The Greatship

by Robert Reed

  But the mind was in worse weaknesses than the body. Without adequate nutrition, the complicated landscape of wet neurons and dry neurons and neuroglia and bioceramic armor was only half-finished, and even more debilitating were the effects of relentless boredom—a hundred centuries drifting in space, the brain suffocating inside an infinite, solitary blackness.

  Just to walk took years of hard practice.

  Decades and infinite patience were needed to teach Mere a few words and their basic meanings.

  If she weren’t immortal, no one would have bothered. She would have been a novelty buried in a holy place, her and the ground soon forgotten. But because of the occasional success, and because the truth-seekers were naturally stubborn, each of them willingly invested their lives in this very slow undertaking.

  One day, Mere asked, “What happened to the other one?”

  Startled to hear a complete sentence, the truth-seeker’s voice sputtered. “Who do you mean, madam?”

  Mere squinted, trying to find a name to match with the missing face. But there was no name. Instead, she described the Tilan woman who had purposefully chopped off her big toe and her left leg, and then with others holding Mere still, had cut into her hand and newborn leg. “Where is this woman now?”

  “Dead,” the little male replied.

  Dead things were food. True death meant that the food could never return as life again. Why should that happen to a truth-seeker?

  “She grew old,” he explained.

  “I don’t grow old,” Mere said.

  “And you never shall,” was the quick, untroubled reply.

  And then on another day, some years later, she asked the truth-seeker, “What is wrong with you?”

  “I am dying.”

  “Good. May I watch?”

  “Of course, madam.”

  What Mere saw was interesting, but then troubling. This dying business seemed too easy and far too simple. Afterwards she insisted on watching the corpse, studying its decay, and on occasion poking the bloated flesh with sharp tools or a curious finger. The newest truth-seeker agreed to these experiments: To the Tila, death was a tiny business involving just one of the infinite shadow realms. But once the remains were liquid and putrid, the truth-seeker suggested that the god please allow the mess to be taken away.

  “Dead,” Mere kept saying.

  “Yes,” the new truth-seeker allowed. “This is death.”

  “And I am a god?”

  “The only god I know,” he said.

  She dwelled on this for another year. Then one morning, as light flooded into the temple, Mere strode forwards, bright human eyes examining the contents of a vast room that was decorated with polished copper mirrors and jeweled gypsum wings, little feet walking on a carpet woven from blessed shadow threads that multiplied as they spread outwards from the Creation. The diamond and hyperfiber ruins of her long-ago home stood in the room’s center. Set on a golden pedestal beside them, illuminated by a beam of reflected sunlight, rested the pale and mummified toe that centuries ago had been sliced from her writhing foot.

  “Why build this place?” she asked, for the last time.

  “To honor you,” her truth-seeker replied.

  “Why honor me? I don’t understand.”

  “Because you are holy.”

  Mere had heard that said many times.

  “And because we love you very much, madam.”

  “Oh,” said Mere, surprised.

  From some deep place came the memory of warm nothingness, unvarying and awful. Then she remembered dying in the crash and dying under the gypsum wing, and after that she felt the wrenching sensation of a flint axe falling on her naked leg. With a grimace, she said, “I was wrong. I didn’t understand.”

  “What didn’t you understand, madam?”

  “I always thought it was a bad thing, being a miserable god.”

  * * *

  The Tilan brain was laced with delicate structures—crystalline proteins wrapped around tiny quantum wellsprings. Neurons like that, whether natural or synthetic, helped spawn quick thoughts and relentless intuition. But those benefits brought inescapable difficulties. For instance, the Tila possessed a keen sense of vision, but when they looked at any surface, particularly along the edge, they saw a thin gray aura that glimmered and endlessly changed shape. The aura might be meaningless noise precipitated by quantum imprecisions, but the Tila considered it to be quite a lot more—a true glimpse into the deepest, strangest workings of the universe. Their existence was just one narrow example of what was buried inside countless other possibilities. Whenever they looked at a lifelong friend, or a foolish god, or even a random stranger, they saw hints of the shadow realms filled with friends very much like theirs, and gods similar to theirs, and too many strangers to measure in a trillion lifetimes.

  Mere had fine human eyes. But compared to her hosts, she felt blind. Truth-seekers constantly studied her aura, employing lessons from many generations, and their calm expert voices reported everything they saw and what it wanted to mean. The closest realms were full of creatures much like her. Some were happier, some taller and others smaller, and there were gods among the shadows who were considerably sadder than her. In that, Mere was part of a multitude, unspectacular by every measure. Of course each soul existed in a multitude of forms. But what made Mere unusual, even precious, was the narrowness of her existence. Every truth-seeker admitted that most of the realms don’t know her. “To them, you don’t exist at all. Or if you are real, you and the world live apart.”

  Mere didn’t know how to interpret such news. But because it seemed easiest, she believed them, and with no tools but her imagination, she practiced seeing the world and its shadows in the infinite way that the Tila beheld every small thing.

