The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  In an instant, the engineer beside her gave the same answer that her father had delivered many centuries ago. The ancient Sag A aliens had received the miracle stuff from one of the galaxy’s oldest species, now long extinct …

  Aasleen hesitated.

  “But that isn’t what you want,” she guessed.

  “I don’t know what I want,” Washen confessed.

  The soldiers from both platoons began to board the armored cap-car. Behind it, tucked into a small crevice, was a second, much smaller and infinitely less impressive car that had slipped in here by another route.

  The harum-scarum officer entered the smaller vehicle. Then with a crisp command delivered by one finger, she beckoned the Submasters to join her.

  “Whoever built the Great Ship was first,” Aasleen conceded.

  Probably so.

  “Is that what you were talking about? When you were telling me about the models that you played with when you were a girl?”

  “No,” Washen admitted.

  The women cut away each other’s pressure suits and discarded the pieces.

  “No,” Washen said again. Then as she sat—as the cap-car began to slip away into the cold murk—she said with a grim voice, “I was going to tell you how proud I was. All those times that the awful little black holes had cut through my ship … the most terrible monstrous force in the universe … and my wonderful ship had weathered the damage with barely a trace of damage.”

  THE SECURITY OFFICER was right in one awful way. The next infinity was more massive by a factor of five, and worse, it had been given its own momentum, bearing down on its target at almost ten percent lightspeed. There was no effective warning, even for the highest officers. Five days after the first impact, Washen was sitting in one of the auxiliary bridges, speaking to holos of other Submasters and picked captains and representatives from an assortment of species and crew. She was saying nothing at that moment, but she happened to glance up the length of the table, the corner of an eye picking up the flash as one of her colleagues was turned into plasma and light.

  In reflex, a hundred other holo projections turned toward the flash.

  Countless alarms were blaring, and as many captains and automated systems were begging for information.

  In less than half a second, the black hole had cut through the ship. Endowed with its own momentum, it did a better job of resisting the hyperfiber’s tug. And worse, the black hole missed the bow by less than twenty kilometers, tracing out a perfectly perpendicular trajectory. It was close to a dead-on shot, and the damage was spectacular. The Janusian Submaster was dead. Reactors were pierced, and the plunging black hole had traveled through Fall-Away—a vertical chamber hundreds of kilometers tall and filled with some of the most expensive homes on the ship. This time there was genuine carnage. Every two seconds, new casualty lists were generated, while AIs predicted a final count approaching fifty thousand. All dead. Then after the Fall-Away, the black hole had cut through the ship’s core, and then the trailing hemisphere, missing twelve cities by nothing before it finally burst back into empty space through the ship’s central rocket, increasing the damage to the mangled and still-powerless motor.

  But inside that wealth of data and cold conjecture was a notable gap.

  Marrow.

  Washen rose to her feet.

  The image of Pamir stood beside her. With a knowing look, he told her to stay where she was. With a hand composed of compliant photons, he touched her real hand, as if he could hold her in this place.

  She sat again, her energies spent.

  Pamir took control of the meeting. On Washen’s authority, he gave orders and set priorities, then turning toward Aasleen, he asked, “When are we ready?”

  The chief engineer flinched.

  “Which one?”

  “Endeavor,” he said, naming the ship’s port.

  “Eight days,” she offered. “And an hour.”

  The fef Submaster bent his body as far as possible, the raised face declaring, “We have extra hands.”

  “Hands aren’t the trouble,” Aasleen explained. “Unless it’s too many hands, which is where I am now.”

  Crash projects were always ugly and inspired, and nothing the engineers could do now would complete the impossible work any sooner. Pamir nodded and moved on. More orders became necessary. In the chaos at Fall-Away, looters were at work, and he ordered Osmium to pull troops out of the reserves. “Whatever you need to bring order and not kill anyone. Understand?”

  “Agreed,” said a mouth.

  Soon everyone in attendance had better places to be, and some new purpose, and that was when Washen took over again. Barely three minutes had passed, but the span felt enormous and eventful. Again, the Master was speaking to the entire ship. Again, Washen peered down the length of the table, long hands pressed with authority against polished olivine, and with a voice that sounded more flat than unperturbed, she told her audience, “Go and do your work. Nothing else.” And then a premonition took her, and with a menace that was easy to generate, she said, “This isn’t going to be a long war. From here on, everything the polypond has, she’s going to be pushing at us now.”

  THEN THEY WERE back inside Washen’s apartment.

  Except neither dared come close to a ripe and well-known target like this. What if the polypond sent a spray of tiny black holes at this one place, trying to murder the captains who had always lived in this district? No, they weren’t inside Washen’s apartment, and they certainly weren’t naked in her bedroom. They were at opposite ends of the ship, and the image of hands being held was nothing but a bit of pretend. Yet there was no other place in the ship where a special immersion eye sent its encoded feed. Only in her bedroom, under the olivine sky, could Washen gaze down on Marrow.

  In the blackness, iron glowed red and fires burned. But the world was quieter than she had ever seen it, and it was darker, and that despite the passage of the black hole—a nearly perfect shot that had missed the center of its core by less than a hundred kilometers.

