The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  “I fought for the captains,” said the harum-scarum woman. With an honest, well-deserved boast, she said, “I was brave. I did important things. And I murdered a few of the Waywards, too.”

  The human said nothing.

  “All five of us helped in the fight, Osmium. We deserve the chance to construct our own ship—with our own moneys and time and tools. Why shouldn’t we be allowed to travel where we wish? Or if it is our choice, in the end, remain on board?”

  “Where would you go?” Mere asked.

  “Anywhere,” the woman replied.

  The tiny woman shook her head, human fashion. “We’ve left your colonies behind. And mine, too. The orbital mechanics are pretty gruesome. A little starship with very few passengers won’t be able to turn around. And even if the ship could make the maneuver, then it very likely dies during the long voyage. Impacts and recyke failures are just two miserable possibilities. Which leaves you searching for an alien world and the hope of finding sanctuary there.” She paused, then said, “How about the Pak’kin?”

  Everyone knew the story of the Calamus. The Submasters had let the truth slip free, most certainly as a warning to anyone who thought of making any wild leaps to freedom.

  “What about the Inkwell?” the harum-scarum countered. “I have heard plenty of rumors, each one claiming there is life inside that cloud. Life and little worlds full of light and heat, and water, and perhaps other treasures, too.”

  “You cannot,” Mere remarked. With what looked like genuine sorrow, she said, “Even if you could find the aliens, you don’t have the skills. The sense. The magic necessary to make those very strange organisms think of you as their friend. And even if you did have that rare magic, how happy would you be to live aeons among such strange souls … ?”

  Then she gestured, sticklike arms reaching out, as if trying to embrace the multitude around them.

  The harum-scarum had no worthwhile response. She sat motionless, her mind fixed on a series of equally disgusting images. Life among the humans was barely tolerable, and these baby apes were not nearly as awful as most of these other intelligent species. Perhaps for the first time, the woman appreciated just what kind of doom would hang upon her if she actually abandoned the ship, now or in any conceivable future.

  Mere rose abruptly.

  To Osmium she said a few quiet words, using the human tongue. Then with an expression of utter contrition, she reminded the others, “It is not any kind of weakness, of course. This need that you feel … this love of your own kind … a species-hunger telling you to sacrifice everything to keep close to your own little flavor of life …”

  THE PECULIAR LITTLE human gave a two-stomp salute and left. Their table quickly absorbed its extra side, and after a few dismissive insults, everyone sat quietly, watching the carcass flinch and writhe.

  Osmium conspicuously said nothing.

  Finally one of the other men remarked, “I have never met a monkey woman quite like that one.”

  Again, Osmium was silent.

  The woman who had bluffed and lost now looked at the Submaster, and with a transparent frustration, she said, “All right, I will beg. Tell us about that little creature, if you would.”

  For a long while, the old harum-scarum gazed across the avenue. Eventually he spotted a massive black sphere rolling in the distance. Inside that insulated contraption, safely entombed, was a creature rarely seen by passengers or crew. Jellyjells, humans had dubbed them. Organic crystals formed frail bones and a slow but relentless mind, and overlying both was a gelatinous body composed of complex fats dissolved in liquid methane. On the ship, the jellyjells lived in their own little sea, frigid and sluggish. They were ancient and rich, and on the fringes of half a thousand solar systems, they were rather common. But their customs and nature seemed extraordinarily strange to hot-blooded creatures like the harum-scarums. Watching the black sphere tumble out of sight, Osmium asked, “Why did the captains allow them on board?”

  “The aliens paid enough,” the woman replied testily. “In empty worlds, in technologies. In those things cherished by monkeys.”

  The Submaster made a rude sound with his eating mouth.

  Another woman used a nexus, and with a sudden expertise, she attacked his question. “Their home world was old and stable, and very simple,” she explained. “Organic rain fed a few species of plankton that fed the jellyjells. There were no other multicellular species in their universe. Until they moved into space, they never interacted with other species, much less anything intelligent. They barely imagined creatures such as us were possible, much less important.”

  “They have some difficulties in their past,” Osmium allowed. “Feuds. Long wars. And ugly extinctions for certain rivals.”

  His little audience glanced down the avenue.

  With a gesture both fond and self-conscious, Osmium touched his uniform. “You don’t appreciate this. Until you stand inside one of these mirrored suits, you are powerless to understand: Every day, the captains must decide what is best for the ship. Every moment, small and mammoth choices are made. What passengers do we allow aboard? And which species are turned away? Who is too dangerous or too demanding, or too disruptive, or simply too hard to judge fairly?” His broad armored hand floated above its own reflection, fingers and thumbs slowly closing into a jagged fist. “A species offers us a fortune to come on board, but will that be enough? As a captain, I must consider that difficult question. And always, my first loyalty is to the Great Ship.”

  The others stirred uneasily. Did their old friend mean what he said? Incredible as it seemed, they couldn’t smell duplicity or any other politics at work.

  “A strange and potentially dangerous species approaches me. I am offered worlds and technologies and everything else that I deem valuable. But will I place my ship and passengers in jeopardy by accepting these newcomers?”

