by Neil Clarke
Every Highland citizen was human. That was the law. Humans were archaic animals, noble and true, while every captain was a contraption full of mechanical parts and magic. And without question, Washen was a striking machine. Tall and graceful as a willow, not only did she look more human than Amund would have guessed, but nothing about her voice or manners seemed artificial. The local hour was twilight. With darkness spreading, the visitor bent low before the important residents. She had mastered their local language, presumably for this single occasion. With passion, Washen spoke about the honor of breathing holy air and apologized for the pollution that she had brought to them. But important matters had been pressed into her hands. She warned her audience that duty sometimes gave her little time to act. And while she was asking for an enormous favor, the captain promised to deliver ample compensation as well as the hope that this insult, horrible as it was, could be forgotten by future generations.
Amund didn’t want to be impressed, but he was. This captain had mastered certain customs, and how many minutes did that take her?
“But she’s not a ‘her,’ ” he muttered under his breath.
“What’s that?”
“What you see down there,” he said. “That’s nothing but machines wrapped inside machines.”
Where stone turned to air, he was lying on his stomach, his favorite girl beside him. She was a beauty by every measure, though less creative than some. Perhaps a little simple, and very definitely conservative. Yet Amund’s lover was charmed by that woman-faced creation, and that’s probably why she didn’t appreciate his tone, slipping out of his grasp and then crawling out of his reach.
Abandoned, Amund had little choice but to watch the drama below.
“This beautiful realm is your home, and your home lives inside my ship, and the Great Ship lives within the Galaxy,” Washen said. “As I stand here, one distant world is actively begging. It wants permission from the Master Captain to come onboard. Which is wonderful news. Captains are sworn to many jobs. But after we ensure the safety of our passengers and the safety of this vessel, our primary task is to welcome every guest that we can carry. For a reasonable fee, we make them comfortable, and we allow them to build homes among us, and we promise to carry them safely through this glorious wheel of stars.”
The Highland was a cavern furnished with jungles and jungle birds and artful crisscrossing waterfalls. It was also rich with blindfolds and stubborn indifference to everything beyond these wet green walls. Amund’s neighbors looked as if they absorbed the machine’s prattle without complaint. Didn’t they understand? Washen was stripping the situation down to its simplest, most appealing core. Amund saw the trick. This was what he would do, if his chore was to explain stars to idiots or language to dogs. And that’s why he was offended. Dressed in charm, offering up some carefully crafted words, this outrageous entity had mastered a dog’s vocabulary.
“‘Where-the-rivers-live,’ ” said the machine.
“What is that?” Amund’s lover asked. “What’s that mean?”
The boy didn’t know. And judging by faces, nobody else understood. A muddled, confused rumble filled the cavern, and Washen responded by taking a step backward before repeating that very peculiar phrase.
“‘Where-the-rivers-live.’” She said, “That’s our best translation of the world’s name. A large terran planet. There’s a dense atmosphere, minimal seasons. More ocean than land, but every continent has a spine of young mountains. The natives possess a vibrant, relatively advanced toolkit of technologies. In that, nothing is unique. Except for the fact that the population is a little under one thousand individuals, and each citizen is a living, sentient river.”
Washen said, “River,” and the cavern was suddenly flooded with illusions. Sculpted light was focused on every open eye, and sounds were driven into the ears and teased the vestibular systems. Suddenly Amund felt like a bird. Towering white clouds stood in an otherwise azure sky, and below him, the exuberant vegetation was every shade of blue. What looked like a dark blue river was pinned to the valley floor. Save for those colors, that could be any earthly jungle. But when he dropped low over the river, the water ceased to be water. The quivering dark surface was more gelatin than fluid. Capable of motion in any direction, this river was pushing upstream, and it was far larger than the trickles flowing through the Highlands or even the Earth’s famous rivers. Flexible trunks that weren’t trees lined the nearest shoreline, a canopy of arms or tentacles pushing toward the sky. Except those weren’t arms and they weren’t tentacles. Amund was reminded of sea anemones. That’s what these were. Gigantic terrestrial anemones. And against every expectation, the boy was thinking how interesting and how pretty everything was.
