Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (2 page)

"You aren't talking about your practicum, are you?"

"Not really," she said. "No, I have friends who need to hire a drive-mechanic."

"Friends," he said.

"Best friends," she said. "And like all best friends, they have quite a lot of money."

Pamir said, "No."

"Take a leave of absence," she said. "The bosses like your work. They'll let you go. Then in a little while... well, a long while... you can come back again with enough money to wipe away all of your debts."

"What do you know about my debts?"

The smile sharpened. "Everything," she said.

"No, I don't want this," he said.

Then a little meanness crept into her laugh. "Is it true what they say?"

"It often is."

"Luddite minds are better than others," she said. "They work harder because they have to start out soft and simple."

"We all start simple," he said.

"You need to go with me," she insisted.

There was a threat woven into the words, the tone. Pamir started to gauge his surroundings as well as this peculiar creature, but he never heard the killer's approach. One moment, the drive-mechanic was marshaling his tools for some ad hoc battle, but before he was ready, two impossibly strong hands were clasped around his neck, reaching from behind, calmly choking the life out of a thousand-year-old body.

The Kajjas home sun was a brilliant F-class star circled by living worlds, iron-fattened asteroids, and billions of lush comets. Like humans, the Kajjas evolved as bipeds hungry for oxygen and water, and like most citizens of the galaxy, biology gave them brief lifespans and problematic biochemistries. Independent of other species, they invented the usual sciences, and after learning the principles of the Creation, they looked at everything with new eyes. But their solar system happened to be far removed from the galactic plane. The nearest star was fifty light-years away. Isolated but deeply clever, the Kajjas devised their famous pulse engines—scorching, borderline-stable rockets built around collars of degenerate matter. Kajjas pulses were as good as the best drives once they reached full throttle, but stubborn physics still kept them from beating the relativistic walls. Every voyage took time, and worse still, those pulse engines had the irksome habit of bleeding radiation. Even the youngest crew would die of cancers and old age before the voyage was even half-finished.

Faced with the problem of spaceflight, every species realized that there were no perfect answers, at least so long as minds were mortal and the attached bodies were weak.

A consensus was built among the Kajjas. Alone, they began reengineering their basic nature. With time they might have invented solutions as radical as their relentless star-drives, but not long after the project began, a river of laser light swept out at them from the galaxy's core—a dazzling beacon carrying old knowledge, including the tools and high tricks necessary to build the bioceramic mind.

A similar beacon would eventually find the Earth, unleashing the potentials of one wild monkey.

But that event was a hundred million years in the future.

Human history was brief and complicated—a few hundred thousand years of competing, combustible civilizations. By comparison, the Kajjas built exactly one technological society. War and strife were unimaginable. Unity rode in their blue blood. Once armed with immortal minds and the infamous engines, their starships rained down across a wide portion of the galaxy, setting up colonies and trade routes while poking into ill-explored corners. The Kajjas were curious and adaptable explorers, and it was easy to believe that they would eventually rule some fat portion of local space. But the species reached its zenith while the dinosaurs still ran over one tiny world, and then their slow decline began. Colonies withered. Their starships began keeping to the easy, well-mapped routes. Some of the Kajjas never even went into space. And what always bothered Pamir, and what always intrigued him, was that these ancient creatures had no clear idea what had gone wrong.

A few Kajjas rode onboard the Great Ship. They were poorer than the typical passenger, but each had a love for brightly lit taverns, and in moderation, drinks made from hot spring waters and propanol salted liberally with cyanide.

Philosophers by nature and cranky philosophers at that, the Kajjas made interesting company. Pamir approved of their irritable moods. He liked cryptic voices and far-sighting reflections. This was a social species with clear senses of hierarchies. If you wanted respect, it was important to sit near your Kajjas friend, near enough to taste the poison on his breath, and to wring the best out of the experience, you had to act as if he was the master of the table and everyone sitting around it.

Pamir's favorite refugee was ageless to the eye, but eyes were easily fooled.

"We were courageous voyagers," said the raspy voice.

"You were," Pamir agreed.

His companion had various names, but in human company, he preferred to be called "Tailor."

"Do you realize how many worlds we visited?"

"No, Tailor, I don't."

