by Robert Reed
“If we could just make this wonder substance,” her husband said. And then he carefully and conspicuously stopped talking.
“I wish I knew how to build it,” she said.
Then the man looked at his mate—stared at her with a hard, cutting expression that betrayed secret distrusts—and with a suspicious voice, he said, “It has been suggested. More than once, suggested. That perhaps our resident alien knows more than she wishes to share with her little Tilans…”
That was Mere’s eighth mate, and as it happened, he was the last.
7
The world grew hotter and wetter, its death pangs worsening each year. Cities were swept away by endless storms. Famine and opportunistic plagues killed millions, while filthy new industries and uranium reactors poisoned the hearts of the continents. Yet every catastrophe was endured and accepted and then left behind, and meanwhile the Tila accomplished miracles. Rockets and rail-guns lifted vast cargoes to space. Crude aluminum mirrors were built on the ground and deployed in useful orbits. A massive nickel-iron asteroid was selected as a planetary nudge, mass-drivers and chemical rockets, fuel tanks and mountains of perchlorate waiting for deployment. Driven past the nearest gas giant, the asteroid would borrow momentum that it would share when it raced past the Tilan world, easing it a little farther away from the colliding suns.
Even with a flock of asteroids, the process would remain unbearably slow. And even if the sky were filled with mirrors, the climate would never stabilize in a livable state. But one small, self-sufficient colony could be established on some far moon, and if the colony survived for ten thousand spans—if those few Tila walked one lucky thread—then their descendants would be able to return to a sterile but otherwise habitable world.
Mere would never become a colonist. That was a decision made in the early days of the work, and only on rare occasions did regret nip at her. Most of her wealth and possessions were given away to the powers in charge, and she missed none of it. What she retained was the old home perched on the rain-drenched mountaintop and its now useless observatory, and with her final resources, she built a little city around her where a few of the endless refugees could find the raw essentials of life.
As a rule, the Tila didn’t waste resources on the doomed. But of course none of the homeless, starving souls were truly doomed. Creation was a magnificent home where everyone found extraordinary good fortune. Every little misery simply proved that somewhere else, on a cooler, drier world, these same Tila lived as sweetly and perfectly as any mind could envision.
Occasionally, Mere adopted one or two orphans. For the Tila, this was rarer than caring for the condemned, but it served to fill some ill-defined need in her alien heart. She took strength from newborns that had no bone-ties to her. Like any mother, she found delight in their successes and lost count of the disappointments; and after three hundred years of selfless work, she stood as the ageless matriarch of an enormous family—children and grandchildren and their descendants living in her little city, and elsewhere.
Mothers should never have favorite children, and they always do.
Mere’s favorite was her last son, and he was special for the simplest reason: He looked as if he could be her own. He wore elements of her face and features, and he mastered her odd way of walking, and in his voice was a quality, a gait, that others heard in her voice. Like Mere, he was more persistent than authentically brilliant. He had a patience that could have come from her and an alien’s sense of humor, and somewhere in his youth, he learned to sob as she still did on occasion, when one or the other of them was exceptionally sad.
The boy’s name was Always.
While still a young man, Always left the world, taking a coveted student’s posting on the moon’s observatory. He was to be gone for three years, but before the first anniversary, without forewarning, he rode out of the clouds, his metal gypsum wing dropping him into the town’s center.
Mere assumed trouble and imagined the worst.
But Always claimed that he was healthy and loved his studies, and better yet, his superiors thought that he wasn’t too much of a dullard.
“Then why are you here?” Mere asked.
He smiled as she smiled, a weak little sob leaking free. A fresh rain had started, but he didn’t notice. One hand reached into a satchel, retrieving a tiny light-pad that recognized his touch and came awake. Then with a smiling voice, Always said, “We just finished upgrading your old radio dishes. Made them bigger, more sensitive—”
“I know that,” she interrupted.
He hesitated, suddenly nervous. Then as the rain worsened, drumming on their heads and the bare water-soaked stone on all sides, he said, “We heard something, finally. From the sky, we have an alien signal.”
Mere flinched, saying nothing.
“Are you a little curious, Mother?”
“Never just a little,” she said.
Satisfaction framed his voice. “I have been granted special permission,” he said. “The official announcement comes as soon as I tell you the news.”
“The news,” she said.
“Look.”
She was staring at the lighted pad, but her fancy mechanical eyes seemed to have failed. Why couldn’t she see anything? She rubbed at them, and rubbed, and then she bent low to look at what seemed to be a child’s toy. It was a ball of shiny gray glass, and erupting from one side of the ball were tubes or nozzles…or rocket engines of some peculiar design…
“Mother,” he said. “Do you recognize the object?
“No,” she said. “And why would I?”
“Some of us, a stubborn few of us…we believe this could be your starship.”
With both hands, she cast that nonsense aside.
“Our hypothesis has weaknesses,” he said. “The ship’s current location and velocity show that it never actually passed through our solar system. And today it is several hundred light-years beyond its closest approach.”
“How large is this machine?” she asked.
He told her.
