The Greatship (5 page)

Ten thousand and forty-eight years after discovering the hole, Alone returned.  The winch remained fixed in place, but someone else had visited, and possibly more than once.  Boot prints showed in the dust.  He smelled and tasted signs of a second human.  But nobody had stood on this ground for long, and when he went below, he found the body exactly where he had left it—only more dried, more wasted.  More helpless, if that was possible.

Once again, Alone emptied the pack of its belongings, but this time he tenaciously studied the design and contents of even the most prosaic, seemingly useless item.  He taught himself to read.  He mastered the old, once-treasured machines that had thoroughly recorded one life.  The mummified man had a long, cumbersome name, but he answered easiest to Harper.  Eyes pressed against digital readers, Alone marveled at scenes brought from the distant earth—glimpses of brightly lit humans, the toothy faces of a family, and a sequence of wives.  But all of his people and every lover were left behind when Harper sold his possessions, surrendering his home and safety for a ticket to ride the Great Ship—embarking on a glorious voyage to circumnavigate the Milky Way.

Between the man’s arrival at Port Alpha and this subsequent disaster, barely fifty years had passed.  Fifty years was no time at all.  What’s more, Harper had filled his days with a single-minded hunt for the Ship’s ancient builders.  Infused with a maniacal hunger, the human not only presumed that a grand purposeful force had built the derelict starship, but the same force was still onboard, hiding in an odd corner or unmapped chamber, biding its time while waiting for that brave, earnest explorer who would discover its lair.

Harper intended to be that very famous man.

Every aspect of the lost life was studied.  There were gaps in the records, particularly near the end.  But Alone wasn’t familiar enough with human ways to appreciate that another hand might have blanked files and entire days, erasing his presence from the story.  What mattered was digesting the full nature of this alien beast, learning Harper’s manners and looks and duplicating his high, thin voice.  Then Alone refilled the pack.  But this time, he left the hole with the lost man’s possessions carried under what looked like a human arm.

At the top of the hole, he transformed his face, his body.

There are many ways to be alone.  The next weeks were spent duplicating the voice and gestures found on the digitals.  Only then did Alone abandon the safety of the cavern.  The local time was night, as he planned.  Obeying customs learned only yesterday, Alone summoned a cap-car that silently carried him halfway around the Ship.  He paid for the service with funds pulled from an account that hadn’t been touched for thousands of years.  The modest apartment hadn’t seen this face for as long, but its AI said, “Welcome.”  The master’s sudden reappearance didn’t cause suspicion or curiosity.  Entering a home that he didn’t know, Alone spent the next ten days and nights continuing his studies of the lost man.  Then his apartment announced, “You have a visitor, sir.”

Baffled, he asked, “Who?”

“It is Mr. Jan.”

“Who is Mr. Jan?”

“I have no experience with the gentleman.  But he claims to be your very good friend.”

Alone considered a few implications.

“What shall I tell him, sir?”

“That I have no friends,” he replied.

“Very well.”

The matter seemed finished.  But fifty-three minutes later, the apartment warned, “Mr. Jan is still waiting at our door, sir.”

“Why?”

“Apparently he wishes to speak with you.”

“But I’m not his friend,” Alone repeated.

“And I told him as much.  But he is upset about some matter, and he refuses to leave until he shares words with you.”

“Let him walk into the front hall.”

A narrow, nervous human crept into the apartment.  Mr. Jan had a familiar scent, and judging by the intricacy of the braids, he was quite proud of his thick red hair.  The hallway was thirty meters long, which wasn’t long enough.  The two figures stared at one another from opposite ends, and when Mr. Jan took a small step forward, the other soul said, “No.  Come no closer, please.”

“I understand,” the guest whispered.  “Sure.”

“What do you want with me?”

What did Mr. Jan want?  The possibilities were too numerous or too vast for easy explanations.  He gazed down at his pale hands, as if asking their opinion.  Then quietly and very sadly, he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“Yes I am.”

Alone felt sick to be this near a stranger.  But the borrowed voice remained calm, under control.  “For what are you apologizing?”

Mr. Jan straightened his back, surprised by those words, and on reflection, angered by them too.  “I’m apologizing for everything, of course!  I’m sorry for the entire mess!”

Alone waited, his new face unchanged.

