The Greatship (26 page)

In ancient times, Perri would have looked like a man in his early twenties—adulthood just achieved, childhood still lurking in the face and manners.  But time and age were different creatures today.  The youngster was thousands of years old, and during that busy long life, he had explored just a tiny fraction of the avenues and caverns, chambers and odd seas that lay inside the Great Ship.

By contrast, Quee Lee preferred an older, more mature appearance.  She moved like a woman who had forever to accomplish the smallest deed—a suitable façade, since she was considerably older than her husband.  She was a young girl when the first alien words and images were captured by telescopes.  From the time of the pharaohs, wealthy old women had been embarking on great voyages.  She was the wife walking up the wide lane with her boyish husband, hands clasped and heads tipping towards one another whenever one of them spoke.  Sometimes a finger would point, some little question asked and answered, or the question was repeated to a buried nexus, dislodging a nugget of information from some data ocean, another tiny piece of the Dawsheen existence explained to the curious tourists.

The lane was covered with hard sheets of living wood, turquoise and photosynthetic when the weather was warm, but now turning black and soggy in the cold.  No one shared the way with them.  Heaps and ridges of hard dirty snow stood to the sides, and behind the snow were vegetable masses, dome-shaped and crenulated where they pushed through, their sides punctured with doorways leading into chambers of every size.  What passed for leaves had died with the first hard freeze.  The masses themselves were dying, choking under the snow while their roots froze with the soil.  But the hollow chambers in their wooden hearts remained inhabited.  Sheets were draped across the doorways, the heated air inside making them ripple, and the sloppy, half-melted ice on the thresholds was littered with the long, faintly human prints of busy feet.

In one sense, Dawsheen biology was perfectly simple.  Diversity was low, ecosystems few and trimmed to a minimum of trophic levels.  One species always held prominence based on intelligence and tools.  For convenience’s sake, the rest of the Ship referred to those creatures as the Dawsheen.  Tripeds with a single burly arm in front and two flanking arms tipped with delicate hands, in the high country they tended to be round-bodied and short.  Their skin was the color of sun-bleached straw, and their hair turned from black to gold as they aged.  They were normally vegetarian.  The Dawsheen home world had small continents, and feeding a large population meant eating low on the food chain.  But whenever the All collapsed into winter, meat became a cheap, holy indulgence.  As the lovers strolled away from the cliff, the air filled with the smell of burning fats and spiced vitals.  With a hungry sigh, Perri said, “There was a restaurant last time, on that hilltop, overlooking the river.”

“Last time,” she said.

That was nearly a hundred centuries ago.  But with a tug on the arm, he reminded Quee Lee, “The Dawsheen are compulsive traditionalists.”

Sure enough, another eating establishment was perched on the summit.  But the hill was smaller than Perri remembered, the rock scrapped down by the last glaciation.  And the view wasn’t quite the spectacle that he had promised Quee Lee.  For that, he apologized.  Snow was falling again, fed by the drenched air and gathering cold.  They sat together in one of the communal booths, on the steeply tilted bench, gazing at a gray expanse of water and the swirling white of the snow, and except for the occasional slab of ice being carried towards the falls and its death, nothing seemed to change outside.

But that was fine.  There was the building itself to enjoy—a great home-tree hollowed out by worms, the flat floor and immovable furniture carved with a million relentless mouths.  They could happily study the creatures sitting and walking about.  There were several species of tourists, plus Dawsheens too old and feeble to stand in the cold, waiting for their Queen.  The indoor air was warm and smoky.  Most of the patrons stared at an interior wall sprinkled with live images from downstream.  The Queen Herself was never quite shown; She was too important to be reduced to a mere digital stream.  Instead, audiences were treated to the celebrations held in distant cities.  Beneath the illusion of a warm blue sky, millions of Dawsheen stood in the open and sang, wishing their Queen luck and bravery on the trails awaiting Her, and in the trials awaiting their species.

What passed for a waiter approached the two humans.  Speaking through a translator, he called out, “Adore the Queen!”

“Adore the Queen!” they replied, amiable words transformed into an amiable singsong.

