The Greatship (53 page)

“‘Your secret hope was to accomplish what I would never allow…you wanted to name your world, and to name it in exactly the manner that would make the universe take note of your presence.

“‘And you were right, my sweet darling.  That would have been your only hope of salvation.

“‘But I visited that far valley and your secret beacon.  Just this morning, I destroyed the dishes and power plant, and I slaughtered everyone in my reach, but I left the local communication system intact.  During these last hours, every time you spoke your fellow rebels, you were actually speaking to me.’”

Finally, the voice paused.

In the perfect darkness, a deep useless breath was taken.

Then the entity was talking again, quietly admitting, “I gave my lover one last freedom.  She could be the last to die, or first.  She chose to be first, and she did that herself, releasing the acids inside her body.  But I was already standing at a safe distance from our bed, my back to the carnage.  Hearing the screams and smelling the blistered flesh, I kept my eyes averted, reminding myself that the worst of this awful night was finally finished.”

The two humans clung to one another.

In the same moment, in a rough chorus, they asked, “What happened?  What did you do?  What about the other people?  What?”

A tight slow creak was audible, old leather or old bones moving.

From a point markedly closer than before, a mouth opened and breathed and then breathed again.

“I did precisely what I promised.”  The voice seemed to be within arm’s reach.  “However imperfectly, I have always strived to serve my cause, and that includes punishing those who dared rise up against me.  I had no choice but gather the worst of the offenders on the Sunset Plaza, and with the rest of the grandchildren watching, I removed them from the living world.  Then I ordered the low-animals to clean the bricks of blood and pink tissues, and the dead bones were ground up and piled high on the nearest beach.  And within five years, those who had survived my justice had managed to make up for lost time.  Within ten years, my work was finished, and I carved away the gray summit of the volcano and pulled from the hot workroom a single machine encased in the finest hyperfiber—a wonder of genius and competence that made my stay on that world worth any cost.”

The voice drifted even closer, and feeling the intrusion, Quee Lee instinctively leaned away.

Perri held her and spoke past her, asking, “When did the mountain erupt?”

Nothing.

“After you abandoned the world, did the island explode?”

A sound of amusement, weary and cool, ended with the simple pronouncement, “Never, no.”

They waited.

“Your assumption has been that this was the Earth.  And that is a reasonable, wrong assumption.  But I let you believe what you wanted.  As a rule, every species, no matter how open to odd notions and alien fancies, will find its own stories to be the most compelling.

“No, this wasn’t your cradle world.  And its people were perhaps not quite as human as I might have let on.”

“What happened to them?” Quee Lee pressed.

“As I promised my lover, I undid my fancy tinkering.  I made her citizens simple again, just as I pulled back the engineering of the other species.  The population scattered.  The palace was abandoned.  Without trained hands to make repairs, the city fell into ruins.  Within a few years of my departure, the island was a mystery already famous across half of that world.  But its mountain would never erupt.  My work had stolen away too much heat, and the magma lake below had cooled and turned to stone.”

The voice paused.

Then with a matter-of-fact tone, it explained, “The Earth is blessed in many ways.  It has a mature, very stable sun.  Comets are rare beauties in the sky, not constant hazards.  And it possesses a relatively thin crust, easily pierced and quick to bleed.  But this world that I speak of is notably different.  Its skin is much thicker than the Earth’s, and much more resilient.  As its core generates heat, oceans of magma build up slowly, millions of years required to reach that critical point when a thousand eruptions come at once.

“That harum-scarum probe surely recognized the inevitable—a world perched on the margins of a grand, yet thoroughly natural disaster.

“I left that world and placed my magical machine in a secret place.  A new mission called to me from the sky, and I was en route when that nameless world suddenly and violently attacked itself.  The sulfurous gases and blistering lava flows achieved everything that I had counted upon.  Every convincing trace of my visit was erased.  The continents were wracked by quakes.  Ten thousand volcanoes spat ash and fire, and they exploded, flinging their poisons into the stratosphere.  Every forest burned.  Every breath brought blisters and misery.  The ocean floors were wrenched upwards, forcing saltwater over the coastlands.  My little island was washed clean beneath a quick succession of tsunamis, erasing even the palace.  The human-like creatures were reduced to a few scattered populations, ignorant and desperate.  And after another thousand years of geologic horror—when the skies finally cleared and the lava cooled to glass—not a single example of that very promising species could be found in Creation.”

Those deadly words were absorbed in silence.

Then Quee Lee said, “How awful.”

Softly, the voice asked, “In what way is this awful?”

