The Greatship

by Robert Reed

  Even as she repeated her congratulations, Washen doubted the explanation. Creatures like Ishwish would want the largest possible audience to admire the treasured moment. And like the flickering of the eyes, the fact that he was lying now meant something. Though what this said about the circumstances, she couldn’t yet say.

  The Submaster glanced at her. “My memory tells me,” he said quietly. “You were born in the Great Ship, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And your parents were not captains?”

  “They were engineers,” she admitted. But Ishwish surely knew that already, just as he seemed to remember every detail from her tiny life.

  “You’ve never left the confines of the Ship,” he said.

  There was nothing confining about a machine with the mass of Uranus and enough caverns to explore for the next ten billion years. But she simply dipped her head, admitting, “I have not traveled far. No, sir.”

  “You haven’t walked the harum-scarum worlds.”

  Washen shook her head, pretending to be disappointed in herself. “Never, sir.”

  “I have.”

  She waited for advice, or at least some tiny insight.

  But Ishwish offered none. He lifted a utensil—a heavy crab-pincer—while glancing across the room. A colleague had just arrived, and in the smallest possible way, he waved the pincer and his elegant hand, offering his greetings to a fellow Submaster.

  Washen bowed to the newcomer, then asked Ishwish, “Do you have any advice for a novice captain?”

  “The Great Ship always needs new engineers.”

  His threat earned a small nod from Washen. But she was watching the newcomer stroll toward an empty table reserved for no one but her. Miocene was her name, and she was said to be the Master Captain’s most loyal and dangerous officer. Since becoming a novice captain, Washen had spoken to the woman perhaps half a dozen times. None of those conversations held any substance. Yet the tall, imperious woman was looking at her now. Just for a moment. And for no obvious reason, Miocene tipped her head at the young officer, offering a dim but lingering smile…a smile that for no clear reason felt important…

  3

  “Where is your uniform?”

  “It is doing its own business this morning.” Washen confessed while giving a two-foot stomp. She was standing before the diamond door, wearing civilian clothes, including sandals and slacks and a pair of simple silk belts. If not for the small mirror-patch on the shoulder of her blouse, she would have been completely out of uniform, subject to a multitude of deserved punishments. “As I promised, I am here. And now I wish to step inside your apartment.”

  “No.”

  She nodded as if unconcerned. “Tell me why not.”

  “I don’t crave visitors. Why is this so difficult to comprehend?”

  Washen puckered her lips and blew air, making a doubtful sound. “As I understand these matters,” she said, “your family clan is one of the largest. Your relatives stand tall on half a hundred worlds.”

  “Yes, we are great.”

  “Success hauls responsibility in its wake,” she said.

  “For more species than mine,” Hoop said.

  “According to your laws and honored conventions, you cannot turn away the weakest mouths. If a citizen with no status comes to your door begging for a small meal, it is your duty to feed her enough to live out the day.”

  Both of the harum-scarum’s mouths snorted, amusement mixed with warm disgust. “You are far from weak,” he said.

  “Am I?”

  “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, my dear. But even a lowly captain commands respect from the multitudes.”

  “Not from you, sir.”

  “You do have my respect. I honor your office and rank. I’m just refusing to surrender my home to any captain.”

  With her best impression of a harum-scarum smile, Washen asked, “But what if I wasn’t a captain anymore?”

  The black eyes stared.

  “If I surrendered my rank and authority, what would that mean to you…?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Yet Washen acted as if she’d heard a different response, removing her blouse and the mirrored emblem attached to it, folding them into a small wad easily thrown over her naked shoulder. Then she kicked off the sandals and unfastened both belts, her slacks falling into a heap around her bare ankles. “As a traveler without rank or privilege, may I enter your home?”

  “No,” said Hoop.

  She kneeled and bent low, slowly licking the granite floor of the avenue. Then employing a passable harum-scarum voice, she said, “Without food, I die.”

  “You are being silly,” the alien said.

