The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  “You’re right,” he conceded.

  Then he lifted his eyes again, smiling as if embarrassed. “I guess I didn’t know. I didn’t realize. That we understand the polyponds well enough to say anything for sure …

  “Do you see my point, madams? Sirs?”

  THE PARTY FELL into an easier, more comfortable rhythm. Washen found herself looking at Perri, an earlier intuition again playing with her. When he noticed her gaze, he responded with a rakish smile and a little wink. Quee Lee whispered in his ear, and he laughed. Then on a private nexus, Washen called to him, speaking through the polite conversations and the clicking of silverware.

  “I want to meet with you,” she told him. “Just you.”

  Perri remained mute, both with his mouth and his nexus. But his eyes were round and watchful, the pretty mouth pressed into a tight line.

  “I’m going to introduce you to my son,” Washen promised.

  Surprise blossomed.

  “Locke’s doing some work for me,” she explained. “A rather odd project, and with your extensive knowledge of the ship—”

  “He’ll happily help,” Quee Lee interrupted.

  They shared their nexuses, too? How odd and suffocating, and noble, and lovely.

  Across the table, Perri said, “I would be glad to help. If I can.”

  The other conversations dipped. Then came a low rumble that shook plates and bones for a moment or two. Encrypted explanations were fed to Washen. One wet body of a baby polypond had slipped through the shields and survived the lasers, splashing down on a distant patch of empty hull. Every captain quickly surveyed the damage, finding nothing too alarming. Then their desserts arrived—sweet treats carved from a variety of iced lactations—and as spoons lifted, Julius said, “Madam,” in a soft whisper.

  “Yes?”

  “I have a question,” the youngster admitted. “About things that I shouldn’t know anything about.”

  Pamir turned an ear. Otherwise, no one seemed to notice.

  “What things?” Washen prompted.

  “I know someone who knows someone, and that soul spoke to a crew member. I don’t know which one—”

  “A rumor, is it?”

  “If that,” he joked. Then with a sheepish look, he said, “Years ago, in secret, we sent someone into the Inkwell. Alone.”

  Washen took a sweet, chilled, happy mouthful of her dessert, then let it melt against her curled tongue.

  “A little human woman,” the boy continued.

  “What’s your question?” Pamir prompted.

  Julius gave a start. But he found the composure to ask both of them, “What has she told us? Has she found anything of use?”

  Pamir and Washen exchanged quick glances. At this time, with the secret leaked and running free, where was the harm in small admissions?

  “She’s been extremely helpful,” was Pamir’s assessment.

  Julius nodded, concentrating on his spoon.

  Then Washen swallowed and touched the youngster with her free hand—a light touch on a bare slice of wrist—and with a grim, honest tone, she admitted, “But our friend is late with her reports. Honestly, we haven’t heard anything from her in months …”

  Twenty-five

  The antenna was the rugged best that Mere could manage—an elaborate tangle of hyperfiber scraps and fullerene filaments lashed together over the last awful weeks, then unfolded slowly, forming a gossamer web trailing behind her battered, mostly dead ship. In better circumstances, she would have sent home volumes of data along with her own ravaged image, giving Washen every byte of data while trying to re-create how she had come to her elegant, awful conclusions. But her antenna had a limited output, and her new course had not only increased the gulf between her and the Great Ship, it had carried her into an unexpected portion of the sky. They wouldn’t be looking for her here, and even if someone happened to glance in this direction, the great swarm of watery bodies had finished surrounding the ship, their crude bulk and the last breaths of rocket plasmas forming a bright loud sphere that looked as big as a cantaloupe held at arm’s length, effectively blinding the captains. Even a significant signal would have trouble pushing through that mayhem. Even an undisguised message—no dancing frequencies or deep encryptions—might go unnoticed. Whatever message was sent, it had to say enough, but it had to be simple, and it had to prove that she was the genuine Mere, and to help make it noticed, she had to repeat her message thousands of times, in slightly different forms, on a prearranged, normally silent channel.