“You allowed that to happen,” she began.

“But the people were doomed,” it said.  “Long before I knew of their existence, they had a fate to face, and despite my considerable powers, there was little I could have done, except delaying the story’s end by one day, or at the very best, maybe two.”

The humans said nothing.

“If you need righteous anger,” it continued, “direct your emotions toward the harum-scarums.  Their probe saw the same future that I saw.  Three of their colonies were near enough and powerful enough to launch rescue missions.  Better than me, they could have saved a worthy sampling of those people before they passed out of existence.  But no missions were launched.  Their costs and the benefits were too much and too little, respectively.  The battered world remained nameless until a starship eased its way into orbit.  That particular ship was bringing colonists, I should mention—people who didn’t care about the bones under their feet, people who wanted nothing but to start new lives on this rich empty place.”

Quietly, Perri asked, “Is it a harum-scarum world?”

“No,” the voice replied, “it is not.”

“Then who has it?”

“Who else would be a likely suspect, my friend?  Remembering all that we have discussed by now…”

Humans had claimed the empty world.  The colonists might even be humans that had come from the Great Ship…people whom Quee Lee and Perri had met and even known well at one time or another…

Quee Lee was desperate to talk about anything else.

And Perri was too.  With a scornful, demanding tone, he said, “I still don’t believe in your Union.”

“No?  In what ways do you doubt it?”

“When you describe this organization, it sounds like an exclusive club or somebody’s secret society.  Not the imperial underpinnings of a powerful political machine.”

A long pause ended when the voice said, “Power.”  It said the word four times, each utterance employing a different emotion.  Amusement was followed by disgust, and then came contempt, and finally, a different species of amusement—a joyful, almost giddy rendering of the word, “Power.”  After that, there was a laugh that lingered until the voice decided to speak again.

“As you must have guessed by now,” it told them, “I am embroiled in a new task in the service of my Union.  A mission full of facets and difficult challenges, yes, and it is not something to be accomplished in an easy few centuries, either.”

The humans held their breath.

The voice pushed even closer, less than an arm’s length away, and from a mouth that they could only imagine came the reminder, “I did once visit your cradle world.  Your Earth.  Yes, I did.”

Quee Lee nodded.

“Before it was named,” Perri recalled.

“Moments before,” the voice added.  And then the bulk of an invisible body drifted even closer, hovering within a tongue’s length of Quee Lee’s ear, and an intimate whisper offered her a single date.  A specific time.  Then a place inside a city that she would never see again.

Quee Lee shivered.

Perri reached out with one arm, aiming for the face that had to be lurking in the blackness…but his hand closed on nothing, and nothing else came from the voice, and after a few moments more of clinging comfort with one another, their camp lights returned—a scorching white glare of photons that left them blinking, blinded in a new way altogether.

They didn’t sleep that night, and they didn’t miss sleep until the middle of the following morning.  By then, Perri and Quee Lee had thoroughly explored the enormous room and most of the little tunnels leading out from it.  But they didn’t find any trace of visitors other than themselves.  Their sniffers tasted surgically clean surfaces and cold air uncluttered by even a single flake of lost skin, and just as puzzling, none of their machines could explain why they had failed last night.  Whatever the voice was, it had been careful.  With its absence, it proved its great power…at least when it came to fooling a couple peasants who were ignorant of the real powers of a galaxy that they had barely begun to know.

There was talk about returning to the flex-car, or at least contacting their missing friends.

But one last tunnel needed a quick examination.  And with Perri at the lead, they marched up into an increasingly narrow space that turned sharply, revealing a pair of security robots waiting for anyone who might wander where they didn’t belong.

The robots were in slumber-mode, facing in the opposite direction.

Perri retreated, pulling his wife behind him.  “They’re the last in a string of sentries,” he decided.  “I bet if we found our way to the other side, we’d come across barricades and official warnings from the captains not to take one step farther.”

“The captains don’t know about our route?”

“Not yet,” he said.  Then with a soft conspiring voice, he added, “Maybe we should hurry home.  Now.  Before we get noticed.”

They discovered their friends waiting at the flex-car.  An argument had just ended, and one of the twin brothers refused to say anything to anyone.  Apparently he had lost on the competition for the rich woman’s affections, and his anger helped Quee Lee and Perri avoid the expected questions.

The tiny expedition abandoned the Vermiculate before evening.

Home again, the old married couple made love and ate enough for ten hungry people, and throughout the sex and the dinner, they discussed what they should do next, if anything.  And then Quee Lee slept hard for three dream-laced hours.  When she woke, Perri was standing over her.  He was smiling.  But it was a grim, concentrated smile—the look of a man who knew something enormous but unsatisfying.

