The Greatship (54 page)

Every irreducible moment brings the New.  Nothing will ever remain where it was and how it was.  Matter is transformed.  Energy and thought are transformed.  With endless hands, the universe frantically shuffles its pieces, and every part of the universe must move and grow colder or move and grow temporarily warmer, and every possibility is manifested, and no mind finds any happiness to inhabit forever, and even what seems stable and true skids upon a razor balanced upon another razor perched upon the thinnest, keenest slice of luck.

Five hundred thousand years is the promise—one circuit through the finest portions of the galaxy.  Increasingly competent entities are thoroughly in charge, and nothing goes wrong.  Nothing is wrong.  A thousand centuries of relative peace and occasional bliss can make the mind believe that the next centuries will be very much the same.  But the Great Ship is not alone.  Even when the Ship appeared empty, drifting beyond any reach, there was Marrow.  Marrow is the world sitting snug at the Ship’s center, and after not being noticed for so very long, it is suddenly discovered and explored, settled and named, and certain ideas get loose inside its children.

The inevitable moment arrives, and the Ship’s old course is thrown aside.

The Polypond waits before the Ship—a black cloud full of rage and intelligence and the joy of oblivion.

The Polypond tries to kill the Great Ship, and Everything.

Inside a multitude of futures, it succeeds.

But one little possibility springs up like a root—a blind sickly colorless root that pushes out of the Milky Way, pushes into the deep familiar cold of true space, achieving very little beyond surviving through this moment, and the next moment, and perhaps the moment after that…

Yes, the galaxy possessed an ethereal beauty, particularly when magnified inside the polished bowl of a perfect mirror.  Every raider conceded as much.  And yes, the rocket nozzle where they lived was a spectacular feature, vast and ancient, its bowl-like depths filled with darkness and several flavors of ice lain over a plain of impenetrable hyperfiber.  Even the refugee city was lovely in its modest fashion, simple homes and little businesses clinging to the inside surface of the sleeping nozzle.  But true raiders understood that the most intriguing, soul-soaring view was found when you stood where Peregrine was standing now:  Perched some five thousand kilometers above the hull, staring down at the Polypond—a magnificent, ever-changing alien body that stretched past the neighboring nozzles, reaching the far horizon and beyond, submerging both faces of a magnificent starship that itself was larger than worlds.

The Polypond arrived thousands of years ago, descending as a violent rain of comet-sized bodies, scalding vapor and sentient, hate-filled mud.  The alien wanted to destroy the Great Ship, and perhaps even today it dreamed of nothing less.  But most of the city’s inhabitants believed the war was over now.  In one fashion or another, the Ship had won.  Some were convinced that the alien had surrendered unconditionally.  Others believed that the Polypond’s single mind had collapsed, leaving a multitude of factions endlessly fighting with one another.  Both tales explained quite a lot, including the monster’s indifference to a few million refugees living just beyond its boundaries.  But the most compelling idea—the notion that always captivated Peregrine—was that human beings had not only won the war but killed their foe too.  Its central mind was destroyed, all self-control had been vanquished, and what the young man saw from his diamond blister was nothing more, or less, than a great corpse in the throes of ferocious, creative rot.

Whatever the truth, the Polypond was a spectacle, and no raider understood it better than Peregrine did.

Frigid wisps of atomic oxygen and nitrogen marked the alien’s upper reaches, with dust and buckyballs and aerogel trash wandering free.  That high atmosphere reached halfway to the hull, and it ended with a sequence of transparent skins—monomolecular sheets, mostly, plus a few energetic demon-doors laid out flat.  Retaining gas and heat was their apparent purpose, and when those skins were pierced, what lay below could feel the prick, and on occasion, react instantly.