  “I’m only following your example,” she countered.

  Hoop refused to answer. For a long while he remained motionless, spines and fingers held in relaxed positions. But there was pedestrian traffic in the avenue, and eventually half a dozen humans strolled past, pausing to watch this very peculiar scene. A Janusian couple joined them, and then a pack of Fume-dogs. Eventually half a hundred passengers stood in a patient half-circle, enjoying the spectacle of a former captain going mad, naked and splayed out on the hard chilled ground, muttering again and again in that harsh alien language, “Without food, I die.”

  Nothing in his demeanor changed until a pair of harum-scarums appeared down the avenue, leaving Hoop with no choice. This human creature had done nothing but follow orders, and the only worthy response was to invite her inside.

  Just the same, he hesitated.

  He didn’t surrender until Hoop’s brethren started kicking Fume-dogs out of the way, trying to see what was so interesting. Letting out a low wet sound, he backed out of sight, and an instant later, the thick diamond door split along every invisible seam.

  4

  Like many shipboard residences, the apartment began as a tiny portion of an enormous cavern. Walls were erected at convenient points, tunnels closed off, and a cozy ten hectares of floor space and high ceilings was created. No public record linked Ishwish to the place. The man lived there for his early centuries onboard the Ship, but wanting privacy, it was owned by an AI mask. Then the local district misplaced its cache. The Submaster and his mask acquired a more spacious and impressive address while the old apartment was sold to a human marriage—early passengers from a rich colony world. Over the next thousand years, two women and two men raised eight children from embryo to adulthood. Then came a difficult divorce and a quick sale to a gathering of Higgers—machine souls that promptly flooded the chambers and long passageways with the hot, pressurized silicone that they needed for survival. But Higgers have accelerated minds and painfully low thresholds for boredom, and fourteen years was too much time in one location. They sold to an investment conglomerate specializing in boondock properties. The new owners paid rather more than market value, but the Ship’s population was growing rapidly, and better yet, shifting fashions and a parade of new species eventually lifted the district back to its former importance.

  Hoop-of-Benzene acquired the property twenty-five centuries ago, draining the silicone and then renovating the interior with his own hands and curses, creating a volume that perfectly suited his needs.

  He had lived nowhere else since boarding the Ship.

  On bare feet, Washen walked upon the greeting-mat laid out in the hallway—the complex patterns of fuzzy rings displaying the name and important history of Hoop’s family clan. The first of a hundred towering statues stood with their backs against the walls, each defending a block of ceremonial soil. Treasured ancestors had been carved from a ruddy wood alien to both of their species. A thick oily scent hung in the air, dark and disgusting to the human nose. But Washen took a deep sniff before turning to her host. “Tidecold-6,” she said quietly.

  Hoop gave no reply.

  Then in his language—in the proper dialect—she named the tree. “Blood-twice,” she said.

  Considering the inadequate mouth, her diction was g
ood.

  The harum-scarum watched his guest absently scratch her bare ear, her bare breast. Then he studied her ribs and that patch of soft tissue where a beating heart could be seen. Perhaps he had never shared air with a naked human. Devoid of armor, Washen appeared exposed and ridiculously frail—a reaction tied to his oldest instincts—and as a consequence, the big hands pulled themselves into fists.

  Washen returned to the standard human language. “Blood-twice trees are native to Tidecold-6.”

  “Botany is an interest?” he asked.

  “It is, but I would have learned about them anyway.” Throwing her own fist through the air was a gesture of respect. “I’ve done a respectable amount of research about you,” she said.

  He said nothing.

  Washen started down the hallway, examining each of the life-sized statues. The first ancestors were the most ancient, the pink wood gone pale and dusty dry. But at some point the statues darkened, every slice of the old awls still deep, each figure decorated with scraps of clothing and jewelry, spines and plates of armor that belonged to each of the men and women being portrayed. They stood where the hallway curled sharply to the right. More statues waited out of sight, but Washen stopped and kneeled down, pretending to exam the meeting-mat beneath her feet. With a quiet, thoughtful voice, she said, “You came onboard my ship 2507 earth years ago.”

