The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  “How widespread are these big stories?” Washen inquired.

  The captain gave hard figures and warm estimates.

  The First Chair nodded. “Suggestion?”

  “Do nothing.”

  She looked at the face, at the pale gray eyes. “Don’t counter the rumors, you mean?”

  “I was going to suggest that, yes.” He nodded, squirming inside the mirrored uniform. “To my supervisors, I was going to say … let people tell their stories, and we’ll tell them what we think is true, and after a little while, I think this rumor fades.”

  Washen shook her head, grinning now.

  The captain was an expert with multitudes. But individuals were a source of puzzlement and occasional blunders. Quietly, almost fearfully, he asked, “You don’t believe that’s the best course, madam?”

  “Is it your best, most informed opinion?”

  He said, “Yes.”

  Another thought grabbed him. “Should I not tell my superiors what I believe? Leave the matter with you, perhaps?”

  “Never,” she cautioned.

  He straightened his back, growing a little pale.

  “We have a chain of authority,” she reminded him.

  “You report to Captain Glenn-john, who reports to the Office of Civil Authority, and the official reports will be filed, and I will make sure that I see them.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  His station was a slab of ruby embedded with screens and nexus links and ports through which several million AI pollsters could speak directly to one lowly captain. For a long moment, he stared at the elaborate images being spawned on a range of the entertainment channels. The Satin Sack seemed to shimmer with energies, its body jammed full of enemy ships ready to assault them. Fictional or not, the story had power over its audience. With a confessional tone, he admitted, “I halfway believe them, madam.”

  She said nothing.

  “Not this specific scenario,” he continued. “But that the polyponds want to take the ship for themselves.”

  “Why?”

  He swallowed, considering his response.

  “You’ve seen a decent portion of our communications from the polyponds. And what the streakship tells us, too.” She gently clucked her tongue before adding, “If there’s any reason to see danger coming, perhaps you should point it out to me.”

  “No,” he allowed.

  Then with a soft regret, he admitted, “The polyponds seem helpful enough. They might prefer isolation, but really, they don’t have any choice in this matter. We are going to swim through their ocean—”

  “Not by choice,” Washen added.

  “And I think they believe us. At least, I haven’t heard any voice telling me otherwise.”

  “Any voice?”

  “Intuition,” he added. In a gesture as old as the species, he touched his own temple, adding, “In my old business, a voice would whisper to me. Tell me what to pursue and what to ignore.”

  “I hope you’re still listening for that voice.”

  He nodded, but not with total assurance. Then softly, he said, “If you want, I might offer some new dreams to the general population. Through my old companies, or other avenues.”

  “Which dreams?” Washen asked.

  “Reassuring ones. That the polyponds are odd but harmless, and we have nothing to fear.” He shrugged. “Just to give passengers the chance to sleep easier. Actually, I’d probably find that there’s quite a market waiting for me. For us.”

  “Your intuition says so?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Then he asked, “Should I pursue this?”

  “Don’t ask me. Ask Captain Glenn-john.”

  He nodded, returning his gaze to the screens. The cumulative wastes from a thousand ship habitats were being analyzed on his orders, artificial tongues measuring the stress hormones dissolved in the piss and feces of a great nervous multitude.

  “Thank you, madam,” he said gratefully.

  Washen nearly turned away. But another question occurred to her. With a quiet tone, she reminded the captain, “You know more than most of us about audiences. Certainly you know more than I do.”

  He nearly argued that point, but then thought better of it.

  “About the polyponds,” she continued. “You’ve studied most of our files. You know what they’ve shown us about themselves, and what Pamir has seen and deciphered. In your opinion, do you know enough about the polyponds to sell them any dream?”

  The question puzzled him for an instant.

  Then with a grim little smile, he had to admit, “No, madam. No. Frankly, with these particular aliens … I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  Thirteen

  Because he didn’t know when the chance would come again, Pamir climbed into his cabin and tethered himself inside his crush-web mattress, and with an ease that came from considerable practice as well as simple need, he closed his eyes and relaxed his long body as his mind collapsed into a deep black slumber. When dreams came, they were his own. Wild impossible things happened; routine elements yanked from recent days repeated themselves with tireless abandon. Again and again, Pamir found himself staring through a diamond port, doing nothing while watching nothing, nothing to see but a boundless darkness punctuated with the rare burst and glimmer of ruddy light. And always, there was the deep rumbling of his little ship, both in his dreams and in reality. The main engines continued to blaze away, firing through slots opened up in the hyperfiber umbrella, killing any dusty hazards as well as the last of their enormous momentum, while the maneuvering rockets had continued firing, relentlessly nudging them along a chaotic, bug-wiggling course that had proved safe enough up to the present moment.

  Since the business with the V-elbow, everything had been a little bit too perfect. Pamir wasn’t the kind of person who believed in the flawless, but for the last months he had been pressed to find anything to complain about. The streakship was diving down a narrow tunnel—a clearly defined avenue swept free of most of the large debris and much of its gravel and ice. The Inkwell was laced with thousands of similar transit zones. The only difference was that theirs had been built specifically for them, and with a patient regularity, the polyponds repeated their promise to complete a wider, longer avenue through which the Great Ship could pass with ease.

