The Greatship (41 page)

Leading an army of captains was the Master Captain, and next in command was her loyal and infamous First Chair.  Miocene was second most powerful creature in this spectacular realm.  She was tough and brutal, conniving and cold.  And of all the impossible crap to happen, this was the worst.  Pamir watched his guest peel away the last of her elaborate disguise.  The AI was propped outside, set into a diagnostic mode.  The soldiers remained hidden by the new darkness and their old tricks.  It was just the two of them inside the apartment, which made no sense.  If Miocene knew who he was, she would have simply told her soldiers to catch him and abuse him and then drag him to the Ship’s brig.

So she didn’t know who he was.

Maybe.

The First Chair had a sharp face and black hair allowed to go a little white, and her body was tall and lanky and ageless and absolutely poised.  She wore a simple uniform, mirrored in the fashion of all captains and decorated with a minimum of epaulets.  For a long moment, she stared into the depths of Pamir’s home.  Watching for something?  No, just having a conversation through a nexus.  Then she closed off every link with the outer world, and turning toward her host, she used his present name.

Pamir nodded.

She used his last name.

Again, he nodded.

And then with a question mark riding the end of it, she offered a third name.

He said, “Maybe.”

“It was or wasn’t you?”

“Maybe,” he said again.

She seemed amused.  And then, there was nothing funny about any of this.  The smile tightened, the mouth nearly vanishing.  “I could look farther back in time,” she allowed.  “Perhaps I could dig up the moment when you left your original identity behind.”

“Be my guest.”

“I am your guest, so you are safe.”  She was taller than Pamir by a long measure—an artifact of his disguise.  She moved closer to the wayward captain, saying, “Your origins don’t interest me.”

“Well then,” he said.

And with a wink, he added, “So is it true, madam?  Are you really in love with me?”

She laughed abruptly, harshly.  Stepping away from him, Miocene studied the apartment again, this time focusing on its furnishings and little decorations.  He had a modest home—a single room barely a hundred meters deep and twenty wide, the walls paneled with living wood and the ceiling showing the ruddy evening sky of a random world.  With a calm voice, she announced, “I adore your talents, whoever you are.”

“My talents?”

“With the aliens.”

He said nothing.

“That mess with the harum-scarums…you found an elegant solution to a difficult problem.  You couldn’t know it at the time, but you helped the Ship and my Master, and by consequence, you’ve earned my thanks.”

“What do you wish from me tonight, madam?”

“Tonight?  Nothing.  But tomorrow—early in the morning, I would hope—you will please apply your talents to a small matter.  A relatively simple business, we can hope.  Are you familiar with the J’Jal?”

Pamir held tight to his expression, his stance.  Yet he couldn’t help but feel a hard kick to his heart, a well-trained paranoia screaming, “Run!  Now!”

“I have some experience with that species,” he allowed.  “Yes, madam.”

“I am glad to hear it,” said Miocene.

As a fugitive, Pamir lived among the J’Jal on two separate occasions.  Obviously, the First Chair knew much more about his past.  The pressing question was if she knew only about his life five faces ago, or if she had seen back sixty-three faces—perilously close to the day when he permanently removed his captain’s uniform.

She knew his real identity, or she didn’t.

Pamir strangled his paranoia and put on a wide grin, shoulders managing a shrug while a calm voice said, “And why should I do this errand for you?”

Miocene had a cold way of smirking.  “My request isn’t reason enough?”

He held his mouth closed.

“Your neighbors didn’t ask for your aid.  Yet you gave it willingly, if rather secretly.”  She acted angry though not entirely surprised.  Behind those black eyes, calculations were being made, and with a pragmatic tone, she said, “I promise not to investigate your past.”

“Because you already have,” he said.

“To a point, and maybe a little farther than I first implied.  But I won’t use my considerable resources any more, if you help me.”

“No,” he said.

She seemed to flinch.

“I don’t know you,” he lied.  “But madam, according to your reputation, you are a bitch’s bitch.”

In any given century, how many times did the First Chair hear an insult delivered to her face?  Yet the tall woman absorbed the blow with poise, and then she mentioned a figure of money.  “In an open account, and at your disposal,” she said.  “Use the funds as you wish, and when you’ve finished, use some or all of the remaining wealth to vanish again.  And you should hope to do a better job of it this time.”

She was offering a tidy fortune.

