The Greatship (40 page)

Little shards of far flung worlds never stop rising.

The purest strongest most elaborate materials have been cobbled into elegant streakships that climb to the Great Ship, dropping into prepared berths inside Port Beta, each welcomed by celebrations and suitable music, or if preferred, long silences designed to honor the onboard species.  Slower ships are more common but just as reveled:  Ungainly taxis and battered freighters, hyperfiber balloons and waspish yachts.  Ships come from every important place in this arm of the galaxy, enduring risks and damage and sometimes severe damage.  Many will never fly again.  Chopped into salvage, they can be woven into new machines wearing ten million improvements.  Fueled and crewed, they will then embark for worlds out in the dusty deep where new species and fresh experiences will be waiting, paying premiums for space onboard the Great Ship.

Mechanical shards carry living shards.  Drips and sacks of alien fluid walk on bony legs, or they have jointed exoskeletons, or they make due with mobile roots or perfumed trails of slime.  Many supremely wet creatures live inside larger drips and sacks.  Liquid water is a necessity, or liquid methane, or molten sulfur, or ammonium hydroxide, or perchlorate, or silicone, or a different flavor of silicone, or gases compressed to high densities.  Yet there are biologies that have no use for fluids.  They can be machines or entities indistinguishable from machines, and there are species that don’t pretend to belong to one camp or the other—cyborgs born from old traditions or difficult environments, or perhaps recent marriages between unlikely, loving mates.

In some way shape or form, every species has been designed.

Evolution is the first master.  Chance and cold practicality push the simple species into their basic, boilerplate structures.  But natural selection often bows to experience and genetic manipulations.  Disease is banished.  Immortality is routine.  Fashion has its influences, as do political certainties and political uncertainties.  But tradition counts for quite a lot:  Humans still look like apes, and they sing like apes, but the flesh and their young minds have been transformed by tricks older than the Krebs’ cycle.

Humans used to be the most common shards to step onboard, but those times are done.  Human space was a thin belt of metal-poor worlds and sterilized worlds and odd planets that would probably never be entirely stable or safe for life, and the Great Ship passed out of that realm long ago, entering more civilized and wealthier and considerably more intriguing neighborhoods.  Harum-scarums and Ginas and blue-passions and Janunsians are older, far more abundant species, and they are just a tip of the proverbial tentacle.

Life wears its culture and history and names, and humans have favorite names for the new passengers that never stop arriving.

In one average century, Undersheens and Jakks and cocoHarols and Lol*Tings step into the yellow, Sol-inspired lights of Port Beta.  Quaker Maids ride on columns of compressed air.  Channelmen and Ravvens are flyers—beautiful, unrelated creatures sporting wings and crimson plumage—while X(66)s are ugly beasts with voices so lovely, perfect and lovely and fluid, that the echoes of their arrival can be heard for years.

And this menagerie is nothing compared to the drips and circuits that arrive with the intelligent life forms.  Each new passenger has its entourage.  Microbes and fleas and important intestinal worms come onboard with the pets and domesticated livestock.  Habitats and little apartments have critical plants and pretty plants and the special rare species that are supposed to be carried to the far end of the galaxy.  Every alien body is precious, unique, and rich with tiny environments where little beasts and quick swift minds can hide from easy view, or in some cases, use their hosts as platforms to show the universe their own magnificence.

The humans own the Great Ship, and they rule it, and one key activity is to count the species that step and fly and swim their way inside.

Numbers always look precise, even when they fall short of the truth.

The Ship is eighty thousand years into a voyage scheduled to last half a million years, and it already can be said that no body in the galaxy, or perhaps even the universe, contains so much diversity.

There is no way to calculate the potential that lives beneath the deep hard hull.

But that doesn’t stop humans from building models, charting the promise and dangers.  They use biology and sociology, history and other oracles.  Weighty equations will say whatever they want to say, and perhaps a few captains believe one result over countless others.  But even the fools among them would never risk their endless lives for any of these fantastical, deeply subjective guesses, while the wisest few realize that each result is important only because it shows another future that will never come to pass.

