The Greatship

by Robert Reed

  5

  The building only resembled its neighbors—a home-tree façade encompassing a set of rounded rooms that pretended to have been shaped by determined worms. But every surface was cultured diamond braced with threads of hyperfiber. The furnishings had a slick, impervious feel promising durability as well as ease of cleaning. One of the back rooms, visible at the end of a remarkably straight hallway, was enclosed with hyperfiber bars—horizontal, not vertical—and inside that large cage stood half a dozen Dawsheen, a single harum-scarum sitting behind them, threatening to crush anyone who came near her.

  Many things in the universe were not universal, Perri reflected. But police stations very nearly were.

  “I have no authority,” said the officer on duty.

  Quee Lee halfway laughed, saying, “And I’m not precisely sure why we have come here.”

  The Dawsheen looked at Perri. “I have no authority,” he repeated. “Do you claim special knowledge about a criminal incident?”

  “Maybe,” Perri said.

  The alien spoke, and with a flat, incurious tone, three separate translators asked, “Which criminal incident?”

  “The kidnapping.”

  The translators struggled to deliver that simple concept. A blur of barks and tweets ended with the station’s translator taking charge of the interview. Its AI asked Perri directly, “Do you mean the Queen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know Her whereabouts?”

  “No.” Then he shook his head, deciding that wasn’t quite true. “Or maybe I do. Maybe.”

  “But you have some useful knowledge?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  The officer sat listening to the conversation between machine and man. One leg was thrown behind his tilted bench, the others locked in front. Every hand lay in a pile on the little desk set before him. He wore a greenish-black uniform of densely woven yarns. His face with covered with bristly golden hairs. Every eye was open, but there was no way to determine if he was even a little interested in what was being said.

  Finally, he muttered a few syllables.

  “My superiors are searching for Her,” he offered. “I have no authority, but I will listen to whatever you say.”

  “I saw some men,” Perri said. “Human men. My wife and I noticed them before the Gathering.”

  Quee Lee glanced at him, sensing some little portion of his reasoning.

  “I recognized one of those men,” Perri said.

  “What do you know about the man?”

  “He’s a smuggler, on occasion.”

  Quee Lee was neither surprised nor disappointed. Her husband knew all kinds of people, and a tangle of questions could wait until later. For now, it was enough to make a dismissive cluck with her tongue, smiling and staring back at the jail cell.

  “You recognized this smuggler?”

  “I think so,” said Perri.

  “His appearance was familiar to you?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “His face had been modified. Disguised. Smugglers have to have tricks.”

  “But his voice was familiar,” the officer pressed.

  “No. It’s a new voice, and that also means nothing. Every time that I’ve seen him, he sounds different.” Perri cut the air with one hand—a Dawsheen gesture promising that he was telling the truth. “I’ve known this man for centuries. I know his manners, his methods, how he moves his hands and his tongue. Lately, he’s been working with a pair of brothers. There were brothers with him today. And the fourth man in their party was a stranger, but he seemed to be in charge.”

  Like any cop, the Dawsheen had to ask, “How is it, sir, that you are familiar with a notorious smuggler?”

  Never hesitating, Perri said, “Because I know just about everybody.”

  Quee Lee’s willpower came close to breaking, but she managed to say nothing.

  “I have no authority,” said the Dawsheen one final time. “My superiors are searching upriver. The Queen will be recovered soon.” An unreadable expression passed across the narrow, bristly face. “Or she is already ours again,” he promised someone, perhaps himself. “But you can be sure that I have already relayed your words to every one of my superiors.”

  “Every escape route is closed,” Perri said. “Am I right?”

  The officer said, “Yes.”

  “But how can you be sure?” Quee Lee asked.

  Perri spoke. “Up and down the Long River, every tunnel and little doorway has been closed. They are closed and sealed and not one Biggolow flea can get inside this cavern, much less escape.” Then he looked at the officer again. “Is that why you’re confident?”

