Heaven (11 page)

The ecclesiarchs back on the Cloister Worlds of Intermundia, the religious leaders at the core of Cosmic Unity’s domain, would
be well pleased.

“I just can’t get over how flouncin’
big
this thing is,” said Fat Apprentice, who had spent much of the trip so far exploring
Talitha
in his golden sailor suit.

“Yeah,” Short Apprentice responded. It was difficult to find better ways to express the feeling of sheer incomprehension that
he felt whenever he tried to come to terms with the Neanderthal vessel—and, even more so, with its builders. The biggest sailing
boats on No-Moon were cruiseliners about eighty yards long, thirty broad at the beam; their masts were seldom more than fifty
yards tall, and the sail, on the occasion he was fortunate enough to be able to go on board and inspect one of those impressive
boats, had been absolutely massive.

Now it seemed puny in retrospect. And
Talitha
didn’t even
have
a sail. Not that it needed one.

Stun had been kind enough to show them a graphic of Ship once the routine of quitting orbit for deep space had been completed.
It was vast. There were interminable corridors, some straight, some twisty. Huge engines occupied much of the stern. A veritable
flotilla of transpods had been stowed in just one of the capacious holds. Apparently, the Precursor vessel housed not just
active crew but their families, from the very young to the elderly. But the family areas were off limits to Fat Apprentice
and all the other polypoids, to minimize disruption.

Ship was twenty times as long as No-Moon’s giant boat—a little over a mile. It was shaped like nothing that Fat Apprentice
had ever come across, except maybe a very warty sea slug. Nothing about the starship was geometrically regular or simple;
every surface that started to resemble something he could put a name to, like a sphere or a cone, merged into something else
or just suddenly stopped.

The reefwives, if they had put their mind to it, would have known why . . . but they had never seen Ship, nor had they ever
needed to. However, if they had seen it, they would immediately have realized that the vessel had not been designed but had
been evolved. It was closer to an organism than to a machine. Yes, everything about it was mechanical, made from metal and
ceramic, but it had been grown more than built. In fact, Ship’s automata occasionally decided to modify some part of the vessel,
often while it was in transit between stars. The Neanderthals and the rest of its crew seemed used to this. Fat Apprentice
had been horrified, the first time he tried to go to a part of the ship that he had visited a few days earlier, only to find
that the previous entrance had been remodeled and the layout beyond it changed out of all recognition.

He couldn’t imagine deliberately tearing a boat to bits while it was sailing. The wind and waves of No-Moon did enough of
that without assistance.
Rebuilding
a boat while it was sailing—ah, that they had to do all the time. But no mariner would voluntarily seek it out. And polypoids
could
swim
across an ocean.

Neanderthals couldn’t swim through space.

All of this was lost on the crew. They seemed to trust Ship implicitly and never turned a hair when part of it was being melted,
crushed, or unglued by robots outside their control.

If the outside of Ship was weird, the inside was even weirder. The “cabins,” if that was the word—and Fat Apprentice knew
no other way to describe the internal compartments of a boat—were of every conceivable shape and size. Some had gravity and
some had not, and this was very disconcerting because you could easily wander from one to another without warning. The gravity
was generally no more than a tenth of that experienced at the surface of No-Moon, though, so even if you accidentally wandered
into a hundred-yard shaft, it was easy to grab something and arrest your descent. And on the one occasion when his desperate
grab for a stanchion (or whatever the eel-shaped protrusion was) had failed, and it had dawned on him that even in one-tenth
gravity he’d hit the bottom very hard, Ship itself had turned off the gravity-field before he had fallen more than twenty
yards.

For the first few seconds, though, it had been the worst experience of his young life. So now, when he explored Ship, even
in areas he thought he knew well, he carried a small lump of rock, which he used to test new cabins for the presence or otherwise
of a gravitational field before he let his suit roll him through the opened wall-iris.

