The Greatship (44 page)

A ninety-second tube ride placed him beside Sorrel’s front door.  The apartment addressed him by the only name it knew, and with alarm creeping into the officious voice, it asked, “Do you know how badly you are injured, sir?”

“I’ve got a fair guess,” said Pamir, an assortment of shrapnel still buried inside his leg and belly.  “Where’s the lady?”

“On the patio, where you left her, sir.”

Everybody was terrified, except for Sorrel.  But why would she worry?  She had only been knifed by a quick-and-dirty thief, which on the scale of recent crimes was practically nothing.

“I’ll meet her in her bedroom.”

“Sir?”

“I’m not talking in the open anymore.  Tell her.”

“What about her friend?”

“Another husband is dead.”

Silence.

“Will you tell her?” Pamir asked.

“She is already on her way, as you have requested.”  Then after a pause, the apartment suggested, “About Gallium, please…I think you should deliver that sorry news…”

* * *

He told it.

She was dressed in slacks and a silk blouse made by the communal spiders of the Kolochon district, and her bare feet wore black rings on every toe, and while she sat on one of the dozens of self-shaping chairs, listening to his recounting of the last brutal hour, her expression managed to grow even more sad as well as increasingly detached.  Sorrel made no sound, but there was always the sense that she was about to speak.  The sorry and pained and very pretty face would betray a new thought, or the pale eyes would recognize something meaningful.  But the mouth never quite made noise.  When she finally uttered a few words, Pamir nearly forgot to listen.

“Who are you?”

Did he hear the question correctly?

Again, she asked, “Who are you?”  Then she leaned forward, the blouse dipping in front.  “You aren’t like any environmental technician I’ve known, and I don’t think you’re a security specialist either.”

“No?”

“You wouldn’t have survived the fight, if you were just a fix-it man.”  She tried to laugh, a little dimple showing high on the left cheek.  “And even if you had survived, you’d still be running now.”

“I just want you to point me in the safest direction,” he said.

She didn’t respond, watching him for what seemed like an age.  Then sitting back in the deep wide chair, she asked, “Who pays you?”

“You do.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“But I’m not pushing too hard for my wages,” he said.

“You won’t tell me who?”

“Confess a few things to me first,” he said.

She had long hands, graceful and quick.  The hands danced in her lap for a little while, and when they finally settled, she asked, “What can I tell you?”

“Everything you know about your dead husbands, and about those who just happen to be alive still.”  Pamir leaned forward.  “In particular, I want to hear about your first husband.  And if you can, explain why the Faith of the Many Joinings seemed like such a reasonable idea.”

She had seen him earlier on the voyage and spoken with him on occasion—a tall and slender and distinguished J’Jal man with a fondness for human clothes, particularly red woolen suits and elaborately knotted white silk ties.  Cre’llan seemed handsome, although not exceptionally so.  He was obviously bright and engaging.  Once, when their boat was exploring the luddite islands in the middle of the Gone-A-Long Sea, he asked if he might sit on the long chaise lounge beside hers.  For the next little while—an hour, or perhaps the entire day—they chatted amiably about the most ordinary of things.  There was gossip to share, mostly about their fellow passengers and the boat’s tiny crew.  They made several attempts to list the oceans that they had crossed to date, ranking them according to beauty and then history and finally by their inhabitants.  Which was the most intriguing port?  Which was the most ordinary?  What aliens had each met for the first time?  What were their first impressions, and second impressions, and what did they think today?  And if they had to live the next thousand years in one of these little places, which would they choose?

Sorrel would have eventually forgotten the day.  But a week later, she agreed to a side trip to Greenland.

“Do you know the island?”

“Not at all,” Pamir lied.

“I never understood that name,” Sorrel admitted, eyes narrowing as if to reexamine the entire question.  “Except for some fringes of Martian moss, the climate is pure glacial.  The island has to be cold, I was told.  The upwellings in the ocean and the sea’s general health are at stake.  Anyway, there is a warm current upwind, which brings the moisture, and the atmosphere is a hundred kilometers tall and braced with demon-doors.  The snows are endless and fabulous, and you can’t sail across the Gone-A-Long Sea without visiting Greenland.  At least that’s what my friends told me.”

“Was Cre’llan in your group?”

Somehow that amused her, a little laugh leaking free.  “No, everybody was human, except for the guide, who was an AI with a human-facsimile body.”

Pamir nodded.

