The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  “And too circular,” Perri added. “I’d expect something more elliptical. A scarred orbit, I’d want to see.”

  Again, the circumspect nod.

  “And what about moons? It looks like some kind of gas giant. What is it? A jovian mass?”

  “Nearly,” said Pamir.

  “Wouldn’t it have retained at least its closer moons? But I don’t see anything like that. Or rings. Just the one pretty sun and her faraway husband.”

  Quee Lee laughed softly, squeezing at the hand.

  “There’s other ways to accelerate an entire sun,” Perri continued. “This could be ancient momentum stolen from its nursery. Seven or eight billion years ago, judging by the metal loads and the core profiles.”

  “Eight-point-two billion years old,” Washen offered.

  “Or it’s from outside our galaxy. From one of those dwarf galaxies that splashed into the Milky Way, and over the last few billion years have shattered and fallen back into us again.” He shrugged, and after a moment said, “Huh.”

  Quee Lee tugged on his arm. “What is it?”

  “There’s still another place where this planet looks wrong.”

  The observation wasn’t his alone. Several other voices had already started to whisper about some of the more recent, more thorough observations.

  “Too much helium,” he declared. “By a long ways, I’d say.”

  Estimates were muttered; guesses were generated. The audience had enough experts present to come up with all kinds of explanations, a few of which might actually kiss what was true.

  “An old gas giant should have pulled most of its helium into its core,” he continued. “And those temperature profiles … well, they look awfully high. Which means something could have stirred up its interior, maybe. Brought the old helium rising to the surface again. Although that’s a pretty cumbersome way to get this effect.”

  The Master had taken a mild interest in Perri. With a rumble, she said, “Name another, more elegant method.”

  “Nobody lifted the helium,” he replied. “Instead, I’m guessing that they just stole away a fair fraction of the resident hydrogen.” When he looked at the Master’s golden face, Perri almost giggled. “But you know that already, madam. Sure you do. You just want to see what we can accomplish, stumbling over this little puzzle for ourselves.”

  Again, voices made guesses. Most of them approached the best, most recent estimates. The jovian mass had originally been half again larger, but some compelling force or bullying hand had peeled away the outermost layers of the atmosphere.

  Quee Lee finally asked the obvious question:

  “What is this 305th message? Does someone live on this gas giant? Or somewhere nearby?”

  “As far as we can observe,” said Pamir, “the system is utterly sterile.”

  Then after a deep breath, he added, “What we have found is something else entirely. Something we’ve been carrying with us for thousands of years now. An old transmission buried inside a million bottled transmissions—in an historical archive given to us to help pay for a few hundred passengers. The transmission was a distant radio squawk originating on a superterran world. The species had just developed high technologies. The transmission was typical of these sorts of things: a picture of themselves and their home, the sun and neighboring planets, and their relative position in the galaxy.” The dusty data emerged beside the most recent images of the dead jupiter. “Nobody noticed. Until a few years ago, nobody even thought to look for this kind of clue. And you’ll see why nobody imagined drawing a link between this sun and that old whisper. There were six planets, including the living one. And the gas giant had a big family of moons. And even the sun itself was more massive than what we see today. Which implies that the same force that carried off the missing hydrogen also dismantled every other world. Every asteroid, and the entire cometary belt. And whatever that force was, it even managed to take a big spade to the red sun, digging out enough gas and plasma to make another world or two.”

  The room was silent, and respectful.

  “A few hundred years before their sun entered the Inkwell, the vanished species broadcast their first message. They aimed at a likely sun, which was uninhabited, but the signal continued on for another few hundred light-years, and it was noticed at least once, and recorded, and we captains were shrewd enough or lucky enough to accept that kind of useless knowledge as a partial payment for some of our new passengers.”

  Perri asked, “What do the aliens say about the Inkwell?”

  “Nothing,” Pamir replied.

  Then with a cold face and a wisp of anger, he added, “No, I may be misleading you. When I say that we have a 305th message, I mean that we don’t have anything. Just silence. Just five worlds missing, plus a sentient species that’s gone extinct, with no trace of any of these precious things after they passed through that damned cloud.”

