The Greatship (19 page)

She talked quickly, not waiting for any response.  “Your mirror wasn’t any mirror, just a synthesized image.  And you drugged me, probably with an elaborate cocktail that keeps adapting to my body, fending off its attempts to make me see and feel normally again.  My nexuses weren’t just compromised.  I think months have passed, but I suspect it’s been a matter of days, even hours.  And despite your promises, you probably didn’t even shoot me with hard radiation, did you?  Did you?”

“Would you have wanted that?”

“One honest incident would feel refreshing, yes.”  Quee Lee remained inside the lifesuit, just the two of them flying back to Port Beta.  Everyone had agreed there was no point in keeping her on the bow.  Orleans would see her on her way home.  The rest of the crew was still working, and he would have time to return and finish his shift.

“You owe me money,” she said.

Orleans’ face was bluer than before.  His tusks framed a calm icy smile.  “Money?  Whose money?”

“I paid for a service, and you never met the terms.”

“I don’t know about any of this,” he said, laughing.

“I will report you,” she said, using all of her venom.  “I know captains, and they know me.”

“Then you’ll embarrass yourself even more.”  He was confident, cocky.  “Our transaction would be labeled illegal, not to mention disgusting.  No captain will look at you as being anything but a silly rich woman, believe me.”  A long laugh ended with a growl.  “Besides, you can’t prove any of this.  Your nexuses weren’t just befuddled, but we erased everything that we said in each other’s presence.  Maybe you gave your funds to someone, but that attached AI will testify that the gift was used properly, and I promise, you don’t want people to know what that money was supposed to deliver.”

The shame was brilliant and horrible, and Quee Lee crossed her arms while saying nothing, trying to wish herself home again.

“The drugs will wear off soon,” he said.  “You’ll feel like you deserve to feel, a gentle complacent creature all over again.”

Softly, with a breathless little voice, she asked, “How long have I been gone?”

“Three days.”

She felt ill to her stomach, and it still wasn’t her real stomach.

The Remora watched her for a long while, remorse mixed into the expression.  Or was she misreading those features?

She used the best insult she could find, speaking with certainty.  “You aren’t spiritual people.  Your ancestors were monsters, and you couldn’t live below if you were handed the chance, and this is the best place for you, and you have to die here.  Probably soon.”

Orleans said nothing, watching her.  Then he looked out the window beside Quee Lee, absorbing the endless gray landscape.  “We try to follow Wune’s path.  We try to be many things and maybe a little spiritual too.”  The armored shoulders shrugged.  “Some of us do better than others.  We’re human, after all.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Why do this to you?”

She nodded.

“Oh, Quee Lee.  You haven’t been paying attention at all.”  He grasped her helmet, pulling her face next to his face.  She saw nothing but the eyes, each black hair moving and nameless fluids circulating through them, and the voice rolled over her like hard surf, saying, “This has never, ever been about you, Quee lee.  Not for one instant.”

* * *

Perri was already home.

“I was worried,” he said, sitting in the garden room, honest relief on his lovely face.  “The apartment says you are going to be missing for a year or more.  So I was scared for you.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m back.”

Her husband tried not to appear suspicious, and he worked not to ask certain questions.  Quee Lee could see him holding the questions inside.  She watched him decide to try charm, smiling when he said, “So you went exploring.”

“Not really.”

“Where did you go?”

“Cloud Canyon.”  She had practiced the story all the way from Port Beta, yet it sounded false.  A three year-old girl could tell a better lie.

Yet her husband didn’t hesitate.  “Did you go into the canyon?”

“I rented a boat, but I didn’t have the courage.  I couldn’t even make myself step onboard.”

Perri grinned, relieved enough to enjoy one deep breath.  Then he said, “By the way, I raised almost eight thousand hectos and struck a coin for you.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll find the rest too.”

“I can wait, Perri.”

Relief faltered.  Confused, he said, “You don’t look right.”

“No?”

“You don’t sound like yourself.”

“I am tired, and maybe a little embarrassed.”

He brightened.  “Then let’s go to bed.”

Perri was compliant, making love to her before falling into a deep sleep, apparently as exhausted as Quee Lee.  Yet she insisted on staying awake, sliding into her private bath and giving her autodoc a drop of Perri’s seed.  “I want to know what’s right and what is odd,” she said.

“Yes, miss.”

“And scan him, without waking him.”

The machine set to work.  Almost instantly, Quee Lee was being shown lists of abnormal genes and shriveled, long useless organs.  She didn’t bother to read about them.  Staring at her own hands, she remembered what Orleans had told her after he had admitted that she was nothing but an incidental bystander.  “Perri was born Remora, and he left us.  A long time ago, by our count, and leaving the fold is the worst kind of insult.”  His voice was slow, measured, and poisonous.  “Every so often, one of us visits his current home, choosing a moment when he has gone wandering.  Slip a little dust into our joints makes them grind, and we do a pity-game to whomever we find.”

