by Robert Reed
Physically, Pamir was his father’s child. But in temperament and emotions, he was very much like his mother.
Bracing himself, the boy asked, “Am I crazy like her?”
“No.” The man shook his head. “You’ve got her temper and some of that knife-wit. And things that nobody’s found a name for. But those voices she hears belong to her. Alone. And those foolish ideas come straight out of her sickness.”
“Can she be helped?” the boy asked.
“Probably not. Assuming she’d want to be helped, that is…”
“But maybe someday…?”
“The sad, simple truth,” his father continued, “is that these tricks keeping us young also stop us from changing. Almost without exception. A sick mind, like any good healthy one, has key patterns locked into its ultracortex. Once there, nothing gets them out.”
Pamir nodded. Without fuss and remarkable little pain, he came to terms with his mother’s condition, accepting it as another one of life’s burdens. What bothered him more—what eventually kept the young man awake at night—was that persistent and toxic idea that a human being could live for so long and see so much, yet despite standing on all that experience, he still couldn’t change his simplest nature.
If that’s true, the boy realized, then we’re all doomed.
Forever.
Pamir’s world was desert and high desiccated mountains, oxygen-impoverished air and little seas laced with toxic lithium salts. Twenty million years ago, life was abundant, but an asteroid had murdered everything larger than a microbe. Given time, new multicellular life-forms would have evolved, just as they once managed to do on the ancient, pulverized Earth. But humans didn’t give the world that opportunity. In a few decades, the colonists had spread widely, immigrants and their children creating instant cities where there was nothing but salt and rock; every sea was scrubbed clean of its toxins, then stocked with slightly tweaked but otherwise ordinary examples of earthly life; and great blue aerogel clouds sucked up the potable water, then rainboys shepherded the clouds inland and squeezed them dry, bringing soft rains to new farms and the young green forests.
By the time he was thirty, Pamir had decided that his home was a dull place being made duller by the day.
Sometimes he would lie on a high ridge, the dusty pink sky darkening as night spread, revealing an even dustier mass of cold and distant stars. And he would lift his young hand, holding it up to the sky, dwarfing all those fierce little specks of light.
That’s where I want to be, he thought to himself.
There.
As soon as escape was possible, Pamir visited his mother, hungry to tell her that he was emigrating and would never see her again.
Mother’s house was beautiful in odd ways, like its owner. She lived inside an isolated, long-dead volcanic peak. The underground mansion had a contrived, utterly crazy majesty made even more chaotic because it was perpetually under construction. Robots and tailored apes kept the atmosphere full of dusts and curses. Every room was carved from soft rock, according to Mother’s volatile plans, and most of the hallways were empty volcanic tubes aligned according to a magmatic logic.
Mother distrusted sunlight. Windows and atriums were scarce. Instead, she decorated with thick carpets of perfumed compost and manure, synthesized at great cost and leavened with the spores of tailored fungi. Mushrooms became huge in that closed, damp air, leaking a weak light, ruddy and diffuse, from beneath their broad caps. Smaller fungi and puffballs and furlike species produced gold and bluish glows. To keep the forest in check, giant beetles wandered about like cattle. And to keep the beedes under control, dragonlike lizards slithered about in the damp darkness.
It took Pamir three full days to find his mother.
She wasn’t hiding. Not from him, or from anyone. But it had been nearly five years since his last visit, and the construction crews, following her explicit directions, had closed every hallway leading to her. There was no way in but a single narrow crevice that didn’t appear on anyone’s map.
“You look upset,” were Mother’s first words.
Pamir heard her before he saw her. Trudging through the glowing forest, he came around the massive stalk of a century-old deaths-mistress mushroom, finding himself staring at a two-headed dragon. A conjoined twin, and his mother’s favorite.
Mother sat on a tall wooden chair, pretending to hold a gold-chained leash. The dragon hissed with one mouth, while the other—on the head that Pamir had never trusted—tasted the air with a flame-colored tongue.
