The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  There were Gaians in the literature—depending on the most rigorous definitions, less than one hundred examples, or at most, several thousand. And a few of those giant entities had produced starships, eventually seeding distant worlds with their vast daughters.

  Perhaps that explained the polyponds’ beginnings: A Gaian world enters a black cloud of gas and wet dust, finding resources enough to make new worlds where it and its million daughters could thrive. But in every other example, the sentient offspring had hoarded their memories about their origins and great parent. They were proud, slow, and decidedly independent souls, and they seemed unable to organize with anyone, including their own equally proud sisters.

  A synthetic creation made for a cleaner explanation. On some forgotten world, biosculptors could have assembled a cocktail of organisms, using their creation to seed icy moons or wandering comets. Terraforming would have been the noble goal. Add heat and light to the watery bodies, and the artificial Gaian would rebuild the world around it. If some of those cocktails had slipped free, or if their makers had strewn them about a little too indiscriminately … well, some combination of circumstances and blunders might have brought them into the Inkwell, and then in some distant past, set them free …

  But that again explained very little.

  Dark nebulae were too cold and far too dangerous to appeal to most sentient life-forms. Whatever the polyponds had accomplished inside the Inkwell, this was not the sort of home where most species went first or willingly. Besides, despite decades of hard searches, both in the sky and through the available histories, there was no trace of polyponds or anything bearing any resemblance to them in the surrounding districts. No potential cradle worlds. No watery colonies drifting among the comets. Polyponds lived where they lived and nowhere else: Not so much as one warm puddle drifted on the fringes of the cloud, in full view of a universe infinitely vaster and more amazing than anything that could be found in the darkness.

  Better than most, Mere understood darkness.

  She was born inside a crippled starship, after all. For what seemed like forever, her entire world was barely any bigger than her own stunted body and her starving little mind. For centuries, the only voice she heard was her own, and the only sound she made was a pained wail broken up with weak little sobs. Existence was miserable and fearful, and, by a hundred different criteria, Mere would have seemed perfectly insane. But even at her worst, that half-born creature had an enduring sense of identity—a concept of self and place, of events that strung together to form a sloppy history. Even in that eternal hell, there was a dust-blasted pane of scrap diamond that afforded her a view of the universe. Squinting, she could make out a few hundred blue-shifted stars, and with the sluggish passage of time, those stars would move. They shifted positions relative to each other, and the stars on the fringe sometimes drifted toward the edge of the window; and then despite all of her pressing and digging, forcing her big eyes flush to the cold diamond, each star would silently and bravely pass out of view.

  Whenever Mere thought about the polyponds—and she thought about little else—her mind inevitably fell back to the darkness of her youth. Even in those narrow circumstances, change had proved to be a genuine force. Little happened to her, and nothing obvious changed with her ship. But at least the sky taught her that certain things were not meant to be forever and always, and maybe there were moments when she derived hope, if not exactly joy, from that starved little insight.

  MERE’S SHIP WAS an ensemble of tiny pieces. Minus fuel, the entire machine didn’t possess even a thousand metric tons of hyperfiber and aerogel, diamond and patient flesh.

  Yet in another sense, it was vaster than the Great Ship.

  Through the long voyage, her engines and fuel tanks, mirrors and twin habitats moved with the same precise trajectory, each piece wearing an entirely different set of disguises. Some components were connected to their neighbors with fullerenes or feeble com-lasers. But most were fully independent, obeying a series of sophisticated strategies while keeping themselves in reasonable repair. A casual eye would see debris left over from Pamir’s original boost cone. A thorough examination would identify shards of diamond and several masses of water ice, plus what seemed to be pieces of machinery halfway melted by the giant lasers. The two identical habitats were barely visible, even with the best instruments. Each was smaller than a comfortable room, and both used a shifting set of tricks to appear even tinier than that. One habitat served as Mere’s home, the other held in reserve. Like the rest of the mock debris, the habitats drifted along in the wake of the streakship, slower by a wide margin and gradually spreading out, currently scattered across a volume better than a hundred thousand kilometers in radius.

