by Robert Reed
“There’s that alien weed you like to grow. The one that sings.”
“The llano-vibra.”
“Is that its name?”
He nodded, removing his mirrored captain’s cap and setting it on one of the obsidian busts fixed to the table’s corners. “You think I should be giving away weeds.”
“Pretty ones,” she said. “Why not? Offer a reason.”
Disgusted, he said, “People would see the unmistakable calculations.”
“Then again, maybe you don’t deserve any promotion.” Washen was tall and strong—a captain of roughly equal rank—and she was pretty in a smooth, unconscious way. They were lovers once, but that was so long ago that the details had evaporated. Friend to friend, she argued, “A captain must believe in calculations. How else can he do his job? Formulas for acceleration, for stress loads. For managing passengers, for ass-kissing. If you don’t respect your equations, maybe you don’t belong at the Master Captain’s table.”
“I agree with you.” Their drinks rose from the table’s center. Claiming his rain-of-tears, Pamir said, “I don’t deserve anything, and we can move to other business.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. You wanted to see me, as I recall.”
“And I can’t linger,” she complained. “I’m greeting a shuttle full of Y’uy’uy. Have you heard of them?” No, he hadn’t. “A social species, and tiny. A couple million of them are arriving, and if I don’t wiggle my fingers at each one, in the proper way, the entire nest is my enemy.”
As if practicing, Washen curled and uncurled a ring finger.
Pamir looked across the lounge, through the long transparent wall. The shallow black surf sloshed against the rocks below. Poisonous to earth life, alien plankton were rapidly consuming the false sunlight and water, and a host of little fish were growing swiftly. In another few months the lake would become a stiff coal-colored gelatin—the only food for the ten thousand Bloom onboard. Arriving in force, the Bloom would throw a celebration, and the lounge would be jammed with onlookers, watching their fellow passengers chop out feasts and snacks and the trapped succulent fish.
“But hey,” said Washen. “Speaking of newcomers…”
Pamir turned. Puzzled, alert.
“I found one for you. And he fits most of your parameters.” With a sweeping, overly dramatic gesture, she handed him a memo chip. “The odd bioscan. A very peculiar ship. And a port of origin that doesn’t quite seem real.”
The chip was a giant snowflake worn simple by countless hands, its whiteness magnified by the tired black stone of the tabletop.
“A peculiar ship,” she repeated. “Wooden, but not like any wood I know. He sold it for scrap. I’ve got the recyke reports. How many times have you seen a starship built from lumber?”
Pamir reached across the table, making a fist. “Who is he?”
“Don’t you know? You asked me to watch for him.”
Loudly, he asked, “How long has he been here?”
“You should see yourself,” said Washen. Then she laughed, shaking her drink and inhaling the gases that rose out of solution. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite that face on you.”
“When did this passenger come onboard?”
She tapped the snowflake, as if answers would spring forth. “More than a week ago. But I was too busy to handle the case, and you were off-duty somewhere, and besides, you never offered any reason to sound alarms.”
Pamir wrestled with adrenaline, feigning self-control.
“Wood,” she repeated. “Tough, weird wood. Cellulose laced with non-terran proteins configured for strength and durability. Except it doesn’t give much protection from radiation, or from impacts, and I’m surprised how fit the passenger seemed to be.”
“An organic ship,” he said.
“In places, yes.” She sniffed her drink again, enjoying the temporary corrosion of her nervous system. “The engines had metals where you need them, and ceramics, and the guts were good-enough diamond. But there wasn’t anything like hyperfiber, and the scrap value was nil.”
“A starfaring tree.” Pamir consumed the rest of his drink, barely tasting the salt, wishing all the while that this was some enormous, curious coincidence.
“I did some research for you.” Again she tapped the chip. “There’s a report of another ship like this one. Organic and sloppy. But it didn’t stay with us, as it happens.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“A sketchy, misfiled report.” Washen was staring at a point behind his eyes. “I don’t even know who wrote it.”
