The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  Washen struggled to stand.

  “What do you think?” Miocene continued. “That I was an insufferable bitch through the whole of my life?”

  Washen woke, finding a hand upon her shoulder and Locke saying, “Sorry. I let you sleep, and our time’s done.”

  “What time is it?” she muttered, momentarily confused.

  Through a hundred nexuses, she learned the name of this particular moment. And then the moment was gone, left behind and lost, and that’s when she finally talked herself into taking the vacation.

  IT WASN’T ENOUGH just to silence her buried nexuses. Pamir had agreed, and with a calm insistence, he added, “You also need to be somewhere without people. Without crew or passengers, or me.”

  “I’ll miss you,” she mentioned.

  “We barely see each other,” he reminded her, just enough of a barb in the words to make his disgust plain. Then he proposed an itinerary for an unusual, one-of-a-kind holiday.

  “The Grand Ocean,” he began.

  An image took hold of her. She laughed, interrupting him to ask, “Why not just a little pond in an unlit room? Wouldn’t that be just as dark and alone?”

  “We’ll light the sky for you,” he promised.

  The waste made her queasy.

  “And while the cavern’s lit,” he continued, “Osmium’s troops can search for secret colonies and illegal adventurers. So there is a good purpose in this business, other than keeping the ship’s head sane.”

  The Grand Ocean was not a single cavern; it was a vast array of linked caves that happened to lie at the same depths inside the ship. The first humans mapped the great volume, and then flooded it with melted ice from a hundred higher caverns. The Ocean’s surface area was larger than the Earth’s. Reaching more than a hundred kilometers deep, it was the biggest body of water on the ship and bigger than most of the galaxy’s other oceans, too. And it was empty. Except for a tiny quantity of dissolved minerals and salt, it was nothing but pure, cold, and unlit water, kept in reserve for the homeward leg of the ship’s voyage. Except for the rare autotrophic bacteria, nothing lived in this realm. Just with her presence, Washen had nearly doubled the bioload of the entire sea.

  She hadn’t swum so much since childhood. Every morning for the last thirty mornings, Washen had practiced a variety of strokes, muscles gradually relearning the rhythm and feel of pressing against the water. Then the swimming became unconscious, and she could push her ageless long body to its limits, steady hard strokes eventually making her gasp and giggle.

  Thinking about the Great Ship wasn’t allowed—at least not until the long swim home. And when she did think of large subjects, she kept her mind fixed on the broadest matters, no little jobs or urgent timetables nipping at her now. In that seemingly infinite span of water, Washen kept finding a sweet comfort: the ship’s size and age, and the unimaginable distances that it had crossed, always on its own. She loved this glorious orb of high technology and simple stone, and how could she not feel a little foolish to worry about threats, real or imagined?

  Her schooner called to her with the only nexus she allowed herself—a simple navigational beacon whispering, “This way, yes. This way.” Back on her temporary home, she prepared a huge meal and ate all of it, and she raised the sails with her increasingly strong back and arms. The artificial sun had darkened her limbs. A steady wind always rose by midday, carrying her for another few kilometers before the sun dropped and darkness descended. But it wasn’t the perfect black that ruled here normally. Pamir had painted a starscape both odd and familiar. Without nexuses, Washen couldn’t feel sure about its origins; but when she looked at the smears of light and occasional feeble star, she realized that she was gazing at the galaxies of the Virgo cluster—a vast realm of suns and unnamed worlds, gas clouds and raw energy that might, in many millions of years, meet the Great Ship.

  Alone, Washen would hold long, elaborate conversations with herself, enjoying the sound of her own voice and the quick well-rested thoughts that slipped between the words.

  She slept hard for six or even seven hours at a stretch—the longest uninterrupted sleep she could remember—and she woke rested, alert eyes gazing across an emptiness of quiet water that couldn’t seem more lovely.

  On the thirty-first morning, she swam again.