Curiosity was an indulgence at best, a hazard at the worst. The Highlands couldn’t have survived two generations if its citizens chased every sweet question. But long history and his culture didn’t matter. All at once, Amund was intensely, selfishly curious.
The captain’s voice returned.
“The Great Ship is a beggar too,” Washen said. “Our hull is covered with telescopes that beg the Milky Way for light and radio noise. My ship never stops studying local planets and the distant ones too. And between the telescopes are enough antennae to shout at those worlds, begging to be heard and to be answered by any mind with the means and the desire.
“What you’re seeing here is a fresh transmission. Where-the-rivers-live sent these images along with explanatory texts and certain diplomatic overtures. This world is six billion years old and clever. Commensalism is the norm. Unrelated species have woven themselves into unified bodies. The native genetics have found a very stable point where there’s no boundary between the forest and the river. What you see is one creature, and, as it happens, this entity controls the central watershed of the wettest continent. Rather like our Amazon does. Except this river is longer than the Amazon, and it extends far beyond the continent. Which is another marvel, and if you want to see where the living water flows, don’t close your eyes for more than a moment.”
Amund clamped his eyes shut.
A foolish, incurious reflex, and he didn’t know why he did it. Perhaps the eyes were thinking for him. Opening them again, he discovered that the spell had been broken, the living river was lost, and he had nothing to see but his lover staring at nothing, her gaze spellbound, shameful. Everyone but Amund was happily trapped inside that other world. And nobody else understood. That machine-infused captain had one goal for her day, and she knew just what to say to them and just what to show to them.
The boy had suffered enough. Slip home, close his door, and pretend to sleep or eat or accomplish any other human task. That’s what he was planning to do. Except his legs had a different opinion. Instead of taking him home, they found the quickest stairs, carrying him toward the captain and her fine voice and that very pretty face—the polished face of a beautiful marble statue dedicated to some ancient, unreachable deity.
Washen’s voice continued to sing out.
“Serving as a captain, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet multitudes,” she boasted. “Species from very strange worlds, and species from worlds unnervingly similar to the Earth. And every point between. But this realm, Where-the-rivers-live, is like nothing else. It’s fresh and it’s wondrous, and on the basis of novelty alone, I would invite a trickle of any river into the Great Ship. I would build a habitat where their nature and beauty could thrive. And if the creature didn’t have the resources to afford passage? I’d pay its way. That’s how interesting these creatures are to me.
“But there isn’t any need for charity. Where-the-rivers-live happens to be the only inhabited world inside a solar system rich with potential. This transmission came with an offer. In exchange for passage on the Great Ship and certain new technologies, the living rivers will grant us full possession of two hot planets and two cold moons. Four worlds, each of which can be terraformed, and any one of which can become a home for humans.”
She
said the local word for “humans.” That was a critical detail. Or she was careless, which seemed very unlikely. By then, Amund had reached the cavern floor. Elders and the high faithful were crowded around the captain. A few of them had stopped watching the show, but they continued to stare at their guest, mindlessly smiling and nodding. Most of the audience remained lost in the astonishments. But of course nothing they saw had to be real. Everything was a lie. That possibility ambushed Amund, frightening him and making him angrier than ever. Which was rather pleasant. The boy enjoyed being enraged by the one-sided nature of this mess. An immortal machine had marched into their little cave to tell them a ridiculous story, forcing them to watch invented lights and invented sounds, and this was such an easy trick for a god, making stupid little humans believe in any preposterous world.
But why would Washen lie?
To embarrass Amund’s people, obviously.
That paranoid idea was exactly what he needed. Rage gave him courage, and courage gave him the power to say anything or do anything.
