The Greatship

by Robert Reed

  He shook his head. “Sorry. I can’t.”

  She took another step. “Will you turn yourself in to me?”

  “No.”

  “Will you surrender to anyone?”

  “Not intentionally, no.”

  She paused, probably wondering if she could physically restrain him. Not now, not in these circumstances. With a quiet, calculating voice, she said, “I don’t see why you sneaked in here, frankly.”

  “I have a gift for you.”

  She exhaled, entirely surprised.

  “You advised me to give gifts, didn’t you?”

  “What is it?” Washen asked.

  He laid a biovial on the nearest tabletop and passed a small kinetic gun to his other hand, yanking a memo chip from his trousers’ pocket. “These are the instructions.” It was the same chip that she had given him, resembling a worn snowflake. “It’s all pretty straightforward, once you get past the strangeness. That is, if you are willing to help.”

  “Help you?”

  The homely face smiled. “No. I don’t want that.”

  She looked at the vial and gun and snowflake. “What happened down there? Give me that much.”

  “Do whatever you believe is right, but promise me, you need to study everything in the chip.”

  She nodded but her expression drifted into pity and gloom. “Where will you go, Pamir?”

  He said nothing.

  “We won’t stop hunting you.”

  The grin brightened. He stepped to one side and past her, making for the apartment’s emergency hatch. “Good-bye, darling. And thank you.”

  Washen grabbed the vial, and hoping to delay him, she lifted it overhead, aiming at the olivine floor.

  Pamir didn’t give even a backward glance. “It’s flesh,” he said. “Barely living, perfectly stupid flesh.”

  “Yours?”

  “Yes. And theirs too.”

  “Whose?” she asked.

  He stepped through the open hatch.

  “Who else is this, Pamir?”

  The hatch closed and a shaped charge melted its mechanisms. Then after a moment’s contemplation, Washen set down the biovial and picked up the old snowflake, tapping it as if to coax the answers to spring forth, explaining every mystery without fuss, without delay.

  11

  She called him the Child, and she called herself his mother, even when both knew that no part of her was incorporated into him. The Child lived in his mother’s home, growing faster than human children but requiring far longer to mature. His talents were baffling and incomplete. His mistakes were painful for both him and his botched creations. But he persisted with his education, imagining the future, some ambitious part of him eager to become vast, and powerful, and wise.

  His mother-who-wasn’t-his-mother told him what little she knew.

  When the Child dreamed of the past—worlds he didn’t know; violence beyond measure—she would comfort him, wetting his forehead with damp rags while saying, “That isn’t you. You are not them.”

  Yet they were part of him.

  Tiny, tiny bodies floated inside each of his myriad cells, giving him magical powers over bone and meat.

  “The others were enemies,” she taught him. “They came here and fought—a terrible, brutal war—and then they killed each other.”

  “But why, Mother?”

  She didn’t know, but she made guesses. She talked about greed and jealousy, and fear—human emotions, which made them suspect. Then she said, “Tiny parts of them survived. But not enough to remake either, which is why your father bound those pieces with his own flesh.”

  A human was his father. The Child couldn’t stop asking about him.

  “I don’t know where he is,” she said, her face grave, sorrowful. “I don’t even know if he’s alive anymore.”

  “I will find him,” the Child said.

  But one day, instead of acting happy when he repeated that promise, Mother shook her head and told him, “You won’t do that, no. Never. You’re getting too strong, too skilled. I think it’s time that you leave.”

  He had never left the apartment. “You want to walk out the door?”

  “No, I need you to leave the Ship.” She showed images of a young, barely living world. Its sun was ruddy and fixed in the sky. Its ocean was thick with organics and simple bugs. “Your father left instructions. Once you were ready, he wanted you to go to a place like this and live. Do you like it?”

  Not at all. In the Child’s mind, the world seemed ugly.

  Yet then again, the prospect of embracing an entire planet seemed wondrous, even inevitable.

