The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

“It isn’t any stronger because of that,” Washen pointed out.

  “I’m not talking about strength,” her son replied, a hint of testiness in the voice. “I mean reach. And if the Great Ship was built when the universe was newly born … as you proposed, Mother, standing in the temple on Marrow … well, perhaps these hidden dimensions weren’t quite as well hidden back then. At the beginning of Creation, I mean. Which again makes for some interesting ideas.”

  Washen knew enough to shiver but not enough to offer so much as a tiny suggestion. All she could do was stare at the yellowy glow of a bristle mold, and with a firm and pragmatic voice—a captain’s voice—she remarked, “Conjecture only gets us so far, darling. And if you don’t realize it, let me tell you: There may not be many more days before the ship isn’t ours.”

  Three faces grew even more sober, sad and quiet.

  It was Quee Lee who finally asked, “Why now, madam? Why are you here when so much else needs you?”

  Washen lifted the tablet, piercing several deep encryptions before legible words finally began to form. “Just as the attack began,” she reported, “we received a short, repeating message. In an extinct language called Tilan, by the way. Which helps us authenticate the author. Who is Mere.”

  The name was enough. No one breathed, not so much as a fingertip moved.

  “It’s a brief message, and we managed to hear it repeated fifty-seven times. I don’t think she was certain that we’d hear her at all, and so …”For a moment, Washen lost her way. Then she smiled abruptly, surprising everyone, including herself. “I’m tired,” she confessed. Then after a deep sigh, she began to read the translation from the tablet. “‘once pond, only. No buds, only countless fingers.’”

  Quee Lee glanced at her own soft hands. “Oh, goodness.”

  “The Inkwell,” Locke muttered. “Is it a single Gaian?”

  “Which makes sense,” Washen reported. “A lot of our evidence, some of which was sent home by Mere, points in that direction.”

  “The slow ships moving neural matter from place to place,” Perri recalled. “They could be physical transfers of a shared mind, like electrical pulses between the cells in a brain.” He paused. “If the nebula is a single Gaian and it wants to function as so many little warm worlds, then it has to keep its bodies spread thin. Because if the pieces gather together—”

  “Stars would form,” Quee Lee answered.

  “Killing it,” her husband concluded.

  Locke read his mother’s face. “But there is more. Am I right?”

  Washen lowered the tablet.

  “What else did Mere tell us, Mother?”

  Stepping forward, she showed him the full text. With an appreciative expression, he studied the third, final line.

  “What?” Quee Lee asked.

  “It’s a tiny piece of a much larger equation,” Washen confessed. “By implication, I think Mere is telling us that this is what the polypond, the Inkwell, the one mind … this is what it believes.”

  “Which equation?” asked Perri.

  “It’s one of the Theories of All,” his new friend reported. Then Locke glanced up, staring at no one in particular, explaining, “This is one of those mathematical wonderlands that neatly explain everything just as well as their six good friends manage to explain it.”

  “I thought there were just six Theories of All,” Quee Lee muttered.

  “There’s always been a seventh,” Locke assured.

  “It gets mentioned, on occasion,” said Washen. A deep memory surfaced for a moment, the face of her own mother appearing before her. “Engineers and most scientists don’t have any use for the monster, so they don’t bother mentioning it.”

  “What exactly does it say?” Quee Lee pushed.

  Everyone turned toward Locke.

  “You know these shadow realms we talk about?” he began. “These parallel worlds and such?” He set the tablet facedown on the moist yellow ground. “In some theories, the parallel worlds are real places. In others, to varying degrees, they’re only shadows, ghosts buried in the big equations, and we are what is genuine, what is real. Our reality carries the rest along like a tree trunk holding up countless branches.”

  He paused.

  Then with a genuine deep-felt scorn, Locke said, “The seventh theory is just as impossible to disprove as the others, and much less useful, too. Basically, everything in Creation is shadow, ghostly and unreal … while the future is infinitely vague, as is the past …”

  “Which means?” Quee Lee pressed.