  At first, Washen lay on her back, one arm after the other reaching over her head, swift hands cutting into the water and yanking hard. When she felt warm and loose, she turned over onto her belly, and like a happy porpoise, she did a rolling stroke, browned arms reaching together as the body bent like a wave, every muscle working with an instinctive grace, pointed feet delivering the final hard kick.

  It was an expensive stroke for a human body. Eventually she collapsed into a simple crawl, from time to time pausing, looking back over her shoulder. The horizons were far away, but her boat was a little thing, and she had only good human eyes to look across all that bright smooth water.

  Once the masts and folded sails had vanished, she turned for home.

  With a simple patient breaststroke, Washen made the return voyage, her tanned face held out of the water and her long black hair streaming behind her. Quietly, she talked to herself. About nothing, usually. She spoke to dead people and lost lovers, and sometimes she imagined the grandchildren whom she had left down below, fighting for their lives on Marrow.

  “What are you doing now?” she asked them.

  Then she apologized for leaving. “I did what was best. I hope. For the ship, which means for you, too.”

  It was the last morning of her holiday.

  Halfway back to the boat, while thinking about nothing clear or certain, she hesitated. Her arms pulled up beneath her and stopped, while her tucking legs remained tucked. A body just buoyant enough to float now drifted along on the last of its momentum, and then she pulled herself into a tiny hard ball, exhaling hard enough to leave her lungs deflated and small.

  Washen sank.

  A minute passed, and most of another. Then she surfaced again, breaking into a hard clean crawl fed by deep quick breaths. Water splashed. Legs thundered. She reached the schooner in less than ten minutes, too exhausted to climb the ladder on her first attempt, or her second.

  Struggling, Washen managed to clamber up onto the dampened oak deck.

  Still naked, she tucked herself into a fetal ball, eyes open and seeing nothing. Nothing. She was focused and slack-faced. Even as her breathing slowed, she didn’t seem to notice, a deeply distracted attitude clinging to her as she dried herself and dressed.

  “Make breakfast or not?” she asked herself.

  “Make it,” she decided.

  But somewhere in the middle of the preparation, watching blocks of salted fat and round dabs of cultured eggs cooking in the hot skillet, she said, “Stop.”

  Alone, she climbed up on deck and sat on the narrow bow.

  To herself, she said, “Okay. I guess that’s it then.”

  Several hours before her vacation was scheduled to end, she woke one of her nexuses, and with a calm, smooth, and certain voice, she said, “Pamir.”

  “It’s too early,” he snapped.

  “Listen,” Washen said.

  “What?”

  “As soon as possible,” she said.

  Angry silence.

  Then she glanced out over the empty water, feeling the day’s delicious wind playing across her face. “We need to change course,” she said to Pamir and to herself. “Today, I mean. This minute. And I couldn’t be more sure.”

  Twenty

  “Two three-engine burns,” Washen promised. “In thirteen hours, then fifty hours later. Brief burns, the second putting us on a parallel course. Here. We’ll be moving ten AU removed from our present route. Here. Outside the tunnel wall, no polyponds or major obstructions visible. Of course we’ll send warnings beforehand. We don’t want to be impolite. And yes, we’ll have to absorb extra impacts. Piercing the wall, then a fortyfold increase in the base erosion rate. But tha
t’s within tolerances. Ten years to cross the Sack, and what’s the best guess? Between nine and eleven hundred Class-4 impacts, and half a hundred Class-3s. With nothing large enough, at least so far, to cause a Class-2 or worse.” Washen threw a sturdy look down the length of the table, telling the Submasters, “I’ll offer my reasons, starting with the most obvious and weakest example.” She paused for a moment, then admitted, “I don’t trust our hosts, and a prudent course correction that puts us on a new, unexpected trajectory … well, that’s going help me sleep tonight.”

  Again, she fell silent.

  The meeting room was long and plainly decorated, one of the short walls overlooking the ship’s bridge. Better than a hundred captains were visible below them, standing at their stations, accomplishing their work with a smooth competence. But sometimes one or two would glance up at the Submasters, narrowed gazes and a few muttered words hinting at the curiosity and the raw worry that was already seeping through the ranks.

