Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (3 page)

G'lene kept her distance. "How do you feel, Jon?"

"Can you guess?" he asked.

She laughed quietly, apparently embarrassed.

In the distance, three entities were moving in their direction. Two of them were human.

"Our autodoc just spliced a fast-breaker pipe into your femoral," she said. "You'll be strong and ready in no time."

Pamir studied legs that didn't look like his legs, and he looked at a rib-rich chest and a stranger's spidery hands. Starvation and nothingness had left him eroded, brittle and remarkable.

"Our captain wants you to start repairing the pulse drive," G'lene said.

"And I imagine that our captain wants enthusiasm on my part."

She blinked. She said, "Hopefully."

"You know a little something about machines," he said. "How does the old engine look?"

"I'm no expert, as you like to tell me. But it looks like the last crew put everything to sleep in the best ways. Unfortunately there's no fuel onboard, and none of the maintenance equipment is functioning."

"I hope our captain considered these possibilities."

"We brought extra fuel and tools, yes."

"Enough?"

She stared at his skinny legs.

Pulse engines, like flesh, were adaptable when it came to nutrition. Any mass could be fed through the collars, transformed into plasma and light.

Pamir wiggled his bare toes.

The other crewmembers were kicking closer.

"I'm guessing that the Kajjas crew is also missing," he said.

"Oh, yes," she said.

"How long missing?"

The question made her uneasy.

"How long have we been here?" he asked.

That was another difficult topic, but she nodded when she said, "Nineteen days."

The autodoc beneath him was a small field model, serviceable but limited. Pamir studied it and then the girl, and then he flexed one leg while leaving the other perfectly still. Asked to work, the atrophied muscles took the largest share of the new food, and the leg grew warmer, sugars burning and lipids burning until the slippery blood began to glow.

"How about the sovereigns?" he asked.

"Sovereigns?"

"The ship's AIs." Most species patterned their automated systems after their social systems, and the Kajjas preferred noble-minded machines in charge of the automated functions.

"We've tried talking to the AIs," said G'lene. "They don't answer."

Tossing both legs out from the tiny growth chamber, Pamir dragged the fast-break pipe with them. "And what are we? A salvage operation?"

She said, "Yes."

"And at the end of the fun, am I paid? Or am I murdered for good?"

"Paid," she blurted. "The offer from me was genuine, Jon. There's a lot of money to be made here."

"For a badly depleted Kajjas ship," he said, sighing. "It's more than hopeful, believing this derelict can earn much on the open market."

She said nothing.

"But it is exceptionally old, isn't it?"

"That's what our captain says."

"Sure, the Kajjas sent missions everywhere," he said. "They were even happy to poke far outside the Milky Way."

"Which makes this a marvelous relic," she said.

"To a species inflicted with hard times. Nobody with a genuine purse would give a little shit about this lost wreck."

The two other humans were arriving—a woman and a man. They were closely related, or they loved to wear faces that implied some deep family bond.

"This is Maxx," G'lene said, referring to the man.

"And I'm Rondie," the woman offered.

Powerful people, each as muscular as G'lene was round, their every motion and the flash of their eyes proved they were youngsters.

Pamir wondered whose hands had strangled him.

"It's great to finally meet you," Maxx said, nothing but pure, undiluted happiness in his voice. "We keep hearing that you can make this ship healthy again."

"Who says that?" Pamir asked.

"The only one who matters," the fellow said, laughing amiably.

What was more disturbing: Being kidnapped for a mission that he didn't want to join, or being trapped in the company of three earnest, inexperienced near-children?

Next to the humans, the drive-mechanic was utterly ancient.

But compared to their captain, Pamir was a newborn.

"Hello to you, Jon," said the Kajjas.

"Why me?" Pamir asked. "You should know how to fix your own beast."

One last kick made the glass crinkle and flow, bringing the captain into the group. The sound of grinding iron preceded the words, "I have never mastered the peculiar genius to be a worthy engineer."

