by Robert Reed
Three
It was an expensive vegetable, particularly when you paid for quality. But Washen knew her audience. She was certain that her old friend would appreciate the voices rising from the plant’s many mouths, the voices filling the empty, almost darkened cavity with a serene, deepest-space melody that his particular ear would find lovely. Her friend wasn’t here just now.
But wherever he was, he would hear the llano-vibra singing about blackness and emptiness and the glorious cold between the galaxies.
In another life, her friend raised the llano-vibra as a hobby, mastering the species’ complex genetics, twisting its elaborate genes to where it sang melodies even more serene than this specimen, and on the open market, infinitely more precious.
But he would never sell his companions.
Then his life and peculiar interests moved in even stranger directions, and he lost interest in his once precious hobby.
Eventually, he lost his post as a rising captain.
Crimes had occurred. Charges were filed. Using the escape route that the Master herself ordered her captains to create, the man went into hiding. The only contact Washen had had with him since was a cryptic note telling her that if she ever wanted to reach him, she should plant a llano-vibra in this empty and very dark corner of the ship, then plant herself in a comfortable seat in the nearest human tavern.
Which for the next two days was what Washen did.
The tavern was dark and mostly empty, but considerably warmer than deep space. She sat in back, in a booth carved from a single petrified oak, and she drank an ocean of various cocktails, thinking about everything, and nothing, finally concluding that it was too much to expect anyone to remember you after this many centuries… deciding that it was time to get on with her mission…
A man appeared, squinting into the cheap darkness, and Washen knew it was him. He was large, just as she remembered. The face was changed, but it was still pleasantly homely. His bearing had lost that captainly arrogance, and he wore civilian clothes with an ease that Washen could only envy. Who knew what name he went by? But ignoring the risks, she cupped a hand against her mouth, shouting across the gloom:
“Hey, Pamir! Over here!”
They had been lovers, but they weren’t well suited as a couple. Captains rarely were. The man was headstrong and confident, and he was smart, and in most circumstances, he was perfectly self-reliant. Yet those qualities that made him a successful captain had also weighed down his career. Pamir had no skill or interest in saying the proper words or giving little gifts to people in higher stations. If it hadn’t been for his considerable talent for being right more than most, the Master would have cut off his professional legs at the beginning, leaving him with a minimal rank and next to no responsibilities. Which might have been for the best, as it turned out.
The big man sat and ordered a pain-of-tears, and staring at the homely face, Washen replayed his tragic fall.
When he was a captain, Pamir befriended a very strange alien. And on this ship, strangeness took some doing. It was a Gaian entity—a small, deceptively ordinary humanoid body with a secret capacity to cover any world with its own self. Its flesh could grow rapidly, forming trees and animals and fungal masses, all linked by a single consciousness.The creature was a refugee. It had lost its home world to a second Gaian. And when that archenemy came on board, a full-scale war erupted, eventually destroying an expensive facility as well as the remains of Pamir’s career.
The Gaians fought to an exhausted draw, but their hatred still burned.
On his best day, Pamir was a difficult man, but he had a gift for seeing what was best inside any hopeless mess. He turned a laser on both Gaians, saving just enough of their tissue to let them begin again. Then he used his own flesh to make a child that embraced what was best in both aliens. And because Washen was Pamir’s friend, and because it was the right thing to do, she raised the Child. That was her name for it. The Child. Like any mother, she kept it safe and taught it what it needed to know, and when it grew too powerful to remain on board the Great Ship, she hugged it and kissed it and sent it off to an empty planet where it could live alone, making ancient wrongs right again.
It seemed as if the Child were sitting with them now, listening as its mother told proud stories and happy stories; and hopefully it could sense how very remarkable it was to see its father weep with joy.
Pamir wept like a captain. Quietly, and always under control. Then he wiped his eyes dry with heavy fingers and summoned up a grim smile, looking at his old friend for too long, reading her clothes and face and how she sat with her back against the backmost wall of this dingy pub.
Finally, he asked, “Are you like me?”
She volunteered nothing.
A thick, effortlessly strong hand reached out, touching her through the sleeve of her silk blouse. Then he quiedy, and firmly, and with certainty said, “No. You aren’t like me. That’s pretty obvious.”
She shook her head. “I’m not a wanted felon, if that’s what you mean.”
“Who is?” he asked. Then he laughed, adding, “I’ve never met a genuine criminal. Ask the worst sociopath if he is, and he says he isn’t. He talks a lot about good reasons and bad circumstances and the unfairness of his luck.”
“Is that what you talk about?” she inquired.
The grin strengthened. “Perpetually”
“Have you heard?” she went on. “Have any other captains vanished?”
“No,” he replied. “No, I haven’t heard.”
She watched his hands.
“Do you know if they have, Washen?”
Carefully, she gave away nothing with her eyes.
“But all of you could vanish, and we wouldn’t notice.” He said it, then gave a low laugh, adding, “And we wouldn’t care. At all.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
A softer laugh. Then he explained. “Living any life but a captain’s teaches you. Among all the good lessons, you learn that captains aren’t as important as they tell yourselves they are. Not in the day-to-day business of running this ship, or even in the big, slow, massive matters, either.”