But why would the second most powerful entity on the Ship dangle such a prize before him?  Pamir considered triggering hidden machines.  He went as far as activating a tiny nexus, using it to bring a battery of weapons into play.  With a thought, he could temporarily kill Miocene.  Then he would slip out of the apartment through one of three hidden routes, and with luck, escape the pursuing soldiers.  And within a day, or two at most, he would be living a new existence in some other avenue…or better, he would stand alone in one of the very solitary places where he had stockpiled supplies.

Once again, Miocene confessed, “This is a confidential matter.”

In other words, this was not official business for the First Chair.

“More to the point,” she said, “you won’t help me as much as you will come to the aid of another soul.”

Pamir deactivated the weapons, for the moment.

“Who deserves my help?”

“There is a young male you should meet,” Miocene replied.  “A J’Jal man, of course.”

“I’m helping him.”

“I would think not,” she replied with a snort.

Then through a private nexus, she fed an address to Pamir.  It was in the Fall Away district—a popular home for many species, including the J’Jal.

“The alien is waiting for you at his home,” she continued.

Then with her cold smirk, she added, “At this moment, he is lying on the floor of his backmost room, and he happens to be very much dead.”

Every portion of the Great Ship wore at least one bloodless designation left behind by the initial surveys, while the inhabited places enjoyed one or twenty more names, poetic or blunt, simple or fabulously contrived.  In most cases, the typical passenger remembered none of those labels.  Every avenue and cavern and little sea was remarkable in its own right, but under that crush of novelty, few were unique enough to be famous.

Fall Away was an exception.

For reasons known only to them, the Ship’s builders had fashioned a tube from mirrored hyperfiber and cold basalt—the great shaft beginning not far beneath the heavy armor of the ship’s bow and dropping for thousands of perfectly vertical kilometers.  Myriad avenues funneled down to Fall Away.  Ages ago, the Ship’s human engineers etched roads and paths in the cylinder’s surface, affording views to the curious.  The crew built homes perched on the endless brink, and they were followed by a wide array of passengers.  Millions now lived along its spectacular length.  Millions more pretended to live there.  There were more famous places onboard the Great Ship, and several were arguably more beautiful.  But no other address afforded residents an easier snobbery.  “My home is on Fall Away,” they boasted.  “Come enjoy my view, if you have a free month or an empty year.”

* * *

Pamir ignored the view, and when he was sure nobody was watching, he slipped inside the J’Jal’s apartment.

The Milky Way wasn’t the largest galaxy, but it was most definitely fertile.  Experts routinely guessed that three million worlds had evolved their own intelligent, technologically adept life.  Within that great burst of natural invention, certain patterns were obvious.  Half a dozen metabolic systems were favored.  The mass and composition of a home world often shoved evolution down the same inevitable pathways.  Humanoids were common; human beings happened to be a young example of an ancient pattern.  Harum-scarums were another, as were the Glory and Aabacks, the Mnotis and Striders.

But even the most inexpert inorganic eye could tell those species apart.  Each humanoid arose on different life-trees.  Fur and plumage and armor and neatly folded fat enclosed the dissimilar bodies.  Some were giants built for massive worlds, others frail little wisps that could barely survive the Ship’s gravity.  Even among naked mock-primates, there was an enormous range when it came to hands and faces.  “I am nothing like a human,” shouted the elegant bones, while the flesh itself was full of golden blood and DNA that proved its alienness.

And then, there were the J’Jal.

They had a human walk and a very human face, particularly in the typically green eyes.  Diurnal creatures, they were hunter-gatherers from a world much like the Earth, having roamed an open savanna for millions of years, using stone implements carved with hands that at first glance, and sometimes with a second glance, looked entirely human.

But the similarities reached even deeper.  The J’Jal heart beat inside a spongy double-lung, and every breath pressed against a cage of rubbery white ribs, while the ancestral blood was a ruddy mix of salts with iron wrapped inside a protein similar to hemoglobin.  In fact, most of their proteins had a telltale resemblance to human types, as did great portions of their original DNA.

Convergence could happen when species evolved in similar environments, but mutation-by-mutation convergence was preposterous.  A common origin, however unlikely, was ten million times more practical.  The Earth and J’Jal must have been relatively close neighbors in the past.  One world evolved simple, durable microbial life.  Then a comet splashed into the ocean, and a piece of living crust rose into space.  With a trillion sleeping passengers safely entombed, the wreckage drifted free of the solar system, and after a few light-years of cold oblivion, the crude ark slammed into a new world’s atmosphere where at least one microbe survived, happily eating every native pre-life ensemble of hydrocarbons as it and its children conquered the new realm.

