The Greatship

by Robert Reed

  She felt a hand carrying her by her long hair, and then there were long stretches when she was stashed inside dark, cramped places. Sometimes she smelled soil, sometimes rotting wood. Then came the searing white pain of a fire, and she woke in agony, her voiceless mouth opening, the tongue and her exposed lips burning to nothing.

  The mind inside the slick white skull was still alive, but blind now, and deeply, perfectly asleep.

  Mere dreamed in a fashion, and with practice, she learned how to control her dreams, carefully reliving her life. She saw mistakes made by others and by her own hand. She saw the stars. Sometimes she was floating in a different place—a tiny place far from the world—and then she was suddenly lying on her back, the gypsum wing reaching with his jaws spread wide, reaching for her lost eyes.

  Later, another fierce blaze found her, consuming bone and teeth while her soul fell into perfect blackness, free of time and every dream.

  And then she discovered eyes.

  The eyes couldn’t close, and they showed nothing but dull gray light. But her vision improved, and after an age or maybe just a day, she saw a Tilan face watching her, and surrounding the face, milky and thin but undeniably real, was the ghostly glimmer of countless others staring down at her from their shadowy high places.

  Someone said, “Mere.”

  I have ears again, she thought.

  She did, but the voice she heard was her own. “Mere. Mere. Mere,” she kept saying.

  A warm hand was laid across the new lips and tongue.

  “We know who you are,” said a stranger’s voice. “Now quiet, please. And please, old woman, lay still.”

  * * *

  One after another, her hosts described the last thirteen hundred years. To speak to her, each of the Tila had to master a language long extinct, and each became expert in the history of one eighty-year span. With a reverence for things ancient plus the natural pride of a talented student, each of the Tila wove a little portion of the endless thread, and at the center of everything rested the head of the reborn god.

  The City had survived the siege. It seemed that its fat leaders were wiser than Mere, or at least they were shrewder. They outlasted their enemies, and when the drought finally broke, they reestablished the empire. But the new climate remained warmer and wetter than anything before. Snow never again fell on the mountains, and there were years full of rain and much darkness. Every old shoreline was inundated, and in winter the entire valley was submerged, people finding safety in the room where a god had been murdered.

  Meanwhile, beyond the mountains were wild tribes riding half-tame gypsum wings. The floods and long plagues weakened the City, but it was the tribes that killed it. Mere’s head was the great prize of war. From there, at least three major religions were spawned because of her. She was a messenger from the gods, and she was instilled with magical blessings, and if an army marched with Mere strung up beside their banner, then that army could never lose.

  But armies always lost.

  Unaware of any great event, Mere was carried away to a distant continent, and then due to the vagaries of politics and time, and the fragility of memory, her importance was forgotten and her eventual grave was mismarked.

  “We were excavating inside a minor temple,” the last teacher explained. “No one had seen you for so long that you had become a legend. For most of us, you were just another rusted old story, interesting to children and simple minds, but to sophisticated minds always a little silly and plainly, pathetically false.”

  The teacher was speaking the latest language. Over the last year, he and his colleagues had taught Mere its basics.

  “When we found you, we brought you here.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Near your old city, as it happens. But in the foothills, where you find cooler, drier breezes.” The orange teeth shone brightly. The wide face was smooth and drab, showing its age. “We have built an institute of learning. The finest in the world, we would like to believe.”

  The Tilan glimmer was gone. Mere’s eyes were complete, her focus good and sharp. And the rest of her body was almost finished, too. She could sit up. On a less taxing day, she might attempt to walk. Even her voice sounded more and more like her own. “Thank you for saving me,” she said.

  “No. Thank you, madam.” The teacher made a circle with his two long arms, encompassing his happy face. Ages had passed, yet the Tila still employed the same artful gestures to prove their respect. “My entire life has revolved around your remains as well as my blundering attempts to make you live again.”

  Mere made her best circle, matching his respect.

  “Because of you, we have learned much that matters about life and living flesh. We know your flesh as well as our own. Which are two quite different flavors of life, I should warn you.”

  She closed her hands around her face, saying nothing.

  “The last few spans have been a golden age,” the teacher continued. “My species is abundant and mostly at peace. There are no droughts and no winters anymore. The world is a paradise, and with so much easy wealth, we have learned what the world is.”

  “What is the world?” she asked.

  Then in the next moment, with reflexive confidence, Mere answered her own question. “The world is the center of everything, and everything but the world revolves around us.”

  Those foolish words had to dissipate. Then with a sober little voice, almost an embarrassed voice, he said, “Madam, no.”

  She dropped her weary arms.

  And a smile emerged, and the eyes became wide while the mouth formed a thin and toothless, perfectly flat line. With this long-anticipated moment suddenly before him, he had to breathe. He had to find strength. Then with what was little better than a whisper, he said, “Our world is a very little place, as it happens. And we believe, madam…some of us, at least…we believe we know where it is you came from, and what you very possibly are…!”