“But these troubles weren’t only my fault,” the visitor insisted.  “You used me, Harper.  And I know you made fun of me.  We were supposed to have a business relationship, a partnership.  I heard quite a few promises about money, but did you give me even half of what I’d earned?”

“What did I give you?”

“None of it.  Don’t you remember?”

“Then I must have cheated you,” Alone said.

“‘Cheat’ doesn’t do it justice,” Mr. Jan said.

Alone wasn’t certain which words to offer next.

“Look,” said Mr. Jan.  “What I did…I was just trying to scare you.  Taking you that deep, down where your nexuses couldn’t reach anybody, and cutting the sapphire before you dropped into that room.  It looks bad, if you strip things down and make it simple.  But it was only meant to be a warning, and nothing else.”

“You were trying to scare me,” Alone said.

“Don’t you remember?  I spelled out my reasons afterwards.”  Mr. Jan looked at the granite floor and then the matching ceiling.  With a stiff, self-absorbed voice, he said, “You heard me calling down to you.  I know you heard, because you answered me.  I told you that I was going to let you sit there and commune with the Great Ship until you promised to give me everything I was owed.”

“I remember,” Alone lied.

“Money and respect.  That’s what I wanted, that’s what I deserved.  And that’s why I had to do what I did.”  The walls were only partly tiled.  Like the rest of the tiny apartment, the hallway was far from finished.  Mr. Jan leaned against the shifting quasicrystals, beginning to cry.  “All you needed to do…I mean this…you just had to say a few words to me.  You could have told me another lie, if you wanted.  I never planned to leave you down there.  I’m not cruel like that.  If you’d made any promises, spun together a few nice words, I’d have pulled you right out of there.  Yes, I would have saved you in an instant.”

The voice faded.

“I should have done that,” Alone agreed.  “Lying would have been best.”

“Well, I don’t know if that’s quite true.”  The weeping man looked at his nemesis—a ghost that had stalked him for eons.  “But listen, Harper.  You have no respect for anyone but yourself.  Those insults you yelled up at me.  Yes, you managed to hurt me.  Those awful things that you said…they last.  They’re still cutting me.”

“I was wrong,” Alone agreed.

Mr. Jan looked at him.  He took three steps forward, and when the other figure didn’t complain, he admitted, “You don’t realize it, but I returned to the hole.  I went there to check on you.  After you fell into the coma, I used a little lift-bug to reach your body.”  A trembling hand tugged at the braided copper-colored hair.  “I meant to bring you out, but I was scared.  It looks bad, what happened, and I didn’t want trouble.  So I scrubbed away every trace of me, from your field recorders and in here too.  I convinced your apartment that I never existed and that you were always coming home tomorrow.  In case anybody became curious about your whereabouts.”

“People can be curious,” Alone agreed.

Mr. Jan smiled grimly, and wiping at his eyes, added, “I was always your best friend.”

Alone said nothing.

“You should know…when you vanished, nobody noticed.  Oh, some might ask me about you.  Since they knew we were close.  For several years, they would come up to me and wonder if I’d heard any noise from Crazy Harper and where you might have gone.”

“‘Crazy Harper’?”

“That’s what some people called you.  I never did.”

Alone remained silent.

Mr. Jan concentrated on his mind for a while, searching for courage.  “I am a little curious,” he finally admitted.  “How did you climb out of that hole?”

“There is a story,” Alone said.  “But I don’t wish to tell it.”

Mr. Jan nodded, lips mashed together.  “Does anyone know the story?  About us, I mean.”

Silence.

Mr. Jan wrapped his arms around his chest and squeezed.  “Not that you’re in terrible shape now.  I mean, it’s not as if I murdered somebody.”  He paused, dwelling on possibilities.  “You’ve lost time.  I know it was quite a lot of time.  But here you are, aren’t you?  Everything is back where it belongs.”

“I’ve told no one about my years.”

With a deep sigh, Mr. Jan said, “Good.”

“Only you know what really happened.”

The human nodded.  He tried to laugh, but his voice collapsed into soft sobs.  “I won’t mention it, if you don’t.”

“I don’t know what I would say.”

Wiping at his wet face, Mr. Jan quietly asked, “What can I do?  Please.  Tell me how to make this up to you.”

Alone said nothing.

