The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  Quietly, Pamir pointed out, “We would have noticed a ship tagging after us. Long ago, I’d hope.”

  Locke agreed.

  Then in the next instant, the pragmatic captain came to the conclusion that Locke had derived from days of data searches, careful calculations, and elaborate models built inside AIs and drawn on the palm of his pale gray hand.

  A closer rendezvous with the white dwarf.

  A sharper course correction.

  “If I was five thousand light-years behind you,” Pamir said, “and if I saw you fire your engines and dive into the galaxy … into all those stars and worlds … I might have been tempted to make a tighter turn and stay above you.”

  With a hand laid flat, he showed the Milky Way. With the other hand’s index finger, he traced a straight sure course above the swirling stars.

  Both hands dropped.

  “The white dwarf,” Pamir muttered. “I remember. We put probes into orbit. To map the space, measure its exact mass … just to be triple sure that we weren’t going to smash into anything on our flyby …”

  Impressed, Locke nodded.

  “Are the probes still functioning?” Pamir asked.

  Then he answered his own question, saying, “They used to be, and we kept track of their broadcasts.” It had taken him several moments to find the proper log with his own nexuses. “For the first half of the voyage—”

  “Captains are thorough,” Washen interjected.

  The data was easy to find because Locke had tagged it just days ago. And the results were still obvious, half a hundred individual entries glowing where he had reached deep to examine the ancient numbers.

  “What’s the verdict?” Pamir asked, looking across the table. “Are we being chased through the cosmos?”

  Locke glanced at his mother.

  Washen straightened her back, squared her shoulders, and waited.

  “Nothing else has passed by that dead star,” said Locke.

  And then with a different voice—a louder, distinctly intrigued voice—he said, “That means there was no other ship. Ever. Unless, of course, it managed to find a different route, or it was built on principles we don’t understood. Or maybe, we were looking in the wrong direction to begin with …”

  ANOTHER NIGHT CAME.

  It was days later, or perhaps weeks. The press of moments and months didn’t feel important of late. Nothing of substance seemed to change on board the ship, and perhaps it never would. That was the general consensus. Pamir couldn’t discount the sameness with either muscular reasoning or cold practicality. The human mind had been improved in a multitude of ways … but it still could be lulled into a sense of foreverness, a velvetlike complacency that made even a hardhearted son of a bitch think that he had been here forever, flying through the heart of the Inkwell …

  They were lying in Washen’s bed, again. On her ceiling, images from the ship’s leading face appeared in real time, in a shifting range of frequencies and details. The polypond buds had begun to arrive, and despite good simulations predicting all types of behavior, they had done nothing. Thousands were scattered across a light-week of dark dusty space, and despite endless pleas from the Master Captain and her Submasters, none of the interlopers had said one word in response, much less tried to explain their looming presence.

  One night, the captains made love under that crowded sky.

  Another night, too exhausted for anything else, they slept.

  And then came a third night when Pamir woke too soon, finding himself on his back, watching as another hundred of those great watery bodies swam out of the black, pushing themselves close with sloppy muscular engines.

  Washen stirred, a dream causing her to roll away from him.

  Pamir sat up and drank ice water and said nothing, staring at the fine long back of his lover.

  “What?” she asked, her face invisible to him.

  “Feel my eyes?” he asked.

  “I thought they were knives,” she joked. Then she rolled closer to him, and after a moment’s consideration asked, “What are you thinking?”

  What wasn’t he thinking?

  “What bothers you?” she asked.

  Everything.

  Then she said his name with a brittle tenderness, tired of this game and this moment, wishing for the things to finally happen now. Just to break the deadlock.

  “Pamir,” she said. “What is it?”

  “I was wondering,” he whispered. “In the face of all this, why are you and your son … why are you spending so much time and effort asking if the ship is being chased by somebody … ?”

  “But what if we are?” she replied.

  “I’m not questioning the importance of it.”

  “Then what?”

