by Robert Reed
“Want to hear a rumor?” he asked.
She sat up in bed, answering him with a look.
“Like we heard before, the captains did discover the hole in their maps, and they sent an old robot down into the hole. But it got lost and climbed out again, and it couldn’t explain where it had gone wrong.”
“That’s the story I remember,” she said.
“Engineers tore open the robot. Just to identify the malfunction. And that’s when they found a message.”
Quee Lee blinked, and waited.
“Addressed to the Master Captain,” he continued, his smile warming by the moment. “After a thousand security checks, the invitation was delivered. Except for the Master Captain, and maybe a few Submasters, nobody knows what the message said. But a few days later, alone, the Master Captain walked down that tunnel and vanished for nearly five hours. And when she emerged again, she looked sick. Shaken sick. The rumor claims that she actually cried in the presence of her security troops, which is why the whole story refuses to get wings and soar. It doesn’t sound at all like the benign despot we know so well.”
His wife agreed with a nod. “When did this happen?” she asked.
“Ten years ago, nearly.”
“And since then?”
“Well,” said Perri, “the Master Captain has quit weeping. If that’s what you’re curious about.”
She lay back on her pillows.
“No,” her husband said.
“What else?”
“I didn’t wake you just to tell you something that might have happened. Or even to give you another mystery to chew on.”
“Then why am I awake?”
“I know a man,” Perri said. “And he’s very good pulling old memories out of very old skulls.”
* * *
The magician was named Ash.
He was human, but he lived inside an alien habitat where the false sun never set. Sitting in a room full of elaborate machinery, Ash told his newest clients, “I can make promises, but they don’t mean much. This date is a very big problem, madam. You were alive then, yes. But barely. This is a few years before bioceramic brains came into existence. You could have been the brightest young thing, but my tricks work best with the galactic-standard minds…brains that employ quantum many-world models to interface with a trillion sister minds…”
“Can you do anything?” Perri asked.
“I can take your money,” Ash replied. “And I can also dig into the old data archives. You claim you have a place in mind?”
“Yes,” Quee Lee said. Then she repeated the location just as the voice had given it to her.
“I assume you think you were there then,” Ash said.
“I don’t know if I was.”
“And this is important?”
“We’ll see,” she said.
Ash began to work. He explained that on the Earth, for this very brief period of history, security systems as well as ordinary individuals tried to keep thorough digital records of everything that happened and that didn’t happen. The trouble was that the machinery was very simple and unreliable, and the frequent upgrades as well as a few nasty electromagnetic pulses wiped clean a lot of records. Not to mention the malicious effects of the early AIs—entities who took great delight in creating fictions that they would bury inside whatever data banks would accept their artistic works.
“The chances of success,” Ash began to say.
Then in the ancient records, he saw something entirely unexpected, and lifting his gaze, he mentioned to Quee Lee, “You were a pretty young lady.”
“Did you find me?” she asked expectantly.
“Too easily,” he allowed. Then he showed her a portion of the image—a girl who was nine or maybe eight years old, dressed in the uniform mandated by a good private school.
With a shrug, Ash allowed, “No need for paranoia. This does happen, on occasion.” He gave commands to a brigade of invisible assistants, and then said, “If I can dig up a few more records, I think I can piece together what you and the man talked about.”
“What man?” she asked.
Perri asked.
“The man standing beside you,” Ash remarked. “The man with the golden balloon.” Then he showed an image captured by a nearby security camera, adding, “I’m assuming he’s your father, judging by his looks.”
“He’s not,” she whispered.
“And now we have a second digital record,” Ash said happily. “Hey, and now a third. See the adolescent boy down the path from you? Wearing the medallion on his chest? Well, that was a camera and a very good microphone. His video has been lost, but not the audio. I can’t tell you how unlikely it is to have this kind of recording survive this long, in any usable form.”
“What is the man saying to me?” Quee Lee asked nervously.
“Let me see if I can pull it up…”
And suddenly a voice that she hadn’t thought about for aeons returned. The young girl and the stranger were standing in Hong Kong Park, on the cobblestone path beside the lotus pond. A short white picket fence separated them from the water. Standing in the background were towers and a bright blue sky. With the noise of the city and other passersby erased, the voice began by saying, “Hello, Quee Lee.”
“Hello,” the young girl replied, nervous in very much the same fashion that the old woman was now. “Do I know you?”
“Hardly at all,” the man replied.
The girl looked about, as if expecting somebody to come save her. Which there would have been: Quee Lee was the only child to a very wealthy couple who didn’t let her travel anywhere without bodyguards and a personal servant. “Where are my people now?” she seemed to ask herself.
The voice said, “I will not hurt you, my dear.”
Hearing that promise didn’t help the girl relax.
“Ask me where I came from. Will you please?”
The youngster decided on silence.
But the strange man laughed, and pretending the question had been asked, he remarked, “I came from the stars. I am here on a great, important mission, and it involves your particular species.”
The girl looked up at a face that carried a distinct resemblance to her face. Then she looked back down the path, hoping for rescue.
