The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  “But that doesn’t explain this new acceleration,” Peregrine would point out. “The engineers and captains . . . everybody everywhere . . . they assumed that these big rockets were the only engines. But plainly, they weren’t. Obviously, they weren’t even the most powerful thrusters available.”

  “It is quite the puzzle,” Hawking conceded.

  The acceleration was not huge, but to make anything as massive as the Great Ship move faster . . . well, that was an impressive trick. “The captains found something new during the war,” Peregrine suggested.

  “A talent hidden until now,” his friend added. “That notion has a delightful sourness about it, yes.”

  Sour was sweet to the !eech.

  Peregrine would narrow his gaze, imagining captains standing in a crowded, desperate bridge. “They wanted to outmaneuver the Polypond. That’s why they kicked the new motors awake, and now they can’t stop them.”

  “A compelling possibility. I agree.”

  But Peregrine didn’t believe his own words. “That still won’t explain why the captains don’t come out to get us. Even if they don’t suspect anybody’s here, they should send up teams to scout the situation . . . and even better, to send messages home to the Milky Way . . .”

  Long limbs acquired the questioning position. “Where would you expect them to appear?” Hawking asked.

  “Inside one of the nozzles. I would.”

  Silence.

  Peregrine offered his reasons as he thought of them. “Because the Polypond can’t reach inside the nozzles. Because the captains could pretty easily work their way through the barricades and hyperfiber plugs. And because from the nozzle floor, they’d have an unobstructed view of the galaxy, and they would be able to measure our position and velocity—”

  “The barricades are significant,” the alien cautioned.

  “To us, they are. We don’t have the energy or tools to cut through the best grades of hyperfiber.” Shaking his head, he said, “From what I’ve heard, when my mother’s ship was damaged, she spent her free time trying to find some route to the interior. She explored at least a thousand of the old accessways leading down from here.” Every tunnel, no matter how obscure, was blocked with hyperfiber too deep and stubborn to cut through. “But if there were captains below us, and if only a fraction of the old reactors were working . . . they could still punch out in a matter of years . . . maybe weeks . . .”

  Silence.

  “So there are no captains,” Peregrine would decide. Every time.

  “Which means what?”

  “Somebody else is in charge of the Great Ship.” That answer seemed obvious, and it was inevitable, and it made a good mind usefully worried. Yet that answer was a most frustrating creation, since it opened doors into an infinite range of possibilities, imaginable and otherwise.

  “Who is in charge?” Hawking would ask, on occasion.

  A few powerful species were obvious candidates. But each of them would have sent teams to the surface. They might be different species, but they would be drawn by the same reasons and needs that humans would feel.

  “Perhaps the culprit is someone else,” Hawking would propose. “An organism you haven’t thought to consider.”

  Anything was possible, yes.

  Peregrine threw his ape arms into a posture that mimicked his friend’s, underscoring the importance of his next words. “Nobody here is looking for a route down,” he said. “I think it’s been what? A thousand years since anyone has even tried.”

  The three hemispherical eyes were bright and still.

  Peregrine continued. “Once I get enough savings in the bank, I’ll take up my mother’s other work. Just to see what I can see.”

  “That could be a reasonable plan,” Hawking would say.

  Then most of the time, their conversation ended. Peregrine often made that promise to himself, but he never had the resources or the simple will to invest in the luxury of a many-year search. Besides, he was the finest raider in the city, and raiders were essential. If he gave up his present work, the level of poverty everywhere would rise. Citizens would have to forgo having children and new homes. At least that was his excuse to wait for another decade or two, biding time before setting out on what surely would be a useless adventure.

  Hawking never questioned Peregrine’s lack of action. But then again, that creature was ancient and eerily patient, and who knew how many promises he had made to himself during the last eons, all bound up inside his powerful mind, waiting to be fulfilled?

  One day, Peregrine surprised himself; he imagined a fresh candidate and a compelling logic that would explain the mystery.

  “It’s the Great Ship,” he offered.

  The !eech was silent, but there was a different quality to his posture, and even the crystalline eyes looked brighter.

  “The Ship itself has come to life,” the young man proposed.

  “And why would that be?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it finally had enough of human beings at the helm, this damned Polypond trying to kill it, and all the rest of these unpleasant creatures running around inside it. So one day, it just woke up and said, ‘Screw you. From here on, I’m in charge!’”