  The heart of her habitat was a padded cavity barely two meters long and half as wide. Yet even that seemed like a tremendous waste of space. Before her mission began, Mere’s body was carefully frozen, tissues and bone plunged into a rigid state on the brink of absolute zero. Only her mind lived, and then only through a series of tricks and cheats, its heat signature diminished to a manageable flicker. Given any choice, other humans would never tolerate this kind of existence. This endless abuse. But Mere had experienced miseries worse than this inconvenience, and really, she was exceptionally good at keeping her cold mind busy.

  Breakfast was a few gentle sips of electrical energy. Lunch and dinner were the same, delivered directly from a finger-sized reactor through a cable implanted into the back of her neck, the current translated into compounds suitable for an anaerobic crisis-metabolism. But Mere always took the trouble to select a menu, letting her mind experience the flavors and textures of whatever she would have prepared inside her little kitchen at home. Sometimes she ate Tilan food, or at least what she remembered to have eaten on the world of her youth. Outside her mind, no such cuisine existed. No such world existed. Which lent every imaginary bite a uniqueness and importance—feasting at the table of a billion ghosts, in a sense.

  Mere’s large brown eyes had been eased out of their sockets and frozen, a pair of superconductive taps lending her a larger vision. At any moment, she could look everywhere. Immersion eyes fixed to the scattered pieces of her ship shared input, fabricating a vividly detailed and constantly changing set of images: the last stars passing beside her; the Milky Way strewn out behind her, bright and chill; and the Inkwell directly in her path, black and seemingly endless and very nearly perfect—save for a minuscule tunnel through which Pamir and the others had already vanished.

  Slowly, patiently, Mere followed after them.

  Each day had its schedules and goals, responsibilities and perfect freedoms. In the past, friends and lost lovers had asked Mere, “How do you live that way? How do you survive the day in that kind of solitude?”

  But it wasn’t difficult. She reminded them about her first long voyage—the toxic food and the absolute lack of even the slightest stimulation—which made this an infinitely better existence. Whenever she wished, she read. Whenever she needed conversation, she woke one of the tiny AIs that rode with her. Each had a familiar voice and a distinct personality. Each was a friend, and in careful terms, Mere hinted that they might serve as occasional lovers, too.

  She read alien works, mostly. Quirky texts and difficult texts. Sometimes in their original language.

  She also read about the polyponds, digesting the fresh reports as well as dipping into the oldest for the hundredth time.

  Every day, Pamir sent home his latest data and recorded discussions from among his crew. He was a thorough captain, smart and determined, and certainly better than most when it came to understanding alien species. But he wasn’t nearly as talented as Washen could be on her good days; and without a shred of self-consciousness and very little pleasure, Mere knew that nobody on board the streakship or the Great Ship brought to bear half as much talent as she possessed.

  Each day, without fail, Mere consumed and examined the latest report. There were always a few missteps. Errors of decision;
errors of pure bias. The crew knew they were on an important mission, and that’s why they were quick to embrace anything that might be a clue, applying it like wet lumps of clay to the most recent models. The polyponds were born here, were born there. They intended this, and they wanted that. Obviously, they were friends to the human species. Or they were scared of the Great Ship. Or the aliens were brazenly hiding critical secrets, and as the emissaries dove deeper into the Inkwell, their paranoia was growing. Accelerating. Threatening to take wing.

  Every day, Mere translated a very human account of the expedition, reshaping it into a form with which she might work.

  If she had any secret, this was it. Mere was not truly human. Or Tilan, either. Or anything else to which any accepted name could be affixed. She was a species of one. Alone, yet unlonely because of it. Freed because of it. At least that was what she always told her lovers, explaining how they might consider themselves lucky, enjoying this rare, almost singular chance to copulate with what only appeared to be an Earth-made primate.