“In a little while,” said the stranger, “my work here will be complete.”
“Why?” the girl muttered.
“Because that is when one of your mechanical eyes will look at the most lucrative portion of the sky, at the perfect moment, and almost everything that you will need to know about the universe will be delivered to your doorstep.”
The pretty black-haired girl hugged her laptop bag, saying nothing.
“When that day comes,” said the man, “you must try and remember everything. Do you understand me, Quee Lee? That one day will be the most important moment in your species’ history.”
“How do you know my name?” she asked again.
“And this is not all that I am doing on your world.” The man was handsome but quite ordinary, nothing about him hinting at anything that wasn’t human. He was wearing a simple suit, rumpled at the edges. His right hand held the string that led up to a small balloon made from helium and gold Mylar. He smiled with fierce joy, telling her, “It has been decided. Your species has a great destiny in service of the Union.”
In the present, two people gasped quietly.
“What’s the Union?” the girl asked.
“Everything,” was the reply. “And it is nothing.”
The girl was prettiest when she was puzzled, like now.
“You won’t remember any portion of our conversation,” the man promised. “Ten minutes from now, you won’t remember me or my words.”
One hand smoothed her skirt, and she anxiously stared at her neat black shoes.
“But before I leave you, I wanted to tell you something else. Are you listening to me, Quee Lee?”
“No,” she claimed.
The man laughed hearti
ly. Then he bent down, placing their faces on the same level, and when he had her gaze, he said, “You were adopted, only your parents don’t know that. The baby inside your mother had died, and I devised you out of things that are human, but also elements inspired by a wonderful old friend of mine.”
The girl tried to step back but couldn’t. Discovering that her feet were fixed to the pavement, she looked down and then up at the other adults walking past the long brown pond, and when she tried to scream, no sound came from her open mouth.
“I am not gracelessly cruel,” the stranger told her. “You may think that of me one day. But even though I live to aid the workings of an enormous power, I make certain that I find routes to kindness, and when it offers itself, to love.”
The little girl couldn’t even make herself cry.
“Part of you,” he said. Then he paused, and from two different perspectives, the audience watched as his free hand touched the girl’s bright black hair. “The shape of your mind was born on another world, a world too distant to be seen today. And I once lied to that mind, Quee Lee. I told it that I could stand aside and watch it die forever.”
She had no tears, but the man was crying, his face wet and sorry.
“I wish I could offer more of an apology,” he said. And then he rose up again, pulling the balloon’s string close to his chest while wiping at his wet face with a wrinkled sleeve. “But much is at stake…more than you might ever understand, Quee Lee…and this is as close to insubordination as this good servant can manage…”
Then he glanced at the security camera hidden in the trees and handed the string and balloon to the girl beside him. “Would you like this, Quee Lee? As a little gift from your grandfather?”
The girl discovered that she could move again.
“Take it,” he advised.
She accepted the string with one little hand.
For a brief instant, they were posing, staring across the millennia in a stance that was strained but nonetheless sweet—the image of a little girl enjoying the park with some undefined adult relative.
“I will see you later,” he mentioned.
Quee Lee released the string, watching the gold ball rise faster than she would have expected—shooting into the sky as if it weighed nothing at all.
When her eyes dropped, the stranger had stepped out of view.
And a few moments later, her father ran up the path to join her, asking, “Where did you go? I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
“I didn’t go anywhere,” the girl replied.
“Tell me the truth,” the scared little man demanded. “Did you talk to somebody you shouldn’t have talked to?”
She said, “No.”
“Why are you lying?” he asked.
“But I’m not lying,” she protested. Then with a wide, smart grin, the young Quee Lee added, “The sky is going to talk, Father. Did you know that? And he promised me, he did, that I am going to see him again later…!”
Bridge Eleven
Every irreducible moment brings the New. Nothing will ever remain where it was and how it was. Matter is transformed. Energy and thought are transformed. With endless hands, the universe frantically shuffles its pieces, and every part of the universe must move and grow colder or move and grow temporarily warmer, and every possibility is manifested, and no mind finds any happiness to inhabit forever, and even what seems stable and true skids upon a razor balanced upon another razor perched upon the thinnest, keenest slice of luck.
Five hundred thousand years is the promise—one circuit through the finest portions of the galaxy. Increasingly competent entities are thoroughly in charge, and nothing goes wrong. Nothing is wrong. A thousand centuries of relative peace and occasional bliss can make the mind believe that the next centuries will be very much the same. But the Great Ship is not alone. Even when the Ship appeared empty, drifting beyond any reach, there was Marrow. Marrow is the world sitting snug at the Ship’s center, and after not being noticed for so very long, it is suddenly discovered and explored, settled and named, and certain ideas get loose inside its children.
The inevitable moment arrives, and the Ship’s old course is thrown aside.
The Polypond waits before the Ship—a black cloud full of rage and intelligence and the joy of oblivion.
The Polypond tries to kill the Great Ship, and Everything.
