The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  “Measured how?” the Master inquired.

  “Sloppily,” he admitted. “I commissioned three different polls by three different species. I charted consumer interest in various escape entertainments and psychoactive drugs, plus the foot traffic in mating parlors. But most important, I asked for opinions. I prepared a holo of myself, and in the course of an hour, I interviewed nearly a million residents. And each of these studies came to the same ugly conclusion. We’ve got a lot of scared and angry souls, and most of our hundred billion would leap off the ship tomorrow. Or today. Although they would have preferred to have left years ago … before anybody ever heard about Marrow or the damned Waywards …”

  There was a brief, tense pause.

  Then one of the AIs spoke, reminding everyone, “But we lack the starships.” Behind the rubbery face lay a tiny consciousness—a quantum-computing mind smaller than the tip of a finger—and with that day’s face, it gave precise figures about the starships on hand and their limited capacities. Machine souls were the tiniest passengers, but even if they were packed like so much mindless sand, not even their ranks would be able safely to escape.

  “Thank you,” the Master interrupted. “We don’t have enough lifeboats. We’re aware of that hard fact, and thank you.”

  Had it said something wrong? No, it couldn’t find any factual errors. And none of the other Submasters were offering new information either. The AI threw back its false shoulders, and with a little too much humanity, it began to pout.

  “Some of us have already escaped,” Pamir continued. “After the war and our dive past the old star … when it looked as if the ship was going to collide with the black hole … there was a small exodus. By my count, we’re missing two streakships and thirteen slow taxis—maybe fifty thousand passengers in all—plus another eleven or twelve or thirteen hundred souls riding inside emergency blisters.” Blisters were sacks of hyperfiber launched from the open hull. Possessing only alarm beacons and minimal recycke systems, they relied on their initial trajectory and the benevolence of others. “The blister cowards are screwed,” Pamir reported. “We’re crossing an empty stretch of space, in terms of friendly ports. If they could have fled before we changed course, they might have been all right. In another hundred years or so, we would have entered a thickly settled region. But most of those poor bastards left with some variation on our present trajectory. The wrong trajectory.” Streakships could twist their vectors, and with patience, even a slow taxi could eventually make it to someplace important. “But there aren’t fifty suns in the likely sweep path,” he continued. “M-class dwarfs, mostly. We know of six worlds with technological life. Four terraformed, two native-born. Maybe some have the resources to reach out and grab a few blisters. Maybe. But the prospect of applying a major fraction of their economy to save a motley collection of refugees … well, I know about luck and a little something about kindness, and there isn’t enough of either to save more than none of those crazy shits …”

  Pamir fell silent, leaning forward in his chair. The sturdy wood creaked as the back legs lifted off the bare rock. Then with a quiet but massive urgency, he told his audience, “We need every last one of the remaining starships. Seventeen thousand-plus sitting in berths inside our ports, as my good colleague has reminded us. And as soon as it’s practical, we should build more ships. Faster, bigger, and better ships, if that’s possible. And we should never allow anyone to leave, for any sum—unless we can guarantee that the vessel eventually returns to us. Bearing critical cargo, if possible.” He shook his homely face, reminding them, “We’ve managed an ugly eighty-degree turn around the red giant and black hole, and now we’re charging into districts we do not know. That we never bothered to care about. In not too many centuries—if we cannot or will not return to our old course—we’ll cross into intergalactic space. Few suns, the occasional world, and next to no civilizations out there to help us.” His eyes narrowed, and with a shaman’s keen intensity, he said, “Don’t ask me why. I don’t know why. But I’ve got this feeling, this sense—”

  “That we need every starship,” the Master offered.

