The Greatship (16 page)

Perri began as a story shared by immortal ladies.

One day, Quee Lee was in the Make-ling district, enjoying an ordinary luncheon with a dozen acquaintances.  The gollings were breeding in the canyon below.  Perhaps that’s why the subject of the moment was sex, although frankly there didn’t have to be any excuses to let that topic reign.  One acquaintance was a Martian woman with a flair for sexual intrigues, and she took the lead, boasting about a certain local boy who had done this and allowed that, and my, she hadn’t had so much fun in decades.  Sordid details were her specialty.  She gave the ladies and a couple husbands quite a lot to think about while the gollings continued to screech and wail.  But then the superlatives began to flag, and needing something else to talk about, the woman mentioned, “Oh, yes.  And Perri also tells these long wonderful and interesting stories.”

“What kinds of stories?” Quee Lee asked.

With a smirk and gently mocking tone, she said, “The young man likes to travel around the Great Ship.  His dream, his life-plan, is to swim in every puddle and walk every tunnel, poking his business into every willing crevice and hole.”

The bawdy people laughed hard.

Quee Lee sat quietly, watching a golling rising into view.  The Martian had a history of embellishments and outright lies, and who knew if there was any Perri behind the name?  The moment passed without significance.  The golling was a female glowing deep in the UV range, and her male suitors attacked her from below, slashing at the weakest parts of her body.  Hydrogen gas bled into the open air and then detonated—blue flames felt by the audiences gathered on the balcony.  Countless eggs started their blazing fall to the ground below.  The mother would have died in the ancient past, bones and ashes feeding her children.  But gollings were just as immortal as humans, and the giant lady would eventually heal.  Of course every egg was infertile; there were limits to reproduction among the Ship’s passengers, particularly among aliens.  Yet the females endured the incendiary misery because it was their nature, and because it defined them as a unique, eternal species.

The subject of young lovers was forgotten.

For years, Quee Lee didn’t think about the name Perri.

Then a woman friend vanished without warning, missing for a long while and then suddenly back again.  Explaining her whereabouts, she told Quee lee about an empty river running down the middle of an uninhabited cavern system and a handsome fellow named Perri who acted as her guide and sole companion.  Nothing much had happened, except for the usual things that a bored woman does with a healthy male body.  Perri proved himself to be a talker although she didn’t believe half of what he said, and he was a funny and very pretty man, and they enjoyed quite an adventure that day when they came across a secret camp of Hall’al’amans being sought by the captains for some important crime.

Quee Lee concluded that Perri did exist, but he was tiny in her thoughts, and as the decades mounted, he once again vanished.

Millions of humans lived onboard the Great Ship, and Quee Lee had never met anyone as old as her.  But one of her dearest friends was eight days her junior.  Both were from Earth, specifically from Old China.  They often sought each out to share meals or wander through some touristy adventure, and they were often invited to the same parties—day-long affairs where thousands of bodies, mostly human, would trade gossip and observations, long stories and ancient jokes with tiny new twists.

The friend came to one grand party with a young-faced human on her arm.  Quee Lee was unimpressed with the boyfriend.  He looked vain and silly and far too proud of himself.  And when they were introduced, Perri acted utterly indifferent to this ancient creature from the home world.  The three of them stood together, women making all of the polite noise.  Then the friend spotted an ex-husband who needed to be abused public, and as she left, she jokingly warned Quee Lee not to steal anything of hers.

Two strangers were left beside a tidal pool.  Quee Lee watched the helt-trilobites dancing over beds of glass mussels.  The man calmly studied her, and he said nothing.  Then Quee Lee began looking for the perfect excuse to extract her from this misery.  But that was the moment when her future husband threw a radiant smile at her, quietly saying, “I know quite a lot about you.”

“Your girlfriend talks about me,” she guessed.

“Sometimes, but I have a far more reliable source than that,” he said.

Quee Lee named the other two women who spent time with this unexceptional man.  But Perri shook his head, saying, “No, neither of them ever mentioned you.”

“So who has told you about me?”

“My intuition,” he said.

A moment passed, and then she laughed at him and at the entire situation.

