Authors: Robert Reed
The Well of Stars (10 page)
Several dozen faces nodded in weak agreement.
The squidscreen brightened with a flash. Suddenly everyone was staring at the interior of a sealed and heavily guarded berth inside Port Alpha. Filling the berth was a set of enormous engines, fusion rockets spiked with antimatter and the power yields increased by every possible trick of hyperfiber containment and quantum manipulations. The engines were attached to cavernous fuel tanks ready to hold millions of tons of metallic hydrogen, and above the giant tanks was what passed for the streakship’s prow—a blunt but elegant arch of high-grade hyperfiber, designed to be reconfigured at will, then braced in twenty different ways to protect the ship from every impact. If there were living quarters, they were invisible, tucked between the fat tanks in a slot that looked too tiny to give anyone more than the barest legroom.
Washen summarized the ship’s history. She listed five past missions and every one of its important successes, and because there has never been a crew without a feel for luck or its absence, she failed to mention the little tragedies that had kept two other missions from being total successes.
“Over the last nine decades,” she continued, “this particular streakship has been refitted and repaired. What isn’t new is nearly new, or better than new. There probably aren’t three vessels of this mass that can move any faster. Not in this galaxy, at least. At better than two-thirds
the speed of light, you will be able to beat us to the Inkwell by more than ten years. Critical years, I should add.”
the speed of light, you will be able to beat us to the Inkwell by more than ten years. Critical years, I should add.”
After a moment, Washen said, “Questions.”
Hands rose high.
One woman asked, “Who’s our captain?”
“I am.” Pamir gave a half nod. “I’ve got experience in small starships, and I can represent the ship with full authority.”
It was momentous news. The idea that the Second Chair would leave on any mission underscored its importance. Unless this was a demotion, of course. Pamir was a stubborn soul, and in the universe of gossip, he was always butting heads with the Master Captain.
Washen pointed at a fresh hand. “Yes, Quee Lee?”
The woman smiled politely, then with an honest distaste, she mentioned, “We seem to be a rather narrow group.”
Judging by the nods, the question swirled in every head.
She was a beautiful woman, Asian in the old ways, born on the ancient Earth in times that no one else could remember. Quee Lee lifted her gaze as if finding something of interest in the ceiling, and she said to nobody in particular, “All of us are human.”
Washen and Pamir conspicuously said nothing.
The Master rose to her feet in a slow, powerful motion that ended with a deep sigh and a shake of the head. Snowy white hair framed the rounded face. The face acquired a less honest disgust, as if some deep voice were reminding her that these were new times, and she needed to bow to the newborn conventions.
“It was our decision,” she reported. “For good solid reasons, the three of us decided to send only a single species.”
Nobody spoke.
While the Master rose, Washen had sat back down
again. Now she looked at the others, saying with the crisp voice of an order, “Ask it.”
again. Now she looked at the others, saying with the crisp voice of an order, “Ask it.”
They hesitated.
“We told you,” she continued. “Three hundred and six messages, to date. Which means that there’s still one communication that we haven’t quite managed to tell you about.”
Again, she said, “Ask it.”
“Okay,” Perri said. “Where did this last message come from?”
Washen hesitated.
It was the Master Captain’s right and honor to announce, “The message came directly from the Inkwell. Of course.”
Silence descended.
Then she added, “What we have received is a brief greeting, plus a chart giving us the safest course to one of the nearest warm worlds—”
“Who are they?” Perri interrupted.
The breach in etiquette went unmentioned. Quietly, the Master warned, “We don’t know anything that is certain. Not about what lives inside the ink, we don’t. But the face that it showed us, and the body … well, she looked rather like a human person … as odd or ordinary as that sounds …”
Whoever the Builders had been and whatever their high purpose, they possessed a considerable fondness for rivers. The ship’s rock-and-hyperfiber crust was laced with intricate long caverns and winding tunnels perfectly suited for the simple purpose of letting methane or ammonia, silicones or liquid water flow free across their floors, pooling now and again to create the lakes and little
seas, then pouring over some brink or lip before continuing on their poetic journey. The first explorers found abundant stores of ready ice, muscular reactors to supply heat, and banks of environmental controls to salt and sweeten the molten treasures. Pumps and attached conduits waited at the bottom of every deep hole, having no obvious purpose but to lift those rivers high again. On occasion, two or more caverns joined together, entirely different chemistries mixing, life-forms from opposite ends of the galaxy suddenly sharing the same narrow channel. One great room welcomed a dozen major rivers, plus at least thirty lesser streams. It was a round room beneath a high-domed ceiling of mirrored hyperfiber, the nearly flat floor made of gravel and river mud and great expanses of tired water. At eighty kilometers in diameter, the room was vast enough to feel worldly, particularly at its center. The dying rivers gradually spread out and merged, becoming a single flow bearing down on a simple hyperfiber throat—a seemingly bottomless pit set at the precise center of the room, one fat kilometer wide and leading into a maze of pumps and busy filters. Engineers had constructed a series of platforms around the hole, and billions of passengers and crew had taken the time to stand on one of those vantage points, watching an ocean’s worth of water plunge into a blackness, screaming as it fell, the thunder loud enough to kill a human’s ears, leaving him or her deaf for as long as an hour after each little visit.