“Want to hear a rumor?” he asked.

She sat up in bed, answering him with a look.

“Like we heard before, the captains did discover the hole in their maps, and they sent an old robot down into the hole.  But it got lost and climbed out again, and it couldn’t explain where it had gone wrong.”

“That’s the story I remember,” she said.

“Engineers tore open the robot.  Just to identify the malfunction.  And that’s when they found a message.”

Quee Lee blinked, and waited.

“Addressed to the Master Captain,” he continued, his smile warming by the moment.  “After a thousand security checks, the invitation was delivered.  Except for the Master Captain, and maybe a few Submasters, nobody knows what the message said.  But a few days later, alone, the Master Captain walked down that tunnel and vanished for nearly five hours.  And when she emerged again, she looked sick.  Shaken sick.  The rumor claims that she actually cried in the presence of her security troops, which is why the whole story refuses to get wings and soar.  It doesn’t sound at all like the benign despot we know so well.”

His wife agreed with a nod.  “When did this happen?” she asked.

“Ten years ago, nearly.”

“And since then?”

“Well,” said Perri, “the Master Captain has quit weeping.  If that’s what you’re curious about.”

She lay back on her pillows.

“No,” her husband said.

“What else?”

“I didn’t wake you just to tell you something that might have happened.  Or even to give you another mystery to chew on.”

“Then why am I awake?”

“I know a man,” Perri said.  “And he’s very good pulling old memories out of very old skulls.”

* * *

The magician was named Ash.

He was human, but he lived inside an alien habitat where the false sun never set.  Sitting in a room full of elaborate machinery, Ash told his newest clients, “I can make promises, but they don’t mean much.  This date is a very big problem, madam.  You were alive then, yes.  But barely.  This is a few years before bioceramic brains came into existence.  You could have been the brightest young thing, but my tricks work best with the galactic-standard minds…brains that employ quantum many-world models to interface with a trillion sister minds…”

“Can you do anything?” Perri asked.

“I can take your money,” Ash replied.  “And I can also dig into the old data archives.  You claim you have a place in mind?”

“Yes,” Quee Lee said.  Then she repeated the location just as the voice had given it to her.

“I assume you think you were there then,” Ash said.

“I don’t know if I was.”

“And this is important?”

“We’ll see,” she said.

Ash began to work.  He explained that on the Earth, for this very brief period of history, security systems as well as ordinary individuals tried to keep thorough digital records of everything that happened and that didn’t happen.  The trouble was that the machinery was very simple and unreliable, and the frequent upgrades as well as a few nasty electromagnetic pulses wiped clean a lot of records.  Not to mention the malicious effects of the early AIs—entities who took great delight in creating fictions that they would bury inside whatever data banks would accept their artistic works.

“The chances of success,” Ash began to say.

Then in the ancient records, he saw something entirely unexpected, and lifting his gaze, he mentioned to Quee Lee, “You were a pretty young lady.”

“Did you find me?” she asked expectantly.

“Too easily,” he allowed.  Then he showed her a portion of the image—a girl who was nine or maybe eight years old, dressed in the uniform mandated by a good private school.

With a shrug, Ash allowed, “No need for paranoia.  This does happen, on occasion.”  He gave commands to a brigade of invisible assistants, and then said, “If I can dig up a few more records, I think I can piece together what you and the man talked about.”

“What man?” she asked.

Perri asked.

“The man standing beside you,” Ash remarked.  “The man with the golden balloon.”  Then he showed an image captured by a nearby security camera, adding, “I’m assuming he’s your father, judging by his looks.”

“He’s not,” she whispered.

“And now we have a second digital record,” Ash said happily.  “Hey, and now a third.  See the adolescent boy down the path from you?  Wearing the medallion on his chest?  Well, that was a camera and a very good microphone.  His video has been lost, but not the audio.  I can’t tell you how unlikely it is to have this kind of recording survive this long, in any usable form.”

“What is the man saying to me?” Quee Lee asked nervously.

“Let me see if I can pull it up…”

And suddenly a voice that she hadn’t thought about for aeons returned.  The young girl and the stranger were standing in Hong Kong Park, on the cobblestone path beside the lotus pond.  A short white picket fence separated them from the water.  Standing in the background were towers and a bright blue sky.  With the noise of the city and other passersby erased, the voice began by saying, “Hello, Quee Lee.”

“Hello,” the young girl replied, nervous in very much the same fashion that the old woman was now.  “Do I know you?”