“I’m crushed,” she replied, and laughed.
He shrugged and said, “You don’t believe me.”
“You’d be astonished if I did believe you.” Washen shook her newest drink—a reliable narcotic exploded with the carbon dioxide bubbles—and after sniffing her fill, she suggested, “You just wish that we were unimportant. But without us doing our important work, everything would collapse. In less than a century. Maybe less than a decade.”
The one-time captain shrugged his shoulders again. The subject bored him; it was time to move on.
Washen agreed. She emptied her glass, then let the silence last for as long as her old friend could stand it.
For almost an hour, as it happened.
Then with a delicate caution, he asked, “Is something wrong? You’ve gone underground… so is there some sort of disaster looming…?”
She shook her head with confidence.
And Pamir, bless him, was still enough of a captain not to ask anything else, or even look too deeply into her wide chocolate eyes.
They spent two full days together, and as many nights. Wanting privacy, they rented a shelter inside an alien habitat, filling their days hiking through a dense violet jungle, special boots allowing them to keep their feet since the only pathways were the thick and slippery slime ribbons left by the passing landlords. During their second night, as something massive dragged itself past their little front door, Washen moved into Pamir’s bed, and with a mixture of nervousness and bawdy zest, they made love until they could fall into a deep sleep.
Washen hugged the Child in her dreams. She hugged it ferociously, and sadly. But when she woke again, she realized that it wasn’t the Child that she’d held in her dream arms. It was the ship itself. She had reached around that great and beautiful body of hyperfiber and metal and stone and machinery, begging it not to leave her.
For absolutely no good reason, she hurt enough to ache now, and in a captainly way, she wept.
Pamir sat up in bed, watching without comment. A sloppy gaze would have missed the empathy in his eyes and in his pressed-together lips.
Washen wasn’t sloppy. She sniffed and wiped at her face with the backs of both hands, then calmly admitted, “I need to be somewhere. I should be there already, honestly.”
Pamir nodded. Then after a deep, bracing breath, he asked, “How long would it take?”
“Would what take?”
“If I happened to turn myself over to the Master, bent low and begged for her forgiveness… how long would she keep me locked up… and how soon could I get back to being some sort of captain…?”
In her mind’s eye, Washen saw the rigid, colder-than-death Phoenix.
Remembering its punishment and appreciating the Master’s quixotic moods, she touched her newest lover on his lips, pressing down as she told him, “Whatever you do, don’t do that.”
“She’d keep me locked up forever. Is that it?”
Washen said, “I don’t know. But let’s not test the woman, all right? Promise me?”
Yet Pamir was too stubborn even to offer a comforting lie. He just pulled away from her hand, and smiled at a faraway point, and said to Washen, or himself, “I still haven’t made my mind up. And maybe I never will.”
Four
There were six primary fuel tanks, each as large as a good-sized moon, set in a balanced configuration deep inside the ship—spheres of hyperfiber and shaped-vacuum insulation far beneath the hull and the inhabited districts, below even the sewage plants and giant reactors and the deepest stomachs of the great engines. Every tank was a wilderness.
Only the occasional maintenance crew or adventurer would visit them. In boats carved from aerogels, they would voyage across the liquid hydrogen, nothing to see but their own cold lights, the frigid and glassy ocean, and beyond, a seamless, soul-searing night that left most visitors feeling profoundly uneasy.
Aliens occasionally asked permission to live inside one of the fuel tanks.
The leech were an obscure species. Ascetic and pathologically secretive, they had built their settlement where they could be alone. Weaving together thick plastics and diamond threads, they dangled their home from the tank’s ceiling. It was a large structure, yet following leech logic, its interior was a single room. The room stretched on forever in two dimensions while the glowing gray ceiling was near enough to touch. Washen would do just that from time to time. She would stop walking and lay both hands against the plastic’s surprising warmth, and she would breathe, shaking off the worst of her claustrophobia. Voices lured her on.
She couldn’t count all the voices, and they were too cluttered to make sense or even tell her which species was speaking.
Washen had never met the leech.
Not directly, she hadn’t.
But she had been part of the delegation of captains who spoke to the leech’s bravest diplomats, nothing between the parties but a windowless slab of hyperfiber. The aliens spoke with clicks and squeals, neither of which she could hear now. But if it wasn’t the leech, who was it? A dim memory was triggered. At one of the Master’s annual dinners—how many years ago now?—some fellow captain had mentioned in passing that the leech had abandoned their habitat.
Why?
For the moment, she couldn’t recall any reason, or even if she had asked for one.
Washen hoped that the leech had reached their destination, disembarking without incident. Or perhaps they had simply found a more isolated home, if that was possible. But there was always the sad chance that some great disaster had struck, and the poor exophobes had perished.
Shipboard extinctions were more common than the captains admitted in public, or admitted to themselves. Some passengers proved too frail to endure long voyages. Mass suicides and private wars claimed others. Yet as Washen liked to remind herself, for every failed guest there were a hundred species that thrived, or at least managed to etch out a life in some little part of this glorious machine.