“We power skied up onto the ice.  An incredibly hard snowfall was falling, but when we on the glacier, our guide turned to us, mentioning that it was a clear day, as they went.  And we should be thankful we could see so much.”

At most, they could see twenty meters in any direction.  Sorrel was skiing with a good friend—a child of the Great Ship like her, but a thousand years older.  She had known the woman her entire life, sharing endless conversations and attending the same fine parties, and their shopping adventures had stretched on for weeks at a time.  They always traveled together.  And in their combined lives, nothing with real substance had ever found them.

The glacier was thick and swiftly built up by the waves of falling snow.  Sorrel and her friend skied away from the rest of the group, scaling a tall ridge that placed them nearly a kilometer above the invisible sea.  Then the snow began to fall harder—fat wet flakes joining into snowballs that plunged from the white sky.  They were skiing close together, linked by a smart-rope.  Sorrel happened to be in the lead.  What happened next, she couldn’t say.  Her first guess, and still her best guess, was that her friend thought of a little joke to play.  She disabled the rope and untied herself, and where the ridge widened, she attempted to slip ahead of Sorrel, probably to scare her when she was most vulnerable.

Where the friend fell was a bit of a mystery.

Later, coming to the end of the ridge, Sorrel discovered that she was alone.  The natural assumption was that her friend had grown tired and gone back to rejoin the others.  There wasn’t cause for worry, and she didn’t like worry, and so Sorrel didn’t give it another thought.

But the other tourists hadn’t seen the young woman, either.

A search was launched.  But the heavy snowfall turned into what can only be described as an endless avalanche from the sky.  In the next hour, the glacier rose twenty meters.  By the time rescue crews could set to work, it was obvious that the missing passenger had stumbled into one of the vast crevices, and her body was dead, and without knowing her location, the only reasonable course would be to wait for the ice to push to the sea and watch for her battered remains.

In theory, a human brain could withstand that kind of abuse.

But the AI guide didn’t believe in theory.  “What nobody tells you is that this fucking island was once an industrial site.  Why do you think the engineers covered it up?  To hide their wreckage, of course.  Experimental hyperfibers, mostly.  Very sharp and sloppy, and the island was built with their trash, and if you put enough pressure on even the best bioceramic head, it will crack.  Shatter.  Pop, and die, and come out into the sea as a few handfuls of fancy sand.”

Her friend was dead.

Sorrel and the woman hadn’t been lovers, and she didn’t feel any bond unique just to the two of them.  But the loss was heavy and persistent, and for the next several weeks, the young woman thought about little else.

Meanwhile, their voyage through the Great Ship reached a new sea.

One night, surrounded by a flat gray expanse of methane, Sorrel happened upon the J’Jal man wearing his red jacket and red slacks, and the fancy white tie beneath his nearly-human face.  He smiled at her, his expression genuine with either species.  Quietly, he asked, “What is wrong?”

Nobody in her own group had noticed her pain.  Unlike her, they were convinced that their friend would soon return from oblivion.

Sorrel sat with the J’Jal.  For a long while, they didn’t speak.  She found herself staring at his bare feet, thinking about the fragility of life.  Then with a dry low voice, she admitted, “I’m scared.”

“Is that so?” Cre’llan said.

“You know, at any moment, without warning, the Great Ship could collide with something enormous.  At a third the speed of light, we might strike a sunless world or a small black hole, and billions would die inside this next instant.”

“That may be true,” her companion said.  “But I have invested my considerable faith in the talents of our captains.”

“I haven’t,” she said.

“No?”

“My point here…”  She hesitated, shivering for reasons other than the cold.  “I have lived for a few years, and I can’t remember ever grabbing life by the heart.  Do you know what I mean?”

“Very well,” he claimed.

His long toes curled and then relaxed again.

“Why don’t you wear shoes?” she finally asked.

And with the softest possible touch, Cre’llan laid his hand on hers.  “I am an alien, Sorrel.”  He spoke while smiling, quietly telling her, “And it would mean so much to me if you could somehow, in your soul, forget what I am.”

* * *

“We were lovers before the night was finished,” she admitted.  A fond look passed into a self-deprecating chuckle.  “I thought all J’Jal men were shaped like he was.  But he explained that they aren’t and why he wasn’t, and that’s when I learned about the Faith of the Many Joinings.”

Pamir nodded, waited.