The alien face was narrow and stiff.  The crest of hair had turned a dull whitish gold.  His breath smelled of broiled fish and exotic oils.  Three pearl-colored eyes regarded them with no obvious emotion, but the translator made the voice sound angry.  “She is a slow Queen,” their waiter exclaimed.  “A late Queen, at this rate.”

Quee Lee glanced at her husband, waiting for advice.

With a shrug of shoulders, he told her to say nothing.

“If this weather worsens,” the alien continued, “we will all be dead and frozen before she can Gather us.”

A few elderly patrons growled in agreement.

The humans shifted their weight against the polished wood.  They had no menus, and no fees were expected.  Where was the value of money when the world was dying?  An enormous fire pit was dug into the middle of the room and lined with rock.  Perri was ready to point at one of the platters of blackened food.  But Quee Lee was a problem.  As a rule, she didn’t appreciate heads attached to her dinner.

“You’ve still got time,” another voice called out.  “The glacier isn’t going to out race your little Queen!”

Perri didn’t immediately notice what was different about the voice.  Then he heard the singsong translation following in its wake, and curious now, he turned.  Four humans were sitting in a distant booth.  The largest man was glowering at their waiter.  Two other men were cutting at the seared flesh, eating with famished urgency.  The final man stared out at the falling snow, saying nothing and apparently paying no attention to his companion’s complaints.

The waiter turned towards them, lifting one leg while standing on the other two—the standard Dawsheen insult.

The talking man didn’t notice the gesture.  “I want a fresh plate, and I want you to stop badmouthing your Queen.”

The Dawsheen dropped his leg and faced Quee Lee, a slow tight voice asking, “What would you like to eat, madam?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Ask me,” the loud man called out.  “I want something.  Come here!”

“And you, sir?” the Dawsheen said to Perri.  “There is a large pudding char that died of old age.  I have been saving it for an adventurous set of stomachs.”

Perri said, “Yes.”

“Hey!” the loud man shouted.  “Before you’re dead, old man.  Why don’t you pay a little attention to—”

Crack.

The sound was abrupt and astonishingly loud.  No one was watching the loud man, and then everybody was.  His face was beginning to bleed.  His shattered nose hung limp on his face, too damaged to heal itself quickly.  Two of his companions laughed quietly while they ate, enjoying his discomfort and embarrassment.  The other man continued to stare out the window, studying the relentless snow, his face and posture unchanged, while his left hand slowly and carefully set an empty iron platter back on the worm-carved table where it belonged.

The Dawsheen home world was a cyclic snowball.

Many worlds were.  Even the young Earth passed through its own snowball phase.  Watery bodies with a few small continents were most susceptible, particularly when their continents lay scattered along the equator.  If the sun’s energy flagged, or if the world’s orbit shifted by the tiniest margin, the dark open waters at the poles would abruptly freeze over.  Sea ice was a brilliant smooth white.  Light and heat were hurled back into space, allowing the climate to cool further.  The newborn icecaps expanded rapidly, reaching into normally temperate regions.  And as the world brightening further, it cooled again, and again, the ice spreading, and over the poles, beginning to thicken.

Seven hundred million years ago, the Earth’s climate collapsed.  A murderous cold reached to the equator.  Glaciers born on the high peaks rumbled into once-tropical valleys.  The ocean froze to a depth of nearly a full kilometer, and the water beneath was black and choked of oxygen.  The cold was enormous, and enduring.  But without evaporation, there were no clouds or fresh snows, and the desiccated glaciers began a slow retreat.  Deserts of glacial till covered the barren land, frigid winds piling up towering dunes.  But even in the most miserable chill, volcanoes kept rumbling and churning, spitting carbon dioxide into the sky.  Without rainwater or plant life, the greenhouse gas built up to staggering levels.  A tripping point was achieved, and the seas began to melt, and snows fell again, the glaciers growing even while the heat continued to soar.

In a matter of decades—in a geologic blink—the glaciers burned away, and the world moved from snowball to furnace.

On the earth, the snowball cycles eventually moderated.  The continents gathered together and drifted away from the equator, while the aging sun grew warmer.  But with each glaciation, earthly life was battered.  Entire lines of multicellular species were pushed into extinction.  The biosphere that eventually arose—the world of grass and men and jeweled beetles—owed its existence to the tiny few survivors clinging to the deep-sea vents or swimming in the hot springs on the shoulders of the great volcanoes.

