The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  More than anything, O’Layle was amazed how quickly he had adapted to his new and extremely tiny life. Before this, he was a comfortable if not quite wealthy human, and if every day had seemed like every other, at least the mornings brought the possibility of doing one or two or a thousand entirely new things. The ship was a wonderland of diversions and raw surprise. Sitting in any public avenue, he could watch inhabitants from a fat fraction of the galaxy as they strolled past. Or rolled past. Or glided overhead on long, powerful wings. And if he wished, he could spend the day exploring the Great Ship. There were endless caverns laced with rivers and deep cold lakes, and dozens of genuine oceans, and because there were so many passengers busily making homes for themselves, the caverns and big rooms were changing every few centuries. Every wandering would feel new and strange, and memorable, and why hadn’t he done more of that when he had the chance?

  Because there was always time, he had believed. Tomorrow was an endless parade, and he was comfortable where he sat, and so why go to so much sweaty trouble today?

  It was a mistaken assumption, yes.

  A long life thoroughly wasted.

  But still, O’Layle couldn’t remain angry or forlorn. Against so many odds, the ship had survived, and he was alive, too. Both of them had won, at least temporarily. And wasn’t there a small but genuine chance of being saved? Perhaps he might even one day return to the ship and rejoin his circle of friends and lovers—provided that enough time had passed for them to forgive his abandonment, or at least forget their own rage. Then he would have a spectacular story to share. How many souls had ever traveled between the stars alone, inside a tiny cocoon of hyperfiber, with no companion but their own tiny soul?

  The chance of that future—survival followed by redemption—was fantastically small. On the brink of impossible, frankly. His tiny lifeboat had no engines, thus there was no way to adjust its course. Its launch had been hurried and flawed, and the navigational equipment was consistent in its expert pessimism. O’Layle would miss his target sun by almost a tenth of a light-year, which was a considerable distance. Someone would have to be listening for his beacon, and that same someone would need to launch their own ship at a fantastic velocity. His lifeboat lacked engines, but it had the momentum of the Great Ship plus the punch that had been delivered by the electromagnetic rail. He was streaking through the heavens at nearly half lightspeed, which would be a challenge for the best star-travelers to match. Even if he had remained on course, few could have caught him, and fewer still would have bothered. His passage through any solar system would take less than a long morning, unless it ended with his fiery impact against someone’s suddenly boiling sea.

  O’Layle originally wished for an impact course. That would make him a threat, which would force the natives to deal with his presence, in one fashion or another. But eventually he settled on a less aggressive and possibly more compelling scheme: In his first twenty months on board the blister, he had reworked the beacon’s endless message. What began as a general plea for help delivered in a thousand popular languages was now an elaborate set of promises and lies, implications and subtle miscues.

  “I am a very important person,” he told the stars.

  In honest terms, he described the ship that he had abandoned—its majesty and great age and the powerful display of technologies aboard—and then with a rugged assurance, he painted himself as being one of the very best experts about the Great Ship. “I have explored it in full,” he lied. “And I was a member of the crew for the last long while. I am a qualified engineer possessing a robust working knowledge of the ship’s enormous engines and its reactors and the various means by which the highest-grade hyperfiber can be produced in planetary quantities.”

  His fable gained a backbone through the use of little details—the harvest of a long life spent sharing tables with wiser, more informed souls. In particular, he borrowed from a human named Perri—an expert explorer who was said to know the ship better than even the captains knew it, and who had walked or floated or flown through as much as one or two percent of the ship’s considerable volume.

  “It is a wonder, my ship,” he proclaimed.

  “I want to show it to you,” he told the silent stars. “Come help me, and I will give you everything that I know about this ancient wonder.”

  Would that be enough bait?

  For another few months, he thought so. But then the doubts began to gnaw, and after some considerable reflection, he decided to build on those rather pedestrian lies. During his last few hours on board the ship—in the midst of the panic and the desperate fight to save it—a wild rumor had found its way to O’Layle. By then, everybody knew about the secret world buried at the center of the ship, but inside Marrow were more secrets. Greater mysteries, claimed the fresh rumors. In fact, according to a onetime lover who had recently spoken with Perri, there was the distinct and momentous possibility that the Great Ship had been built to entomb something from the very beginnings of the universe. Something tiny, but powerful. Something with a soul and intentions and the capacity to reach out of its abode, influencing the thoughts of the lesser souls within its ethereal grasp.

  O’Layle borrowed parts of that very odd rumor.

  But he decided to downplay the entity’s malicious nature. His unseen audience needed to feel curiosity, not fear.

  For more years, the beacon’s central message was about the ancient and powerful soul riding aboard the ship—the ship he knew so well. And that was why O’Layle could entertain a genuine optimism about his prospects. Alien or human, every sentient organism was inflicted by a measure of greed. His long, comfortable life had been spent using that innate quality, slaking his own considerable thirsts. Perhaps the creatures living on the first world wouldn’t respond, but there would be plenty of opportunities in the future. He would spend another few thousand years inside the galaxy or on its fringes … there was no way to know how many worlds would hear his pleas and promises … and surely someone would launch an armada to save the little man who could deliver the Great Ship to them … !

