The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  “The very first,” she persisted. “In the universe, I mean.”

  The obvious answer presented itself. Neither of the engineers, nor any of the considerable experts on board, could do more than guess at my true age. But I was at least as old as the Earth, and perhaps much older. “It could have been the ship’s builders,” Washen’s mother offered with a shrug and a little laugh. “Maybe they were first in Creation to culture hyperfiber.”

  She and her husband had been married for most of a thousand years. Their feuds and little fights served as a mortar, as relentless as gravity, helping to keep them securely and forever locked together. As soon as her husband saw the flaw, he snarled, “That’s ridiculous. Think of the odds! That the builders were the very first, and that they happened to send their empty ship toward our little galaxy … and then out of the 2.2 million estimated intelligent species in the Milky Way, we just happened to be the first to come along and take possession of their prize …!”

  The complaint served no purpose except to send his wife’s mind drifting down a new avenue.

  While she pondered, the old man turned to his daughter. “We don’t know who was first, Washen. Does that answer your question?”

  For endless reasons, it did not. It could not. Yet the young girl nodded, setting the round scrap on the table, and after a moment of perfect balance, it began to roll away from everyone. Over the edge it fell, hitting the floor with the softest ping. Then with a charm that would eventually lead billions of souls, Washen lied, telling her parents, “Yes, sir. Yes, ma’am. And thank you very, very much for your help.”

  For more than a hundred thousand millennia, I had a great voice, and never once did I show any doubt in the words and images that I offered to the universe. My captains led flawlessly, or nearly so. The Master Captain was the image of a wise ruler—a nourishing queen, or at least a pragmatic and occasionally forgiving despot. My voice beckoned, and a multitude of species and odd souls rode little starships out to join me. My voice lured them, and the humans were enriched in myriad ways: with fresh technologies, cultural hybridizations, and trading pacts, plus fat grants that gave them worlds and asteroids to terraform and colonize, or to mine down to dust if they wished.

  And then came Marrow.

  Unknown to the captains, an entire world was hiding inside me. A living world, as it happened. The first examples of native life ever found inside me—forests and fungi and a multitude of pseudoinsect species—had thrived on this Mars-sized globe, undetected for many thousands of years. And deep inside Marrow lay other surprises. There was a cargo. Or perhaps, a passenger. Some willful entity, ancient and mysterious, imprisoned in my core and apparently dangerous, and according to a few voices, important beyond all measure.

  I wasn’t just an empty ship after all.

  A few of the captains journeyed to Marrow, in secret. There they were marooned, and with the scarce resources on hand, they built an entirely new civilization. Then over the course of the next centuries they lost control of everything they had built. Their children and grandchildren spoke of Builders and the Bleak. One was worshiped, the other loathed. But which was which? Who gave them visions and faith? What power born at the beginning of the universe was responsible, telling the self-named Waywards to climb up to the Great Ship and take back what had always been theirs … ?

  There was a swift and devastating war, and my voice suddenly fell silent.

  The Waywards’ conquest failed—just by a little ways, it collapsed—and the worst of my newest wounds were repaired. But my proud and loud and long-reaching voice remained silent. My carefully plotted course through the galaxy had been changed. Passing near an aging sun, then its sister, a massive black hole, my trajectory was twisted, sending me plunging on a course that in just a few thousand years would carry me out of the Milky Way, back into the cold, empty reaches of space.

  With my other tongues gone, I could hear my true voice again.

  Warnings whispered to me.

  Urges tugged, too subtle for anyone else to feel.

  Fear lay in my bones. My fear, or another’s? I didn’t know. I didn’t dare guess. Out of wisdom or simple exhaustion—is there any difference?—I decided not to make distinctions.

  Anyone’s fear means there could well be a reason to be scared.

  I have always been, as I am now. Terrified. And I shall always be this way, I imagine.

  One

  “So where is this holy site?” Pamir asked.