Beneath the skins was a thick wet atmosphere, not just warm but hot—a fierce blazing wealth of changeable gases and smart dusts, floating clouds and rooted clouds, plus features that refused description by any language.  And drenching that realm was a wealth of light.  The glare wasn’t constant or evenly distributed.  What passed for day came as splashes and bright winding rivers, and the color of the light as well as its intensity and duration always varied.  After spending most of his brief life watching the purples and crimsons, emeralds and golds and the myriad blues that stretched from the brilliant to the soothing, it had suddenly occurred to Peregrine that each color and every intricate shape held some important meaning.

“A common belief,” Hawking had told him.  “But your translator AIs can’t find any message, or even the flavor of genuine language.”

“Except I wasn’t thinking language,” Peregrine countered.  “Not at all.”

His friend wanted more of an answer, signaling his desires with silence and circular gestures from his most delicate arms.

“I meant plain simple beauty,” the young man continued.  “I’m talking about art, about visual poetry.  I’m thinking about a magnificent show performed for a very special audience.”

“You might be the only soul holding that opinion,” Hawking counseled.

“And I feel honored because of it,” Peregrine had laughed.

The Polypond’s atmosphere was full of motion and energy, and it was exceptionally loud.  Camouflaged microphones set near the base of the rocket nozzle sent home the constant roar of wind sounds and mouth sounds, thunder from living clouds and the musical whine of great wings.  But even richer than the air was the watery terrain beneath:  Tens of kilometers deep, the Polypond’s body was built from melted comets mixed with minerals and metals stolen from vanished worlds.  This was an ocean in the same sense that a human body was mere saltwater.  Yes, it was liquid, but jammed inside the wetness was structure and purpose.  Alien tissues supplied muscles and spines and ribs, and there were regions serving roles not unlike those of human hearts and livers and lungs.  Long, sophisticated membranes were dotted with giant fusion reactors.  And drifting on the surface were island-sized organs that spat out free-living entities—winged entities that would gather in huge flocks and sometimes rise en masse, millions and even billions of them soaring higher than any cloud.

Hatches, those events were called.

What Peregrine knew—what every person in his trade understood—was that each hatch was a unique event, and the great majority of them were worthless.  Sending a fleet of raiders that returned with only a few thousand tons of winged muscle and odd enzymes was a waste of their limited power, and worse, a criminal squandering of lives.  What mattered were those rare hatches that rose high enough to be reached cheaply, and even then it didn’t pay to send raiders if there wasn’t some respectable chance of acquiring hyperfiber or rare elements, or best of all, machines that could be harvested and tamed, then set to work in whatever role the city demanded.

Judging a hatch’s value was three parts diagnosis, two parts art, and inevitably, ten parts good fortune.  Telescopes tied into dimwitted machines did nothing but happily stuff data into shapes that brighter AIs could analyze.  Whatever was promising or peculiar was sent to the raider leaders.  The average day brought ten or fifteen events worthy of closer examination, and because of his service record, Peregrine was given first-glance at those candidates.  But even with ripe pickings, he often did nothing.  Other raiders flying their own ships would dive into the high atmosphere every few days, but sometimes weeks passed without Peregrine once being once tempted to sit in the pilot’s padded chair.

“I want to grow old in this job,” he confessed whenever his bravery was questioned.  “Most souls can’t do what I do.  Most of you are too brave, and bravery is suicide.  Fearlessness is a handicap.  Chasing every million-wing flight of catabolites or sky-spinners is the quickest way to go bankrupt, if you’re lucky.  Or worse, die.”

“That is one reasonable philosophy,” his friend mentioned, speaking through the voice box sewn into a convenient neural center.

“I’m sorry,” said Peregrine.  “I wasn’t talking to you.  I was chatting with a woman friend.”

The alien lifted one of his intricate limbs, signaling puzzlement.  “And where is this woman?”

“Inside my skull.”  Peregrine gave his temple a few hard taps.  “I met her last night.  I thought she was pretty, and she was pleasant enough.  But she said some critical words about raiders wasting too many resources, and I thought she was accusing me of being a coward.”

“You listed your sensible insights, of course.”

“Not all of them,” he admitted.

“Why not?”