  Mere aligned her vagabond antenna, pointing it at the center of that vast orb of life and blistering fire.

  She meant to send her message at least a hundred thousand times, but before she reached ten thousand, little impacts cut the web strands, and then a fleck of dust obliterated the central housing, shrapnel slicing through the increasingly tattered remains.

  For a full day, Mere attempted to rebuild the antenna.

  But the impossibilities refused to surrender, and she fell into a black depression that lasted for another two days, her anguished mind fighting for any answer to what had become an unsolvable technical problem. By dismantling the remnants of the Osmium, she could theoretically build a new antenna and transmitter, but the task would take years and end up being utterly useless. A couple light-months removed from the ship, her new course meant that she could never match its trajectory. Instead of moving parallel to ship, letting it gradually catch up, she was beginning to wander off into other regions of the Inkwell. Her-engine was in lousy condition, but even if it operated at full power, and even if she burned all that remained of her anti-iron fuel, Mere could only make herself into a cold piece of dead debris drifting in the Great Ship’s wake.

  She couldn’t throw off any more mass. Nothing left was extraneous, except perhaps her own little body. Whack off the head and throw the rest away? But no, even that sacrifice wouldn’t matter.

  What she needed was help.

  From the Great Ship?

  Maybe they would notice her abbreviated message and measure her course. For a sweet moment, Mere imagined a team of brave volunteers cutting through the surrounding cloud, riding an armored streakship that was dispatched to do nothing but save one of their own.

  She had to laugh at herself, shaking the image off.

  Then a day later, her navigational AI interrupted her concentration, remarking with a tense little voice, “The polypond cloud is changing, madam.”

  Even with her minimal eyes, Mere saw what was happening. The shrouding bodies were on the move again, a few of them killing their own momentum, drifting closer to the ship, vanishing from her view as they allowed those twenty Earth masses to grab hold of them and yank them downward.

  Quietly, fiercely, she said, “Shit.”

  “Exactly,” the AI replied.

  Grief demands time. In this very slender existence, rage and despair were indulgences, and in the next few moments, she forced herself to think about nothing but what was genuinely possible.

  “The full sky,” she blurted. “Show me.”

  The navigator complied instantly.

  “Here. What’s this?”

  A fleet of neurological taxis—her term for the big slow starships—were relatively close, pushing toward unseen targets.

  “Destination?”

  None were apparent.

  “What about this mass? Over here?”

  A swirl in the dust was visible, significant but relatively motionless.

  “What about these infrared signatures?”

  They were factories, perhaps similar to the facility investigated earlier. “Do you wish to move closer to them?”

  “No,” she replied.

  Then, “These! Coming into view here!”

  A trivial school of polypond buds—barely five hundred offspring—showed as a faint sprinkling of red pinpricks swimming through a dense bank of silicate dust. They were traveling toward the Great Ship in close formation, yet each possessed its own pr
ecise course. Judging distance and trajectories ate up long hours of observation; navigation was never easy in deep space, even for a healthy ship. And even after much careful consideration, nothing was certain. With a confessional tone, the AI reported, “I cannot be sure. But what you want … I believe it isn’t possible—”

  “The vectors—?”

  “Are not cooperating,” the voice replied. “We haven’t enough fuel, and that assumes our engine absorbs the work.”

  “In some reality, it will.”

  The comment didn’t earn any reaction.

  Mere examined the apparent distances to the buds, the light of their big-throated engines, and the estimated absorption of the intervening dust and gas. Then with a low hush, she pointed out, “They’re late. See? They won’t reach the ship until it’s escaped the Satin Sack, and by then, from what I can tell, the rest of the swarm will have fallen.”

  “The buds started from a greater distance,” the AI offered.

  “And they’re smaller than most,” Mere added.

  “They had to throw off more of their bodies as a reaction mass,” her companion reported with an easy conviction.