  The Dawsheen replied and the translator snapped, “Yes.”

  “Loon Fairbanks,” Perri offered. “That’s the smuggler’s name. And believe me, he anticipated every measure that you have employed already and whatever you might do ten moments from now. He knows your security systems, your psychology, your weather and every other factor. Loon will have a good, solid plan. If those men and your Queen are still inside the cavern, they won’t be for long. And if he can get Her out here, what chance do you have to find Her inside the Great Ship?”

  The officer fell silent, white eyes dulling slightly.

  “I can help you,” Perri said. “I want to help you. I don’t particularly like that man, and I wish to be of service to your Queen.”

  The alien stood abruptly.

  “I have the authority,” he shouted with astonishing energy. A cabinet jumped open, a hyperfiber vest and two weapons flying across the room. He put on the vest and pocketed the weapons, and then one of his little hands touched a control, causing the cage in back to open. The horizontal bars fell into a neat triangular pile at the feet of the prisoners. In a scream, he told the Dawsheen, “You have been freed. Go home and wait for the glacier.”

  The harum-scarum rose to her feet, towering above the rest. From her speaking mouth, she snarled, “What about me?”

  “I do not like you. You have earned my scorn and my distrust, and if you can live with that burden, you also are welcome to leave.”

  6

  Slowly, slowly, the Dawsheen biosphere grew more sophisticated, intricate, and robust. The brutal winters both delayed and inspired the wheel of evolution. There were never many species, but each was highly adaptable. Native genetics were intricate and miserly. No gene, useful or otherwise, was thrown away. Who could guess when or how one of these developmental oddities might become precious again?

  In little steps, intelligence arose. Simple civilizations flickered into existence—in the scattered valleys, typically–and each was summarily crushed under the next river of ice. Yet there are advantages to the occasional Death. What society wouldn’t relish the chance to wipe your world clean and begin again? The young Dawsheen began to educate their Queens, leaving them with elaborate instructions. Each All began with hints and advice, and clear warnings left behind by the wise departed. Each All blossomed with the help of thousands of past Alls. Every new city was superior to its forbearers. Every new society was quicker to grow and more likely to remain at peace. Gradually, the Dawsheen acquired industry and high technology. Like humanity, they cobbled together enormous telescopes—radio ears listening to alien gossip. With that burst of knowledge, they built starships and found empty worlds. But where most spacefarers embraced some flavor of immortality, the Dawsheen resisted. Their winters and the purging glaciers were too important, too deeply embedded in their bones. They bolstered their lifespans, but only to a few thousand years. And learning to control their climate, they made their winters as brief as possible. But they wouldn’t surrender their most powerful myth: The Dawsheen as creatures of endless change, born from relentless reinvention. The occasional Death was a blessing, and each new All was fresh and full of potentials. In their lustrous white eyes, most alien species seemed humdrum, and stodgy, as well as pleasantly, even deliciously, contemptible too.

  7

&nbs
p; Perri sat in the back of the little ship studying his own holo-map.

  “You may examine our map,” the Dawsheen remarked, sitting at the ship’s controls, carefully touching nothing. The AI pilot was keeping them close to the river’s face, ice piled on ice, tiny leads betraying the cold black water beneath. “My map is accurate to the millimeter, and updated by the instant.”

  “Thank you,” said Perri, his voice distracted. “But no, thank you.”

  Quee Lee was sitting beside the Dawsheen, her high-collared robe pulled snug across her squared shoulders. Suspicious and a little amused, she looked back at her husband as he stared into that maze of colored lines and pale spaces. “My husband is very proud of his map,” she said. “He loves it more than he loves me, I think. There are entire months when I can’t pry his nose away from it.”