  PAMIR SAT ON his chair, one long leg thrown over the other.

  After a moment, Washen rose, and with a relaxed smile, she said, “I’m sure you know enough to guess our general plan. Each of you has at least one skill that makes you valuable. Many of you have served the ship as ambassadors or xenobiologists. Others have different talents, and hopefully, new perspectives.” She nodded in Perri’s direction before adding, “There is a mission first planned long ago. From a much larger pool of potential candidates, we’ve chosen you. Just in the last few days, as it happens. Your participation is asked for but not demanded. But I will tell you: If you decide to stay on-board the ship, you must move to secure quarters until this mission is finished or until we’ve lost all interest in this undertaking.”

  Several dozen faces nodded in weak agreement.

  The squidscreen brightened with a flash. Suddenly everyone was staring at the interior of a sealed and heavily guarded berth inside Port Alpha. Filling the berth was a set of enormous engines, fusion rockets spiked with antimatter and the power yields increased by every possible trick of hyperfiber containment and quantum manipulations. The engines were attached to cavernous fuel tanks ready to hold millions of tons of metallic hydrogen, and above the giant tanks was what passed for the streakship’s prow—a blunt but elegant arch of high-grade hyperfiber, designed to be reconfigured at will, then braced in twenty different ways to protect the ship from every impact. If there were living quarters, they were invisible, tucked between the fat tanks in a slot that looked too tiny to give anyone more than the barest legroom.

  Washen summarized the ship’s history. She listed five past missions and every one of its important successes, and because there has never been a crew without a feel for luck or its absence, she failed to mention the little tragedies that had kept two other missions from being total successes.

  “Over the last nine decades,” she continued, “this particular streakship has been refitted and repaired. What isn’t new is nearly new, or better than new. There probably aren’t three vessels of this mass that can move any faster. Not in this galaxy, at least. At better than two-thirds the speed of light, you will be able to beat us to the Inkwell by more than ten years. Critical years, I should add.”

  After a moment, Washen said, “Questions.”

  Hands rose high.

  One woman asked, “Who’s our captain?”

  “I am.” Pamir gave a half nod. “I’ve got experience in small starships, and I can represent the ship with full authority.”

  It was momentous news. The idea that the Second Chair would leave on any mission underscored its importance. Unless this was a demotion, of course. Pamir was a stubborn soul, and in the universe of gossip, he was always butting heads with the Master Captain.

  Washen pointed at a fresh hand. “Yes, Quee Lee?”

  The woman smiled politely, then with an honest distaste, she mentioned, “We seem to be a rather narrow group.”

  Judging by the nods, the question swirled in every head.

  She was a beautiful woman, Asian in the old ways, born on the ancient Earth in t
imes that no one else could remember. Quee Lee lifted her gaze as if finding something of interest in the ceiling, and she said to nobody in particular, “All of us are human.”

  Washen and Pamir conspicuously said nothing.

  The Master rose to her feet in a slow, powerful motion that ended with a deep sigh and a shake of the head. Snowy white hair framed the rounded face. The face acquired a less honest disgust, as if some deep voice were reminding her that these were new times, and she needed to bow to the newborn conventions.

  “It was our decision,” she reported. “For good solid reasons, the three of us decided to send only a single species.”

  Nobody spoke.

  While the Master rose, Washen had sat back down again. Now she looked at the others, saying with the crisp voice of an order, “Ask it.”

  They hesitated.

  “We told you,” she continued. “Three hundred and six messages, to date. Which means that there’s still one communication that we haven’t quite managed to tell you about.”

  Again, she said, “Ask it.”

  “Okay,” Perri said. “Where did this last message come from?”

  Washen hesitated.

  It was the Master Captain’s right and honor to announce, “The message came directly from the Inkwell. Of course.”

  Silence descended.

  Then she added, “What we have received is a brief greeting, plus a chart giving us the safest course to one of the nearest warm worlds—”

  “Who are they?” Perri interrupted.

