The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  “Dim it,” she ordered.

  But Pamir had felt the light, and with a low grunt, he rolled onto his side, facing her now, one broad arm tossed over his tightly closed eyes.

  In the false light of the neutrinos, Washen looked at her lover. He was a huge man blessed with a naturally powerful build, and even in sleep, he carried himself with a tangible indifference to things that most people would consider important. Rank meant little to him. Making him assume the post as Second Chair had proved difficult, and if Pamir enjoyed his newfound authority, he was careful not to show it. A modern person could affect his appearance in nearly infinite ways, and this man wore his own peculiar homeliness without self-doubt or special importance. Yet in every circumstance, he believed in work and serving the ship, and there wasn’t one captain in the ranks who would risk as much as Pamir to care for the passengers, defending them as well as the enormous crew.

  With a wet gasp, the man began to dream. Under his lids, the eyes jumped back and forth, and with a shameless ease, his penis began to stiffen, the vivid dark blood pooling inside a structure older than the species. That thought drew Washen into thinking about people in general: Why was it that with all the tools and tricks at their disposal, people still looked like people? Artificial genetics and bioceramic materials were discovered ages ago, yet in most cases, people had applied these extraordinary technologies to enhance their traditional bodies. They made themselves immortal, and also, immortally human. And it wasn’t just human beings. Harum-scarums were a considerably older species, scattered across thousands of light-years and a wide array of worlds, yet they cherished their ancient appearance and most of their instincts. The majority of the passengers were the same. Reach a certain point in development, and the sentient species ceased to change. When you could look and act in any fashion, you tended to gravitate toward familiar bodies and old manners, leading lives that you willingly let carry you for the next million years.

  Washen reached for the ancient penis. But her hand stopped short, and with a whisper, she said, “Radio. Laser light. Any artificial signal.”

  The ceiling took on a new appearance.

  As expected, the nebula was riddled with modulated noise. Tightly focused beams and weak lasers jumped from little world to little world. What they could see from the Great Ship was the occasional trace of leakage—millions of brief examples collected over the last several years. And what they had learned from this vast puddle of data was nothing. Or nearly nothing. What lived inside the nebula used deeply encrypted tools for every kind of chatter, and that secrecy, taken alone, might be a clue. A harbinger.

  The nebula had its official designation. But every species seemed to have its own name for that dark and cold and rather mysterious smear. Some passengers used any of twenty common labels: The Cloud. The Deep Dark. The Dust. And on a few occasions, The Face of God. But a name employed by the Master Captain, almost in passing, had been accepted by the captains, and as the years passed, it was gaining favor elsewhere.

  “When I was a very young girl,” the Master said at her most recent banquet, “there was an artifact in the possession of one of my relatives.” Standing before a silent and increasingly alien audience, she had recounted an age very close to the beginnings of human civilization. “My grandfather had this antique sitting on his desk. It was a very simple container. Heavy glass upon which sat a silver lid. A fancy object, perhaps, but not ornate. A couple centuries old already, which made it seem deliciously ancient to me. Inside that little basin was an intense and thick black ink derived from the excretions of a certain sea creature. A beautiful animal with a close resemblance to several of our honored passengers.” The woman had grinned at some portion of that memory, or perhaps just to show her audience that she could feel sentimental about her long-ago childhood. “What humans would do, back in ancient times … they would grip a metal-and-wood tool in one hand, dipping it into the ink, and with that they would compose some of the oldest, finest works in our literature …

  “That artifact was called an inkwell,” she continued. “A little bath of potential from which great and hopeful things were born …”

  AGAIN PAMIR ROLLED onto his back, his dream ending.

  For a while, with a haphazard discipline, Washen attempted to fall back to sleep. The inkwell and its neighboring suns lay overhead again, looking much as a motionless human eye would see them, and she soon reached that point where thousands of years of habit and every inborn reflex were coaxing her back into a light, dream-stirred sleep. But it didn’t last. She was awake again, suddenly and utterly, her mind tripping over another one of her endless obsessions.