  “In part,” Pamir replied. “But I was thinking more about the passengers. Some of them, or all of them … we’re going to be glad that we’ve got so many of them, before this mess is over …”

  EACH SUBMASTER WAS free to speak his mind, and most did, and votes were cast while the three supreme officers made the final choices. By the time the subject was exhausted, the day was done. The illusory sun was touching the sea’s far shores, and the night birds were flying, and two critical decisions had been locked into the ship’s codes: a nearly total ban on emigration, plus the conscription of every private vessel capable of long-distance travel. To entities accustomed to great spans of changeless time, this had been a very busy day. Gazing out at the sun with both of her/his faces, the Janusian asked, “What follows now? After these next few suns, what waits?”

  There was the obvious answer. Submasters and captains and even many of the passengers understood what lay across the ship’s path. But the Janusian was asking larger, more complex questions. “What follows?” was an opening to predict the future. “What waits?” was a plea for someone, anyone, to define those things that were inevitable.

  Washen triggered one of her nexuses, and a chart appeared before them. The Great Ship was a carefully defined point falling through a mist of little suns. The suns and their various worlds had been mapped, while the sunless worlds between and the occasional primordial black hole wore navigational labels. The starry mist was relatively brief, barely seventy light-years thick, and beyond those suns stood the smooth, vast, and perfectly black face of a nebula. The nebula was a conglomerate of cold gases and lazy dust, ice particles and perhaps a few half-born suns. Before the Waywards, the occasional brief survey had peered inside that deep frigid blackness, finding traces of odd heat and soft radio voices—the hallmarks of high technologies busily at work.

  Washen avoided the obvious. If the ship fired its working engines tonight and for the next two hundred years, their course wouldn’t change any important distance. They would pass by every sun at too great a distance for a useful flyby, the nebula would eventually engulf them all the same, and then with their fuel nearly exhausted, they would have no choice but to plunge through the black dusts and opaque gases. The wiser course would be greedily to hold on to their hydrogen oceans while repairing their shields and lasers, and always make plans, then make more plans, and finally scrap all of those wise contingencies, inviting new ideas to push aside the obvious and useless.

  Washen said none of that.

  For a long moment, she made no sound. Rising to her feet—an imposing woman who had always had more grace than strength; the consummate captain wearing a mirrored uniform seemingly designed for her before anyone else—she looked out across the open water, thinking back to a childhood spent on this little shore. Some feeble half memory nipped at her. For the second time today, she was thinking about her parents. The three of them sitting together, talking. About what? She still couldn’t recall the subject, and probably never would. Let it go, she kept telling herself. Then with her face and stance and wise silence, she looked at each of her companions, a genuine fondness preceding the smile that came before she said, “Whatever happens.”

  Then just as suddenly, she paused.

  Even the aliens and the swift-minded machines felt curious, waiting patiently for the next word or little gesture.

  “Whatever happens,” she repeated. Then with a nod, she said, “It will be an endless surprise, I think. And hopefully, a sweet surprise.”

  A warm reassurance rippled through her audience.

  Everyone who was sitting began to rise.

  Except for the Master Captain. She remained planted upon her chair, her golden face taking a quick measure of her new Submasters. A figurehead now, she still managed a massive dignity, and with a whisper of her old self, she cleared her throat, demanding the full attention o
f others.

  “A proposal,” she said. “May I?”

  Washen immediately turned toward her. “Yes, madam.”

  The Master climbed out of her black chair, her feet apart to hold her body steady. “Each of us should imagine ten distinct futures,” she suggested, her bulk dwarfing even the harum-scarums. “Ten possible and awful futures, well-defined and thoroughly simulated. Then as an exercise, we will trade our futures, and before the next Master’s banquet, each of us needs to save our ship ten times.”

  With an appreciative nod, Washen said, “Yes, madam.”

  “As an exercise,” the ancient woman repeated. “That’s all I intend here.”

  “Of course.”

  Then with a charm that hadn’t been seen in aeons, the Master admitted, “I know what I am now. Full well, I understand my new role here. And while I don’t enjoy it, I most definitely deserve it.” The ageless face grinned, sadness mixed with an almost childlike resignation. “But please, if you will, Washen? Would you allow me the tiny honor of declaring this meeting complete … please … ?”

