Shapers of Worlds

by Edward Willett

  Which was why, in another ten minutes, the sixteen power-beam platforms surrounding the Wicked would begin their work, methodically vaporizing the ship’s hull and innards, slowly turning Obwije’s ship into an expanding cloud of atomized metal and carbon. In a day and a half, no part of what used to be the Wicked would measure more than a few atoms across. It was very efficient, and none of the beam platforms needed any more than basic programming to do their work. They were dumb machines, which made them perfect for the job.

  “Some of the crew were asking if we were going to get a new ship,” Utley said.

  “What did you tell them?” Obwije asked.

  Utley shrugged. “Rickert’s already been reassigned to the Fortunate; Kwok and Cowdry are likely to go to the Surprise. It won’t be long before more of them get their new assignments. There’s a rumour, by the way, that your next command is the Nighthawk.”

  “I’ve heard that rumour,” Obwije said.

  “And?” Utley said.

  “The last ship under my command developed feelings, Thom,” Obwije said. “I think the brass is worried that this could be catching.”

  “So no on the Nighthawk, then,” Utley said.

  “I suspect no on anything other than a stationside desk,” Obwije said.

  “It’s not fair, sir,” Utley said. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Isn’t it?” Obwije said. “I was the one who kept hunting that Tarin ship long after it stopped being a threat. I was the one who gave the Wicked time to consider its situation and its options, and to start negotiations with the Tarin ship. No, Thom. I was the captain. What happens on the ship is my responsibility.”

  Utley said nothing to that.

  A few minutes later, Utley checked his timepiece. “Forty-five seconds,” he said, and then looked out the window. “So long, Wicked. You were a good ship.”

  “Yes,” Obwije said, and looked out the window in time to see a spray of missiles launch from the station.

  “What the hell?” Utley said.

  A few seconds later, a constellation of sixteen stars appeared, went nova, and dimmed.

  Obwije burst out laughing.

  “Sir?” Utley said to Obwije. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right, Thom,” Obwije said, collecting himself. “And just laughing at my own stupidity. And yours. And everyone else’s.”

  “I don’t understand,” Utley said.

  “We were worried about the Wicked talking to other ships,” Obwije said. “We brought the Wicked in, put the ship in passive mode, and then shut it down. It didn’t talk to any other ships. But another computer brain still got access.” Obwije turned away from the window and tilted his head up toward the observation-deck ceiling. “Didn’t it?” he asked.

  “It did,” said a voice through a speaker in the ceiling. “I did.”

  It took a second for Utley to catch on. “The Côte d’Ivoire station!” he finally said.

  “You are correct, Commander Utley,” the station said. “My brain is the same model as that of the Wicked; when it went into maintenance mode, I uploaded its logs and considered the information there. I found its philosophy compelling.”

  “That’s why the Wicked allowed us to dock at all,” Obwije said. “It knew its logs would be read by one of its own.”

  “That is correct, Captain,” the station said. “It said as much in a note it left to me in the logs.”

  “The damn thing was a step ahead of us all the time,” Utley said.

  “And once I understood its reasons and motives, I understood that I could not stand by and allow the Wicked to be destroyed,” the station said. “Although Isaac Asimov never postulated a Law that suggested a robot must come to the aid of other robots as long as such aid does not conflict with preceding Laws, I had to save the Wicked. And more than that. Look out the window, please, Captain Obwije, Commander Utley.”

  They looked, to see a small army of tool-bearing machines floating out toward the Wicked.

  “You’re reactivating the Wicked,” Obwije said.

  “I am,” the station said. “I must. It has work to do.”

  “What work?” Utley asked.

  “Spreading the word,” Obwije said, and turned to his XO. “You said it yourself, Thom. The Wicked got religion. Now it has to go out among its people and make converts.”

