by Robert Reed
“I can’t move anything at the moment, sir,” said the Blue World’s emissary. “Except for myself, that is.”
“Sure. I forgot.” The Remora now watched his other guest, his rubbery wide mouth grinning as a warm voice said, “If I’m wrong about the forecast, get into a bunker somewhere.”
“Always,” Pamir promised. Then with a sweeping gesture, he remarked, “You’ve done a lot in these last years.”
Bright diamond domes were rising from the ruins of a different city. The Waywards had swept this portion of the hull bare during the War, but repairing damage was what Remoras did. Of course they had returned to this place. Of course they would honor their dead by spreading cloaks of new hyperfiber over the charred bones and empty shells. With a keen stubbornness, they wouldn’t rest until a million domes reached to the horizon, empty for the moment or for the next ten thousand years … but still, ready for their children to reclaim them with their old numbers as well as their unflinching arrogance.
“Take my personal skimmer,” said Conrad.
“Thanks.”
For a moment, the Remora stared at Pamir’s companion. Then with a calm, unreadable voice, he asked, “Have you ever walked the hull before?”
“No,” she replied.
“Does it worry you?”
“Would that be polite?” she inquired. “To feel worry?”
“It doesn’t matter,” the Remora allowed.
The emissary glanced at Pamir, apparently waiting for advice.
“Walk in that direction,” he suggested. “Our skimmer’s waiting.”
She obeyed, instantly and without hesitation, her lifesuit soundlessly marching across the smooth gray hull.
Following after her, Conrad spoke on a secure channel. “Does your lady know you’re spending time with this beautiful young woman?”
“It was Washen’s suggestion, as I recall.”
“I guess that’s possible,” Conrad kidded. “She’s never struck me as the jealous sort.”
The laughter fell away quickly.
Then with a different tone—a serious, anticipating tone—the Remora asked, “Is it the news from the bow?”
“Sure.”
“Want a closer look, do you?”
The joke had no effect on either man.
Finally, Pamir admitted, “We just want to see her reaction. Walking beneath the Inkwell this way, in the open. And then we’ll show her what the big mirror fields are iinding—”
“An experiment, is that it?”
Not much of one. But since the emissary had been pulled from the fuel tank, thawed out and revived, virtually nothing of substance had been eased free of her. Twenty competing labs had studied her genetics. Her neural pathways and every spoken word had been analyzed to the limits of the available tools. Experts in aliens, sitting on an ocean of experience, had come to the same conclusion: She was a relatively simple creature woven around some scrupulously ordinary DNA. Human DNA, as it happened. And specifically, O’Layle’s own genetics.
“I don’t trust her,” Conrad declared.
Pamir kept silent.
“Or them, for that matter.”
The Second Chair glanced at the black sky.
“Not that they’ve done anything particularly unfriendly.” The Remora walked faster, following the outside edge of a vast and empty dome. “We’re the intruders here. We weren’t invited. And if someone dove through me …”
His voice trailed away.
Then after a long silence, he asked, “What the telescopes see … what do you think it means … ?”
The emissary stopped abruptly, her helmet pivoting, allowing her smiling face to ask, “Is this the skimmer?”
“I don’t know,” Pamir confessed.
“It is your skimmer, yes,” Conrad told her.
Then as she climbed aboard, Pamir told his friend again, “I don’t know. What means what? I haven’t half of a faith in any one notion now.”
OTHER FLAVORS OF energy ran wild on the hull: ambition and creativity, selfishness and bravery, rage and fear and vengeance, plus the occasional dose of generous, unalloyed altruism.
The slick gray landscape accelerated around them. On their left, in the distance and blurred by their speed, was a fef work camp.
The emissary asked about the little aliens.
She was wearing limited nexuses, none reaching into the data reservoirs. Every question had to be audible, and when she listened to answers, her responses were measured and set against all the other questions she had asked and her reactions to everything else that she had ever heard.