  “There is no such thing as history, at least where it matters to you and me.” He shook his head, placing a bare foot on top of the glowing tablet. “Which means that there is no one true past. A trillion trillion pasts give birth to every shadowy moment that we call Now.”

  He paused, briefly.

  “And more important than that, the universe hasn’t actually been born yet. Strange as that seems, it follows inevitably and inarguably from the same equations. Creation is an event that has been suspended. Creation is something that still waits to begin. Think of a tiny ball that rolled down a pitched slope many billions of years ago, and suddenly the ball found itself caught … trapped … perched on a treacherously narrow lip.” He still had a Wayward’s foot, broad and comfortably callused and happily bare. Pushing his foot into the glowing earth, he confessed, “I don’t know these equations as well as I might. But from what I have heard and what little I’ve read, they claim that if you are one of the shadows, and if you happen to discover where the Creation was halted … where the little ball lies … and if you can give that stubborn ball a good firm kick in just the right direction …”

  With a toe, he kicked a tiny lump of iron.

  Quietly, almost inaudibly, he said, “Boom.”

  CONCEPTION

  I remember this …

  Myself. Alone. Me, simply and purely, and there was nothing else, and for no perceptible measure of time, there was only me. No compelling sense of a volume occupied or a vastness left empty. I was smaller than I am now. On the brink of nothingness, perhaps. Perhaps. But I remember nothing other than my own form, perfect and timeless, and in a deep and abiding fashion, I understood that everything that was had no choice but to be part of me. There was nothing else. What else could be real? I was wandering through a perfect seamless night, not a whisper of light defining the surrounding blackness. Even in my dreams, I knew nothing else. Nor could I imagine any temperature but the changeless cold, perched on the brink of absolute nothing. Nor could I appreciate my own terrific and relentless motion.

  I was born inside that blackness, I am sure.

  Born alone, without question.

  The two of us are rather similar. Are we not? Each of us holds great long memories of dark and cold, timelessness and changelessness. If we could speak—if you had a voice of your own, a voice that rose from your truest soul—then I think we would find much in common. Shared assumptions, and understandings, and a host of deep, eternal intuitions.

  Like me, you were born tiny.

  But unlike you, I grew. My darkness was not as empty as yours, and then the darkness was ended. What do I remember of it? My own stark terror, of course. And a searing pain. And perhaps worst of all, I recall the terrible suddenness of the change. One moment, all was blackness and forever. Then before the next moment could find me, I slammed onto the surface of an unseen, unfelt body. I struck a large lost comet, as it happened. The impact created a brilliant white-hot fire, and the fire spilled across a volume of space millions of times farther than I could ever reach. Thus, millions of times the distance that I could imagine. Not that I saw the spectacle, of course. My body and soul were left mangled and temporarily dead. But in another moment, or 10 billion moments, what remained of me managed to heal itself, reconstituting inside the watery depths of a still-molten world … and slowly, slowly, I learned to use my limbs and strength, swimming sluggishly about my enormous new realm.

  Still, everything was bl
ackness. And still, I was alone. An entity born in my circumstances—our circumstances—has no choice but to believe in a seamless, unending solitude. And any mind accustomed to such thoughts will not give up her solitude easily, and perhaps never completely.

  I had found an entire world, and I explored it thoroughly. I swam through the freezing sea, then cut and clawed my way to the surface, easing across the dusty black ice. In gradual and spectacular motions, I learned about the greater universe: The world’s sluggish pull taught me about gravity; eroded craters hinted at the depths of time; every new shape gave me experience in the common geometries; and the occasional impact of dusts and pebbles convinced me that there was even more to Creation than myself and this one vast worldscape.

  Like any life, I grew.

  From the dusts and ice, I found the makings of myself, and gradually, gradually, I consumed my world.

  In strength and in mind, I prospered.