The human male had lived on the avenue for thirty-two years.  Neighbors generally regarded him as a solitary creature, short-tempered on occasion, but never rude without cause.  His dark wit was locally famous, and a withering intelligence was rumored to hide behind the brown-black eyes.  Those with an appreciation of human beauty claimed that he was far from handsome, his face asymmetrical, the skin rough and fleshy, while his thick mahogany-brown hair looked as if it was cut with a knife and his own strong hands.  Yet that homeliness made him intriguing to some human females, judging by the idle chatter.  He wasn’t large for a human, but most considered him substantially built.  Perhaps it was the way he walked, his back erect and shoulders squared while the face tilted slightly forwards, as if looking down from a great height.  Some guessed he had been born on a high-gravity world, since the oldest habits never died.  Or maybe this wasn’t his true body, and his soul still hungered for the days when he was a giant.  Endless speculations were woven about the man’s past.  He had a name, and everybody knew it.  He had a biography, thorough and easily observed in the public records.  But there were at least a dozen alternate versions of his past and left-behind troubles.  He was a failed poet, or a dangerously successful poet, or a refugee who had escaped some political mess—unless he was some species of criminal, of course.  One certainty was his financial security, but where his money came from was a subject of considerable debate.  Inherited, some claimed.  Others imagined gambling winnings or lucrative investments on now-distant colony worlds.  Whatever the story, the man had the luxury of filling his days doing very little, and during his years on this obscure avenue, he had helped neighbors with unsolicited gifts of money and sometimes more impressive flavors of aid.

Thirty-two years was not a long time.  Three decades was little different than an afternoon, and that’s why for another century or twenty, locals might still refer to a neighbor as the newcomer.

Such was life onboard the Great Ship.

There were millions of avenues like this one.  Some were short enough to walk in a day, while others stretched for thousands of uninterrupted kilometers.  Many avenues remained empty, dark and cold as when humans first discovered the Great Ship.  But some had been awakened, made habitable to human owners or the oddest alien passengers.

This particular avenue was almost a hundred kilometers long and barely two hundred meters across.  And it was tilted.  Wastewater made a shallow river that sang its way across a floor of sugar-and-pepper granite.  For fifty thousand years, the river had flowed without interruption, etching out a shallow channel.  Locals had built bridges at the likely places, and along the banks erected tubs and pots filled with soils that mimicked countless worlds, giving roots and sessile feet happy places to stand.  A large pot rested outside the man’s front door—the vessel made of ceramic foam trimmed with polished brass and covering nearly a tenth of a hectare.  When he first arrived, the man poisoned the old jungle and planted another.  But he wasn’t much of a gardener, apparently.  The new foliage hadn’t prospered, weed species and odd volunteers emerging from the ruins.

Along the pot’s edge stood a ragged patch of llano vibra—an alien flower famous for its wild haunting songs.  “I should cut that weed out of there,” he would tell neighbors.  “I pretty much hate the racket it’s making.”  Yet he didn’t kill them or tear out the little voice boxes.  And after a decade or two of hearing his complaints, his neighbors began to understand that he secretly enjoyed their complicated, utterly alien melodies.

Most of his neighbors were sentient, fully mobile machines.  Early in the voyage, a charitable foundation dedicated to finding homes and livelihoods for freed mechanical slaves leased the avenue.  But recently organic species had begun cutting their own apartments into the walls, including a janusian couple downstream, and upstream, an extended family of harum-scarums.

The human was a loner but by no means a hermit.

True solitude was the easiest trick.  There were billions of passengers onboard, yet the great bulk of the Ship was full of hollow places and great caves, seas of water and ammonia and methane, as well as moon-sized tanks filled with liquid hydrogen.  Most locations were empty.  Wilderness was everywhere, cheap and inviting.  Indeed, a brief journey by cap-car could take the man to any of six wild places—alien environments and hidden sewage conduits as well as a maze-like cavern that was rumored to never have been mapped.  That was one advantage:  He had more than one escape route.  Another advantage was his neighbors.  Machines were always bright in easy ways, fountains of information if you knew how to employ them, but indifferent to the subtleties of organic life.