  The breach in etiquette went unmentioned. Quietly, the Master warned, “We don’t know anything that is certain. Not about what lives inside the ink, we don’t. But the face that it showed us, and the body … well, she looked rather like a human person … as odd or ordinary as that sounds …”

  Nine

  Whoever the Builders had been and whatever their high purpose, they possessed a considerable fondness for rivers. The ship’s rock-and-hyperfiber crust was laced with intricate long caverns and winding tunnels perfectly suited for the simple purpose of letting methane or ammonia, silicones or liquid water flow free across their floors, pooling now and again to create the lakes and little seas, then pouring over some brink or lip before continuing on their poetic journey. The first explorers found abundant stores of ready ice, muscular reactors to supply heat, and banks of environmental controls to salt and sweeten the molten treasures. Pumps and attached conduits waited at the bottom of every deep hole, having no obvious purpose but to lift those rivers high again. On occasion, two or more caverns joined together, entirely different chemistries mixing, life-forms from opposite ends of the galaxy suddenly sharing the same narrow channel. One great room welcomed a dozen major rivers, plus at least thirty lesser streams. It was a round room beneath a high-domed ceiling of mirrored hyperfiber, the nearly flat floor made of gravel and river mud and great expanses of tired water. At eighty kilometers in diameter, the room was vast enough to feel worldly, particularly at its center. The dying rivers gradually spread out and merged, becoming a single flow bearing down on a simple hyperfiber throat—a seemingly bottomless pit set at the precise center of the room, one fat kilometer wide and leading into a maze of pumps and busy filters. Engineers had constructed a series of platforms around the hole, and billions of passengers and crew had taken the time to stand on one of those vantage points, watching an ocean’s worth of water plunge into a blackness, screaming as it fell, the thunder loud enough to kill a human’s ears, leaving him or her deaf for as long as an hour after each little visit.

  Washen went away happy and deaf. Her only company on the platform had been a school of gillbabies who barely noticed the spectacle below. Far more remarkable was the sight of the First Chair, and one after another, in ways less than subtle, they had conspired to make sonar images of themselves standing beside her famous sound-wake.

  Washen left her admirers, a little cap-car swiftly carrying her upstream. Low patches of soggy ground and tangled marshland emerged from the slowing, shallowing waters. Individual rivers defined themselves, each of the large flows shackled by banks of dried mud and determined tufts of vegetation. Every wood had its color, its distinct and illuminating shape. Life from dozens of worlds lived together in this great room. Every day, one or two rivers would flood, spilling out into their neighbors’ channels. Dry places would be swept bare, new seeds germinating from the raw mud. A novel current would cut a hundred new holes, then fill the old holes with suffocating silts, while odd fish and things not at all like fish would colonize the fresh deep water. In the entire galaxy, there was probably no little place with so many species pushed so close together. Every day, the local ecology shifted ten times, and little species went extinct, and new species were brought down on rivers that could be ten thousand kilometers long, and in the quiet backwaters, by means natural and otherwise, new and entirely novel species would slip into existence.

  Upon one of the taller, more stable banks, where a spine of bluish trees stood above an earthly green tangle of corn, someone had constructed a tiny cabin. Even though she knew its approximate location, Washen could not see the cabin on her first pass. She smiled without smiling—a tight, uncomfortable grin betraying a long-building unease—then she turned, coming back again and setting down on the most distant available slip of brown goo and Timothy grass.

  Washen sat inside her cap-car, one hand holding the other. When her ears began to heal—when she could hear the squawks and opera songs of birds—she climbed out, stretched for a moment, and began to walk. After a little while, she could hear her boots making the mud squish and the soft rumbling of the falls, twenty kilometers from this nameless place and dampened by antinoise baffles, yet still, astonishingly loud. Then she heard the closer waters moving over flat banks of warm muck. A great long reef of titanium shells lay on her right, and to the left, in a different kind of water, a whale-sized fish lay in the chocolate shallows, basking in the illusory sun.

