The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  What remained was made of tougher stuff.

  After the water boiled free, a limb was revealed—hundreds of kilometers long, but flexible, composed of diamond bones and fullerene cords and superconducting tendrils that reached out with a motion never practiced before. Later, watching replays from every vantage, Washen would notice a lack of coordination—a slapping motion followed by three failed attempts to grab hold of the nozzle standing beside it. Three times, it came close to its own collapse. But the polypond made adjustments, improved her aim, and on the fourth attempt she managed not only to cling to the nozzle’s exterior, but also the lip above, a cap of hyperfiber protecting what might have been a living finger that was quickly and purposefully shoving itself down into the rising fire.

  Surging EM currents disrupted the magnetic containment.

  Finger nukes scarred the vents and mirrors.

  But what killed the engine, eventually and for good, was a slurry of hyperfiber shards suspended with light—a smothering, nearly invincible flood that told a thousand AI systems that there was trouble and an overload was inevitable and if the captains didn’t give the Shut-Down order, they would gladly do it themselves.

  Aasleen gave the order, grudgingly.

  The Master stopped shouting at the monster and her own miserable luck. Then with a sideways glance at Washen, she said, “It can, and it knows it. So it’s going after another engine, as soon as possible.”

  “I would,” Washen admitted.

  Speaking only to herself. Since the Master had already vanished, leaving her standing alone on the abandoned bridge.

  IN BED, SITTING in a darkness that suddenly turned to a fierce white light, Washen and Pamir watched the Blue World end its long, long chase. The impact came on the ship’s trailing face, between Port Denali and the outer ring of nozzles—all but one of those engines left dead and useless for now. With its bulk and rigid hull, the ship accomplished what all of the captains’ weapons couldn’t achieve. It boiled the entire world. A portion of the kinetic energy pushed downward, creating a thunder that everyone felt passing through the ship. Then the energy was reflected off the far ends of the hull, returning again, gathering around the blast zone, causing the steam and rushing waters to give a little bounce.

  By then, Washen was almost blind.

  One after another, the sensors and immersion eyes perched on the dying rockets were being disabled. But the polypond, by chance or design, allowed the captains and crew, and the passengers, to watch this last great drop of living, thinking moisture join with the rest of itself. Millions of years of life, and the polypond had never gathered so much of itself in one place. Could that novelty bring a weakness? An opportunity, maybe? She started to wonder, started to ask experts … and then her voice trailed away as the last of the overhead eyes were cut out and killed.

  In the Blue World’s core, hyperfiber packets and shielded reactors would survive, and in the next days and weeks, they would be incorporated into the polypond’s growing bulk. But the ship’s hull remained intact. The rockets were dead, but Aasleen was working on the problem in a thousand directions. And there were always options unused, and a few tricks waiting to be discovered.

  She said that much, in a quiet, angry, and rather lost voice.

  Pamir preferred to say nothing.

  Eventually, they attempted sex, and they kept at it until they were certain that neither one of them was genuinely interested. Then they tried sleep, and for a long while, that showed very little promise as well.

  This would be a long, awful war.

  Washen told herself that hard fact, again and again.

  For comfort, she told her ceiling to show her a new view. Something reliable and very dark, and in its own way, absolutely beautiful.

  Pamir didn’t complain.

  Still awake, he lay next to Washen, hands folded behind his head, his expression studious and a little angry but fundamentally calm. Or was it simple exhaustion? Together they watched rivers of red iron flowing into new basins, and in the dark places between they saw hints of light, and life, and reminders of the possibilities still waiting.

  “Contingency plans,” he muttered. “We just need to keep making them.”

  He was speaking to her, or himself.

  Then Washen fell asleep. For a full fifteen minutes, she was relaxed enough to dream, and it seemed to be a pleasant dream. And then the alarm shook her awake again. Eyes watering, she found herself gazing up at the ceiling. But Marrow had vanished, replaced by an expansive and thorough chart showing the subtle tides rippling through all of the Great Ship’s seas.

  A mass was bearing down, from somewhere directly ahead of them.

  “Pamir?” she muttered.

  He said, “Here,” and offered a big hand, helping her sit.

  Then before she could ask, he reported, “It’s not a big one, apparently. But it’s close.” Then with a grim look, he added, “About the mass of Ceres, about.”

  An instant later, the black hole struck them.

  A bit of perfect nothingness—a sizeless example of nothing made from gravity and a spin and an electromagnetic charge—dove into the hull and through, and at nearly one-third the speed of light, it cut very easily through the meat of the ship.

  Thirty-three

  There had been just this one voyage in her very long life. Gazing at the sum of her existence, Mere saw her little soul as a point, mathematical and spare, that wandered in every dimension, covering a genuinely tiny portion of Creation, absorbing a little of everything that it brushed up against. She saw herself as fortunate, and as blessed—which were somewhat different qualities. Alone, she was happiest. But she had been alone for too long now. “Too long,” she whispered. Then with a voice that didn’t quite sound convinced, she said, “This will work.” She examined the apparatus one last time before crawling inside, and with a Tilan’s voice, she said, “What will happen is everything.” Then with a human voice, soft and sober, she added, “Hopefully, I’ll get lucky.”