Perri was neither surprised nor offended.  Nothing dimmed the smile, and he reached out with one hand, fingers closing on her elbow.  It was the first time he touched her, and then he said, “Madam, I think you are the most important person here.”

She continued laughing at him.

He shrugged and let go of her.

“All right,” said Quee Lee.  “So you think that I’m the most important person in this room.”

“In this room and everywhere,” Perri said, winking once before turning and walking away.

Perri failed to come home the next day, and the next.  Then ten days had passed, and Quee Lee had left messages with nexuses and his usual haunts.  She was careful not to explain why she wanted him.  Nothing about the silence was unusual.  Perri was probably wandering somewhere new, and he liked to isolate himself as much as possible.  For her part, Quee Lee was skilled at waiting, her days defined by visiting friends and little parties thrown for any small excuse.  It was her normal life, never anything but dreamily pleasing; yet she kept thinking about Orleans, imagining him walking on the open hull with his seals bursting, his strange body starting to boil away…that poor man…!

Taking the money to Orleans was an easy decision.  The hectos weren’t an impressive sum, particularly when wrapped inside AI guardians.  But wasn’t it better to have Perri owing her instead of owing a Remora?  She had the better chance to recoup the debt, and besides, she doubted that her husband could raise the money without borrowing from others—aliens as well as humans.  For the nth time, she wondered how she had ever let Perri charm her.  What was she thinking, agreeing to this crazy union?

But her husband was a blessing, and not just a little blessing.  Ridiculously young and wearing his youth with verve, he gladly shared what he had in abundance, including enthusiasms and boundless energy.  He was an excellent lover, but rarer than that, Perri knew when to stop and what to do next.  He could listen when it was important, and nothing she told him was misunderstood or conveniently forgotten.  Not once had he tried to rob Quee Lee from her money, and his personal tastes could never be confused for expensive.  Besides, the man was a challenge.  No doubt about that.  Maybe her friends didn’t approve of the man.  Flings and long affairs were not the same as legal bonds, as more than a few wise voices had pointed out.  But to a woman of her vintage, in the beginning millennia of a five hundred thousand year voyage, Perri was something fresh and remarkable.  And Quee Lee’s old friends, quite suddenly, seemed like fossils doing nothing but sitting inside museum exhibits.

“I was born on the Ship, did you know?” he explained at the beginning.  “Just weeks after my parents came onboard.  They were riding as far as a colony world, but I stayed behind.  My choice.”  His laughs came in countless flavors.  Laughing and gazing into the false sky of her bedroom ceiling, he asked, “Do you know what I want to do with my life?”

“Explore every corner of the Great Ship,” she said, repeating what she was told years before.

“Except the Ship isn’t the point,” he said.  “The aliens are what matter.  Where else in the galaxy can you find thousands of species and their assorted civilizations woven together?  Each species is fascinating, and most have never seen one another up close.  For instance, there’s a giant spidery creature with a scent-name which roughly translates as Webmaster, and tiny machine aliens called G/gloons live with them.  Two species from a thousand light-years apart, but the G/gloons build cities on the sprawling webs, and each Webmaster collects rent in the form of addictive pheromones.”

Quee Lee had to be impressed.  Who else in her small life could tolerate aliens, what with their overbearing odors and impenetrable minds?  Perri was remarkable.  Even her most critical friends admitted that much.  And even the old friend who lost a lover to Quee Lee made a habit of forgetting her jealousies, begging to hear the latest Perri adventure as told by his foolish, indulgent wife.

“Can you afford to stay on the Ship?” she asked him.

“I’m paid up for the next ninety thousand years,” he claimed.  “Minus my day-to-day expenses, but that’s all right.  Believe me, when you’ve got armies of wealthy souls in one place, there are always opportunities to make a living.”

“By legal means?”

“Glancingly so.”  He had a rogue’s humor, all right.  Yet later, in a more sober mood, he said, “I have grown a few enemies.  I’m warning you, my love.  Like anyone, I’ve made more mistakes than seems fair—my youthful blunders—but at least I’m honest about them.”

Blunders, indiscretions.  Crimes, perhaps.  Yet Perri had nothing to earn her distrust.

“We should marry,” he proposed one evening.  “We like each other’s company, yet we seem to weather our time apart too.  And from what I see, you don’t need a partner who shadows you day and night.  Do you, Quee Lee?”