To herself, in a whisper, she asked, “Who are you?”
An hour had passed since Washen stepped from the simple elevator. She had begun walking in the habitat’s center, passing first through a necklace of cleansing chambers meant to purify the newly arrived. None of the chambers worked, and every doorway was propped open or dismantled. Obviously someone had been here. But there were no instructions, not even a handwritten note fixed to the last door. Washen had covered eight or nine kilometers in this subearth gravity, which was a few steps more than halfway to the habitat’s single circular wall.
She paused again and placed her hands flush against the ceiling, and twisting her head, she judged from where those voices were corning. The acoustics were that fine.
She broke into an easy jog.
The room’s only furnishings were hard gray pillows. The air was warm and stale, smelling of odd dusts and durable pheromones. Colors seemed forbidden. Even Washen s gaudy touristy clothes seemed to turn grayer by the moment.
The voices gradually grew louder, turning familiar. They were human voices, she realized. And after a little while, she could even tell who they were. Not by their words, which were still a tangled mess. But by their tone. Their self-importance. These were voices meant to give orders and to be obeyed instantly, without question or regret.
She stopped. Squinted.
Against the grayness was something darker. A spot, a blemish. Very nearly nothing, at this distance. She called out, “Hello?”
Then she waited for what seemed to be long enough, deciding that no one had noticed her voice, and as Washen started to shout, “Hello,” again, several voices reached her, telling her, “Hello,” and, “This way,” and, “Welcome, you’re nearly late…!’ Yes, she was.
The Master’s orders had given her two weeks to slip down to this odd place. Washen had said her good-byes to Pamir with some time to spare. But afterward, waiting for a cap-car in a little way-station, she had run into security troops who examined her fake identity and her donated generics, then finally let her go again. After that, just to be certain that no one was hiding in her shadow, she had wandered another full day before starting for here.
Washen began to run.
But when the dark spot became people standing in knots and little lines, she slowed to a walk again, aiming for decorum.
A quiet rain of applause began, then fell away.
Suddenly, Washen couldn’t count all the captains spread out before her, and putting on her most captainly smile, she joined them, almost laughing as she asked, “So why, why, why are we here?”
No one seemed to know this had happened. But the captains had obviously spent the last few days talking about little else. Each had a pet theory to offer, and none had the bad taste to defend their words too far. Then that ritual was finished, at least for the moment, and colleagues asked Washen for stories about her travels. Where had she wandered, what marvels had she accomplished, and did she have two or twenty interesting ideas about this whole crazy business?
Washen mentioned a few touristy haunts but avoided any word that could, even by accident, remind anyone of Pamir.
Then with a shrug of her shoulders, she admitted, “I don’t have guesses. I’m presuming this is a necessary business, and gloriously important, but until I have the facts, that’s all that I can assume.”
“Bravo,” said one gray-eyed captain.
Washen was eating. And drinking. The first arrival had followed a steady drip-drip-dripping sound, coming to this place and discovering stacks of sealed rations and a dozen kegs of the ship’s best wine, brought from the Alpha Sea district, raised by the hands and feet of tailored apes. Judging by the size of the drops and the small red puddle, the keg had opened itself the moment that first captain had stepped from the elevator.
Delicious wine, thought Washen.
Again, the captain said, “Bravo.”
She loo
ked at him now.
“Diu,” he said, offering a hand and a wide smile.
She balanced her mug on her plate, then shook his with her free hand, saying, “We met at the Masters banquet. Twenty years ago, was it?”
“Twenty-five.”
Like most captains, Diu was tall for his species. He had craggy features and an easy charm that instilled trust in the human passengers. Even dressed in a simple gown, he looked like someone of consequence.
“It’s kind of you to remember me,” he said. “Thank you.”
“You’re quite welcome.”
Even when he stood still, Diu was moving. His flesh seemed to vibrate, as if the water inside were ready to boil. “What do you think of the Master’s taste?” he inquired, gray eyes brightening. “Isn’t this a bizarre place to meet?”
“Bizarre,” Washen echoed. “That’s the word.”
For the moment, they looked at their surroundings. The ceiling and floor ended with a plain gray wall punctuated with a very rare window.
Bracing herself, ‘ Washen asked, “Whatever happened to the leech? Does anyone remember?”
“They leaped into the sea below,” said Diu. “No,” she muttered.
“Or we got them to their destination.”
“Which was it?”
“Both,” he reported. “Or something else entirely. They’re such a strange species. Apparently, they can’t take any course without pretending to go a hundred other places at the same time.”
To confuse their imaginary enemies, no doubt. “Wherever they are,” Diu assured her, “I’m sure they’re doing well.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Washen replied, knowing what was polite. In the face of ignorance, a captain should make positive sounds.
Diu hovered beside her, smiling as his flesh shivered with nervous energy.
Twenty-five years since they met… and what, if anything, did Washen remember about the man…?
Her thoughts were interrupted.
A sudden voice, familiar and close, told her, “You were nearly late, darling. Not that anyone noticed.” Miocene.