  Perri seemed enthralled with his own narrow business. The tiny projector in one hand threw up a comprehensive view of the Long River, and he poked and prodded with his free hand. For no obvious reason, certain points needed to be enlarged and studied in detail. He let his instincts steer him. Quietly, he said, “You have an enormous area to search. The river starts under the hull—here—and twists and turns its way back and forth, down down down, into your little sea. The drop is nearly three thousand kilometers. Except near its source, it’s a lazy river. A couple meters down for every kilometer crossed. The river is one and a half million kilometers long, making it the longest river in the galaxy, no doubt. And since the cavern has an average width of twelve kilometers, your living area is roughly equal to the lands on your home world.”

  “It is a satisfying relationship,” the officer interjected.

  Leasing an enormous habitat required frightful sums. The Dawsheen had surrendered titles to half a hundred worlds—difficult planets with climates too stable or seas too tiny to feed deep ice ages; perfect for an inventive ape that could terraform and colonize, making homes for billions of prosperous souls.

  “This is a maze,” Perri cautioned. “This is a huge and intricate and beautiful maze. And I don’t think you can search it in the time left, no.”

  “We have sealed every exit.” The officer had no better response, and he repeated what he believed. “There is no way to escape.”

  “You’re searching mostly upriver,” Perri continued. “But they could have taken the Queen downstream.”

  “No,” the Dawsheen replied. “We tracked them coming this way.”

  “I bet so.” Perri touched an approaching sector, asking for an enlargement. A thousand square miles of ice and raw stone appeared before him. And again, he fingered portions of the map, gazing into the wasteland’s corners.

  Quee Lee smiled gently.

  “It just realized that I don’t know your name.”

  The Dawsheen uttered something quick and soft. His translator said, “Lastborn Teek.”

  With genuine sadness, she repeated, “Lastborn.”

  “A common name,” the Dawsheen explained. “As Firstborn is common at the beginning of an All.”

  The river was frozen over, and the weather continued to worsen, snow falling in thick white waves, hurricane winds trying to push them out of the sky. The worst gusts made the ship tremble, but shape-shifting wings and powerful engines kept them on course. Lastborn studied his controls and listened to reports from distant search parties, empty hands closing and opening again with a palpable nervousness.

  Quee Lee looked over her shoulder.

  “Darling?”

  Perri didn’t react.

  She said, “Darling” again, with a certain weight.

  He noticed. A soft sigh proved it, and he blinked, his poking hand held steady for a moment.

  “What are you thinking, darling?”

  He wasn’t sure. Until the question had been asked, his thoughts were utterly invisible to him.

  “Our friend deserves to know.” She reached back. Her hand was small and warm, soft in every way, little fingers wrapped around the man’s elegant young hand as she pulled gently, insistently, saying again, “Lastborn deserves to know.”

  “The flyer is up in the glacier,” Perri guessed. “It’s going to be buried, but not that deep. Camouflaged, but not that well.”

  Lastborn said nothing.

  “And there’s going to be at least three trails worth following. Heat trails, boot prints, and there will be signs of a second flyer, probably.”

  Alien fingers tightened into knots.

  “Have there been any ransom demands?”

  With a touch, the Dawsheen took the controls away from the AI pilot. In a near-whisper, he spoke for a long moment. Then his translator admitted, “The flyer was discovered a little while ago. It was left empty, hiding in a rock crevice. Not in the ice.”

  Quee Lee smiled with nervous pride.

  “The flyer was empty almost from the beginning,” Perri explained. “If I was stealing the Queen, I would have slipped her into a second ship. A better, far less visible ship. Then I’d double back, probably somewhere below the city.”

  “Every passageway out of our world is closed and secured—”

  Lastborn paused, as if hearing his own voice for the first time.

  Then with a new tone, he asked, “Where?”

  “Here.”

  Perri pulled his view back a hundred kilometers, passing over the city and dropping with the enormous falls. Beside and beneath the Dawsheen habitat were more caverns and tunnels, plus innumerable fissures too tiny to wear names. “A lot of things in this universe are difficult, but cutting a new door isn’t difficult,” he said. “In fact, with the right tools, it’s about the easiest job that there is.”

  8

  Ten thousand years ago, Perri came home from a long wandering.