  Hoop watched her eyes, struggling to read the alien face.

  “You came alone, a young, relatively wealthy man off on an adventure. Payment for your passage came through a universal account established on what you called your home world. Which was not Tidecold-6.”

  Hoop opened a huge hand. “This planet you keep naming…I have never seen the Tidecolds…”

  She nodded agreeably, touching one of the mat’s elegant rings. The fabric was young and clean. Pushing against the weave, she felt the living fibers moving in unison, debating if she was a threat and if she should be contested.

  “Twelve light-years,” she mentioned.

  He was silent.

  “Tidecold-6 was abandoned, and a portion of the survivors migrated to a hard little world twelve light-years removed. And to the best of their ability, they rebuilt. It was your clan that made new homes there, your people who had to weave the shame into their mats and then walk on.”

  The alien’s spines straightened and the plates of armor pulled closer to his body, reflexively making ready to fend off any blow.

  “That wicked ugly war of yours,” she said.

  Hoop’s eating mouth made one wet sound.

  “A harum-scarum apocalypse,” she said.

  “That is not possible.” Staring at the tiny creature kneeling before him, he said, “My species aren’t crazy apes. We do not fight to oblivion.”

  “Which makes your family history all the more tragic.” Then Washen intentionally passed gas, her rectum offering the crudest possible curse—neatly underscoring the war’s unbearable, unforgivable waste.

  Their walk through the apartment continued in silence.

  After the turn were the final few dozen statues. Washen paused beside a conspicuously empty slab of soil, and her host pushed ahead, polite in a harum-scarum fashion, entering the greeting room before his feeble guest.

  Heavily pruned blood-twice forests grew in tall sapphire urns. Elegant furnishings meant for giants were scattered about the vast round space. The ceiling was a beautiful dome of polished green olivine. Light poured from everywhere, and nowhere. Some unseen functionary had just delivered a fresh meal to a greeting table set in the room’s center. It was a dead meal, meat peeled from an immortal animal, seasoned and then cooked to a human’s taste. In some other portion of the apartment, the meat’s source was now recovering inside its spacious stable, feeling modest discomfort while eating its fill from the trough, damaged flesh rapidly patching the gaping wound.

  The novice captain thanked Hoop-of-Benzene for going to so much trouble, and then she ignored the cooling feast.

  “I have looked over your life,” she mentioned again.

  Hoop regarded her for a moment. “And what did you learn about me?”

  “That I understand practically nothing.”

  Another silent stare began.

  “I know something about the war,” she said. “At least, I know one version of its history. Every few years, some young captain…someone even newer to his post than me…will pull me aside to ask, ‘Do you know the story…?’”

  “Which story?”

  “My superior, the Submaster who refuses to be named, served as the captain to a small colony ship,” she said. “His mission was to deliver ten thousand eager humans to a little world perched at the edge of the galaxy. A harsh young world, as it happens, and a huge challenge for ignorant monkeys like us, since we had almost no experience terraforming such marginal places.”

  Hoop’s breathing mouth opened and then closed, forgetting to inhale.

  “It was an unfortunate voyage,” Washen said. “There were the usual problems with the engines and with life-support. But worst of all were the troubles between colonists. Personal qualms turned into political difficulties. Old feuds reignited in the quiet between the stars. The captain of any colony ship is responsible for his machinery and his human cargo, and this particular captain managed to keep the angry factions under control. But he lost his grip during the final decades, and a low-grade war broke out in the hallways and habitats. Plainly, his ship needed help, which was why he changed course, braking early and dropping into a low orbit around Tidecold-6.”

  With a slow voice, her host said, “Ishwish.”