  Pamir slept easily, and deeply, and after ten uninterrupted hours, he consciously triggered one of his favorite dreams.

  In an instant, he found himself sitting in a little boat drifting down the Canyon of Ten Thousand Falls. Artists had produced this imagery, but Pamir was free to pluck what he wished from his own life. Did he want company? Yes. Washen appeared, sitting with her back to the bow, her elegant body dressed in nothing but a billowy soft gown. With her smile, she said, “Naughty boy.” With a tilt of her head, she warned him, “I won’t let things go where you want them.”

  But what did he want?

  On the Great Ship, there were many places that were considered among the most scenic, the most spectacular. Passengers had actually fought about which corner and what cave were superior to every other, to the eye and nose, and sometimes to the tough tip of a sensitive tendril. Some fights had turned violent enough to kill, if only temporarily. But whenever someone took a bloodless poll, the Canyon ended near the top hundred sights that every passenger and crew member was obligated to see and smell, and to the best of his ability, embrace.

  A deep warm river pushed down the Canyon’s floor. Steep walls of pale pink granite soared high on both sides; then the slope diminished, changing to calcite and magnesite generated by beds of reef-forming species. Numerous springs burst into the cavern from just beneath its ceiling, nearly ten kilometers overhead. Ten thousand waterfalls was a low estimate, or high. Because there were really only two falls, one covering each shoreline, and each was woven into tens of thousands of individual braids and ropes of bright silvery water that slid off the bottom edge of reefs, making the granite shine a sweet candy red in a false sunlight
designed to tease out the beauty and soothing perfection of this place.

  “Remember our first trip down,” said the woman in the bow.

  Quee Lee had replaced Washen. Dressed in a conservative sarong, she was speaking to her husband. Uninvited, Perri had placed himself on the seat between Pamir and herself.

  Perri said something just to her.

  The plunging water roared as it struck the river on both sides of them. Voices had to be loud, and a mouth had to point at its intended audience.

  Quee Lee chuckled amiably.

  “He’s tired of us,” she said, motioning at Pamir.

  Pamir just shook his head. Too much time living with the same few people, and not even his dreams were private anymore.

  What could he do?

  Laugh, he decided.

  But then the roaring stopped abruptly. He took a deep breath and looked high. The falls had stopped flowing. Every spring had been choked off, and except for a last shimmer of moisture up on the green-and-gold reefs, there was nothing to see. The reefs were dying. Who had screwed this up? He began to look at his companions, but they were gone. Washen had returned, but she was dressed as the First Chair, complete with an officious expression of worthy concern.

  “Be careful,” she said to him.

  His eyes jumped open. For a little moment, Pamir wondered how he had gotten trapped inside this odd little closet. Then he remembered this was his cabin and his mission, and everything about the dream was swept away … except for realization that after years of constant firing, the maneuvering rockets had abruptly fallen silent.

  “THERE IS NOTHING before us,” the ship’s AI reported. “Except for the Blue World, that is. This region has been scrupulously cleaned of dust and gas. Except for a thin veil of hydrogen atoms, and that veil is only slightly above interstellar norms—”

  “Understood,” Pamir interrupted.

  He began to study the unbroken blackness.

  The entire crew was inside the galley, pushed together at the bottom end by the smooth decelerating thrust of the main engines. The floor had been stripped of all but the minimum number of low-backed chairs. Even without tables, there was barely enough room for all. Everyone stared at images piped in through an array of lenses and radio dishes, reading what could be seen as well as weighing the telltale echoes produced by bursts of laser light. To a soul, they were disappointed. The Blue World—their host and grand benefactor—was within 10 million kilometers, but the only trace was a dull red ember showing heat seeping out of a deeply insulated sky.

  “We knew we wouldn’t see much,” Quee Lee offered.

  The main engines continued to labor, their smooth braking blaze indistinguishable from a high-terran gravity.

  “But think what we are seeing,” Perri added.

  That brought a sober long silence.

  With a secure nexus, Pamir told the AI to squirt updates back to the Great Ship, and buried within that roar would be a second, much condensed version of the same transmission—for an audience that was much closer, and hopefully, still completely invisible.

  “Repeat every three minutes,” he ordered. “Once in orbit, every ninety seconds.”

  If anything went wrong, Washen and Mere would see it happen.

  To everyone, he pointed out, “We have jobs to work. Before we can drop into orbit, we should get ourselves ready. For whatever’s going to be.”

  Whatever’s going to be.

  Pamir meant to sound suspicious, and he probably succeeded a little too well. He saw it in the faces, in the tight lips and downcast eyes. For a moment, he let the warning sink home, then he grinned and offered a different tone, admitting, “Whatever happens, it’s going to be spectacular. No doubts at all.”