  How likely this was, O’Layle couldn’t guess.

  But the plan gave him hope, and hope became a habit, and the habit brought a kind of rugged happiness that made it possible for him to open the diamond eyes on an irregular basis, inviting the glories of the universe to trickle down inside his very tiny world.

  In darkness, O’Layle saw nothing but stars and the blackness between. Relativistic velocities made the retreating suns turn redder than normal, and there was some distortion. But in most ways, he saw nothing too strange and nothing in any great hurry to change. Before him were few visible suns, blued by their approaching velocity, and beyond lay the deep black mass of dust and gas that blocked an increasingly huge portion of the sky. Pass through the nebula, and there were some thick bands of stars. His navigational charts promised as much. If he could just pierce the cloud of dust and gas without suffering a significant collision, then everything seemed possible.

  Even salvation.

  “I am important,” he told the universe. “And I know about things far more important than me.”

  The beacon’s tiny voice sang and sang.

  And then came the day when O’Layle awoke from his usual dreams, and after a tidy little meal of cold, heavily sugared fats, and after a sip of distilled water and squirt of urine into the appropriate orifice, he told the diamond eyes to open.

  “Show me the universe,” he whispered.

  But instead of the stars and the nebula, he saw something else entirely, and for a very long while he just drifted in the middle of his tiny world, startled and puzzled, laughing in that nervous, almost joyous, way people use when they feel as if they should be scared, but really, they can’t quite tell why.

  Four

  Washen was failing, spinning wildly downward into a perfect blackness, silent and boundless. This was a dream, and an old dream at that, and after a few moments of acceleration, she tried to yank herself awake. But ev
en then, she felt her body plunging into the coal black depths. Long legs kicked while arms lashed out, reflexively clutching for handholds. Then the sheets took hold of her, reassuring with their firm embrace and instant warmth, and possessed by that narrow clarity that comes after sleep, Washen realized that she was lying in her own bed, safe as safe could be, and that she was far from being alone.

  But if Pamir noticed her unseemly little episode, he had the good manners or the sturdy indifference to pretend sleep. He lay in his customary pose—naked on top of the sheets, on his back, hands tucked firmly behind his head. Something in that simple posture betrayed an innate defiance, or perhaps a brute indifference. Any sort of enemy might lurk in this darkness, but he proclaimed with his body that he truly did not care.

  Quietly, Washen gasped.

  Wishing for any distraction, she triggered a service nexus, and her apartment delivered to her bedside a chilled glass of water and another of pawpaw juice.

  The bedroom was a substantial chamber, the floor tiled with slowly changing views teased out of the Mandelbrot fractal, the surrounding black brick wall rising toward a high domelike ceiling. Dimly illuminated, the ceiling displayed a present-time view delivered from the ship’s armored prow. Blue-shifted light and the relentless shimmer of the shields had been carefully scrubbed away. What remained was a ring of stars that lay at the bottom of the ceiling—the eye able to peer hundreds of light-years through the heart of the Milky Way. But directly above were far fewer suns, most of them rather small and all of them close by, and beyond those points of light was a different species of blackness, deeper and much stronger, possessing a palpable mass and a distinct chill that any experienced starfarer would recognize at a glance.

  Washen did more than glance at the nebula.

  Carefully, she sat up. She allowed her sheets to wick away her perspiration, and her pillows built a little chair against which she could sit and sip at her cold water, then the juice.

  Enormous telescopes had once stood near the ship’s prow—great fields of eyes probing the space to come. But when the Remoras fought the Waywards, they needed a trap. They had lured their enemies out onto the ship’s leading face, then destroyed the lasers and shields, bringing down a rain of dust and comets that obliterated an entire army, plus every mirror and each of the hundred-kilometer dishes. The entire system had to be built again from nothing, including support facilities and key upgrades. This was eighteen years after the war’s end, and only now were enough eyes and ears ready to give the First Chair an honest view of what was to come.

  Through her nexuses, Washen changed the sky.

  The nebula was black for two basic reasons. Enough gas and cold dust were spread out before them to build almost a thousand suns. And even more important, barely a handful of dwarf suns were scattered across a roughly spherical volume some twelve light-years in diameter. Without illumination from within, the cloud was blacker and even colder than it might normally be. If the nebula followed the typical history of such structures, it was on the brink of collapsing into dozens and perhaps hundreds of high-density regions, forming nurseries where stars and brown dwarfs coalesced over the next million little years, followed by an array of new worlds that happily danced with one another and battered each other, violence and mayhem carving new solar systems out of the rawest beginnings.