  “I haven’t mentioned names,” Washen said, sitting on the edge of the greeting table, two fingertips riding up her bare stomach and sternum and neck. “The story that I have heard, and heard, and heard again, centers on the same few facts: Tidecold-6 was a large, mature world with oxygen and oceans and a vigorous biosphere. Two harum-scarum clans had lived there for eons. They were evenly matched, both in terms of population and resources. And that wasn’t a coincidence. There had been half a thousand little confrontations already. But what would look like quick wars to humans were very formal, brutal on the edges but predictable in the meat. Your species is innately conditioned to spit and pummel one another, but the usual result is to reinforce some worthy status quo.”

  Hoop stared at her face, watching the weak little bones beneath her thin, practically useless skin.

  “This is a consequence of your heritage.” An appreciative smile broke out. “Your home world is eight billion years old, with worn-down islands and quiet seas and no reliable volcanism. Animals that evolve in similar circumstances, where resources are scarce and growth must be slow, often adapt along certain predictable lines.”

  “Am I an animal?”

  She nodded. “You are a spectacular animal. And your ancestors were exceptionally expensive collections of bone and armor, muscle and energy. Without volcanic activity, key minerals are locked away in deep sediments. Soils are poor and the ocean is half-sterile, and it once took decades of slow, patient growth to wring enough calories and protein from some little patch of landscape, producing an adult as splendid as you. But evolution is a weave of complex calculations written in gore. You are a fabulous investment, and at the end of the day, you were a grand success.”

  Hoop gave an agreeable click of a tongue.

  “What most humans should realize, but don’t…if they are to work beside the Clan of Many Clans, they see furious, quick-tempered aliens. But most of what you do is for show. Not that what you do and say isn’t real. The noise and fuming is not empty or unimportant. But when your powerful minds see nothing but disaster looming, you will give up. You will give in. Recognizing defeat, a sane and responsible citizen on any of your happy worlds will bow down and surrender to whatever clan or species has the battle won.”

  “How else should we behave?” asked Hoop.

  “I agree. Every species in the universe should act this way,” she said. “I
know my sad people need a dose of your humility and wise nature. Particularly when you consider those human colonists: There was a new world to build, yet they felt it was more important to murder their own kind. If the unnamed captain had been shepherding two clans of harum-scarums across the galaxy, I guarantee you that there wouldn’t have been any threat to the ship. Or to the mission. Or to the man sitting on the bridge, weighing his options.”

  “Ishwish came to Tidecold-6,” Hoop said.

  “He wanted to ask your species for help. Yes.” Washen waited a moment. “I’ve heard this story too many times and always the same way. The human begged for aid, and it was given. But there were other players and another request for help was made, and after a few strokes of bad luck, what was simple became terribly complicated. What should have been finished in a few hours ended up filling most of eight days, and that poor world was butchered in the process.”

  Hoop squeezed tight both of his mouths.

  “You must know a different version of the story, or at least a fuller telling. Am I right?”

  “I know very little,” Hoop said. “When this happened, my shadow hadn’t been cast.”

  The naked captain said nothing, letting her silence work.

  “But my mother,” Hoop finally said, his voice faltering for a moment. “When I was old enough, she told me another history. Which is exactly the same as your story, except for the differences.”

  5

  Hoop described the aliens’ arrival: A crude, ungainly starship suddenly plunging from deep space, fusion engines struggling to kill its terrific momentum. Ishwish was the first human voice they ever heard, and the first human face they had ever seen for themselves; and in a pose of perfect submission, he begged the ruling clans for help. They gave permission for him to move into orbit, but the machine struggled with even that simple task. Once a sun-blasted comet, the ship was a fancy set of engines rooted in black tar and porous stone, the entire contraption bolstered with hyperfiber girders and incalculable amounts of luck. Ten thousand humans, plus supplies and an army of sleeping machines, had set out to make a new world habitable. But the colonists were plainly inexperienced at terraforming. Dressing a newborn world in a breathable atmosphere and a drinkable ocean would require more bodies than they had, as well as a heroic patience. Yet most alarming to the Clans was that their crude starship had been damaged, and not by natural means.