  “Or,” she said.

  “Madam?”

  “The Sack is a nursery,” she reminded her companion.

  The point was absorbed, and appreciated. “These could be younger buds,” the AI replied. “Smaller of mass, perhaps earlier in their development.”

  Mere’s big eyes narrowed, her mind racing.

  Finally, she allowed, “That’s part of the answer, I think.”

  “Help me, madam.”

  “Look here.” She pointed to a string of examples. “There is a gradient here. Total mass, acquired velocity—”

  “Agreed.”

  Despite endless care and the ingestion of every reserve of organic matter, Mere was an even tinier version of herself. She was physically exhausted, and she had been exhausted for so long she could imagine no other state. She was a trembling tired whiff of something barely alive. Her fingers were like spider legs. Her flesh had a transparency that let a cage of pale yellow ribs show beneath a breastless chest. Even her blood was miscolored and sluggish, pink turning to purple as a feeble heart pushed it through her tiny body. But her voice had a clarity, even a strength, and with her loudest voice in ages, she said, “Could there be slower, smaller buds somewhere behind this school? Stragglers behind those stragglers that we can see?”

  “It is possible,” her companion allowed.

  “Assume it,” she said. “What can you give me?”

  The navigator offered a new course and a little blue vector drawn across the sky.

  “No,” she said. “That uses up all our fuel. Since we don’t have a target, we’ll need to maneuver.”

  A new blue line barely managed to intersect with the imagined stragglers.

  “How soon do we have to burn?” Mere asked.

  “Now,” the AI replied. “Although yesterday would have been better—”

  “Align us and fire,” she commanded.

  “We will be obvious,” he warned. “With so many eyes close to us—”

  “Do we have a choice?”

  None, apparently. “But we need to make a crush-web for you, madam. In your physical state, the gee forces will—”

  “Align us and fire,” she repeated, the voice cracking. Moments later, the engine began fighting their momentum, flinging Mere against the wall, yellowed bones splintering and the big eyes collapsing as her present velocity was bent into another, even more enormous velocity—a blaze of radiation spewing out into the blackness, a tiny cylinder of near nothingness made warmer, and perhaps warmer than anytime since the Creation.

  MERE WAS FINALLY noticed. Unless she had been seen earlier, of course, but judged not to be a worthwhile threat. She woke from her latest crippling to find three separate machines tracking her. Two were distant, and, judging by the output of their engines, they would never catch her, while the third machine was more distant but traveling on a more useful line. Her course change was finished for the moment, her velocity bent and boosted just enough; the engine had failed several times, but never totally and never at the worst possible moment.

  “Not in this existence, at least,” the AI began to chant.

  The approaching vessel was minimally organic. Mere studied a jellyfish-like body that had collapsed as its hydrogen burned. There was a good high-yield fusion engine but minimal hyperfiber, and judging by her observations and old data, she recognized a general sort of scout craft—the same species that had discovered O’Layle drifting between the stars.

  Obeying elaborate instructions, the jellyfish avoided moving too close. From twenty thousand kilometers, it could see enough to send thorough reports across the sky. What it saw was the last incarnation of the Osmium: Mere had carefully pulled her hyperfiber armor into a sphere, lending strength in all directions. Only eyes and the exhausted engine remained on the exterior, plus a tiny surprise that she had managed to piece together during the last long week.

  Lasers played across the Osmium’s surface.

  Using one of the local languages, and with a weak jury-rigged transmitter, Mere announced, “I am a Tilan scholar.”

  Hopefully the language was familiar. But the lasers brightened, moving from play to abuse, carefully testing the armor’s resolve.

  “I am the last of my kind,” she reported. Then she sent off the image of her long-dead husband, adding, “I have come seeking you. I know what you know. I know this.”

  A string of dense equations jumped across the tiny gulf.

  “This is the truth. Is it not, my colleague?”

