The Greatship (36 page)

Oblivious to the approaching human, the Child grabbed the controls with both hands.  Then it paused, watching monitors, examining images of the cavern and its nemesis and the willingness of the fusion engine.

Pamir dropped the gun and began to climb the scaffolding.

Then the Child smiled, razor-cold serenity defining the eyes while the little mouth pursed, lips saying the words, “Now, you die.”

A sun was born just meters away, the flash and plasmas blinding Pamir as he leaped for the floor.  His head was tucked and his back was exposed, and that single burst of light hammered the hyperfiber ceiling, energies absorbed but the residue bouncing down on their heads, washing the realm clean.

And Pamir lay beneath the engine, guessing everything else, including the scope of his own magnificent ignorance.

Samara—the bulk of Samara—had been turned to gas and ash.  But one surviving splinter was alive, huddling beneath a half-melted desiccator.  The body wore the same human shape and face that had first stepped onboard the Ship, but radiation had seared the flesh, and the legs were too weak to lift it from the ground.  Yet the Gaian acted amused regardless.  Cocky and sharp-tongued, it said, “What did you accomplish?  Nothing.  More of us are coming, and they know what I know, and what does it matter if it takes millennia to kill that thing?”

Pamir was holding the plasma gun.

The Child was unarmed, its armor cracked by the stardrive and discarded.

“Burn the Monster,” said the Child.

Samara’s green-gold eyes found the captain.  “The Monster is prepared for a million-year hunt,” it said with glee.  “What could be more patient than a vengeful Gaian?”

The Child moved to strike it, or worse.

Pamir lifted the barrel, saying, “No.  I want to hear this.  Stand back.”  There was no plug for the weapon’s umbilical, but its batteries were halfway charged.  Turning to Samara, he said, “Tell me a new story.”

“No,” the Child said.

Pamir threw a burst of plasma into the desiccator, earning silence.

Samara looked into the distance, seeing the past and left-behind places.  “My home wasn’t a Gaian world, no.  It didn’t have a self, a soul.  But Aeon gave it both.  And it gave the world its first name:  The Child.

“Before becoming the Monster, I was Aeon’s little offspring, weak and well aware of its weakness.  But stronger by the century, and more experienced.  And like any Child, I imagined the future and how I would act differently than my parent, and maybe I could improve on Aeon’s way.”

Pamir stood where he could see both of them, and he nodded.

Samara looked at the other Gaian, with an expression more complex than disgust.  “We fought each other, yes.  As you heard, we fought over water.  Aeon wouldn’t share the abundance.  But other resources were rationed, and it tried to forbid certain knowledge.  Aeon demanded oaths of fealty.  And when words didn’t convince, it invented physical acts to prove the same.  But no proof was adequate.  The Child gave and gave of itself, begging for acceptance and winning none.  With each word, every gesture, Aeon found flaws, minuscule and often invented.  And when the Child tried to claim freedom, its parent battered with curses and far, far worse.”

The creature was panting, slowly rocking back and forth.

“That bridge between the worlds was built by Aeon, for Aeon.  It was to help maintain control—an avenue where griffins, armies of griffins, could descend on the bothersome Child.”

“Lies,” spat the other Gaian.

Pamir drew a circle with the gun’s barrel, and he nodded.

“Aeon also put mirrors and curtains in space.  Changing the sunlight, it could bring drought and endless dust storms.  ‘I am hurting in order to teach,’ it would say.  ‘I am doing these little things to help you, Child.’”

Pamir felt weak, cold.

“But I didn’t surrender or even pretend to relent, and Aeon decided to murder me, sterilizing land and both seas before taking the little world for itself.”  Samara paused, a hearty smile building.  “But you can guess the rest.  All that effort to teach the Child, and what was learned?  The importance of misery and treachery and of course I put every good lesson to work, and that’s why the rest of the story is mostly the story you know…”

The other Gaian began to jump.

But Pamir was ready, firing between them, the sand rising in a fountain as the air between the grains burned.

The gun’s batteries were past half-drained now.

“Lies,” said the current Child, again and again.

“No no no,” Samara said.

In some form or another, real truth existed.  There was a history and a string of ugly events leading to this moment.  But these creatures were built by entities that shaped flesh at will, and couldn’t memories be molded too, and every chance of doubt chiseled out of their helpless souls?

Pamir looked at the current Child.  “How did you acquire that stardrive?”

A vulnerable look turned to resolve.

