The Greatship

by Robert Reed

  “Why? Does she interest you?”

  “Not particularly.” Ash looked up abruptly, staring at the black eyes. “She asked you a question, didn’t she?”

  “I remember. Yes.”

  “What question?”

  “She asked about human beings, of course.” With gentle disdain, the historian said, “You are a young species. And yes, you have been fortunate. Your brief story is fat with luck as well as fortuitous decisions. The Great Ship is a prime example. Large and ancient, and empty, and you happened to be the species that found it and took possession. And now you are interacting with a wealth of older, more knowledgeable species, gaining their gifts at a rate rarely if every experienced in the last three billion years.”

  “What did she ask?”

  “Pardon me. Did you just ask a question?”

  “I want to know what the woman said.”

  “I think…I know…she asked, ‘Will humanity be the first species to dominate the Milky Way?’”

  “What was the woman’s name?”

  Master said nothing.

  Ash feathered a hundred separate controls.

  “She did not offer any name,” the historian said.

  “What did she look like?”

  Again, with a puzzled air, the great mind had to admit, “I didn’t notice her appearance, or I am losing my mind.”

  Ash waited for a moment. “What was your reply?”

  “I told her and the entire audience, ‘Milk is your child’s food. If humans had named the galaxy after smoke, they wouldn’t bother with this nonsense of trying to consume trillions upon trillions of worlds.”

  For a long while, Ash said nothing.

  Then, quietly, the historian asked, “Where is my assistant? Where is Shadow?”

  “Waiting where you told him to wait,” Ash lied. And in the next breath, “Let’s talk about Shadow for a moment. Shall we?”

  * * *

  “What do you remember…now…?”

  “A crunch cake, and sweet water.” Shadow and Ash were standing in a separate, smaller chamber. Opening his mouth, the subject tasted the cake again. “Then a pudding of succulents and bark from the Gi-Ti tree.”

  “And now?”

  “Another crunch cake. In a small restaurant beside the Alpha Sea.”

  With mild amusement, Ash reported, “This is what you remember best. Meals. I can see your dinners stacked up for fifty thousand years.”

  “I enjoy eating,” the alien said.

  “A good Aaback attitude.”

  Silence.

  And then the alien turned, soft cords dragged along the floor. Perhaps he had felt something—a touch, a sudden chill—or maybe the expression on his face was born from his own thoughts. Either way, he suddenly asked, “How did you learn this work, Ash?”

  “I was taught,” he said. “And when I was better than my teachers, I learned on my own, through experiment and hard practice.”

  “Master claims you are very good, if not the best.

  “I’ll thank him for that assessment. But he is right: No one is better at this game than me.”

  The alien seemed to consider his next words. Then, “He mentioned that you are from a little world. Mars, was it? I remember something that he said, something that happened in your youth. The Night of the Dust, was it?”

  “A lot of history happened back then.”

  “Was it a war?” Shadow pressed. “Master often lectures about human history, and your worlds seem to have a fondness for fighting.”

  “I’m glad he finds us interesting.”

  “Your species fascinates him.” Shadow tried to move and discovered that he couldn’t. Save for his twin heart/lungs and the mouth, every muscle in his body was fused in place. “I don’t quite understand why he feels this interest.”

  “You attend his lectures, don’t you?”

  “Always.”

  “He makes most of his income from public talks.”

  “Many souls are interested in his words.”

  “Do you recall a lecture from last year?” Ash gave details, and he appeared disappointed when Shadow said:

  “No, I don’t remember. There must not have been any food in that lecture hall.”

  The Aaback and human laughed together.

  Then Ash said, “Let’s try something new. For the sake of calibrations, I want you to think back as far as possible. Describe the very first meal that you can remember.”

  A long pause ended with, “A little crunch cake. I was a child, and it was my first adult meal.”

  “I used to be an interrogator,” Ash said abruptly.

  The other’s eyes were gray and watchful.

  “During that old war, I interrogated people, and on certain days, I tortured them.” He nodded calmly, adding, “Memory is a real thing. Maybe it is the most real thing, Shadow. Memory is a dense little nest made, like everything, from electrons—where the electrons are and where they are not—and you would be appalled, just appalled, by the ways that something real can be hacked out of the surrounding bullshit.”

  * * *

  “Quee Lee.”

  “Pardon?”

  “She is the mysterious human woman.” Ash began disconnecting his devices, leaving only the minimal few to keep shepherding the Vozzen’s mind. “It was easy enough to learn her name. A lecture attended by humans, on such-and-such day. When I found one lady, she told me about another. Who mentioned a good friend who might have gone to listen to you. But while that woman hadn’t heard of you, she mentioned an acquaintance who had a fondness for the past, and her name is Quee Lee. She happened to be there, and she asked the question.”

  Relief filled Master, and with a thrilled voice, he said, “I remember her now, yes. Yes. She was interested in human dominance over the galaxy.”

  “Not quite, no.”

  Suspicion flowered, and curiosity followed. “She didn’t ask the question?”

  “She did, but it was her second question, and strictly speaking, it didn’t belong to her.” Ash smiled and nodded. “The woman sitting beside her wanted it asked, and as a favor, Quee Lee repeated the question, since she had your attention in hand.”