  * * *

  Gods were immortal, and gods could be tremendously powerful, and some of them were liable to act in mysterious ways. But a god’s emotions and desires were always knowable. Where was the good in the indecipherable deity? A god served as a mirror held up to the self-aware soul. The image might be distorted and rather strange, but there was always something familiar—a quiet humor, a vengeful rage, or the simplest, most normal incompetence that the average citizen would recognize with a glance.

  But an alien was infinitely stranger than any god.

  The best minds of the age explained their verdict. Mere was the child of another world. In every detail, her body was unique—the shape of her bones and the stacking of her organs and the composition of her enduring mind. There was no place to insert her into the Tilan thread-of-life. Even the tiny workings of her flesh were unique. With delicate lenses, they showed Mere her blood and skin, and then they proudly displayed their own bubble-shaped cells, expert eyes identifying hundreds of obscure features that proved her complete Otherness. Then with giant mirrors and lenses, they forced her to gaze skyward: At the eleven worlds moving around the double suns, the thousands of asteroids and moons, plus millions of faraway suns that certainly were dancing with their own wet planets.

  Ancient stories described silver wings filling the night sky, and then Mere fell to the world wrapped in fire. Those wings were likely some kind of ship. Pieces of odd material had been collected on all three continents—finer than any fabric, and fantastically strong. Recent discoveries about gravity and orbits pointed to her coming from outside their world’s orbit. Perhaps she flew from one of the three giant gaseous worlds or their world-sized moons. Although it seemed to be very cold out there, and Mere was such a warm creature—an observation that turned a few imaginative minds to thoughts about distant, unknowable stars.

  Whatever her origin, Mere was no god. She was utterly strange and crushingly alone, freed of every natural tie to this species and little world. The Tila respected her and in a lesser fashion still worshipped her, tryi
ng however they could to fill her needs; but instead of being a deity with some slippery noble purpose, Mere felt like the sole inhabitant of a privileged zoo, her days and nights spent in a soothing, suffocating isolation.

  Her response was swift and determined. With a razor, she shaved her scalp and underarms and her legs and between her legs. Where she once walked with a comfortable stride, she now took care to mimic the walk of her hosts, forcing her hips and legs to dance in an unnatural fashion. She wore Tilan clothes that had been cut to enhance the illusion of the Tilan body. A leather noose tightened around her neck made her voice squeak nicely, and with lenses ground to order, Mere wore eyeglasses that gave every edge and every surface a slight aural shimmer.

  In the past, whenever she was sad, Mere wept. It was a natural, godly way of proving her suffering. But determined practice allowed her to give up tears and sobs, invoking instead Tilan misery postures and woeful silences.

  Never in the past, not once, had she taken a lover. But because it seemed essential now, she seduced not one lover, but many. Lessons learned with her hands and soft sticks were now applied to compliant alien bodies. Most were male, but gender didn’t matter. The goal was in taking this next important step on the course to becoming Tilan. Mere even bonded with one young male in an official public ceremony—a little creature who was both a brilliant researcher, and according to even his most permissive colleagues, singularly odd.

  For the rest of his life, they lived inside a little cabin on a remote mountaintop. Beside their home stood an old brick observatory refitted with the latest telescopes. Mere studied the double suns in the day and at night watched the nearby worlds, and to the best of her limited ability, she proved what she had sensed more than a thousand years ago: The twins were gradually and inexorably drifting closer to each other. Yet her success was dwarfed by her husband’s triumphs. A genius and a theorist, he was armed with solitude and stacks of parchment, writing out a series of elaborate equations that played against each other, building revelations out of deep thoughts and abstract marks.

  In a sequence of landmark publications, he explained how matter was just another form of energy. Compressed and heated hydrogen burned in a new fashion, releasing vast stores of energy as heat and light, and gravity could be described as twisted space and light and time. And finally, he gave a mathematical clarity to what all of the Tila knew by instinct: The universe existed as an infinite number of intricate shadows, each slightly different from all others, and with every tiny bite of time, these individual shadows effortlessly divided into countless shadows streaming away in every possible direction.

  Upon his death, her husband was hailed as the finest mind that had ever lived inside this one particular shadow realm.

  Mere walked behind the rotting corpse, fighting to maintain the ritual pose of the celebratory mate and feeling lonely again. A warm rain was falling. Heavy clouds obscured the twin suns. Looking through her thick glasses, she saw an unbroken crowd with long arms thrown up in worshipful circles, and surrounding them, on the brink of vision, she could almost see the nearest shadow realms where her husband was equally loved. Yet her grieving mind was filled with so much more: She imagined the infinite tangle of worlds where she had never been, where she never could be, and where for the entirety of their history none of these endless souls would bother to imagine a creature such as Mere.

  6

  The ageless widow selected her second mate from among a thousand talented suitors. Then using rudimentary AIs, she and her new husband worked together, trying to decipher the chaotic harmonics of the twin suns. The man began as a tireless and infinitely cheery soul, but his character changed over the years. More and more often, his work brought deep silences and an unshakable sadness. When they finally had what they felt were definitive results, he made an announcement to colleagues and the general public. With a cold grieving voice—a remarkable voice for a normally fatalistic species—he declared that the stellar cores were accelerating their merger. In another thirty spans—a little more than two thousand years—the suns would collapse into a single superheated body, and the resulting surge of light and heat would boil the seas and sterilize the land, launching a runaway summer leaving their tiny world dead, probably for all time.