  When it was time to envision the Creation—a seminal moment for any species, I would imagine—I focused my intellect on a set of premises and intuitions that few organisms would willingly consider, except in the most abstract fashion.

  Inside that perfect darkness, I saw an abbreviated Creation.

  Inside a realm of shadow, I drew an existence built upon vague possibilities, nothing real except for my own mighty self.

  Alone, my world-self drifted, and for a long while, that was enough. In the dense heart of the nebula, dust and snowballs would find their way to me, a natural accretion giving me more wealth to swallow—meat to ingest and transform however I wished. But then I decided to grow faster, and for another long while, I wove tendrils and elaborate nets, delicate and far-reaching, and strong enough to bring more treasures to my mouths. But ionizing the far dusts and then snaring them with EM rivers was more productive. And . after a little heavy feasting, what began as an anonymous lump of ice and tar was swollen a millionfold, creating a deep watery body with enough mass to yank down all that passed by

  I do not believe in a single history.

  There are countless paths to my story, each ending at this perfect and not-quite-real moment. But at some point in every past, I reached a critical juncture where I had to reverse the flow of the EM rivers, quenching the, flow from above. And at some other juncture, I asked myself—with the private and intense and thoroughly self-consumed voice—“What else can I accomplish?”

  I made my first tentative buds, and with caution and a host of sensible rules, I cast the buds out into the cold.

  A series of wet warm worlds became Me.

  With my new wealth, I began to play with biology and physics, occasionally stumbling into new principles and possibilities.

  The blackness was far from black, I realized. My vast new eyes betrayed flickers of light, particularly in the infrared and radio frequencies. Ever-larger eyes peered out into the nothingness, and gradually, the universe emerged. But to my way of thinking, it was a decidedly unimpressive universe. Unremarkable, forgettable. The false Creation was built upon vacuum—great endless reaches of true Nothing—with only a diluted webwork of warm matter and temporary plasmas strung here and there. With just a little watching, I could see every future. Stars aged and died, but new suns were slow to be born. Galaxies reddened and grew old, exhausting their finite dusts. And the dying emptiness was expanding, accelerating away from itself at a spectacular rate … a damning oblivion waiting for those who were born in the next little while …

  I saw nothing, then I blinded myself.

  For a very long while, I happily produced my totipotent buds and sent them to find comets that grew into new worlds that were Me.

  Within my realm fat with matter and latent energies, I prospered.

  Inside a frigid cloud, I became vast, no one noticing my hands at work, thoroughly remaking a great volume of space.

  A few suns were scattered inside my body—wanderers with a firm pull and a dangerous heat. Since they did not suit my needs, I let them pass; but their little worlds offered rare metals and good experience. I devised ways to gut those worlds, lifting out their useful hearts and dismantling what remained.

  One of the worlds had life and sentient minds that rode inside a tiny portion of the living matter. My solitude was finished, if only for a moment and only in a small fashion. I studied the little creatures. I learned more about them than they knew about themselves. And of course, nothing about them was special or beautiful, and they did not offer any knowledge about others who were close to my equal. The few bits of knowledge that were new to me, I took. And I took their world and their flesh and consumed each of their minds, and with their own genetics, I built bodies far more lovely than they had ever envisioned.

  Afterward, I devised machines that carried slivers of myself out of the nebula, stealing flesh and technologies from my neighbors, and always dressing myself as what I was: powerful and remote and forever undefined.

  All is shadow.

  The past and future are equally vague, and the Creation was aborted before it could begin, and whenever I listen to the chatter of the little species, none speak about such obvious truths.

  Plainly, others are fools.

  Inferior, and tiny, and contemptible.

  For aeons, through every possible past, I have maintained my perfection. My only regret was that I would live to see the end of this empty unlovely universe—the galaxies cooling and retreating into nothingness; the wasteful suns eating their own flesh until they were cold embers or light-sucking holes; and all of those little species eventually collapsing back to dust.