  A brief pause ended with a wary question. “What then did the woman ask first?”

  Ash stared at the remaining displays, and with a quiet, firm voice said, “I’ve spoken with Quee Lee. At length. She remembers asking you, ‘What was the earliest sentient life to arise in the galaxy?’”

  The words generated a sophisticated response. An ocean of learning was tapped, and from that enormity a single turquoise thread was pulled free, and offered. Five candidates were named in a rush. Then the historian rapidly described each species, their home worlds, and eventual fates.

  “None survived into the modern age,” he said sadly. “Except as rumor and unsubstantiated sightings, the earliest generation of intelligence has died away.”

  Ash nodded and waited.

  “How could I forget such a very small thing?”

  “Because it is so small,” Ash said. “The honest, sad truth is that your age is showing. I’m an old man for my species, but that’s nothing compared to you. The Vozzen journeyed out among the stars during my Permian. Your mind is enormous and dense and extraordinarily quick. But it is a mind. No matter how vast and how adept, it suffers from what is called bounded rationality. You don’t know everything, no matter how much you wish otherwise. And your surroundings today are enriched, full of opportunities to learn. So long as you wish to understand new wonders, you’re going to have to allow, on occasion, little pieces of your past to fade away.”

  “But why would such a trivial matter bother me so?” asked Master.

  And then in the next instant, he answered his own question. “Because it was trivial, and lost. I’m not accustomed to forgetting. The sensation is quite novel. I suppose it must have preyed on my equilibrium, and wore a wound in my mind.

  “Exactly,” lied Ash. “Exactly, and exactly.”

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  After giving him fair warning, Ash began to leave the historian. “The final probes still need to disengage themselves,” he said. Then with a careful tone, he asked, “Should I bring your assistant to you? Would you like to see him now?”

  “Please.”

  “Very well.” Ash pretended to step outside, turning in the darkened hallway, centuries of practice telling him where to step. Entering the secondary chamber, he used a casual voice, mentioning to Shadow, “By the way, I think I know what you are.”

  “What I am?”

  With sudden fierceness, Ash asked, “Did you really believe that you could fool me?”

  The alien said nothing, and by every physical means, he acted puzzled but unworried.

  Ash knew better.

  “Your body is mostly Aaback, but there’s something else. If I hadn’t suspected it, I wouldn’t have found it. But what seems to be your brain serves as an elaborate camouflage for a quiet, nearly invisible neural network.”

  The alien reached with both hands, yanking one of the cables free from his forehead. Then a long tongue reached high, wiping the gray blood from the wound. A halfway choked voice asked, “What do you see inside me?”

  “Dinners,” Ash reported. “Dinners reaching back for billions of years.”

  Silence.

  “Do you belong to one of the first five species?”

  The alien continued tearing out the cables, but he was powerless to void the drifters inside his double-mind.

  “No,” said Ash. With a sly smile, he said, “I don’t think you’re one of the five. I can tell. You’re even older than that, aren’t you?”

  The tongue retreated into the mouth. A clear, sorry voice said, “I am not sure, no.”

  “And that’s why,” said Ash.

  “Why?”

  “The woman asked the question about the oldest species, and you picked that moment because of her.” He laughed, nodded. “What did you use? How did you slice a few minutes out of a Vozzen’s perfect memory?”

  “With a small disruptive device–”

  “I want to see it.”

  “No.”

  Ash kept laughing. “Oh, yes. You are going to show me the tool.”

  Silence.

  “Master doesn’t even suspect,” Ash said. “You were the one who wanted to visit me. You simply gave the Vozzen a good excuse. You heard about me somehow, and you wanted me to peer inside his soul, and yours. You were hoping that I would piece together the clues and tell you what I was seeing inside your peculiar mind.”

  “What do you see?” Shadow asked.

  “Two basic elements.” A thought severed every link with Shadow, and with professional poise, Ash said, “Your soul might be ten or twelve billion years old. I don’t know how that could be, but I can imagine: In the earliest days of the universe, when stars were young and metal-poor, life found some other way to evolve. A completely separate path. Structured plasmas, maybe. Maybe. Whatever the route, your ancestors evolved and spread and then died away as the universe turned cold and empty. Except on occasion, when they managed to adapt. Using organic bodies as hosts, from what I can see.”

  “I am the only survivor,” Shadow said. “Whatever the reason, I cannot remember anyone else like me.”

  “You are genuinely ancient, and I think you are smarter than you pretend to be. But this ghost mind is limited, unsophisticated. Vozzens are far smarter, and most humans too. But when I was watching your thoughts, when you were contemplating crunch cakes, I saw other dinners, secret dinners, reaching back for a billion years, at least. And that kind of vista begs for an explanation.”

  Ash took a deep breath. “Your mind is limited, but your memory has help. Quantum help. And this isn’t on any scale that I’ve ever come across, or even imagined possible. I can gather the collective conscience from a trillion Masters, but with you, I can’t pick a number than looks sane.”

  The alien showed his pink teeth, saying nothing.

  “Are you pleased?” Ash asked.