  After months of fighting against her own terrific momentum, making hard burns and delicate maneuvers, Mere had done what was possible. She had acquired a suitable target, and if nothing important changed, there was better than a ninety-seven percent likelihood of a remarkably close rendezvous. But the target was a tiny thing in its own right, barely ten kilometers in diameter and still shriveling as it accelerated toward the Great Ship. A collision was a virtual impossibility. And even if the implausible happened, Mere would simply die for the final time. Her trajectory was too different; the kinetic energies would not only boil her blood, but the mind would scorch, splinter, and explode into a foolish plasma. And the bud itself would probably boil, inside and out, ripped to the core by a fleck of matter roaring into its watery face.

  What Mere needed was a final enormous course correction. And after taking a thorough inventory, counting every gram of mass and every sliver of hyperfiber, she had found just one barely workable solution.

  During these last months, between the bums and her little dashes of sleep, she had outfitted the Osmium with the simplest, slenderest tail imaginable. A hair would have seemed thick beside the structure. Proteins stripped from her own hair as well as her skin and deep tissues had been woven into a single, almost invisible thread—a thread doped with superconductive materials and strengthened with whispers of hyperfiber.

  A slight but relentless current could be induced within the new tail.

  A small body jacketed in iron could ride that tail, and if every adjustment were made in a timely fashion, the body would come off the invisible tip with a new, rather more useful trajectory.

  When finished, the Osmium’s tail measured more than twenty thousand kilometers in length, with a mass slightly greater than a dozen human hearts.

  Such a thin road could accept only a minimal cargo. When Mere finished her calculations for the final time, she saw what was possible and what wasn’t, and when the time came, she very nearly failed to do what was possible.
Why not continue on her way, riding inside the battered remains of her ship? In some faraway future, she would emerge from the Inkwell, and a sentient and talented race would come upon her, and against very long odds, she would again find herself saved.

  Surrendering her little body was almost too much.

  It was a wasted, anemic human body, decidedly unappealing and insubstantial and sad. But as the autodoc began cutting away at the neck, Mere nearly said, “Stop.”

  Even when her throat was severed, she could have pleaded, “No,” by speaking through a nexus. “I want to think this through again.”

  Why didn’t she?

  Because she was too scared to think anything through again. That was the simple, ugly truth. When the critical moment arrived, this little human found herself terrified by many things, but worst of all was the possibility that when she thought again—looking at the numbers and geometries and odds—she wouldn’t know what to do. Indecision would grab her and pull her under, and then time and the relentless trajectories would have made their choice for her.

  “This is my choice,” she reminded herself.

  Then she went blind, her eyes were boiled away with a soft, unfelt laser, and her mouth was a vapor of bone shards and dim echoes bouncing inside the tiny, almost poisonous cabin.

  Her skull was evaporated.

  Her bioceramic brain lay exposed.

  But even her small old mind was too massive, too cumbersome. What the autodoc took away next required several days and a fine touch that was only possible in deep space and nearly perfect zero gee. With a laser chisel and a nanoscopic precision, the machine removed the bulk of what was extra and what was standard. Half of Mere’s soul was surrendered to the oblivion, and what was left—hopefully the most learned, wisest half—was placed into a thin iron envelope and eased out of the Osmium, riding that fine long tail as it twisted and curled, slowing her still-terrific momentum until she fell into the path of the oncoming alien.

  A FEW DAYS later, the polypond sensed the heat and saw the flash of something piercing her sky-skin. At first, she assumed that the object had been nothing but the usual detritus. But then one of her stomachs began to digest the free iron, and what lay inside was too intricate and lovely to be natural.

  By a thousand means, she attempted to reconstitute the creature that must have belonged to this odd, battered mind.

  Then she found instructions etched into the mind itself.

  In the polypond language, as it happened.

  Tiny symbols written with single atoms told the creature where to begin and how to proceed, and after some lengthy but relatively straightforward work, a newly reconstituted creature lay on the surface of the living sea.

  “Who are you?” her savior inquired.

  The woman kicked and lay back, and after a long pause and some very deep breaths, she said, “You. That’s who. I am you.”

  Thirty-four

  Riding inside a tissue-thin jacket of hyperfiber, guided by electrostatic charges and a practiced hand, the black hole had been nudged into position and fixed in space. Stripped of every eye and its minimal power to maneuver, the Great Ship had plunged into the waiting hazard at one-third lightspeed. The entire event barely filled an entire second. The jacket collapsed like a balloon, and freed of containment, the black hole burrowed its way through the hull, entering at a point some eight thousand kilometers east of the bow. Hyperfiber parted around the tiny, asteroid-mass body. A fingerwide channel was born, fiercely hot and sloppy wet. Then the weapon passed through rock and lesser grades of hyperfiber, and the channel grew larger. But the worst damage came inside the open places, the apartments and long avenues and four little seas that were trapped in its path. A fleck of infinite matter dove through water and living tissue, and everyone nearby died from the heat and the wallop of hard radiations. Bodies and pieces of bodies from ten thousand passengers and crew were stolen away. Two first-line fuel pumps were taken off-line, plus half a dozen subsidiary reactors. The worst damage came to a deep sea inside the ship’s trailing hemisphere: A blue bolt of Cherenkov light erupted on the sea’s floor, and the only city built by a species of slow chemoautotrophs was obliterated. The Worms-of-heaven lived beside deep vents, and if the Master hadn’t ordered them to disperse, they would have gone extinct. But nearly half had remained at home—sometimes illegally—and in a fraction of a microsecond, they were torn apart by the tide and the light and a fierce heat that left their bodies stripped of their shells, a soulless gray-white fluid drifting at the edges of what was now a red-hot lake of molten basalt and superheated seawater.