  “I don’t think as other people do.”

  “You seem more like one of us,” a long-ago husband observed. From his breathing hole, he joked, “If I was blind and my pricks were numb, I would swear that I was screwing a very tiny harum-scarum.”

  “A good screw, I would hope.”

  “Hope all you want. You are barely better than my hand.”

  “You’re joking,” she told him.

  Human beings almost never recognized when harum-scarums were having fun. To humans, everything about Osmium’s species looked like bluster and insults and a thousand battles barely averted.

  “My oddness makes you drunk,” Mere told him.

  Osmium had to agree.

  “My secret,” she began. And then with remarkably little pain, she removed herself from him and pulled his severed prick from her vagina, staunching both of their bloods with a casual hand while a smooth warm and impenetrable voice admitted, “My secret is in my head. And I don’t know what it is.”

  THE SCATTERED SHIP continued its long, long plunge.

  A thousand times, by various means and with varying levels of intensity, Mere was examined. Light and microwaves danced off the various pieces, and perhaps most of the echoes went unnoticed. Several times, elaborate pulses of energy emerged from the Inkwell, joined with the streakship’s daily signal. Plainly, something was sitting near the ship’s wake, looking back along its trajectory. Hunting for stragglers? Perhaps. But a human conclusion was too tempting, and she firmly resisted the urge. Really, after all of these years of constant work and practiced thought, the polyponds were still a deep mystery, and they were a source of constant, studied pleasure.

  Twice at least, probes flew through the middle of her scattered ship.

  They were not small machines, and they acted interested. With Mere’s various eyes, she saw mirrored dishes using the last ruddy traces of starlight, staring back at her with an unnerving intensity. But both of the flybys were finished in less than a second, and if anyone felt suspicious, or even simply interested, they would launch a new probe with the opposite trajectory. And until someone or something flew beside her, Mere would cling to her present course.

  As Pamir reached his destination, Mere was finally diving into the nebula itself. The tunnel remained open—a well-tended route leading back to the Great Ship. There was nothing unexpected about that. Pamir needed a clean path home, and the polyponds were being nothing but helpful.

  One morning, as Mere breakfasted on a whisper of current barely powerful enough to feed a horsefly—as the taste of Tilan fish and earthly seaweeds filled her frozen mouth—she opened her eyes to the outside.

  Nothing could be seen.

  The blackness was relentless, seamless and ancient and brutally cold. Despite every wise thought and every comfortable platitude, she felt afraid. Her imaginary breath grew tight and slow. Suffocating, she began to doubt everything that she held dear about her own toughness and endurance.

  The claustrophobia was awful for a day or two.

  In a rare breach of her own rules, Mere medicated her cold mind. Tranquilizers and mood enhancers gave her a false euphoria that allowed her time to prepare for the inevitable.

  Who knew this would feel so awful?

  She felt ashamed, and sad. For the first time since she was a newborn, Mere struggled with the kind of horrible solitude that would have stunted any soul.

  The medications faded.

  Gradually, gradually, Mere learned how to look into the dust, noticing glimmers of heat and ropes of energy and odd, slow, and rather large vessels moving patiently from warm body to warm body. From polypond to polypond. What a remarkable and unexpected, odd and oddly beautiful realm.

  Finally, something obvious occurred to her.

  Could it be?

  When Mere felt certain, she sent home the first message in nearly ten years. A carefully encrypted and very quiet message—a few words dressed inside a snarl of ordinary static—was broadcast to the Master Captain and Washen.

  “I don’t know yet how the polyponds evolved,” she admitted. “I don’t know if they came from a natural world, or if they were someone’s tool that got loose. But they were not fully sentient until they were here. Inside the Inkwell. Inside all this dust and black.”

  A genuine excitement lifted her bare metabolism.

  “When they were born … I’m nearly certain about this … when the first polyponds grew self-aware, and for a long time after that, they reasonably assumed they were the only souls in existence, and their home was everything, and that the Creation was blackness without end … !”