Pamir lifted his cap with both hands, placing it on his head, at an angle calculated to give the passengers confidence in him. At least the human passengers. Again, he said, “Thank you.”
“The man calls himself Samara.”
He barely heard the voice.
“Human, but not completely. From a colony world that exists, only we didn’t pass within five hundred light-years of it.”
What should happen next? It was centuries since Pamir had considered this scenario, and he felt lost, cold and ill, fears building between those gaping weaknesses.
“Samara qualified as primarily-human.” Another tap at the snowflake. “If you need his address, it’s waiting for you.”
Washen was a close friend, and she was doing him a great favor. Yet he was so consumed by his troubles that when he looked at the captain he felt anger—a blistering, sloppy, unfair rage. He wanted to ask how such a creature could get onboard. But instead of speaking, he tugged on the violet-black epaulets, thick fingers struggling to remain gentle.
“Some advice,” said Washen. “Come to the Master Captain’s dinner this year. Bring your singing weeds, call them calculations, and smile until your face hurts.” She showed him a gracious smile and two flirtatious winks, all framed by her mirrored uniform and cap. “Sit beside me, if you’d like.”
Pamir could think of nothing to say except, “I don’t raise llano-vibra anymore.”
“No?”
“Not in ages,” he said, claiming the memo chip and again looking through the transparent wall, gazing at the strange black lake while struggling not to think about death.
2
The Great Ship was safer than any other starship, but it was also far larger and substantially more complicated. There were fine districts and wondrous, important neighborhoods, and there were poverty wards famous for crime and novel forms of madness. Samara had taken an apartment in the most notorious ward. Pamir learned that from the chip and from his own research. Yet the newcomer was a relatively wealthy passenger, offering more than just a wooden starship to the local markets. He had brought vials of giant molecules, intricate and irreproducible, considered high art by various species. He also brought the mummified feet of another alien, collected on the home world and sold to grieving, grateful relatives. Plus Samara was the reputed author of a billion-word novel meant for the AI readers, already purchased by an onboard publisher and released to lukewarm reviews.
Whatever Samara was, he was distinctive.
A minor captain had interviewed him. His humanness was a central question. There were oddities in the bioscans, and shown the details, Samara nodded and smiled, tiny teeth flashing in a small, thin-lipped mouth. Then a voice more suitable for a bird said, “Yes, yes. A consequence of my home world. But those bodies are inert. Take all you want and watch them. Feed them. Torture them, if you wish. Nothing will happen because they aren’t alive.” The bodies were organic, convoluted and holding a passing resemblance to mitochondria. “They’re produced by the natives. They get inside us, and there’s no ridding of them. Unless you want to endure a cell-by-cell scrubbing, which I’m willing to do if you believe this grit might pose some kind of threat…”
Samara was small and almost pretty, attempting charm but not quite succeeding. If Pamir had been the interviewer, knowing nothing, he would have pressed the man for more information. Why leave the home world? What was his ulti
mate destination? There was ample reason to delay, pulling new tests from the bottomless bag that every captain possessed. But that little captain had avoided any ugliness, moving toward short-term issues. “How will you live here?” he had asked.
“How will I pay my way?” A songful laugh. A human hand swept through hair that seemed blond until it was touched, then for an instant, at certain angles, became a bright golden-green. “I’ve done my research, and believe me, I plan to live cheaply. Without complaints.”
Captains like to hear promises of compliance.
“You’ve seen my ship,” said Samara, using another grin. “To have come this far, and in such a vessel…doesn’t that prove sincerity?”
It proved desperation, but the interviewer had seemed impressed with the logic, nodding and smiling in turn.
Pamir made a note to reprimand the officer, if he could do so without being noticed by anyone higher up. Then he hunted through every shipboard record in his grasp. A thousand-year passage was paid off. The cramped apartment was rented and then left empty. After a long search of security digitals—and several turf wars with security troops—Pamir pieced together portions of the man’s last few days, including a talkative lunch with a familiar face.