"You do not know, and we can only guess numbers." The words were tumbling out of an elderly, often repaired translator. "Ten million planets? Twenty billion? I can't even count the places that I have walked with these good feet."

The Kajjas suddenly propped his legs on the tabletop.

Knowing what was proper, Pamir leaned between the toe-rich, faintly kangaroo-style feet. "I would tolerate your stories, if you could tolerate my boundless interest."

The alien's head was narrow and extremely deep, like the blade of a hatchet. Three eyes surrounded a mouth that chewed at the air, betraying suspicion. "Do I know you, young human?"

"No," Pamir lied. "We have never met."

He was wearing that new face and the name Jon, and he was cloaked in a fresh life story, too.

"You seem familiar to me," said the Kajjas.

"Because you're ancient and full of faces, remembered and imagined, too."

"That feels true."

"I beg to know your age," Pamir said.

The question had been asked before, and Tailor's answer was always enormous and never repeated. If the alien felt joyous, he claimed to be a youthful forty million years old. But if angry or despairing, he painted himself as being much, much older.

"I could have walked along your Cretaceous shoreline," said Tailor that evening, hinting at a very dark disposition.

"I wish you had," said Pamir.

"Yet I can do that just the same," the Kajjas said, two eyes turning to mist as the mind wove some private image.

Pamir knew to wait, sipping his rum.

The daydream ended, and the elderly creature leaked a high trilling sound that the translator turned into a despairing groan.

"My mind is full," Tailor declared.

"Should I envy you?"

Iron blades rubbed hard against one another—the Kajjas laugh. "Fill your mind with whatever you wish. Envy has its uses."

"Should my species envy yours?"

Every eye cleared. "Are you certain we haven't met?"

"Nothing is certain," said Pamir.

"Indeed. Indeed."

"Perhaps you know other humans," Pamir said.

"I have sipped drinks with a few," Tailor said. "Usually male humans, as it happens. One or two of them had your bearing exactly."

The focus needed to be shifted. "You haven't answered me, my master. Should humans envy your species' triumphs?"

A long sip of poison turned into a human-style nod. "You should envy every creature's success. And if you wish my opinion—"

"Yes."

"In my view, our greatest success is the quiet grace we have shown while making our plunge back to obscurity. Not every species vanishes so well as the Kajjas."

"Humans won't," said Pamir.

"On that, we agree."

"And why did your plunge begin?" the human asked. "What went wrong for you, or did something go right?"

Pamir had drunk with this entity many times over the millennia. Tailor gave various answers to this question, each delivered without much faith in the voice. Usually he claimed that living too long made an immortal cowardly and dull. Too many of his species were ancient, and that antediluvian nature brought on lethargy, and of course lethargy led to a multifaceted decline.

Wearing the Jon face, Pamir waited for that reliable excuse again.

But the alien said nothing, wiggling those finger-like toes. Then with an iron laugh, fresh words climbed free of his mouth.

"I think the secret is our minds," he began.

"Too old, are they?" asked Pamir.

"I am not talking about age. And while too many memories are jammed inside us, they are not critical either."

"What is wrong with your mind?"

"And yours too." Tailor leaned forward. A hand older than any ape touched Pamir's face, tracing the outlines of his forehead. "Your brain and mine are so similar. In its materials and the nanoscopic design, and in every critical detail that doesn't define our natures."

"True, true," said the worshipful Pamir.

"Does that bother you?"

"Not at all."

"Of course not, no," said the alien. "But have you ever asked yourself... has that smart young mind of yours ever wondered... why doesn't this sameness leave you just a little sick in your favorite stomach?"

Choke an immortal man, pulverize the trachea and neck bones and leave the body starved of oxygen, and he dives into a temporary coma. But the modern body is more sophisticated than machines, including star-drives, and within their realm, humans can be far more durable, more self-reliant. Choke the man and a nanoscopic army rises from the mayhem, knitting and soothing, patching and building. Excess calories are warehoused everywhere, including inside the bioceramic mind, and despite the coma and the limp frame, nothing about the victim is dead. Pamir wasn't simply conscious. He was lucid, thoughts roaring, outrage in full stride as he guessed about enemies and their motives and what he would do first when he could move again, and what he would do next, and depending on the enemies, what color his revenge would take.