"Too bad," said Pamir.

Then Tailor touched his own head above the eyes. "And to learn the necessary talents now would require empty spaces inside my head, which means discarding some treasured memories. And how could I do such to pieces of my own self?"

Pamir knew that nobody was clever enough or worthy enough, much less lucky enough to truly disappear.

The tiniest body still possessed mass and volume, shadow and energy.

And a brilliant mind was never as clever as three average minds sniffing after something of interest.

The wise fugitive always kept several new lives at the ready.

But every ready-made existence carried risks of its own, including the chance that someone would notice the locker jammed with money and clothes, the spare face, and a respectable name never used.

Like real lives, each false life had its perfect length, and there was no way to be sure how long that was.

No matter how compromised the current face, transitions always brought the most perilous days.

Paranoia was a fugitive's first tool.

But panic could make the man break from cover at the worst possible moment.

Love meant trust, which meant that no face should be loved.

Most of all, the wanted man should be acutely suspicious of the face in the mirror.

Patterns defined each life, and old patterns were trouble.

Except acquiring the new walk and voice, pleasures and hates were the most cumbersome work possible. And even worse, fine old strategies could be left behind, and the best instincts were corroded by the blur of everything new.

In a crowd of ten million strangers, nobody cared about the human who used to be many things, including a captain. And among the millions were four exceptions, or perhaps one hundred and four, or just that one inquisitive soul standing very close.

Now look into that sea of faces, stare at humans and aliens, machines and the hybrids between. Look hard at everything while pointing one finger—a finger that has been worn for some little while—and now against some very long odds, pick out which of those souls should be feared.

Humans found the derelict machine drifting outside the Milky Way, and after claiming the Great Ship as their own, loyal robots proceeded to map the interior. Each cavern was named using elaborate codes. Even excluding small caves and holes, there were billions of caverns on the captains' maps. Positions and volumes were included in each name, but there was also quite a lot of AI free verse poetry. Then as the Great Ship entered the galaxy, one paronomasia-inspired AI savant was ordered to give a million caverns better designations—words that any human mouth could manage—and one unremarkable hole was named:

Where-Peace-Rains.

Peace ruled inside the dark emptiness, but there was no rain. Remote and unspectacular, the cavern remained silent for long millennia. Communities of archaic humans were established in other locations. Some failed, others found ways to prosper. Mortal passengers had one clear advantage; being sure to die, they paid relatively small sums to ride the Great Ship. And unlike their eternal neighbors, they could pay a minimal fee to have one child. Three trifling payments meant growth, and the captains soon had to control populations through laws and taxes as well as limiting the places where those very odd people could live.

Forty-five thousand years ago, human squatters claimed Where-Peace-Rains, setting up the first lights and a hundred rough little homes in the middle of the bare granite floor. They told themselves they were clever. They assured each other that they were invisible, stealing just a trickle of power from the Ship. But an AI watchdog noticed the theft, and once alerted to the crime, the Master Captain sent one of her more obstinate officers to deal with the ongoing mess.

Pamir was still a captain—an entity full of authority and the ready willingness to deploy his enormous powers.

Wearing a mirrored uniform, he walked every street inside the village, telling the strangers that they were criminals and he wasn't happy. He warned that he could order any punishment that could be imagined, short of genocide. Then he demanded that the Luddites meet him in the round at the village's heart, bags packed, and ready for the worst.

Three hundred people, grown and young, assembled on the polished red granite.

"Explain yourselves," the captain demanded.

A leader stepped forward. "We require almost nothing," the old/young man began, his voice breaking at the margins. "We are simple and small, and we ask nothing from the captains or the sacred Ship."

"Shut up," said Pamir.

Those words came out hard, but what scared everyone was the captain's expression. Executions weren't possible, but a lot of grim misery lay between slaughter and salvation, and while these people believed in mortality, they weren't fanatics chasing martyrdom or some ill-drawn afterlife.

