The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  With a slight tremor, this tiny piece of the world stood.

  A deep perfect darkness had fallen around them. Only the glow leaking from inside the shuttle showed them where to step. A few moments later, a deep roar began in the distance, in every direction, and grew swiftly into a thunderous mayhem. The jungle was being destroyed. Absorbed. Digested. The Gaian was beginning to clean away what for it was nothing but an elaborate but odd scab on its otherwise unblemished flesh.

  “Pamir,” said the figure beside him.

  “Who are you now? The world still?”

  “When your skin cells are taken, do they remain part of you?”

  “You’re separate now,” he surmised.

  She said, “Entirely. Yes.”

  “Are you a new world then?”

  “Again,” she said. “When a cell of yours leaves your body, is it another you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really,” she repeated.

  “But it might be, treated in the right ways. If it was allowed to grow.”

  “Creation,” she said with a warm and fond and very much spellbound voice. “It is an endless, wondrous process. Creation is.”

  They had reached the base of the shuttle. Behind them, the towering greeters began to tilt and fall, crashing onto the bare metal, bones shattering and their flesh splitting wide, the sound of black fluids gushing an instant before a thousand new mouths began to suck and chew, pulling this wealth of organics back into stomachs of every sort. Pamir watched. With the dim glow of the shuttle, he could just make out hills of meat and spent plumage quickly collapsing, everything about this show impressive—which was precisely as it was intended to be.

  “Creation,” said the creature beside him.

  He started up into shuttle, remarking with more warmth than necessary, “I’m sorry. But we don’t have room for two new bodies. If you come home with us, we’ll have to freeze you inside one of the hydrogen tanks.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  She didn’t ask about O’Layle’s fate, or lack thereof.

  Then with a slow, careful voice, she admitted, “The guest of mine, this O’Layle, mentioned that your Great Ship carries a rather special cargo.”

  Pamir said nothing.

  “Or a passenger, perhaps. Very old and kept safe at the core.”

  The continent shivered beneath them, individual masses of spongework being ripped apart at the seams.

  “Very old,” she repeated.

  “We don’t understand what’s down there,” he admitted. “But in our communications, I’m sure the Master Captain explained everything that we do know.”

  The only light in the world was inside the shuttle. Washing across her face, it made her look simple and entranced, happier than perhaps any organism had ever been. O’Layle was somewhere above, still sobbing. Otherwise, it felt as if they were stepping inside an empty vessel.

  “A prisoner,” she mentioned. “That’s what some call it.”

  Pamir said nothing.

  “Ancient as the universe,” she exclaimed. “Or more so.”

  The world beneath him continued to tremble. Beside him, thousands of tons of freshly killed flesh were being eaten whole. A sad little man was weeping over the loss of his vast lover, and meanwhile the Great Ship was plunging headlong into a black nebula populated with a multitude of very peculiar souls.

  The dread was real and abusive. But try as he might, Pamir couldn’t decide which of those problems had the strongest, most dangerous grip.

  Sixteen

  In distance and time, the voyage home was relatively brief. The Great Ship had continued plunging toward the Inkwell, and now the streakship was maintaining a collision course, obliterating much of its fresh hydrogen to return at better than half lightspeed. The return voyage would take years less than the first leg, and everything about everything was familiar now. But time is a slippery business to any mind, and space is always incalculably, numbingly vast. With their central mission finished, there was little to do but think about old haunts and avenues, friends and left-behind lovers. Reports continued to be filed, but since they were crossing old terrain, new information was rare and without any obvious importance. The mission itself had been a considerable success: Messages of congratulations continued to arrive from the Master and her various officers. They had spent only hours with a single polypond, but the event … meeting or ceremony or whatever this business had been … was deemed an official success. No tragedies had befallen their mission. A polypond representative was sleeping peacefully inside an auxiliary fuel tank, its makeup and frozen mind constantly studied by dozens of eyes wielding every available tool. The aliens had equaled or exceeded every promise of support. Retracing its original course, the streakship discovered that its path was growing cleaner by the day, the polyponds’ electrostatic charges and the streakship’s own lasers shepherding the debris off toward the edges. If the Great Ship’s course proved equally well scrubbed, then cutting through the Inkwell would prove easy to the brink of boring. Where was the bad news in any of that?