“You know, they did eventually find my lost friend.”  A wise sorry laugh came out of her.  “A few years later, a patrol working along the edge of the glacier kicked up some dead bones and then the skull with her mind inside.  Intact.”  Sorrel sat back in her chair, breasts moving under the blouse.  “She was reconstituted and back inside her old life within the month, and do you know what?  In the decades since, I haven’t spoken to my old friend more than three times.

“Funny, isn’t it?”

“The Faith,” Pamir prompted.

She seemed to expect the subject.  With a slow shrug of the shoulders, Sorrel observed, “Whoever you are, you weren’t born into comfort and wealth.  That shows, I think.  You’ve had to fight during your life…probably through much of your life…for things that any fool knows are important.  While someone like me—not a fool, I hope—walks through paradise without once asking herself, ‘What matters?’”

“The Faith,” he repeated.

“Think of the challenge.”  Staring through him, she asked, “Can you imagine how very difficult it is to be involved—romantically and emotionally linked—with another species?”

“It disgusts me,” he lied.

“It disgusts a lot of us,” she replied.  For an instant, she wore a doubting gaze, perhaps wondering if he was telling the truth about his feelings.  Then she let the mistrust fall aside.  “I wasn’t exceptionally horrified by the idea of sex outside my species, which was why I wasn’t all that interested either.  Somewhere in the indifferent middle, I was.  But when I learned about this obscure J’Jal belief…how an assortment of like-minded souls had gathered, taking the first critical steps in what might well be the logical evolution of life in our universe…”

Her voice drifted away.

“How many husbands did you take?”

She acted surprised.  “Why?  Don’t you know?”

Pamir let her stare at him.

Finally, she said, “Eleven.”

“You are Joined to all of them.”

“Until a few years ago, yes.”  The eyes shrank, and with the tears, they grew brighter.  “The first death looked like a random murder, horrible but imaginable.  But the second killing was followed a few weeks later by a third.  The same weapon was used in each tragedy, with the same manner of execution…”  Her voice trailed away, the mouth left open and empty.  One long hand wiped at the tears, accomplishing little but pushing moisture across the sharp cheeks.  “Since the dead belonged to different species, and since the members of the Faith…my husbands and myself…are sworn to secrecy—”

“Nobody noticed the pattern,” Pamir said.

“Oh, I think they saw what was happening,” she said.  “After the fifth or sixth death, security people made inquiries at the library.  But no one there could admit anything.  And then the killings slowed, and the investigation went away.  No one was offered protection, and my name was never mentioned.  At least that’s what I assume, since nobody was sent to interview me.”  Then with a quiet, angry voice, Sorrel added, “After linking the murders to the library, nobody saw any reason to care what happened next.”

“How do you know that?”

She stared at Pamir as if he were a perfect idiot.

“The authorities assume this was some ugly internal business among the Joined.  Is that what you think?”

“Maybe,” she said.  “Or maybe they received orders telling them to stop caring.”

“Who gave those orders?”

She looked at a point above his head and carefully said, “No.”

“Who wouldn’t want these killings stopped?”

“I can’t,” she said, shaking her head.  “Ask all you want, but I won’t tell you anything more.”

“Do you consider yourself in danger?”

She sighed.  “Hardly.”

“Why not?”

She said nothing.

“Two husbands are alive,” Pamir reminded her.

She worked him over with a suspicious expression.  “I’m guessing you know which two,” she said.

“There’s the Glory.”  Glories were bird-like creatures, roughly human-shaped but covered with a bright, lovely plumage.  “One of your more recent husbands, isn’t he?”

Sorrel nodded.  “Except he died last year, on the opposite side of the Great Ship.  The body was discovered only yesterday.”

Pamir flinched.  “My condolences.”

“Yes.  Thank you.”

“And your first lover?”

“Yes.”

“The J’Jal in the red suit.”

“Cre’llan, yes.  I know who you mean.”

“The last man standing,” he said.

That earned a withering stare from the pained cold face.  “I don’t marry lightly, and I don’t care what you’re thinking.”

Pamir stood and walked up beside her, and using his best stare, he said, “You don’t know what I’m thinking.  Because I sure as hell don’t know what I’ve got in my own soggy head.”

She dipped her eyes.

“The J’Jal,” he said.  “I can track him down for myself, or you can make the introductions.”

“It isn’t Cre’llan,” she whispered.

“Then come with me,” Pamir replied.  “Come and look him in the eye and ask the old man for yourself.”