Pamir lived as a hermit for a time.  That was only sensible.  Ship captains rarely abandoned their posts, and captains of his rank and great promise never made ruins out of an important facility—regardless whether they had good reasons or not.

But thousands of years had brought changes to his status.  By most accounts, the Master Captain had stopped searching for him.  Two or three or four possible escapes from the Ship had been recorded, each placing him on one the new colony worlds that humans were building as they traveled through the galaxy.  Or maybe he had died in some ugly fashion.  The best story put him inside a frigid little cavern.  Smugglers had killed his body and sealed it inside a tomb of glass, and after centuries without food or air, the body had stopped trying to heal itself.  Pamir was a blind brain trapped inside a frozen carcass, and the smugglers were eventually captured and interrogated by the best in that narrow field.  According to coerced testimonies, they confessed to killing the infamous captain, though the precise location of their crime wasn’t known and would never be found.

Pamir spent another few thousand years wandering, changing homes while remaking his face and name.  He had worn nearly seventy identities, each elaborate enough to be believed, yet dull enough to escape notice.  For good reasons, he found it helpful to wear an air of mystery, letting neighbors invent any odd story to explain the gaps in his biography.  Whatever they dreamed up, it fell far from the truth.  Machines and men couldn’t imagine the turns and odd blessings of his life.  Yet despite all of that, Pamir remained the good captain.  A sense of obligation forced him to watch after the passengers and Ship.  He might live on the run for the next four hundred millennia, but he would always be committed to this great machine and its precious, nearly countless inhabitants.

Now and again, he did large favors.

Like with the harum-scarums next door.  Giants by every measure, adorned with armored plates and spine-encrusted elbows, they were possessed by an arrogance caused by millions of years of wandering among the stars.  But this particular family was politically weak, and that was a bad way to be among harum-scarums.  They had troubles with an old Mother-of-fathers, and when Pamir saw what was happening, he interceded.  Over the course of six months, by means both subtle and decisive, he put an end to the feud.  The Mother-of-fathers came to her enemies’ home, walking backwards as a sign of total submission, and with a plaintive voice begged for death, or at the very least, a forgetting of her sordid, graceless crimes.

No one saw Pamir’s hand in this business.  If they had, he would have laughed it off, and moments later, he would have vanished, throwing himself into another identity inside a distant avenue.

Large deeds always demanded a complete change of life.

A fresh face.

A slightly rebuilt body.

And another forgettable name.

That was how Pamir lived.  And he had come to believe that it wasn’t a particularly bad way to live.  Fate or some other woman-deity had given him this wondrous excuse to be alert at all times, to accept nothing as it first appears, helping those who deserved to be helped, and when the time came, remaking himself all over again.

And that time always came…

“Hello, my friend.”

“Hello to you.”

“And how are you this evening, my very good friend?”

Pamir was sitting beside the huge ceramic pot, listening to his llano-vibra.  With a dry smirk, he mentioned, “I need to void my bowels.”

The machine laughed a little too enthusiastically.  Its home was half a kilometer up the avenue, sharing an apartment with twenty other legally sentient AIs who had escaped together from the same long-ago world.  The rubber face and bright glass eyes worked themselves into a beaming smile, while a happy voice declared, “I am learning.  You cannot shock me so easily with this organic dirty talk.”  Then once again, he said, “My friend,” before using the fictitious name.

Pamir nodded, shrugged.

“It is a fine evening, is it not?”

“The best ever,” he deadpanned.