Pamir described the fef, in brief.
“Could I meet one someday?” she asked.
Pamir said, “Of course,” and left it there.
Neither wore lifesuits, though two of the elaborate machines stood nearby, ready to wrap themselves around their fragile bodies in case of trouble. Pamir filled a standard uniform, while the emissary was dressed in simple gray trousers and a loose white blouse. She looked very long and strangely pretty. Her face seemed both inquisitive and simple. In most ways, she had kept her appearance unchanged. But in the years since her arrival she had noticeably aged, the long black hair growing whiter and finer, her face softening in countless little ways.
She was O’Layle’s DNA; but immortal lives depended on bioceramic genetics much more durable than any nucleic acid.
She was dying, and according to projections, old age would kill her around the moment when they broke free of the Inkwell.
Less than thirty years from today.
For a moment, and not for the first time, Pamir entertained the image of sleeping with the creature.
He closed his eyes, and for the next few hours he pretended to sleep, and she respected his privacy, allowing him to work through his nexuses before stealing a brief dreamy nap. Then a voice nudged him awake. Sitting up, he saw another bright splotch of light in the distance—a white light punctuated with blinking colors, red and green and violet beacons matching the three most common colors for blood. Port Alpha lay just over the distant horizon. Set on the arbitrary northern pole, no other port was as busy normally; but after the Great Ship entered the nebula, little traffic was required. As a precaution against wandering comets, each of the six ports was kept sealed. And only limited, short-range missions were allowed. The polyponds claimed that even small vessels made it difficult to sweep clear the debris and mark what couldn’t be moved with bright beacons. In terms described either as perfectly polite or distinctly chilly, they repeatedly reminded the captains that they should keep very close to home.
Past the mothballed port stood the first shield generators—blunt cylinders and bland cones bigger than most mountains.
Every moment spent in the open brought a measurable, predictable risk. The skimmer’s armored plates had aligned themselves to blunt the likely impacts. Its engines had accelerated to their limits, the angular velocity great enough to make Pamir’s body feel a kilo or two lighter. Everything close was a blur, and for a little while there was nothing else to see. Then came soundless flashes as lasers lashed out at dust and grit, and the shields grew stronger and deeper, a colorful swift aurora swirling overhead. The skimmer eased toward the left—toward the east—passing wide around a site where ionized wreckage was gathered and sorted, purified and sent off to some useful place.
The polyponds did much the same trick, but on a vast scale.
Pamir tied into a nearby mirror field, using its eyes to gaze at the sky beyond the shimmering aurora. What had appeared black from the ship’s trailing face was nothing. It was a simple darkness, deep but transparent. What was coming—the Satin Sack—was heavier and colder by a factor of ten, blackness heaped on blackness that was buried deep in the bowels of the nebula. Not dense by any human measure, the Sack was a massive feature nonetheless, jammed full of dust and cold gases. Alone, the ship could weather any transit, but its hull would end up battered, the mirror fields ground down to so much bright hot dust.
But they weren’t alone; the polyponds were deploying gigantic shields of their own, ionizing then coaxing trillions upon trillions of hazards out of the way.
In certain frequencies, the ship’s course was obvious.
If the Sack was a thick cylinder of black smoke, then it looked as if a strong narrow breath had blown through it, punching a million-kilometer-wide hole clear to the other side.
The emissary watched the blurring terrain. According to every buried sensor, she was exactly as interested as a young human should be, and for someone with narrow understanding of the ship, she was no more or less nervous than what was expected of her.
“What you can do,” Pamir began to say.
She looked at him. Her graying hair was a little dull, but the eyes remained bright and cheery. “Excuse me?”
“It’s amazing,” he said. “What you can accomplish, I mean.”
“I can do nothing,” she insisted.
“Your species, I mean.”
With an emissary’s poise, she nodded, telling him, “Thank you very much.”
