Galactic Empires

by Gardner R. Dozois

  "But this is no rumor," the man proclaimed. "And I don't approve of legends. What I told you is the truth, I swear it."

  "Yet you won't name your source," Perri pointed out.

  "I cannot," the man repeated. "Frankly, I wish I hadn't said this much."

  Perri was a modern human, durable and functionally immortal. But unlike all of the well-moneyed souls in the room, he wore a boyish face and a pretty, almost juvenile smile. When it served his needs, he played the role of a smart child surrounded by very foolish adults. "It scares the hell out of you, doesn't it? You hear about this puzzle, and you're the kind of creature who won't fall asleep unless every puzzle is solved, every question mark erased."

  "And what is wrong with that?" asked the rumor's source.

  "What's right about it?" Perri countered.

  Quee Lee had expected precisely that response, and when it came, she laughed softly.

  The gentleman bristled. "My dear, I thought you would be interested in this matter. But if you're going to tease me—"

  "I didn't mean that," she began.

  But the man had his excuse to turn and march away. No doubt he would avoid Quee Lee for the rest of the day and, if genuinely angry, she wouldn't see him for the next fifty years.

  "I shouldn't have laughed," Quee Lee admitted.

  "He will forgive you."

  True enough. Fifty years of chilled silence was nothing among immortals. All but the most malicious slights were eventually pardoned, or at least discarded as memories not worth carrying any farther. "It's too bad that the story isn't true," she said. "I wish there was some unmapped cave hiding out there."

  "Oh, but there is," Perri replied.

  Quee Lee worked through the possibilities. "You lied to me," she complained. "You'd already heard about the Vermiculate."

  "I didn't, and I haven't."

  "Then how can you say—?"

  "Easily," he interrupted. "Your friend might be a wonderful soul. He might be charitable and sweet—"

  "Hardly."

  "But he has never once shown me the barest trace of imagination. I seriously doubt that he could dream up such a tale, and I know he wouldn't repeat any wild fable, unless it came from a reasonable, responsible source."

  "Such as?"

  "One of the captains," Perri allowed.

  "But why would any rational officer take any passenger into his or her confidence?" She hesitated, and laughed. "I suppose my old friend is rather wealthy."

  "Wealthier even than you," Perri agreed.

  "And if he happened to be sleeping with a captain…"

  "That's my cynical guess."

  Quee Lee knew her husband's mind. "You already know which captain it is, don't you?"

  "I have a robust notion," he allowed.

  "Who?"

  "Not here," he warned, stroking her arm with a fond hand. "But my candidate has rank and connections, and she's desperately fond of money. And if you mix those qualifications with the fact that she, like that prickly man sulking over there, doesn't appreciate mysteries…"

  "Is the Vermiculate unmapped?" she asked.

  "If any place is," Perri allowed. Then, with long fingers, he drew elaborate shapes in the air between them. "If you wove all of those empty caves together and straightened them out, you'd have a single tunnel long enough to reach from your Earth to Neptune and partway home again. So yes, it's easy to imagine that some AI expert could massage the old data, and guess that one corner here and one little room there might have escaped notice and naming. And maybe after fifty thousand years of sleep, one of the original survey robots was awakened and shoved down a hole, and, because of its age, it malfunctioned, making everything seem far more mysterious than it actually was."

  On her own, Quee Lee had narrowed the list of suspect captains to three, perhaps four. With a quiet, conspiratorial voice, she asked, "Who's going to make our discreet inquiries, you or me?"

  "Neither of us," Perri said.

  "Then you're not my husband," she teased. "The man I married would want to finish the mapping himself."

  Perri shrugged and grinned. "We can make our own good guesses where to look." Then with a fond whisper, he added, "Besides, if we get ourselves noticed, what began as a tiny data anomaly mentioned to a lover will become much more: an area of potential embarrassment to the godly rulers of the Great Ship. Then our nameless captain will personally march into that empty corner… and keep me from having my little bit of fun…"

  "And me, too," said Quee Lee.