Nobody spoke.

Then once again, the captain's voice boomed.

"Before anything else, I want you to explain your minds to me. Do it now, in this place, before your arbitrary day comes to an end."

Nobody was allowed to leave and reset the sun. With little time left, a pretty young woman was pressed into service. Perhaps the other squatters thought she would look appealing to the glowering male officer. Or maybe she was the best, bravest voice available. Either way, she spoke about the limits of life and the magic of physics and the blessings of the eternal, boundless multiverse. Pamir appeared to pay attention, which heartened some. When she paused, he nodded. Could they have found an unlikely ally? But then with a low snort, he said, "I like numbers. Give me mathematics."

The woman responded with intricate, massive numbers wrapped around quantum wonders, invoking the many worlds as well as the ease with which fresh new universes sprang out of the old.

But the longer she spoke, the less impressed he seemed to be. Acting disgusted, then enraged, Pamir told the frightened community, "I know these theories. I can even believe the crazy-shit science. But if you want this to go anywhere good, you have to make me believe what you believe. You have to make me trust the madness that we aren't just here. There are an infinite number of caves exactly like this stone rectum, and infinite examples of you, and there is no measurable end of me. And all of us have assembled in these endless places, and this meeting is happening everywhere exactly as it is here.

"Convince me of that bullshit," he shouted.

The woman's infinite future depended on this single performance. Tears seemed like a worthy strategy. She wept and begged, dropping to her knees. Her skin split and the mortal blood flowed against the smooth stony ground, and every time she looked up she saw an ugly immortal dressed in that shiny garb, and every time she looked down again, the world seemed lost. No words could make this blunt brute of a man accept her mind. No action or inaction would accomplish any good. Suddenly she was trying only to make herself worthy in the eyes of the other doomed souls, and that was the only reason she stood again, filling her body with pride, actively considering the merits of rushing the captain to see if she could bruise that awful face, if only for a moment or two.

Yet all that while, Pamir had a secret:

He had no intention of hurting anyone.

This was a tiny group. A captain of his rank had the clout to give each of them whatever he wished to give them. And later, if pressed by his superiors, Pamir could blame one or two colleagues for not adequately defending this useless wilderness. Really, the scope of this crime was laughably, pathetically tiny—a mild burden more than an epic mess, regardless of what these bright terrified eyes believed.

Out of fear or born from wisdom, the woman didn't assault him.

Then the captain reached into a pocket on his uniform.

The object hadn't been brought by chance. Pamir came with a plan and options, and eons later, novice captains would stand in their classrooms, examining all the aspects of the captain's scheme.

Out from the pocket came his big hand, holding what resembled a sphere.

He explained, "This is a one hundred-and-forty-four-faced die, diamond construction, tear-shaped weights for a rapid settling, each number carrying its own unique odds."

Luddite faces stared at the object.

Nobody spoke.

"I'm going to toss it high," said Pamir. "And then you, baby lady... you call out any number. And no, I won't let you look at the die first. You'll make your guess, and you will almost certainly lose. But then again, as you understand full well, any fraction of the endless is endless. And regardless of my toss, an infinite number of you are going to win this game."

Swallowing, the woman discovered a thin smile.

"And if I am right?" she asked.

"You stay here. And your people stay here. The entire cavern is granted to you, under my authority. But you aren't allowed to steal power from our reactors, and your water has to be bought on the common markets, and you will be responsible for your food and your mouths, and if you overpopulate this space, the famines and plagues will rest on your little shoulders.

"Is that understood?" he asked.

Everybody nodded, and everybody had hope.

But when Pamir threw the die, the girl offered the most unlikely number.

"One," she shouted.

One was riding on the equator, opposite 144—the smallest facets on the diamond face.

Up went the die.

And then was down, rattling softly as it struck, bouncing and rolling, slowing as sandals and boots and urgent voices pulled out of the way.