by Neil Clarke
How must that have felt.
What did you do, Nash? The question was on the tip of her tongue. And really, she could make Nash answer.
In the end, though, she didn’t have to make him.
“You know how they got me?” he asked. “I came back in. I was trying to get in with one of the younger human Fathers. See if we could find some common ground. I guess I was spoiled by you; he pegged me pretty fast as a separatist, and tossed me to the Su, with prejudice. He never lodged a grievance over me, though. You know, you’re the only person who ever has?”
Petra’s stomach stilled like a dead thing. “I said that Ilen should have. It would have had more weight coming from her.”
“I was nothing, remember?” Nash snorted. “Wasn’t a Sudaeg any more, after I left allocation. Hurem Nash Carder. A grievance from a Maker had plenty of weight on its own.” He looked at her. “I told Amad that Ilen was learning how to make human Fathers and Makers in utero. Amad told someone else. That’s why they decided to take her. Can you imagine what that would do for human independence? We wouldn’t need the Su at all.”
“You made her a target,” Petra said.
Nash showed his palms. “If you hadn’t listed that grievance, they’d never have handed me over to you.”
Petra laughed, if that was what you wanted to call it. “How convenient for you.”
It was an unusual sight, to see Nash struggle with words. But there was a struggle between his throat and his jaw now, as though human articulators could not shape human words into their right sentiment. He gestured helplessness, and abasement again. “What can I do?”
Change the past, maybe, Petra thought. Convince the Su to take back the ship territories. Give them what they need to do that. Hurt all the rest of these friends of yours the way you hurt me.
“What makes you think I have an answer?”
Nash’s shoulders slumped, just slightly. “Maybe I just look up to you,” he said.
Then, literally, he did look up. Met her eyes, held her gaze.
“I’m going to keep trying,” he said.
As long as I own you, Petra thought. Made it hard to trust his good intentions, even when some small traitorous part of her was tempted to. “I’m going to go lie down,” Petra said, and turned away from him.
Petra made it back through her quarters to her sleeping cubby and collapsed into bed, staring up at the curving ceiling.
She could feel an active bank of lightning clouds moving in. Energy for the colony, noise and pain for her. Not too long and they’d be right over her, and she’d be lucky to keep stringing thoughts together. Not that her thoughts were proving so helpful to her now.
She raised her hand and caught the faint lines of energy that pervaded the colony, and she almost tweaked them, almost gestured a comm channel into being, but stopped herself. That was interesting. She hadn’t come this close to calling in a long time.
What do I do, Ilen?
Her fingers held there, on the edge of completing the gesture. Opening the comm line, seeing Ilen’s face projected in the dark.
There’d been a time when she could have just rolled over, pressed her face into the curve of Ilen’s neck at the shoulder, said wordlessly that which she didn’t have words for. And Ilen would wrap around her, human warmth and human softness, and make the noise in her head go away. Lightning or no lightning. It was a skill Petra had never developed in herself.
What do I do, Ilen? Storms, what do I do?
A pressure was creeping up between her shoulder blades; it mirrored, above her, the crashing power of an unstable atmosphere, of some cataclysmic ecological mistake. The kind of thing that made anything she or Nash or Ilen or Amad could do pale by comparison. They hadn’t managed to bring down an entire world.
Just felt like it, sometimes.
Her hand curled around the air. Even from here, with great effort, she could punch a spire of smart matter into the sky like she could cut it apart. With that cloud formation rolling in, the energy would be replenished as fast as she could deplete it. The Su would question it, but probably not excise her for it, and it would be just as pointless and futile as most of her other options.
Feel good, though, that energy coursing through her. Proof that she could make a mark, even if in the end it didn’t matter.
She moved her hand, changed her gesture. Contact addresses scrolled through her awareness: an array of human and Su connections she wouldn’t let herself reach out for. After three loops through she settled on the old address for Amad—a contact that she hadn’t erased, despite every reason to do so. The address had been dead at Ilen’s kidnapping and was probably still dead now, but the data pings, heading off into nowhere, occupied part of her awareness. With all the various storms, any distraction was welcome.
Anyway, calling out into nothingness fit her mood. She could sense the change in the data, the signals routing out, and watch them, waiting until they were dissolved in her awareness by the lightning strikes.
Then the nothingness answered.
The screen fitzed into existence in front of her, the pale white of ship lighting casting most of the picture as edges and impressions. What wasn’t faint and poorly defined, though, was the face of the man who’d answered the comm.
“The hell?” Petra said.
Amad looked just as confused as she was. “You’re the one who called me!”
“The hell are you still responding on this address?” Petra asked, scrambling up to sit and face the screen. And it might have been her imagination, but she thought Amad flushed.
“I—look, a colony data address is useful, okay? Why are you calling if you thought the address was dead?”
“Diagnostics,” Petra said.
Amad stared at her for a moment. “You, ”he said, “are a crap liar. ”
“We can’t all be good at it,” Petra growled.