  The two of them had just emerged from an unmarked cap-car. Washen paused, bright black eyes fighting the glare of a sun that was not real. “Out on the rocks,” she reported, gesturing at a long spine of basalt that reached into the blue sea. She was a tall and elegant woman, and lovely, and her smile was quick and full of a shackled but genuine pride. “The chairs are waiting for us.”

  “I see them fine, but that’s not what I’m asking.”

  “What’s your question?”

  “Your original home,” Pamir explained, impatience lurking in his rough, low voice. “You’ve only mentioned it a few thousand times. We’re close enough to walk. Since we have time, maybe you could show me your childhood abode.”

  Why not? thought Washen.

  Yet for the next moment or two, she fumbled for her bearings. Centuries had passed since her last visit, and the city had changed its appearance in her absence. Entire streets had been moved or repaved, and the buildings surrounding them were either remodeled or obliterated. Unless, of course, everything was exactly the same as her last visit, and she was simply being forgetful. After more than a thousand centuries of life, not even the brightest person, on her finest day, could remember more than a fraction of everything she had seen and everything that she had done.

  The easy response to the confusion was to ask a buried nexus for an address and map. But Washen resisted the temptation, and after waiting for an inspiration that never quite arrived, she started to walk, leading her companion along a likely avenue while hoping it would lead to the correct hilltop.

  The cavern surrounding them was a modest-sized bubble tucked inside a vein of black basalt, strands and girders of buried hyperfiber holding the ceiling and distant walls securely in place. When first mapped by the survey teams, this entire volume was filled with water ice dirtied with nitrogen frost and veins of methane. Because of the cavern’s relatively small dimensions—barely a thousand kilometers long and half as wide at its widest—and because it was close to the ship’s bridge and Port Alpha, this was among the first habitats to be terraformed. Coaxing half a dozen nearby reactors out of their ancient sleep, the engineering corps had gradually warmed the ice to where it was an obedient, if still chilled, fluid. Then the cavern was drained. As an experiment, every drop of fluid was filtered twice and analyzed with an array of sensors, and like everywhere else on board the ship, not a single credible trace of past life was uncovered. The water was far from pure. In the ancient ice were traces of minerals and salts and a few molecules of simple organics. But missing were the telltale fragments of lipid membranes, the persistent twists of DNA or RNA, or any cell that could not be tied directly to any human being or one of her escaped bacteria.

  Giant pumps and siphons were scattered throughout the ship, presumably intended for this one function. With a command, the machines began lifting the water back into the cavern, and when it was half-filled, the engineers stopped the pumping and sealed the drainage holes. Other teams began tinkering with the environmental controls, establishing a day-and-night cycle and a sequence of seasons, modeling a climate that was dubbed Mediterranean. The new ocean was salted just enough, then laced with iron. A bright blue sky was painted with holo projectors, and at night, blackness and a scattering of ancient constellations wheeled overhead. Then an array of simple microbes and planktons was released in the wind, and the rare patches of flat ground were slathered with black soils made from hydrocarbon stocks. Fish and squid were pulled from arks originally brought from Earth, rugged oaks and oli
ve trees grew on the black shores, and a tidy few species of birds suddenly seemed to be everywhere. The ship’s first city was built on this ground, housing the engineers and other crew members who had come on the starships. Twenty-two other patches of ground and shallow water were designated for future settlements. But even after more than a thousand centuries, only half of those planned cities had so much as a few houses standing on the reserved sites. The ship’s enormity had absorbed the vast bulk of development. With more caverns than passengers, why not live in your own private paradise? Besides, since this was the first little corner of the ship to be terraformed, people better suited to repairing starship engines had done the hurried work. Every other sea seemed more elegant or beautiful or odd or special. At least that was the snobbish opinion carried by most of the passengers. But not Washen. She had grown up along this rocky black shoreline. Even now, uncertain about her bearings, she found it very easy to remember sweet moments and those long, long days when she was a child in a world with very few children, busily living her life in what was the Great Ship’s finest city.

