The Greatship

by Robert Reed

  2

  Despite sharing parents and the same home world, Aasleen and her brother were profoundly different people. In part, it was their ages: Rococo was a thousand years younger than his big sister. In part, it was the long and very separate lives they had led. But they were poles apart mostly because they were siblings, which meant that what was the same between them wasn’t half as important as the attitudes and oddities making them feel unique.

  Aasleen grew up on a young, UV-blistered world on the edge of the galaxy—a harsh body that demanded nothing from its citizens but strength and pragmatic, selfless genius. Her first centuries were spent mastering the rough, reliable machinery preferred by colony worlds. Then as the colony’s conditions improved—as wealth and free time gained toeholds—she earned degrees in five species of engineering. The colonists had brought every possible tool from Earth, but most of those tools existed only as impossible plans locked inside data vaults. On an alien world with its own peculiarities, people had limited resources with almost no industrial base to spare. Yet Aasleen opened the vaults and picked what she needed, adapting plans to fit local conditions. Against the responsible advice of her parents and few friends, she set to work on a continent far removed from where humans had always lived. Alone, she built a generation of high-functioning AIs, equipping them with tough bodies and relentless work ethics. Her machine army set to work, manufacturing a giant tent of nanotubes and microlasers. The fabric was transparent to most flavors of light but selectively permeable to gases. Her plan was to drape the tent over a corner of the empty continent, terraforming one broad piece of terrain. There were setbacks, naturally, and then a string of disasters that destroyed the first tent and rendered the next three useless. What succeeded was the fifth tent—a structure designed entirely by her, borrowing the shape of an earthly conk shell. Within a hundred years, the tent’s internal atmosphere was free oxygen and nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water vapor. No other place on the world allowed people to walk naked beneath the blue-white sun, and nowhere else where they could enjoy deep, unfiltered breaths. Inside twenty years, most of the original colony domes had been abandoned for the new lands, and Aasleen’s grand dream made every life easier and wealthier, particularly for herself.

  When she was eight hundred and three years old, staggering news arrived: A human probe had discovered the Great Ship, and every local human colony was assembling scarce resources, trying to mount expeditions to reach the Ship before any other species. With an engineer’s gaze, Aasleen examined the technical problems any mission would face, including the mortal dangers, both known and probable. Then after two minutes of hard consideration, she made her decision. She would surrender her new fortune and the lands that she still owned. Then she would purchase the colony’s original tug, and she and her AIs would refurbish it and then travel to a distant rendezvous point where Belters were carving up an asteroid, building one of the swiftest starships ever attempted. The plan was to offer herself and her loyal machines as trained engineers and as hundreds of willing hands; and if these captains were rational souls—a great leap of faith, that was—then Aasleen would be immediately welcomed into their grand adventure.

  But her parents didn’t want her to leave. They believed this mission was an idiotic business, dangerous and without gain, and they didn’t wish to lose the daughter that had brought them delicious local fame. And because they were parents with a single child, they used guilt and every awful trick, shamelessly trying to make her crumble under their will.

  But ninety days later and despite the heroic efforts, Aasleen proved her traitorous nature, abandoning that teary, anguished home, never to return.

  Two centuries later, she and her loyal machines were serving onboard a historic starship. The retrofitted asteroid had been named for a bird of legend—Olympus Peregrine. Rough quarters were set between cavities jammed full of metallic hydrogen, the hydrogen feeding five enormous engines, each boosted by antimatter and stranglet accentors. The ship was only beginning its long, dangerous journey out of the galaxy, and in that moment of glory and great danger, a brief message arrived from home.

  “Hello, darling,” Aasleen’s mother said with a tight, bitter voice.

  Beside her sat her father, happier than he had ever looked, and with a fond hand, he was patting the back of a small, very handsome boy of perhaps ten years, or eleven.

  “His name is Rococo,” her mother said.