Her husband had lied to her from the beginning, about everything.

“We’ll trick the lady into making good on old debts.  And sometimes, when the situation is ripe, we find clever ways to make more money, just as we’ve done with you.”

“You want vengeance,” she said.

“Our eventual goal is, yes.”  Orleans didn’t laugh and he didn’t seem proud.  His attitude was cool and complacent, like a worker doing his job.  “Eventually every rich woman is going to know Perri’s story.  He will run out of hiding places, and money, and he won’t have any choice but to come back to us.  We just don’t want to rush the process.  You see, this is like curing the hyperfiber—it takes patience and a flair for perfection.”

Quee Lee looked up from her hands.  The abnormalities were tiny and rigorously cataloged.  Perri wasn’t someone who had lived on the hull for a few years.  He probably had to work to appear so completely human, coping with the mutated genetics.  She was living with a full-blooded Remora who had committed the worst crime, removing his suit and living below, safe from the mortal dangers of the universe.  Quee Lee was just the latest ignorant lover, and she knew precisely why he had selected her.  More than money, she offered a useful naiveté and sheltered ignorance, and she was absolutely within her rights to confront him, confront his lies and demand that he leave at once.

“Erase the lists,” she said.

“Yes, miss.”

Then she told her apartment, “Project the view from the bow.  Put it on my bedroom ceiling, please.”

“Of course, miss.”

She stepped out of the bath, lasers and exploding comets overhead.  She fully expected to do what Orleans anticipated, putting her mistakes behind her.  Sitting on the edge of her bed, on Perri’s side, she waited for him to wake on his own.  He would feel her gaze and open his eyes, seeing her framed by a Remoran sky.

She hesitated.

Taking a breath and holding it, she glanced upwards, remembering that moment on the crater’s lip when she had felt a union with her body; an intoxicating sense of self.  Induced by drugs and ignorance, yet it still seemed true.  Here was a perception worth any cost, and she set that against Perri’s imagined future, hounded by the Remoras, every human friend stripped away, the man left with no choice but the hull and his left-behind life.

She looked at him, the peaceful face stirring.

Compassion.  Pity.  Not love, but there was something not far from love drawing her to the fallen Remora.

“What if?” she whispered, beginning to smile.

And Perri smiled in turn, eyes closed and busy, watching some lazy dream that in an instant he would surely forget.

Fourteen rocket nozzles stand high over the stern, imposing yet sleek, each nozzle the size of a small world.  Eleven identical engines are fed by billions of kilometers of pipe and conduit, most of which have never been used and never will be used—back-ups to back-ups, all presumably as clean and ready as the day they were built.  Every engine has nineteen gargantuan impellers ready to force compressed liquid hydrogen into the reaction chambers, though only three impellers are necessary to feed a nuclear firestorm.  Again, no system exists without profound redundancies.  In addition, there are tens of thousands of lesser impellers and pumps and compression valves and spindle injections serving to feed fuel and enhancements into a maelstrom which can generate energy and thrust unmatched by other ships or even by the heart of the hottest star.

Attached to the centermost engine and nozzle, one giant impeller has never been awakened yet has been used constantly since the human arrival.  Bigger than most cities, the machine is filled with vacuum and motors and grand arching blades of hyperfiber, valves measured by the kilometer and control systems built to withstand radiation and time and the natural creep of unwatched atoms.  Humans have studied every aspect of the impeller.  The brightest, most creative engineers have measured and probed, and on the basis of numbers built models that run for aeons of simulated time.  The impeller is not eternal; no device can be.  But these simulations have reached out for five hundred billion years of constant work, and the machine never pauses.  A thousand thousand little systems can fail, but what hasn’t been used even once is nonetheless eager to run flawlessly for as long as a trillion years, shoving hydrogen into an engine that is just as durable, just as perfect, and just as puzzling as any other portion of the Great Ship.

* * *

Engineers are not spiritual or transcendent or pious or divine.  Truth is composed of numbers and the relationships between those numbers and how the equations stack on top of one another and how they manage to stand apart when need be.

Engineers are the same, their flesh and mechanics and chemical fires being factors in the maintenance of the soul’s essential equations.

The true engineer recognizes beauty as a dance between elegance and the worthy task.

Genius is rare, and it is laudable until it proves too clever or too proud for the task in hand, and then genius has to be set aside, or if it proves stubborn, choked to death by the strongest available means.

Engineers appreciate other engineers, regardless of species, while humans and aliens outside their ranks are regarded with skepticism, bafflement, and interlocking layers of indifference.