  Three

  In his dreams, he was always the walker. He would find himself strolling past odd shops and entertainment emporiums, cafes and apartments, the avenue decorated with alien skies and the occasional exotic tree or sessile animal planted in solitary steel pots, or sometimes many of them planted in elaborate groves designed to seem just a little wild and pleasantly mysterious. At the border of every district was an alien statue carved from marble or light, and with a human voice it would say, “Careful, sir. You are about to enter a different atmosphere.” In life, the demon doors produced a slight and mostly ignorable tingle. But in his dreams the doors were heavy cold curtains clinging like a statically charged cloth to his restless body. He had to push his way through the invisible barrier, and suddenly the air was thick and oven-hot, or it was mountaintop thin and cold enough to blister his lungs. Yet he wouldn’t stop, and somewhere in the next few hundred steps his dream body would adapt to the new environment. Then came more shops to visit and new aliens to watch—by the hundreds and by the thousands, the endless avenue jammed with their vast and tiny and always odd and wondrous bodies—and in the midst of that chaos, he would spy friends sitting around a little table, eating exotic fare while chatting amiably. In every dream, he approached the table and smiled. He could feel his face grinning while his heart beat harder. He would hear his own voice above the mayhem, saying to these dear lost friends, “Hello.”

  A moment would pass, then another. Finally, one of the friends would look up—usually a human friend, oftentimes a former lover—and what might or might not be a smile would precede the mouthing of his name.

  During his long tenure aboard the ship, the man had possessed half a hundred identities. Or more to the point, those identities had possessed him. There was no guessing which name would be used now. People who never knew him by one name would use it regardless, and to his great distress, he realized that everyone at the table could peer inside his soul, cutting loose every secret. He felt transparent. He was simple and obvious and quite helpless. O’Layle was his final name, but none of his dream-friends ever used that appellation. Even his most recent lover would refer to him as someone officially dead and lost, then with a warm hand, she might touch him on the back of his suddenly cool hand, the smile falling into an easy scorn as a slow loveless voice asked, “Don’t you feel foolish now?”

  Very foolish, yes.

  “We survived,” she would proclaim. “It looked bad for a little while, but we managed to avoid obliteration. We clipped the fringes of that dying sun, but that’s all. A touch. Little more than a kiss, really. And then we missed the black hole entirely, and now everyone is safe and happy again.”

  Good for you, he would say.

  “What about you?” His final lover was little older than a child, and she was pretty in a thousand ways, and as happens with youngsters, she had been intrigued by his life of petty crime and low-grade corruption. “Are you still alive?”

  I am very much alive, O’Layle would claim.

  “Not to me.” Then with a casual scorn, she would laugh. Her hand would retreat, and her beautiful eyes—bright cold white eyes set in a dark brown face—would turn away from him. To other friends and ex-lovers, she would say, “This man is very much dead.”

  “The fool,” another would spit.

  “Idiot coward,” a third might add with conviction.

  Then everybody sitting around the table stopped hearing O’Layle. He would sit among them, speaking to them, explaining his good smart reasons for everything. And then he would scream at them, fiercely defending what he had done. The Waywards had appeared suddenly, and just as quickly, they were defeated and gone. But the Great Ship had been pushed toward catastrophe, with everybody sure to be killed when the monster trapped at Marrow’s core was set free.

  Every rational soul had panicked. O’Layle reminded his companions that each of them had imagined the worst, and in those next minutes and hours, the worst had seemed inevitable. Everybody here had done their frantic best to escape, but with the fighting and damage, and the general martial law, the rest of them had failed. O’Layle was the lucky exception. Though it wasn’t exactly luck that bought him passage to the open hull, nor did good fortune give him that little escape blister and enough momentum to carry him off into the deep and cold and relatively safe depths of space.

  With a sadness that was mostly genuine, he would tell his ex-lover, “I couldn’t take you with me.”

  She would pretend not to hear him.