  Then with a menacing smile—the kind of look that only the most determined parent achieves—she added, “We’ve told him about his sister, and now he knows all there is to know about you, darling.”

  3

  By the time they slipped back inside the galaxy, Aasleen and her colleagues felt they had mastered the Great Ship’s timeless machinery. Most of the cavernous chambers remained dark and empty, but configuring each volume to suit the needs of alien biology was usually a simple matter. Far, far harder was deciding which creatures to accept, and even more difficult, determining how many and for what exceptional but fair price.

  This was no task for engineers.

  Captains claimed the right to refuse any creature that might prove violent, toward humans or the other, more responsible passengers, but even the most arrogant officer clung to any opinion or advice that lent them some measure of confidence.

  The Scypha were early conundrums.

  One captain explained the situation to his chosen crew. “Scypha live in a three-sun system. Their home star is K-class, with millions of asteroids and only one substantial world. There’s also an M-class sun traveling in a long elliptical orbit, plus a G-class sun that’s practically next-door. It’s the final sun and its jovian-class world that interest us. The world and several massive moons orbit inside its biosphere. None of those moons have significant life today, but with minimal expense, human colonists could terraform three of them.”

  Hazz was a pleasant, gracious and genuinely liked captain rumored to be enjoying a hard boost up to the Submaster ranks.

  “Our mission,” said Hazz, grinning to a small room jammed with carefully selected souls. “We will take one of our original starships to visit to the Scypha. One of the new streakships might seem more reasonable, but there are cultural/species-specific factors at work. The onboard teams will include scientists and diplomats. Scientists will have three intense years to study our gracious, perplexing hosts, and our diplomats will have the same three years to cobble together a worthwhile agreement. What we want is legal title to the jovian world and all of its moons. What we’ll settle for is something less, but that’s for the diplomats and Master Captain to determine. And what the Scypha want—what they have told us in our initial contacts—is to be granted their own modest habitat onboard the Great Ship.”

  The “original starship” was the Olympus Peregrine. No wonder Hazz was plucking Aasleen away from her routine duties, or so she assumed. Nobody knew the ship’s engines better—their capacities and histories and genuine limits. In the intuitive ways of engineers and lovers, she had a natural feeling for the ship’s difficult, rewarding personality.

  A hand rose from the front row, and with a nod from Hazz, the first question was asked.

  “What sort of species is the Scypha?”

  “I could give a partial answer,” Hazz said. “But instead of underscoring my limits, I’ll let a better voice have this chance.”

  The captain glanced to his right.

  A tall figure strode into the room. With a first glance, Aasleen felt an instant and deep, almost painful connection. The man shared her build and mannerisms, long in the body, with sturdy limbs and a precise, determined way of marching forward. And like Aasleen, the visitor’s skin was as black as human tissue could be. But immigrants were coming from every colony world now, and plenty of them demanded protection from UV light. The coincidence was tiny. And what if their faces shared same oval form, elegant and smooth, and what if their teeth were a buttery yellow and their eyes set far apart? Maybe this fellow came from he
r gene pond, but even that wouldn’t be much of a coincidence. By now, hundreds of the crew, if not thousands, shared that left-behind world with her.

  Hazz whispered his welcome, then turning to his future crew, explained that their distinguished guest was an exobiologist as well as a member of the diplomatic corps, and his name was “Rococo”, and these were his various ranks.

  When Aasleen heard the name, she became deaf.

  Their guest was carrying a small hyperfiber satchel. He set it down and graciously thanked the captain, and then with a bright, inescapable charm, he turned to his audience and delivered a well-rehearsed lecture about the curious origins of the Scypha, and their nature and incredible numbers and obvious potential. But Aasleen was still struggling to listen, studying records yanked through an array of nexuses, reconstructing the man’s life from this moment backwards to that distant point in space and in time when their shared mother gave birth to him.

  “To the Scypha,” said her brother, “there is no concept called a ‘species’.”