  “Interesting,” his friend offered.

  “And what if . . . ?” Peregrine continued. Swallowing and then smiling, he asked, “What if we aren’t just following some random line? Instead of heading out into nothingness, the Ship is actually steering us toward a genuine destination?” Then he laughed in a tight, nervous fashion. “What if our voyage has only just begun, Hawking?”

  There was a momentary silence.

  Then his friend replied, “Every voyage has just begun. If you consider those words in the proper way . . .”

  7

  Buried in those old data sinks were schematics for a host of impossible machines—devices too intricate or demanding to be built by refugees and their children. Included were wondrous starships like those that once brought passengers to the Great Ship. Peregrine had always dreamed of seeing vessels like those, and judging by the spectrums, that’s what the apparition was: an armored starship equipped with a streakship drive, efficient and relentless, yet operating at some minuscule fraction of full throttle. With just that whisper of thrust, the gap between him and it closed in an instant. Peregrine’s ship was a tiny, toyish rocket that barely had time enough to fold its wings and kick itself out of the way. The rising starship missed Peregrine by less than ten kilometers. The silvered ball of hyperfiber stood on a plume of hard radiations, the exhaust narrow at the nozzle but widening as it drove downward, scorching heat causing it to explode outward into an atmosphere that was cooked to a broth of softer plasmas, a stark blue-white fire betraying only the coldest of the unfolding energies.

  “Run!” he ordered.

  His pilot had already made that panicked assessment. Using the last shreds of its wings, the raider ship tilted its nose and leaped toward space, not following the starship so much as simply trying to keep ahead of the awful fire. The black mass beneath them continued to churn and spin. And the living ocean below everything could see the starship too, a thousand defensive systems triggered, the burning air suddenly full of laser bursts and particle beams and a host of slow ballistic weapons that could never catch their target. Whatever the reason for fighting, hatred or simple instinct, the Polypond employed every trick in its bid to kill its opponent. And that’s when Peregrine’s tiny ship was kissed by one of the lasers, a portion of his hull and two entire wings turned to carbon ash and a telltale glow.

  “Reconfigure!” he screamed.

  The AIs began shuffling the surviving pieces, pulling their ship back into a rough shape that might remain whole for another few moments.

  But the main fuel tank was pierced, leaking and unpatchable.

  “We can’t make it home,” was the uniform verdict.

  Peregrine had already come to that grim conclusion.

  “Hunt for help,” he said. “Who’s close
—?”

  “No one is,” he heard.

  The surviving portions of the black mass were still churning, a few billion fusion bombs riding little rockets. It was a useless gesture, Peregrine believed. But then he noticed how the cloud was changing as it moved, acquiring a distinct pancake-shaped base above which a tiny fraction of the bombs were gathering, pulling themselves into a dense, carefully stacked bundle.

  In a shared instant, the pancake below ignited itself.

  The resulting flash dwarfed every bolt of laser light, and even the stardrive faded from view. A hypersonic slap struck the last of those bombs, destroying most but throwing the rest of them skyward at a good fraction of light-speed. Then as the bombs passed into the last reaches of the atmosphere, they gave themselves one last shove, rockets carrying them close enough that the starship was forced to react, shifting its plume slightly, evaporating every last one of its pursuers.

  But the pancake burst had launched more than just bombs. A fat portion of the atmosphere was being shoved upward, and soon it would stand higher than Peregrine had ever seen. More out of instinct than calculation, he said, “Try wings again, and ride this updraft.”

  It wouldn’t lift them much, no. But the soaring maneuver would keep them at a safer altitude for a little while longer.

  “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 engine throwing back a jet of plasma that grew even thinner and hotter as it began to finally throttle up.

  “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 too—”

  8

  “You were once an engineer,” he had whispered to Fusillade. “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 founded 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.”

  “The 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, Fusillade 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 very often. 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, yes. 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 relationships with whoever seemed to be the best raider.”

  “I’ve heard that story before,” Peregrine muttered. 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 . . .”

  “And what about your mother?”

  “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 anything. 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 have celebrated tens of thousands of birthdays. Minds like yours have habits, and habits don’t easily change.” Now he sat up and pushed against her chest. The woman had a 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 burned. 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’ll 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 o
f 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 and 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, and with maybe a tenth my mass . . .”

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