  Centuries ago, when the ship was still firmly on course and untroubled, cursory studies had been made. An officious name was given to the nebula—numbers and letters defining its position, apparent size, and year of discovery. Charts of mass distributions and temperature gradients, plus models projecting a range of likely futures, were accumulated and routinely stored in ship libraries. But the nebula was neither an obstacle nor a likely ground for recruiting new passengers. The occasional hint of life and high technologies might have intrigued some experts, but not the captains. On at least five occasions, the Master had diminished the priority of the work, arguing with conviction and not a small amount of good sense, “We’re approaching a rendezvous with a black hole. That’s where our focus belongs. Not in some little storm cloud sitting on someone else’s horizon.”

  Even now, Washen couldn’t fault the Master’s decision. How could a rational mind act on the very remote possibility that this place had importance? Black holes were dangerous for many compelling reasons, particularly those massive black holes living beside aging suns. How could any decent mind dedicated to the service of the Great Ship imagine things going horribly wrong, and going wrong in the precise pattern necessary to put this ship where it was today, on a collision course with a star nursery?

  “Infrared,” Washen ordered, specifying frequencies and the resolution.

  What looked like a normal dark nebula remained normal by most measures. The bulk of its enormous mass was really quite thin and very cold, composed of molecular hydrogen and helium gas, with tiny flecks of hydrocarbons and silicates and the occasional odd buckyball or two. On average, the cloud was a superior vacuum, and if not harmless, at least endurable. But inside it were pinpricks of heat. The largest heat sources were as big as worlds, and the smallest to date seemed no larger than a major comet. From the radiant signature, it was obvious that the bodies wore elaborate insulation—clinging to precious heat, or perhaps supplying some measure of camouflage. Scattered between the warm bodies were much smaller, much brighter heat sources, each betraying the presence of a fusion engine. Those ships were neither particularly large nor powerful. But if those warm bodies were settlements—little worlds unto themselves—then the unremarkable ships were exactly what one would expect from local trade and slow, patient migrations.

  Against the vastness of the Milky Way, the nebula was a fleck of blackness. But when you summed up the volume of warm living space that might exist inside a volume some twelve light-years on a side … well, the numbers were quite simply staggering …

  “Microwave,” she ordered, picking her frequencies moment by moment.

  When water molecules radiated energy, they had a specific signature, and inside every normal nebula was an abundance of water. But not in this case, it seemed. Barely a third of the expected moisture was visible, and its distribution was highly unusual. When the Submasters examined the recent maps, Aasleen saw the obvious. “Like rivers in space,” she observed. “Look. Ice particles are being collected and shepherded into specific regions. Here, and here, and this knot over here.” The woman had giggled out loud, like a child. “Dopplers give us velocities. Look! The rivers are flowing toward the interior, but not toward the same exact points.”

  “How is this done?” the Master had inquired.

  “Carefully,” Aasleen reported, admiration mixed with the humor in her voice. “Whoever’s doing this, they’re not being aggressive or energy-intensive. Otherwise, we’d see more heat and other big telltales.”

  Washen had imagined trillions of comets, each the size of a closed fist. “Microchines,” she suggested. “Landing on each little world, and then building a tiny mass-launcher—”

  “Probably not,” Aasleen interrupted. “There’d be too much dust flying, and pumping energy into each ball of ice would make a second mess.”

  “What then?” the Master pressed.

  But the chief engineer needed another few moments to make a string of enormous, exacting calculations. Then with her imagination and a long life rich with experience, she devised a simple answer.

  “Microchines, yes,” she said with a genuine appreciation. “But what they do … they sit on the surface and generate an electrical charge. Give your pebble or dust mote a robust negative charge, say. Then whoever oversees this business … this construction project … well, they use static charges to push and pull their little bricks wherever they want them. Which is here and here, and these places over there. Do you see? Estimate the volume of these presumed worlds, and compare that figure to the water that seems to be missing from the nebula. They’re not equal, but they’re close to equal. And if you assume that they’ve
been gathering up all the dust and asteroids and whatever else is available—”

  “How long?” Pamir had asked. “The project to date … from what you can tell … how much time has it taken?”

  “At this morning’s rate?” Aasleen used a fingertip, drawing figures on the dark brown palm of her hand. “Ten or fifteen or maybe twenty million years.”

  But nebulas didn’t persist that long. Either they collapsed into new stars, or nearby supernovae blew them apart.

  “Maybe our neighbors worked faster in the past,” Aasleen conceded. Then she nodded, adding, “What we’re seeing … it could be the tail of a long building project. With these tools and tricks, and the kinds of populations that we can envision …” A look of delighted awe came into her face, eyes shining while a low voice said, “My goodness. You know, now that I think about it, this might not be a natural nebula.”

  That earned a sturdy silence from the others.

  Finally, Washen asked, “What do you mean? Their engineers have stabilized it somehow? Staving off its collapse, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” Aasleen replied.

  Then with a nervous laugh, she added, “Or maybe I mean something considerably bigger than that.”

  “NEUTRINOS,” WASHEN TOLD her nexus.

  Her ceiling erupted into a fierce white glare. What had been a dark cloud was suddenly a kind of ghostly fire—a great if extremely diffuse rain of subatomic particles emerging at the speed of light, particles born inside the fusion furnaces keeping millions of sunless worlds as warm as bathwater.