  What was that?

  Rococo showed his audience a thousand distinct body types, each one adapted to low-gee conditions or pure free fall. Each was different from the others in highly unpredictable ways. Yet to Scypha eyes, every one of those organisms was the same. No matter its size or its architecture, they were recognized as belonging to a union, a shared and decidedly holy lineage.

  “The Scypha are not one species or fifty million species,” he said. “They are a distinct line of totipotent cells. Each cell is capable of living alone, subsisting on minimal food and water. But in times of wealth, those same cells will grow and divide, and thousands or trillions of them can join together, forming elaborate bodies.”

  He paused, staring at the wall behind his audience.

  “But why take this path for life?” he asked. “Because the Scypha evolved in an extraordinary environment—a world with a special, perhaps even unique history. But when the Scypha achieved space flight, they immediately abandoned their home and colonized their system’s extensive asteroid belts. This is the environment where they have prospered. Make a rough count of the sentient cellular conglomerates, and their total population stands in excess of one and a half trillion bodies.”

  Selected images were fed into Aasleen’s nexuses. Comets in the far flung Ice Ring were wrapped in monomolecular bags and lit up with hot fusion torches. Silica-rich asteroids in the Stone Ring were turned to slag and pulled into elaborate shells, transparent and filled with warm, bright air. Orbiting beside the orange-white K-class sun was a dense belt of iron-rich bolides, unpopulated but actively mined for their precious ores. And between the Iron Ring and Stone Ring was an empty zone where a single moonless world moved in a circular orbit. With half the mass of the Earth, the rocky gray sphere sat inside a deep dirty atmosphere, under which lay shallow seas and silted lakes and great ringed basins, as well as hundreds of sharp, relatively small craters formed over the last million years.

  “This is the Scyphas’ birthplace,” said Rococo. Then with a broad, intense smile, he added, “Calculate the odds and marvel: Multicellular life should never evolve on such a body, in a solar system as dangerous as this. And not only did life emerge in this unlikely womb, but it is still alive. It can even thrive on occasion. And that despite the certainty that every few thousand years, on average, some fat bolide kicked out from the Rings ends up impacting here—blistering, apocalyptic events on par with those that killed the dinosaurs, and before that, obliterated all of the multicellular creatures on ancient Mars.”

  The declaration earned prolonged silence.

  Then one hand rose. It was a broad black hand, strong and wearing on its fingertips the hard callus presently fashionable among engineers—as if the hand had been toughened up by genuine physical labor.

  Rococo nodded. “Yes, Aasleen.”

  She stood. Her intention was to greet her brother. She had planned every word, ready to say, “Welcome, and I didn’t know you were onboard, and by the way, how are our dear distant parents?” In a very public way, she wanted to define their relationship: The siblings were far from close. Everyone needed to know that her brother had joined the crew in secret, never mentioning his presence to his respectable sister. Of course this was an enormous vessel, and they had very different duties, but it seemed important for her to paint the young brother as being less than polite.

  Yet when Aasleen spoke, unexpected words ran from her mouth.

  “Do the Scypha today live on their home world?”

  “No,” Rococo said, the grin turning wary but his eyes smiling.

  “Yet they definitely came from there.”

  He nodded. “About half a million years ago was a period—a unique period—of fifty or sixty thousand years. There were no major impacts, just a few showers of two and three kilometer asteroids. In other words, their home world was given a window of peace. And the Scypha lineage prospered well enough to develop basic spaceship technologies.”

  Aasleen studied images of that left-behind world. It appeared cold now, which was only reasonable. The world orbited its sun at an earthly distance, but its sun was notably weaker than Sol. Her terraforming skills allowed her to build a simple mental model of climate, and she realized that without constant impacts—the steady and reliable battering of two and ten and forty kilometer bolides—that little world would soon fall into a deep, impoverishing ice age.

  “That world’s name,” she began.

