The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  The Great Ship filled the sky, and Mere barely recognized what she saw.

  “Watch,” the voice commanded.

  That was her only choice. Her head was suddenly locked in place, her helpless eyes unable to make tears. What she watched was an enormous sphere flecked with vivid colors and slippery bolts of energy. The hull lay hidden beneath a deep, stormy ocean. The only landmarks to survive were the rocket nozzles, but each wore a fresh appendage that had grown out of the water. None of the engines were firing. The ship was drifting, helpless and ensnared. And as she thought about the consequences of that helplessness, a sudden flash of light filled the central nozzle, leaving in its wake a thin vertical trail of ionized matter standing in the rarefied gases that had pooled inside the great nozzle.

  Mere’s new heart hammered against her new ribs.

  The polypond released her, and she stood, only her tiny feet still gripped by the world’s skin.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “You can’t hit the target,” she assured herself.

  Then with a genuine curiosity, she had to ask, “What do you call it? What you think is at the center of the ship—?”

  “The All.”

  “Inside Marrow?”

  “The All,” the voice repeated.

  She mouthed the word, “All,” and nodded grimly. Then in a tone of simple confession, she admitted, “I don’t know the mathematics, the philosophy. The seventh theory isn’t often taught in my realm, and almost never believed.”

  Silence.

  “The universe is unfinished. You claim.”

  “Do you regard the Creation as being finished?” The voice responded with a tone both reasonable and amused. “Have the stars finished aging? Has every species evolved to perfection? Will another trillion years bring no change to everything that you see and can imagine?”

  Mere was positioned behind and to one side of the Great Ship. She could see past its wet limb, out into the depths of the Inkwell. With a finger, she reached at what looked like a simple blue dot, and the dot grew larger, magnified and highlighted until she could see too much: an ensemble of powerful machinery and living limbs steering a sphere of hyperfiber, and inside that sphere, highly charged and held in suspension, was something very tiny and exceptionally powerful. She knew it. Another black hole was being aimed, a careful hand lobbing it at a very tiny target.

  “The universe is changing, changing,” she allowed. “Everything evolves in every way, yes.”

  “But what you see is only shadow,” the polypond assured. “Shadow and vague possibility, and with each moment, the useful energies of the universe diminish. Stars age. Entropy rises. Matter compresses into pockets of nothingness, while the galaxies ride the dark tides, receding from one another at a rate that only quickens with the next moment, and the next.”

  As Mere watched, the shepherding machines began to fold themselves up into knots and dive into the sphere, lending their mass to the final weapon. With a tight little voice, she said, “If the All is riding inside my ship … if it is anywhere, and real … how big is the All?”

  “It has no definable size.”

  “But how large is your actual target?” She pressed a finger and thumb together, adding, “You want to rip it out of its containment. Its prison. So just how large is this nut that you want to crack?”

  “Quite small, yes.”

  “Like a nut?” She held an imaginary walnut in her hand. “Bigger? Smaller? Or do you even know?”

  Silence.

  “O’Layle knew nothing about it. Just rumors thrown over some half-truths. The specifics, if there were any … only the people who lived on Marrow were privy to what was inside …”

  Living pieces of polypond were now crawling inside the hyperfiber sphere, presumably falling all the way to the black hole, living water and dying flesh accelerating to the brink of lightspeed before vanishing with a quick flash of X-rays that left nothing to see.

  Mere pulled her view back to the Great Ship.

  “Waywards,” she muttered.

  “Yes?” the polypond replied.

  “O’Layle wasn’t the only soul that you rescued. Was he? Of course he wasn’t. Thousands threw themselves off the ship. Who else did you find? A little taxi jammed full of odd gray people, maybe?”

  She nodded, answering her own question.

  “In the center of Marrow, under the hot iron and nickel, is a machine. A prison cell, maybe. Something ancient, whatever it is. I saw the official files, years later. And Washen told me what she knew. The Waywards would weave hyperfiber around gold and lead ballast, and inside refrigerated cabins, they sank down. Down to the prison, down the containment vessel, whatever we agree to call it … down where the All is safely and forever entombed.”