“Perri,” said the captain. “Out of everyone, and he finds you.”
Several hours later, he was inside a wealthy human district, at the front door of what passed for a modest local apartment. Long ago, Perri had been a member of the crew, but he quit for the high life of a gigolo, eventually fooling an ancient lady into marriage.
The wife met him at the door.
Pamir had several excuses at the ready, but Quee Lee just smiled at the unexpected captain. “You probably need to see my husband. Am I right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
In the same moment, she and the apartment called for Perri. But there were hectares of rooms behind her, and she had enough time to invite him into the stone hallway, and reading his public nexus, she said his name. She said, “The Pamir Mountains are one of the earth’s backbones. Unless they were torn down since I left, I suppose.”
“I wouldn’t know, ma’am.”
“I climbed several of the peaks, but that was ages ago.”
The captain didn’t know what to say.
“I am such a humdrum creature anymore,” she said, amusement working within the words.
Pamir was thankful when the husband finally appeared, and the wife kissed him and whispered a few words before retreating out of sight.
With the natural smile of a charmer, Perri asked, “What do you want, friend?”
Friend was an insult. Showing a digital, he said, “Samara.”
“I remember his name.”
Pamir said, “You ate with him.”
“I guess I remember that too.” Something here was quite funny. “And you want to know what we talked about.”
“I know what you said.”
The gigolo was weighing Pamir’s mood.
“Samara learned that you are a traveler, that you know the Ship better than anyone else.”
“Not better than the captains, of course.”
Pamir ignored that noise. A lip-reading AI had prepared the transcript, and while parts of conversation were invisible, the gist of the luncheon was easy to see. “Samara asked about secret places, private wildernesses, and any quiet location that never quite makes the public maps.”
“The intriguing rooms in our house, yes.”
“What does he want?” asked the captain.
“He seems to be a traveler in his own right. But he didn’t name any specific goal.”
“Can you guess?”
“Conjectures are light. It doesn’t take much to throw one.”
“Where does our sewage go?”
“Down,” said Perri, laughing quietly and shrugging his shoulders. “Yes, he asked about sewage, and you already know that.”
“There are treatment plants, and they are off-limits. Just a jumble of machines, you told him.” Pamir was breathing in ragged, wet gulps. “Big facilities as old as the Ship, doing nothing but scrubbing the water clean. And there’s nothing interesting to see in any of them.”
Perri leaned against the polished stone wall, waiting.
“You told him there’s no point in visiting the treatment plants, then you claimed that you’ve never been there.”
“Because I haven’t been.”
Pamir took him by the throat, squeezing for emphasis. It was an ancient gesture, useless today and yet woven into every human’s innate fear. A choking hand remained an effective crudeness, and so did a low angry voice. “Lie and I’ll hurt you,” said the captain. “If I don’t believe you, I will ruin you.”
“I didn’t tell him.” Perri’s face was red and wet. With both hands, he tried to punish Pamir’s forearm. “I told him…nothing…!”
“Because you knew I was watching.”
Perri gave him a hard kick to the groin.
The pain was savage, and it was nothing. “You met with him later, in secret,” said Pamir. “That’s when you told Samara what you saw.”
“I saw nothing,” the smaller man said. “And we didn’t meet later. I saw that man just once.” Then Perri wrapped both of his hands around Pamir’s choking hand, and a sly odd and almost mischievous look came into his bulging eyes. He started to squeeze, adding to the pressure, and a major bone inside his neck shattered with a quiet snap.
Pamir let go.
Leaning against the wall, Perri felt his neck healing, and he coughed in pain and then in less pain. Blood came up with the spit. Both men looked at the mess on the back of the small hand, and then a thick, slow voice said, “I promised not to tell, and I didn’t tell, and I wouldn’t know what to say if I had the urge, since I barely saw the place.”
“Samara offered to pay you handsomely.”