“I told you,” said Peregrine.  “I thought she was pretty.  And if I acted like an unapologetic coward, I wouldn’t get invited to her bedroom.”

Hawking absorbed this tidbit about human spawning.  Or he simply ignored it.  Who could know what that creature was thinking beneath his thick carapace?  Low-built and long, Hawking held a passing resemblance to an earthly trilobite.  A trio of crystalline eyes pulled in light from all directions, delicate optical tissues teasing the meaning out of every photon.  His armored body was carried on dozens of jointed legs.  But where trilobites had three sections to their insect-like bodies, this alien had five.  And where trilobites were dim-witted creatures haunting the floors of ancient seas, Hawking’s ancestors evolved grasping limbs and large, intricate minds while scurrying across the lush surface of a low-gravity world.

Hawking was no social animal.  And this was a blessing, since he was the only one of his kind in the city.  Peregrine had studied the available files about his species, but the local data sinks were intended to help military operations, not educate any would-be xenologists.  And likewise, after spending decades in close association with the creature, and despite liking as well as admiring him, there were moments when old Mr. Hawking was nothing but peculiar, standoffish and quite impossible to read.

But Peregrine had a taste for challenges.

“Anyway,” he said, cutting into the silence.  “I lied to that woman.  I told her that I wasn’t flying because I knew something big was coming.  I had a feeling, and until that ripe moment, I was resting both my body and my ship.”

“And she believed you?”

“Perhaps.”

After a brief silence, Hawking said, “She sounds like a foolish young creature.”

“And that’s where you’re wrong.”  Peregrine laughed and shrugged.  “Just as I hoped, I climbed into her bed.  And during one of our slow moments, she admitted who she was.”

“And she was?”

“The woman was an engineer during the War.  She was working in the repair yards while my mother served as a pilot.  So like you, my new girlfriend is one of the original founders.”

“Interesting,” his friend responded.

“Fusilade is her name,” he mentioned.  “And she seems to know you.”

“Yet I do not know her.”

Then Peregrine added, “And by the way, she very clearly remembers your arrival here.”

Fourteen moon-sized rocket nozzles stood upon the Great Ship’s stern, and the center nozzle served as the gathering place for tired pilots and engineers during the War.  Once the fighting ended, representatives of twenty different species found themselves trapped in this most unpromising location, utterly isolated, with few working machines, minimal data sinks, and no raw materials.  Facing them was the daunting task of building some kind of workable society.  Hawking was a rarity—the rich passenger who had visited the hull before the comets began to fall, and who managed to outlive both his guides and fellow tourists.  Alone, this solitary creature had scaled one of the outlying nozzles, and then his luck lasted long enough to find passage with a harum-scarum unit—the final group of refugees to make it to this poor but safe place.

“She feels sorry for you, Hawking.”

“Why would she?”

“Because you’re a species with a population of one.”

The alien was unimpressed with that assessment.  He cut the air with two limbs, his natural mouth rippling before leaking a disapproving click.

“I know better than that,” Peregrine continued.  “I told her that you’re such a loner, it’s difficult for you to share breathing space with me, and you know me and approve of me far more than you know and approve of anyone else.”

The creature offered no reply.

“‘Why call him Hawking?’ she asked me.  ‘Nobody else does.’”

“Few others speak to me,” his friend said.

“I explained that too,” said Peregrine.  “And I told her that your species are so peculiar, you never see reason for any permanent names.  When two of you cross trails, each invents a new name for himself or herself.  A private name blossoms, and it lasts only as long as that single perishable relationship.”

The limbs gave the air an agreeable sweep.

“You picked Hawking, and I don’t know why,” Peregrine continued.  “Except it’s a solid sound humans can utter, unlike your own species’ name, of course.”

Quietly, with his natural mouth, Hawking made a sharp clicking sound followed by what sounded like, “Eech.”

“!eech,” the human tried to repeat.

As always, there was something intensely humorous about his clumsy attempt.  Nothing changed in the creature’s dome-like eyes or the rigid face, but suddenly all of the long legs wiggled together, signaling laughter, the ripples moving happily beneath his hard low unreadable body.