  Her third mate was her stepson. Almost as brilliant as her first husband, he was versed in every odd form of high thought. With superior AIs and the latest data, he continued his father’s work, producing a new, even more damning timetable for the world’s end.

  Civilization had eighteen spans at most, with a cruel minimum of less than fifteen.

  Mere’s fourth mate was an elderly male—not an intellectual, but instead a shrewd and candidly lucky citizen who had built a fat fortune in biomechanics. As a gift, he had special eyes crafted for his bride. Mere’s own eyes had to be cut free, the empty sockets treated with caustic agents to prevent any bothersome regrowth. Then the twin machines were implanted and integrated with her optic nerves, and when turned on, Mere found herself looking into the surgeon’s face, seeing not only the woman’s tight-mouthed smile and her bottomless black gaze, but also a multitude of whispery presences hovering close, smiling at her with that same professional pride.

  The multitude was no simple illusion. With delicate, quantum-sensitive structures, her new eyes mimicked both Tilan sight and Tilan perceptions. What Mere saw was the vagueness of things small and ethereal. What the eyes gave her was the sensation—the deep and profound and unrelenting intuition—that she was one tiny creature walking along a narrow thread of reality.

  In less than a year, Mere was widowed again. After another determined search, she settled on a young female with an infectious interest in space travel. Using Mere’s inherited wealth, her new mate designed and tested a series of muscular rockets, and over the course of the next eighty-year span, Mere was able to build an observatory on the tiny Tilan moon—optical and radio telescopes of unprecedented power gazing out into the boundless wilderness of sky.

  Her sixth mate died with a million others, drowned in a monster cyclone.

  Armed with the latest data from Mere’s observatory, her seventh mate revisited and refined the old projections of doom. The Tila still had twelve spans until their world died, but he foresaw the difficult and sometimes gruesome years between. Rising temperatures were already playing fits with crops, while the endless rains washed away key portions of the industrial infrastructure. Time was limited, but resources were even more precious. Mere demanded a divorce from him and then mated with a young scientist—a genuine savant who saw three routes to save the Tila: They could build enormous orbiting mirrors that would deflect the sunlight. Or massive asteroids could be pushed into new orbits, passing close enough to nudge the world into a more distant orbit. Or with ships not even imagined today, the Tila could carry part or all of their species to an elaborate refuge built somewhere in the outer solar system.

  “Each path has the same essential problem,” he confessed to his alien wife. Lying beside her, comfortably exhausted by a bout of lovemaking, he calmly said, “Each of these options is nearly impossible. Even with fifty spans, I doubt we could make any one of them succeed.”

  “Then our world is dead,” she muttered, without hope.

  “Perhaps we are entitled to our sad-silence, yes.” He had to laugh at his mate’s bleak tone. “But in other shadows, with different harmonics, our suns won’t coalesce for another thousand spans. Or they were joined in some remote, pointless past, and nobody is here to complain.”

  Mere rose from the narrow mating pad. In the appropriate corner of the room, she relieved herself, and with an ease that had come gradually over these last centuries, she took a ceremonial nibble of her own feces. Little surgeries and large ones had radically changed her body and limbs. Extra joints in the arms allowed her to make convincing Tilan gesture. Her skull had been crushed in artful lines and then healed inside special containers, forcing it into a wide oval shape. She no longer grew hair of any kind, and her
feet were longer and much narrower, and her vagina had an entirely different architecture. When the time seemed ripe, she intended to have her internal organs reshuffled, and her skin was going to be peeled away, the bloody tissues beneath treated to produce the same glossy pale skin that seemed so perfect and lovely in Tilan eyes.

  “You said, ‘Perhaps,’” she noted. Then with a wary interest, she guessed, “You aren’t sure this world has to die. Is that what you mean?”

  “If we attempt not one, but all three impossibilities, with the full focus of our entire world and species—“

  “As interlocking projects, you mean?”

  “If you notice, each hopeless task can help the other two. If we build a refuge near one of the gas giants, presumably on an icy moon, we can use it as a staging platform. If we are going to push a suitable comet or asteroid into some useful orbit, then it will slide close to our world and the gas giant, too. Why not make it carry passengers? And if we can manage that kind of presence in space, then perhaps we can also invent a simple way to manufacture truly impressive mirrors that could be brought here by the same asteroid that carries our people and gives our world the occasional little nudge.” His black eyes became distant, and with an equally distant voice, he said, “Of course, darling…darling…there’s one little nut of knowledge that would help us enormously…”

  “What nut?”

  Hung on the nearby wall, stretched tight like a treasured skin, was one of the surviving shreds of Mere’s enormous light-sail. A mining dredge had found it on the deepest reaches of the sea. Despite being woven from badly degraded armor, under the most difficult conditions, and despite being further eroded by radiation and micrometeorites and its fiery descent through the atmosphere, the hyperfiber was in spectacular condition. It weighed almost nothing, and it was still the perfect mirror, and except along the failed edges, this tiny whiff of brilliant nothing possessed an impossible strength.