Amad made a series of gestures that Petra couldn’t interpret. She shook her head, and squinted at the screen. Some kind of human gesture, she thought; there were physical nonverbal languages in human history, and ship people sometimes pulled those things out as counterculture. Whatever he was saying, Petra got the feeling it wasn’t complimentary.
“Right, so you found my little not-so-secret data address, “ Amad said, his voice still coming through flustered. Why the hell he felt flustered was an open question. If the emotion had anything to do with why he’d kept a data address he’d only set up at Petra’s insistence in the first place, Petra didn’t want to examine the situation too closely. “Should we both go into another room and pretend this was a wrong gesture that never happened?”
Petra’s head was pounding. It sounded like an appealing option. Except then Amad would get in contact with Nash again, try to smuggle him back out to the edge of the colony and get the collar off, and this would probably come up—in a what the hell is Petra playing at way or an is Petra investigating us way or a is something wrong with her way, and Petra’s mind flashed to Nash, kneeling on the floor, hand moving from his forehead to the ground.
What the hell were any of them supposed to do?
She let out a breath and collapsed back to the bed. Energy was itching at her fingertips, ready for the shaping. Do something, it seemed to say. “We need to talk,” she said.
Not every writer enjoys the act of writing. Robert Reed enjoys writing. The author of several hundred stories, Reed is perhaps best known for his Great Ship—a world-sized machine journeying across the galaxy. Marrow and The Memory of Sky are two novels set in that universe. His stand-alone novella, “A Billion Eves,” won the Hugo in 2007. Among the busy author’s recent efforts is a giant alternate history entitled The Trials of Quentin Maurus, available only through Amazon and Kindle. Robert lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with a small family of distractions.
PARABLES OF INFINITY
Robert Reed
There were better workers aboard the Great Ship. Virtuous entities with proven resumes reaching back across the ae
ons. But the timetable was inflexible, the circumstances brutal. Seventeen hours, six minutes, and two breaths. The job had to be completed within that impossible span, beginning now. Now. The client was among the weakest citizens of the galaxy, reasonably healthy one moment, and in the next, passing out of life. What wasn’t a home and wasn’t a shell had to be rebuilt from scratch. If the client perished, nobody was paid. But the respectable guilds would take too much time. The Avenue of Tools. That’s who the experienced contractor approached when trying to dodge the bureaucracies. Speaking through private channels, he could offer extraordinary pay for brutal, brief work. “But only for those who get here first, and I mean immediately.”
Then, one final enticement.
“And no background checks,” the contractor promised.
The Avenue looked more like a clogged artery than any traditional street, and the ‘Tools’ portion of the name was a stubborn relic of intentionally clumsy translations. Every resident was a devised organism that lived against the walls, stacked high on its neighbors and waiting for work. Many were AIs, yes. But there were also organics drawn by various means, most sporting rugged exoskeletons and interchangeable limbs. According to galactic law and the ruling captains, every ‘tool’ was emancipated. All were competent, purpose-capable individuals. But like stone hammers and old plasma drills, they shared one sorry feature: each had been discarded by a previous owner.
The Great Ship was a vast machine, and the Avenue wasn’t particularly close. But seven tools boarded slam-caps and made the journey. All were hired immediately, but finding more than enough hands, the contractor modified his earlier promise. Criminal histories were examined. One member of the team was subsequently released and arrested. The remaining six received wet-ware educations, and the new team plunged into the frantic work. Which has zero bearing on the story. With two breaths to spare, the project was finished and finished successfully. Competence never makes for an interesting tale. Tools appreciated that even more than humans did. But of course competence should always be welcomed with a glad heart, and that’s why the contractor was humming while he paid his crew.
“Never seen an odder job,” he mentioned.
The fresh funds were eagerly consumed by those ex-employees. Five offered agreeable, “Thank yous,” and then five of them rushed off. But the quiet tool preferred to linger.
She was female by choice or design, or maybe only by chance. Her visible biography reached back ten million years, which wasn’t particularly remarkable. Well-designed AIs could yank out their own cognitive centers, replacing the weakest for better and then shifting their identities into fresh neurons. But today’s background check showed several names riding the entity, and most interesting, the oldest name was based on a language extinct for millions of years.
Offering that old name, the contractor repeated his thanks.
Then the tool said, “I’ve been swallowed by many assignments far more peculiar than this, sir.”
Neither of them had pressing engagements. The contractor sat on the edge of a cultivation chamber, and knowing how to prompt machinery, he said, “Let me judge what’s peculiar.”
The tool was large when she was naked, and she was dressed and gigantic now. The carapace was Mandelbrot-inspired, made from lovely diamond and a lovelier iron, and it was punctured in dozens of places. Where needed, arms and legs had been added. What wasn’t a mouth produced words, and what couldn’t be confused for eyes were staring at the human who demanded to be impressed. What did she know about this man? Quite a lot, she felt. Her research as well as a dedicated sieving of social noises proved that this compilation of meat and bioceramics was born on the Great Ship, and more importantly, he was barely a thousand years old. Which made him innocent
and smug. Humans often felt they were blessed, and with reason: their young species owned the largest, most impressive starship ever constructed. And that’s why the tool picked the story sure to leave her audience astonished.