  Except. The mood on board the streakship remained stubbornly pensive, whiffs of despair emerging on the bad days. The ship’s interior felt cramped and overheated, and most people blamed their new passenger. O’Layle was a moody, simple, and decidedly odd soul. After decades of being loved and entertained by an organism as large as a world, he found himself abandoned, forsaken to the company of strangers who weren’t as simple or moody as he was, and who were odd in ways he couldn’t begin to decipher. His misery was a little bit infectious. Pamir noticed it in the first days. Their guest would pass through the galley, make a few pained observations about the cold and blackness surrounding them, and after vanishing again, some little spat would break out between best friends, the tension spreading like a subtle, meme-born disease.

  Pamir had always possessed a useful paranoia. Watching Perri and Quee Lee exchange half a dozen sharp words at dinner, he instantly set the autodocs to work. There were a few notorious examples of aliens crippling one another with caustic notions and vivid imagery. Was that O’Layle’s purpose here? Yet after several more years of study and help from distant experts, the machines couldn’t blame anyone but O’Layle himself. Clinically speaking, he was a bit of shit. An egomaniac and a determined coward, and in the same way that a person’s body could live almost forever, his flawed character and brittle personality had persisted for hundreds of centuries without meaningful change.

  Besides, it took more than one man to cause the ugly moods. Even as they passed through that tunnel of scrubbed space, the AI pilot continued to spot little hazards and fire the maneuvering rockets. And the black dust played its nefarious role, packed thickest around the tunnel’s edges—in effect, making everyone blind. There was also the brutal, relentless cold lying just beyond the hull. And there were the polyponds themselves: Despite everything seen and all that had been learned, the aliens remained mysteries, enigmas of the worst kind, without charm or any obvious human quality.

  The Great Ship had many odd and baffling passengers, but in most cases, people learned how to interact with the important and social species. The average human, given time and the motivation, would find or imagine traits that were reassuringly familiar. But the polyponds had never given them that chance, and if the future went as promised, they never would.

  “What do you make of them?”

  Every day, that was the central question. Someone would pose it, usually early in the morning, in the cramped little galley, and someone else would offer an old intuition tweaked just enough to seem fresh.

  “They have no choice but to let us pass through,” most argued. “But they’re xenophobes, and this is difficult for them. Or they’re arrogant bastards, and it’s easy to dismiss us. Or they are afraid of us, which is smart. Since we represent the Milky Way, after all. We are millions of living worlds and every technological advance, while they’ve lived in total isolation. So they’re naturally terrified
of what might follow in our wake.”

  “What might follow us?”

  This was relatively early in the voyage home. Unlike almost every other morning, O’Layle came out of his tiny cabin for breakfast. Entering the galley, he looked at no one, and again, he asked, “What might follow us?”

  Perri had voiced that shrewd opinion. But he had too much charm and grace to act self-conscious. A big shrug and a sad smile preceded the obvious words: “I don’t know what. I’m just saying—”

  “We’re the first wave of an invasion?” O’Layle grumbled.

  “No.” Perri’s smile sharpened. “I just meant things might seem that way. If you’re a hermit—a hermit living in a windowless cabin—and if somebody suddenly knocks on your locked door, telling you that they’re in trouble and need to come inside your home … well, it’s only natural to worry …”

  The logic won a brief, disagreeable pause.

  “We don’t mean to invade anybody’s space,” Quee Lee offered. “Nobody planned to put our ship on this trajectory.”

  O’Layle squashed his mouth to a point, considering the matter.

