The Greatship (46 page)

One of the plunging rivers pulled close to the wall, revealing what it carried.  Inside the diamond tube was a school of finned creatures, not pseudofish nor pseudowhales, but instead a collection of teardrop-shaped machines that probably fused hydrogen in their hearts, producing the necessary power to hold their bodies steady inside a current that looked relentless, rapid and chaotic, turbulent and exceptionally unappealing.

Watching the swimming machines, Pamir decided that this was how he had lived for ages now.  Then he showed a shrug and soft laugh, continuing the long walk up the path, moving past a collection of modest apartments.  The library was just a few meters farther along—a tiny portal carved into the smooth black basaltic wall.  Its significance was so well hidden that a thousand sightseers passed this point every day, perhaps pausing at the edge of the precipice to look down, but more likely continuing on their walk, searching richer views.  Pamir turned his eyes toward the closed doorway, pretending mild curiosity, hands on the simple basalt wall that bordered the outer edge of the trail, eyes gazing down at the dreamy shape of the Little-Lot.

The massive cloud was the color of butter and nearly as dense.  A trillion trillion microbes thrived inside its aerogel matrix, supporting an ecosystem that would never touch a solid surface.

The library door swung open—J’Jal wood riding on creaky iron hinges.

Pamir opened a nexus and triggered an old, nearly forgotten captain’s channel.  Then he turned towards the creaking sound and smiled.  Sorrel was emerging from the library, dressed in a novice’s blue robe and blinking against the sudden glare.  The massive door fell shut again, and she quietly said, “All right.”

Pamir held a finger to his closed mouth.

She stepped closer, speaking through a nexus.  “I did what you told me.”

“Show it.”

She produced the slender blue book.

“Put it on the ground here.”

This was her personal journal—the only volume she was allowed to remove from the library.  She set it in front of her sandaled feet and asked, “Was I noticed?”

“I promise.  You were seen.”

“And do we wait now?”

He shook his head.  “No, I’m too impatient for that game.”

The plasma gun was barely awake when he fired it, turning plastic pages and the wood binding into a thin cloud of superheated ash.

Sorrel put her arms around herself, squeezing hard.

“Now we wait,” he advised.

Not for the first time, she admitted, “I don’t understand.  Still.  Who do you think is responsible?”

Again, the heavy door swung open.

Without looking, Pamir called out, “Hello, Leon’ard.”

The J’Jal librarian wore the same purplish-black robe and blue ponytail, and his expression hadn’t changed in the last few days—a bilious outrage focused on those who would injure his helpless dependents.  He stared at the ruins of the book, and then he glared at the two humans, focusing on the male face until a vague recognition tickled.

“Do I know you?” he began.

Pamir was wearing the same face he had worn for the last thirty-two years.  A trace of a smile was showing, except around the dark eyes.  Quietly, fiercely, he said, “I found my wife, and thanks for the help.”

Leon’ard stared at Sorrel, his face working its way through a tangle of wild emotions.  “Your wife,” he said.

Then he tipped his head, saying, “No, she is not.”

“You know that?” Pamir asked.

The J’Jal didn’t respond.

“What do you know, Leon’ard?”

Leon’ard glanced back across a shoulder—not at the library door but at the nearby apartments.  The man was at his limits.  He seemed frail and tentative, hands pressing at the front of his robe while the long toes curled under his naked feet.  Everything was apparent.  Transparent.  Obvious.  And into this near-panic, Pamir said, “I know what you did.”

“No,” the J’Jal replied, without confidence.

“You learned something,” Pamir said.  “You are a determined scholar and a talented student of other species, and some years ago, by design or idiot luck, you unraveled something.  At the knot’s center was a secret that was supposed to remain a deep, impenetrable.”

“No.”

“A mystery about my wife,” he said.

“What is it?” Sorrel asked.

Pamir laughed and said, “Tell her.”

The blood had drained out of Leon’ard’s face.

“No, I agree,” Pamir continued.  “Let’s keep this between you and me, shall we?  Because the poor kid doesn’t have any idea what this means.”

“What means what?” she asked.

“She is not your wife,” the librarian said.