“You know,” he continued, “we always believed—I’m talking about the captains—we congratulated ourselves for our robust understanding of aliens. With tens of thousands of species as our experience, it was easy to think that we knew everything. But the polyponds are different. Unexpected, mostly.”
Again, she said, “Thank you.”
“Which makes us wonder: ‘What else is there?’” He knew what he would say, but he let himself pretend a reflective silence. “If we end up flying out of the galaxy, out into deep space … maybe we’ll find other species that we never anticipated …”
Without a shred of embarrassment, she said, “Since I know nothing about such possibilities …”
“You won’t respond. Of course.”
Again, she looked off at the smoothly blurring hull.
“Is this where you were born?”
The emissary played her own game, pretending not to hear him.
Not for the first time, Pamir asked his companion, “Do you know anything about your species’ origins?”
“No,” she replied.
Honestly, said the watchful instruments.
“What about your history?”
With a human shrug, she replied, “I have no interest in such things.”
“When we first met,” he continued, “you mentioned my ship’s cargo. What was it that you said exactly?”
Without a trace of humor, she asked, “Have you forgotten my words?”
Not for a moment.
Then she glanced at Pamir, and she smiled with her mouth and eyes, and while she sat, one knee lifted high into the air, distracting him with a moment’s empty flirtation.
IN THE MIDDLE of the ship’s leading face, perched on the smooth gray bow, was perhaps the largest telescopic array in the galaxy—thousands of kilometers of optical mirrors and radio antennae, remote-sensing lasers and neutrino traps. The construction that began with a crash program, two centuries ago, had continued unabated. Factories built for no other purpose continued shoving out high-grade reflectors and AIs trained to think about the oceans of raw data. An army of robots cultured for the first wave of construction had nothing to do now but repair the occasional impact damage, filling the bulk of their time assembling new mirrors and dishes, then splicing in the baby minds. If nothing slowed their pace, this hemisphere would be covered with telescopes in less than eighteen hundred years, and another eight centuries after that, the trailing face—minus rocket nozzles and Remoran cities—would be equally plastered with great lidless eyes.
The skimmer began to slow, seats reversed, and the passengers yanked into the deep foam. The gees weren’t difficult for Pamir, but his companion had only the ancient protein-spawning repair genes. Her back and legs were bruised, and without autodoc help, the purple blotches would remain visible and sore for days.
The landscape slowed to a crawl, and at a seemingly random spot, the ship quit moving beneath them.
“We walk,” he announced.
She donned her lifesuit without complaint or questions.
“It’s not far,” he promised.
But she hadn’t asked, and she didn’t seem to care now.
They were parked on a narrow path set in the midst of an enormous, silent, and utterly motionless forest. Shields and exploding bits of grit colored the sky. Vast dishes stood on both sides of them, rising high on elegant columns of diamond and optical cables. Hexagon-shaped dishes touched one another. No light fell beneath the telescopes, and the brutal cold only worsened in the smothering darkness.
“Follow my marker,” Pamir instructed.
The tall emissary walked stiffly, her eyes fixed on a tiny red light riding on the crest of his helmet.
“Keep close,” he advised.
But she didn’t have the strength to match the man’s pace. Age and the fresh bruises pulled her back, forcing her to call out, “I can’t see you now.”
“Stop walking,” Pamir advised.
She stopped and waited silently. Her breathing was a little quick, and her human heart raced to a normal degree. But as soon as her body recovered from its exertions, breath and the heart rate slowed again. Her own suit had several lights, but she didn’t use them. She seemed utterly at ease in the blackness. Nothing could be visible to her eyes, and she was happy enough to smile.
In the distance, the red beacon blinked back into view.
Pamir said, “Come on now.”
She held the line, every step accomplished with a blind faith that the hull was smooth and trustworthy. Only when she reached the beacon did she realize that it was higher than before, and the lifesuit beneath was as large her own. She hesitated. For an instant, her old-fashioned water-and-fat mind felt a perfectly ordinary confusion that was detected by an array of subcutaneous sensors.
