The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  Again, silence.

  “Your blessing was the ship that you were riding inside. I think. I think.” She nodded with a growing certainty. “It was intact, for the most part. It possessed a fully equipped recycling system—a biosphere in ajar, in essence—and if its engines were dead, at least you didn’t have much momentum to fight. You were drifting. Do you remember? Not well, I think. It was millions of years ago, after all. And you were a tiny, lonely, and possibly insane mind. Who knows how much of what you remember are only delusions?”

  “I remember everything.”

  “Delusions,” she repeated. “Hundreds and thousands of years of daydreams and madness. And then without warning, you found what?”

  “Many beginnings,” it argued.

  “No. Just one. Probably a lump of tar and ice, which was more than you needed.” She paused, breathing softly while holding her ribs. “You were a single organism equipped with a talented array of machines, and with the machines’ help, you survived. You prospered. Or at least, you managed to replicate your onboard reactors, and you re-formed your little world in some fashion. But without any other species with which to work … with nothing but your own clinically clean body, its narrow genetics and finite number of cells … you gradually, very gradually, managed to invent something that approached a genuine biosphere …”

  The jets beneath her gave a kick, the avian streaking faster across the tumbling waves.

  “Gaians are rare,” Mere admitted. “But they always emerge from living worlds. Inevitably, they are compilations of many species. Animals and plants, microbes and fungi. Every Gaian I know of, and those very few that I have been lucky enough to meet … they share traits. They are self-centered. Self-obsessed. But they aren’t gods, nor do they pretend to be. Because gods require worship, and worship is not possible for them. They are so utterly self-possessed that the praise and fear of .another entity, small or giant, simply cannot interest them. And the praise of their own pieces … well, that’s like me expecting my own thumbs to deify me …”

  She laughed.

  “You had a little world,” she said. “You were alone, and you were insane—impoverished in every sense, and probably for tens of thousands of years—but written in your own genetics was the compelling, irresistible need to be with others. You were a social organism. I’m guessing. And following the whispers of your genes, you eventually hit upon the idea of cloning yourself, introducing little tweaks and odd mutations to make each one of you serve some increasingly narrow niche.

  “Instead of a Gaian twisting a million species to serve one great function, you eaused a single organism slowly to grow complicated.

  “Alone, you began to fill your sky.

  “With sufficient tools, this could happen. Not quickly and never neatly. I imagine there were some early disasters and ugly little wars between disagreeing groups of clones. But eventually, you developed tricks and the essential hard-wiring to keep all of your increasingly far-flung pieces joined in spirit. In soul.”

  An enormous wave rose up before them, then with a great slow motion, it receded, revealing a round region of ocean that was different—a zone marked by agitated white foam spread across dark, almost black water.

  The avian tilted its head and rose higher.

  “In the end,” Mere claimed, “there is not much of a distinction. Between what you are and what a Gaian would be. But I’m not talking about ends. Not now, at least. Beginnings. That’s what I keep coming back to.”

  The avian tucked in its wings, accelerating upward.

  “You believe in a universe that isn’t quite real. That isn’t finished, and that has no lasting consequence. Which is a horrible thing to believe, I think. Most of the souls I know are rather like me. Not you. Which makes me wonder: Why are you so considerably different?

  “It’s not enough, blaming your impoverished beginnings. If I was in your place … if I had been born in a starless black, and if I had stumbled on this odd awful theory before any other … well, maybe I would have believed it. But later, when I learned about other species and the stars … I’d like to think that eventually I would have let doubts sink in, and found hope … I would have let the past become something real, full of consequences, and the future would look like a realm where I could live and live happily …”

  The white foam had dissolved beneath Mere. For kilometers on every side, the water was calm and dark, like ink in a great bowl.

  She was flying above one of the ship’s main ports. Had the alien breached the hull? Or were the captains responsible?

  To the best of her abilities, Mere didn’t betray her fears.

  Instead, she calmly said, “No.”

  Shaking her head, she said, “In another fashion, we couldn’t be more different.”

  The avian had attained the high reaches of the atmosphere. Beyond the demon-doors, the air was thin and cold, while beneath lay a great deep realm as black as the sky.

  “You weren’t born alone,” she said, with a plain, certain voice.

  Then with a grim, sorry nod of the head, she added, “I think there was somebody else. Or many others. I think your oldest memory … the single image that drives to this moment … is that someone very much like you said to you, ‘You are banished. You are not fit to live with us. We banish you for all time.’

  “Those others sent you wandering in the nebula, alone.

  “You were a child still, or nearly so. And you still remember enough that the memory aches, and it sickens you, and of course you’ll cling to any theory or lame belief that promises you that every awful thing in your past has no consequence.” Mere shook her head, telling the sky, then the water, “If you are sufficiently clever and perfectly ruthless, you have the chance to obliterate everything that has hurt you. You will erase a past that you won’t let yourself believe in, but that you cannot, despite all your cleverness and muscular beliefs, ever get free of … !”

  Forty

  “I do not know you well, sister.