“Hardly at all,” the man replied.

The girl looked about, as if expecting somebody to come save her.  Which there would have been:  Quee Lee was the only child to a very wealthy couple who didn’t let her travel anywhere without bodyguards and a personal servant.  “Where are my people now?” she seemed to ask herself.

The voice said, “I will not hurt you, my dear.”

Hearing that promise didn’t help the girl relax.

“Ask me where I came from.  Will you please?”

The youngster decided on silence.

But the strange man laughed, and pretending the question had been asked, he remarked, “I came from the stars.  I am here on a great, important mission, and it involves your particular species.”

The girl looked up at a face that carried a distinct resemblance to her face.  Then she looked back down the path, hoping for rescue.

“In a little while,” said the stranger, “my work here will be complete.”

“Why?” the girl muttered.

“Because that is when one of your mechanical eyes will look at the most lucrative portion of the sky, at the perfect moment, and almost everything that you will need to know about the universe will be delivered to your doorstep.”

The pretty black-haired girl hugged her laptop bag, saying nothing.

“When that day comes,” said the man, “you must try and remember everything.  Do you understand me, Quee Lee?  That one day will be the most important moment in your species’ history.”

“How do you know my name?” she asked again.

“And this is not all that I am doing on your world.”  The man was handsome but quite ordinary, nothing about him hinting at anything that wasn’t human.  He was wearing a simple suit, rumpled at the edges.  His right hand held the string that led up to a small balloon made from helium and gold Mylar.  He smiled with fierce joy, telling her, “It has been decided.  Your species has a great destiny in service of the Union.”

In the present, two people gasped quietly.

“What’s the Union?” the girl asked.

“Everything,” was the reply.  “And it is nothing.”

The girl was prettiest when she was puzzled, like now.

“You won’t remember any portion of our conversation,” the man promised.  “Ten minutes from now, you won’t remember me or my words.”

One hand smoothed her skirt, and she anxiously stared at her neat black shoes.

“But before I leave you, I wanted to tell you something else.  Are you listening to me, Quee Lee?”

“No,” she claimed.

The man laughed heartily.  Then he bent down, placing their faces on the same level, and when he had her gaze, he said, “You were adopted, only your parents don’t know that.  The baby inside your mother had died, and I devised you out of things that are human, but also elements inspired by a wonderful old friend of mine.”

The girl tried to step back but couldn’t.  Discovering that her feet were fixed to the pavement, she looked down and then up at the other adults walking past the long brown pond, and when she tried to scream, no sound came from her open mouth.

“I am not gracelessly cruel,” the stranger told her.  “You may think that of me one day.  But even though I live to aid the workings of an enormous power, I make certain that I find routes to kindness, and when it offers itself, to love.”

The little girl couldn’t even make herself cry.

“Part of you,” he said.  Then he paused, and from two different perspectives, the audience watched as his free hand touched the girl’s bright black hair.  “The shape of your mind was born on another world, a world too distant to be seen today.  And I once lied to that mind, Quee Lee.  I told it that I could stand aside and watch it die forever.”

She had no tears, but the man was crying, his face wet and sorry.

“I wish I could offer more of an apology,” he said.  And then he rose up again, pulling the balloon’s string close to his chest while wiping at his wet face with a wrinkled sleeve.  “But much is at stake…more than you might ever understand, Quee Lee…and this is as close to insubordination as this good servant can manage…”

Then he glanced at the security camera hidden in the trees and handed the string and balloon to the girl beside him.  “Would you like this, Quee Lee?  As a little gift from your grandfather?”

The girl discovered that she could move again.

“Take it,” he advised.

She accepted the string with one little hand.

For a brief instant, they were posing, staring across the millennia in a stance that was strained but nonetheless sweet—the image of a little girl enjoying the park with some undefined adult relative.

“I will see you later,” he mentioned.

Quee Lee released the string, watching the gold ball rise faster than she would have expected—shooting into the sky as if it weighed nothing at all.

When her eyes dropped, the stranger had stepped out of view.

And a few moments later, her father ran up the path to join her, asking, “Where did you go?  I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

“I didn’t go anywhere,” the girl replied.

“Tell me the truth,” the scared little man demanded.  “Did you talk to somebody you shouldn’t have talked to?”

She said, “No.”

“Why are you lying?” he asked.

“But I’m not lying,” she protested.  Then with a wide, smart grin, the young Quee Lee added, “The sky is going to talk, Father.  Did you know that?  And he promised me, he did, that I am going to see him again later…!”