But there were many states between full life and true death.

He was sprawled out on the shop floor, and standing over him, somebody said, "Done."

Then he felt himself being lifted.

A woman said, "Hurry."

G'lene?

His body was carried, but not far. There was a maze of storage hangers beneath the shop. Pamir assumed that he was taken into one of those rooms, and once set down again he found the strength to strike a careless face, once and then twice again before someone shoved a fat tube down his ruined throat.

Fiery chemicals cooked his flesh.

Too late, he tried to engage his nexuses. But their voices had been jammed, and all that came back to him was white noise and white deathly light.

In worse ways than strangling, his body was methodically killed.

Deafness took him, and his sense of smell was stripped away, and every bit of skin went numb. In the end, the only vision remaining was imagination. A body couldn't be left inside a storage hanger. Someone would notice. That's why he imagined himself being carried, probably bound head to toe to keep him from fighting again. But he didn't feel any motion, and nothing changed. Nothing happened. Lying inside blackness, his thoughts ran on warehoused power, and when no food was offered those same thoughts began to slow, softening the intensities of each idea, ensuring a working consciousness that could collapse quite a bit farther without running dry.

The streakship's launch was never noticed, and the long, fierce acceleration made no impression.

But Pamir reasoned something like that would happen. Clues and a captain's experience let him piece together a sobering, practical story. If any Kajjas ship was wandering near the Great Ship, it would have been noticed. That news would have found him. And since it wasn't close, and since the universe was built mostly from inconvenient trajectories, the streakship would probably have to burn massive amounts of fuel just to reach the very distant target—assuming it didn't smash into a comet while plunging through interstellar space.

This kind of mission demanded small crews and fat risks, and Pamir was going to remain lost for a very long time.

"Unless," he thought. "Unless I'm not lost at all."

Paranoia loves darkness. Perhaps this ugly situation was a ruse. Maybe the relentless AI hunters had finally found him, but nobody was quite sure if he was the runaway captain. So instead of having him arrested, the captains decided to throw the suspect inside a black box, trying to squeeze the secrets out of him.

Bioceramic minds were tiny and dense and utterly unreadable.

But a mind could be worn down. A guilty man or even an innocent man would confess to a thousand amazing crimes. Wondering if prison was better than dying on some bizarre deep-space quest, Pamir found the temptation to say his old name once, just to see if somebody had patched into his speech center. But as time stretched and the thoughts slowed even more, he kept his mind fixed on places and days that meant something to a man named Jon. He pictured Port Beta and the familiar machinery. He spoke to colleagues and drank with them, the routine, untroubled life of the mechanic lingering long past his death. Then when he was miserably bored, he imagined Where-Peace-Rains, spending the next years with a life and beliefs that before this were worn only as camouflage.

For the first time, he missed that life that he had never lived.

Decades passed.

Oxygen returned without warning, and flesh warmed, and new eyes opened as a first breath passed down his new throat.

A face was watching him.

"Hello, Jon," said the face, the hint of a smile showing.

Pamir said, "Hello," and breathed again, with relish.

G'lene appeared to be in fine health, drifting above the narrow packing crate where his mostly dead body had been stowed.

Pamir sat up slowly.

A thoroughly, wondrously alien ship surrounded them. Its interior was a cylinder two hundred meters in diameter and possibly ten kilometers long. Pamir couldn't see either end of this odd space. The walls were covered with soft glass threads, ruddy like the native Kajjas grass, intended to give the Kajjas good purchase for kicking when they were in zero gravity, like now. But when the ship's engines kicked on, the same threads would come alive, lacing themselves into platforms where the crew could work and rest, the weaves tightening as the gees increased. That was standard Kajjas technology. Kajjas machines were scattered about the curved, highly mobile landscape, each as broken as it was old. There were control panels and what looked like immersion chambers, none of them working, and various hyperfiber boxes were sealed against the universe. Every surface wore a vigorous coat of dust. Breathing brought scents only found in places that had been empty forever. Rooms onboard the Great Ship smelled this way. But the air and the bright lights felt human, implying that his abductors had been onboard long enough to reconfigure the environment.