  THE MAIN ENGINES fired until the ship’s momentum was almost drained away, then, following detailed instructions delivered over the last several weeks, every rocket was buttoned down and put to sleep. The ship’s body rearranged itself again. The hyperfiber armor pulled apart like a blossom. Empty fuel tanks were pushed to one side, valves opened wide to the hard vacuum. Exactly as promised, a simple tug appeared from the blackness—a blunt cold machine spinning thousands of fullerene webs tipped with tiny robots that quickly and expertly connected their web to the armor and the entire ship.

  Moments later, the tug set to work, nudging them with a brute authority, inserting them into a high circular orbit around the Blue World.

  Afterward, it detached the lines and ate them.

  With tiny bursts of secondary rockets, the alien ship came closer. Umbilicals built for this single occasion were deployed. Radar and lasers made elaborate measurements of the streakship, presumably to make certain that every system was compatible. And Pamir’s crew examined the tug with the same thoroughness. How good were its engines? How efficient was its reactor? A chamber was riding inside the tug’s nose. Three different crew members noticed either the emptiness of that space or the heat radiating from it, and at the same instant, they pointed it out to Pamir.

  In another moment, he spotted it for himself.

  “Opinions?” he muttered.

  No one responded.

  With a different voice, Pamir said, “Opinions.”

  This was an order now.

  The AI replied first. As the umbilicals eased in closer, it described what it saw inside the heavily shielded chamber.

  “It is a sack of dirty water,” was the expert answer. “No more than two meters long and less than half a meter wide, at the most.”

  Two answers offered themselves.

  In the Great Ship’s own language, the umbilicals asked permission to link with the empty fuel tanks.

  Pamir studied the infrared images again, and, with the barest nod, said, “Permission given.”

  Moments later, the streakship began receiving a small ocean of liquid hydrogen, hyperfiber-faced compressors squeezing down on the fluid, producing bricks of metallic hydrogen stabilized with diamond exoskeletons. Even with the best pumps and compressors in the galaxy, the fueling would take fifty hours. Without hydrogen, there was no quick return home. For at least the next two days, they were going to dance in the dark with a thoroughly unique alien.

  “Hello?”

  Pamir blinked and shook his head.

  “Hello?” the voice said once again.

  The Blue World was a perfect black orb no bigger than a thumbnail held at arm’s length. The voice came from much closer, and wrapped around it was a thin little laugh and a genuine nervousness.

  “Do you hear me?”

  “No,” Pamir kidded. “We cannot hear you.”

  The voice was riding the telemetry signal from the tug. With a deep sigh, it told its audience, “I’m here.”

  “Are you a pond?” Pamir asked, already knowing better.

  But the voice laughed, declaring, “Of course I’m a pond. We’re all ponds. Didn’t you realize that?”

  The voice was O’Layle’s.

  “May I come on board?” asked the long-lost refugee. “Please let me on board, would you please?”

  Fourteen

  Conjecture. Surmise. Interpret and hypothesize. Thousands of years of experience brought to bear on the moment’s problem. A long life of little successes and glorious failures had produced an intellect peculiarly fitted to an impossible task. Understand. Gaze at the body of evidence, and more importantly, note the cavernous gaps in fact and data. What was truly known? Nothing. But there was never such a creature as nothing. Wasn’t every modern soul taught that basic physics lesson? Absence should never be confused with emptiness. The hardest, purest vacuum bubbled with energies and raw potentials. To piece together the mind of any species, what mattered was the shape of its nothing. The lies it told to strangers and the myths it recited to its own good self.

  “Where did you first evolve?”

  On numerous occasions, xenobiologists aboard the Great Ship had asked that critical question. With a natural curiosity, they inquired, “Where did you begin? And w
here was your first home?”

  It was only reasonable. Only natural. What species didn’t want to point to its lowly cradle and boast? But if the polyponds knew their origins, they didn’t share the story. Time after time, they answered almost every question, but in that one rootstock realm they remained conspicuously silent.

  The Master Captain finally threw up what she thought was an irresistible lure. “If you tell us about your beginnings,” she said in one late broadcast, “then I will tell you everything I know about ours. Our entire recorded history, from dust to stars!”

  When a response finally came, it was nothing anticipated.

  “All the pasts are genuine,” read the thoroughly translated text. “Do not talk about choosing any one.”

  Yet there had to be some place and moment where the polyponds began. Genetics might hold clues, but no samples had been analyzed. And what would their flesh tell us? Perhaps an aquatic beginning, judging by how they lived today. Perhaps they had appeared on some cold world, their ancestors clinging to the occasional hot spring, surviving in some cooperative huddle, the oases scattered across an otherwise icebound landscape. There were plenty of examples in the xenobiologic literature. Snowball worlds tended to concentrate life in the tiniest of patches, and inside one of the richer patches, the various species would manage to unite into an elaborate, purposeful symbiosis. When the climate moderated, they spread rapidly. One oasis excelled, racing across the seas and ice-chewed continents, and in a geologic heartbeat, a Gaian was born—a sophisticated single entity masquerading as a world’s entire biosphere.