Again, she believed nothing. “Why are you sure? How can you accept such insanity?”
“This is just one image,” Always said. “The starship noticed our signals and sent us millions of images. And we have also received whole libraries of text and years of speeches and odd-sounding songs. A few pieces have been deciphered, and we’ve studied a portion of these very beautiful pictures, and what we can surmise is that this incredible vessel is indeed far larger than our own little world. And its crew…its god-like pilots…”
Her son paused and tilted his head back, rain flowing over the oddly shaped face.
To the clouds, he said, “The captains are your species, Mother. About that, everyone is certain. Your brothers and your sisters are guiding that marvel on a journey around the Wheel of Suns.”
* * *
The harmonics of a single sun are wickedly complex, but two suns merging is an incalculable problem for even the most arrogant astronomer. The suns will mix their plasmas at changeable rates, and the fraternal magnetic fields can alternate between wrestling and dancing, while roaring pulses of sound will ignore one another or cancel each other out, right up until the moment when every busy force decides to join together—an event without warnings or mercies.
Brighter than both suns, the flare scorched the inner solar system with hard radiations and fantastic heat. Every grand mirror dissolved into an aluminum rain. All of the orbiting Tila were killed, as were the moon’s inhabitants who weren’t sheltered in deep bunkers. Mere’s favorite son died in his sleep while the great telescopes were mangled by pulses of wild energy. The world’s daylight hemisphere absorbed the blast, radiations blunted by the atmosphere but the heat punching down to the cloud-draped sea, cooking up storms that carried hot clouds higher than ever, piercing the increasingly sultry stratosphere.
One of the great-grandchildren woke the alien woman. Describing the ongoing disaster, the young woman used her most careful voice. Mere was a sensiti
ve soul, always taking death news harder than the Tila could. Mere was sensitive because she was alien and because her immortality was woven inside a deep nest of good fortune. Some flaw in Mere’s soul kept her from grasping what every Tila held with instinct: One soul might die in this narrow reality, but a billion trillion others just like her had to survive, walking along the neighboring threads, a few of them destined for perfect happiness.
The great-grandchild made these salient points. Then with a voice that sounded almost stern, she added, “Most of us have survived, madam. And most of the survivors will live out the year. If the climate worsens, so be it. We have options. Without so many bodies, we can migrate to the poles. Then, when necessary, we will ride airborne cities. And within another span, perhaps sooner, we will rebuild the orbiting factories and resume the colonization of the distant ice moon.”
No expression showed on the ancient face. Nothing Tilan, and nothing alien. Mere stared blankly at the table between them, at one of the old pictures of the Great Ship. More and more, she spent her days alone, studying the alien texts and the wondrous images. “Hunting for useful gifts,” was her excuse. Though the truth was that Tilan scholars had done all of the critical work.
“The new mirrors will be huge improvements,” said the young woman. “Did you know? We will make them out of hyperfiber, just as your people, the great captains, taught us to do. And our next ships will be fusion-powered, swift and strong. And very soon, perhaps in just three spans, we’ll begin lifting everyone to their new homes on the ice.”
“And if another flare strikes?”
“Flares live on chance,” said the great-grandchild, impatience tightening her voice. “If our thread happens to end here—“
“Another million threads carry us forward.”
“Yes madam, exactly.”
At last, the alien woman looked at her guest. Then with slow words and a strange tone, she asked, “Do you ever feel scared?”
“Scared?”
“Terrified,” said Mere. “Your head fills with rational despair. Your entire existence is threatened, and everyone you care about is equally endangered. Does that kind of thinking ever find you?”
With an honesty suited to the Tila and the moment, the young woman said, “No. I never feel that way, madam.”
“Since the universe is endless.”
“Plainly, it is.”
“And you are immortal, after a fashion.”
“All that can be is eternal, madam.”
“Perhaps so,” the alien woman muttered. Then from a pocket on her hip she removed a knife, unfolding a mirrored blade that had been given to her as a gift just last year—a prototypical wisp of hyperfiber produced as an experiment, using a recipe supplied by the Great Ship.
“Perhaps so,” she said again.
Then with that impossibly sharp blade, using her steadiest hand, she carefully hacked free both of her mechanical Tilan eyes.
* * *
Only Mere lived in the mountains.
Her human eyes had regrown, and she had allowed her human body to reemerge. The heat was awful, but her constitution never faded. Rains brought endless steam, but she could endure a hundred days of storm just to reach those rare moments when the rain stopped, allowing her to walk a certain ridge out to where she could look down on the river valley.
There was no forest anymore. Even the most determined weeds had retreated to the poles and the highest peaks. What lived in and beside the water were species of bacteria that tolerated the near-boiling temperatures. Colonies of purple and pale yellow and sickly orange microbes created a vivid carpet, and from her vantage point Mere would use one of her surviving telescopes to watch how the bacterial mats grew in elaborate patterns—threads of life branching out, twisting in the current, sometimes ending abruptly, sometimes breaking loose and riding the river towards the dying sea.
A voice said, “Mere?”