  They went to one of the Ship’s ports, to a tiny vessel that would carry him to the new world. Kneeling before him, Mother straightened his useless clothes, and she cried, saying, “Remember. Two of your parents hated each other so thoroughly that they couldn’t see anything else. They lived badly, and they hurt one another, and how do you erase their terrible crimes…?”

  “I will live properly,” he said, with feeling.

  “What does ‘properly’ mean?”

  “With kindness to all of my parts, and to whatever life forms that I meet along the way.”

  She sobbed and said, “Be good.”

  The eternal motherly advice.

  Suddenly the Child looked over her shoulder, focusing on something distant.

  “A man,” he said.

  She turned.

  “He was watching me. But he’s gone now.”

  “Did he look like you?”

  “Maybe.” He thought harder, and then said, “No, he didn’t. He was much more handsome than me.”

  She straightened his clothes again, smiling bravely.

  “I think you’re lovely,” she told him. “Just beautiful, if you ask me.”

  Bridge Eight

  The finest minds are cold or believe they are cold.

  A small dense superconductive brain enjoys the swiftest thoughts. Whiskers of silicon can travel anywhere while demanding very little, and if those were the only criteria, then the galaxy would be awash in thoughtful dust. But physical law limits what the small mind can embrace, and being quick is rarely best. This is why one liter of bioceramic sentience is a more popular size. Thinking fast enough for most occasions and then survive its mistakes, that kind of mind can walk about on two legs, or fly with four wings, or happily sit inside a cool box on a high safe shelf. And that is the mind that can hold thousands of years of memory, each moment and every year patiently waiting for the chance to speak.

  Inspiration flourishes in the big mind.

  Memories like to talk to one another, and Genius is the beast that sits to the side, eavesdropping on the roaring conversation.

  A million years can be bottled inside a liter-sized maelstrom, and the chaos spits out dreams and little ordinary thoughts and sometimes great mad wonderful ideas, and sometimes Genius will take away what seems new or wise or nothing but fun.

  It is a nature of the universe to make minds.

  But even a feeble, barely self-aware soul realizes that minds are never the priority. What matters in the universe is dark energy and then cold dark matter and then come the little stars and the worlds circling those stars and the worlds lost between.

  Thought is a contaminate woven through the dark cold.

  Consciousness can look like a flaw, a mistake.

  Yet even scarce, minds continue to bear down on each vivid moment, and Genius contemplates what it can, and the universe expands while it cools as the stars begin to wink out, and minds die, and certain questions are asked and answered in the same reliable ways, and sometimes the survivors can find the peace to sleep awhile and let the dreams roll on.

  The Caldera of Good Fortune

  1

  The hamlet was forbidden to wear any name, and by decree, its population and borders were never allowed to grow. Tucked inside a high valley, the tiny community was flanked on three sides by dense, ancient rock—walls of black rock flecked with w
hite and dubbed “granite” because of a passing resemblance to the bones of Old Earth. Stunted forests of cold-adapted, light-starved trees grew wild on the slopes, while the caldera’s rim was reserved for native life forms. Visiting the rim required special permission from the Luckies, and without exception, one of the hamlet’s permanent citizens had to act as an Honored Guide.

  Twenty-five hundred humans, aliens, and AIs lived permanently in the nameless hamlet. On the strength of an address, even the laziest among them made excellent livings. Passengers came from the far reaches of the Great Ship to walk the high rim and gaze into the caldera’s magnificent lake. But when the prolonged winter was finished—when the signs pointed at catastrophic change—the fattest of the fat times began. When the lake began to simmer and bubble, news quickly spread among the wealthy. Tens of thousands of strangers would ride the tram into the high valley, dressed for the brutal cold, happily paying insane fees for the chance to sleep in somebody’s cellar or attic, or be stacked like logs in the back of a little closet. The hamlet was transformed by bright cheery souls who sang drinking songs and spent fortunes on the overpriced food, all while watching vapor rising from behind the towering rim. Guests were constantly searching out the natives, asking them when the caldera would finally erupt. “Soon,” was a safe reply, but these decisions were made entirely by the Luckies. Ten Ship-days was the average length of an eruption—time enough for the entire lake to boil skyward and freeze solid. And how big and beautiful would the new mountain be? “It will be enormous and gorgeous,” the residents promised. And that wasn’t just because they wanted to peel more money from these prosperous souls; even the most jaded, sun-starved citizen looked forward to the spectacle of fragile, moon-washed ice hanging over their drab little home.