“The hell she isn’t.”  He laughed.  “Check the public records.  Two hours ago, in a civil ceremony overseen by two Hyree monks, we were made woman and male-implement in a legally-binding manner.”

Sorrel stepped in front of him.  “What do you know about me?”

Pamir stared only at the J’Jal.  “But somebody else knows what we do.  Doesn’t he?  Because you told him.  You said a few words in passing, maybe.  Unless of course you were the one who devised a simple, brutal plan, and he is your simple accomplice.”

“No!” Leon’ard screamed.  “I did not dream anything.”

“I might believe you.”  Pamir looked at Sorrel, and he winked.  “When I showed this man an image of one of your dead husbands, his reaction didn’t feel quite right.  I saw the surprise, but the J’Jal eyes betrayed a little bit of pleasure, too.  Or relief, was it?  Leon’ard?  Were you genuinely thrilled to believe that Sele’ium was dead and out of your proverbial hair?”

The librarian looked pale and cold, arms clasped tight against his shivering body.  Again, he glanced at the nearby apartments.  His mouth opened and then pulled itself closed, and then Pamir said, “Death.”

“What did you say?” Leon’ard asked.

“There are countless wonderful and inventive ways to fake your own death,” Pamir allowed.  “But one of my favorites is to clone your body and cook an empty, soulless brain, and then stuff that brain inside that living body, mimicking a very specific kind of demise.”

“Sele’ium?” said Sorrel.

“What I think.”  Pamir was guessing, but none of the leaps were long or unlikely.  “I think your previous husband was a shrewd young man.  He grew up in a family that had lived among the harum-scarums.  That’s where his lineage came from, wasn’t it, Leon’ard?  So it was perfectly natural, even inevitable, that he could entertain thoughts about killing the competition, including his own identity.”

“You know nothing,” Sorrel said.

“Almost nothing,” Pamir agreed.  “Leon’ard is the one who is carrying all the dark secrets on his back.  Ask him.”

The J’Jal covered his face with his hands.  “Go away.”

“Was Sele’ium a good friend and you were trying to help?  Or did he bribe you for this useful information?”  Pamir nodded.  “Whatever happened, you pointed him toward Sorrel, and you must have explained, ‘She is perhaps the most desirable mate on the Great Ship—’”

A sizzling blue bolt of plasma struck Pamir’s face, melting it and obliterating everything beyond.

The headless body wobbled for a moment and then slumped and dropped slowly, settling against the short black wall.  Leon’ard leaped backwards, flattened hands waving in the bright air, while Sorrel stood over the remains of her newest husband, her expression tight but calm—like the face of a sailor who has already ridden through too many storms.

A pedestrian wandered past, his gaze distracted and his manner a little nervous.  He seemed embarrassed by the drama that he had happened upon.  He looked human.  The cold blond hair and purplish-black skin were common on high-UV worlds, while the brown eyes were as ordinary as could be.  He wore sandals and trousers and a loose-fitting shirt, and he stared at the destroyed body, seeing precisely what he expected to see.  Then he glanced at Sorrel, and with nothing but warmth, he said, “You do not know…you cannot appreciate…how much I love you…”

“Sele’ium,” she said doubtfully.

He started to speak again, to explain himself.

“Stay away,” she said.  “Leave me alone!”

His reaction was to shake his head with his mouth open—a J’Jal refusal—and then calmly and with considerable malice, he informed her, “I am an exceptionally patient individual.”

A bitter thin laugh came out of her.

“Not today, no, and possibly not for a thousand years,” he said.  “But I will approach you with a new face and name—every so often, I will come into your life—and there will be an hour and a certain heartbeat when you come to understand that we belong to one another.”

Suddenly the corpse kicked at the empty air.

Sele’ium glanced at the distraction.  Then slowly, he realized that Pamir’s body was shrinking, as if it were a balloon slowly losing its breath.  How odd.  He stared at the mysterious phenomena, not quite able to piece together what should have been obvious.  The headless ruin twitched hard and then harder, one shrinking leg flinging high.  And then from blackened wound rose a puff of blue smoke, and with it, the stink of burnt rubber and cooked hydraulics.