seas, then pouring over some brink or lip before continuing on their poetic journey. The first explorers found abundant stores of ready ice, muscular reactors to supply heat, and banks of environmental controls to salt and sweeten the molten treasures. Pumps and attached conduits waited at the bottom of every deep hole, having no obvious purpose but to lift those rivers high again. On occasion, two or more caverns joined together, entirely different chemistries mixing, life-forms from opposite ends of the galaxy suddenly sharing the same narrow channel. One great room welcomed a dozen major rivers, plus at least thirty lesser streams. It was a round room beneath a high-domed ceiling of mirrored hyperfiber, the nearly flat floor made of gravel and river mud and great expanses of tired water. At eighty kilometers in diameter, the room was vast enough to feel worldly, particularly at its center. The dying rivers gradually spread out and merged, becoming a single flow bearing down on a simple hyperfiber throat—a seemingly bottomless pit set at the precise center of the room, one fat kilometer wide and leading into a maze of pumps and busy filters. Engineers had constructed a series of platforms around the hole, and billions of passengers and crew had taken the time to stand on one of those vantage points, watching an ocean’s worth of water plunge into a blackness, screaming as it fell, the thunder loud enough to kill a human’s ears, leaving him or her deaf for as long as an hour after each little visit.
Washen went away happy and deaf. Her only company on the platform had been a school of gillbabies who barely noticed the spectacle below. Far more remarkable was the sight of the First Chair, and one after another, in ways less than subtle, they had conspired to make sonar images of themselves standing beside her famous sound-wake.
Washen left her admirers, a little cap-car swiftly carrying her upstream. Low patches of soggy ground and tangled marshland emerged from the slowing, shallowing
waters. Individual rivers defined themselves, each of the large flows shackled by banks of dried mud and determined tufts of vegetation. Every wood had its color, its distinct and illuminating shape. Life from dozens of worlds lived together in this great room. Every day, one or two rivers would flood, spilling out into their neighbors’ channels. Dry places would be swept bare, new seeds germinating from the raw mud. A novel current would cut a hundred new holes, then fill the old holes with suffocating silts, while odd fish and things not at all like fish would colonize the fresh deep water. In the entire galaxy, there was probably no little place with so many species pushed so close together. Every day, the local ecology shifted ten times, and little species went extinct, and new species were brought down on rivers that could be ten thousand kilometers long, and in the quiet backwaters, by means natural and otherwise, new and entirely novel species would slip into existence.
waters. Individual rivers defined themselves, each of the large flows shackled by banks of dried mud and determined tufts of vegetation. Every wood had its color, its distinct and illuminating shape. Life from dozens of worlds lived together in this great room. Every day, one or two rivers would flood, spilling out into their neighbors’ channels. Dry places would be swept bare, new seeds germinating from the raw mud. A novel current would cut a hundred new holes, then fill the old holes with suffocating silts, while odd fish and things not at all like fish would colonize the fresh deep water. In the entire galaxy, there was probably no little place with so many species pushed so close together. Every day, the local ecology shifted ten times, and little species went extinct, and new species were brought down on rivers that could be ten thousand kilometers long, and in the quiet backwaters, by means natural and otherwise, new and entirely novel species would slip into existence.
Upon one of the taller, more stable banks, where a spine of bluish trees stood above an earthly green tangle of corn, someone had constructed a tiny cabin. Even though she knew its approximate location, Washen could not see the cabin on her first pass. She smiled without smiling—a tight, uncomfortable grin betraying a long-building unease—then she turned, coming back again and setting down on the most distant available slip of brown goo and Timothy grass.