The gigolo charms had been set aside. Lucid fury filled the eyes. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but I don’t need money. And I paid for my own damn lunch.” Massaging the broken neck, he said, “Besides, I like Samara even less than I like you.”
Pamir was surprised. “Oh, what don’t you like?”
No easy answer was waiting. “There’s something wrong with Samara, and there’s not enough that’s right.” The coughed-up blood was retreating into his skin. He swallowed twice, the pain lessening, and then he said, “The entity is deep water. Whatever he is, he’s mostly hidden.”
Pamir’s surprise had doubled. He believed the man, despite all odds, and he felt utter pleasure in the fact that two people didn’t approve of this new immigrant.
“Darling?”
The hapless wife was emerging from the shadows, walking with a deliberative gait, looking at Pamir while she asked her husband:
“Are you all right, sweetness?”
Another cough, and Perri said, “Absolutely fine.”
Quee Lee stopped just short of them. She was small and pretty, and the pretty face was set. “Sir, I think you should leave now.” With a chilled voice, she said, “Captain or not, I want you out of my home.”
As if Pamir was the villain here.
3
Captain had their preferred districts, usually just beneath the hull, and in this one slender case, Pamir had obeyed the tradition. His apartment was relatively small, set away from the traffic areas, in a portion of a catacomb that nobody entered by mistake. The private realm had several hundred meters of tunnels, rooms of a hectare or two, and a whirlpool pond with bronze-colored orfes swimming endlessly in the spinning water, beds of blackpot mussels fixed to the bottom, preventing erosion for the last ten thousand years.
Before the mussels, Pamir had used hypersaline corals and wise-squids from Karta’s World.
Before corals, he just let the water gnaw at its basin, sculpting the greenish olivine however it wished.
Staring at the unkempt surroundings, the rare visitor might mention that cleaning your home wasn’t a crime. After all, nobody knew who the Ship’
s builders had been, and what if one of them returned suddenly: Wouldn’t you want to keep their property presentable?
But Pamir relished the slumping, oxidized walls. He loved the palpable sense of titanic age, the possibilities of history. In the early centuries, he had spent every off-duty moment inside his largest room, staring a wall covered with crosshatched scratches, trying to decipher meanings that might not exist. It was another delicious, unanswerable mystery inside a machine with more mysteries than inhabitants. In the same room, Pamir began culturing the delicate llano-vibra plants, mastering their byzantine genetics to create songs of fragile, surreal beauty. But then the hobby drifted away from him, and the plants went wild, crossbreeding at will while losing all sense of pitch and rhythm.
A harsh, incoherent wail rose when Pamir entered the room. Barely noticing, he halfway ran through the tangled growth, bending to touch a certain knob of damp green stone.
The floor beside him neatly dropped out of sight.
The cap-car waiting below didn’t exist, and it used nothing but energy stolen from nonessential machinery. The hatch sealed with a hiss. As Pamir sat, the car accelerated, taking him through a network of empty tubes and passageways, never repeating any previous course.
Sensors watched for any fool trying to follow him.
Nobody ever did.
But he imagined Samara hunched over an identical panel, watching him with a cool, amoral malevolence. The image made him anxious when he was awake, and then its way into his dreams while he slept; and only in the last thousand kilometer fall could Pamir genuinely rest, shaken awake with the berthing.
Pamir undressed, his uniform left hanging in the car. Stepping through a second camouflaged doorway, he was attacked by a screaming mist, gray and toxic. Hands to the mouth, he pushed ahead slowly, eyes tearing and sinuses catching fire, his naked feet splashing through caustic puddles and over a slope of badly eroded, diamond-sharp hyperfibers—a last line of defense to dissuade the curious and the feeble.
A thousand sewers fed into the district’s purification center. Spent water, industrial wastes and the byproducts of alien biologies came roaring from orifices on all sides. The nearest sewer flowed from human places, and it was a genuine river, swift and familiarly rancid, beaten white by the ceaseless turbulence.