  Fifteen

  “Her clothes are a little bland, I’ll grant you. But everything beneath is beautiful. Gorgeous. Absolutely glorious.” Then with a deep, nearly winded gasp, O’Layle added, “She’s a wondrous, perfect lady. She really is.”

  The object of his considerable affections was the Mars-sized sphere dressed in a nearly perfect black. Except in infrared, where she glowed like the final coal in a very old fire.

  “Have you ever imagined such a creature?” O’Layle inquired. And then he halfway giggled, underscoring again the simple fact, “That’s what she is. A creature. An organism. A single fully functioning entity. And a lady who happens to be seven thousand kilometers across.”

  “It is spectacular,” Quee Lee offered.

  “She is,” O’Layle corrected.

  “Of course. She.”

  Pamir remained silent. Piloting the shuttle was simple enough, three onboard AIs doing the bulk of the work. But he was already tired of the Blue World’s emissary. Better this chore than another tedious and entirely useless conversation with O’Layle. After rechecking their course and insertion site, Pamir glanced back at the streakship, magnifying a patch of the sable sky until he saw a bright fleck still singing “All is well,” with a preset and very precise melody.

  “I named her the Blue World.”

  Or the polypond simply allowed him to call her that. But Pamir didn’t offer the possibility; cynical thoughts rarely found purchase in souls that believe themselves to be in love.

  “She’s excited to meet you,” O’Layle claimed.

  Quee Lee nodded, replying, “We are thrilled to meet her.”

  A third of the streakship’s crew was crammed inside the tiny shuttle. The mood was complex, ever-shifting. Excitement bled into a nervous energy that would suddenly drain away, leaving everyone suspicious, even paranoid. Then as the mood drifted back to optimism—as the first smiles reemerged—O’Layle would make a fresh declaration or an exponential promise. Without obviously intending it, he would chum up the excitements and doubts all over again.

  “Before her,” he said, “I had never believed this would happen to me.”

  Perri rose to the bait. “What would happen?”

  O’Layle winked and grinned. “An alien for a lover. Really, I never dreamed that I could stomach it. Much less enjoy the experience.”

&n
bsp; Pamir glanced at the idiot.

  Misreading that simple expression, the man said, “You don’t know, Submaster Pamir. None of you can. What she accomplishes as a lover … you have no idea what her affections can achieve …”

  “I have a good imagination,” Pamir replied.

  “Oh, no. No.” O’Layle laughed. Giggled, almost snorting. “I mean, the Blue World can build any body with ease. Any shape, any purpose. Every whim and unique desire can be answered.”

  There was an obvious, tempting response. Gaians fabricated bodies with the unconscious ease with which humans secreted new skin cells. These bodies had no bounds and no morals, and they could be infused with every pleasure while ignoring even the most withering pain. Whatever the purpose, it had to be spectacularly easy, feeding the lust of a grateful and lonely man. And how could one human animal comprehend his lover’s motives, particularly when the creature was investing nearly nothing in that lopsided relationship?

  Pamir threw a look at Quee Lee and her husband.

  With a wink and sharp “Hey,” Perri pulled the man’s attention back to himself. “You know, I once met a Gaian.”

  O’Layle put on a doubting face. “Is that so?”

  “Ages ago,” Perri recalled. “It was a refugee, of sorts. Made friends with one of the captains and slipped on board the ship, in secret.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Didn’t she live inside one of the sewage plants?” Quee Lee asked, gently nudging her husband. “You slipped down there along with the garbage, didn’t you?”

  “Did I tell you that story?” Perri inquired.

  “You did,” she swore. “But you never mentioned that Gaians are lustful creatures. Should I be jealous, darling?”

  Both cackled at that.

  “Except she didn’t play with me,” Perri continued. “What good could I do her? No, it was the captain who let her aboard in the first place. That’s who she was entertaining.”