received permission, or they were scientists intrigued in the robust biosphere.  But a few souls had no obvious qualifications.  They were peaceful, profoundly focused individuals who preferred not to ride the cable car to the ridge, but instead would walk the steep trails, investing time and some effort into the last moments of normal life.

The hamlet residents might discuss their fate, but not often and rarely with much feeling.  Free sentient entities could do any fool thing they wished, so long as no one else was hurt.  And besides, there was always the chance that somebody would come looking for those who were lost, and there was money to be made from that very peculiar work.

One day, a human woman arrived on the tram.  She was handsome and queenly and reserved and alluring.  Rumors swirled about her desires, and Crockett gladly put himself where he could impress an old lady with his professionalism and strong back.

She hired him, promising ten days of constant labor.

The first six days were spent loading the cable car with equipment that was lifted to the end of the line and then carried over foot-worn trails, up to a rocky shelf on the far side of the caldera’s ridge.  The lake lay below them.  In the middle of winter the deep water was barely warm enough for a bath, and it was spectacularly clear—a vertical realm filled with swimming shapes and flexing tendrils and the delicate, rib-like reefs where the communal Luckies enjoyed their easy times.  Alien eyes covered nearly a quarter of the lake surface—thin, profoundly black disks made of light-sensitive neurons.  They were lidless and unsleeping eyes, missing nothing that happened in the sky.  By comparison, the woman’s telescope was tiny, feeble, and perhaps even laughable.

Crockett laughed, but only when he reached home again.

Six full days were needed just to bring the pieces of the machine up to the high shelf, and another three days were spent standing in the brutal cold.  The two worked in clumsy partnership, assembling and calibrating all the components and photon traps and the generator and its backup, struggling to meet the deadline that came on that last, tenth day.  By then, the Luckies’ weak sun had dropped beneath the illusionary horizon.  A sky that had been suffused with soft purple tones fell into total darkness.  Bright stars became brilliant, and thousands of unseen stars leapt out of the night.  Glancing through the viewfinder, Crockett saw more detail than he had ever imagined possible.  Each one of those miniscule stars was nothing more, or less, than a colorful mark painted on an otherwise invisible ceiling.  And not painted once, but endlessly—a succession of tiny, intense images that if examined closely would reveal flares and sunspots and perhaps the occasional, consistent transit of worlds.  And by the same inherent logic, each tiny round patch of shadow, smaller than a virus, was itself imbued with a thorough, finely rendered map, mountains giving birth to twisting rivers that ran unseen down to the invisible seas.

The Luckies had to feel utterly comfortable with their sky.

Crockett understood that logic, the alien mind…or at least he accepted the creatures’ strangeness well enough to make them familiar, and in the fashion of a tapestry hung for too long on the wall, forgettable.

But his client didn’t care about stars, bright or otherwise.

The vagaries of orbits had brought both of the outer moons into view.  In reality, the outermost moon was sold to humans as payment for passage onboard the Great Ship.  Colonists had rapidly terraformed the prize, transforming the ice crust into a blue ocean where millions of humans lived in floating cities and submerged cities and walked along beaches designed to be idyllic.  Sometimes, in a mocking mood, Crockett would tell neighbors, “I wouldn’t mind visiting that place.”  And everybody laughed, enjoying his weak humor even as they secretly wondered how walking that sand would really feel.

The nearer moon was half-full, and following the orbit of its namesake, on that day it reached opposition with the Luckies’ home moon.  The two celestial bodies couldn’t have been closer.  That icy neighbor was as large as possible, big as a big palm riding on the end of the short arm; and while it wasn’t near enough to touch, at least it managed to look genuine and immediate, even when the eyes knew it was a smear of light.

A picture.

Nothing.

Except for his presence as an Honorable Guide, Crockett wasn’t needed anymore.  His client told him to step away, which he did willingly.  For the next few hours, he staved off boredom by watching the caldera’s lake.  He studied the banded face of the old brown dwarf.  Then with eyes closed, he imagined sleeping with this woman with whom he had shared effort and time and very little else.

The telescope was a broad, blunt machine focused hard on one of the cities of that nearby moon.  With limited success, Luckies had colonized their neighbor’s natural hot springs.  Starships had brought other species, and later, the Great Ship brought even more.  With the available resolution, the woman found a certain building, and when the light was good, she could make out a solitary figure standing on its roof.  Then with a laser barely strong enough to throw its beam across a very large room, she sent a message, and after the appropriate delay, she received an answer that made her laugh quietly and then sob to herself.

Hours passed while she conversed with that dead person.

Crockett never learned who it was.  Human?  Alien?  Was it a former lover, or just some lost friend?  In a roundabout fashion, he made inquires.  But his client pretended not to hear him, and later, she mentioned that perhaps this was none of his business, thank you.

“I was just curious,” he muttered.  “Sorry, never mind.”

In the Luckies’ sky, no object was so thoroughly rendered as that neighboring moon.  Knowledgeable voices claimed that not even the Ship’s captains had the computing power that was being focused on that one illusionary body.  Every city on the visible hemisphere was real, as were the cities on the far side:  How else could the entire organic world be maintained?  Each city had its population, and every citizen had a name and address and life and loves, including the fierce hates and passionate disinterests and all the other untidy, inelegant, and wonderful hallmarks of existence.  Some self-declared experts claimed the vast imagery was so thorough that every mote of dust had its own label.  Every snowflake knew its place; every gust of wind had its story.  And that was why the Luckies could demand fortunes from those souls who were desperate enough or odd enough to have themselves killed:  Killed so those strange mite-sized creatures could tear their minds apart, revealing every memory, every cherished secret, and then slather whatever they learned to the plaster on their busy ceiling.

Finished at last, the woman turned away from the telescope and wept again.

When her grieving was finished, she called Crockett over, and together, they dragged the telescope to the edge of shelf and gave it one shared push.  An apparatus worth plenty tumbled into the warm water.  And alien bodies instantly tore it apart—the rare metals and hyperfibers most likely part of her payment.

Together, the two strangers returned to the cable cars.

In silence, they rode back down to the hamlet—a tiny place full of warm homes and real people and organisms that were as good as any person.

Only in the station, at the end, did Crockett suggest to his client that she might enjoy an evening spent with him.  He meant sex, but he didn’t say it.  He meant to sound friendly and fun, and that was exactly how he came across.  But she reacted instantly, decisively.  A knife in the belly wouldn’t have made her straighten up any faster, and with a tight, small voice, she asked, “Why would you ever think such a thing would be half-possible?”

He blinked, too startled to react.

“You’re the one living a dream,” she informed him.

This was not the first time, nor was it the last, that Crockett wondered if perhaps he didn’t know women quite as well as he believed.