She didn’t.  True enough.

“A small tidy marriage, complete with rules and barricades,” he assured her.  “I get a home base, and you enjoy your privacy, plus my considerable entertainment value.”  Those words demanded a big long laugh, from both of them.  Then he said, “I do promise.  You’ll be first to hear my latest tales.  And I’ll never be any kind of leech, darling.  The mayhem will be out of sight, and with you, I will be the consummate gentleman.”

* * *

Quee Lee carried the money and AIs in a camouflaged pouch, traveling to the hull by cap-car.  There was one Orleans in the crew listings, no mention made if he was a Remora or not, and the only address was Port Beta.  The facility was enormous—a towering cylinder lined with shops and capped with a kilometer-thick hatch—and there were days when Beta was filled with workers and robots and elegant streakships freshly arrived from new worlds.  But this was a different day:  The floor was an empty sweep of gray hyperfiber.  An engineer stood nearby, but she didn’t notice the visitor; wrapped in shifting lights that formed numbers and intricate technical plans, she calmly some unseen person that they were prone to profound little errors.  Besides Quee Lee, the only tourists were aliens, some kind of fishy species encased in bubbles of ammonium hydroxide.  The fish wiggled their fins and their bubbles rolled forward in response.  It was like standing inside a school of wise tuna, the sharp chatter audible and Quee Lee unable to decipher any of it.  Were they mocking her?  She had no clue, and it made her all the more frustrated, leaving her feeling lost and more than a little homesick because of it.

By contrast, the first Remora seemed quite normal.  Walking without any grinding sounds, it covered ground at an amazing pace.  Quee Lee had to run to catch it.  To catch her.  Somehow the lifesuit seemed feminine, and a woman’s voice responded to the urgent shouts.

“What, what, what?” asked the Remora.  “I’m busy.”

Gasping, Quee Lee asked, “Do you know Orleans?”

“Orleans?”

“I need to find him.  It’s quite important.”  Then she wondered if something had happened, something terrible, and she had arrived too late.

“I do know someone named Orleans, yes.”  The face had comma-shaped eyes, huge and black and bulging, and the mouth blended into a slit-like nose.  Her skin looked like silver, odd bunched fibers running beneath the surface.  Black hair showed along the top of the faceplate, except at second glance it wasn’t hair.  It looked like ropes soaked in oil, the strands wagging with a slow stately pace.

The mouth smiled.  Then the utterly normal voice said, “Actually, Orleans is one of my closest friends.”

True?  Or was she making a joke?

“I really have to find him,” Quee Lee said.  “Can you help me?”

“Can I help you?”  The strange mouth smiled, gray pseudoteeth as big as thumbnails, the gums the same silver as her skin.  “I’ll take you to him.  Does that constitute help?”  And Quee Lee found herself following, walking onto a lifting disk without railing, the Remora standing in the center and waving to the old woman.  “Come closer.  Orleans is up there.”  Skyward gestures were delivered with both gloved hands.  “A good long way, and I don’t think you’d want to try this alone.  Would you?”

* * *

“Relax,” Orleans advised.

She thought she was relaxed, except she found herself nodding, breathing deeply as a secret tension began to evaporate.  The ascent seemed to take ages.  Save for the rush of air slipping past her ears, it had been soundless.  The disk had no sides at all—a clear violation of safety regulations—and Quee Lee needed to grasp hold of the Remora’s shiny arm, surprised to feel rough spots in the hyperfiber.  Minuscule impacts had left craters too tiny to see.  Remoras were very much like the ship itself—enclosed biospheres taking abuse as they pushed through raw space.

“Are you feeling wonderful?” Orleans asked.

“I feel better.”  First she endured a thirty kilometer ride through the cavernous port, clinging tight a Remora, and now this.  She and Orleans were inside some tiny room not five hundred meters from the vacuum.  Did Orleans live here?  Studying the bare walls and stubby furniture, she was tempted to ask.  But no, this was too spare, too ascetic to be anyone’s home, even Orlean’s.  Evading that subject, she asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Tired.  Fresh off my shift, and devastated.”