Such things often happened in the galaxy’s early times.  At least half a dozen other worlds shared biochemistries with the Earth.  But only the J’Jal world took such a similar evolutionary pathway.

In effect, the J’Jal were distant cousins, and for many reasons, they were poor cousins, too.

                * * *

Pamir stood over the body, examining its position and condition.  Spider-legged machines did the same.  Reaching inside the corpse with sound and soft bursts of x-rays, the machinery arrived at a rigorous conclusion they kept to themselves.  With his own eyes and instincts, Pamir wished to do his best, thank you.

It could have been a human male lying dead on the floor.

The corpse was naked, on his back, legs together and his arms thrown up over his head with hands open and every finger extended.  His flesh was a soft brown.  His hair was short and bluish-black.  The J’Jal didn’t have natural beards.  But the hair on the body could have been human—a thin carpet on the nippled chest that thickened around the groin.

In death, his genitals had shriveled back into the body.

No mark was visible, and Pamir guessed that if he rolled the body, there wouldn’t be a wound on the backside either.  But the man was utterly dead.  Sure of it, he knelt down low, gazing at the decidedly human face, flinching just a little when the narrow mouth opened and a shallow breath was drawn into the dead man’s lungs.

Quietly, Pamir laughed at himself.

The machines stood motionless, waiting for encouragement.

“The brain’s gone,” he offered, touching the forehead with his left hand, feeling the faint warmth of a hibernating metabolism.  “A shaped plasma bolt, something like that.  Ate through the skull and cooked his soul.”

The machines rocked back and forth on long legs.

“It’s slag, the brain is.  And some of the body got torched too.  Sure.”  He rose now, looking about the bedroom with a careful gaze.

A set of clothes stood nearby, waiting to dress their owner.

Pamir disabled the clothes and laid them on the ground beside the corpse.  “He lost ten or twelve kilos of flesh and bone, and he’s about ten centimeters shorter than he used to be.”

Death was a difficult trick to achieve with immortals.  And even in this circumstance, with the brain reduced to ruined bioceramics and mindless glass, the body had persisted with life.  The surviving flesh had healed itself, within limits.  Emergency genetics had been unleashed, reweaving the original face and scalp and a full torso that couldn’t have seemed more lifelike.  But when the genes had finished, no mind was found to interface with the rejuvenated body.  So the J’Jal corpse fell into a stasis, and if no one had entered this apartment, it would remain where it was, sipping at the increasingly stale air, its lazy metabolism eating its own flesh until it was a skeleton and shriveled organs and a gaunt, deeply mummified face.

He had been a handsome man, Pamir could see.

Regardless of the species, it was an elegant, tidy face.

“What do you see?” he finally asked.

The machines spoke, in words and raw data.  Pamir listened, and then he stopped listening.  Again, he thought about Miocene, asking why the First Chair would give one little shit about this very obscure man.

“Who is he?” asked Pamir, not for the first time.

A nexus was triggered.  The latest, most thorough biography was delivered.  The J’Jal had been born onboard the Ship, his parents wealthy enough to afford the luxury of propagation.  His family’s money was made on a harum-scarum world, which explained his name:  Sele’ium—a play on the harum-scarum convention of naming yourself after the elements.  And just a youngster, barely five hundred years old, Sele’ium carried a life story that couldn’t seem more ordinary.

Pamir stared at the corpse, unsure what good that did.

Then he forced himself to walk around the apartment.  It wasn’t much larger than his home, but with a pricey view making it twenty times more expensive.  The furnishings could have belonged to either species.  The color schemes were equally ordinary.  There were a few hundred books on display—a distinctly J’Jal touch—and Pamir set loose a little flat-scribe to read each volume from cover to cover.  Then he lead his helpers to every corner and closet, to new rooms and back to the old rooms again, and he inventoried every surface and each object, including a sampling of dust.  But there was little dust, which meant that the dead man was exceptionally neat, or somebody had carefully swept away every trace of his own presence, including bits of dried skin and careless hairs.

“Now what?”

He was asking himself that question, but the machines replied, “We do not know what is next, sir.”

Again, Pamir stood over the breathing corpse.

“I’m not seeing something,” he complained.

A look came over him, and he quietly laughed at himself.  Then he requested a small medical probe, and the probe was inserted, and through it he delivered a teasing charge.

The dead penis pulled itself out of the body.

“Huh,” Pamir exclaimed.

“All right,” he said, shaking his head.  “We’re going to search again, this place and the poor shit’s life.  Mote by mote and day by day, if we have to.”