“I’m older than you realize,” she began.
“I see ten million years.”
“I’m far older than that, sir.”
The human had a perfectly reasonable face, ageless but holding the jittery energies common to recently born boys. Except there were occasions, like now, when the man seemed more complicated than a coy little sack of meat. In the eyes, mostly. When those wet white and blue eyes looked at her, she discovered a focused intensity that she had never witnessed in any other contractor.
The tool’s longest limb reached toward his patient face and then reached farther. What served as toes gripped the cultivation chamber, first by a long helve and then a sealed extrusion valve. The just-completed project had demanded several thousand kilos of an exceptional grade of hyperfiber. Their former client was now sleeping safe inside the universe’s finest armor. Unless, of course, a weapons-grade plasma torch arrived, or a black hole decided to gut the new home.
The tool said, “My first assignment,” and paused.
The human offered silence. Nothing else.
“Was to cultivate hyperfiber,” she continued. “That’s the only reason I was built. And if I have a genius, hyperfiber is it.”
The man nodded, feet absently tapping the granite path.
“I was working on a rather larger scale than this,” she continued, invoking that respectable technique of misdirecting the audience’s imagination.
“More than ten million years ago,” said the man.
“Yes.”
A smile emerged, and in his eyes, suspicion. “This starship of yours,” she said. Wet eyes grew larger. “It isn’t mine.”
“Yes, agreed. But human, tell me this: have you ever wondered how this marvel was built?”
Larger than worlds, the Great Ship was discovered outside the Milky Way. A cold, lifeless derelict racing at one-third light speed, it might be billions of years old, implying that it was cobbled together in some distant portion of a much younger universe.
“I’ve never asked myself how,” said the man. Then laughter emerged with the mocking words. “Not once. Not ever. No.”
“Well, I know how,” she said.
The laughter grew louder and angrier. Or happier. She was beginning to realize that this was a rather difficult creature to disassemble.
“Because you helped build the Ship,” he guessed.
Every limb pointed at their surroundings. “If my hands and feet had done any piece of this, I would remember. And I don’t have those recollections.” “Too bad,” he said.
“I’m talking about my first job and a hundred thousand years of labor,” she said. “You see, my makers intended to build their own Great Ship. Long before humans existed. Ages before anyone realized that this kind of wonder already existed.”
“How long ago?”
“Ninety-three million years,” she said.
The human took a moment to frame his answer.
“Bullshit,” he said.
She offered her best contemptuous laugh.
Then he said, “I’m not a student of anything. But I don’t remember any history where any species was stupid enough to attempt construction on this scale.”
“Agreed,” she said. “Inside this galaxy.” Big eyes grew small, the mouth clenched tight as could be. “Do you want to hear my story, or don’t you?” she asked. “Yes to both,” the human said. “I do, and I don’t. So you tell it, and let’s both discover what I think.”
The contractor wasn’t ancient, certainly not compared to the Great Ship or this well-traveled tool. But he was quite a lot older than he appeared to be. His born name was Pamir and he was an important captain serving the Great Ship, but certain troubles caused him to leave that life and the greatest profession. Hiding ever since, he had worn a wild variety of names and jobs, lives and passions. One of the galaxy’s great experts in wearing carefully contrived life stories, he earned what he could to thrive, and that included hoarding secret funds and prebuilt lives ready for the moment his present lie
s began to crumble.
Pamir leaned back, looking like a man who had nowhere else to be.
“I was built near the center of a different galaxy,” the tool began. “A satellite galaxy, but not to your Milky Way. No, this was a little sister to what you call Andromeda. My galaxy’s stars were predominantly ancient, metal-poor and unsuited for life. But a later bloom of young stars produced rock worlds and metal worlds, and biologies, and a few lasting civilizations.”
Remaining in character, the contractor offered a shrug and one vaguely interested gaze. But the genuine Pamir was interested enough to create a complete list of candidates, rating the likelihood of each while throwing none aside.
“I was born above a hot world,” the tool reported. “An almost nameless world of iron and baked rock orbiting a red dwarf sun. There was nothing remarkable about that solar system, except that the sun and its dozen planets weren’t native to my galaxy. Large events inside Andromeda had thrown them free. As a consequence, these interlopers were blessed with enormous momentum. And even better, their future course would carry them close to a massive local star and its black hole companion. Tailoring that flyby was possible. Barely. My makers had already spent thousands of years abusing the red dwarf. They struck its face with lasers, sank antimatter charges into its body. Towering flares rose up from the sun, punching the same piece of the sky, slowly changing the solar system’s trajectory.”
“To capture the interlopers,” the human said.
“And add to one body’s velocity, yes. One-eleventh the speed of light. That was the goal. Not as swift as your vessel, no. But it was a smaller galaxy, and our ship would wear engines large enough to let it maneuver. Shrouded in a hyperfiber envelope, that machine would drop close to suns and black holes, repeatedly surviving fire and gravity, always racing towards the next suitable target.”
The tool paused, for dramatic purposes, or perhaps to let her audience respond.
“‘The next suitable target,’” the human repeated.