  Silently, she sat up in bed.

  Without an audible sound, she told her nexuses what she wanted. Immersion eyes were all-spectrum cameras tied into AI overseers that could never blink. Nearly twenty thousand kilometers beneath her apartment was a single immersion eye. Between it and her was a sealed, secured channel. No one but Washen could connect with it on a whim, and perhaps no one else could care half as much. In an instant, she and her bed as well as her blissfully ignorant partner were stuck to a surface of high-grade hyperfiber, and above her was an entire world held suspended from the chamber walls by an ethereal array of mighty buttresses.

  Marrow.

  The war had left it badly mauled, but alive. Eighteen years later, the planet’s atmosphere was still choked with dust and ash, and the vacuum above was gradually growing dark, some kind of night approaching within the next couple centuries. Directly beneath the tiny eye, where the once great Hazz City had stood, an ocean of molten iron and nickel still bubbled and spat at the sky. But there was solid ground elsewhere, and liquid water. The immersion eye could see the telltale signs of photosynthesis and oxygen metabolisms. Waywards had survived, in some battered fashion, along with the native life-forms, enduring and strange in their own right. More than Washen could let on, she missed that odd world. She had lived there for better than forty-six centuries. Those people were her own desperate grandchildren, and she was their absent grandmother who had set her allegiance to the surrounding ship, leaving them to weather these horrors by themselves.

  Washen was still crying when Pamir woke.

  The whisper from a nexus told him it was morning. The urging of ancient biorhythms made him ready for his day. His grunt was soft and disgusted. Looking up, he said, “If you want, I could cut out your heart. Would that make you feel better?”

  “You might as well.”

  “The Waywards picked that war with us,” he reminded her. Then with a glowering expression, he added, “Besides, this is where you belong. For the moment, you can’t help anyone as much as you can help us.”

  “You’re nice to say that.”

  “I’m never nice,” he countered, laughing.

  “You’re a mean old shit,” she said.

  “Absolutely!”

  “Except you aren’t,” she remarked. Then with her own warning glower, she said, “We each have our weakness. Marrow is mine. And yours is you.”

  “I’m not as tough as I pretend. Is that it?”

  With a thought, she severed the com-line. Now there was nothing above them but a dome of polished green olivine stained over the last thousand centuries, the dampness of Washen’s breath doing most of the damage.

  With an easy fondness, she took hold of Pamir’s morning erection.

  “When a species gains total control over its body and its mortality,” she began, “it typically improves its sexual organs. But it never, ever edits them out. Hearts, on occasion. Limbs, sometimes. But never has a man been born—”

  “Who willingly surrenders his prick,” Pamir said, finishing the old truism:

  “Ever wonder why?”

  “Never,” he replied with a perfect honesty. “Not once, ever. Never. And no.”

  Five

  Excerpts from tight-beam broadcast received 119.55 post-Wwar—Origin K-class sun 8.2 light-years from the Inkwell—Apparent source Streakship Calamus, A
cting Captain Lorkin (Former rank: Tech-agent, Class-C)—Security status of transmission: For the perusal of .Master, Submasters only; zero exceptions.

  AN OPEN LETTER:

  Until this evening, we honestly did not know your fate, Good Master. None of us could imagine anything but the worst for you and our good colleagues, what with the Wayward invasion and subsequent conquest of the ship, and the suicidal fight between Waywards and Remoras … a battle that threatened every vessel berthed at Port Denali, I should add … and then our subsequent maneuvers around the dying and dead suns, placing considerable resources and valuable property in mortal danger … Naturally my crew and I had no choice but to save whatever lives and property we could. Thankfully, we were able to pluck nearly one hundred passengers from the mayhem, along with myself and 311 handpicked crew members … at a time when the reconquest of the ship seemed quite impossible, I should add … and naturally, afterward, we were thrilled to see the Great Ship survive both its close approach with the red giant and its dance with the black hole … but until this evening, while conversing with our new friends, the Pak’kin, we never imagined that your forces, Good Master, had actually won the war, regaining full control over the helm and all the facilities within our wondrous home …

  Congratulations to you from all on board the Calamus … !