  The rising avenue was a wide lane, basalt pavers set in the traditional quasi-crystal pattern, red buckyfiber mortars pressed between them, and the lane was lined with stout oak trees that might be two hundred years old, or twenty thousand. To the left, the blue sea quietly rolled into the rocks and the increasingly high cliffs. On their right, houses and little businesses created the comfortable mood of a genuine neighborhood. The occasional resident saw Washen and Pamir passing, and too late, they would emerge into the dappled light. Had they really seen whom they thought they saw? Were these the two captains who had defeated the Waywards? Word spread up ahead and along the tributary lanes. Humans and other species hurried outdoors, waiting to see the spectacle of two people dressed in their mirrored uniforms, walking side by side up the most average of streets. No one could believe her luck. Were they holo projections? No, apparently not. One fearless little boy approached, showing a big smile before asking, “Are you really the First Chair, madam?”

  “I am,” Washen replied.

  “And you’re the Second Chair, sir?”

  “I suppose,” Pamir rumbled.

  The two captains had recently become Submasters. The precise reasons for their promotions were complex and a little sordid and inevitably quite sad. But to a boy’s mind, the story was obvious. The Waywards were evil and dangerous souls who had risen up from that secret world, Marrow. Washen and Pamir had done heroic deeds, beating back their enemies, and their new epaulets had been earned by their bravery and undiluted loyalty to the Great Ship. The Master Captain herself, with nothing in her heart but gratitude, had bestowed these high offices on their proven, glorious shoulders, and now everyone should sleep easy through the night.

  “You’re here for the meeting,” the boy told them.

  He was walking beside Washen. They made an unusual pair—the small boy with short straight hair and a stocky build, and the tall, willowy woman with the pretty face and the basalt black hair worn in a tight bun. Washen nodded and glanced down at her companion, and with a false nonchalance, she asked, “Do you live nearby?”

  “Up there,” he replied, waving at the hill rising before them.

  “Hunting for a local guide?” Pamir teased.

  Washen conspicuously ignored him.

  With pride, the boy announced, “This is the oldest city on the Great Ship. That’s why we call it Alpha City. Or the First City. Or just Alpha.”

  “I know,” Washen purred.

  “The Master Captain always holds her most important meetings out there, on those big rocks out there.”

  “So I understand.”

  “Have you ever been to one of those meetings?”

  Washen shook her head. “I don’t believe so. But there’s always the chance that I don’t remember.”

  “So why walk up this way?”

  “That’s a wonderful question,” Washen allowed.

  “Because we’re lost,” Pamir offered, remaining a step behind the First Chair and her new best friend.

  Other pedestrians laughed with a nervous glee, but the boy seemed to disapprove of their mood. He frowned for a moment, then he decided to warn Washen, “There’s nothing important up here. Nothing at all.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  Was this some kind of trap? The boy concentrated before repeating his warning. “It’s an old neighborhood. The houses can’t be torn down, unless they happen to fall down. And they can’t fall down, because everybody is supposed to keep them strong.”

  “Because this is an historic district,” Washen explained. She winked at the boy. “The first people to board the ship built those houses. That makes them important. And one or two captains were born up there, as I understand it.”

  The boy seemed genuinely surprised. “Which captains?”

  “Just some little ones,” Washen said.

  “I’m going to be a captain,” her new friend announced. Then he glanced up at Washen with a sudden wariness, and finding something agreeable in her expression, he looked back at the Second Chair. “I’m going to be a captain soon. Very soon.”

  Pamir was a tall, imposing man. Unhandsome and typically surly, he had little interest in charm or false smiles. His heavy rough-hewn face was perfectly capable of frowning at any crew member or passenger, at any time and for the smallest good reason. But this was a child, and perhaps Pamir’s new uniform and rank helped him to behave. Whatever the reason, he decided to avoid the bald truth. “Maybe you will be a captain,” he replied simply. “I wish you all the luck.”