  "Or quite a lot of fun," Perri added, wrapping an arm around his wife's waist. "If you're in the mood for a little darkness, that is."

  * * *

  II

  Yet nothing was simple about this simple-sounding quest. Finding holes inside the existing maps proved difficult, requiring months of detailed analysis by several experts paid well for their secrecy as well as their rare skills. Meanwhile, half a dozen of Perri's best friends heard about his newest interest, and, by turning in past favors, they earned slots on the expedition roster. Then Quee Lee decided to invite two lady friends who had been pressing for centuries to join her on a "safe adventure," which was what this would be. The Vermiculate might be imperfectly known, but there was no reason to expect danger. The dry caves were filled with the standard minimal atmosphere-nitrogen and oxygen and nothing else. There were no artificial suns or lights, and the only heat was thermal leakage from the nearby habitats and reactors. But even if the worst happened-if everyone lost their way and their supplies were exhausted—the end result would be a bothersome thirst and gradual starvation. Eventually, their tough bioceramic minds would sever all connections with their failing bodies, and, when no choice was left, ten humans would sit down in the darkness and quietly turn into mummies, waiting for their absence to be noted and a rescue mission to track them down.

  But Perri didn't approve of losing his way. Meticulous in recording their position on the new, modestly improved map, he earned gentle and then not-so-gentle ribbing from the others. The Vermiculate was far too enormous to explore, even a thousand years. But their flex-skin car took them to areas of interest, and before they stepped away from each base camp, he made his team memorize the local layout of tunnels and chambers. He insisted that everyone stay with at least one companion. He begged for the others to carry several kinds of torches as well as locator tools, noisemakers, and laser flares. But eighteen days of that kind of mothering caused one of Quee Lee's friends to break every rule. She picked a random passageway and ran for parts unknown, at least to her. She was carrying nothing but one small torch and a half-filled water bottle, and after ten hours of solitary adventuring, she discovered that she had no good idea where she was in the universe.

  One night alone was enough of a lesson. Perri and Quee Lee found the explorer sitting in a dead-end chamber, shivering inside her heated clothes-shivering out of hunger and anxiety. And from that moment on, everyone's wandering was done with at least the minimal precautions.

  It was the boredom that began to defeat the explorers.

  The Vermiculate's walls were stone buttressed with low-grade hyperfiber. No human eye had ever seen these tunnels, but the novelty was minimal. Some places were beautiful in their shape and proportions, but it was an accidental beauty. The Ship's builders might have had a purpose for each twist and turn, every sudden room, and for the little tubes that gave access to the next portion of the maze. But to most eyes, nothing here was strange or particularly interesting, and, after two months of wandering, the novice adventurers were losing interest.

  One by one, the expedition shrank.

  First to leave was the woman who hadn't gotten lost. Then Perri's friends complained about these dreary circumstances, each demanding a ride to the nearest exit point. The only ones left were identical twin brothers and that dear old friend of Quee Lee who had gotten lost and scared, and then discovered a genuine fondness for spelunking.

  Or maybe it was the brothers who held her interest.
One night, when the camp lights were dropping down to a nightly glow, Quee Lee spotted the twins slipping into her friend's little shelter-entering her home from opposite ends, and neither appearing again until morning.

  Another month of wandering brought few highlights. Half a dozen tunnels showed evidence of foot traffic over the last few thousand years. The desiccated slime trail of a Snail-As-God was a modest surprise. Inside one cave, they discovered the broken scale from a harum-scarum shin, and a few meters farther along, a liter of petrified blood left behind by a human male. And then came that momentous afternoon when they discovered a graveyard of surveying robots-ten thousand machines that had pulled themselves into neat, officious piles before dropping into what had become an eternal sleep.