  “Where does this obsession come from?” Pamir smiled and offered a big shrug. “The two people most thoroughly and intimately tied to Marrow, and neither of you can stop thinking about things that can’t be found …

  “Does that ever strike you as being more than just a little bit interesting … ?”

  Twenty-three

  Life was meant to be a string of abundances, warm glories, and trusted pleasures. O’Layle had always professed that shameless code, but the bald truth was that most of his life had been spent slinking about in shadow, begging and cheating to achieve whatever paltry success was his to enjoy. Only in these final decades had he come to appreciate how tiny and maudlin that old life had been. His transformation began when he escaped from the seemingly doomed ship. In his mind, he had shown both enormous initiative and a dry-eyed bravery. Alone, he had crossed an inhospitable wilderness. Alone, he had met and befriended an alien unlike any other, forging intimate bonds with the Blue World while teaching her about his life and species and about the Great Ship. No one played a more critical role when human emissaries finally met with the polypond. Then O’Layle had gladly returned home. He couldn’t remember it any other way. He left the Blue World willingly and freely, arriving here in triumph, his corner in history secure, the name O’Layle sure to be known for aeons to come, while his adventures were the subject of endless retellings and a boundless, incandescent envy.

  True, the voyage home had been less than pleasant. With every day and every breath, he could feel a palpable dislike directed at him by the crew, and worse, the deep mistrust of the Second Chair. O’Layle was also kept from any hero’s welcome, he and that frozen sliver of the Blue World ushered aside, victims of the ugliest, most pointless fears. And there were a few other surprises waiting for him—events and limitations that would rightfully disappoint any person who had accomplished as much as he had accomplished.

  The quarantine, for instance.

  Why keep him apart from the passengers and crew? Perhaps it was as simple as the captains’ explanation. “This is just a precaution, and temporary,” Pamir had promised, escorting him to a private apartment in a deep, isolated district. “We just want to be sure you aren’t anything more, or less, than what you seem to be.”

  What did he seem to be?

  Pamir shook his heavy head, smiling with a guarded amusement. “You’re a very lucky man,” he observed. “Maybe the luckiest ever, considering the long odds that you’ve crossed. And believe me, we’re going to keep a lucky man like you happy in your new home.”

  In ways good and bad, captains were true to their words: O’Layle was quite happy, yes. The apartment was large enough to suit the needs of the most demanding passenger, more than two hundred spacious rooms knitted together with a delicious maze of curling hallways and little avenues. Its only resident was encouraged to decorate the rooms however he wished, and O’Layle took on that considerable task with more energy than he would have imagined possible. In the end, almost sixty rooms had been transformed, both by his hand and with help from a platoon of compliant robots. Chairs and potted jungles, not to mention nearly half a cubic kilometer of synthetic earth had been purchased on his behalf and brought from distant parts of the ship, passing through a series of
airlocks before being ushered down a hyperfiber throat and through his grand front door. Sixty rooms was an enormous accomplishment, and with a keen pride, he would parade his accomplishments to whoever visited him. Of course nobody visited in a physical sense. Even the captains appeared to him as projections. Why these kinds of precautions were necessary or reasonable, O’Layle couldn’t say. Hadn’t he lived among the crew of that streakship? They didn’t have to endure this kind of isolation, yet for months at a time, hadn’t they shared his air and drunk his recycled pee? Besides, O’Layle had already endured a series of exhaustive tests, during the voyage and afterward. His blood and bones, mind and sturdy heart were examined by every available tool, and every measurement, every knowing touch, proved what he knew to be true:

  He was still and would always be O’Layle.

  The captains’ true logic revealed itself gradually. A onetime lover visited as a hologram. After he showered her with charm and some aggressive begging, she agreed to marry herself with a warm, skin-covered robot. Then O’Layle led her to his favorite bed and climbed on top of her. If she didn’t enjoy the experience, at least she made the appropriate sounds. Then afterward, feeling spent and fine, he sat up and grinned at the machine’s temporary face, asking in an offhand fashion, “When do you think they’ll give up this quarantine nonsense?”

