The Greatship

by Robert Reed

  “Now are there any raiders who can reach us?”

  Several, maybe.

  “Offer them anything,” Peregrine told his mercantile AI. “Thanks. Money. My family name. Whatever works.”

  Moments later, a deal was secured.

  The airborne wreckage of his ship continued to jump and lurch through the blazing atmosphere. Life support was close to failing, and once it did, his body would cook and temporarily die. Peregrine invested his last conscious moments looking up at the streakship, watching as it broke into true space, that relentless gorgeous engine throwing back a jet of plasma that grew even thinner and hotter as it began to find its strength.

  “Yell at the ship,” he ordered.

  That brought confused silence.

  “Assume there’s a tribe of humans onboard,” he instructed his AIs. “Curse at them and blame them for all our miseries. Say whatever you have to, but get them to talk back to us…”

  “And then what?” asked his pilot.

  “Remember everything they say,” he muttered as his lips burned. “And everything they don’t say…remember that too…!”

  8

  “You were once an engineer,” he had whispered to Fusilade. “But not anymore, I have to believe.”

  “And why not?”

  The arbitrary moment on the clock called ‘morning’ was approaching. The two humans were sleepy and physically spent. But Peregrine found the energy to explain, “I know every engineer. By face. By name. By skills. After all, I am a raider.”

  “You are.”

  “None of you founders are helping us fly. Your children and grandchildren, sure. But never you.”

  Silence.

  “It’s funny,” he allowed. “I don’t keep track of you. I mean humans and harum-scarums, the fef and all the others…those lucky ones who established our city. I doubt if I could attach ten faces to the right names, since most of you seem happy to keep close to each other…”

  The only response was a smile, thin and wary.

  Peregrine grew tired of this dance. “So what do you do with your time?” he finally asked.

  The smile brightened. “I study.”

  “What subject?”

  “Many matters.” The woman was taller than Peregrine, and stronger. She pushed on his chest—pushed harder than necessary—and he felt his heart beating against the flat of her palm. Then very quietly, Fusilade asked, “What do you know about your half-brother?”

  Peregrine offered a crisp, inadequate biography of a man who lived and died long ago.

  “And your two sisters?”

  There were three siblings in all. Two were raiders who eventually didn’t return from their missions, while that final sister had followed their mother’s other pursuit, hunting for a route back into the Great Ship. But a crude plasma drill exploded during testing, obliterating most of her mind along with her bones and meat.

  With a shrug, Peregrine confessed, “I don’t think about them too much. Different fathers and we never knew each other…and all that…”

  His lover winked and said, “You know, he was their friend too.”

  “Who was?”

  “You know who.” The smile had been replaced by a genuinely cold expression, eyes weighing everything they saw—not unlike the !eech eyes. “He wore different names each time. But he was a companion to your sisters and your brother too. They weren’t as good friends as you are to him, but he was always close. And when your mother had no living children, he would strike up a relationship with whoever seemed to be the best raider.”

  “I’ve heard that story before,” Peregrine said. Then with a pride that took him a little by surprise, he added, “Yeah, everyone says that I’ve got some odd tie with Hawking, or whatever he wants to call himself…”

  “What about Alopex?”

  “What about her?”

  “She and the alien knew each other. Not at first, no. At least, nobody in my circle remembers any relationship. But your mother invited your dear companion along when she went below, hunting for an open road to the Great Ship. I’m sure you can imagine why. That !eech could slip his way into some amazingly tiny crevices, if he had to…”

  Peregrine was perfectly awake now.

  Quietly, firmly, the ageless lover said, “I wouldn’t want you to mention this to your good friend. What I’m sharing, I mean. Let’s keep it between ourselves.”

  Again and again, the young man realized that he knew little about almost everything. Looking at the woman’s stiff, unreadable face, he asked again, “What exactly do you do with your time?”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “You’re still an engineer, aren’t you?”

  “Do you think so?”

  “The founders, and particularly the oldest of you…each of you has celebrated tens of thousands of birthdays. Minds like yours have habits, and habits don’t easily change.” Now he pushed sat up and pushed against her chest. The woman had an peculiar asymmetry—a giant black nipple tipped the small hard right breast, while its large and very soft neighbor wore a tiny silver cap. Between the breasts lay a heart beating faster than he expected. “So tell me: What kind of engineering do you do?”

  “Mostly, I buy useless items in the markets.”

  “Which items?”

  “Pieces of neural networks. You know, the little brains of those big corpses that you bring home…from gull-wands and clowners and the rest of the free-ranging bodies…”

  Those brains were always tiny, simple of design, and often mangled or burnt. Generations of raiders had collected the trinkets, and not even the largest few had shown any hint of sentience.

  “Maybe as individual fragments, they’re simple.” She pulled Peregrine’s other hand over her chest, and smiled. “But if you splice them together, very carefully…if you spend a few thousand years doing little else…you’ll cobble together something that captures a portion of one genuine soul. Maybe it’s the Polypond’s mind, maybe something else. Whatever it is, you find memories and images and ideas…and on occasion, you might even hear some timely, important news…”

  “Such as?”