  HOLO IMAGE:

  Captain Lorkin posed for the cameras, accompanied by his officers and current hosts. It was a nighttime image, the rare stars hovering above the distant horizon, only the Inkwell filling the heart of the sky. The humans wore new uniforms grown for this single occasion, the tailoring reminiscent of various military cultures, with tall boots and wide belts on which hung overly ornate sidearms. Lorkin’s chest was decorated with colored ribbons and important jewels, implying many selfless actions and examples of intense bravery. He smiled, after a fashion. But his officers seemed less determined about their pleasure. The image captured one of them—a young-faced woman—closely watching the Pak‘kin squatting beside her. It was a rock-colored creature, roughly cone-shaped with many legs and thick, short, jointed arms, plus dozens of orifices scattered haphazardly across its body. The officer’s expression might be described as disgusted, perhaps even appalled. A single detail in one holo—one image among thousands squirted home to the Great Ship—yet much was implied. The woman did not like her hosts. She was suspicious and perhaps even scared. Indeed, none of the humans could easily hide their constant discomfort, both with the environment and the Pak’kin. To cope with the world’s extremely high gravity, they employed an assortment of mechanical braces worn beneath their uniforms. To cope with the dense atmosphere, they had met the aliens on a very high mountaintop. In an apparent bid of friendship, gifts had been exchanged. The humans brought examples of hyperfiber—random scraps of battered ship armor, mostly. The local Pak’kin, knowing next to nothing about their guests, gave a pheromone-laced oil that was promised to give its wearers access to their particular hive.

  Olfactory files attached to this image proved what the expert eye would suspect: The Pak’kin possessed a horrible, choking odor. Also, orbital images and cursory sensor data proved that no portion of the world was habitable by humans. The atmosphere was thick and hot and extraordinarily dry. Cataclysms during the world’s formative years had either denied it water or removed the seas it had managed to collect. Old oceans and a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere could have been peeled away by a collision with another world. That would explain the world’s substantial mass and how it had avoided runaway greenhouse events: The nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere lacked the heat-retention capacities. Life formed in one of several tiny seas, or perhaps inside a persistent hot spring. With water scarce, the local biosphere evolved as mechanical systems wrapped around tiny aqueous vacuoles where key reactions occurred.

  The Pak’kin were hive-born pseudomachines. With poor eyes and spectacular noses, they lived at the bottom of an enormous gravity well. They possessed certain critical technologies, including radios and fusion reactors; but without the urge or muscular capacity to launch large vessels, their presence in space was limited to a few tiny probes.

  Return to the tired, scared people. Walking inside the holo, approaching them to the limits of resolution, any observant soul could see the cumulative erosions caused by travel and endless fear. Acting Captain Lorkin was a prime example. He smiled, and for as long as that image exists, he will continue to part his lips and show his teeth to the circling cameras. But he had lost weight since abandoning his post and the Great Ship. Worse still, his flesh and the deep centers of his eyes showed the telltale signs of inadequate nourishment. A significant event had recently stolen away his right leg. It had regenerated, but not with the usual thoroughness. Even wearing high-gravity braces, Lorkin tilted conspicuously to one side.

  Between the scraps of battered hyperfiber and the physical state of the crew, an obvious conclusion presented itself: The Calamus had suffered some kind of near-crippling damage. One or several bolides had struck it, and with inadequate supplies on board and a crew composed of low ensigns and techs untrained for this kind of voyage, the ship may well have been crippled. What’s more, the shuttle waiting in the background—the squat, muscular vessel that had brought them to the surface—had been designed for this single flight. Equipment harvested from every onboard shuttle had been lumped together, huge stocks of fuel had been burned, and Lorkin had risked everything to stand on this barren mountaintop, meeting with this new and rather peculiar species.