“I can see the records.  It was purchased by a harum-scarum.”  He named the individual before asking, “Do you know him?”

Resolve became haughtiness.  “I have met him, yes.”

“How did that happen?”

With a stiff voice, it said, “Friend Pamir.”

“But I’m rarely here, and you are a huge talented creature,” Pamir said.  “For all I know, you have spent centuries manipulating aliens and humans, building a little empire of helping hands and eyes.”

“How can that possibly matter to you?” it asked.

“I learned about Samara’s arrival, and I came here immediately to tell you…but you already knew, didn’t you…?”

“I don’t love the others,” the Child said.  “I love you.  You were the one that I wanted with me today.  But what if some disaster took you?  An accident could have happened, and I needed safeguards.”

Pamir used silence.

“Safeguards,” the Child repeated, in a mutter.

He turned toward Samara.  “More like you are coming.  Is that your promise?”

“There are many more of us, each more clever than the last.”

“But you have to kill this one,” said the Child.

Pamir watched Samara, studying the eyes.  “But what if this creature is dead?  Will these others keep threatening the Ship?”

“Never.  They are built for vengeance, nothing more.”

Then he glanced at the Child.  Its face was changing shape and color as claws sprouted on the hands that were just beginning to reach out.

“All right,” the captain said.  “I have decided what to do.”

His arms held the weapon steady, and two bursts were fired, the air filled with the vivid stink of evaporated flesh, and steam, and the brief beginnings of twin screams cut short by the boiling of their respective tongues.

“You look different.”

“I’m out of uniform.”

“We’re chasing you.  I saw the arrest warrant and the charges.”

“I know.  I’ve seen them too.”

“You destroyed an entire facility.  If we didn’t have the water reserves, we’d already be drinking our own urine.”

“I built the reserves,” Pamir said.  “And everything will be fixed years before anyone suffers.”

“Mention those facts at the trial,” Washen said, taking a tentative step toward the fugitive.  “Whatever has happened, you need to turn yourself in and let the Submasters examine the evidence.”

“Why?  I’m guilty.”

“What do you know?  You’re not a Submaster.”

Pamir laughed.  Washen’s home was rather like his, but cleaner and brighter.  Against one wall, in a tiny, root bound pot, a tired clump of llano-vibra sang in hushed voices about everlasting love.

“Are you curious about what happened down there?” he asked.

“Tell me,” she said.

He shook his head.  “Sorry.  I can’t.”

She took another step.  “Will you turn yourself in to me?”

“No.”

“Will you surrender to anyone?”

“Not intentionally, no.”

She paused, probably wondering if she could physically restrain him.  Not now, not in these circumstances.  With a quiet, calculating voice, she said, “I don’t see why you sneaked in here, frankly.”

“I have a gift for you.”

She exhaled, entirely surprised.

“You advised me to give gifts, didn’t you?”

“What is it?” Washen asked.

He laid a biovial on the nearest tabletop and passed a small kinetic gun to his other hand, yanking a memo chip from his trousers’ pocket.  “These are the instructions.”  It was the same chip that she had given him, resembling a worn snowflake.  “It’s all pretty straightforward, once you get past the strangeness.  That is, if you are willing to help.”

“Help you?”

The homely face smiled.  “No.  I don’t want that.”

She looked at the vial and gun and snowflake.  “What happened down there?  Give me that much.”

“Do whatever you believe is right, but promise me, you need to study everything in the chip.”

She nodded but her expression drifted into pity and gloom.  “Where will you go, Pamir?”

He said nothing.

“We won’t stop hunting you.”

The grin brightened.  He stepped to one side and past her, making for the apartment’s emergency hatch.  “Good-bye, darling.  And thank you.”

Washen grabbed the vial, and hoping to delay him, she lifted it overhead, aiming at the olivine floor.

Pamir didn’t give even a backward glance.  “It’s flesh,” he said.  “Barely living, perfectly stupid flesh.”

“Yours?”

“Yes.  And theirs too.”

“Whose?” she asked.

He stepped through the open hatch.

“Who else is this, Pamir?”

The hatch closed and a shaped charge melted its mechanisms.  Then after a moment’s contemplation, Washen set down the biovial and picked up the old snowflake, tapping it as if to coax the answers to spring forth, explaining every mystery without fuss, without delay.