  4

  What began as a substantial village gradually had grown into a full-bodied city. Just through her presence, Mere helped the community prosper and expand. Visiting diplomats signed trading pacts and traders brought goods from every end of the continent. The curious and the wealthy came to see this living god, and they left behind precious metals, or smelling opportunity, they would settle here. The trees that supplied food were cut down for lumber and homes, and new lands were put under cultivation—great golden forests heavy with nuts and sweet fruits covering the delta beside the warm blue sea. But there were little famines because there were too many mouths, and the City’s leaders made the necessary decisions. Upriver were other villages, fiercely independent and powerful in their own right. An army was raised and sent marching, and after a long season the soldiers returned with their spoils. Mere watched the parade of victors. Sitting on a jeweled platform built specifically for her odd frame, she was as enthralled as anyone. The army looked spectacular, its armor polished and blood-blue paint on the victors’ faces, and following behind were the prisoners—thousands of vanquished Tila lashed together, ropes secured around their thick necks, each of them bending under the food and cloth and other practical treasures.

  The current truth-seeker sat on the adjacent platform—as beautifully jeweled and exactly as high as Mere’s. Laughing, she told the god, “In every realm, these slaves are defeated and very sad.”

  Mere wondered if that were true. Surely there were enemies marching through different shadows, advancing as conquerors instead of lurching forward as helpless property.

  “I own twelve to the third of these creatures,” the truth-seeker said. “Tomorrow, before dawn, I will set them to building a new temple for our resident god.”

  Mere said, “Thank you,” and tried to smile as a Tila should.

  Then one of the leading slaves collapsed, bringing the procession to an ungainly halt. The others stood motionless, untroubled by their companion’s dilemma. A pair of guards had to beat the weakling, and when that didn’t inspire him, they cut him free and dragged him aside, killing him with their dullest, most painful spears.

  Where the Tila saw millions of slaves dying across the endless shadow r
ealms, Mere saw just the one soul perish. Watching the event brought neither pain nor genuine disquiet. What struck her was the odd, unexpected idea that even though she was immune to death, Mere seemed to appreciate what the creature was feeling, and what it feared, and what terrible thoughts passed through his dying mind and the silent blackness waiting on the other side.

  * * *

  Slaves built the new temple. Yet there was never enough room for all of the worshippers, which was why a fresh army of slaves was soon marshaled, erecting a grander perfection from carved stone and golden sunlight. Several more generations passed, a string of wars were won, and then the final temple was constructed by slaves and volunteers helping stonemasons and other artisans, a long spine of stone covered with a sumptuous, durable edifice made of polished marble inlaid with gems and heroic bones.

  In her honor, Mere was given custody over the largest structure in the world—as a home and as a site where she could be celebrated. Because of Mere, all that was good found the City. Millions of citizens believed as much, and it was equally apparent to their resident god. She was a blessing. Her existence meant that her parents, the heavenly gods, approved of the City. From the highest room of her long home, she gazed across a chaotic river bottom jammed with artificial ridges, each ridge adorned with endless apartments and shops and important little offices. Downstream lay an ocean increasingly crossed by little ships, and upstream was a genuine empire woven together by good roads and army posts and beautiful little temples decorated with mirrors and shadow-thread rugs— spaces of devotion where stone Meres stood beside enameled bowls, alien hands beckoning for offerings in exchange for little blessings.

  The god traveled, but only for the most special occasions. Most of her days were spent at home. Yet she read every word she could find about the empire, including the dry reports of distant officials. And with the painfully complex language of the City, she recorded the events of every day, making observations about the strange and the little that others would discount out of hand as being unimportant.

  “The river is growing smaller,” she said one day.

  The current truth-seeker was a young man, intelligent along narrow lines. He accepted her observation and in the next breath added, “But it still is a magnificent river.”

  “And the weather is drier now,” she said. “Drier, and hotter.”

  The truth-seekers had begun to paint their orange teeth white, and with intricate wigs woven from silky fabrics, they sported an approximation of a god’s long brown hair. To the limits of their body, they walked like the deity. With wraps, they bound the extra joints in their arms, and by cutting themselves in the throat, they gave themselves deeper, more god-like voices. All those tricks were thought to help them speak to Mere. But hearing this unexpected observation, the truth-seeker seemed entirely baffled. What had this god just said to him?

  “I have studied my journals,” Mere continued. “Our winters are always warm now, and I can’t find any mention of snow in the mountains for at least the last two hundred years.”

  “Our river is still strong,” her truth-seeker replied. But his tone was mildly disapproving, shaping some form of warning. Then with a faint glimmer of curiosity, he asked, “Where do you think the problem lies?”

  “Our suns are changing,” she said.

  “How do you know this?”

  What she had found in her old journals, entirely forgotten until now, was a drawing made by her own hand. The twin suns were setting against the distant mountains, cloaked in enough haze to allow weak human eyes to discern the joined disks. The suns were the “stare” position, meaning they were perpendicular to her line of sight, and their outer edges had kissed two of the once-white peaks. Yet when the suns were last in that position, just last evening, she noted gaps between the peaks and the “stare”—as if their suns had fallen towards each other by a little ways.

  Yet the truth-seeker had a ready response. “When the suns move around our world, they journey away from us a little distance and then back again. We have known this for ages. Our moon tries the same trick, but everything in the sky always falls back under our spell again.”