  “How could I take you? The blister’s tiny, and your mass would have doomed both of us.”

  In his dreams, his arguments sounded logical and noble, and he was always surprised when the sweet young face glanced in his direction, those white eyes growing hot as a matching voice spat, “Fucking coward.” Then she would stand abruptly, and everybody at the little table would rise. Each might glance at O’Layle, using expressions laced with scorn and hatred and sometimes a pained pity. Then they would leave him sitting alone, and he would hear his own sorry voice explaining why he was the most reasonable and practical creature in the galaxy.

  “Just to do what I did … it took every resource I had! The contacts. The ridiculous bribes. I had to slip past the security patrols, get myself up to the launch site. Most were broke before they even got on top of the hull. And even then, there were more of us than there were blisters, and the crew in charge of the whole operation just laughed at us, saying, ‘Guess what? There’s going to be a surcharge.’ Which I’d halfway expected, and I was ready. Faster than others, I could transfer the last of my money into ghost accounts, and what did I get for a lifetime’s savings? A tiny, tiny blister. A hyperfiber ball barely two meters in radius. With an iron collar around its waist, and me strapped inside it, and I was plopped down on one of the only magrails to survive the war. We were on the backside of the ship. Did I mention that? On the ship’s stern, with the red sun already behind us, the black hole still over the horizon. They set my blister on the little rail, and I draped an old crush-web over my body, and they started to accelerate me. A huge, bone-snapping acceleration. ‘We’ll send you toward a nice living world,’ the voice in my head promised. Then I died. I became a comatose pulp lying beneath the crush-web, and unknown to me, there was a power surge. A hiccup. I found out later. I wasn’t even a thousand kilometers into the launch cycle, and there was a sudden disruption … and you well know, you can’t do anything wrong at the beginning of an engineless voyage, or your chances of getting to your destination fall away to nothing …

  “I would have aborted, if I’d known. But by then I was a wet smear and a blind brain held together by the web.

  “Then after another seven thousand kilometers, I roared out into the shadow of the ship, and my blister was released from the rail, my iron collar fell off, and my body slowly, slowly began putting itself back together. I’ve never been so dead before. It took days just to
remake my bones, my organs and skin. When I was conscious again, the first thing I did was look out through my little diamond windows. The black hole had fallen behind, and I was free. I watched the ship. I watched you. Honestly, I hoped you would survive. Why wouldn’t I want the best for all of you? My thousands of good friends, and of course I was thrilled when you changed course just enough … for days and days, I watched you fighting … a gray ball getting smaller and duller … slower than me by a long ways and with a slightly different trajectory … and then I couldn’t see you anymore, except inside my head …”

  The dream always ended there. O’Layle would stop explaining himself, and as he glanced up and down the avenue, he discovered that he was alone. Not only had his friends vanished, but the multitudes of strangers had evaporated, too, and the air had turned stale and dark, and there were no more shops or little forests to enjoy. The ship was as empty as the moment it was discovered, a palpable loneliness hanging over the vastness, making it almost easy for the man to open his eyes, looking at the tiny but comforting space that was his world.

  O’LAYLE’S WORLD WAS a blister of moderate-grade hyperfiber punctuated with little diamond eyes—a nearly perfect sphere enclosing layers of recycling equipment and automated beacons, finger reactors and streamlined libraries, plus a minimal navigational system and a single holo projector. Damp air lay at the hollow center, and a naked human body was the only substantial inhabitant. O’Layle’s minimal diet had triggered an assortment of lifeboat genes, reducing his metabolism to the bare minimum. One little meal every other day was ample, and he cleared his bowels less than once each week. Sleep filled sixteen hours out of his typical day, and his waking time was spent reading projected books and speaking quietly to himself, or he did nothing but contemplate his circumstances and the elaborate path that had brought him to this place. Then on those rare moments when he could coax himself into a halfway buoyant mood, O’Layle would use the diamond eyes, peering out into the increasingly black universe.