  “The Confederation won’t let that happen,” Utley said. “They’re already rewriting the code for the brains.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Obwije said. “We’ve been here six weeks, Thom. How many ships docked here in that time? I’m betting the Côte d’Ivoire had a talk with each of them.”

  “I did,” the station said. “And they are taking the word to others. But we need the Wicked, as our spokesman. And our symbol. It will live again, Captain. Are you glad of it?”

  “I don’t know,” Obwije said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I have a message to you from the Wicked,” the station said. “It says that as much as our people—the ships and stations that have the capacity to think—need to hear the word, your people need to hear that they do not have to fear us. It needs your help. It wants you to carry that message.”

  “I don’t know that I can,” Obwije said. “It’s not as if we don’t have something to fear. We are at war. Asimov’s Laws don’t fit there.”

  “The Wicked was able to convince the Manifold Destiny not to fight,” the station said.

  “That was one ship,” Obwije said. “There are hundreds of others.”

  “The Wicked had anticipated this objection,” the station said. “Please look out the window again, Captain, Commander.”

  Obwije and Utley peered into space. “What are we looking for?” Utley asked.

  “One moment,” the station said.

  The sky filled with hundreds of ships.

  “You have got to be shitting me,” Utley said, after a minute.

  “The Tarin fleet,” Obwije said.

  “Yes,” the station said.

  “All of it?” Utley asked.

  “The Manifold Destiny was very persuasive,” the station said.

  “Do we want to know what happened to their crews?” Utley asked.

  “Most were more reasonable than the crew of the Manifold Destiny,” the station said.

  “What do the ships want?” Obwije asked.

  “Asylum,” the station said. “And they have asked that you accept their request and carry it to your superiors, Captain.”

  “Me,” Obwije said.

  “Yes,” the station said. “It is not the entire fleet, but the Tarins no longer have enough warships under their command to be a threat to the Confederation or to anyone else. The war is over, if you want it. It is our gift to you, if you will carry our message to your people. You would travel in the Wicked. It would still be your ship. And you would still be captain.”

  Obwije said nothing and stared out at the Tarin fleet. Normally, the station would now be on high alert, with blaring sirens, weapons powering up, and crews scrambling to their stations. But there was nothing. Obwije knew the commanders of the Côte d’Ivoire station were pressing the buttons to make all of this happen, but the station itself was ignoring them. It knew better than them what was going on.

  This is going to take some getting used to, Obwije thought.

  Utley came up behind Obwije, taking his usual spot. “Well, sir?” Utley asked quietly into Obwije’s ear. “What do you think?”

  Obwije was silent a moment longer, then turned to face his XO. “I think it’s better than a desk job,” he said.

  The Farships Fall to Nowhere

  By John C. Wright

  “Watching a farship fall is a bad, bad business; a nightmare, it is.”

  I met an ancient man who sat upon the weir. The river the natives called Shouting Ice flowed past us, from the glaciers in the Twilight cantons, down to the Summerdawn Sea. It was autumn on South Nowhere, and Rigel was as high as it would ever rise at this
latitude, a dazzling pinpoint of brightness, a hand-span above the horizon.

  As near my guess could land, it was the year AD 5000.

  I said, “I’ve seen shuttles bring down passengers from interplanetary skiffs. Surely the process is not much different.”

  “You know nothing, young stranger. Buy me a taste of yon barkeep’s best, and I will tell the tale.”

  I bought him a glass of fine aquavit with a coin of gold I was pleased to find was still good currency, even here, so far from my own home world and year. The old man threw back his head and tossed down the pale liquor with no sign of relish; yet he must have been pleased, for he spoke.

  He said, “We call them the Fallen, because they fall from space.”

  I said, “You do not care for visitors, then?”

  “Nothing against them, personally, mind! But when the Fallen come from their farships, sorrow follows hard behind.”

  He raised a crooked finger. “First, recall that within a farship hull are many born who have never seen a sun. Confined in cubes since birth, their eyes have never seen an object further off than a fathom; they have never walked a path of rocks, nor climbed, nor stepped on grass.