  With a calm voice, Pamir asked, “So what do you think?”

  Silence.

  “You have experience with our new friends,” he reminded O’Layle. “In your opinion, how does your old girlfriend regard us?”

  The mouth relaxed.

  After a moment, O’Layle took a deep breath. And another. Then with a dismissive, almost amused tone, he remarked, “She doesn’t have much regard for you.”

  “No?”

  “That’s my impression.”

  Perri gave a low snort. “You never mentioned that before.”

  With a shrug of the shoulders, O’Layle explained, “It’s just my impression. A feeling. I don’t have any hard evidence—”

  Pamir interrupted, asking, “What other intuitions are you hiding?”

  “None.”

  Everyone stared at the interloper, waiting.

  Finally, O’Layle shook his head and smiled, smugly pleased to be the center of attention. “She loves me,” he announced with a chilling fondness. Then after a deep breath and a clicking of the tongue, he added, “The Blue World told me … early on, she confided to me that it was her greatest moment … when she saw a little lost ship falling toward her … !”

  He hesitated.

  Then he dredged something new out of his memories, or at least found a fresh perspective. “I assumed that she was talking about my ship,” he said. “And about me … of course, of course, of course …”

  TWENTY-FOUR DAYS AND fifteen hours later, the ship’s AI woke Pamir.

  “Debris,” the voice reported.

  The timing was far from unexpected. But because of the chance that undetected sensors had been smuggled aboard, either through the unaware shore party or mixed with the cold hydrogen, the incident had to seem utterly harmless. Playing a role devised decades ago, Pamir asked, “What debris?”

  “Our own,” the machine reported. “It’s too massive and quick for the polyponds to push out of our way.” Details were fed into the appropriate nexus, including points of origin, the distribution, and each object’s current velocity. “There’s a small but important chance of impact.”

  “Agreed,” Pamir replied.

  Then in the next breath, he said, “Sweep the trash out of our way.”

  “In any particular direction?”

  Yes. Just yesterday, Mere had transmitted a glimmer broadcast, feeding Pamir detailed instructions. And he had already instructed the AI, on encoded channels. But for an audience that had little chance of being real, and even less likely chance of appreciating this conversation’s significance, Pamir said, “I don’t particularly care. Kick it wherever your mood tells you.”

  Bolts of laser light raced ahead.

  Each little piece of Mere’s ship was slathered with excess diamond. The carbon boiled, erupting in neat jets of plasma, while the hyperfiber beneath felt the hard shove of coherent photons. And with a deftness that looked too casual to be planned, her ship was neatly ushered out of the way, tracing new trajectories that would soon take Mere into the surrounding wall of dust, and afterward, deep inside the nebula itself.

  IN THE END, during those final busy days, moods shifted again.

  For that instant, they were outside the Inkwell again. The Great Ship was familiar and welcome, and it looked lovely in the last glimmers of starlight. Decades of work and millions of hands had repaired the hull, making it glisten like a vast frozen tear, gray and elegant. It seemed as if every square kilometer on its forward hemisphere had its own laser or shield generator or upturned mirror. Diving toward the nebula, only a tiny portion of the lasers needed to fire at oncoming debris. Bits of comet and clods of stone were obliterated in an endless fusillade. With so much firepower, nothing could stop the ship. If its full rage were unleashed, it would pound its way through any conceivable barrier.

  To make the rendezvous, the streakship had to slow itself.

  To land, it followed the traditional course of shuttles bringing passengers and cargo, maneuvering behind the Great Ship to match velocities and course, then using the ship’s considerable gravity to aid its final approach.

  The giant engines showed as burnished gray cones tilting starward. They were thousands of kilometers above the hull, and the Inkwell briefly vanished behind the vast round bulk of hyperfiber and stone, water and busy flesh.

  Approaching Port Alpha, the AI remarked, “I will miss working with you, sir.”

  Pamir nodded, and after a moment’s reflection, he admitted, “The feeling’s mutual, my friend.”