Washen sat inside her cap-car, one hand holding the other. When her ears began to heal—when she could hear the squawks and opera songs of birds—she climbed out, stretched for a moment, and began to walk. After a little while, she could hear her boots making the mud squish and the soft rumbling of the falls, twenty kilometers from this nameless place and dampened by antinoise baffles, yet still, astonishingly loud. Then she heard the closer waters moving over flat banks of warm muck. A great long reef of titanium shells lay on her right, and to the left, in a different kind of water, a whale-sized fish lay in the chocolate shallows, basking in the illusory sun.
The cabin was tiny and artfully placed. Washen didn’t notice it until she saw the woman sitting in the open door. A tiny and apparently frail creature, by all signs, she seemed to be sleeping. Her chair was some kind of puffer fish, inflated before death and probably not too uncomfortable to sit on, and her clothes were simple and rugged, dyed the same silvery blue of the sky to help her hide from the fish that she hunted for food.
As close to silent as possible, Washen crept forward.
Like a portrait painted in some impoverished age, the sleeping woman sat motionless. Washen thought of a peasant girl, half-starved and possibly dying of some ancient blight. With every step, the creature looked less human. She was so small and emaciated, and her skin had a thinness that Washen had never seen in another person. Stare hard at her face, and the skull seemed to emerge. And it was only the thinnest sketch of a skull, tiny teeth, and big eye sockets—human always, but in a thousand subtle ways, wrong.
Again, Washen took a step.
The woman did not stir. She didn’t even seem to inhale, which meant that she had been holding her breath, waiting to speak. The thin, wide, and wise mouth parted slightly, and the words leaked out before the eyelids finally rose.
“Is it time?” she asked. “Already?”
“Yes, Mere,” said Washen, her own voice sounding a little bit sorry in ears rebuilt just moments ago.
WHEN THE SHIP was barely two hundred centuries into its voyage—when Washen was a midlevel captain finally beginning to show her promise—the original First Chair came to her with an assignment.
“I am honored,” Washen declared.
“That’s foolish to say, and a little funny,” Miocene replied. “You don’t know what I will ask you to do.”
But in her entire life, Washen had spoken to this great woman only at the Master’s banquet, and then only in the
most glancing fashion. She felt honored, and she refused to backtrack from her declaration. “If I can help the ship, in any way, madam. In any little fashion.”
most glancing fashion. She felt honored, and she refused to backtrack from her declaration. “If I can help the ship, in any way, madam. In any little fashion.”
“Perhaps you should help me,” Miocene rumbled. A tall, narrow-faced soul famous for her personal drive and her unmatched talents as the Master’s best hand, she said, “I have a problem. Not a large problem, but rather difficult. I require a captain who can give an honest impression, and afterward, my request will remain with the three of us.”
“The three of us?”
“Or just you and me.” The woman laughed without real humor, adding, “Everything depends on your decision. Unless I don’t particularly like what you decide.”
The less-than-large problem involved a peculiar starship. It was tiny and powerful—one of the original streakships, according to its designation—but it was also poorly maintained and heavily damaged. Someone with minimal talents had repaired it and refueled its powerful engines. The ship’s AI had also suffered crippling abuse, leaving it stupid and almost entirely ignorant about its own past. According to the fragmentary logs, the little ship was meant to ferry a group of wealthy colonists to the Great Ship. Indeed, there were more than twenty names with empty apartments still waiting for their arrival, paid for by a transfer of wealth from a very distant human world. But the names and the people attached had never reached their destination. According to the AI, a chunk of cometary material had breached the hyperfiber armor, exploding into a bubble of superheated plasmas and radiation, shrapnel scattering backward at better than half the speed of light.
Everyone on board the ship was instantly killed.
But as it happened, one of the women was a little bit pregnant—an embryo sleeping in suspended animation inside her patient uterus. It was a common tradition among colonists: arrive at your new home with a child ready to be born. The intended mother died, but while
searching for survivors, the brutalized AI discovered a single entity still alive, barely, entombed inside a mangled, now-headless corpse.
searching for survivors, the brutalized AI discovered a single entity still alive, barely, entombed inside a mangled, now-headless corpse.
