Marrow m-1

by Robert Reed

  An engineer was necessary to oversee sudden, unexpected repairs of key systems. On most starships, the Master Engineer delegated the job. As a young man, Pamir might have had the stomach for that kind of bullying. But he had lived most of his life on this cranky ship, and he knew it better than anyone else. That’s why he dressed in a life-suit and armor, then walked up into the push-plate’s familiar passageways, living inside his suit for twenty-five lull days, half a dozen malfunctions cured because of his quick, timely work.

  Pamir never saw the incoming comet.

  His only warning was the rapid, almost panicked firing of railguns and nukes.Then the nukes quit launching when the target was too close, and with a mathematical clarity, Pamir realized that the impact was coming, and for no useful reason, he pulled himself into a ball, hands over his knees and a deep last breath filling his lungs- Then, blackness.

  More empty than any space, and infinitely colder.

  Everyone hovering around him was a stranger, and none wanted to tell him about the passengers, the crew, or the fate of his ship.

  Finally, a well-intentioned Eternitist minister let out the news. “You’re a fortunate, fortunate man,” he proclaimed, his smiling face matching his smiling, almost giddy voice. “Not only did you survive, dear man. But a ship of kind Belters found your remains inside that old push-plate.”

  Again, Pamir’s body was being decanted from almost nothing. Still unfinished and desperately weak, he was lying in a white hospital bed, inside a zero-gee habitat, a soft webbing strung over his naked body, bristling with sensors that tirelessly marked his steady progress.

  Despite his weakness, he reached for the minister.

  Thinking it was a gesture of need, the man tried to take the hand with his hands. But no, the hand slipped past and closed on the nearest shoulder, then yanked at the heavy black fabric of his robe. And with a voice too new to sound human, Pamir grunted, “What about… about the rest of them…?”

  With a blissful surety, the minister said, “Long, happy lives received their deserved rest. Which is precisely as it should be.”

  Pamir clamped his hand around the exposed neck. The minister tried removing the hand, and failed. “All of them died in a painless instant,” he croaked. “Without worry. Without the slightest suffering. Isn’t that the way you, in your time, would wish to die?”

  The hand tightened, then let up again. And with that new voice, Pamir said, “No,” as the newborn eyes gazed off into the distance, losing their focus. “I want suffering. I want worry. When you see Death—soon, I hope—I want you to tell It. I want the worst It has. The shittiest worst. I want it all the way till the miserable end…”

  Centuries had passed while Pamir’s body drifted between the stars. He found himself living in a thinly colonized region of human space, among scattered settlements reaching to the brink of the Milky Way. Only one event of consequence had occurred in his absence, and it was enormous. Pamir learned that an alien starship had been discovered between the galaxies. No one knew where it came from or why it was here. But every important world and species were marshaling resources to reach it and claim it for themselves.

  By simple luck, humans had seen it first. They had the jump. The Belter guild, vast in its reach and rich with experience, had opted to build a fleet of swift ships. And to get a lead on the other groups, the guild would launch its first ships before they were finished—small asteroids chosen for the proper mix of metals and carbonaceous goo and water ice, minimal tunnels cut through them, durable habitats built deep and safe, then engines and vast fuel tanks strapped to the raw exterior.

  Every engineer in the region had been put under contract by the Belters: for their know-how and their hands, and oftentimes, just to keep the talent pool dry, making life hard for their competitors.

  His deep-space experience meant that Pamir was included on the lead team.

  Rumors promised that some fraction of the team would be included on the great mission. At first, Pamir assumed that he would be invited to join the Belters, and that he would refuse. The alien ship was interesting enough, but this district was a virtual wilderness. A man with wealth and his own starship could visit dozens of alien worlds, none of which had ever seen a human face before. As adventures went, he believed that was the bigger one. And with that decided, Pamir believed his future was set.

  One early morning, he found himself floating inside a grimy, dust-choked tunnel, ignoring a heated discussion between architects and bolidologists. The precise angle of this very minor tunnel was the subject, and Pamir couldn’t have been more bored. Prayers for a distraction, any distraction, were answered suddenly. A hundred captains appeared, drifting along in a loose chain, each having just arrived from places deep inside the Milky Way and all wearing the new mirrorlike uniforms that had been invented specifically for this one great mission.

  Leading the group were a pair of Belter women—one tall and the other taller, the latter rumored to be the front-runner for the Master Captain’s chair.

  Her companion, knife-faced and magisterial, noticed Pamir drifting by himself.

  She nodded in his direction, then said, “This one, madam. He’s the gentleman who survived the Elassias disaster.”

  Centuries had passed, yet they still remembered.

  Pamir returned the nod, saying nothing. And the debate about the tunnel’s angle came to an abrupt, embarrassing halt.

  The future Master smiled, then decided that this moment required a graceless touch.

  “I’d like to have this one with us,” she proclaimed. “He’d bring us luck!”

  But the knife-faced captain had to disagree. “The luck was his, madam. He didn’t share it with his ship.”

  Pamir felt an easy hatred for the woman. Peering through the black dust, he read her nameplate. Miocene, he read. What did he know about her?

  She was young, said the rumors. And ambitious like no one else.

  The future Master winked at her lowly engineer. “Are you interested, darling? Would you like to leave the galaxy behind?”

  He thought, Thank you, no.

  But there was something about the circumstances, about the drifting dust and the two captains and this talk about luck… all of those factors, and more, combined inside him, making him say, “Yes, I want to go. Absolutely.”

  “Good,” the giant woman replied. “We can use all the luck we can put on board. Even if you hoard it for yourself.”