But the Dawsheen world never moderated.

The largest moon of a massive gas giant, it was a blue body with tiny continents and tidal-churned tectonics.  With the precision of a pendulum clock, the climate continued swinging in and out of the snowball state.  Predictability was a blessing.  Predictability allowed the ancient Dawsheen to adapt to their suffering.  Obeying the season, terrestrial plants threw spores on the wind, trusting that one in ten trillion would survive the cold drought.  Animals climbed into the high mountains, building nests inside deep caves and stuffing them with thick-shelled eggs.  The ocean’s creatures changed their metabolisms, borrowing the slow, tiny ways of anaerobic organisms, living sluggishly in the deep darkness while the ice creaked and roared above them.

Every winter was a savage winnowing.

And every thaw left the world stripped and lifeless, defenseless and full of promise.

Surviving the winter wasn’t enough.  Success meant spreading quickly, furious breeding, children adapting rapidly to a landscape transformed by glaciers and eruptions.  Success meant being first to swim into the first dark thread of open seawater, and spawning before anyone, and fending off every rival to a rapidly growing empire.

Cooperation brought the greatest successes.

The early queens were ensembles:  Species hiding together in the largest, most secure redoubts, existing as totipotent spores and fertilized eggs along with a dowry of mummified bodies and dried shit—organic wealth brought to feed and fertilize what was, in simple terms, an ark that was waiting for the next All.

That was a billion years ago.

Life on the Earth was little more than a film, a gray tapestry woven of single-celled bacteria; while on Dawsheen, the Queen was becoming more interesting and more elaborate, gradually but inexorably evolving into what the world would see as a spectacular, utterly beautiful woman.

“Bride of the world, Bride of the All!”

They could scarcely hear their own translators.  At this penultimate moment, the city’s entire population was standing along the main lane, every Dawsheen chanting in a wonderfully smooth chorus, the melded voices loud enough to shake stone and passionate enough to make humans shiver and smile at one another.  Quee Lee turned to her husband, winking in a certain way.  “It’s as if we’ve wandered into an orgy.”

“What?” Perri shouted.

“We’ve stumbled across an orgy!”  But that wasn’t quite true, and reconsidering, she added, “No, no!  It’s a salmon run.  Coho spawning!  That’s what this reminds me of!”

“Accept our selves,” their translators screamed.  “Accept our offerings, accept our souls!”

The crowd was a blur, a vivid living mass of the Dawsheen lining the parade route, plus another twenty or thirty, or perhaps forty animal species visible from that little knob of basalt.  The bulky species stood alone, clambering little bodies dancing on their shoulders and backs.  Limbs rose high.  Every creature was full-grown, and many were elderly.  Why make children when this world was about to perish?  Trembling bodies shoved against neighbors, forming two astonishingly straight lines.

Nothing mattered but the Queen.  Nothing else existed.  Her exhausted vanguard moved onto the wide lane.  Leading the procession were the intelligent Dawsheen, each wearing elaborate ceremonial robes and carrying relics from great, long-past Alls.  Behind them, big work-grazers pulled wagons filled with a tiny sampling of Her wealth—sacks of blessed soil, armored plates made from titanium and cultured diamond, slabs of pasteurized fat sealed in plastic, and one long banner lit from within by electrified gases, showing the redoubt that had been prepared for Her at the top of the cavern, at the birthplace of the Long River.

“There…I see Her…!” Quee Lee cried out.

The Queen was being lifted up the last long flight of stairs, rising over the cliff’s lip at a slow pace that might have been majestic, but more likely signaled great fatigue.  She was huge.  Resembling an enormous caterpillar, she was adorned with turquoise plates and gold emblems that shone in the snowy light.  What might be legs were wrapped securely around the trunk of a sky-holder tree.  Handles and saddles had been fastened to the tree, and every possible species helped carry Her.  Work-grazers and Dawsheen and bounce-maidens and three-cautions and whisper-winds; and in the middle of the tree trunk, a pair of massive hill-shakers strode along, each with six pillar-like legs, each leg stepping with practiced care, setting the pace for the others.