Inside a multitude of futures, it succeeds.
But one little possibility springs up like a root—a blind sickly colorless root that pushes out of the Milky Way, pushes into the deep familiar cold of true space, achieving very little beyond surviving through this moment, and the next moment, and perhaps the moment after that…
Hatch
1
Yes, the galaxy possessed an ethereal beauty, particularly when magnified inside the polished bowl of a perfect mirror. Every raider conceded as much. And yes, the rocket nozzle where they lived was a spectacular feature, vast and ancient, its bowl-like depths filled with darkness and several flavors of ice lain over a plain of impenetrable hyperfiber. Even the refugee city was lovely in its modest fashion, simple homes and little businesses clinging to the inside surface of the sleeping nozzle. But true raiders understood that the most intriguing, soul-soaring view was found when you stood where Peregrine was standing now: Perched some five thousand kilometers above the hull, staring down at the Polypond—a magnificent, ever-changing alien body that stretched past the neighboring nozzles, reaching the far horizon and beyond, submerging both faces of a magnificent starship that itself was larger than worlds.
The Polypond arrived thousands of years ago, descending as a violent rain of comet-sized bodies, scalding vapor and sentient, hate-filled mud. The alien wanted to destroy the Great Ship, and perhaps even today it dreamed of nothing less. But most of the city’s inhabitants believed the war was over now. In one fashion or another, the Ship had won. Some were convinced that the alien had surrendered unconditionally. Others believed that the Polypond’s single mind had collapsed, leaving a multitude of factions endlessly fighting with one another. Both tales explained quite a lot, including the monster’s indifference to a few million refugees living just beyond its boundaries. But the most compelling idea—the notion that always captivated Peregrine—was that human beings had not only won the war but killed their foe too. Its central mind was destroyed, all self-control had been vanquished, and what the young man saw from his diamond blister was nothing more, or less, than a great corpse in the throes of ferocious, creative rot.
Whatever the truth, the Polypond was a spectacle, and no raider understood it better than Peregrine did.
Frigid wisps of atomic oxygen and nitrogen marked the alien’s upper reaches, with dust and buckyballs and aerogel trash wandering free. That high atmosphere reached halfway to the hull, and it ended with a sequence of transparent skins—monomolecular sheets, mostly, plus a few energetic demon-doors laid out flat. Retaining gas and heat was their apparent purpose, and when those skins were pierced, what lay below could feel the prick, and on occasion, react instantly.
Beneath the skins was a thick wet atmosphere, not just warm but hot—a fierce blazing wealth of changeable gases and smart dusts, floating clouds and rooted clouds, plus features that refused description by any language. And drenching that realm was a wealth of light. The glare wasn’t constant or evenly distributed. What passed for day came as splashes and bright winding rivers, and the color of the light as well as its intensity and duration always varied. After spending most of his brief life watching the purples and crimsons, emeralds and golds and the myriad blues that stretched from the brilliant to the soothing, it had suddenly occurred to Peregrine that each color and every intricate shape held some important meaning.
“A common belief,” Hawking had told him. “But your translator AIs can’t find any message, or even the flavor of genuine language.”
“Except I wasn’t thinking language,” Peregrine countered. “Not at all.”
His friend wanted more
of an answer, signaling his desires with silence and circular gestures from his most delicate arms.
“I meant plain simple beauty,” the young man continued. “I’m talking about art, about visual poetry. I’m thinking about a magnificent show performed for a very special audience.”
“You might be the only soul holding that opinion,” Hawking counseled.
“And I feel honored because of it,” Peregrine had laughed.
The Polypond’s atmosphere was full of motion and energy, and it was exceptionally loud. Camouflaged microphones set near the base of the rocket nozzle sent home the constant roar of wind sounds and mouth sounds, thunder from living clouds and the musical whine of great wings. But even richer than the air was the watery terrain beneath: Tens of kilometers deep, the Polypond’s body was built from melted comets mixed with minerals and metals stolen from vanished worlds. This was an ocean in the same sense that a human body was mere saltwater. Yes, it was liquid, but jammed inside the wetness was structure and purpose. Alien tissues supplied muscles and spines and ribs, and there were regions serving roles not unlike those of human hearts and livers and lungs. Long, sophisticated membranes were dotted with giant fusion reactors. And drifting on the surface were island-sized organs that spat out free-living entities—winged entities that would gather in huge flocks and sometimes rise en masse, millions and even billions of them soaring higher than any cloud.
Hatches, those events were called.
What Peregrine knew—what every person in his trade understood—was that each hatch was a unique event, and the great majority of them were worthless. Sending a fleet of raiders that returned with only a few thousand tons of winged muscle and odd enzymes was a waste of their limited power, and worse, a criminal squandering of lives. What mattered were those rare hatches that rose high enough to be reached cheaply, and even then it didn’t pay to send raiders if there wasn’t some respectable chance of acquiring hyperfiber or rare elements, or best of all, machines that could be harvested and tamed, then set to work in whatever role the city demanded.