  “There were twenty-three Waywards,” the voice allowed, “one of whom happened to have the rank and good fortune to see the All for herself.”

  Mere nodded; breathing hard.

  “But the Great Ship is built to survive,” she offered. “It’s designed to cross vast reaches, enduring whatever natural hazards it finds. Stellar-mass black holes are rare between the galaxies. But the tiny ones, like you’re using … the odds of one of them impacting on a target measuring just a few kilometers across …” She shook her head. “No, that’s too inevitable. The Builders wouldn’t have allowed such a porous little prison to be built.”

  She said, “The All has no size.”

  Again, with a surging confidence, she told both of them, “You’re trying to hit nothing with bombs tinier than my fingertip. It won’t work. You can’t succeed. In one shadow realm out of a billion … maybe … but that kind of cataclysm has to happen every day, in some shadow realm …”

  Then she laughed sadly, remarking, “But we’re still here, aren’t we?”

  The hyperfiber sphere was accelerating, plunging toward the ship with a fierce urgency. The first flash erupted on the leading face of the ship, which was unexpected. Mere shouldn’t have been able to see the impact up near the invisible bow. Yet there it was, a fountain of radiant gases; and an instant later, even before her racing heart could fill with blood and beat again, that knob of twisted and highly charged nothingness burst out of the ship’s trailing face. Not from inside the centermost nozzle, this time. Not even from somewhere within the forest of other towering nozzles. The black hole missed the core by nearly twenty thousand kilometers, delivering a horrible glancing blow that surely killed thousands before it emerged into space again, leaving in its wake a fierce little pinprick of heat that was already beginning to cool.

  “A weak shot,” Mere almost said.

  But she stopped herself. With a tight quiet voice, she said, “That was intentional. Wasn’t it? A nudge to push your target into a slightly better position.”

  Silence.

  But there was something smug and proud in the silence. With a low whisper, she said, “Show me. Out ahead.”

  The view changed instantly, radically. What she saw was a feed from a sister bud or a machine traveling on a different trajectory. From beside the Great Ship, she could see in every direction, and with an improving deftness, she identified and studied a series of little blue marks set along the ship’s course.

  Each mark was the same as the others—tiny black holes contained within neat spherical jackets of hyperfiber.

  Beyond was what was interesting. Out on the fringe of what was visible—but probably no more than a week or two in the future—waited something else entirely. Mere enlarged what looked like a faint red smear, and after a moment or an hour, she managed to breathe again. But she refused to make any comment. Masking her pain to the best of her ability, the tiny woman forced herself to look in the opposite direction, gazing back into the Coal Sack with these wonderful borrowed eyes.

  “You are going to die,” she said.

  “I am not alive,” the polypond responded. “I am shadow and nothingness, and I have never been.”

  “In every existence, the captains w
ill defeat you,” she promised. Never in her wisp of a life had she sounded more human, a boastful, brazen, and preposterous voice saying, “They’ll find a thousand ways to make you fail. To subvert and deny what you want. To make you look silly and stupid, and miserable. And afterward, you will die.”

  Silence.

  “All these millions of years, you’ve kept this nebula intact. Suns pass near it and through it, but you move the gases and dusts just so. Genius and giant muscles have kept your ocean whole.” She paused, enlarging key portions of the dense black Coal Sack. “But that’s all shit now,” she growled. “Look. Already, the exhaust of so many engines—your engines, mostly—is pushing the dust, making it fall into high-density zones that are tugging at the neighboring dust and gas, and in another few thousand years—not long at all—this home of yours, this strange great body, is going to start collapsing into a hundred new suns. And you will be dead.”

  Again, the creature said, “But I am only shadow.”

  “A cowardly, stupid shadow,” she said.