With his left hand, Sele’ium yanked the plasma gun from inside his shirt—a commercial model meant to be used as a tool, but with its safeties cut away—and turning in a quick circle, he searched for a valid target.

“What is it?” Leon’ard called out.

“Do you see him?”

“Who?”

More puzzled than worried, the young J’Jal refused to panic, his mind ticking off the possible answers, settling on what would be easiest and best.

In the open air, of course.

“Just leave us,” Leon’ard begged.  “I will not stand aside any longer!”

Sele’ium threw five little bolts into the basalt wall, punching out holes, making a rain of white-hot magma.

Somewhere below, a voice howled.

Sorrel ran to the wall and looked down, and Sele’ium crept up beside her, the gun in both hands, its reactor pumping energies into a tiny chamber, readying a blast that would obliterate everything in its path.

He started to peer over and then thought better of it.

One hand released the weapon and the free arm wrapped around Sorrel’s waist, and when she flung her elbow into his midsection, he bent low.  He grunted and cursed softly and then told her, “No.”

With his full weight, he drove the woman against the smooth black wall, and with his chin on her left shoulder, they bent together and peered over the edge.

Pamir reached up and grabbed the plasma gun, yanking hard.

And Sorrel tried to jump away.

The two motions combined to lift her and Sele’ium off the path, over the edge and plummeting down.  Pamir’s gecko-grip was ripped loose from the basalt, and he was falling with them, one hand on the gun, clinging desperately, while the other arm began to swing, throwing the fist into the killer’s belly and ribs.  Within moments, they were falling as fast as possible.  A damp singing wind blew past them, and the wall was a black smear to one side, while the rest of Fall Away was enormous and distant and almost changeless.  Airborne rivers and a thousand flying machines were out of reach and useless.  The three bodies fell and fell, and sometimes a voice would pass through the roaring wind—a spectator standing on the path, remarking in alarm, “Who were they?”

Three bodies were clinging and kicking.  Sele’ium punished Pamir with his own free hand, and then he let himself get pulled close, and with a human mouth only a few days old, he bit down, chewing hard on a wrist, trying to force the stranger to release his hold on the gun.

Pamir cried out and let go.

But as Sele’ium aimed at his face, for his soul, Pamir slammed at the man’s forearm and pushed it backwards again, and he put a hard knee into the elbow, and a weapon that didn’t have safeties released its stored energies a thin blinding beam that coalesced inside the dying man’s head, his brain turning to light and ash, a supersonic
crack
leaving the others temporarily deafened.

Pamir kicked the corpse away and clung to Sorrel, and she held tight to him, and after another few minutes, as they plunged toward the yellow depths of a living, thriving cloud, he shouted into her better ear, explaining a thing or two.

Again, it was nearly nightfall.

Once again, Pamir sat outside his apartment, listening to the wild songs of the llano-vibra.  Nothing looked out of the ordinary.  Neighbors strolled past or ran past or flew by on gossamer wings.  The Janusian couple paused long enough to ask where he had been these last days, and Pamir said a few murky words about taking care of family troubles.  The harum-scarum family was outside their apartment, gathered around a cooking pit, eating a living passion ox in celebration of another day successfully crossed.  A collection of machines stopped to ask about the facsimile that they had built for Pamir, as a favor.  Did it serve its intended role?  “Oh, sure,” he said with a nod.  “Everybody was pretty much fooled, at least until the joke was finished.”

“Was there laughter?” asked one machine.

“Constant, breathless laughter,” Pamir said.  And then he mentioned nothing else about it.

A single figure was approaching.  He had been watching her for the last kilometer, and as the machines wandered away, he used three different means to study her gait and face and manner.  Then he considered his options, and he decided to remain sitting where he was, his back against the huge ceramic pot and his legs stretched out before him, one bare foot crossed over the other.

She stopped a few steps short, watching him but saying nothing.

“You’re thinking,” Pamir told her.  “Throw me into the brig, or throw me off the Ship entirely.  That’s what you’re thinking now.”

“But we had an agreement,” Miocene countered.  “You were supposed to help somebody, and you have, and you most definitely have earned your payment as well as my thanks.”

“Yeah,” he said.  “But I know you.  And you’re asking yourself, ‘Why not get rid of him and be done with it?’”