  “No closer, madam.”

  In a battle zone, security troops held first authority.

  “Madam,” the harum-scarum said once more. Then with a tight, impatient voice, she asked, “What if this is what our enemy wants? Create a lead hole, then kill the curious and the compassionate with an even larger infinity?”

  “Infinity” was a literal translation of the harum-scarum’s name for a “black hole.”

  Washen intended to respond. But Aasleen spoke first, reminding the cautious officer, “That would be a very difficult shot, at best.”

  The infinity’s trajectory had been anything but perfect. Even with gigatons of mass and a terrific velocity, it had changed course while slicing through the ship. Hyperfiber was to blame. To thank. Even as the hull melted away in the assault, the ancient bonds had fought to retain their hold. Chaotic interactions between the severed bonds gave birth to intense EM pulses. The infinity had acquired an intense charge of its own, and as it continued slicing through the hull, it twisted in response to the opposing and entirely unpredictable charges that burst into life around it.

  A half-degree deflection, in the end.

  And critical.

  But neither captain discussed the good news. This was a tour of the damage, critical for a multitude of reasons, most of which were wrapped around simple decency. After fifty thousand years on board the ship, a species of passenger had suffered an enormous disaster, and standing here was the right thing to do.

  Again, the security officer said, “No closer, madam.”

  Washen stopped and knelt.

  The chief engineer knelt next to her, watching the cooling stone, then the lightless water above. Then after a respectful silence, they stood again and began walking across the seafloor, surrounded by a platoon of soldiers.

  “When I was a girl.”

  Aasleen blinked. “What was that?”

  “I was a girl,” Washen said again. In her diamond glove was a rounded lump of warm basalt. “Around my house, everywhere I looked … were these intricate models of the ship …”

  “Life with engineers,” her friend said with an appreciative nod.

  “Not every model was theirs.” Washen offered the stone to her friend. “But the best ones were. And if they were digital, and if I enlarged little portions—key portions—I’d find the ancient scars. The same kinds of scar that this will leave, if we don’t repair it everywhere.”

  Even in the emptiest depths of space, Creation had produced trillions of tiny black holes. On occasion, the ship had collided with those natural hazards. But the hull had always repaired itself. Hyperfiber had that talent, that passion. Severed bonds continued to fight for purchase, and across the width of a single finger, the bonds always found one another again. The shiny gray material spent a fraction of its latent energies, and before it lost its wetness, it flowed inward, linking and rebuilding until it was merely ten thousand times stronger than diamond.

  Rock showed more damage. But even then, the pressure of kilometers of stone pressing on all sides would soon close up the wounds. And of course atmospheres and various liquids would shrug the damage aside soon enough. Even the Worms-of-heaven would eventually recover, in numbers and vigor. The only genuine relic of this impact might be the black hole itself, drifting and highly charged, its new trajectory eventually carrying it out of the Inkwell.

  “I had this idea,” Washen
confessed. “When I was girl, I thought that if we could count the scars, we could better guess the age of the Great Ship.”

  “That was your idea?” her friend teased.

  “I thought of it,” she said. “But I didn’t know hundreds of others had already imagined it and tried it.”

  The concept was sound, but there were too many problems. The hyperfiber hid its oldest wounds best, and no one was sure of the true density of microholes in the distant universe. Looking back along the ship’s course helped only to a point. Like the estimates arrived at by twenty other means, the Great Ship was definitely older than the Earth and presumably younger than the Creation. “At least that’s what my father told me,” said Washen. “But he did it sweetly, if I remember. Then and a hundred other times, he had to break it to me that my exceptionally clever idea wasn’t really my own.”

  The water around them had again grown dark and cold. Besides a thin carpet of black sediment, there was no trace of life, and where they didn’t pass, nothing moved. At this moment, the Master Captain was speaking to the ship, openly describing the damage while accenting all that had been spared. What was the mood of the passengers? The crew? Washen consciously ignored a multitude of tools, walking steadily toward an armored cap-car guarded by a second platoon of troops.

  “Are they yours?” Aasleen inquired.

  “Is who mine?”

  “The Worms-of-heaven. Did you welcome them on board the ship?”

  Washen began to answer, then hesitated. Finally, with a quiet tone, she admitted, “No. But I had to look hard to be sure.”

  “We’re two very old women,” Aasleen said with amusement. “Too many memories tucked into too small of a space.”

  Washen nodded, casting her mind back to the beginning again.

  Finally, she asked, “Who invented hyperfiber?”