  Then through a private, heavily shielded nexus, he said to Washen, “If there’s still a ship to rule, that is.”

  EVEN IN THE midst of a seemingly ordinary walk, the Submasters were busy watching over the routine and the remarkable. Buried nexuses made it possible, and their rank made escape from their duties almost impossible. The ship’s giant engines were being repaired and refurbished in a crash program. Security teams still were hunting for the last of the Waywards. Passengers and the crew had to be encouraged and kept informed, and that required a multitude of media campaigns, each tailored for a given species and the quirky local cultures. And always, rumors had to be exposed and killed in very public ways. If any hazard terrified Washen most, it was the capacity for a simple story to ripple through the public consciousness, mutating and swelling in importance as it spread out from whatever misunderstanding or half-truth had given it birth. Right now, as she strolled calmly into the ancient neighborhood, she was dealing with a persistent bit of nonsense: The captains and their families were preparing to abandon the Great Ship. It was a rumor that began the very minute the Waywards were defeated, and despite every attempt to prove it wrong, the lie continued to find life.

  Today, the abandonment story was being told by an obscure species using a language of elaborate scent markers and fluorescent urines. As soon as the trouble was noticed, a team of AIs and xenobiologists began working on a countercampaign and the means of delivering it. Washen was alerted, and while walking on the narrowing road, she examined and canceled half a dozen plans. “Too much;” was her general assessment. “A light touch,” she demanded. “Get a captain to pee the truth in public,” she suggested; and then she looked up, surprised and more than a little pleased to find a familiar scene greeting her.

  A grove of ageless oaks and walnuts covered a piece of land just large enough to appear endless from the edges. The heavy interlocking limbs and thick green leaves produced a shade so compelling that only a few Lipanian murkshrubs managed to survive on the stony black ground. The single break in the canopy was above and alongside one low-built house. Obviously conceived by engineers, the structure was solid and balanced and slightly drab, fashioned from carved basalt and cultured diamond. Martian trusses and Roman arches lent strength and an accidental elegance, and the false sunshine poured over it, granting it a false brilliance. The front door stood shut—a thick white door made of sm
art plastics and brass nourishes—and for a little while, it seemed as if no one was at home. Washen gave a greeting, but she couldn’t hear the door calling to the inhabitants, and it certainly didn’t speak to her. Perhaps the house was abandoned, she thought. If it were empty, she would buy it. She had time enough to make that decision and briefly imagine living here again, then to suffer the first tugs of regret. She didn’t belong in this place. The girl who had lived here once was gone, and it was a foolish thing to wish for.

  The boy was still hovering nearby. She turned to him, asking, “Whose home is this?”

  “It’s somebody’s,” he blurted with authority.

  Then a face appeared behind one of the diamond windows, and Washen felt a giddy, almost intoxicating sense of relief.

  “See?” the boy added.

  But the face vanished with a strange swiftness, and the door remained closed and silent. With his patience spent, Pamir stepped up and used a heavy fist, pounding until a set of locks turned liquid and flowed into the jamb. The door opened grudgingly. The peering face belonged to a little human woman. She now appeared in the gap, and with a whispery little voice said, “Yes, sir. Yes, madam. What is wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Washen insisted. “I used to live here, that’s all.”

  The boy gave a low laugh and ran off to tell what he had just learned.

  “And if it’s no trouble,” the Submaster continued, “I’d love the opportunity for a quick tour, please.”

  A hard pain struck the woman. Several hundred of her neighbors and presumed friends were standing back in the shadows, watching everything. She stared out at them, a grimace slipping loose for a moment. Then she buried her rage, and with a soggy voice muttered, “I can’t stop you from looking.”

  Her discomfort was contagious. Washen flinched, and said, “I know this is an imposition, ma‘am. And if you tell us, ‘Go away,’ we most certainly will.”