  She stared at him for a long moment. Hadn’t she heard the question? Perhaps the link between her immersion chamber and his bed had been severed. But no, she was simply absorbing his query. Then with a snort and a little shake of the head, she said, “Darling,” in a grating fashion. “Don’t you realize? They might call it a quarantine, but what this is … this is a prison cell, darling …”

  The idea required time to be digested.

  And even when O’Layle believed what she told him, it took more months and years to come to terms with the simple fact.

  “How much longer?” he asked.

  Pamir was visiting. That this powerful man gave his time and attention proved that O’Layle was no simple felon hidden away in the ship’s brig. “How much longer with your quarantine?” Pamir muttered. “I’ve told you. Once we pull clear of the Inkwell, you get the keys to your door.”

  “But that’s all this is?” O’Layle persisted. “A precaution?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not a prisoner?”

  “Hardly.”

  “You don’t think I’m a criminal?”

  The big man snorted, shaking his head. “Why should we?”

  “Because I illegally abandoned the ship,” O’Layle offered. “I used illegal moneys to bribe your crew, saving my own precious ass in the process.”

  “Prisoners have trials,” Pamir argued. “Do you remember any trial?”

  It was a telling point that O’Layle had made to himself, on numerous occasions.

  “Criminals, particularly the guilty ones, live in very tiny spaces,” the Second Chair continued. “By law and custom, the ship has to supply only ten thousand cubic meters of livable room.”

  A fact O’Layle knew well.

  “This doesn’t look like a prison cell, does it?”

  They were standing on the shoreline of his largest, most splendid room. Salt water funneled down from the Alpha Sea had flooded most of the chamber, forming a small lake, and beneath the illusion of a high blue sky, robots dressed as polypond bodies swam beneath the rippling surface.

  For a moment, O’Layle smiled at the water.

  “You miss her,” Pamir observed.

  Did he? After years apart and a good deal of determined thought, O’Layle was less than sure about his genuine feelings.

  Bristling, he heard himself muttering, “All right, I’m not a prisoner.”

  “Agreed.”

  “But this isn’t any normal quarantine,” he remarked.

  Holos were never perfect, but those eyes certainly seemed to belong to Pamir. With a clear scorn, the bright eyes cut into him, while Pamir’s growling voice asked, “What else could this be?”

  “An interrogation,” O’Layle offered.

  That brought a hard, dismissive laugh.

  “There’s a better word than that,” the Second Chair warned. And then he simply ceased to be.

  O’LAYLE WAS ISOLATED but far from ignorant.

  Using the captains’ funds, he had built an immersion chamber where he could view any portion of the ship, save those countless places where there were no eyes or cameras or where security restrictions were firmly in place. He could never visit friends and lovers as a holo; that wasn’t allowed. But he could sit on a comfortable chair of living Dallico leather, passively watching people and creatures that he had known forever while they spoke about everything, and nothing.

  As a rule, his old friends were boring souls. That sad truth emerged after several years of patience. Since O’Layle couldn’t tell his own stories, there was no choice but to listen to others. Even inside that little window of time, it became obvious that each of the voices had only a handful of stories to share. Names changed, and settings, but the outcomes followed reliable themes that could have been stated at the beginning, saving breath. And every joke was a thin variation on the last thousand jokes, the same few punch lines emerging again and again.

  They were boring souls to watch, but oddly enough, O’Layle wasn’t bored.

  He missed them, first of all. He missed the touch of real flesh, the smell and sight of genuine company, and when his old friends mentioned him, he felt a pleasing warmth that made the tedium feel worthwhile.

  Not that they spoke about him often, nor in clear terms.