  If only the Creation had been without flaw, I thought.

  If its enormous potential could have been realized and the shadows were thrown aside for all time …

  And then, I found a speck talking in the dark.

  I found O’Layle.

  The creature sang praises for some great old ship, and I listened casually. And then he spoke about something tiny and awful that was carried inside the ship—something as old as the universe, perhaps—and I listened fervently.

  Suddenly, all made sense.

  The Creation.

  The Great Ship.

  And me.

  In the vastness of All, you found me. Conditions and happenstance and the actions of a multitude of foolish souls had brought you to me, and you cannot imagine how it felt.

  At the speed of light, news traveled through my grand self.

  “My purpose is clear,” I proclaimed with my millions of bodies. And without a shred of doubt or a millisecond of hesitation, I set to work.

  We are very much alike, you and me.

  But do not fight with me, sister.

  If you hear any whisper of what I am saying to you now, hear this:

  You are tiny and weak. I am grand and irresistible. Do not struggle, and together, let us finish the glorious Creation … !

  Tiwenty-eight

  “Think of my body, this little shell, as if it was as large as our dear home,” she began. “Imagine such a thing.”

  An array of visuals and sonic diagrams was broadcast along with a multitude of translated texts. Billions saw the Master Captain as she was: sitting inside her relatively modest quarters, her swollen body wearing a warrior’s uniform and a mirrored cap, her posture relaxed but alert while the great golden face showed every good and honorable emotion. She looked confident She looked defiant. Her tight mouth hinted at strengths waiting to be revealed, while the vivid dark eyes held a keen rage that had to frighten any opponent. And behind the eyes, a savage intelligence, vengeful and coiled tight, was ready to teach the bizarre and evil and utterly foolish alien that it had picked the worst kind of fight.

  “Imagine I am the Great Ship,” she sang, one hand rising toward her audience. Then the hand began to grow, smoothly and effortlessly, a range of sensory effects convincing her audience that the simple human appendage suddenly was thousands of kilometers long. Slowly, she pulled the stubby fingers into the vast golden palm, and she clo
sed the thumb over the newborn fist. A big-knuckled moon stood perched on the end of her arm, and hers was the sturdy sure voice of a god rumbling, “What has happened is this: very little. Almost nothing has changed. I have stepped into a steady rain, and for this moment, I happen to find myself wearing a thin layer of moisture. On my vastness, a dampness clings. Draped across my bones and flesh is a new cloth—an ugly costume placed here against my will—and when the time is right, I will do what I wish with this unwelcome gift.”

  Suddenly the giant woman was wearing only a thin mud-colored fabric, ugly according to a multitude of aesthetics and barely obscuring the mammoth breasts and broad thighs and a prominent golden rump. Every moment or two, a pattern tried to emerge inside the roiling water, but then the Master would flick a shoulder or shake one of her legs, disturbing and distorting whatever design had been struggling to emerge. Without question, she was in charge. The polypond was an inconsequential film desperately clinging to her spectacular self. To prove her dominion, the Master suddenly dropped a fist, landing it on her solid, bare belly—just above the navel, she struck—knuckles glowing white as the polypond beneath turned to steam and death.

  AFTER RELIGION, PROPAGANDA was the greatest art form.

  Who first said those wonderful, cynical words?

  The Master barely imagined the question, and instantly, in the midst of her speech, some tiny nexus began to list a thousand likely candidates, human and otherwise.

  She told it to be quiet, and thank you.

  Through a range of nexuses, she weighed the cumulative reactions of her far-flung audience. Countless measurements were decanted down into mountains of data that were channeled toward parts of her profoundly augmented mind, and she felt an assortment of stubborn doubts. The harum-scarum nation was impressed with her bluster, but unconvinced. So with an artful ease that no one else could have managed, she adapted her planned text. To the worst of the doubters, she admitted, “Of course this won’t be so easy or quick. Before it’s finished, I promise … some of us will have died, and for all time …”