  “Pleased by what?”

  “You are probably the most common entity in Creation,” said Ash. “I have never seen such a signal. This clear. This deep and dramatic. In one form or another, you exist in a fat, astonishing portion of all the possible realities.”

  Shadow said, “Yes.”

  “Yes what?”

  With a tiny nod, a human nod, he said, “Yes, I am pleased.”

  6

  The sun always held its position in the fictional sky. And always, the same wind blew with relentless calm. In such a world, it was easy to believe there was no such monster as time, and the day would never end, and a man with old and exceptionally sad memories could convince himself, on occasion, that there would never be another night.

  Ash was last to leave the shop.

  “Again, thank you for your considerable help,” said the historian.

  “Thank you for your generous gift.” Ash found another cup of tea waiting for him, and he sipped down a full mouthful, watching Shadow untether the floating pack. “Where next?”

  “I have more lectures to give,” Master said.

  “Good.”

  “And I will interview the newest passengers onboard the Ship.”

  “As research, I presume.”

  “And as a pleasure, yes.”

  Shadow was placing a tiny object beside one of the bristlecone’s roots. “If you don’t lend me the disruptor,” Ash had threatened, “I’ll explain a few deep secrets to the Vozzen.”

  Shadow had relented, of course.

  Sipping tea, Ash quietly said, “Master. What can you tell me about the future?”

  “About what is to come–?”

  “I never met a historian who didn’t have opinions on that subject,” Ash said. “Consider my species, for instance. What will happen to us in the next twenty million years?”

  Master launched into an abbreviated but dense lecture, explaining to his tiny audience what was possible about forecasting the future and what was unknowable, and how every bridge between the two was an illusion.

  His audience wasn’t listening.

  With a whisper, Ash asked Shadow, “But why do you live this way? With him, in this kind of role?”

  In an Aaback fashion, the creature grinned. Then Shadow peered over the edge of the canyon, speaking to no one in particular when he explained, “He needs me so much. This is why.”

  “As a servant?”

  “And as a friend, and a confidant.” With a very human shrug, he asked Ash, “How could anyone survive even a single day, if he didn’t feel as if he was, in some little great way, needed?”

  Bridge Seven

  Ruling the skin of one living world are the bacteria and the bugs, giant megaplegs marching through forests of gaul-trees and scurrying heart roaches, and gilled wanderers and quirks and the atolls of rhom-clams that speckle the face of the Twin Seas. That skin, that fierce light-washed biosphere, has a mass. Every physical attribute can be measured precisely, to the nearest microgram and milliliter, and that is for a single planet of no great significance but for its perfect lack of all significance.

  Now repeat the study with a thousand other worlds.

  Gas giants can be sterilized by exploding stars and their own internal furnaces, and cosmic accidents along with grand oversights will strip away the self-replicating and self-improving from uncounted terrestrial worlds. But where life exists, bacteria and viruses dominate. Buried oceans are ubiquitous, common inside large comets and the sunless planets cast into the interstellar silence. Each ocean has its thin population of mindless tenacious slow life. Wet stony crust and cold slurries of methane and rock-hard ice hold their own multitudes. Apply any kind of lasting energy to one of those bodies—sunlight or tides or radionuclides, and everything else arises: Communal cells and elaborate organisms and organs that produce nothing but thought. Intelligence arises. Societies and grand histories emerge. Machines will be built from carved plastics and titanium and
quilts of silicon that think for others and then for themselves, and then machines become another mass of viable, measurable life.

  This is all to say that the galaxy is rich with life.

  Measured as mass and as volume, a staggering quantity of material can live happily somewhere and survive in many other places. The galaxy is thick with naturally made starships, and even the poorest inhabited world is a wondrous vessel, loyally following its sun or wandering free in the dark, carrying far too much possibility to be measured, to be calculated, to be known.

  The Great Ship is so very small by comparison.

  A fleck of simple, sterile rock and pure hyperfiber, reactors and rockets, it carries assorted chambers filled with haphazard examples of life—slivers of great biospheres bound for other places, or nowhere.

  Each planet is a ship that never stops moving.

  The Ship is merely swifter than the rest, and odder. But no grand authority seems able to give the true compelling reason why the Great Ship should be considered valuable, or even notable.

  Ignore me, the voice pleads.

  Get off me and forget me and I promise, I will vanish, into the smothering gloom, with the barest fuss.

  Aeon's Child

  1

  Pamir was a captain of consequence. His ageless frame was tall and strong, partly because passengers seemed to expect both from the ship’s officers, and a large, pleasantly homely face conveyed confidence and a burdensome wisdom. In uniform, he drew long looks, whether from humans or sighted aliens. And unlike most captains, he had risen in the Ship’s hierarchy without depending on friendships or flattery. It was said in his presence, with all the best intentions, that Pamir could have become a Submaster by now, earning a seat at the Master Captain’s table, if only he would attempt to play the game.

  “Give gifts,” Washen advised. “Memorable gifts, and durable. Gifts that will say, ‘Pamir,’ for ten thousand years.”

  He knew the game but feigned ignorance. “What would I give that could impress a Submaster?”