Using its last autodoc, the AI managed to coax the corpse back into a mindless life, saving the embryo. With most of its intellect stripped away and no clear instructions, the machine decided to do its best to help its only companion. A few months later, the girl was born inside a tiny volume of warm, barely breathable air, and she grew up on a diet of recycled meats and bone meal, nothing to drink but tainted water and sometimes her own diluted urine. The AI couldn’t directly communicate with her. It was too mangled and far too busy keeping the derelict ship functioning. Save for the slowly changing stars visible through the diamond ports, there was nothing to see. The girl grew up in an abysmally impoverished environment, suffering constantly, nothing to touch but the close cold walls and her own miserable self. So she did what was natural: In many ways, and for every good reason, the poor creature fell into a deep and simple insanity.
The comet’s impact had pushed the starship off course. Moving faster than the Great Ship, it slipped past unnoticed, its arrow-straight trajectory carrying it deeper into the galaxy, past countless suns before it moved back out to a place rather near the ship’s future course.
According to this very unlikely account, the AI pilot found a pair of close-orbit suns and the living world that revolved around both; and after some lovely or very lucky navigation, it managed to burn the last of its fuel, bleeding off most of its momentum, then jettisoning its lone passenger, sending her down onto the world’s largest continent.
With an immortal’s constitution, the woman survived both the impact and several temporary deaths. Then for the next few thousand years, she lived among the resident aliens—small humanoids called the Tila. In the early years, she was worshiped as a god. The Tila taught her their language and culture, and she played an occasional
role in their development. During her long life, she watched as her foster species built their civilization, gradually learning about the universe and their world and the two suns that kissed one another in their bright beautiful sky.
role in their development. During her long life, she watched as her foster species built their civilization, gradually learning about the universe and their world and the two suns that kissed one another in their bright beautiful sky.
“So how did you acquire your name?” Washen asked, during the first interview. She said the name twice: first as the Tila supposedly had, then as a human might. “Mere,” she said. “It means small. Tiny, and unremarkable.”
“I am,” the tiny woman said of herself. “Small. Tiny. And not all that remarkable.”
Tutors had taught this little creature the human tongue. But Mere spoke the alien language with much more skill and an unconscious ease, and she moved her limbs in ways no human ever did. She could have been raised by another species. There were a few examples on record, although nothing as lengthy or as unplanned as Mere’s supposed life.
“You say you were a god to them,” Washen pointed out. “Why would anyone name their god Mere?”
“Because I wasn’t much of a deity, they learned. Soon enough.”
A considerable sadness showed in her face and body, but the expressions weren’t quite like what a normal human would display. Starvation at birth and an alien diet of odd amino acids and the wrong minerals could conceivably produce a body like hers. But Miocene’s fear, and now Washen’s fear, was that this was not a genuine human, but instead another kind of creature wearing some elaborate camouflage. Washen’s assignment was to discern what was true, or at least to give her best guess. This little whiff of a body and the soul inside … were they really as simple and strange as they pretended to be?
Perhaps Mere understood the importance of the interview. Or maybe she wanted to lend her false story another set of telling details. Either way, she promised the young captain, “The Tila think quite differently from the way you think.”
“Do they?”
“And I think rather differently from the way you or they think. I don’t have a Tilan brain. I don’t have its skills. But judging by everything that the other giant woman said to me—”
“Miocene?”
“I think that you … meaning your species … I think humans entertain some odd little notions about the universe.”
“Little?” Washen laughed softly. “What do you mean?”
“Everything that is possible,” said Mere in a flat, certain voice, “is inevitable. Everything that can happen has no choice but to occur.”
“Is that what the Tilan believe?”
“It’s what they know, and it’s my firm, sure belief.” The big eyes gazed off into the far corners of the room. A prison cell, really, but infinitely more comfortable than the tiny habitat that somebody had added to her battered old starship. “The Tilan mind is very sensitive to the quantum effects of the universe. Every motion they make, every little thing that they see, is shrouded in a cloud of possibility. Life moves in all directions at once. Life always persists, in at least one thread of reality. And the universe—the real universe—encompasses too many realities to count.”
“But I know that,” Washen remarked, almost casually. Then with a quiet calculated laugh, she added, “We have several theories of the universe. Two or three of them believe in the many-worlds scenario.”
Mere laughed at her—Tilan fashion. Then with a tone dismissive in both languages, she said, “You have the mathematics. But do you believe the great equations?”
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