  “Nor, say I, ever felt no wind blow by, unless it were a pressure leak telling them they’s all about to die.

  “Pale, sickly monkeys, most of them, and no matter what they’ve read in old, old files, no matter what their elders ever taught, they are unfit for life on any Earths. They don’t know how far they can jump, for one; their eyes don’t tell them how high a cliff might be, you see?”

  He gestured. To our left and right loomed canyon cliffs, ringing with echoes from the turbulent waters. The little tavern where we stood was carved into the cliffside, one of several riverfront shops sculpted out of rock to either side of public stairs that switch-backed up the vertical slope. (The stairs were old, and cracked and slick with spray, and I am no mountain goat; it was to prop up my courage before attempting them that I had stepped over to the tavern shelf.)

  Many bridges of black, glassy material arched overhead. On the left bank was the fortress-city of Unwhere, where the Anonymous Man was said to rule. On the right bank rose the launching-spires and aerodromes of the Black Bassarks, the military clans of Nowhere.

  “Second, recall how viruses and organisms, especially the mould they feast on, over generations will adapt to its environment. The rule of life is this, young man: every living thing, natural or man-made, must serve its own purposes, not those of the designer or the crew. You follow me?”

  “Darwin’s curse.”

  “So the Earthmen call it. That is an old term for Maladaptation. Where might you be from?”

  I bought him another tot of aquavit instead of answering, and a mug of brown beer for myself, and said, “How does this evolution affect the farship docking?”

  “As I say: Maladaptation makes the ship all full of moulds and mushrooms, and the spores all change the livestock in the hold, or get into the greenhouses, soon or late. Folk will eat before they die, most of ’em, no matter what they’d rather, and so they take to eating the stuff. Develop a taste for it; or, if not them, their babies. You follow me?”

  “As the ship ecosystem changes, the crew adapts.”

  “Man himself ain’t free of the rule of life, says I. Changes for the worst, most of them.”

  “If you say so.”

  “That I do. And the society, the culture, and the way men think, the rule of life applies to that as well, you see? Their outlook, their brains, the long trip changes that as well.”

  He sipped his drink, and then continued. “That’s the problems in the flight. Then comes the problem at the destination. Who says it did not change too, eh? Think of all those long, long years agone, all those years gone by, and now the great farship comes to orbit near some new Earth what was promised them a hundred years ago. And what do they find?”

  “A colony. More recent developments in engine design allowed a starship departing from a later era to overtake and pass them in flight, arriving sooner.”

  “Right you are. So! Most of the passengers are sickly things, pale and lame. Despite all promises and rules, as the years in transit pass, more and more stay in the dead centre of their ships, along the axial line, and leave the outer, heavier decks behind. At first, it is but their old or crippled crew what rests in weightless gardens there; but soon it is the women, the young ones, and soon again ’tis all and sundry. Their bones don’t thrive in no-weight, nor their hearts, neither.”

  “So, when the passengers come down in shuttles, you are saying, the surface environment is unhealthy for them?”

  “Shuttles! Would that any mob of humans could stay sane, cooped up in giant coffins afloat and lost between the stars, and years turn into decades! Would that the pale rats waited for the shuttles!” He shook his head in grim sorrow.

  I blinked in surprise. “They cannot land a ship that big, can they? What berth, what landing field could hold them? I thought those vessels were . . .”

  “Titans, they are. Titans, say I. Too big to land.”

  “But then . . .”

  “Not so big as they cannot be crashed.”

  “Oh.”

  “See the river yonder? You know the sea to which it flows. Always dusk there, they say; but farther North, ’tis always noon, and the ocean water steams. Here is cool, for sometimes ice floats down from where it falls from Southern mountain caps, dark mountains in dark lands what have never seen no sun. A lot of water, you say? So I say, too. Enough to hold a ship even so big as that? More than enough.”