She turned, perhaps a little startled. The Tila seemed to be a stranger, although it was hard to feel sure. He was wearing a refrigerated suit and a bulky helmet that partly obscured his face, and when he spoke, the helmet muted his quiet, slightly nervous voice.
“Yes? What do you want?”
“I have a rock,” he said with a distinct importance. “The rock is behind my back, in one of my hands. Guess which hand.”
“Why?”
“Guess,” he insisted.
She did as asked, and he brought the hand forwards and opened it, showing her a small wedge of eroded black slate.
“Under one of my feet,” he continued, “I have a coin.”
“Do I care?”
“Pick a foot,” he insisted.
This game could not be more foolish. But something was intriguing about this business, which was why she selected one foot instead of the other.
The stranger lifted that foot, and an oval piece of platinum glowed in the cloud-soaked light.
“I have two pockets–” he began.
Before he could finish, Mere pointed at one pocket. And what he removed was a small holo showing a very peculiar object. Nozzles and fuel tanks were wrapped around each other. There may have been more to the structure, but turning the image in her hand, she saw ragged edges—places where pieces had been torn loose by irresistible forces.
“What is this thing?” she asked.
The stranger said nothing.
She threw his silence back.
Then he said, “Telescopes saw a faint spit of light following a highly eccentric orbit, and we assumed that it was a comet. But obviously it isn’t, and what we imagine now is that the vessel passed close to the suns, and it was moving slowly enough to be captured, to begin a very long orbit…an orbit that is still a few years away from completing its first circuit.”
“This is a starship?” she blurted.
“The wreck of a starship, yes.”
Her hand squeezed the holo block until her skin bled. Then she quietly asked, “Is this my ship?”
“Presumably.”
Despite the heat, Mere shivered, and she breathed deeply, calming herself before asking, “What will you do with this wreck?”
The Tila said nothing.
“How old is this image?” she pressed. “A first-generation holo means that it is twenty years old, at least.”
Again, he said nothing. But he seemed to wring pleasure from Mere’s unfolding astonishment.
“Can this ship function?” she asked.
“It can now,” he said.
For a wild moment, Mere was imagining what was suddenly possible. Giant engines of this kind, given fuel and strapped to useful asteroids could accomplish wonders. And then a rational terror took hold, and she asked, “What was this game we just played?”
“You made the right choice three times, madam.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“In thanks,” he said. “And because you guessed correctly, madam, we can give you this gift of thanks.”
8
Against Mere’s wishes, they set her onboard the refurbished starship. Ignoring every argument, they showed her how to use the simple controls they had grafted into the remaining steering mechanisms. A minimal shield of battered hyperfiber was bolstered with aerogel and low-grade lasers. The engines had worked well enough on separate trials, and with the tanks filled to bursting with liquid hydrogen, there was just enough fuel to catch the Great Ship—finally—and with help from the captains, perhaps she would survive.
“You don’t want to do this,” Mere said.
Yet the Tila knew their minds exactly. Without the barest doubt, they said, “All paths are inevitable. This path is yours, madam.”
“But you can save yourselves,” she said. “These engines could carry thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of citizens out to the new colonies, and then they could push and pull the asteroids wherever they need to be.”
The rebuilt cabin was tiny, and with her company, quite crowded. Mere’s supplies and a simple recycling sys
tem would keep her alive for the next few centuries, ship-time. Her luggage consisted of a few heirlooms and important trinkets, plus endless files containing the history and complete works of the Tila. In another few minutes, she would be underway, and by every conceivable means, they had assured Mere that she had no choice in this matter.
The original AI had been recovered, its shredded remains given a voice. In Tilan, the ship said to its single passenger, “It is time, Mere. This is the moment to resume our inevitable voyage.”
She said, “No.”
Enraged, she slapped and kicked at the Tila.
With just enough force, they restrained her. But she struggled again, and they worked together to break her arms and legs, shattering each bone badly enough that they wouldn’t heal until after the long burn had begun.
“You cannot!” she said.
“Without this ship, you’ll die!” she wailed.
One of the Tila—a large woman blessed with poise; a creature destined to be a truth-seeker in another age—made a careful final study of the alien. Then she laid her hand on the strange-boned face and with her own patience exhausted, she asked, “Has it occurred to you, madam? Have you ever considered this improbability? If somehow all of your threads die here, and if you never complete this journey of yours…that there is some destiny greater than ours that you will miss…a future will be cheated, madam…stolen away by little fears and tiny, tiny selfishness…?”
Bridge Three
The animals were perched on the narrowest circumstances. Friable, weak and short-lived, they drank water and breathed oxygen and feasted on almost any digestible object. One sex was relatively tall and strong, while the other was taller and more powerful. They spoke and hollered and sometimes sang and occasionally sang well. They made wealth using hands and slave-animals and slave-machines. They wandered widely and upon their return spun lies about what they had seen and done. They fashioned tiny charms full of power, and they painted magical figures on sacred walls, and whenever those animal eyes looked skyward, they saw nothing but spectacular versions of themselves striding free across the unreachable stars.