  Narrow trails crisscrossed the valley walls, eventually leading to the rim. But hiking was thankless work and a considerable investment of time. Antique cable cars offered quicker, easier journeys. For thousands of years, tourists had gathered inside the spacious, overheated station, and locals who wanted work sat with their backs to the caldera, gossiping with one another, patiently waiting for the first worthwhile offer.

  Crockett had planned to do nothing that day but sleep. The lake had been steaming for weeks, and he’d made plenty already. But a friend mentioned that today and today only, a certain pair of security officers was patrolling in and around the station grounds.

  As it happened, those officers were very beautiful and wonderfully human.

  When the hamlet was jammed with strangers, outsiders were hired to fill critical jobs. Included in their ranks was a platoon of security officers, human and otherwise. Judging the age of immortals was difficult; but those two women carried a palpable, delicious sense of youth. They smiled constantly—weightless, untroubled grins common to barely grown people. In their walks and the secure tilt of their heads, they looked unaffected by responsibility. Another clue was their skin, as smooth and clear as any Crockett had ever seen: After centuries of life, most humans cultivated artful wrinkles near the eyes, hinting at wisdoms that might or might not exist. If appearances could be believed, the duo was thrilled to be living in the hamlet, however briefly. They patrolled together and whispered to each other constantly, sharing giggles and various knowing looks; and several times, Crockett had spied them standing in the middle of a crowded street, ignoring the shoving bodies and lustful glances while they held gloved hands, gazing up at the distant rim of the caldera and the curtain of fresh steam that rose into the gloom and then froze, falling where the winds let it fall as this spring’s first snow.

  Those girls were the reason Crockett walked to the cable car station and sat with his neighbors, making small talk while deflecting the tourists: He was waiting for to see the objects of his affection.

  “Is my offer not enough?” asked a lumbering Tamias.

  “Your offer is most generous,” Crockett replied, examining the alien’s rodent-like face with an appropriately indirect gaze. “But my ass is comfortable, and I will leave it where it is for now.”

  Soon a Hippocamus shuffled forwards—a pregnant male, by the looks of its belly. The creature took a deep breath and held the rich air inside his long neck, assessing the captured odors. Then he bowed to Crockett, but before he could speak, the human warned, “I am claimed by others, my friend. At present, I am helpless to help you.”

  Without complaint, the alien stepped down the line and took another defining breath, and after a few moments of conversation, hired a little Janusian couple to be his Guide.

  Human tourists noticed the rebuff. They looked like a married couple, and married for a very long time. The wife was less pretty than her husband, carrying quite a few millennia on her bones. Both of them had stepped off a cable car that just returned from the rim, wearing smiles and heavy, self-heating coats and tall boots that had recently walked in the snow. The pretty man approached Crockett. “We wish we could have stayed longer,” he confessed. “But our guide was tired, and we had to ride back with her.”

  Crockett shrugged. “The Luckies won’t let you stay up there alone.”

  The old woman mentioned a respectable fee. “For a second peek. Would that be all right?”

  Crockett was tempted, but only to a point.

  “Not enough, is it?” asked her husband.

  “I’m a little nervous.” Crockett threw a dramatic glance over his shoulder. “This eruption is late. It could come any time now.”

  “Are you being honest?” the woman asked, plainly suspicious.