“And I remember your mother,” the old woman had mentioned last night.

Like every citizen, Fusilade’s apartment was tiny and cold; power had always been a scarce commodity in the city.  But her furnishings were better than most, made from fancy plastics and cultured flesh, including a glass tub filled with spare water.  Winking at her young lover, she added, “No, I doubt if your mother ever actually knew me.  By name, I mean.  But I was part of the team that kept those early raider ships flying.  Without twenty ad lib repairs from me, that woman wouldn’t be half the hero she is today.”

Alopex was as famous as anyone in the city, and that despite being dead for dozens of centuries.  She had defended these giant rockets during the Polypond War.  But the alien eventually destroyed each of the Great Ship’s engines, choking and plugging every vent, trying to keep reinforcements from reaching the hull.  And at the same time, the captains below blocked every doorway, desperate to keep the Polypond from infiltrating the interior.  Brutal fights were waged near the main ports, but none had lasted long.  A barrage of tiny black holes was fired through the Ship’s heart, but none delivered a killing blow.  Then the final assault came, and despite long odds, a starship that was more ancient than any visible sun had endured a thorough beating but survived.

Afterwards, over the course of several months and then several years, the Polypond grew quieter, and by every credible measure less menacing.

Something was different.  The alien was different, and maybe the Great Ship too.  But those few thousand survivors could never be sure what had changed.  With the clarity of the doomed, they had come here and built a refugee camp.  Peregrine’s mother proved a natural leader.  Like her son, Alopex was a small person, dark as space, blessed with long limbs and a gymnast’s perfect balance.  And she was more than just an early raider.  No, what made the woman precious was that she was first to realize that nobody was coming to rescue them.  The giant engines remained dead and blocked.  High-grade hyperfiber had plugged even the most obscure route through the armored hull.  And worse still, the Great Ship was now undergoing some mysterious but undeniable acceleration.  Without one working rocket, the world-sized machine was gaining velocity, hurrying its way along a course that would soon take it out of the Milky Way.

Alopex helped invent the raider’s trade.  In makeshift vehicles, she dove into the Polypond’s atmosphere, stealing volatiles and rare earths, plus the occasional machine-encrusted body.  Those treasures allowed them to build shelters and synthesize food.  Every few days, she bravely led an expedition into the monster’s body, stealing what was useful and accepting every danger.

Time and Fate ensured her death.

She left no body, save for a few useful bits of tissue that made up her meager estate.  Her funeral was held ages ago, yet even today, whenever an important anniversary arrived, those rites and her name were repeated by thousands of thankful souls.

By contrast, Peregrine’s father was neither heroic nor well regarded.  But he was a prosperous fellow, and he was shrewd, and when one of the great woman’s eggs came on the market, he spent a fortune to obtain it and a second fortune to build the first artificial womb in the city’s history.

“I remember your mother,” said the old woman, plainly proud of any casual association.  Then with an important tone, she added, “That good woman would have been pleased with her young son.  I’m sure.”

Peregrine was almost three hundred years old, which made him young—particularly in the eyes of a much older lady who seemed to be happily feeding a fantasy.  He offered nods and a polite smile, telling her, “Well, thank you.”

“And I know your father fairly well,” she continued.

“I never see the man,” Peregrine replied with a sneer, warning her off the topic.

“I know,” she said.

Then after a pause, she asked, “Did you mean it?  Do you really feel that an especially large hatch is coming?”

“No,” he said, finally admitting the truth.

Then before his honesty evaporated, he added, “There aren’t any trends, and I don’t have intuitions.  And I never, ever see into the future.”

Something in those words made the old woman laugh.  Then she turned quiet and caring, and with sudden tenderness, she said, “Darling.  Everybody sees some little part the future.  Only the dead can’t.  And if you think about it, you’ll realize…there’s nothing more important that separates big-eyed us from poor cold blind them.”