  AN OPEN LETTER (continued):

  As I have said, I learned tonight that you survived the terrible war, Master … I cannot be more pleased, and thankful …

  Our hosts also mentioned broadcasts coming from the Great Ship. Most of the transmissions predate the war, but the last several appear to be narrow-beamed signals meant only for their eyes. (More properly, for their noses. Their language is quite intricate, and because of a lack of expertise on our little ship, plus our limited translators, comprehension has been difficult for both species.) As a friendly gesture, they showed us your most recent broadcast, and we have confirmed their basic conclusions. The Great Ship will pass within a light-year of their world before plunging on into the heart of a dark nebula. You desire information. In exchange for knowledge, you wish to learn everything possible about the nebula’s inhabitants. Which is perfectly reasonable, Master. And let me assure you, speaking for my crew and our passengers, each of us wishes to help in every way possible.

  But first, let me say this much.

  I am responsible for my many mistakes. Everyone aboard the Calamus has made errors of judgment, and all of us are infinitely sorry for our failures. But when you consider the circumstances of our leaving and the simple fact that we have several dozen passengers of quality who are desperate to return to their apartments and old lives … well, I cannot drop to my knees and cower, Master. I am forced to beg across many light-years, admitting to you that I am weak and sorry; but in all circumstances, Good Master, I have strived to do what is best. A different officer might hold back his knowledge about the nebula. The Inkwell, as you call it. But using what I have learned as a bargaining chip … well, that would be wrong, and I won’t fall for the temptation.

  Simply stated, we need help to come home again. Our streakship is empty of fuel and seriously damaged, and the mood on board is less than comfortable. I trust you, Master. Send a mission to retrieve us. And to show my own good intentions and my genuine faith in your kindness, I will tell you all that I have learned about the dark nebula and its citizens.

  SHIP’S LOG (excerpts, presumably edited):

  A beautiful disappointment, our first potential refuge has been. An M-class sun with three massive jupiters and an assortment of moons, it looked inviting in our best charts. With ample volatiles and a native intelligence broadcasting strong, highly modulated radio signals, we assumed we could find fuel and technical aid. But we didn’t make contact with the local species until we were on the fringes of the s
olar system. They live on the cold watery moon of the largest jupiter. Their technologies are few and development is slow, hamstrung by a lack of metals and stone. Rather like cetaceans, but larger and with far slower metabolisms, they produce the radio signals with their own vast bodies, choruses of them working together. Not having a xenobiologist on board, our interpretations are little better than informed guesses, but it seems there is a religious component to their radio voices. They hear the long radio broadcasts coming from the three local gas giants and their sun—the natural noise generated by magnetic fields and solar nares—and they assume that these celestial bodies are gods, and the gods are speaking to them … and if enough little voices can speak in tandem, then the gods will listen to them …

  But if the planets and sun are deities, then the black nebula is the Mother Ocean that blesses the universe with her bounty. (“It’s the best explanation we could decide upon”—Lorkin added later, with a scribbling hand.) In some long-ago past, the Mother Ocean visited their world with Her body. Their descriptions sound like a starship. The aliens aboard were as large as the natives, or larger. Or perhaps they were secondary ships departing from the main body. Either way, they were finned and perhaps warm-blooded … they knew how to speak to the natives … but in most cases, they chose to say nothing …

  The visitors seem to have planted the idea that the nebula is an ocean and a god, and that She washes the universe with her bounty. Until then, the locals had assumed that the blackness was just a hole in their otherwise god-rich sky …

  We could have visited the cold cetaceans, but our streakship is meant for fast transit and fully equipped ports of call. An icy moon would have supplied us with limitless fuel, but our machine shops are minimal and our shuttles small. I have decided to pass through the system, using the sun to help slingshot us on a new, more promising trajectory … a second system closer to the nebula, where the cetaceans claim to have heard voices rather like their own …