  Was that the explanation? Mere had doubts, but then again, she didn’t understand the mathematics. So with a god’s resolve, she said nothing more, deciding that she would have to wait out this rather stupid truth-seeker.

  * * *

  Regardless of reasons, their drought was real, and once mentioned, the heat grew noticeably worse. The river shrank over the next years. Its flow remained substantial, nobody suffering too badly in the City, but the upper reaches of the empire were turning to dust. Subjects starved while the surviving citizens struggled to keep hold of their own scant harvests. And with an equal inevitability, the army was dispatched to inflict appropriate punishments, winning a string of ugly battles before entire units lost their loyalties to the distant City and its inflexible, unfeeling leaders.

  A new army emerged, rebels and the disaffected marching downstream. The solitary god studied the endless dispatches, but there was nothing in the reports but accounts of rebels being killed, in this little realm and presumably butchered in millions of other shadow realms too. Yet each victory was followed by an inexplicable retreat. Tales of victory were fictions, plainly. Mere began to question the worshippers who came to the great temple. She wanted to know every rumor, stories told by soldiers on leave, and what people had seen with their own sharp eyes, and her relentless skepticism left everyone embarrassed, perplexed.

  Then the worshippers stopped coming. No footfalls sang on marble and no one chanted about their devotion and awe. Staring at the angry god, the now-elderly truth-seeker admitted, “Visitors are not welcome here any longer.”

  “Who decides that?”

  The answer was a cold silence and a dismissive gesture.

  “This is my temple,” Mere said, “and they are and will always be my guests.”

  “But every road belongs to us,” the old man replied. “And if we happen to block these roads, then they are nobody’s worshippers. Isn’t that so?”

  Clean, sobering rage took hold of Mere. But there would always be time, she reminded herself. The best course was to keep silent and wait for the truth-seeker to die, which happened soon enough, and before the body was cold she met with his replacement. A young woman with brilliant white teeth and a shiny new wig, the new truth-seeker had been chosen by a council of leaders and lesser seekers, each of whom had carefully interpreted the shadow souls that clung tight to her. Better than every candidate—better than millions of her own shadow-selves—this soul was deemed wise and strong. Or maybe the judges saw nothing in the little woman’s character that would worry them. Either way, the young woman was thrilled to occupy this great post, and Mere understood that for a little while, she might actually listen to a bothersome god.

  With a well-practiced voice, Mere explained what she had learned about the seasons, and what she believed was the cause, and what she believed should be done now.

  Together, they visited the City’s leaders. Their audience was elderly souls, mostly. A little fat and harmlessly corrupt, of course. But they were intelligent citizens, each with children and grandchildren who needed their protection. Confident in her wisdom, the truth-seeker explained what was obvious: The suns were changing, bringing the heat and drought that had led to this crippling war, and if the arrow of change continued following its present course, the City was sure to be destroyed.

  “How can we bend the arrow?” the old ones asked.

  The truth-seeker offered a simple, pragmatic plan.

  Mere’s plan.

  Then later, recalling her performance, the truth-seeker said, “We will seek peace with the rebels. I am quite sure of that.”

  The two allies were sitting in the temple again, in one of its smaller rooms. Maintaining a posture showing perfect respect, the truth-seeker said, “The City cannot win. So of course we will cut open our treasury and buy off the worst of our enemies.�
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  It would be a temporary peace, Mere understood. But in this world, what wasn’t temporary?

  Then a soft voice asked, “Will you accept a worshipper, madam? I should like very much to see you.”

  Mere rose and said, “Yes. Always.”

  Her guest was dressed in a truth-seeker’s gown, but his teeth were orange and there was no wig on his wide head. In his hands was a sheet of green copper, ancient and decorated with old words. Mere recognized the dialect with a glance. It was from the time when she first fell from the sky, and along the top margin of that single sheet was the official mark of the original truth-seeker. Beneath the mark, someone had written, “Should it become necessary, tomorrow or at the end of time, this is how you may kill the god.”

  Following the newcomer were twenty soldiers armed with keen swords and buckets full of fire. They stood together in a tight, nervous mass. There was a moment when Mere felt that she could convince them to surrender their weapons. But then the new truth-seeker threw a platinum coin to the floor, and he said, “In this one shadow of everything, you will become rich men. I promise.”

  The soldiers forgot their fears. They charged Mere, hacking both her and the defrocked truth-seeker to bloody pieces. Then they cooked the pieces in the burning buckets, and for good measure, they abused the severed heads until the new truth-seeker ordered them to stop. Yet when they turned, ready to collect their fortunes, they discovered that still more soldiers had appeared. For nothing but their basic wages, these newcomers gladly slaughtered those who had butchered their helpless god, and as he watched the carnage, the surviving truth-seeker stood on top of the platinum coin, enjoying the chill of metal against his little foot.

  5

  Mere fell into a protective coma.

  She lived, but only barely. If she concentrated, summoning up an anaerobic metabolism, she could slowly open one of her eyes—usually her left eye—and a patchwork of light and shadow would fall into her sluggish mind.