  The cabin was tiny and artfully placed. Washen didn’t notice it until she saw the woman sitting in the open door. A tiny and apparently frail creature, by all signs, she seemed to be sleeping. Her chair was some kind of puffer fish, inflated before death and probably not too uncomfortable to sit on, and her clothes were simple and rugged, dyed the same silvery blue of the sky to help her hide from the fish that she hunted for food.

  As close to silent as possible, Washen crept forward.

  Like a portrait painted in some impoverished age, the sleeping woman sat motionless. Washen thought of a peasant girl, half-starved and possibly dying of some ancient blight. With every step, the creature looked less human. She was so small and emaciated, and her skin had a thinness that Washen had never seen in another person. Stare hard at her face, and the skull seemed to emerge. And it was only the thinnest sketch of a skull, tiny teeth, and big eye sockets—human always, but in a thousand subtle ways, wrong.

  Again, Washen took a step.

  The woman did not stir. She didn’t even seem to inhale, which meant that she had been holding her breath, waiting to speak. The thin, wide, and wise mouth parted slightly, and the words leaked out before the eyelids finally rose.

  “Is it time?” she asked. “Already?”

  “Yes, Mere,” said Washen, her own voice sounding a little bit sorry in ears rebuilt just moments ago.

  WHEN THE SHIP was barely two hundred centuries into its voyage—when Washen was a midlevel captain finally beginning to show her promise—the original First Chair came to her with an assignment.

  “I am honored,” Washen declared.

  “That’s foolish to say, and a little funny,” Miocene replied. “You don’t know what I will ask you to do.”

  But in her entire life, Washen had spoken to this great woman only at the Master’s banquet, and then only in the most glancing fashion. She felt honored, and she refused to backtrack from her declaration. “If I can help the ship, in any way, madam. In any little fashion.”

  “Perhaps yo
u should help me,” Miocene rumbled. A tall, narrow-faced soul famous for her personal drive and her unmatched talents as the Master’s best hand, she said, “I have a problem. Not a large problem, but rather difficult. I require a captain who can give an honest impression, and afterward, my request will remain with the three of us.”

  “The three of us?”

  “Or just you and me.” The woman laughed without real humor, adding, “Everything depends on your decision. Unless I don’t particularly like what you decide.”

  The less-than-large problem involved a peculiar starship. It was tiny and powerful—one of the original streakships, according to its designation—but it was also poorly maintained and heavily damaged. Someone with minimal talents had repaired it and refueled its powerful engines. The ship’s AI had also suffered crippling abuse, leaving it stupid and almost entirely ignorant about its own past. According to the fragmentary logs, the little ship was meant to ferry a group of wealthy colonists to the Great Ship. Indeed, there were more than twenty names with empty apartments still waiting for their arrival, paid for by a transfer of wealth from a very distant human world. But the names and the people attached had never reached their destination. According to the AI, a chunk of cometary material had breached the hyperfiber armor, exploding into a bubble of superheated plasmas and radiation, shrapnel scattering backward at better than half the speed of light.

  Everyone on board the ship was instantly killed.

  But as it happened, one of the women was a little bit pregnant—an embryo sleeping in suspended animation inside her patient uterus. It was a common tradition among colonists: arrive at your new home with a child ready to be born. The intended mother died, but while searching for survivors, the brutalized AI discovered a single entity still alive, barely, entombed inside a mangled, now-headless corpse.

  Using its last autodoc, the AI managed to coax the corpse back into a mindless life, saving the embryo. With most of its intellect stripped away and no clear instructions, the machine decided to do its best to help its only companion. A few months later, the girl was born inside a tiny volume of warm, barely breathable air, and she grew up on a diet of recycled meats and bone meal, nothing to drink but tainted water and sometimes her own diluted urine. The AI couldn’t directly communicate with her. It was too mangled and far too busy keeping the derelict ship functioning. Save for the slowly changing stars visible through the diamond ports, there was nothing to see. The girl grew up in an abysmally impoverished environment, suffering constantly, nothing to touch but the close cold walls and her own miserable self. So she did what was natural: In many ways, and for every good reason, the poor creature fell into a deep and simple insanity.