Tasting him.
Mother was ancient, and insane, yet she always managed to look more beautiful than mad. Pamir always assumed that’s how she could lure young men to become her husbands. She was small and paler than her fungi, except for a long thick mass of black hair that only made her paleness more obvious. The sharply pretty face smiled, but in a disapproving way. She reminded her son, “You don’t visit me often enough to be a real son. So you must be an apparition.”
He carefully said nothing.
The dragon took a sliding step forward, pulling the chain out of its mistress’s hands. Both mouths gave low, menacing hisses.
“They don’t remember you,” Mother warned.
Pamir said, “Listen to me.”
His rough voice gave away everything. The woman winced and said,’Oh, no. I don’t need any sour news today, thank you.”
“I’m going to leave.”
“But you just arrived!”
“On the next starship, Mother.”
“You’re cruel, saying that.”
“Wait till I do it. That should really hurt.”
Her chair was rotting, creaking beneath her, as she lifted herself up on her sticklike arms, not quite standing, breathing in deep regular gulps.
Finally, in pain, she asked, “Where are you going?”
“I don’t care.”
“That next ship is an old bomb-wagon. The Elassia! For someone who lived as a recluse, Mother seemed in touch with everything that happened on their world. “Wait ten years,” she suggested. “A Belter liner is coming, and it’s a nice new one.”
“No, Mother.”
The woman winced again, and moaned. Then she told her private voices, “Quiet,” before she closed her eyes and began to chant, managing a ragged version of a Whistleforth prayer.
Whistleforths were a neighboring species. Tiny creatures, rather dimwitted and superstitious. A few weak-willed humans believed that the Whistleforths could see into the future as well as the remote past. Using the proper rituals coupled with a pure spirit, any species could accomplish their magic. How many times had Pamir argued the subject with this crazy woman? She didn’t understand the alien’s logic. What those little beasts believed, more than anything, was that the past was as murky as the future, their chants working in both directions, and never particularly well.
Regardless, the woman muttered the potent phrases.
Then she stepped onto the bare black ground, and lifting her long skirt, she pissed between her feet, reading the pattern of the splatters.
Finally, with a forced drama and a strange, unexpected smile, she announced, “It’s a good thing.”
She told him, “Yes, you need to leave. Right away.”
Pamir was startled, but he fought to keep his mood hidden. Stepping forward, he opened his long arms, ready to offer the old woman a kiss and a long hug. He would never again come to the place, never again see the most important person in his life; the enormity of the moment made him deeply and astonishingly sad, and a real part of him wanted to do nothing but cry.
“It’s your destiny, that ship is.”
She said those words so earnestly, with such unalloyed conviction, that a part of Pamir couldn’t help but believe her.
“You must do this,” she proclaimed.The smile only grew brighter, and everything about that pale little face became crazier. “Promise me that you’ll leave now.”
It was a trap. She was setting a clumsy, stupi
d trick to grab his emotions.
But Pamir heard himself grunt, “I promise.”
Mother pretended pleasure, something in her big pale eyes conveying, of all things, an absurd, overwelling awe.
“Thank you,” she told him, kneeling before him, sinking into her own pee.
Her conjoined dragons hissed and took a step toward Pamir. And because he had always wanted to do it, he made a fist and swung at the head that he didn’t trust, snapping it back with a clean sharp thunk, then feeling the dull steady pain as a broken finger began to heal.
Again, softer this time. Mother chanted in that alien tongue.
“Why can’t you be normal?” was the last thing he ever said to the woman.
Then he turned and walked away, following his own footprints through the sickly-sweet, black-as-night manure.
There wasn’t such a creature as Immortality.
But modern life, infused with its technical wonders and medical prosperity, had a strength, a genuine stubbornness, that carried its citizens through disasters as well as simple indifference.
On three occasions in the next two thousands years, Pamir stepped as near to Death as possible, just enough of his soul coming out of the mayhem for his body to be recultured, his memories awakened, and his belligerent nature kept pure.