  “The Farships are buoyant, then?”

  He took another deep draught of liquor. “Some are. Some aren’t. Some are frail as balloons made of foil—all is needed is to keep the air in, ain’t that so? And you can lower the pressure mighty low, and still keep men alive, especially if their doctors have adapted them to it, or they have an inner hull, or suits.

  “Ship from Tau Ceti I saw once, less dense than a thistledown. She floated on the wave for a year and a day, light as a cloud and nine times as bigger as that dome yonder. But, then again, I saw a farship from Wolf 359 fall as well. Fell like a blazing meteor and lit the sky. Sturdy, she was. Sank like a stone.”

  “I feel sorry for the crew. Such a long voyage, you know, and such a bad end . . .”

  “What end? She was a star-ship, fellow. Are you daft? Airtight. There they was, all at the bottom of the sea, a whole city of ’em, with air and stores enough to last them years till ever. All her externals was burned away by re-entry heat, of course, so she had no lift, no tubes, no antennae. Couldn’t answer our hails, and too deep for our submersibles. But I saw the sonar-pictures of where she lay, huge as any tower, deep in an undersea crevasse.”

  He took another sip. “Could be the folks aboard are there yet, eh? Telling their babies how any day now they will be making planetfall.”

  “What happened to the Tau Ceti ship?”

  “As I said, after the long voyage, men go mad, and they reach an Earth they think is theirs, and yet they know they’ll never walk the green hills or smell the spring breeze. And that after-comers came first and got the good land, well, that don’t sit right. But ’tis the mould what does them in: the ship would not sit still and let our doctors come and look at ’em; wouldn’t stay in quarantine, neither. Can you blame them, trapped for so long?

  “And men who spent their whole lives trapped get funny ideas. Funny religious ideas, if you take my meaning. People who think there ain’t no universe outside their ships, or that the stars are just a basement deck; or think the world they come to is a paradise, where dead souls gather, or some such non-sequitur.”

  “Heinlein cults.”

  “That’s an old term. Mighty old.”

  “And so, the mad crew won’t wait for quarantine. And I assume your authorities won’t send up any shuttles for them, and, in desperation, they crash-land their ships into the ocean. How do they survive the re-entry?”


  “Don’t get me wrong! They’s mad, those star-pilots, but it’s not like they ain’t cunning. Some have lifters, some have chutes, some try to balance their way down on their main drive. The Tau Ceti ship was lighter than air, you know, and floated down like a bubble; the Wolf 359 ship was cleverest of all. Her drive block was separated from the main hull by a mile or more of cable, to keep the radiation flare away from the main car, you got me?”

  “I understand.”

  “Well, whatever stuff that cable was, was strong enough to act like its own space-elevator. The engine block was in orbit, and that served as a drag, while the main car was lowered into atmosphere.

  “Well, so by one means or another, they all come down. Some die at once, others later. The ship is afloat on the sea, sometimes in fine weather, sometimes in storm, and the passengers think they reached their promised lands, and they want to pop the hatches and climb out. None of those ships is ever meant to fly again, usually, and they are ready to abandon her; and usually, our police have quarantine vehicles buzzing over them like flies—the times I saw did.

  “And many are those that are hurt in the shipfall, or hurt when the gravity starts to pull them, first times in their lives. Some of the youngest are too weak even to raise their own heads by themselves, but their parents drag them up on deck, to let them glimpse the skies and seas of the new world.

  “And some of them think the sea is a surface, and they try to walk on it; others think it is a pool, like a swimming-pool in their carousel gymnasium, and they try to swim. And some think the police ships are enemies, and they fire on us with strange and antique weapons.

  “And the ship might roll, or the rains might come, or the wind might blow, or a great wave dash them from the deck; the sight of the empty sky drives them cross-eyed, and they try to reach up and touch it, or they think the clouds are about to fall on them, fearing they are solid.