  Quietly, he asked, “To whom do I turn?”

  Then with a flash of humor, he said, “Mere,” and opened his fist, the big hand dropping into his lap.

  “You don’t realize this,” he assured. “But that creature who was just sitting here … she is genuinely famous among the ranks of the captains.” Osmium looked at each of their doubting faces. “Famous, and highly respected, too.”

  “What does the little monster do?” asked the woman.

  “With jellyjells … with a wide assortment of species, cold and hot … she goes to live among them for a long while …”

  “Ah,” said another woman. “An emissary.”

  “Hardly,” Osmium countered. “Diplomats travel in full view. As emissaries, they meet with officials and queens, tyrants and presidents. What they see is what they are shown, and if they are very talented, they see a little more. But telling the captains, ‘We can absorb this new species’ … well, that’s not their responsibility or their burden, or at least it shouldn’t be …”

  “She’s a scientist,” a young man speculated. “Some kind of cultural exobiologist, I would think.”

  “Again, hardly.” His eating mouth spat another foul sound, and at the same moment, he explained, “Thousands of years ago, riding inside a shielded and very swift little ship, Mere visited the jellyjells’ home world. To breed, they lay eggs on shallow ridges under the methane. In secret, she studied their breeding and the eggs, then the creatures that hatched from the eggs. When the babies were old enough, and important enough, she created a duplicate of one of them, inserting her own shielded and heavily insulated mind into the new body, and like the rest of her litter mates, she slowly swam out into the great cold sea.”

  Disgust and fascination held sway over his little audience.

  “They are a physically slow species,” he reminded them. “It took her contrived body several centuries to mature. Yet because she knew how to act and how to speak, Mere avoided detection and serious suspicion.” With a mocking laugh, he asked, “How many of you would live just one day in those circumstances? Bathed in liquid methane. Your bodies so
much slime reaching out to harvest the thin crop of plankton. A minute of that life, and which one of us wouldn’t go mad?”

  No one spoke.

  “Mere lived among the jellyjells,” he continued, “and when the time came, she slipped back to her hidden ship. She returned to the Great Ship. The Master Captain’s original First Chair, the old bitch Miocene, didn’t want any part of these aliens. The expert arguments about the jellyjells described them as treacherous xenophobes with a capacity for murdering entire species. But despite every smart warning and all the rational fears, Mere managed to convince the Master Captain that these cold creatures had learned and matured, becoming flexible enough and confident enough to dress up in a cold little pond and go for a roll down a public avenue.”

  The faces began to look at one another, plainly impressed.

  But Osmium wasn’t satisfied. With a steady, level voice, he listed several dozen species, famous and obscure, that Mere had lived among and who were aboard today because her respected voice had said, “Trust them.”

  If this was true, the variety of monsters that she had lived with was astonishing. Spectacular, and numbing.

  Then the Submaster offered a shorter list of species. When the angry woman admitted that she didn’t know those names, he replied, “Of course. Mere lived with them, too. Lived as them, on occasion. And she found good compelling reasons to refuse them passage.”

  “A talented little creature,” one of the men conceded.

  “But why her?” another man asked. “Among the multitude of humans, how did she gain this rare talent?”

  “That,” Osmium replied, “is quite a story.”

  “Stop,” the angry woman interrupted. “Before you tell the story—”

  “If I tell it,” he warned.

  “First, I want to know something else. Now.”

  The Submaster waited with a keen anticipation.

  “You’ve been a captain for barely twelve decades,” she pointed out. “You’re still learning your own little job, and I doubt if you know much about the history of your new profession. Which makes me wonder why you are the expert. Where did you learn about a creature that the rest of us didn’t hear about until today?”

  With both of his mouths, Osmium smiled.

  Then with a deep and honest pleasure, he explained, “Before you were born … before any of you were prophecies written on your parents’ seed … I spent a few happy centuries as the husband of that strange little human being …”

  Seven

  As a boy, Locke had always been quiet and thoughtful. The only child produced by two of the most ambitious captains, he had inherited something about their appearance and a blend of their keen intelligence but nothing of their innate desire to lead others. On a diet of Marrow nuts and grilled insects, he had grown into a moderate-sized young man, healthy in every measurable way, but distinctly and forever different. He was strong and smoothly graceful. He had his father’s eyes, busy and bright and always intense. He had much of his mother’s face and seamless confidence. But he had absolutely no interest in controlling any group or manipulating any cause, no matter how worthwhile. After much consideration, his mother had decided that it wasn’t an absence of ability; genetic shuffling hadn’t stolen away any inborn talent, and he didn’t lack for an education in the art of inspiring other souls. No, it was simply that Locke easily saw great and noble causes that to others, including his parents, were abstract and perhaps a little questionable—ethereal realms where dream and theory danced together along chains of infinite and infinitely perplexing equations.