  One of his old names would be mentioned, and a ten-thousand-year-old story would be marched out, everyone making little mistakes when they told their particular part. Or someone would recall a mutual friend, and the group would busy themselves for a full day, dredging up old stories and fresh gossip that occasionally involved O’Layle. Sometimes a past lover or one of his finest friends would appear before him, holo fashion, and afterward they would report to the others, describing his apartment and new life and how he seemed to be. In general, O’Layle appeared a little sad to the others. Which wasn’t the case at all, but what could he do? They wanted to think of him as being blue and sorry for what he had done, abandoning them as he had. Though he wasn’t blue or even a little bit sorry. Why should he feel regrets? Hadn’t everything worked out wonderfully well? Then after they had successfully chewed his mental state down to their level, someone inevitably asked:

  “So what does he think about it?”

  About the polyponds, they meant.

  “Is he worried? Happy? What does our dear sweet friend think? In his little head, what does all this mean?”

  They meant the polypond babies. By the thousands, the buds were matching the ship’s trajectory, mirroring its own slowly increasing velocity before settling into a swarm that was literally countless now. The ship was approaching the far edge of the Satin Sack, and the polyponds were traveling with it. Hundreds of thousands of bodies, shriveled by their journey, most just a few tens of kilometers across, were strung out in an elaborate pattern that was spherical at first glance, but decidedly asymmetrical. Most of the buds remained directly ahead of the ship, and all were avoiding the plumes of plasma rising from the blazing engines. There were so many bodies, and each was leaking away enough volatiles to create a thin, far-flung atmosphere, their bodies and collective breath obscuring the sky more than ever, either by chance or design helping to hide whatever lay directly before them.

  One particular lover didn’t mention wearing the robot body, nor anything about pretending to have sex. Instead, she said, “I asked him,” and waited for everyone to pay attention. Then with a soft worried voice, she said, “I asked O’Layle, ‘What are they hiding from us?’”

  “And what did he say?” another ex-lover inquired.

  “‘They aren’t hiding anything,’ he claimed. Then he said, ‘It’s obvious what they’re doing. They’re being helpful. Th
at’s all.’”

  The polyponds were blocking the oncoming dust and comets. Wasn’t that plain to see? With their own bodies and their fantastic momentum, the leading ranks were absorbing some titanic blows, and judging by the rain of dirty ices falling back on the ship today, some of those polyponds were being obliterated by the larger impacts.

  “But why would they help us?” another person asked.

  “I asked O’Layle that,” the first lover continued. “And do you know what he said? He promised me, ‘The polyponds care that much about us.’”

  But that wasn’t what he had said.

  “He told me, ‘They want to see us pass safely through their home.’”

  She was lying, both to them and to herself. For reasons entirely her own, she was borrowing O’Layle’s authority, telling everyone, “There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.”

  But worry was made of harder stuff than that. A few words and a brave little smile did nothing but underscore the general mood. People everywhere were concerned. Every species suffered from the unknown. What O’Layle might not have noticed in his former life, he began to see wherever he looked. Passengers and crew were exhausted by the endless sense of being held in suspense, the drama relentless and unbearable despite every artful reassurance by the captains, experts in the careful word and the cool, implacable expression.

  “I’ll tell you what I really think,” O’Layle cried out at the indifferent friends. “Next time one of you bothers to put in the request and drop by … I won’t open the damned door … !”

  But nobody cared enough anymore. The man who was not a prisoner, nor under quarantine, found himself sitting alone in his spacious home, occupying his days and long nights by watching the skies and studying the public news logs. A long life spent in the pursuit of pleasure had just this one reliable thrill left to it: the sight of millions of polyponds dancing before the ship and behind it, forming an elaborate and vast and very lovely black cloud.

  A light-week across, the cloud was, and perhaps more.

  Countless bodies of water and salt, iron and carbon absorbed everything from the universe beyond. The dust and radiations, and the scarce light, too. For days upon weeks, the polyponds did nothing but silently ingest everything that fell on them. Then there was a moment—an otherwise insignificant point in time—when they began to speak. All that while, the captains had begged for a dialogue, but they were very disappointed by the abrupt response. The sudden flood of radio noise wasn’t intended for them. Even though the captains tried to keep the roaring in the sky secret, the news escaped, and within a few more moments, the Great Ship was jammed with panicked passengers and grim-faced captains.