As the bomb-wagon dropped into orbit, a gift was delivered from his mother. A tidy sum was accompanied by an odd note claiming, “I chanted; I saw. This is precisely how much you will need. Of money.”
It wasn’t a fortune, which was why Pamir became an engineer’s apprentice. There wasn’t any salary with the post, but it meant a free-passage; what’s more, if one of the genuine engineers quit or died, an apprentice would be ready to step into the gap, already trained by the starship’s library and drilled numb by his superiors.
The lowest-ranking engineer was a harum-scarum -the human name for a humanoid species famous for its ugly moods.
Pamir decided that he wanted the alien’s job.
Knowing the dangers, he visited the creature’s large cabin, sat without asking permission and made his pitch. “First of all,” he remarked, “I’m a better engineer than you. Agreed?”
Silence. Meaning “agreed.”
“Second, the crew likes me. They prefer me to you in about every way. Am I right?” Another agreeable silence.
“And finally, I’ll pay you to resign.” He named a carefully calculated sum, then added, “You’ll be making enough. And at our next port, you’ll find a new crew that doesn’t care what a shitty pain you are.”
From his eating hole, the harum-scarum made a low, slightly wet sound.
From the other facial hole—the one that breathed and spoke—came a harsh squeal containing its blunt reply.
“Fuck your ape self,” said the translator.
“You are an idiot,” Pamir assured him.
The alien rose to his feet, towering over the large human.
“All right, fine,” Pamir conceded. “Give yourself a year to think, then I’ll make the same offer. With less money in the pot, next time.”
Insulting a harum-scarum brought revenge, without exception. But the suddenness and the scope of the attack took the young Pamir by surprise.
“A scuttlebug’s gone missing,” the Master Engineer reported. It was twelve hours later, and with a mischievous wink, she added, “Sounds like a good chore for you. Last we heard, it was down near the push-plate, somewhere near the navel.”
On better ships, scuttlebugs hunted for their own kind. But they could be expensive machines, and on an old bomb-wagon, they were normally in short supply. Squeezing into a lifesuit meant for a smaller man, then donning a second suit of hyperfiber and a satchel of secondhand tools, Pamir was ready for the chore. It was a three-kilometer drop to the stem, the last half kilometer accomplished on foot. The push-plate was a vast dish originally built from metal-ceramic alloys, but patched with diamond armors, then cheap-grade hyperfibers, as gaps and fractures developed over the centuries. Minimal, shock-resistant passageways allowed access. The plate itself shuddered beneath him—a blurring tremor caused by the constant detonation of small nukes. In that realm, a weak, unreliable man became claustrophobic, and his bored mind invented faces and voices to fill the drudgery. As much as anything, this duty was a test of character, and Pamir accepted the test without complaint, reminding himself that sooner or later he would have the power to send an apprentice down this same awful corridor.
The navel wasn’t set precisely at the plate’s center. A fat fraction of a kilometer across and perfectly round, it served no function whatsoever. A premature detonation had boiled away a great volume of armor, and since the navel was in the thickest portion of the plate, its repair could wait until the next overhaul.
A sputtering blue-white light greeted Pamir.
Pausing, he called up to the Master Engineer, who in turn contacted the Master Captain, requesting an engine shutdown while promising a minimal disruption. Passengers and crew were warned that the sluggish gee-forces were about to vanish. Command programs were unleashed. Then the nukes quit firing, and the quick blue-white light vanished, and in an instant, the plate grew perfectly still.
Pamir made his head and feet exchange places, then he moved to where the passageway’s roof had been blasted away, his boots holding fast to the scarred and blackened floor.
The scuttlebug was in the center of the blast crater, which was a strange place to be. Why would the machine wander out there?