  “Yes,” he said expectantly.

  “Wait,” she said, interrupting herself. “First of all, are there other lineages? And if so, do they still live on the home world?”

  Rococo couldn’t have looked happier. “There is evidence of at least six hundred distinct lines of totipotent cells,” he said. “From that menagerie, only the Scypha climbed into space.”

  “And did all of the Scypha emigrate?”

  The smile tightened, just a little. It was an expression Aasleen knew well, since it came across her face whenever she found herself in uncomfortable corners, unable to say everything that was in her mind.

  What Rococo did say was, “Our alien hosts are presently extinct on their home world.”

  She started to nod.

  “Chaos,” he said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “You were going to ask for the name of their birthplace. When translated, using our best tools, their language boils down to the word ‘Chaos.’”

  She squinted, considering the news.

  “Chaos means danger to the Scypha. It refers to disasters that arrive from the unexpected avenues.”

  Humans nodded, pretending they understood the alien minds.

  “The home world is being held in quarantine,” Rococo said. “The Scypha want nothing to do with it, nothing at all. And that has been the situation for the last several hundred thousand years.”

  Aasleen was honestly confused. “Why?”

  Her brother offered no simple answer. He made a show of shrugging his shoulders, reminding the entire audience, “We’ll have three years to decipher meanings and reach our best judgments. Will the Scypha make good passengers? And will they pay a reasonable fee for the privilege?” Again, he shrugged. “Speaking as an exobiologist, I want everyone too scared to make premature guesses or biasing notions.”

  “That sounds very diplomatic,” Aasleen said softly.

  Rococo chuckled with a diplomat’s grace. Then he threw a knowing wink in her direction, saying, “The politics of a family can be very difficult.”

  Aasleen laughed loudly and said, “No.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Families are simple,” she said. “Just so long as they aren’t your own family, that is.”

  4

  The Scypha built spaceships much as they built themselves: Mechanical embryos were generated, each containing the guiding principles used by every ship in their enormous fleet. But the growth of each vessel was a nonlinear, wildly unpredictable business. A hundr
ed identical embryos could be instructed to form slow freighters of a specific size, yet no two vessels ended up with identical schematics. To the human engineer, that system was no system, and the results were both astonishing and terrifying. Aasleen would be the first to admit that Scypha machinery was adaptive, tough and reasonably efficient. If necessary, their vessels could heal most damage with the resources on hand, and should one of their freighters need to update its shape and job, the transformation took remarkably little time. But no pair of freighters could reliably exchange components. Hull shapes and engine designs were full of quirks and one-of-a-kind features. And mistakes were inevitable—catastrophic failures in design waiting for that ripe wrong moment to arrive—and that was a grim possibility that Aasleen could never, ever accept.

  On the other hand, human ships were standardized and tenaciously, even dangerously reliable.

  Rococo had no expertise as an engineer or pilot. Yet he had been able to learn enough about human-built shuttles to steal one of them, and without much trouble, he crippled the three sister shuttles remaining behind in the Peregrine’s dock.

  “How long for repairs,” Hazz had asked.

  “Twenty-three hours,” was Aasleen’s best guess. “That’s for bringing all three ships back on line and refueling them, and that’s assuming our colleague didn’t sabotage their AI managers, too. Because if that’s the case, it’s going to take time to discover where and how, and then it could be three days, or four, until we can launch even one shuttle.”

  A captain’s poise obscured what had to be a terrible rage. Hazz nodded and said nothing, considering the situation.

  It was the chief diplomat who couldn’t contain her emotions. “Your brother,” she said, the two words sounding like the most terrible curse. “Where is he going? What in hell is he planning?” A young-faced woman named Krill, she appeared to be little more than a child, yet she was older than anyone else present. Thousands of careful years had been invested in a career that looked ready to shatter. “If we can’t catch your brother soon, then we’ll have to tell the Scypha and let them corral him for us.”