Many areas of the ship were closed to him altogether. The wall-irises were there, but they refused to recognize his presence,
staying stubbornly shut. He wondered if that was because the conditions inside were unsuitable for him. Occasionally, as he
wandered the passages and cabins, he encountered a crew member. He’d come across plenty of aliens at the seaports, but a lot
of these guys were of species that were totally unknown to him. He was smart enough to understand that aliens often needed
different atmospheres, temperatures, humidity, whatever. The tanks where the polypoids spent most of their time had been fitted
out so that they could live comfortably without suits. Presumably, other parts of the vessel were designed for the home requirements
of chlorine-breathers or radiation- consumers. His suit would have protected him even in such conditions . . . but perhaps
Ship didn’t know he was wearing a suit.

It was hard to work out what it did or did not know. It seemed aware of where he was and whether he was getting himself into
trouble.

It never dawned on him that the latter was the main reason why Ship was keeping him away from the home regions of the alien
crew. It didn’t want to risk his causing unnecessary damage, so he had been confined to the common quarters, where all the
crew were expected, and where it could be assumed that they would be equipped with suitable life support.

And it was on one of his early excursions that he had blundered into a gallery and found the window into space.

Fat Apprentice had never seen space before. He’d seen the stars, of course, but space seemed to have a lot more stars—and
these were a lot brighter—than anything he’d witnessed during No-Moon’s nights. And he’d found that if he concentrated on
some region of the starscape, the window would seem to
bulge
, and the view would be magnified. When he had put a tentacle against the window, he’d felt no movement. The bulge wasn’t
a change in shape, just a change in optical properties.

Some things that looked like stars, he found, were actually big collections of stars, presumably seen from a great distance.
Often these star clusters formed pretty shapes, with spirals being especially commonplace. But they weren’t one-armed spirals
like the shells that could be found near the shores of No-Moon’s landmasses. They were usually two-armed, more loosely coiled,
and
flat
.

Maybe a bit bulgy in the middle, but,
Maker! Flat shells made of stars!

One day May found him staring out the window into space. It didn’t take a Neanderthal’s sensitivity to other creatures’ moods
to understand what transfixed him. “Many of the experienced crew find it awe-inspiring, you know,” she told him. “And they
have made hundreds of journeys in this ship, and seen hundreds of worlds. I can sense their awe. Sometimes it is so strong
that I even regret my own inability to share it.”

Fat Apprentice hardly knew how to answer. May’s leonine features and her graceful movements were overpowering. And her confidence
in herself was so much greater than his own. He was still learning his trade, whereas she was mistress of hers, and had been
for a long, long time. And here she was, confiding in him.

Not only that: The shipboard pets that habitually followed her around put him off. He wasn’t used to land animals.

“You can relax, Fat Apprentice,” she said, sensing his awkwardness. “You have nothing to fear from me or my beasts.”

He knew that. It wasn’t fear, it was . . . No, she was right; it was a kind of fear. Not the kind you would swim away from,
though. It was more a respect so enormous that it was frightening to contemplate it.

“Eeesh,” he said, evacuating his speech-siphons, and he felt foolish at his hesitation. “It’s just that wherever I looks,
I sees more and more
stuff
. It’s a flouncin’ big universe, beggin’ ya pardon, miz. I can’t see any end to it.” He paused, trying to express himself
better. “And I can’t see what it’s all
for
.”

May turned thoughtful. “That is either a very clever question, Fat Apprentice, or a very stupid one. I cannot tell which.
Perhaps the universe is not
for
anything. Perhaps it exists merely for its own sake. Because it is what it is, because there is no alternative. Can you contemplate
the possibility of
nothing
existing?”

“Uh . . . no. But I can’t see how things become
real
, either. When I was tiny, the reefwives told me that everything that exists is there ’cause of the Maker, who made the world
and whose siphons cause time to flow.”

“Yes, that is a common solution to the enigma of existence. Do you find it acceptable?”

Fat Apprentice quailed under her level gaze. “Well, to be honest, miz—no. I don’t. Ya see:
Who made the flouncin’ Maker?
I can’t wrap my tentacles ’round that one.”

May laughed. “Neither can the finest philosophers, Fat Apprentice.”
Perhaps even less so than you
. “But if nothing can make a Maker, what can make a universe?” To spare him further embarrassment, she changed the topic.
“What were you looking at?”