It was dead. And worse than that, it was probably useless, too, and he might as well leave it there. But Pamir felt an obligation to be thorough, which was why he lifted his boots and used his squirt-pack, rocketing his way down the shallow crater while clumsy hands reached for the necessary tools that would pop off the machine’s head, letting him see if anything inside was salvageable.
Why he looked up, he was never sure.
Later, struggling to replay events, Pamir wondered if he had meant to look at their destination. The bomb-wagon was falling toward a K-class sun and its two young planets, both of which were being terraformed by human colonists. He must have tilted his head because he wanted a naked-eye look. He was a young man admiring his first new sun, and in turn, admiring a life sure to be long and filled with many exotic places… and that’s why he saw a flash of light, an unexpected nuke ascending… and that’s why he had just enough time to turn his massive self and aim for the passageway, dropping the tools in both hands as he ordered his squirt-pack to burn every gram of fuel in a fraction of an instant…
Pamir was flung back the way he had come.
Too soon, he thought he would escape unscathed, and wouldn’t he enjoy seeing the harum-scarum’s face now?
But his aim was wrong by half a meter, his left arm and shoulder clipping the blackened armor, his spinning body ricocheting against the opposite wall, precious momentum lost… and the nuke detonated with a fantastic light that chased after him, catching him too soon and obliterating very nearly everything…
What survived was the heavily armored helmet and a well-cooked, vaguely human skull. But the ship surgeon and onboard autodocs were relatively skilled—a consequence of the ship’s questionable safety record—and within three months, Pamir’s soul had been decanted into a new mind and a freshly grown body that was recognizable as his own.
As the starship pulled into a berth above the first new world, the Master Engineer slipped into the therapy chamber, watching Pamir finish a two-hour cycle of isometrics. Then quietly, with a mixture of scorn and curiosity, she told him, “Harum-scarums don’t appreciate bribes. Ever.”
Pamir nodded, vacuuming the oily sweat from his face and chest.
“You gave him no choice,” said the older, more cautious engineer. “According to his nature, the poor fellow had to seek vengeance.”
“I knew all that,” he replied. “I just didn’t expect a nuke up my ass.”
“What did you expect?”
“A simple fight.”
“And you thought you’d win?”
“No. I figured that I’d lose.” Then he laughed in a calm, grim fashion. “But I also figured that I’d survive. And the creature would have to give me his job.”
“But that’s my decision to make,” warned the Master.
Pamir didn’t blink.
His commander sighed heavily, gazing off in a random direction. “Your opponent’s gone,” she admitted. “Along with half of my staff. These terraformers are paying bonuses for good engineers, and bad ones, trying to make their lumps of rock livable.”
Pamir waited a moment, then asked, “So did I earn my post?”
The old woman had to nod. “But you could have done nothing,” she told him. “Nothing, and you would have gotten what you wanted anyway.”
“That’s two different things,” was his response.
“What do you mean?”
“Either you pay for something, or it’s charity,” he explained. “And I don’t care how long I live. Everything I get, I pay for. Or my hands won’t hold it.”
* * *
Buoyed by talent and discipline and a disinterest in better work, Pamir eventually rose to the position of Master Engineer.
In the next sixteen hundred years, the old ship underwent two rehabilitations. The final rehab stripped away its outdated bomb drive, a fusion drive installed in its place, complete with merry-go-round nozzles and antimatter spiking. They were running ten thousand colonists out to an Earth-class world. Ahead of them were the thick fringes of another sun’s Oort cloud. Oorts were lousy places for starships. Obstacles were too scarce to map, too common to ignore. But the risks were usually slight, and because of time and a fat debt riding with them, the Master Captain decided to cut through the fringes.
When the ship was rehabilitated, the old push-plate was stripped of its extra mass and bolstered with new grades of hyperfiber, and the whole clumsy apparatus was fastened to the nose. The plate absorbed dust impacts. Railguns obliterated pebbles and little snowballs, while the old bomb drive launched nukes at the largest obstacles, vaporizing them at what was hopefully a safe distance.