“I did something criminal.  I’ll admit that much, of course.  But you should deliver the punishment.  That’s the right solution.  Not the captains.  Let’s not involve them.  You are in charge.”  The smile was weak, desperate.  “I promise.  I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”

Alone had no idea what to say.  Then a memory took hold, and he smile in the human fasion, nodding knowingly.  “You will leave me,” he said quietly, with authority.  “Leave this place and climb to the Ship’s hull.  Since you’re a criminal, you need to be where criminals belong.  Live under the stars and help keep the hull in good repair.”  Alone took a small step forward.  “The work is vital.  The Great Ship must remain strong.  There is no greater task.”

Mr. Jan straightened his back.  “What?”  He didn’t seem to understand.  “You want me to work with the Remoras?  Is that your punishment?”

“No,” said Alone.  “I wish you to become a Remora.”

“But why would I?”

“Because if you do otherwise,” Alone replied, “other people, including the captains, will hear what you did to your good friend, Crazy Harper.”

The demand was preposterous.  Mr. Jan shook his head and laughed for a full minute before his frightened, slippery mind fell back to the most urgent question.  “How did you get out of that hole?”

Alone didn’t answer.

“Somebody helped you.  Didn’t they?”

“The Great Ship helped me.”

“The Ship?”

“Yes.”

“The Ship pulled you out from that hole?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Jan looked at the sober face, waiting for any hint of a lie.  But nothing in the expression gave hope, and he collapsed to the stone floor.  “I just don’t believe you,” he said.

But he did believe.

“The Ship needs you to walk on the hull,” Alone explained.  “It told me exactly that.  Until you are pure again, you must live with the followers of Wune.”

“But how long will that take?”

Alone hesitated.  Then quite suddenly he was laughing.  “I am sorry, Mr. Jan.  I don’t know the timetable.  Even with me, it seems, the Great Ship refuses to explain much about anything.”

Harper must have been a difficult, solitary man.  No one seemed to have missed his face or companionship, and his sudden return caused barely a ripple of interest.  Word spread that somebody was living inside his modest, half-finished apartment, and the apartment’s AI dutifully reported communications with acquaintances from the far flung past.  But the greetings were infrequent and delivered without urgency.  Privacy proved remarkably easy to keep.  For twenty busy years, Alone remained inside the barely furnished rooms, and the apartment never asked where its only tenant had been or why he had been detained, much less why this new Harper never ate or drank or slept.  Mr. Jan had damaged the machine’s minimal intelligence.  A full month was invested in dismantling and mapping his companion’s mental functions, and all that while Alone wondered if he was the same, his mind incomplete, mangled by clumsy, forgotten hands.

Harper had painted himself as an important explorer and an exceptionally brave thinker.  Inside his pack, he had carried dated records about mysterious occurrences inside the Great Ship.  But there were larger self-feeding files in his home, each possessed by one broad topic and a set of tireless goals.  Those files had grown exponentially while the master was mission—anecdotes about ghosts and monsters and odd lost aliens.  After thousands of years, one thin joke of a Builder waving hello to the first scout team had mutated into a string of third-hand testimonies and conspiracies among the captains.  Add to that rumors and misunderstandings as well as a river of compelling lies and buoyant blatant fakes, and it would take the busy soul centuries just to discount each and every tale.

Set doubt aside, even for a moment, and it would be impossible not to accept that the Great Ship was full of ancient, inscrutable aliens—wise souls born when the Earth was just so many uncountable atoms cooking inside a thousand scattered suns.

And each resident species had its preferred Builder.

Humanoids liked to imagine ancient humanoids; cetaceans pictured enormous whales; machine intelligences demanded orderly, nonaqueous entities.  But fashions shifted easily and usually in confusing directions, dictating the key elements to the most recent fables.  Each millennium had its favorite phantom and its most popular cavern.  There was a stubborn lack of physical evidence, but even that absence made true believers dance.  Harper reasoned that the Builders were secretive and powerful organisms, and of course no slippery wise and important creature would leave traces of its passing.  Skin flakes and odd tools were never found in the deep caves, much less one genuine body, because if hard evidence did exist, then the quarry wouldn’t be the true Builders.  Would they?

One of the files focused on the Remora’s ghost.

On Alone.