“Safety for the passengers,” said Washen. “That’s every captain’s first duty. After that, we care for the Great Ship, and then, we welcome new passengers onboard. But there’s a fourth duty waiting. Humanity used to be a minor species. We were late to the business of star travel, but then we found the Great Ship. In the tens of thousands of years since, this beggar of a starship has left multitudes in its wake. New worlds by the thousands, all claimed by our people. Immortals like myself, and humans like you. And those colonists, your brethren and mine, will rule the galaxy for the next ten billion years.”
With that, she paused.
The invisible spectacle must have finished. Eyes were blinking, faces smiling or frowning, and many people shyly looked at their neighbors, trying to gauge what this magician’s trick had done to their tiny souls.
That’s when the great captain was rudely interrupted.
“So what the shit do you want from us?”
Amund shouted those caustic words.
Turning, Washen looked at nobody but the rude boy.
He instantly regretted his action, but in the next moment he was angry all over again. For his doubts, for her invasion. But mostly because he was a stupid little bit of humanity. Amund existed only because the captain machines allowed him to live inside what was little more than a tiny drawer. Washen’s kindness was what kept all of them alive. Unless it was her utter indifference to their little existences, and when the time came, she would throw them out, replacing them with richer, more interesting tenants.
That’s what passed through one young head.
Washen’s thoughts were a mystery, then and always. What kinds of elaborate calculations was she making, transforming this complex, ever-shifting event into the best action? But of course the mathematics were easy. After all, she was one of the finest machines ever fabricated, standing before a tribe of primitives, all of them easily swayed and just as easily forgotten.
“So what the shit do you want from us?”
For a long breath, nothing happened. Except that Amund kept finding reasons to grow angrier.
“The Great Ship,” the captain began.
Another pause.
“And our hands,” said Washen, holding her hands towards the basalt sky. “Ships and hands have limits. We’re passing through the Galaxy, and yes, we’re aiming for the most fascinating portions of the Milky Way. But our speed and course are inflexible. Most solar systems remain out of reach. In reality, there’s only a narrow cylinder of space that our shuttles can reach, and then they have to return to us again.
“Where-the-rivers-live is very close to that cylinder’s edge. Velocities are law. Time is short. And wise as these rivers seem to be, they don’t have their own starships. They might build some workable craft soon. Even a tiny river has astonishing talents, and working together with a world’s full resources … well, they could possibly launch a starship or two in the next few years. But there isn’t time to wait and hope. If we want the rivers to live with us, we have to make our own round trip. And to achieve that, there is a plan. The plan is underway already. This morning, a special streakship was launched. That ship was pre-built and then mothballed for a day like this. It’s massive and full of fuel and exceedingly well protected from the dangers of deep space. But there is no crew. Shaped nukes and war-grade lasers are accelerating it to a healthy fraction of light speed. It’s exactly the kind of vessel that can race out to an alien world, landing under the guidance of AI pilots, and then wait for its passengers to board.”
Washen was ageless. Except when she paused, as she did then, she looked like a woman who had endured a long, difficult day.
Two breaths and she spoke again.
“The living rivers have explained themselves. And that includes some inflexible ideas about ceremony and symbol and the value of life. Which they cherish, by the way. More than most species, the sanctity of organism is held in the highest regard. Perhaps because they are so few, and by any measure, they are so very old.”
The captain took a long step forward, studying the ignorant young fellow who seemed to have forgotten how to talk.
“Their largest river claims to be older than earthly vertebrates, older than our sponges,” she said. “So we’re battling some instinctive, unyielding ideas. There are also the horrible limitations of time and our room to maneuver. We spotted their world years ago, studied them and built an offer of friendship. Two Venus-class worlds, two icebound moons. That was our initial offer. Which is a fair price, a modest price, considering the technologies we’ll share and the places that we will take them. And the rivers have agreed with us. They’ll give us everything we want. Four substantial worlds, with space for hundreds of trillions of good people. When you talk about mortals. If you can imagine millions of generations of humans living beneath this orange sun.”