  She refused to say.

  “And what does this have to do with Hawking?”

  “Maybe nothing,” she replied with an agreeable tone. “But now that you mention it: What should we say about that very good friend of yours?”

  9

  In the end what was saved was too small and far too mutilated to reconstitute itself. Peregrine was a lump of caramelized tissue surrounding a fractured skull that held a bioceramic brain cut through by EM surges and furious rains of charged particles. The damage was so severe that every memory and tendency and each of his precious personal biases had to migrate into special shelters, and life had ceased completely for a timeless span covering almost eighteen days. Death held sway—longer than he had ever known, Nothingness ruled—and then after a series of quick tickling sensations and flashes of meaningless light, the raider found himself recovered enough that his soul migrated out of its hiding places and his newest eyes opened, gazing at a face that was not entirely unexpected.

  “The streakship,” he blurted with his new mouth. “Where?”

  A limb touched his mouth and both cheeks, and then another limb touched his chest, feeling his heart. The limbs were soft strong and human—a woman’s two hands—and then he heard her voice saying, “Gone,” with finality. “Gone now. Gone.”

  “It got away safely?”

  She said, “Yes,” with a nod, then with her eyes, and finally with a whisper. And she leaned closer, adding, “The streakship has escaped, yes. Eighteen days, and it’s still accelerating. Faster than you would ever guess, it is racing toward the Milky Way.”

  Peregrine tried to move, and failed. His legs and arms were only half-grown, wearing wraps filled with blood and amino acids. But he could breathe deeply, enjoying that sensation quite a lot. “What about my crew?”

  “Degraded, but alive.” The woman’s face was pleased a
nd a little astonished, telling him, “At the end, when you were rescued…when that other raider plucked you out of the mayhem…the AIs were flying what was really just a toy glider, barely as big as me, with one tenth of my mass…”

  Peregrine tried to absorb his good fortune. How could you even calculate the long odds that he had crossed?

  The ancient woman sat back, bidding her time.

  “Did the streakship ever talk?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She nodded and smiled wistfully, and then with a matter-of-fact shrug, she added, “As soon as it got above us, we were hit with a narrow-beam broadcast. Yes.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Life survives inside the Great Ship,” she reported. “But our old leaders, the wise and powerful captains…they’re gone now. All of them. Either dead or in hiding somewhere.”

  “Who is in charge?”

  “Nobody.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “From what the streakship told us, passengers are fending for themselves.” The woman studied his new face. “However, there is one exceptionally obscure species that’s come into some prominence. In fact, at the end of the Polypond War, they took control of the Great Ship’s helm.” She offered a flickering wink, and then added, “And oh…now that I mentioned that…guess who else has gone away…

  “Somebody you know…

  “Even before your body arrived home, he picked up his shell, and by the looks of it, scuttled away…”

  10

  Peregrine was perfectly healthy and profoundly poor. The raider who saved him had acquired most of his assets, while his debts to the hospital remained substantial, possibly eternal. He had no ship, and his crew was repaired and working with others. Several investors came forward, offering to pay for a new ship in return for a fat percentage of all future gains. But the only fair offer was a brief contract from his father, and for a variety of reasons, personal and otherwise, the young man decided to send it back unsigned and then follow an entirely new course.

  If you live cheaply and patiently, it takes astonishingly little money to keep you breathing and content.

  For most of a century, Peregrine stalked the deep tunnels and access ports that laced the Ship’s central nozzle. Armed with maps left behind by his mother and sister, he hunted for routes they might have missed. He managed to find two or three every year, but each passageway was inevitably plugged with the high-grade hyperfiber. It was easy to see why no one kept up this kind of search for long. Yet Peregrine refused to quit, if only because the idea of failure gave his mouth such an awful taste.

  New lovers drifted in and out of his life.

  He occasionally saw the old lady engineer, meeting her for a meal and conversation. They hadn’t slept together in decades, but they remained friendly enough. Besides, she had a sharp mind and important connections, and sometimes, when she was in the mood, she gave him special knowledge.

  “You knew a big hatch was coming,” Peregrine accused her. “That’s why you seduced me when you did. Somehow, you and your founder friends pieced together clues that the rest of us don’t ever get to see.”

  “Yet the hatch, big as it was, was only a secondary phenomena,” she said. “Like blood from a fresh cut. I won’t tell exactly how we knew, but we did. What was more important was that someone or something had emerged from one of the old ports. We had reasons to believe that an armored vessel was pushing through the Polypond ocean, heading our way…presumably to get into a useful position before jumping free of the Ship.”

  “And you suspected Hawking?”

  “For thousands of years, I did. We did.” Fusilade nodded, and then she said, “This isn’t official. But in the final seconds of the War, a few messages arrived from the interior. They were heavily coded military broadcasts, which is why they aren’t common knowledge. They describe the creatures that were taking over the battered Ship. The !eech, the broadcasts called them. And not wanting to alert the spy in our midst, we decided to keep those secrets to ourselves.”

  “But he’s gone,” Peregrine countered. “Why not make a public announcement?”