  The skin beneath her rippled and grew still, its stickiness gone. And a moment later, with a flinch of a foot, Mere caused herself to lift free. The bud’s engine had stopped firing. They were close enough to the target. The Great Ship’s mass would pull her the rest of the way home.

  “Don’t lose your hold on me,” she whispered.

  A purplish tendril grew out of the water, its tip reaching for her, then hesitating.

  “Hold me close,” she advised. “And when you reach the surface, I think you should try to protect me.”

  “For what gain? Will you help me?”

  “Gladly.”

  “Then tell me,” said the voice. The tendril flattened and turned into a simple mirror, showing Mere herself.

  “Tell you what?”

  “How will these great captains fight?”

  “I do not know,” she confessed.

  “What are your ship’s secret weaknesses? Offer that much.”

  “Nothing I know is going to be timely or important.” Gazing at her own reflection, she shrugged her shoulders. “Sorry.”.

  Silence.

  “I don’t think you understand,” she warned.

  Then with a cold voice, Mere explained again, “You are going to die. The captains will fight you until you are defeated. Behind us, your nebula will collapse into suns and new worlds. Your neighboring species feel no love for you, and some of them will hunt down your surviving pieces. Or worse, your pieces will fly apart and becoming separate entities, each with its own name and tiny soul.”

  “How can you help me?” the voice asked.

  Mere laughed.

  For a very long time, she made a show of her laugh and a human brashness, then with a wide sharp smile, she declared, “Isn’t it obvious? You stupid, silly creature … don’t you see what I am to you … ?”

  Thirty-seven

  While the stories found their way to Washen—the accelerating estimates of damage and death; the first reports from repair teams; firsthand accounts from a random hundred survivors; plus the black hole’s mass and velocity and its precise course—she began to touch herself. First with one elegant index finger and then its mate, she stabbed at her own sides, the strong nails pressing at the mirrored uniform and the yielding flesh beneath. She wanted to suffer an ordinary, endurable pain. The ship was in misery, but all she could feel was a deep cold numbness set on top of the most trivial emotions. She was sad, of course. Grieving and still disbelieving, and in a striking fashion, she felt embarrassed. How could such a thing have happened? The worst moment in the ship’s long life, and who was it who was standing on the makeshift bridge?

  Embarrassment made her grimace, for a moment. She let her hands press harder, as if trying to bore a hole through her own belly. Then thousands of years of pure habit took hold. Washen straightened her shoulders, and, pulling back her stabbing fingers, she reached for her head, taking the time and finding the perfect poise to adjust the tiny mirrored cap that lay on top.

  With a command, she silenced the majority of her nexuses.

  With a smooth, almost casual gesture, she captured the Master’s eye. “When you are ready,” she told the ancient woman. “Explain and reassure, please. And be as honest as you can make yourself.”

  The Master appeared stern and furious. The gold of her skin glistened with perspiration, and the light in her eyes looked ready to burn. The makeshift bridge was a sketchy affair—a giant chamber full of control stations—but the majority of the stations were unused for the moment. To a casual eye, it almost appeared as if just these two women were trying to guide the ship by themselves.

  “I remember my duty,” the Master Captain purred.

  The implication was: Do you remember yours, Washen?

  “Aasleen?”

  Distance and a tangle of distractions delayed the voice.

  “Yes, madam. My teams are moving,” the chief engineer replied with a smooth deep rush of words. “The Khalla District gets first emphasis, once the Beta tank is secured.”

  The black hole was as massive as a thousand-kilometer ball of iron, and it was smaller than a fat pea, and it had effortlessly bulldozed its way through countless neighborhoods, sucking in matter and scorching what it could not grasp. Plus, it had punctured twin holes in one of the ship’s main fuel tanks. An ocean of frigid liquid hydrogen was jetting out from the wounded hyperfiber, the holes too large to heal quickly without help.

  Washen gave no reply.

  And then Aasleen realized, “But that’s not what you want from me, is it?”