Evening along this avenue was a question of the clock.  The machines used the twenty-four hour ship-cycle, but with six hours of total darkness sandwiched between eighteen hours of brilliant, undiluted light.  That same minimal aesthetics had kept remodeling to a minimum.  The avenue walls were raw granite, save for the little places where organic tenants had applied wood or tile facades.  The ceiling was a slick arch made of medium-grade hyperfiber wearing a thin coat of grime and lubricating oils and other residues.  The lights were original, as old as the Ship and set in the thin dazzling bands running lengthwise along the ceiling.  Evening brought no softening of brilliance or reddening of color.  Evening was a precise moment, and when night came…in another few minutes, Pamir realized…there would be three warning flashes, and then a perfect smothering blackness.

The machine continued to smile at him, meaning something by it.  Cobalt-blue eyes were glowing, watching the human sit with the singing weeds.

“You want something,” Pamir guessed.

“Much or little.  How can one objectively measure one’s wishes?”

“What do you want with me?  Much, or little?”

“Very little.”

“Define your terms,” Pamir growled.

“There is a woman.”

Pamir said nothing, waiting now.

“A human woman, as it happens.”  The face grinned, an honest delight leaking out of a mind no bigger than a fleck of sand.  “She has hired me for a service.  And the service is to arrange an introduction with you.”

With a flat, unaffected voice, Pamir said, “An introduction.”  And through a string of secret nexuses, he brought his security systems up to full alert.

“She wishes to meet you.”

“Why?”

“Because she finds you fascinating, of course.”

“Am I?”

“Oh, yes.  Everyone here believes you are most intriguing.”  The flexible face spread wide as the mouth grinned, never-used white teeth shining in the last light.  “But then again, we are an easily fascinated lot.  What is the meaning of existence?  What is the purpose of death?  Where does slavery end and helplessness begin?  And what kind of man lives down the path from my front door?  I know his name, and I know nothing.”

“Who’s this woman?” Pamir asked.

The machine refused to answer him directly.  “I explained to her what I knew about you.  What I positively knew and what I could surmise.  And while I was speaking, it occurred to me that after all of these nanoseconds of close proximity, you and I remain strangers.”

The surrounding landscape was unremarkable.  Scans told Pamir that every face was known, and the nexus traffic was utterly ordinary, and when he extended his search, nothing was worth the smallest concern.  Which made him uneasy.  Every long look should find something suspicious.

“The woman admires you.”

“Does she?”

“Without question.”  The false body was narrow and quite tall, dressed in a simple cream-colored robe.  Four spidery arms emerged from under the folds of fabric, extending and then collapsing across the illusionary chest.  “Human emotions are not my strength.  But from what she says and what she does not say, I believe she has desired you for a very long time.”

The llano-vibra were falling silent now.

Night was moments away.

“All right,” Pamir said.  He stood, boots planting themselves on the hard pale granite.  “No offense meant here.  But why the hell would she hire you?”

“She is a shy lady,” the machine offered.  And then he laughed, deeply amused by his own joke.  “No, no.  She is not at all shy.  In fact, she is a very important soul.  Perhaps this is why she demands an intermediary.”

“Important how?”

“In all ways,” his neighbor professed.  Then with a genuine envy, he added, “You should feel honored by her attentions.”

A second array of security sensors was waiting.  Pamir had never used them, and they were so deeply hidden no one could have noticed their presence.  But they needed critical seconds to emerge from their slumber, and another half-second to calibrate and link together.  And then, just as the first of three warning flashes rippled along the mirrored ceiling, what should have been obvious finally showed itself to him.

“You’re not just my neighbor,” he told the rubber face.

A second flash passed overhead.  Then he saw the shielded cap-car hovering nearby, a platoon of soldiers nestled in its belly.

“Who else stands in that body?” Pamir demanded.

“I shall show you,” the machine replied.  Then two of the arms fell away, and the other two reached up, one violent jerk peeling back the rubber mask and the grit-sized brain, plus the elaborate shielding.  A face lay behind the face.  It was narrow, and in a fashion lovely, and it was austere, and it was allowing itself a knife-like smile as a new voice said to this mysterious man:

“Invite me inside your home.”

“Why should I?” he countered, expecting some kind of murderous threat.

But instead of threatening, Miocene said simply, “Because I would like your help.  In a small matter that must remain—I will warn you—our little secret.”