  Two days later, Perri brought his team to the bottom of a deep, deep chimney. Mathematical wizards had labeled that location as "mildly interesting." The Vermiculate had patterns, predictable and occasionally repeatable, and, according to sophisticated calculations, that narrow hole should lead to a large "somewhere else." But the unknown refused to expose itself with a glance. Two little tunnels waited at the bottom of the chimney, but every sonic pulse and cursory examination showed that they were merely long and exceptionally ordinary.

  The five humans broke into two groups.

  Perri and Quee Lee slipped into the shorter tunnel. As always, they brought tracking equipment as well as the sniffers that constantly searched for organic traces left by past visitors, and along with heated clothes and survival rations, they carried a variety of lights to offer feeble glows or sun-blazing fires. But the most effective sensor came in pairs, and it was the bluish-yellow eyes that noticed the sudden hole in the floor.

  "Stop," said Perri.

  Quee Lee paused, one gloved hand dropping, fingertips reaching to within a hairsbreadth of the emptiness.

  "Look," he advised.

  "I see it," she said. But she didn't know what she saw. After days and weeks of staring at structural hyperfiber, she recognized that something here was different. It was the area surrounding the hole that was peculiar. Holding a variable beam to the floor, she slipped through a series of settings. Hyperfiber was the strongest baryonic substance known-the bones of the Ship and the basis of every star-faring civilization-yet she had never seen light flickering against hyperfiber quite like it did just then. It was as if the floor was feeling their weight, and the photons were betraying the vibrations.

  "Do you know what this is?" Perri asked.

  "Do you?"

  "The source," he announced. "The source of our rumor."

  She shone a second light up and down the tunnel. There was no sign of disabled robots or the detritus left by mapping crews. But the captains could have cleaned up their trash, since captains liked to keep their secrets secret, particularly when it came to curious passengers.

  "This hole is fresh," Perri decided. And when Quee Lee reached toward the edge, he said, "Don't. Unless you want to cut off a finger or two."

  The floor was pure hyperfiber—a skin only a few atoms thick at its thickest. Because the stuff was so very thin, the light flickered. What they were trusting with their weight was close to nothing, like worn paint stretched across empty air, and the edge of the revealed hole was keener than the most deadly sword.

  "But a robot should have noticed," she guessed. "If we can see that the floor here is different…"

  "I've given that some thought," Perri offered. "We're about as deep into the Vermiculate as you can go, or so we thought. A few surveyors probably started working above us, and when they were overwhelmed, they stopped and ate the rock and replicated themselves."

  "Imperfect copies?" she guessed.

  "Maybe." He shrugged, enjoying the game but taking nothing too seriously. "Whatever the reason, the machine that first crawled into this tunnel wasn't paying close attention. It didn't notice what should have been obvious, and that's why the Ship's map was incomplete."

  "Just like the rumor says," Quee Lee agreed. "Except there isn't much mystery, is there? Because if the captains had found something remarkable down here—"

  "We wouldn't get within ten kilometers," Perri agreed.

  With every tool, including her warm brown eyes, Quee Lee examined the floor and the hole and the blackness below.

  Perri did the same.

  And then, for the first time in perhaps a thousand years, one of them managed to surprise the other.

  It wasn't the adventurous spouse who spoke first.

  Pointing down, Quee Lee said, "That hole's just wide enough for me."

  "If we string tethers to the ceiling," Perri mentioned, "and if there's another floor worth standing on below us."

  "What about our friends?" she asked.

  "I'll go gather them up," he began.

  "No." Then, for the second time, she surprised her husband. "We'll leave a note behind. We can tell them to follow, if they want."

  Perri smiled at the ancient creature.

  "This is our adventure," she concluded. "Yours, and mine."