She called him the Child, and she called herself his mother, even when both knew that no part of her was incorporated into him.  The Child lived in his mother’s home, growing faster than human children but requiring far longer to mature.  His talents were baffling and incomplete.  His mistakes were painful for both him and his botched creations.  But he persisted with his education, imagining the future, some ambitious part of him eager to become vast, and powerful, and wise.

His mother-who-wasn’t-his-mother told him what little she knew.

When the Child dreamed of the past—worlds he didn’t know; violence beyond measure—she would comfort him, wetting his forehead with damp rags while saying, “That isn’t you.  You are not them.”

Yet
they
were part of him.

Tiny, tiny bodies floated inside each of his myriad cells, giving him magical powers over bone and meat.

“The others were enemies,” she taught him.  “They came here and fought—a terrible, brutal war—and then they killed each other.”

“But why, Mother?”

She didn’t know, but she made guesses.  She talked about greed and jealousy, and fear—human emotions, which made them suspect.  Then she said, “Tiny parts of them survived.  But not enough to remake either, which is why your father bound those pieces with his own flesh.”

A human was his father.  The Child couldn’t stop asking about him.

“I don’t know where he is,” she said, her face grave, sorrowful.  “I don’t even know if he’s alive anymore.”

“I will find him,” the Child said.

But one day, instead of acting happy when he repeated that promise, Mother shook her head and told him, “You won’t do that, no.  Never.  You’re getting too strong, too skilled.  I think it’s time that you leave.”

He had never left the apartment.  “You want to walk out the door?”

“No, I need you to leave the Ship.”  She showed images of a young, barely living world.  Its sun was ruddy and fixed in the sky.  Its ocean was thick with organics and simple bugs.  “Your father left instructions.  Once you were ready, he wanted you to go to a place like this and live.  Do you like it?”

Not at all.  In the Child’s mind, the world seemed ugly.

Yet then again, the prospect of embracing an entire planet seemed wondrous, even inevitable.

They went to one of the Ship’s ports, to a tiny vessel that would carry him to the new world.  Kneeling before him, Mother straightened his useless clothes, and she cried, saying, “Remember.  Two of your parents hated each other so thoroughly that they couldn’t see anything else.  They lived badly, and they hurt one another, and how do you erase their terrible crimes…?”

“I will live properly,” he said, with feeling.

“What does ‘properly’ mean?”

“With kindness to all of my parts, and to whatever life forms that I meet along the way.”

She sobbed and said, “Be good.”

The eternal motherly advice.

Suddenly the Child looked over her shoulder, focusing on something distant.

“A man,” he said.

She turned.

“He was watching me.  But he’s gone now.”

“Did he look like you?”

“Maybe.”  He thought harder, and then said, “No, he didn’t.  He was much more handsome than me.”

She straightened his clothes again, smiling bravely.

“I think you’re lovely,” she told him.  “Just beautiful, if you ask me.”

The finest minds are cold or believe they are cold.

A small dense superconductive brain enjoys the swiftest thoughts.  Whiskers of silicon can travel anywhere while demanding very little, and if those were the only criteria, then the galaxy would be awash in thoughtful dust.  But physical law limits what the small mind can embrace, and being quick is rarely best.  This is why one liter of bioceramic sentience is a more popular size.  Thinking fast enough for most occasions and then survive its mistakes, that kind of mind can walk about on two legs, or fly with four wings, or happily sit inside a cool box on a high safe shelf.  And that is the mind that can hold thousands of years of memory, each moment and every year patiently waiting for the chance to speak.

Inspiration flourishes in the big mind.

Memories like to talk to one another, and Genius is the beast that sits to the side, eavesdropping on the roaring conversation.

A million years can be bottled inside a liter-sized maelstrom, and the chaos spits out dreams and little ordinary thoughts and sometimes great mad wonderful ideas, and sometimes Genius will take away what seems new or wise or nothing but fun.

It is a nature of the universe to make minds.

But even a feeble, barely self-aware soul realizes that minds are never the priority.  What matters in the universe is dark energy and then cold dark matter and then come the little stars and the worlds circling those stars and the worlds lost between.

Thought is a contaminate woven through the dark cold.

Consciousness can look like a flaw, a mistake.

Yet even scarce, minds continue to bear down on each vivid moment, and Genius contemplates what it can, and the universe expands while it cools as the stars begin to wink out, and minds die, and certain questions are asked and answered in the same reliable ways, and sometimes the survivors can find the peace to sleep awhile and let the dreams roll on.