  The lasers diminished. Then another burst of light was sent off in the direction of the nearest polypond buds—one of the undersized babies that had already passed through this stretch of space—like a finger poking its superior in the rear end, begging for help with its next little move.

  The reply wouldn’t arrive for a full day.

  With that wealth of time, Mere studied the machine as thoroughly as possible, occasionally telling it more stories about the lost Tila and the meanings of All.

  “I love you,” she lied.

  “We have the same truth,” she lied.

  Then when she was ready, at least an hour before any reply could arrive from the buds, she used her jury-rigged surprise. Separate from her ship was a sliver of her remaining fuel. The anti-iron was no larger than a fingertip, but after it was released from its magnetic jar, with a slight momentum, it had the density and color of ordinary iron. Traveling in the wake of the jellyfish-shaped ship, it touched nothing of substance, then it touched the ship’s hull, striking within a few meters of where she had aimed, the soundless blast carving out its heart.

  FIVE DAYS LATER, Mere managed to acquire a useful target.

  It was a tiny body, as these things went. Barely three kilometers across and composed of water and organics, metals and a whiff of hyperfiber, the polypond bud was the smallest she had ever seen, and it was burning off much of the rest of its body in a desperate attempt to help what mattered.

  Nothing mattered but the Great Ship.

  With the last bits of fuel, Mere matched velocities with her target. Her momentum was too much, and the impact would kill her again. But her little ship would retain its shape and integrity, and with a bit of luck, she might even recover one last time.

  “In this existence, at least,” someone muttered.

  Did she say that, or did the AI?

  Then with a final laugh, someone asked, “Why? Does it matter?”

  Twenty-six

  Armed and armored, the skimmer sat on a magnetized rail, temporarily at rest in the middle of a barren and gray and perfectly smooth stretch of the hull. Inside its tiny cabin, three passengers watched the farthest shields brighten and swirl, EM curtains grabbing hold of charged ions, hydrogen and hydroxyls and carbon monoxides and phenols dragged bodily toward filters and collection bunkers that were already choked with
gaseous treasures. But the shields kept finding the strength and integrity, surging to meet each onslaught; wild purple flashes and blistering UV bolts made the five eyes blink and tear up. Then in another instant, ten thousand columns of laser light punched upward through the shields, each bolt calibrated to boil away an ocean, exposing an enemy’s organic heart. Lasers were followed with tritium bombs and experimental toxins. Explosives and poisons were followed by a second wave of lasers, and the next ten thousand polypond buds were cooked and splattered into hot clouds of vapor, all dead but still plunging, inert and mindless but still bearing down on the fierce ship.

  Oddly, it was Osmium who finally admitted, “This is lovely, this mess.”

  Conrad agreed grudgingly. With his giant eye pressed against his faceplate, the Remora said, “Gorgeous.”

  Pamir shook his head, checking instruments and a series of nexuses. Various simulations had predicted the same failure point, shields and weapons finally saturated by the deluge. That point had been reached thirty-three minutes ago, yet every system seemed to absorb the withering abuse without complaint. Engineers were liars, he reminded himself. They always, always, built better than they ever admitted to outsiders.

  In another ten minutes, Conrad wondered aloud, “What if our defenses manage to hold?”

  The deluge would continue, yes. But it would remain sterile, the buds’ life boiled out of each of them. Water would collect on the hull, dirtied with roasted proteins and the molten slag left by dead machines and breached biovaults; but so long as the lasers could fire up out of the deepening soup, whether for another day or two, or for twenty—

  “No,” Osmium muttered.

  Within Pamir, a critical nexus began to shout at him.

  “South,” Osmium said, hearing the same warning. “A breach—”

  Above the horizon came a string of rapid silent flashes, a secondary bank of lasers and railguns punishing a swarm of watery bodies. But there were too many falling in too small of a volume, and the next flash marked the first of a hundred impacts on a point not far removed from the ship’s prow.