A centuries-long climb was nearly finished.

But the achievement wasn’t quite as astonishing as it seemed.  The sky-holder tree was mostly hollow, saving weight.  And the Queen’s body was nearly as empty.  The carapace was a tough, enduring contrivance—diamond fibers woven into a structure able to endure the angry weight of entire glaciers.  The Queen’s true self was astonishingly small.  But as Perri liked to explain, “Small makes sense.  A little body is easier to move and protect.  The little queen can fall into hibernation faster, and then awaken first.”  Over the recent centuries, on various occasions, he had reminded his wife, “Really, you don’t need much space to hold a world’s genetics.  A sampling of every species…a few million examples, each no larger than a single cell…you could hold that treasure inside one trustworthy hand…”

Thundering chants reached a higher, brighter pitch.  The cliff seemed to be shaking, ready to collapse.  And then the enormous Queen was in view, and the mood changed, the crowd falling into sudden silence.

Quee Lee sighed, and shivered.

Perri looked back across the city.  Thousands of spore-pods began to leap high, home-trees and vines and the living lanes throwing their genetics into the damp, snowy wind.  And in the next moment, the pods detonated, filling the air with talc-like dust.  Perri coughed, and Quee Lee sneezed.  But the natives remained silent, focused on this ultimate moment.  As the Queen passed, each Dawsheen approached.  The two lines pushed inwards, bodies clambering on top of bodies.  With the aliens came the rough equivalent of rats and scorpions, dogs and sparrows, and underfoot, furry worms and tiny bugs.  With quiet solemnity, every creature opened its clothes or parted its fur—in some way exposing itself–needle-like penises and distended vaginas delivering their cargo with a minimum of fuss, and just enough bliss.

Quee Lee nudged Perri with her elbow.  He followed her gaze.  Half a dozen giant wind-masters were still trying to finish their long climb.  Exhausted, ancient and nearly starved, their movements were weak but precise, using a last little updraft somewhere in the cold, dense air.  Perri began to say, “Too bad.”  They were majestic creatures.  He had hoped at least one of them would glide above the parade; that would make the spectacle complete.

But not today, he thought.

Then a new motion grabbed his gaze.  Skimming along the edge of the cliff, just above the falls, was a black and elegantly slender wind-master, large even at a distance, flapping the long wings once and then twice again, twisting its body as the body rose up level to Perri and Quee Lee.

He nudged her with an elbow, and nodded.

Quee Lee whispered a few words.

“What?”

“Stronger,” she said.

The enormous flyer was powerful enough to flap hard and quick, gaining velocity as it continued its ascent.  In another moment it was above them, vanishing into the snow and spores.  Perri thought he heard air racing, which was ridiculous.  The deep rumbling of the waterfall wouldn’t let him hear anything as subtle as wings or breezes.  Then inside that same instant, he heard a new chant from the Gathering, unexpected and sloppy, and not half as loud as before.

“No, no, no!” their translators cried out.

Then with bluntly descriptive voices, the machines said, “PANIC.  THIS IS THE SOUND OF PANIC.”

Again, air was rushing overhead.

Almost too late, Perri looked back at the Queen.  A strange little fire had erupted along Her back, a haze of blue plasmas brightening and lifting like a flap of iridescent flesh.  Then there was a clean sharp explosion, and the Queen’s carapace shattered and fell off its perch on the sky-holder tree, and out of the clouds dove something narrow, black, and wingless.  It swooped low and stopped instantly, absorbing that terrific momentum.  Mechanical hands delicately reached inside the Queen’s jeweled carapace, retrieving a squirming gray body not much larger than a human being.

“What is it?” Quee Lee asked.

The machine had lifted again, vanishing into the endless snow storm.

“What just happened?” she wanted to know, more puzzled than worried, more disappointed than angry.

Perri said nothing.

He was studying the ongoing panic—arms swaying in agony; voices cursing wildly; waves of tiny sparrow-like flyers struggling to chase after their stolen Queen—and then with an expression that looked a little amused, and thrilled, and focused, he turned to his wife and shook his head, telling her, “Stay with me.  Stay close!”