  As a young man, Locke fell in love with the Waywards’ beliefs. One of their major tenets was that in the remote past, when the universe was tiny and young, there were the Builders who created the Great Ship, and the Bleak who had tried to steal it. Then both died away, for a time. The universe was left as a sterile realm, expanding outward, with the ship wandering through the deepest, coldest reaches of space. Then the Bleak were reincarnated, and they found the ship and took it for themselves. Humans were the Bleak, claimed the Waywards. Unless of course you happened to be one of the humans conceived on Marrow, which made you into the Builders reborn, and how could it not be your duty and sole purpose to reclaim the Great Ship, taking it for yourself and your magnificent ancestors?

  As a loyal follower of a lofty cause, Locke lived as a Wayward. But there came a horrible moment when impossible choices had to be made: His mother was in mortal danger, and the only possible way to save her was to kill her assailant. With much grief but absolutely no hesitation, Locke murdered his own father. Then he marked his mother’s burial site with her own silver watch. And afterward, he managed to look as if he was still the loyal Wayward. But Locke was a guilt-ridden son, and whenever he stared at his faith, he saw its flaws and cruel failures. Then he found a second chance to help his surviving parent, and not only did he do everything possible to help her, he also turned his back on the Waywards.

  Of course Washen was his mother.

  In the days following the war, there was lazy talk about allowing Locke to join the ranks of the captains. Washen said it, as did Aasleen and a few of the other survivors of that mission to Marrow. But as Pamir pointedly warned, the young man still looked like a Wayward, and he spoke like one, and he had served their peculiar cause for centuries without complaint. Besides, how would it help the ship if the First Chair began grooming her once-traitorous baby for some lofty, undeserved position?

  “Do you think he isn’t qualified?” Washen asked, her voice tight and a little prickly. “If he isn’t, say so.”

  “I thought I just did.” Pamir laughed.

  But it was Locke himself who put an end to the possibility. With a shrug and a gentle tone, he said, “Mother.” Then the busy dreamy eyes looked off into the distance, and he confessed to her, and to himself, “I don’t have the barest skills to be any kind of captain. And even worse, I don’t have a flicker of the fire that I would need.”

  Washen was injured, and in ways she hadn’t imagined, she was impressed by his honesty and relieved to be free of her own motherly ambitions. Quietly, she asked Locke, “What do you have a fire for?”

  Shrugging amiably, he said, “I’m usually clever, and in narrow ways, I can be very smart. Plus I see things from odd angles. And since I just abandoned the only belief system that meant anything to me for my entire life, my mind is temporarily free and empty.”

  How would such a loss feel? Washen could only imagine that kind of devastation of purpose and place.

  But Locke felt blessed instead.

  “I am empty,” he repeated. “Rudderless, and lost. My soul is desperate to find something new to believe in. Something worthy, this time. Everywhere I look, I can almost see things that are great and true.”

  “What things?”

  With a casual ease, he said, “Here’s a notion, Mother.” Then with the most unremarkable words, he calmly asked if the Builders had constructed just this ship. Or maybe they had fashioned the universe, and the Great Ship was just another little mystery nestled inside an endless series of concentric hulls.

  The purpose and meanings of the ship was a subject of relentless debate. A team of AIs had been built and educated to think about nothing else, and after nearly a thousand centuries of hard thought, they had come up with nothing substantial. But Locke’s little notion interested them quite a lot. The Waywards and their myths also held a certain fascination. A final decision was obvious enough that the machines and both humans came to the same inevitable conclusion. “Join them,” Washen urged her son. “Learn what you need about physics, cosmology, the high mathematics. Help them when you can. Or work on your own, if you’d rather.”

  “That’s what I’m doing now,” Locke reported, with a narrow, somewhat wary smile. “Learning and working on my own, mostly.”

  “Since when?” Washen sputtered.

  “Since that day when we looked down on Marrow.”

  One last time, just before the en
tranceway was sealed with fresh hyperfiber, they had traveled to the ship’s core.

  “I didn’t know this,” Washen confessed. “Why didn’t I know?”

  “You’ve been terribly busy, Mother.”

  True enough.

  “You’re usually distracted,” he observed.

  “And very tired,” she added. “But really, we have to make a point of talking to each other. From now on!”

  BUT THE FIRST CHAIR had always been a busy post, even in easy times. The War was finished, but there were immense repairs begging to be made. Like never before, there were civil concerns and economic barricades. A multitude of passengers had to be calmed and educated, and when necessary, kept distracted. A battered and suspicious crew had to be retrained and reenergized, and an entirely reconfigured army of captains had to be watched over, learning their stations and the subtleties that no school could prepare them to see, much less master. And always, there was the tireless need to make ready for the Inkwell, which would be followed by the next leg of the voyage. As a barrier, a cold nebula offered an endless array of hazards. Dust and the intermittent comet would test the ship’s shields and lasers. Even the most benign course would swamp their defenses, and the hull would again be battered until it was pocked and unlovely and a little bit weakened. That was why Washen decided to keep the repair missions at work, even when every system had been made fully operational again. On her authority, new lasers and enhanced shields were being constructed and deployed, and great fields of mirrors were scanning deeper into the Inkwell every moment. But even if they could conquer the crude monsters of nature—mindless ice and stone and the occasional sunless world—there were the simple and inescapable questions about who or what lived inside that cold black mass and what, if anything, they might want from the ship.