  “Because we don’t want to panic our children, of course.”

  “Am I panicking?”

  “In slow motion, you are. Yes.” The ancient engineer sat back in her chair, tapping at the heart nestled between her unequal breasts. “Spending your life searching for a way into the Ship, when we are as certain as we can be that there is no way inside…yes, I think that’s genuinely panicked behavior…”

  “Hawking disappeared, and that means there’s at least one route out of this nozzle.”

  “If he did slip back into the Great Ship, perhaps. But for all we know, he’s walking today across a living cloud off on some distant piece of the Polypond’s body.”

  11

  Peregrine had wasted decades haunting empty hallways and dangling from soft glass ropes. He could have wasted a thousand centuries before finding the relevant clue, but he was a lucky individual, and he had the good fortune of becoming lost at the proper moment. After two wrong turns, he found himself standing beside a tiny chute exactly like ten thousand other chutes. Except, that is, for the marks left behind by a delicate limb that had been dipped in paint. No, in blood. A blackish alien blood with a distinctive flavor, and the writing was a familiar script, showing the simple word, “HAWKING,” followed by a simple yet elegant arrow pointing straight down.

  The chute ended with a vast airless room built for no discernible purpose. Its walls were half a kilometer tall, and the floor was a circular plain covering perhaps ten square kilometers of featureless hyperfiber—stuff as old as the Ship, far better than any grade that could be chiseled through today. The only obvious doorway led out into the dormant rocket nozzle. Peregrine set up a torch in the room’s center, and then he kneeled, searching that expanse with a powerful night scope. He should have missed the second doorway. If anyone else had ever visited this nameless place, they surely would have ignored what looked like a crevice, horizontal and brief. But someone was standing in front of the opening—a distinctive alien wearing a gossamer lifesuit, his long jointed legs locked into a comfortable position, the body motionless now and perhaps for a very long while.

  Peregrine walked a few steps before breaking into a hard run.

  On their private channel, Hawking said, “You look fit, my friend. And rather troubled too, I see.”

  “What are you doing here?” Peregrine asked.

  “Waiting for you,” was the reply.

  “Why?”

  “Because you are my friend.”

  “I don’t particularly believe that,” said the human. “From what I’ve heard, the !eech are my enemies…”

  “I have injured you how many times?”

  “Never,” he thought, saying nothing.

  “My friend,” said Hawking. “What precise treacheries am I guilty of?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  Silence.

  Peregrine had invested years wondering what he would say, should this moment arrive. “Why live with us?” seemed like a small, inadequate question, yet he asked it anyway. “Were you some kind of spy? Were you sent here to watch over us?”

  There was a pause, then a cryptic comment. “You know, I saw you entering this place. I saw that quite easily.”

  “I’ve been climbing toward you for several hours,” Peregrine complained. “Of course you saw me…”

  Then he hesitated, rolling the alien’s confession around in his head.

  With relentless patience, Hawking waited.

  Peregrine slowed his gait, asking, “How long have you been watching my approach?”

  “Since your birth,” the !eech said.

  Peregrine stopped now.

  After a few minutes of reflection, he said, “Those eyes of yours…they see into the future…?”

  Silence.

  “Do they see everything that’s going to happen?”

  “What eye absorbs ever
ything there is to see?”

  Peregrine shook his head. “A limited sight, is that it?”

  One of the distant legs lifted high, signaling agreement.

  “What else can you see, Hawking?”

  “That I have never hurt you,” the alien repeated.

  “My half-sister…the one who died in the plasma blast…did you arrange that accident?”

  “No.”

  “But did you see the accident approaching?”

  Silence.

  “And why did you come up on the hull, Hawking? The only reason I can think of is to spy on us.”

  “That is an obvious answer, and your imagination is richer than that, my friend.”

  Hard as it was to believe, the compliment forced Peregrine to smile. “Okay,” he muttered. “You wanted to spy on our future. We’re an independent society, free of the !eech, and maybe you’re scared of us.”

  “That is an interesting assessment, but mistaken.”

  “I don’t understand then.”

  “In time, you will,” the !eech promised.

  Then every one of its limbs was moving, carrying the creature backward into the narrow, almost invisible crevice. Peregrine began to run again, in a full sprint; but he was still half a kilometer from his goal when a warm gooey stew of fresh hyperfiber flowed into view, filling the crevice and pushing across the slick floor, glowing in the infrared as it swiftly and foever cured.

  12

  The final doorway had been opened just enough for a small human wearing a minimal lifesuit to slip through, and walking alone, he stepped onto a frigid, utterly flat plain. During the War, portions of the Polypond had splashed into the giant nozzle, dying here or at least freezing into a useless hibernation. Peregrine strode out to where he found a modest telescope as well as a set of telltale marks. His friend once stood here, those powerful eyes of his linked to the light-hungry mirror. By measuring the marks in the ice, and with conservative estimates of the heat lost by Hawking’s lifesuit, Peregrine guessed that the creature had stood here for many years, pulling up his many feet when they had melted to uncomfortable depth and then dancing over to a fresh place before reclaiming his watchful pose.