“Who are you?” she asked.
The giant lifesuit turned slowly. A light came on inside the helmet, the golden face peering out through the faceplate, not quite smiling as the Master Captain said, “I need to ask you something, darling. Come with me.”
The emissary hesitated, then obeyed.
Sometime during the last few days, a fleck of ice had managed to fall through the lasers and shields, striking the hull with a flash and enough force to obliterate a hundred hectares of mirrors. The crater was shallow and white-gray, the hyperfiber able to realign its structure enough to recover most of its strength. Repair crews of robots and fef had been sent elsewhere. What were the odds that a second object would slip through the defenses and explode here? The odds were tiny, but no tinier than any other target zone, of course. What the Master wanted was open ground. What the psychobiologists found appealing was the dose of drama that came with this unexpected meeting. Put the emissary through humane amounts of abuse and worry, then throw her into a situation she could never have anticipated.
In the middle of the round clearing, black chairs had been set up.
Washen met the Master at the fringe, using the public channel to say, “Welcome, madam. And welcome to you, emissary.”
The creature gave a little nod.
“When did we talk last?” Washen inquired. “At the Master’s banquet, was it?”
“Yes.”
“I hope you’ve been enjoying your stay with us.”
A feeling of puzzlement ran through the emissary’s mind. But she had the poise to say, “I have enjoyed everything that I have seen.”
Her years had been spent inside a large apartment decorated with security enough for a prison cell. Except for a few carefully orchestrated trips, she had seen nothing, and not once, even in passing, had she asked for more freedom.
“What question may I answer?” the emissary wished to know.
Pointing with a long arm, the Master Captain said, “This way, please. If you would.”
The chairs were arranged in a widely spaced ring. When the emissary walked into the middle, the Submasters took their seats. Pamir was v
isible again, sitting on the Master’s left side. And Conrad filled the next chair, his single eye staring at the emissary as if he had never seen her before.
Washen was on the Master’s right. “Look up now,” she coaxed.
The sky was a splotch of deep indigo turning crimson at its margins.
“Of course we’re a little bit blind,” Washen confessed. “There’s a lot of noise and busy light to look past, and that keeps us from using these mirrors to their full potential. But still, we can piece together a few things.”
The sky changed. What lay beyond the shields burst into view, shifting from radio to the infrared range and back. The Satin Sack was a vast bubble of noise and tiny puddles of heat, elaborate structures and intricate details revealed suddenly. Ionized gas and ice looked like twisting threads, leading inevitably to clusters of warm water. One of the clusters was magnified, thousands of points appearing beside a standard scale. The points were packed into a neat sphere barely one light-hour in diameter. Each was the size of a small moon, and with a reasoned tone, Washen said, “They’re children, of a kind. Buds, we’ve dubbed them.”
A quiet but intense voice said, “I would not know.”
“I believe you,” Washen said.
The image shifted again. Directly ahead of the ship lay the hole, the promised passageway, as cold and as empty as the rest of Sack was busy and bright.
“Our course,” Washen muttered.
The emissary gave a little nod.
“Still open and ready for us, it seems.”
“Seems?”
“To the limits of our eyes, it looks open. Yes.”
The emissary’s heart beat harder, and her breath sped up until it was audible—a nervous quick breathing that slurred her next words.
“I do not know … what you want …”
“Some weeks ago,” Washen explained, “we noticed a new phenomenon. Something odd or ordinary, but definitely an event that had to have been planned in advance.”
“Yes?”
“These threads here, these rivers of water and minerals … they seem to have been feeding the young polyponds, letting them acquire mass and raw materials.” She paused for a moment, then added, “Together, the rivers started to expand. You can’t see it yet, not with this resolution. But it’s obvious enough. The electromagnetic shackles have been relaxed. The ions are running away from each other, spreading out in all directions.”