  Why this emergency meeting? they wondered. And why were the other Submasters staring at the First Chair with those stunned expressions? What had she said that was so awful?

  A fef raised a middle arm, human fashion.

  “Just a moment,” Washen cautioned. Then she leaned across the long table, adding, “The polyponds aren’t talking. But if we do the unexpected, maybe we can generate a fresh dialogue with them.”

  The alien arm dropped, but an urgent voice said, “Madam.”

  “Change course,” Washen argued, “and we might disrupt our hosts’ plans. Whatever they happen to be.”

  “Madam—”

  “How long would it take the polyponds to barricade the tunnel ahead of us?” Washen looked at the chief engineer. “Since they only need to drag matter across a few tens of thousands of kilometers—”

  “Hours,” Aasleen reported. “They could push a gram of material into every thousand cubic meters, and manage it in less than twenty-four hours.” Then she allowed her own skepticism to surface, calmly adding, “If, if, if that happened to be their desire.”

  Washen magnified portions of the most recent charts, feeding them into her colleagues’ nexuses. “I see five concentrations of matter,” she pointed out. “Scattered beside the tunnel, we have congregations of dust and cometary grit, and inside this last mass, there’s enough iron to fashion a good-sized asteroid. It might have been an asteroid that wandered into the Inkwell and was mined to dust. For all we know, these features have always been here. They’re entirely benign. But if not … if the polyponds wanted to pull this moon back into a single mass and then drop it in our way—?”

  “They still can,” a deep voice interrupted.

  Washen glanced at Pamir. “Elaborate,” she said.

  “Your new course doesn’t get us far from these maybe-hazards,” he pointed out. “The only advantage, from what I can tell, is that we’ll be outside the tunnel, which means outside that wall of dust. Our eyes will work a little better now. If something approaches, we might see it sooner.”

  “That’s one of my reasons for doing this,” Washen agreed. But she would have been more honest to say, “It’s just another tidy rationalization.”

  This was an instinctive decision, and what could she offer?

  Openness.

  “Yes,” she said to the fef. “You have a comment.”

  The creature bent in the middle, lifting his face high before remarking, “Our maneuver will be misunderstood. Unless aggression is the intention, and then we will be making our plans transparently plain.”

  Washen nodded and waited.

  Pamir responded for both of them. “What I know about polyponds—what I am certain about—is that too many of them to count are burning up a huge portion of their own big bodies to approach us. Feeding their curiosity, maybe. But I’ve never genuinely believed that. And I’d tell you what I do believe, except after months of hard thought, I still don’t know. So I’ll just assume that they want to take possession of our vessel, and like any muscle-bound bully, they don’t see the need to explain themselves.”

  A pause.

  Then Pamir glanced at Washen, in warning. “That’s not to say I completely agree with our First Chair’s plan. I can’t. But we’re at the point where we have very little freedom of motion. We’re going to plunge through the Satin Sack, following the same essential course, and nothing substantial can possibly change. That’s why I’ve got a little proposal of my own. Something that I haven’t quite mentioned yet.”

  Washen looked at him, and she looked into herself. What was her motivation here? From everything possible and everything feared, which story did she believe in more than any other?

  “A third burn,” Pamir offered. “I think we need one.”

  Everyone referred to Washen’s charts, trying to guess where the new burn would happen.

  He said, “An all-engine burn, this time.”

  On the chart, a thin white line marked the two deft jogs in their course, and then Pamir added a bluish flare, shoving the ship’s mass forward with a very slight acceleration, pushing it faster into the blackest depths of the Sack.

  “It won’t buy us much velocity,” he admitted. “But anything that throws off our enemy’s timetable sounds workable to me.”

  Washen considered his model.

  “More discussion?” Aasleen asked. “Or is everything decided?”

  Another dozen Submasters asked the same question.