Hundreds of sightings and endless conjecture made for years of unblinking study.  Absorbing every word, every murky image, Alone was fascinated by the mystery that he had walked through.  According to self-proclaimed experts, he was as real as the Whispers that haunted a mothballed spaceport.  But Harper gave more credence to the Clackers who supposedly swam inside the Ship’s fuel tanks, and the Demon-whiffs that were made of pure dark matter.  Many thousands of years after the event, Alone watched the recording of himself standing inside the empty hyperfiber tank—a swirl of cobalt light that could mean anything, or nothing—and he wondered if perhaps he wasn’t entirely real.  Only recently, after billions of steps and missteps, had the phantom acquired that rare and remarkable capacity to stand apart from Nothingness.

For every place on the hull where Alone was seen, the Remoras and others had spied at least ten more examples of the ghost wandering beneath the stars.

What if more than one of him was wandering loose?

Alone didn’t know what to believe.  The sightings had diminished after he abandoned the hull, and no Remora claimed to have spotted Wune’s mysterious friend.  No file mentioned Aasleen and the nightmare inside one of the Ship’s engines, which meant that the captains and crew were talented at keeping secrets, and what else did they know?  A related file focused on shape-shifting machines currently lurking in dark corners and deep wastes.  Alone’s cavern was prominent but far from the most important.  Dozens of sprawling, empty locations were named, but the only cavern to capture Alone’s imagination was named Bottom-E.  Again and again, he found sketchy accounts of tourists wandering down an empty passageway, and glancing over their shoulder, they spied a smear of dim light silently racing out of view.

Bottom-E was a much larger cavern even than Alone’s old home, and if nothing else, it would provide the perfect next home.

But what if a second entity like him already lived there?

Two decades of study and consideration led to one difficult choice.  Various humans had tried to contact Harper on his return.  Most were small figures, many with criminal records and embarrassing public files.  But despite those same limitations, one man had all the qualifications to give aid to an acquaintance that he hadn’t seen for ages.

With Harper’s face and voice, Alone sent a polite request.

Eighteen days passed before any reply was offered.  The recorded digital showed a smiling man sitting inside what looked like a diamond bubble.  He began with an apology, explaining, “I was wandering through The Way of Old.  It’s an ammonia-hydroxide ocean, on a small scale but still a hundred cubic kilometers of murk and life.  That’s why I couldn’t get back to you right away, Harper.  Nexus are outlawed.  And since I’m going back under in another two minutes, I thought I could try to give your questions a few rubs to start with.”

Perri was the man’s name.

“So you’re interested in Bottom-E,” the message continued.  “I can’t promise much in the way of help.  I haven’t seen more than one tenth of one percent of the place.  But there is one enormous room that’s worth the long walk.  Its floor is hyperfiber, and a fine grade at that.  And the ceiling is kilometers overhead and inhabited by the LoYo.  They’re machines, not sentient as individuals but communal in nature.  A few thousand of their city-nests hang from the rafters, and that’s one of the reasons for going down there.”

The grinning man continued.  “The LoYo give that big room a soft, delicious glow.  I’ve got good eyes, but even after a week in there, I couldn’t see far.  Just the immediate floor and what felt like a distant, unreachable horizon.  Once, maybe twice, I saw a light in the distance.  I can’t claim to know what the light was.  But you know me, Harper.  Don’t expect ghost stories.  Usually the truth is a lot more interesting than what we think we want to see…

“Anyway, what I like best about Bottom-E, and in particular about that huge room…what makes a trip genuinely memorable…is that when you walk on that smooth hyperfiber, and nothing above you but the faint far off glow of what could be distant galaxies…it’s easy to believe that this is exactly how it would have felt and looked just a couple billion years ago, if you were strolling by yourself across the hull of the Great Ship.

“Understand, Harper?  Imagine yourself out between the galaxies, crossing the middle of nothing.  That’s an experience worth doing.”

Then with a slow wink, Perri added, “By the way.  I know you keep to yourself.  But if you feel like enduring some company, you’re more than welcome to visit my home for a meal, for conversation.  For no good reason, if you.  I don’t think you ever met my wife, and I’ll warn you, Quee Lee likes people even more than I do.”

Perri paused, staring at his unseen audience.

“You were gone a very long time,” he said.  “Jan claimed you were off chasing Clackers, and that’s what the official report decides too.  ‘Lost in the fuel tanks.’  But I haven’t heard any news about bodies being fished out of the liquid hydrogen, which makes me wonder if our mutual friend was telling another one of his fables.

“Anyway, it’s wonderful-good to see you again, Harper.  And welcome back to the living!”