  “Which is a very big miss,” Pamir offered.

  She said nothing.

  “The prisoner in the middle,” he continued. “Tiny as tiny can be, the estimates keep claiming. What are the odds that the polypond could actually hit that kind of target?”

  Washen refused to speak.

  “She might have a thousand small-mass black holes,” he continued. “Give or take, of course. And if she keeps firing them into us, each time more accurately than the last … at this current rate, with a sample size of two blasts …”

  “One in a million,” she offered.

  Which were bad enough odds to make them feel better. But Pamir was too honest to leave it there. “All she has to do is cut the thing out of its containment,” he remarked. “Whatever the prisoner is. A Bleak. Or a Builder. Or the Creation held up.” He let go of her hand, adding, “That’s what the prisoner tried to do, after all. Before, when it wanted to ram us into that fat black hole.”

  Washen meant to respond.

  Her words were already formed and waiting. Her mouth opened far enough to let out the first tentative sound. Then came an impact that she never felt. A black hole with the smallest mass so far struck within forty-six meters of the ship’s true bow—a mathematical point on the hyperfiber hull that was celebrated with a simple diamond plaque now submerged under a hundred kilometers of living ocean.

  It was a tiny piece of infinity, but the polypond had accelerated it to one-third the speed of light.

  The trajectory was nearly perfect.

  As she watched—as her mute mouth hung open and her eyes brightened—Washen saw a flash of light emerge from the hyperfiber directly above Marrow, traversing the sleepy buttresses and cutting through the heart of the iron planet, then emerging on the far side with the same eerie blue afterglow that hung in what was an otherwise nearly perfect vacuum.

  If the containment at the core had been disrupted …

  If the ancient safeguard
s were failing …

  If the monster was being unleashed now … now could she be here, lying with Pamir on her big undimpled bed?

  “We may not have eight days,” she allowed, thinking of Endeavor.

  “We might not have eight minutes,” Pamir grunted. Then with a big laugh, he said, “We might have died already. The universe has been created, finally, and we’re just shadows making tiny, unimportant sounds … !”

  Thirty- five

  The six great ports had been named after the children of an otherwise forgotten explorer. Alpha was where humans first slipped inside the ship, and it had always been the jewel, preferred by captains and requested by the most important passengers. Beta was a lesser sister, honorable and always reliable, and in her own fashion lovely. Caprice was where the muscular freighters brought in or removed cargo. Denali had earned a reputation for the illicit, although her main function was to handle objects and wild souls deemed a little dangerous. Endeavor was a quiet clean facility used to house surplus taxis and streakships. While the final port, the obscure and mostly unvisited Gwenth, had been left virtually untouched by a hundred thousand years of human occupation. Its central cylinder was rarely lit and never pressurized, and except for basic repairs made to adjacent hatches and berths, the facility looked as if no one had come to the place since the Builders had packed up their tools and walked away.

  O’Layle stepped into a narrow and very deep chamber, and with a nervous little breath, smelled nothing.

  Nothing.

  It occurred to him that no human being, nor any other species for that matter, had stood where he was standing now. A glow-globe followed him, illuminating the entire room with a soft peach light. The floor was a sheet of hyperfiber older than the galaxy, perfectly clean but dimmed to gray by the pressures of simple time. The flanking walls and the low ceiling were much the same. It took a hundred strides to walk the length of the room, as he was supposed to do; then came a thick pane of diamond braced with hyperfiber strands. The glow-globe went black. O’Layle touched the diamond with a single finger, and only then did he realize that his hand was shaking. Both hands were trembling, and a sturdy pressure was building against his chest. What was he supposed to do? Stand alone in the darkness, waiting for the Builders to return? For a moment, despair got the best of him. He dipped his head, butting it against the cold pane, and his arms crossed on his chest, squeezing hard, forcing his tight little lungs to exhale and breathe again.

  “Look.”

  The voice was directly behind him.

  “Ahead,” said the voice. “And down.”

  When could he stop listening to others? When would his soul again be his own? Not yet, plainly. And with eyes that had adapted to the perfect blackness, O’Layle stared down into a chamber vast enough to hold a hundred fully fueled starships.

  There, and there, flecks of light moved a little ways, then vanished.

  More lights emerged, and one of them rose off the round expanse of floor, making no sound he could hear and no vibration that was transmitted through the thick pane. What he was seeing was beautiful—a sparkling mass of light and uncoiling energy—and as O’Layle watched the object rise, he realized it was intricate and vast, and in the end, utterly ordinary.

  A simple tech-wagon sat in the middle of the lights, loaded with fefs and Remoras and scaling its way up an invisible thread.

  “What’s happening—?” he began to ask.

  “Not yet,” the voice told him.

  O’Layle knew that voice. A name and face swam out of his memories, and then much else with it. Odd. That was the sensation. Prickly odd. A thousand tiny memories began to bubble out of nowhere, and in the middle of it, he said, “Perri,” with a soft, almost despairing voice.

  “Quiet,” Perri told him.

  He couldn’t obey. “I don’t feel right,” he explained. “Something’s wrong with my head, my mind—”

  “Stand still,” a second voice growled.