Ten days had changed the face.  The orange pigments were softer, and both eyes were the same sickening hair-filled pits.  How clear was his vision?  How did he transplant cells from one eye to the other?  There had to be mechanisms, reliable tricks…and she found herself feeling ignorant and glad of it, thank you.

“What do you want, Quee Lee?”

She swallowed.  “Perri came home, and I brought what he owes you.”

Surprise emerged from the face.  Then a cool voice said, “That is the best news.”

Out from the pouch she pulled one newly minted coin, fifty-two thousand hectos tied into its circuits, and working not to sound mistrustful, she mentioned that its AI would shepherd the money, making certain that the funds were used where it was needed.

His shiny palm accepted the gift, and when the elbow gave a harsh growl, she said, “I hope this helps.”

“My mood already is improved,” he said.

What else?  She wasn’t sure what to say next.

“I should thank you somehow,” Orleans said.  “May I give you something for your troubles?”  One eye actually winked at her, hairs contracting into their pit and nothing left visible but a tiny red pore.  “How would you like a very quick tour?”

Looking at the bleak room, she asked, “What sort of tour?”

“Outside, on the hull,” he said.  “We’ll find you a lifesuit.  We always have them waiting, in case some captain wants to embarrass himself.”  A big deep laugh filled the chamber.  “Once every thousand years, they come, whether we need their help or not?”

What was he saying?  She had heard him, yet she hadn’t.

A smile and another wink prepared the next moment.  “I am serious, Quee Lee.  Would you like to take a little stroll?”

“I don’t know,” she said.  “I never considered—”

“Safe as safe will be,” he said, whatever that meant.  “Listen, this is the best place for a jaunt.  We’re behind the bow, which means that impacts are nearly impossible.  But we’re not close to the engines and their radiations either.”  The next laugh included a waving hand.  “Oh, you’ll get a snack of gamma rays, but nothing important.  You’re nothing but tough, Quee Lee.  Does your fancy apartment have an autodoc?”

“Of course.”

“Well, there is no problem at all.”

She wasn’t scared, at least in any direct way.  What Quee Lee felt was excitement and fear born of excitement.  She had no experience to compare with what was happening.  A creature of habits, rigorous and ancient, she couldn’t guess how she would respond
out there
.  No habits had prepared her for this moment.

“Here,” said her gracious host.  “Come in here.”

No excuse offered itself.  They walked inside a closet full of lifesuits.  She let Orleans select her suit and then dismantle it with his growling joints.  “Yours opens and closes, unlike mine.  And it lacks two layers of redundancies.  Otherwise, ours are identical.”

On went the legs, the torso and arms and helmet; she banged the helmet against the low ceiling and put a shoulder into the wall with her first step.

“Follow me,” said Orleans, “and stay slow.”

Wise words.  The locker room led to a tunnel that zigzagged toward space, ancient stairs fashioned for a nearly human gait.  Each bend had a demon door that held back the Ship’s thinning atmosphere.  They began speaking by radio, voices close, and she could feel through the suit’s skin, pseudoneurons interfacing with her own.  Here gravity was stronger than earth-standard, yet despite her added bulk she moved with ease, the helmet striking the ceiling as she climbed.  Thump, and thump.  She couldn’t help herself.

Orleans laughed pleasantly, the sound intimate, comfortable.  “You’re doing fine, Quee Lee.  Relax.”

Hearing her own name made her feel courageous.

“Remember,” he said.  “Your servomotors are potent.  Lifesuits make motions large.  Don’t overcontrol and never act cocky.”

She wanted to succeed.  More than anything in recent memory, she wanting to pass as close to perfect as possible.

“Concentrate,” he told her.

Then her gait changed, and he said, “That’s better, yes.”

They arrived at a final turn and a hatch, and Orleans paused and looked back at her, his syrupy mouth making a preposterous smile.  “Here we are.  We’ll dance outside for a little while, all right?”  A pause, then he added, “When you go home, tell your husband what you’ve done.  Amaze him.”

“I will,” she whispered.

And he opened the hatch with one arm—the abrasive noises just audible across the radio—and a bright glow washed over them.  “Beautiful,” the Remora observed.  “Isn’t it beautiful, Quee Lee?”