  * * *

  III

  What lay below was very much the same as everything above. Which was what they had expected. The only difference was that no public map showed these particular cavities and chimneys, and the long tunnels and little side vents always led to a wealth of new places devoid of names. According to Perri's navigational equipment, they had wandered nearly twelve kilometers before beginning their hunt for a campsite. A series of electronic breadcrumbs led back to the original hole and their left-behind note, and, speaking through the crumbs, Quee Lee discovered that her lady friend and the twins hadn't bothered to come looking for them. She speculated as to why that might be, and they enjoyed a lewd laugh. Then, following one promising passageway around its final bend, they entered what seemed to be the largest room they had seen for weeks.

  The floor of the room was an undulating surface, like water stirred by deep currents. They selected a spacious bowl of cool gray hyperfiber, and, with the camp light blazing beside them, they made love. Then they ate and drank their fill, and at a point with no obvious significance, Perri strolled over to his pack and bent down, intending to snatch some tiny item out of one of the countless pockets.

  That was the moment when every light went out.

  Quee Lee was sitting on her memory chair, immersed in sudden darkness. Her first instinct was to believe that she was to blame. Their camp light was in front of her. Had she given it some misleading command? But then she thought about their other torches and, realizing that the night was total, she naturally wondered if for some peculiar reason she had gone completely blind.

  Then from a distance, with a moderately concerned voice, her husband asked, "Darling? Are you there?"

  "I am," she remarked. Perri was blind too, or every one of their lights had failed. Either way, something unlikely had just occurred. "What do you think?" she asked.

  "That it's ridiculously dark in here," Perri allowed.

  Perfectly, relentlessly black.

  "Do you feel all right?" he inquired.

  "I feel fine," she said.

  "I do, too." He was disappointed, as if some little ache might help answer their questions. "Except for being worried, I suppose."

  One of Perri's feet kicked the pack.

  "Darling?" she asked.

  He said, "Sing to me. I'll follow your voice."

  Softly, Quee Lee sang one of the first tunes that she had ever learned—a nursery rhyme too old to have an author, its beguiling lyrics about rowing and time wrapped around a language long considered dead.

  Moments later, she heard Perri settle on the ground directly to her right.

  She stopped singing.

  Then Perri called from somewhere off to her left, from a distance, telling her, "Don't quit singing now. I'm still trying to find you, darling."

  For a long moment, nothing happened. The darkness remained silent and unknowable. And then from her right, from a place quite close, a voice that she
did not recognize softly insisted, "Yes, please. Sing, please. I rather enjoy that wonderful little tune of yours."

  * * *

  IV

  Quee Lee began to jump up.

  "No, no," the voice implored. "Remain seated, my dear. There is absolutely no reason to surrender your comfort."

  She settled slowly, warily.

  Perri said her name.

  Clearing her throat, Quee Lee managed to say, "I'm here. Here."

  "Are you all right?"

  "Yes."

  "But I thought I heard-"

  "Yes."

  "Is somebody with you?"

  In the same moment, two voices said, "Yes."

  Then the new voice continued. "I was hoping that your wife would sing a little more," it remarked. "But I suppose I have spoiled the mood, which is my fault. But please, Perri, will you join us? Sit beside Quee Lee, and I promise: Neither of you will come to any harm. A little conversation, a little taste of companionship… that's all I wish for now."

  Again, with urgency, Perri asked, "Are you all right?"

  How could she answer that question? "I'm fine, yes." Except that she was startled, and for many rational reasons, she was scared, and with the darkness pressing down, she was feeling a thrilling lack of control.

  Her husband's footsteps seemed louder than before. In the perfect blackness, he stepped by memory, and then, perhaps sensing her presence, he stopped beside her and reached out with one hand, dry warm fingertips knowing just where her face would be waiting.

  She clung to his hand with both of hers.

  "Sit, please," the stranger insisted. "Unless you absolutely must stand."

  Perri settled on one edge of her soft chair. His hand didn't leave her grip, and he patted that knot of fingers with his free hand. As well as she knew her own bones, Quee Lee knew his. And she leaned into that strong body, glad for his presence and confident that he was glad for hers.

  "Who are you?" Perri asked.

  Silence answered him.

  "Did you disable our lights?" he asked.