  Then the fef gazed at the Master Captain, saying, “Your excellence,” with a worshipful tone. “What are your feelings and configurings on this matter, your excellence?”

  Sitting at one end of the long table, flanked by her First and Second Chairs, the great woman appeared to smile. But it was a stern, unhappy expression, and the voice that came rolling out of her was sorry and dark. “I have doubts about each of these maneuvers,” she admitted. “Doubts and worries, and genuine concerns. But alone, I can’t make decisions of consequence. I know this, and I can almost accept this limitation. If my first two chairs decide that there will be three burns, then there will be three burns. I have nothing but voice and experience to offer here.”

  Washen felt a chill along her neck. She glanced at the Master, then sighed and turned back to Pamir, remarking, “You don’t have an end point on this huge burn of yours.”

  “Don’t I?” he kidded.

  “How many days do you intend? Or is it weeks?”

  “What do you want from my engines?” Aasleen pressed.

  “I was thinking of years,” Pamir admitted. Then with a snort, he reminded everyone, “We’re being ambushed here. So why not gallop as fast as possible for as long as possible?”

  The silence was perfect and brief.

  Staring at the Master Captain, Osmium asked, “What are your doubts, madam?”

  “Do you wish to maintain our present course?” asked the fef. “As we promised the polyponds?”

  A wide hand swept through the air.

  “No,” she replied with a rumbling voice. Then a sudden laugh took everyone by surprise. “No,” she said and again, “no, I don’t have any unique opinions on the merits and risks of any course adjustment.”

  She treasured this moment, every eye firmly focused on her.

  “But I do know something about duplicity and shrewdness. And as reasonable as this plan feels, I can’t help but wonder … with a tight chest and a drumming heart, wonder … if this is what the polyponds always intended us to do … !”

  THE FIRST BURN was preceded by a quick, thorough, and scrupulously honest explanation of reasons. There was little time to dress up the announcements, much less tailor them for individual species. The Master Captain spoke to passengers and crew at the same time, the practice of aeons allowing her to appear both confident and in control. Yes, there would be a wave of quick impacts. Yes, there would be more large impacts. No passengers would be allowed on the ship’s leading face, at least for the time being. Repair teams and fabrication facilities would be on c
onstant duty. Then with an unflappable resolve, she reminded billions that a large portion of the Inkwell had already been crossed, without incident, and despite the approaching polyponds, not one shot had been fired and no war was declared. “And unless we’re given spectacular reasons,” she concluded, “we will hold our new line and ask nothing of anyone but ourselves.”

  The tunnel wall tested the shields and laser arrays. A few thousand mirrors were off-line for several days, and one crew of fef were vaporized when a fist-sized lump of stone fell on their heads. Then the ship was slicing its way through a bank of cold hydrogen, the shields blazing overhead, and another three engines were twisted and ignited, leaving three broad columns of fierce heat and stripped nuclei curling around one another, building elaborate and sloppy knots across millions of kilometers.

  The third burn began an hour later.

  For the first time since humans came upon this relic, every engine was lit in the same instant and left burning, lakes of liquid hydrogen flooding into chambers of high-grade hyperfiber, compressed and ignited and the blasts made more powerful by myriad tricks and cheats. Antimatter spiked the fuel, and the hyperfiber vibrated across a multitude of dimensions and shadowy realms. Energy normally lost was brought back again. Neutrinos were focused and ejected. A brilliant kick was delivered to the ship, and twenty Earth masses responded with an ever-so-slight acceleration.

  At a distance, the fourteen engines made for a single bright point of light and a straight hot trail that grew until it was light-weeks long.

  But at a greater distance, the engines were only a steady, nearly feeble glow visible only in narrow portions of the infrared. And the ship was nothing. A tiny, tiny point surrounded by a multitude of smaller engines moving tinier masses … hundreds of thousands of buds now … a diffuse sphere collapsing toward a single point, and growing in numbers by the day, by the moment … a blaze of steam and plasmas driving that multitude down on top of that sluggish and tiny and very nearly helpless machine.