  Unseen, the First Chair nodded.

  “Port Endeavor?”

  “This last blow was a nudge, probably.” Washen spoke with a firm low voice, dark eyes wandering up and down the long aisles. “The polypond wants to adjust our course, if I’m guessing right.”

  “Reasonable,” the distant voice agreed.

  “How close are you to bringing it online?”

  “Twelve hours, three minutes.”

  “If we abandon the port now—?”

  “I’ve got too many bodies in the middle of too much work. That and a forty percent drop in yield, if we go now.”

  Washen nodded.

  “Madam?”

  Aasleen had been both colleague and good friend for ages. To hear her say, “Madam,” with a tone such as that, with subservience and a skeptical air, caused Washen to pay strict attention now.

  “Yes? What is it?”

  “Madam,” her chief engineer said again. Then with a tight little laugh, she offered, “Engineers know … on very rare occasions, a problem sometimes requires a little more heart than cleverness. More words than a guiding touch. If you know what I mean, madam.”

  WITH A SECURITY detail in her shadow, Washen left the bridge.

  A waiting cap-car carried her and the soldiers upward, racing in a bone-bending rush through a vertical highway left empty, by decree and by fear. Long avenues and little cities were tucked into side chambers, each looking similarly stripped of life. All the living bodies on board the ship amounted to a very tiny fleck of matter, and they were widely dispersed now, hunkering down inside apartments and useless bunkers and elaborate hives, everyone trying to remain very close to invisible.

  At Port Gwenth, a second team of black-suited soldiers met Washen. In their midst stood Pamir, and with just a glance, he said everything.

  Things were a damned mess, he said, and with luck this mess would soon become infinitely worse.

  Washen asked about their invited guests.

  In crisp phrases, Pamir gave his assessments. He said, “Terrified,” and then, “Intrigued.” Then with a decidedly pleased grin, he described another guest as being, “Nervously expectant.”

  It was a brief walk to the first chamber. “Terrined” stood near the doorway, and as soldiers and the two captains strode inside, he made a show of smiling. Then a quavering voice declared, “This is wonderful—”

  “Really?” Pa
mir snapped.

  Washen walked past O’Layle. He was forced to run to catch up with her, remarking in near panic, “I felt something. A rumbling nearby.”

  “It wasn’t that close,” she countered.

  “No?”

  “Everyone’s pulled out?” she asked Pamir.

  “I was the last to leave,” he replied.

  “Begin,” she ordered.

  They were still fifty strides from the diamond window. But Pamir gave a nod, using his own authority and a simple coded message.

  Washen thought she now felt a distant rumbling.

  But no, it was just another black hole. A little one, this time. It had struck within centimeters of the bow, and, carrying its own terrific momentum, it had managed to cut through the ship in less than a tenth of a second.

  Damage reports offered themselves.

  She ignored them. Before anyone else, she reached the large window, and with both hands pressed against the chilled surface, she looked upward into a great blackness.

  “Did I help?” O’Layle asked. “Was any of it helpful?”

  She couldn’t see anything. And she shouldn’t see anything, either. It was too soon and too far, the assorted simulations predicting that nothing would be visible for another minute or two.

  “Was what helpful?” she asked.

  “My memories.”

  “Which memories are those?”

  The Second Chair cleared his throat. “I let him visit with one of his old friends. Perri, of all people. Perri had a few questions to ask.”

  “About memories?” asked Washen, puzzled now.

  “Long-ago stuff,” Pamir reported.

  Sooner than expected, there was a flash of light and a hint of motion.Washen refused to look at the scene from any other vantage point. This was where she was standing, and with her own weary eyes, she stared up a vertical cylinder that never before had felt the caress of strong light.

  “Is it important?” she wondered aloud.

  Neither man responded.

  Washen glanced back at them. What was going on?

  O’Layle said to Pamir, “I remembered what I could. Which was more than I would have guessed. Honestly, I want to be useful here. Any way I can be—”