  “There’s honesty in my noise,” Crockett conceded with an amiable laugh. “Our lake‘s been simmering longer than usual, and eventually, all that warm water has to leap into the sky.”

  He had no predictive skills. Only the Luckies knew when a full eruption was imminent, and they never gave clues.

  “Warning away the fools,” said the pretty man. “That seems like a good career.”

  “It would be noble work,” Crockett said.

  Then the wife tugged on her husband’s elbow. “Maybe we should go back to our room, dear.”

  Crockett liked to believe that he understood women. One of the attractions of living in this nameless place was the parade of wealthy, carefree ladies. This particular old woman gave every sign of wanting attention, and Crockett imagined that he was her husband. She seemed like an elegant creature, accustomed to wealth but not spoiled by the stuff. He appreciated that old-fashioned face and build, and maybe there was an old-fashioned address in her past. Could she have come from the Old Earth? That was a fascinating prospect, and watching the amorous couple stroll off into the darkness, he promised himself that he would find them tomorrow. For a modest fee, he would offer his valuable services as an Honored Guide, testing his guesses against whatever they revealed about their cultivated lives.

  Besides Crockett, the only Guides were a pair of rubber-faced AIs and a fiery little vesper. But the little sun had just set, and as often happened when night began, tourists grew more interested in dinner than a walk through the cold. The vesper soon rose and danced his way home. The AIs plugged into each other, vanishing in their own unimaginable ways. Crockett was alone, and the two objects of interest—those delightful security officers—had yet to pass through the station. Were they delayed? Did some criminal business ruin their timetable? Crockett turned in his chair, watching the banks of steam illuminated by moonlight; and then he heard a sound and looked forward again, exactly at the moment when the two lovelies strode into the almost empty room.

  He offered a smile and soft sigh.

  Effervescent as always, the officers responded with as much of a glance as he could have hoped for. They were delightful young ladies, each lovely in her way. The shorter one was muscular, with meaty breasts and a buoyant ass. By contrast, her companion was tall and elegant, blessed with a lip-rich mouth and eyes that couldn’t have been brighter.

  “Hello,” Crockett managed.

  Giggling, their hands met for a moment.r />
  That they were lovers seemed self-evident. But Crockett’s favorite rumor was that while they were passionate toward one another, they left the room and grace to invite a third party into their passion.

  “Everybody else is home or on the rim,” he said.

  Really, couldn’t he find anything more memorable to offer?

  “We should visit the rim sometime,” said the taller girl. With a flip of that pretty head, she declared, “You know, we could make it up there and back again before our dinner break is done.”

  They must have a very long break, Crockett thought.

  Since the officers weren’t permanent residents, the Luckies—the aliens who owned this realm—wouldn’t allow them close without a Guide. Seeing his opportunity, Crockett came up with an amount that would make him the perfect companion: Not too much, but then again, not so cheap that they’d think he was begging for the honor.

  For a long, delightful moment, two lovely faces stared at him.

  Then together, without one word being said, they approached the twin AIs, using pointed fingers and sparks of static electricity to alert their Guides.

  Moments later, a cable car pulled out of the station, four passengers rising silently into the darkness.

  Well, this hadn’t worked out at all. Dignity demanded that Crockett wait for a few moments, as if the next action wasn’t connected to the past; and then he stood, putting on his hood, preparing for the sad walk home.

  A lone figure stepped into the vacant station.

  Countless aliens were passengers on the Great Ship. According to official counts, thousands of species were among the wealthy, exceptionally important souls onboard, and some aliens took a multitude of physical forms. Of course not every entity visited the Caldera of Good Fortune, but Crockett had never met the species standing before him. Even a rapid search of reliable databases came up with nothing but a few similar creatures. The entity was humanoid and small, with a tiny sucking mouth and smoky white eyes large enough to nearly fill its elliptical face. Those odd eyes regarded Crockett for a contemplative moment, and then through its translator, the creature asked, “What would be a fair price to ride with me to the top…?”