  His wife greeted him in every usual way. She made love to him, and he returned the pleasure. She fed him and let him sleep, and then woke him with fond hands, using his body until both of them were spent, breathless, and dehydrated. Then they staggered into Quee Lee’s garden—a many-hectare room filled with jungle and damp hot air—and naked, they kneeled and drank their fill from a quick clear stream. Where the stream pooled, they swam and bathed, tired legs barely able to carry them back onto shore. With a voice frank and earthy, Quee Lee spoke to her husband. She explained how much she had missed him. She had craved his voice and stories and his pretty mouth against her mouth, and in her dreams, she had played cruel, sordid games with his delicate parts. She never spoke to anyone else with those words. No other lover, not even to pretend. Perri had been gone longer than usual—several years, and without a word. “Where were you?” she finally asked. “Where did you take that lovely little friend of ours?”

  Perri laughed, gently and happily. Then with a matching voice, he described his adventures. With like-minded idiots, he had explored one of the Great Ship’s engines—a moon-sized conglomeration of machines with pumps as big as cities. Strictly speaking, he didn’t have permission and sentries were stationed at every turn, and it consumed most of his time, remaining undetected. Then he went gambling, playing twenty-deck poker with a platoon of humans and harum-scarums and Blue Passions and AI souls. In less than sixteen days and nights, Perri managed to surrender most of the allowance given him by his very generous wife. He had let himself look embarrassed and a little desperate, smiling painfully at the better gamblers, asking for one more chance. “One more hand? With a fresh twenty-decks, maybe?” He charmed and begged, and of course when the cards were dealt, every suspicious eye was fixed on Perri. But his awful luck held. He had nothing. The Blue Passion at the far end of the table gathered up the enormous pot with suckered fingers; and three days later, in an entirely different corner of the Ship, the same alien surrendered Perri’s share of the profits, along with her weepy thanks.

  “She was in awful trouble,” Perri explained. “She absolutely needed that money.”

  “You’re so noble,” Quee Lee teased. “Anything for a lady in need.”

  With his earnin
gs, Perri bought a used slash-car, and in the depths of the Ship, in a looping tunnel used only for racing, he had raced. And won. And won again. He described the car and how it was to drive, hands wrapped around an imaginary wheel, the stone and hyperfiber walls blurring around him. Then just as Quee Lee was about to ask to see his new toy, Perri said, “I crashed it. Mangled it, and myself. I was clinically dead for a full week. It took most of my winnings to reclaim my body. The autodocs asked if I wanted improvements, but I honestly couldn’t think of one. Being perfect, as I am.”

  Both laughed.

  And then, with a very slight change of tone, Perri said, “The Long River.” He rolled onto his back, asking, “Do you know much about it?”

  “I’ve heard it mentioned. Yes.”

  “And the Dawsheen?”

  She knew about them, but not much.

  Perri explained the snowball world and its enduring biosphere. Quietly, slowly, he described the city perched beside the eleven-kilometer falls, and its inhabitants, and the amazing parade. A Queen had been carried past. An entire world gave Her its seed. And after the Queen was gone, safely entombed in a redoubt high above the blue ice, Perri had waited, watching the river freeze solid while the enormous snows fell, thousands of Dawsheen buried in their homes, happily falling into the eternal sleep—their bones and souls crushed beneath the newborn glacier.

  It was a sad, spectacular event to witness.

  The voice that began soft and happy turned softer and awed. Perri was lying naked on the bank of the stream, on his back, staring at the illusion of stars floating inside the room’s high ceiling. With her frank, practiced hands, his wife measured his mood, and when nothing happened, she admitted defeat. Curling up beside him, she tenderly asked, “What happens to the Queen?”

  “She waits,” he said. “Safe and high, she waits. Everything below her is frozen now, glaciers stretching to the sea. But in another century, maybe two, spring comes. The heat soars, and the ice melts, and safe inside that tough shell, she rides the flood down to the sea.”