Washen took another step forward, standing that much closer to Amund.
He wanted to run.
His feet preferred to hold their ground.
“One icy moon will be warmed and then bathed in a delicious atmosphere,” the captain promised. “Then it will be given to you, the humans, and you and your trillions of children will live out their lives on this spectacular new realm.”
Except there wasn’t any joy in the machine’s words or her face. She was a grim, all-knowing god, talking to tiny entities who couldn’t appreciate the shitty choices that she had to walk through.
“Four worlds would be an enormous gain for our species,” she said. “But it requires one quick mission that culminates with a brief, brief ceremony.”
“Which is what?” Amund meant to shout, but his words emerged as a guttural whisper.
Did she hear him?
“What ceremony?” asked twenty other voices.
“This is a very ancient dance,” Washen explained, “One creature must symbolically merge with another. Two unrelated rivers must join. And to accomplish that, the rivers demand that we offer a single mortal. ‘A piece of your river,’ they call it. Which means that they’re demanding a human sacrifice.”
Amund was ready to feel surprised, yet he wasn’t. He anticipated being enraged, but nothing like anger offered its help. One life? Not only did that seem reasonable, it was such a tiny gesture, and he was instantly thinking about the people that he grew up with. Idiots who wouldn’t be missed, at least after a few happy years.
“Two officers will accompany our offering,” Washen continued.
It was the first and only time someone used that word.
“Offering.”
She said, “My finest exobiologist and my best diplomat are going. The goal is to change the terms of this agreement. Surrender an arm or kidney, or give away a beating heart that we can replace without fuss. But I can’t guarantee survival for anyone. This will be a long sprint through deep space, and shit happens. Yes, it does. But if this mission does reach Where-the-rivers-live, and if any deal is struck, then more starships will be d
ispatched. Slower, much larger and safer vessels will drop away from the Great Ship, make some complicated dances with other stars, and after a few centuries, your descendants will set down on your new home.”
She paused, and most of the audience imagined Paradise.
“I won’t make your choices,” she said. “And I wish I could explain more and answer every question. You must have endless questions. But there’s a timetable at work. Moments matter. The second streakship has to carry passengers, which means that it can’t accelerate as quickly. And it has to launch within two hours and seventeen minutes, or it doesn’t leave. Which might be the best solution. That could be argued.
Do nothing, let this opportunity pass, and consider ourselves fortunate, even if we aren’t.”
On the one hand, Amund was listening carefully. Yet he was also thinking about nothing. An empty place waited inside his skull, black and ready. Ready for what? Then it arrived. The obvious, unavoidable idea. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of luddite communities were scattered across the Great Ship. “Luddies.” That’s what the machines called humans. Luddite was an ancient word that was never charitable, never endearing. And if time was critical, then dozens of captains must be standing inside those enclaves. Right now, each persuasive machine was making her best plea to the silly luddies. One tiny, awful sacrifice. That’s all that was needed, and the gods were playing a very cruel game.
Infuriated, the boy felt justified as he marched straight toward an entity who couldn’t have looked taller or more formidable. His plan was to smack Washen and get killed for it. Which almost certainly wouldn’t happen. What harm could he do to any captain? But no, that promise of violence made him brave, and the courage lasted until she smiled at him, revealing what on any face looked like grave, sorrowful pain.
A step short, he paused.
His little world fell silent, every eye fixed on the empty air between the two of them.
And that’s when Amund finally realized what was obvious. That he wasn’t angry at captains or distant alien rivers. Not then, not ever. The emotions lived inside him, and they couldn’t be anywhere else. Self-doubt and self-loathing had eaten away too much. He was a frail incurious idiot, suddenly looking back at the elders and up at the woman that he had slept with and probably would have had children with.