Without exception, engineers onboard the Great Ship train inside that one impeller.  Nothing about the object is sacred and especially honored.  When every ancient machine is perfect, chance determines which one is special.  The premier engineering school is set beneath the impeller, which is a fine reason to make it the laboratory for high technologies utilized to their very best.  Every student walks the same access tunnels.  Control systems that have never throbbed with power have been mapped and modeled and redesigned ten thousand times, no ever making improvements.  At the impeller’s core is one periwinkle-shape blade famous for the unerring precision of its angle and the gradations within its hyperfiber.  Of course every surface is resilient, but the stress-bearing spots are reinforced just enough, no farther.  This is an important, even revelatory observation.  The finest human engineers always overcorrect.  Incans building stone walls and Incans building space elevators will brace what doesn’t strictly need more bracing, if only to let themselves sleep well.  But ancient temples and hundred thousand kilometer towers would stand just as well with a little less help, and materials have been wasted, and time has been wasted, and no genuinely competent engineer should ever worry about sleep.

The impeller is not a cathedral, and it isn’t holy or blessed or capable of the smallest miracle.

Saying otherwise, even implying otherwise, merits scolding from teachers and demerits to the worst offenders.

The mechanism was built according to a plan, and while nobody doubts that fact, there is no useful data about the vanished builders.  Without data, opinions are gusts of wind best used for other purposes.

And yet.

Every engineer student and hoary old instructor secretly feels the Builder’s presence.  They scale blades that have never moved, tug on nanoweave wires that haven’t carried any current, and walk down throats that where not two drops of cold fuel have dribbled through, and they cannot help themselves.  Say what they want, but here stands a temple to what is possible, a temple that mocks every little thing that they will accomplish, and no engineer escapes those moments and those years when she wants to drop to her knees and kiss the gray face of this wondrous perfect example of why they became engineers in the first goddamn place.

Drifting in the middle of the tiny cabin, Aasleen was sleeping and then she was otherwise.  The tickling tug of her nexus wished to be noticed, telling her that a message had just arrived, swaddled inside human encryptions.  But opening her eyes and then her bed, she realized this wasn’t the only reason she was awake.  The perfect silence of space was lost, replaced by watery sounds and rhythmic vibrations.  She couldn’t see through the milky white cabin walls, but it was obvious that the ship beyond was reconfiguring its body, reinventing its hull and engines for the next leg of this extraordinarily painful voyage.

Warily, she unpacked the message.

Hazz appeared to her mind’s eye.  He was a tall, handsome captain dressed in the crisp mirrored uniform of his station.  Personable and capable of great charm, he smiled at his chief engineer, saying, “About Rococo, we have news…”

A cold spike pierced Aasleen’s belly.

“The Scypha have picked up his trail again.”  The voice was deep and slow, possessing the practiced clarity found in actors and great captains.  “Six days ago, he was still hiding inside the Stone Ring but anchored to an asteroid nearly fifty million kilometers from his last known position.  Nowhere close to where anyone was looking, naturally.”  Hazz paused.  “By the way, the asteroid rides the Ring’s inner edge.”

The implications were obvious.

“Our hosts are certain about their verdict,” said Hazz.  “This isn’t another false lead, or so they claim.”

Hazz’s face and clear voice was just the tiniest portion of a dense data rain.  Most of the rain was an elaborate map that Aasleen fed to her ship’s library.

“Show me,” she ordered.

Her cabin was woven from dense bioglass.  The glass instantly turned black, and the new map blossomed inside the walls.  Stretching before her was the Stone Ring—hundreds of thousands of rough gray worlds, each tumbling along some private path, circling the cool orange sun.  Two spaceships were delineated with vector lines:  The human starship lay outside the Ring, while Aasleen’s tiny vessel traveled above it, nine degrees over the plane of the ecliptic.  Only one asteroid deserved to be circled in blue.  Touching that speck of dust, a tiny portion of the map expanded, filling an entire wall.  Ten kilometers across, the battered world was dotted with bubbles of green water and green air, plus one tiny fueling station tucked inside the deep polar crater.  The obvious explanation was that her brother had stopped at the station, probably in a bid to steal fuel.  But no, every marker drew her attention to a blunt mountain standing on the world’s equator.  The location was without charm or obvious significance.  Why would Rococo, or anybody in his desperate state, waste two moments in that empty, exposed place?

The image shifted to a recently recorded feed.  Scypha hunters were scattered across the rounded summit.  The aliens didn’t exist as species in any traditional sense; each individual was a unique collection of totipotent cells.  But every hunter was assembled in the same basic pattern—a spherical green body cloaked in a clear nacre lifesuit, countless busy spines gripping the rocky landscape while dozens of hemispherical eyes searched for clues that the first twenty searches had missed.