Fat Apprentice gestured clumsily. He still found the suit uncomfortable if he wore it for long. “There’s a star here that
turns into a muckin’ great snail-thing when you look at it close.”

She followed his gaze. “Ah, yes. That is a galaxy. Which is an old word for ‘milk,’ because when you magnify the cluster even
more, it looks as if someone has spilt milk across the sky.” His bafflement was obvious and should have been predicted, and
she laughed again at her own stupidity. Polypoids had little experience of mammalian nutrition. “What is milk? It is like
. . . like the sea when the reef spawns. White and liquid and thick. A galaxy is a gigantic cluster of stars, bound together
by mutual gravitation.”

Fat Apprentice wondered at that. “So . . . is a galaxy what ’appens when a
universe
spawns, miz?”

May stared at him. This was a clever one and no mistake, for all his innocence. “Again, Fat Apprentice, you ask something
that would baffle the finest philosophers. But this time you also ask something that to my knowledge has never been asked
by the finest philosophers. I cannot answer you now.” Her own knowledge of philosophy was limited, but she recalled that on
board there was a genuine philosopher; indeed, he was Ship’s philosopher. He was a portly little Thumosyne whose name was
a purely mental pattern, and he had consequently acquired the nickname Epimenides because they had to call him
something
.

Perhaps Epimenides could answer Fat Apprentice’s innocent-sounding question. May turned to leave, then turned again to give
the polypoid a strange look. Somehow, his question was linked to her ever-present, unnamed fears.

The words were sucked from her against her will, and they came out as a hoarse whisper. “But, Fat Apprentice . . . you may
very well be right.”

The pond lay in a shallow depression, which the prevailing winds had scoured from the lee face of one of the great barchan
dunes. Seasonal evaporation had left a line of crusted salts against the rocky outcrop that sliced across one end; the rest
of its margin lapped against Aquifer’s sparkling desert sand.

Ripples on its surface projected shifting blue patterns of reflected sunlight onto the dull grain of the rock. In its depths,
swarms of tiny crustaceans darted this way and that, hunting down shoals of medusas no bigger than a pinhead. Blue-brown algal
mats carpeted a quarter of the surface in polygonal jumbles like cracked ice. Where the rock shaded the pool from the brilliance
of the sun, small humpbacked amphibians peered out of the water with a single slitted eye.

The pond looked normal; its surroundings did not. For ten yards around, the ground was bare sand. Not an insect moved; not
a twig or dried leaf disfigured the uniform silver-gray surface.

Farther away, tiny yellow spikes sprouted from the desert in isolated tufts. Beyond them were stunted cacti, scalloped by
nibbling mandibles and surrounded by a carpet of fallen needles. A few were in bloom, festooned with patches of soft pink
wool. Segmented insects, each with a dozen long, spindly legs, skittered across the hot sand in search of a cactus that was
marginally more succulent than the rest. Twin-rotored copterflies hovered around the woolly blossoms, coating their legs and
dangling abdomens with thready pink spores.

In most deserts, an oasis would attract vegetation. Not on this world. On Aquifer the vegetation secured its moisture by sending
out roots to tap the deep subterranean water table. It stayed away from the ponds. Vegetation that tried to grow too near
a pond seldom survived for long, so evolution weeded out such tendencies.

A broad, scuffed track ran through the scrub, making a zigzag ascent up the long windward slope of a nearby dune. At the crest,
a walker cast its expert single eye over the terrain ahead of it. Mental processes tens of millions of years in the making
unscrambled the shimmering distortions created by currents of heated air, seeing through the labyrinthine refractions to the
true landscape behind them. A walker would never mistake a mirage for a pond.

The walker was rather like a hybrid of a millipede, a turtle, and a translucent bag, and about the size of a crocodile. It
moved on thousands of tiny tube feet that sprouted from its underside like the bristles of a brush, tipped with soft, pudgy
spheres that stopped the feet from sinking into the sand. As the bristles rippled, the body undulated from side to side like
a slow serpent.