  The landing was accomplished in the same way as the mission had been accomplished—professionally, without fuss or disappointment. The fuss began afterward. Nestled inside its old berth, the streakship was surrounded by banners of welcome, written in too many languages to count. Cameras and immersion eyes had been hung in the hard vacuum. As their nexuses reengaged with the ship’s networks, the crew saw just a tiny fraction of the coverage. “Our heroes have returned!” they read. They heard. They heard the proclamations sung and shouted. And then after the obligatory speeches, from Pamir and the Master Captain, the streakship’s crew and both of its passengers were ushered off for a new round of medical and psychological evaluations, and a mandatory quarantine that lasted another ten weeks.

  Once cleared, Pamir went straight to Washen’s apartment.

  After their usual fun, the two of them lay beneath her domed ceiling, watching the live feeds from the ship’s prow. They had entered the Inkwell in the last few days, or they were still entering it. Definitions were always subject to debate. But the stars were vanishing behind them, and if not for the light of the shields and the obliteration of cometary debris, it seemed that nothing lay ahead of them. Nothing. Not even blackness, the ink was so deep and cold and pure.

  “When we were landing,” Pamir began.

  Washen waited for a moment, and then asked, “What?”

  “I noticed some new mirror fields tucked between the engines.” He paused for a moment, then added, “They must have been thrown together while I was gone.”

  “On my orders,” his lover admitted.

  “On your orders, what?”

  Silence.

  But that would be a reasonable precaution. Hazards could come from any direction, and if they were seen while they were still far away …

  “It’s my son’s fault,” Washen offered.

  “How is Locke?”

  “Busy. Happy. Intensely curious.” She switched the view to the aft hemisphere, and with a tone of confession, she admitted, “But I’m the genuine paranoid in the family.”

  Pamir said nothing.

  Then after a full hour of thoughtful silence, Washen asked, “Do you ever wonder?”

  “What?”

  “Where is our ship supposed to be going?” she whispered. “And is there anybody else out there … anybody who is chasing after us, maybe �
�� ?”

  Seventeen

  The vacuum tingled and roared with energies.

  Under a boundless black sky, the hull was brightly lit, pools and great blankets of hard blue and faint yellow light marking where the Remoras lived and the fef worked. One of the giant engines would ignite, superheated plasmas rushing out of its towering nozzle, up into the smothering cold. Powerful magnetic fields would surge and spin, grabbing up flecks of iron or iron-dirtied ice, then fade away again into a brief restful hum. Whispered signals danced back and forth at lightspeed, bringing orders and data feeds and fresh gossip and white-hot curses, and buried inside that endless chatter were little secrets wearing encrypted shells and anonymous faces. Gamma radiation from the ends of the universe caught the ship, burrowing into its hull and dying, or battering its way through a Remora’s wet human cells. Billion-year-old neutrinos dove deeper, their trajectories twisted by the hyperfiber’s ultimate bonds; then with the keen urgency of their species, most of the neutrinos escaped, following some slightly changed path through the Creation. Dark matter particles hung like a cold fog in the blackness, occasionally colliding squarely enough with a nucleus to make it rattle for a moment. And always there was the vacuum itself: empty only in name, possessing a Planck-tiny spongelike structure that every moment gave birth to an array of virtual particles, too many to count, every last particle colliding with its mirror image and vanishing before either could be noticed. Before either could be real.

  “The forecast is favorable,” Conrad reported. He stood in the vacuum, wearing the lifesuit with its Submaster epaulets on the shoulders and no other trace of his considerable rank. His single eye, wide and oval and black as the sky overhead, stared at his two guests. One of them was tall, and the other was considerably taller. “There won’t be any significant hazards for another eighty hours. Then we’ll cross a debris field. Pieces of a big comet, apparently.” To the taller guest, he said, “A comet that must have splintered when you tried moving it out of our way.”