The critical discovery lay at the base of the mountain.  Six earth-days ago, an exhausted ship buried itself in the dusty regolith—a violent maneuver, but no more spectacular than a million other impacts among the asteroids.  Then yesterday, a lone Scypha hunter noticed the fresh crater buried by a convenient landslide.  On a hunch, it recruited some of the locals—lobster-like workers brandishing claws wrapped in steel and diamond teeth.  Under the hunters’ guidance, those workers uncovered the tangled remains of a human shuttle.  But there was no trace of the hated pilot.

Examining the wreckage, Aasleen triggered a recorded response woven into her captain’s transmission.

“See if you can puzzle this out,” said Hazz.  “Why did your brother visit this non-place?”

As an older sibling, Aasleen couldn’t find any worthy answers.  But as a trained engineer, the solution was obvious.

“What else has been recovered?” she asked the data rain.

There was only one item of substance.  In the shadow of a room-sized boulder, somebody had hurriedly buried a hyperfiber satchel.  It had ruby-rope straps that allowed it to be carried, and the main pocket was locked by several methods, including a diplomat’s seal.  She recognized the article immediately.  For as long as she had known him, her brother had carried the satchel everywhere, his personal journal locked inside.

“I want that,” she said loudly.

Then with a more careful tone, she explained why.  It would take a human agent to break the seal, and its contents were possibly valuable but most likely booby-trapped.  An expert in human ingenuity was essential if the security systems were to be subverted.  Aasleen deserved the discovery because nobody else could hope to find and interpret whatever clues were hiding inside.

Her plea was sent to Hazz and to the Scypha hunters and to a hundred important little worlds—by agreement, every word Aasleen said to her captain was shared with their alien hosts.

There was more to see inside the data rain, but she responded first to Hazz’s question.  “I know why my brother was there,” she said.  “If he fled the Stone Ring inside that stolen shuttle, we would have spotted him.  And judging by his position in the system, he probably didn’t have any fuel left, much less the velocity necessary to avoid us any longer.

“So Rococo crashed at a prearranged location, then unburied himself and climbed to the summit.  Alone and wearing nothing but a minimal lifesuit.”  The tiny world had a quick spin, its gravity falling to almost nothing along the equator.  “This is a problem in mass and force,” she said.  “I’m sure what he wanted was to hide his shuttle before jumping into space.  Any kind of rocket assist, and he might have been noticed.  But his leg strength should have been adequate.  I’m guessing, but leaving the satchel behind was probably a last-moment decision.  For whatever reason, he wasn’t convinced that he was strong enough to make it into orbit with an extra kilo or two.”

She imagined her brother kneeling on summit, his face grim but determined.  A little worried, perhaps, but definitely sure about his cause, whatever the crazy cause was.

“He jumped into a low orbit, but you won’t find him there either.”  Aasleen hesitated, her belly twisting into a hard lump.  “It’s exactly what everybody is scared of, that the man is not working alone.  What’s likely is that another ship has come to play—a quick vessel we haven’t been looking for.  It passed by recently, and it was there for no purpose but to snatch him up.”

The recorded image of the captain put on a broad smile, and the last of the data rain opened up.  Suddenly the asteroid pulled back and back, revealing a great arcing swath of the Stone Ring.  Then a blue line—the color of alarm among the Scypha—was laid across the grand map.  The line marked the course of a single vessel.  A Scypha seeder, judging by its designations and lazy motions.  The seeder had been traveling slowly along the Ring’s inner edge, cutting close to various asteroids, making a series of intricate maneuvers that eventually took it past Rococo’s last known position.  That was several days ago and nothing changed immediately.  But a few thousand kilometers later, the seeder’s course straightened unexpectedly, powerful engines bursting to life to shove it toward the system’s largest world.  Any fleshy passengers would have been crushed by the gees, but flesh heals and Rococo would have made a full recovery long before he reached his ultimate goal.

Once again, Aasleen grew aware of the vibrations extending beyond her tiny cabin.  Obviously her situation changed while she slept.  She asked the ship to make the walls transparent, which it did; and then she studied the machinery as it gracefully shifted positions around her—engines and fuel tanks realigning themselves, while the extra mass was being cobbled into a crude but useful heat shield.  What was built to be a swift pursuit vessel able to dance among the asteroids was now being transformed into something even faster but decidedly less graceful, getting ready for the voyage’s last leg.

According to the dangerous blue vector, two days ago Rococo’s new ship had crashed into the system’s largest world:  Chaos.

For a sad, sorry moment, Aasleen imagined her brother watching the cold gray planet grow huge before him—a world built upon endless violence and relentless, unpredictable rebirth.  But his smart, always confident voice interrupted her daydream, asking, “Do you really think you could have stopped me, Sister?  How would you believe, knowing me as you do, that preventing any of this was remotely possible?”