  “The utter pure and perfect truth is that what I know is what the great captains have learned about you. In painstaking detail, they have studied your genetics and the repeating structures inside your cells and organs, your tiny bodies and great. They have teased apart what has been borrowed from aliens, separating it from what seems to be yours. And what they have found—what they have shown to me and explained in some detail—are similarities and stark parallels between your vastness and my little self. We are not the same species, no. Too much time and too many circumstances have been crossed. Your brilliant reinvention of yourself has erased much of what you were. But like me, you possess a cobalt-based blood and a five-carbon sugar metabolism. Like me, your mind is wet and elegant, born inside young tissues set between our largest limbs. We are profoundly conservative souls. In our details and even with the broadest sweeps, we hold true to our natures. Out of all the possible bodies to weave, you have a reflexive need to produce bodies very much like mine. Modified, yes, but true to their origins, and even now, they dance in the lung-wet atmosphere above your great body … like the grin worn by the happy human apes, you cannot help but show your truest, oldest self to others …

  “You know me not at all, sister.

  “In your presence, I am a baby. Twenty thousand years ago, as this ship counts time, I was born as a finned larva swimming in an ocean world. Ooloo, we call our home. Ooloo is our name. We are a modest species, free of age but not so durable as most, happily scarce and free of ambition. But we are not innocents, and we are not afraid of the company of others. For as long as our history flies, we have produced heroes who gladly abandoned their home skies, riding with the visiting star-travelers to see what else there is to be seen, sending home songs and images and elaborate scents harvested from a thousand worlds, experiences the rest of us can still enjoy today, and embrace.

  “This ship we ride upon and within … what do you truly know of it … ?

  “I was a baby by every measure when we firs
t heard the Great Ship singing from between the stars. It still lay in the distance, but closing. Using old machines and timeless tricks, we built a tiny starship, and in a race that cares more of form than speed, a thousand babies sought the honor of the journey. I finished second in the competition, which was worse than last. But as happens sometimes, luck took a role. The winner was killed in an accident that was not an accident, and I survived an equally unlikely disaster. Then it was learned that the Ooloo who finished third had conspired against both of us. Guilty of murder, he was sentenced to the ritual doom given to any despicable soul: His wings were chopped free, and his still-living body was saddled with weights, and while I was riding off on my great adventure, he was dropped into the ocean, plunging into the black depths where his wingless form would live out its life alone, slithering about in the deep black mud, subsisting on detritus and his own endless misery.

  “I know you, my sister.

  “When I arrived in this place, my first friend was a great captain. Washen welcomed me and explained her essential laws to me, and in payment for my passage, she took title to a dry little world that orbits our sun. Perhaps to be made into a new home someday. And with many thanks, she accepted the full, unabridged history of the Ooloo, including every account from that ancient time—that very brief period—while my species actively sought to plant their own colony worlds across the universe. About that time, I knew little. I know much more now. Washen visited me recently, asking about a grand mission to another watery world. A colony was to be established. And by all accounts, it was a successful colony. But we eventually lost interest in far-flung possessions, and our citizens returned home. It was during that long unhappy voyage that a baby was conceived and born. While the starship skimmed along the wispy edges of a young nebula, the baby died suddenly. His slightly older, possibly jealous sister was blamed. The records are thorough. Even today, the trial survives as a digital record, untouched by the millions of years. Washen explained how teams of AI scholars, working at the brink of lightspeed, had noticed similarities between that family’s genetics and your own. Certain coding sequences remain true today, woven into thousands of your oldest genes, including an odd and useless mutation in your cobalt blood, and what is certain is that the death of the youngster was either an accident or a malicious murder, and that the homebound citizens could accept nothing that smacked of leniency. They ordered the girl’s wings cut away—tiny wings barely half-grown—and in a ceremony honorable and cruel, they lashed the criminal into a suit of metal and threw her into the depths of the black nebula.

  “Her survival was quite unlikely. But plainly, you did survive. Which cannot be explained, not by any record brought here by me. No. No, I can only assume that a parent, or perhaps both of your parents, stole supplies from the ship’s stores. A fusion battery, I imagine, plus enough recycling equipment to keep you alive for thousands of years. And that is why you could survive at all. The illegal and immoral charity of grieving parents saved a little girl—saved you—and then you were dropped into the blackness and made blind. Across the thousands of years, you forgot your past life, and I can only imagine how awful your existence must have been.

  “You should know me, my sister.

  “I have always tried to be the honorable Ooloo—a worthy emissary representing my tiny species—and in that vein, I must tell you this:

  “If I could, I would strip away your wings a second time.

  “Seeing what you are doing now, and knowing the awful thing that you are attempting, I would if I could happily chop off every last one of your wings and toss the miserable pieces of you not into any blackness, but into a blaze of fire. Not into a cold endless gloom, but into the kind of brilliance that burns, blinding you in that more perfect and eternal way …!”

  Forty-one

  The avian struck the black face of the water, its body splitting apart, organs tumbling loose, and all of its pieces dissolving in the next wild instant.