The First Chair was wearing a passenger’s clothes and a face slightly disguised, eyes blue and the matching hair curled into countless tight knots, her cheeks and mouth widened but nothing about the present smile any warmer than any other smile that had ever come from this hard, hard creature.

“You know me,” she said.

A moment later, she asked, “Will you tell me who you are?”

“Don’t you know yet?”

She shook her head, and with a hint of genuine honesty admitted, “Nor do I particularly care, one way or the other.”

Pamir grinned and leaned back a little more.

“I suppose I could place you under custody,” Miocene continued.  “But a man with your skills and obvious luck…well, you probably have twelve different ways to escape from our detention centers.  And if I sent you falling onto a colony world or an alien world…I suppose in another thousand years or so, you would find your way back again, like a dog or an ugly habit.”

“Fair points,” he said.

Then with a serious, warm voice, he asked, “How is Sorrel?”

“The young woman?  As I understand it, she has put her apartment up for sale, and she has already moved away.  I’m not sure where.”

He said, “Bullshit.”

Miocene grinned, just for a moment.  “Perhaps I do have an idea or two.  About who you might be, I mean.”

“She knows now.”

The woman’s face seemed to narrow, and the eyes grew larger and less secure.  “Knows what?”

“Who her father is,” said Pamir.  “Her true father, I mean.”

“One man’s conjecture,” the First Chair reminded him.  Then with a dismissive shake of the head, she added, “A young woman in a gullible moment might believe you.  But she won’t find any corroboration, not for the next eternity, and eventually she will have to believe what she has always believed.”

“Maybe.”

Miocene shrugged.  “It’s hardly your concern now.”

“And it never was,” he allowed.  Then as the overhead lights flickered for the first time, he sat up straighter.  “The robbery was your idea, wasn’t he?  The thief who came to steal away the Darmion crystal?”

“And why would I arrange such a thing?”

“What happened afterwards was exactly what you were hoping for,” he said.  “An apparently random crime leaves Sorrel trusting me, the two of us emotionally linked.”

With a narrow grin, Miocene said, “I must be a very clever person.”

“And you assumed that the killer, whoever he was, would likely put an end to me.  Exposing himself in the process, of course.”

“Wicked as well as clever,” she said.

A second ripple of darkness passed along the avenue.  Pamir showed her a stern face, and quietly, he said, “Madam First Chair.  You have always been a remarkable and wondrously awful bitch.”

“I didn’t know it was Sele’ium,” she confessed.

“And you didn’t know why he was killing the husbands, either.”  Pamir stood up slowly.  “Because the old librarian, Leon’ard, pieced together who Sorrel was.  He told Sele’ium what he had learned, and he mentioned that the Sorrel’s father was a woman, and as it happens, that woman is the second most important person onboard the Great Ship.”

“There were some flaws in the public records, yes.”  She nodded, adding, “These are problems that I have resolved already.”

“Good,” he said.

Miocene narrowed her gaze.  “And yes, I am a difficult soul.  The bitch queen, and so on.  But my life is enormous and very complicated, and for a multitude of reasons, selfless as well as selfish, it is best if my daughter remains apart from my life and from me.”

“Maybe so,” he said.

“Look at these last few days.  Do you need more reasons than this?”  Then she took a step closer, adding, “But you are wrong, in one critical matter.  Whoever you are.”

“Where is the error?”

“You assume I wanted you to be killed, and that’s wrong.  It was a possibility and a risk.  But as a good captain, I had to consider the possibility and make contingency plans, just in case.”  She took another little step, saying, “No, what all of this has been…in addition to everything else that it seems to have been…is what I have to call an audition.”

“An audition,” said Pamir, genuinely puzzled.

“You seem to be a master at disappearing,” Miocene admitted.  Then she took one last step, and in a whisper, she said, “There may come a day when I cannot protect my daughter anymore, and she’ll need to vanish in some profound, eternal fashion.”

The third ripple of darkness came, followed by the full seamless black of night.

“That’s your task, if you wish to take it,” she said, speaking into the darkness.  “Whoever you happen to be…are you there, can you hear me…?”