  O’Layle didn’t recognize that male voice, but it never spoke again. Instead, Perri moved closer to him, if not exactly close, and through acoustic trickery, he whispered into the frightened man’s ear. “You’re safe,” he promised. “You’re fine. I brought an old friend of mine.”

  In the near blackness, O’Layle saw nothing. “I want to help,” he said again. “I told Washen—”

  “We know.”

  “What occurred to me,” O’Layle muttered. “I was thinking, and suddenly it occurred to me … and if it’s useful, and I can help …”

  “But that’s an entirely different matter,” Perri claimed.

  O’Layle shut his eyes, and now the blackness was his own.

  “My friend brought some machinery with him—very rare, very elaborate tools—that help with memories. Did you know, O’Layle? The universe has infinite layers, and you exist in some infinite fraction of them. Did you know that?”

  “Yes,” he blurted.

  “And you understand that?”

  Rarely, and never with much feeling. He shook his head, admitting, “It’s never made much sense to me.”

  “Nor to me,” Perri replied.

  O’Layle turned again, looking out through the diamond. No one told him to remain motionless, and the odd prickling in his head seemingly had fallen away. The lights below were softer now, and scarcer. As he watched, two and then two more of the glows folded in on themselves and vanished.

  “How long have we known each other?”

  Perri asked the question, and then he gave a clear and definitive answer. He named the precise year when they first met, and with a sharp tone, he asked, “Is that right? Or am I mistaken?”

  O’Layle started to say. “You’re right.”

  Then, he hesitated.

  “No.”

  “I’m wrong?” Perri snapped.

  “It was eighty years earlier,” O’Layle confessed. “I had a different name, a different face. You and your old wife—”

  “Quee Lee.”

  “You were attending a party. In the Wealth District, wasn’t it? Sure, it was. I haven’t thought about that party in ages. If ever.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “Your old wife.”

  Silence.

  “She wandered off to find something unfancy to eat. That’s what she said to me. ‘Unfancy fare.’ And I turned to you and asked, ‘So how did you find …”’

  His voice trailed away.

  “How did I find what?” Perri purred with a soft, almost seductive voice. “Tell me what you remember. Exactly.”

  “‘How did you find such a sweet place to park your prick?’”

  In the darkness, O’Layle braced himself. The remembered moment came back to him, and with it arrived the memory of a pretty-faced man cracking him in the mouth with a crystal goblet. Suddenly he felt a blow delivered tens of thousands of years ago, and with one hand rubbing his unsore jaw, he asked, “How does this trick work?”

  “In certain ways, the mind acts across the quantum universe.” Perri seemed to have moved closer than before. His voice was both softer and louder, and with only the barest trace of anger, he explained, “Memories can be enhanced. If the one person that you are can be linked with an infinite number of very similar O’Layles, and if all of you can work together to resurrect forgotten things—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re not sorry,” Perri told him. “You’re just scared for the moment.”

  And maybe for the rest of my life, O’Layle thought.

  “Yes,” Perri said. “That’s when we met.”

  “I wish I was sorry.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  O’Layle took a deep, deep breath. But he could still smell nothing but emptiness and himself.

  “Do you know why you’ve come here?” Perri inquired.

  “No. Why?”

  “I have no idea. Washen asked you here.” His interrogator laughed for a long moment. “She told me where to find you. I asked about yoù beca
use I want to pose a few questions to you, while I still had the chance.”

  O’Layle bristled. “What questions?”

  Silence.

  There were no lights below him now. But above, moving swiftly and silently, were sparkles and glimmers bright enough to show O’Layle the outline of one of his trembling hands.

  “About the long-ago past,” Perri offered.

  “All right.”

  “And aliens.”

  “What aliens?”

  Silence.

  Again, O’Layle’s mind felt the odd cold touch of a trillion fingers. With a quavering voice, he asked, “Which species?”

  “I want to know about the aliens that you never think of.”

  Now the lights above were quietly blinking out of existence, and suddenly every cold finger dove inside O’Layle’s helpless mind.

  Thirty-six

  The skin of the water was sticky and thick, warm and pleasantly scented—not unlike the aroma of a spent petal from a blooming lilac. Mere lay upon it, on her back, hands folded across her narrow belly and her bare ankles crossed; and to the best of her limited capacity, she listened to the water, feeling for the pulse and tides of the world beneath her.

  During the last long while, the pulse had quickened.

  Great organs were beginning to move, shifting positions according to some fresh need. The water was gradually warming, and sometimes a jet of fluid caused its skin to ripple slightly. This tiny living dollop—a nameless drop of the great polypond—was making itself ready for something. And Mere was a minuscule twist of life clinging to the creature, stripped of clothes and machinery, helpless in every meaningful way.

  “I will show you now.”

  Her response was to do nothing. She lay motionless, her breathing slow and even, the newborn heart beating lazily while she kept her eyes closed tightly enough that only the slightest hint of light crept into them.

  “Mere,” said the vaguely feminine voice.

  She would do nothing easily or instantly.

  “You will wish to see this,” the polypond decided. Then with an impatient gesture, it evaporated the lids of her eyes.