  Mere was grabbed and nearly crushed. Fractured ribs were twisted and shattered again, cutting into spongy lungs and the soft wet muscle. But she refused to scream. Holding her mouth closed against the fantastic pressures, she felt herself suffocating. But her new flesh was too weak to endure more than a few moments without oxygen, and she wouldn’t let herself believe that even one breath waited outside her increasingly blue lips.

  A monstrous force yanked her down and down.

  Then despite all of her effort and focus, a single bubble emerged from her mouth, laced with carbon dioxide and other toxins, rising off her face and shattering into a thousand tiny bubbles that were lost instantly among the swirling waters.

  Moments later, a second bubble escaped.

  Through squinting eyes, she saw the precious air shoot out of her mouth, abandoning her with the most shameless panic. She saw her own arms dangling upward, their flesh pressed tight against the sketch work of bones, the weight of so much water and blood and meat and mind threatening to crush her.

  A third bubble started to emerge.

  And then, feeling the fire in her chest and too much exhaustion, Mere let the last of the air spring free, carrying with it a sad, long, sorrowful wail.

  The air exploded upward, and stopped.

  She was staring at a puddle of gas, silvery and buoyant and very beautiful. What had she ever seen that was so lovely? Nothing. As she dipped into unconsciousness, she was marveling at the beauty of a little woman’s final breath as it danced lightly just out of reach.

  Her eyes closed.

  The bubble expanded and reached down, covering her outstretched hands and the long frail arms, elbows emerging and then her hairless head and the quiet face and a small but always sturdy body with the tiny breasts and the long fat nipples meant for a much larger woman. That body slumped and fell. Obeying some final command, it refused to breathe. But a fingerlike object pushed through the wall of the chamber, poking her; and then it delivered a second poke, along with a burst of blue electricity.

  Mere coughed.

  She threw up water and blue, oxygen-starved blood.

  Before she was completely conscious—even before she could remember where she was and why she was—a familiar voice said, “Listen.”

  Again, she threw up.

  “Do you hear me?”

  A look of understanding swept across her face. First, Tilan-style, with the mouth pulled wide and the tongue displayed. And she gave a human nod, weary but relieved.

  “Listen,” the voice said again.

  “I am—”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?” She couldn’t hear what was being said. She had to swallow, purging the water from deep inside her ears, and even then there was a numbing buzz that swept away every other sound.

  “I am tiny,” said the voice.

  The creature was screaming at her, desperate to be heard.

  “Tell them!”

  “You’re tiny,” Mere whispered.

  “And vast.”

  She nodded, understanding exactly how those two statements could be equally true.

  “What is tiny might believe,” the voice declared. “But what is vast will not listen to you or to them, and it will not accept what it hears.”

  “Eventually—”

  “No,” the polypond interrupted. “There is no time for things that are eventual.”

  Mere dragged her bony knees to her chest, shivering. Outside the newly made chamber, water was roaring past at a spectacular speed, or she was diving deeper, and while she stared through the transparent wall, she glimpsed something that looked like a tall window behind which stood an assortment of people.

  “It cannot be stopped,” the voice warned.

  “You can’t end it?”

  “Nothing can,” the polypond moaned.

  Then with a mixture of deep regret and utter pride, she explained, “I foresaw everything that was possible. I knew you might trick me, or even that you might, in some small fashion, convince me I was wrong. And so
what I did—what is vast about me, and all that is small—what I am has worked hard to fashion one good weapon that would survive every doubt.

  “Tell them that the weapon cannot be stopped, and if you please, explain that a small piece of me feels remorse.

  “Please, will you tell them, please … ?”

  Forty-two

  A single finger lifted into the gray light, and with an expression that seemed both curious and exhausted, Aasleen stared at the finger’s broad tip, saying, “No,” with a voice that was dry and undeniably old. Then a moment later she said, “Not yet,” with a palpable disappointment. Then after another brief pause, with a grim certainty, she said, “No.”

  She looked awful. Washen’s chief engineer hadn’t slept in weeks, or washed, and judging by the sharpened cheeks and the narrowness of the neck, Aasleen must have given up eating, too. Just standing was a burden for the woman. Standing before the First Chair, she rocked gently, shifting her fading weight from one exhausted leg to the other and back again. One last time, she said, “Not yet,” then suddenly, almost unexpectedly, the weary face brightened. Infinite burdens lifted, at least a little, and a voice younger by a hundred thousand years quietly declared, “Now. We’re ready.”

  Washen nodded.

  To the Master Captain’s image, she asked, “Do you agree, madam?”

  The golden face appeared a little better rested, and in certain ways, almost confident. Was it her true face, or was the Master enhancing her appearance? Washen had time to pose the question; the woman was standing on the opposite side of the ship, far enough removed to delay any response by a full luxurious second.

  “Agreed,” the Master finally replied.

  The ceremony was finished. An order already crafted and agreed upon was left in the First Chair’s hands. The final decision was hers, and what surprised her was the ease with which she said, “Go.”

  Aasleen was a projection, but physically closer. “Port Endeavor—?”