  It was a joke, and a bad one. Pamir couldn’t make himself laugh, even though the other captains and architects and rock experts were giggling themselves sick.

  The only other person unmoved was Miocene.

  “Who goes,” she reminded everyone, “are the people who deserve to go. Nobody else. Since our ship is going to be built on the way, without anyone’s help, we haven’t space or the patience for those who aren’t the very best.”

  In that instant, Pamir realized that he had made the right choice; he wanted nothing but to be part of this grand mission. For the next year, he worked without complaint, never fighting with commanders, and leading his little teams with a quiet competence. But as the deadline approached, an uneasiness took hold. Disquiet evolved into a massive black dread. Pamir knew exactly what he was. He was a good engineer, and nothing more. The men and women around him cared more for machinery than people. They told jokes about fusion engines and gossiped about each other’s designs, and their best friends were machines. A few engineers openly and happily lived with robots of their own design, their physical forms doctored only to a point, their machineness obvious under the warm rubber glands and those worshipful, doll-like faces.

  When the final roster was released, dread turned to resignation.

  But Pamir went through the ritual of hunting for his name, and despite knowing better, he felt a numbing surprise not to see “Pamir” on that list.

  Surprise descended into a low-grade anger made worse by two days and nights of strong drink and the ingestion of several pot
ent drugs. In his altered haze, revenge seemed like a sweet possibility. With a harum-scarum’s logic, Pamir fashioned a weapon from a laser drill, cutting off the safeties and retiming its frequencies. Then with the laser dismantled and hidden, Pamir drifted past the security troops, entering the half-born starship, thinking of Miocene when he muttered to himself, “I’ll show her some luck.”

  The captains already lived on board. Maybe Pamir meant to injure them, or worse. But once the possibility of revenge became the reality, his anger dissolved into a pure, unalloyed self-loathing.

  He had never felt this way.

  It was the drugs in his system; he wanted to believe nothing else. But if anything, those chemicals were only flattening his emotions, distorting all reason, forcing him to keep searching for his pain’s watershed.

  Luckier, more talented engineers were working in the main habitats.

  Pamir crept up a long dead-end shaft.

  At the end of its voyage, this starship would be among the finest ever built by human hands and human minds. But not his hands, he knew. Inside that dark, choking hole, he discovered that he didn’t care about this ship. All that mattered was the ship. That dead relic that was plummeting from nowhere, heading straight for him…!

  Maybe it was the drugs, or the despair. Or maybe it was exactly as it seemed to him just then. But the morions of his life—leaving home when he did; traveling with the Elassia, then as a corpse; and the remarkable good luck that caused him to be found—these unlikely events suddenly looked like Fate and Grand Design. Every important event in his life, and the tiny ones, had occurred in order to put him here, hunkering down in this unseemly place, and in that drunken, drugged, and self-possessed state, nothing seemed more obvious to Pamir than his personal destiny.

  He had to find some means of staying on board.

  But a stowaway couldn’t stay hidden for long. Not for a century, much less for thousands of years.

  The only solution was obvious; it was inevitable.

  Few other men could have done what Pamir did next. To a human given thousands and perhaps millions of years of uninterrupted life, the idea of placing such a treasure in mortal danger was unthinkable.

  But Pamir had died before.

  Twice.

  Not only did he power up the laser, but his hands were steady as stone. He found himself growing happier by the moment, by the breath. He carefully positioned his body at the back of the cramped tunnel, taking time to judge how the tarlike carbonaceous crap would melt and flow around his incinerated corpse, and how its blackness would merge and conceal his own.

  In the end, for a slender instant, he felt afraid.

  He wasn’t a singing man. But waiting for the laser to charge, then fire, he heard his own rough voice pushing its way through an old Whistleforth melody that, if memory served, his mother used to sing to him, and to her dear two-headed dragon.

  “All of the universe,” she would sing, “and I am the only one.

  “All of Creation, and there’s only this one of me. “All of Everything, and what I am now will never come again.

  “With every step I change. ‘With every step, I die.

  “Always and forever, here, here, here, I be…!”

  Twenty-nine

  Pamir had never seen the Master’s station in such turmoil.

  Demon doors were at full strength, armored hatches sealed and locked. Brigades of security troops wore imposing weapons and bullying faces. An infectious, intoxicating paranoia hung in the bright damp air. Pamir was interrogated by two captains and a Submaster. How many searches of his body and uniform were carried out discreetly, he couldn’t say. He was asked point-blank about Washen and Miocene. What had he seen? What had he heard? And what, if anything, had he said to their missing officers? He volunteered all of it, no detail too mundane. Then in a by-the-way tone, he confessed that a fat twenty seconds had passed before he contacted the Master, informing her that a pair of ghosts had appeared to him, and learning that those same apparitions had spoken to her first.

  “They may be dead,” he offered, “but they still respect the pecking order.”

  Pamir was asked about his route to the ship’s bridge, his mode of transportation, and whether he had seen anything even a little bit peculiar.

  No journey through the ship, no matter how brief, lacked for oddities. Pamir described watching a pair of blue-necked ruffians copulating in plain view, and seeing a school of Hackaback squids that had gotten their rolling bubble caught in a shop’s doorway, and mentioned that while his priority cap-car approached the ship’s bridge, he had spotted a lone human male wearing nothing but a simple handwritten placard that declared:

  The End Is Here!

  Each interrogator recorded every oddity. Later, their staffs would rank these events by presumed importance, and where necessary, investigate.

  It was a magnificent, spellbinding waste of minds and time.

  The last hatch was opened, and Pamir stepped onto the station itself. And AI staffer glared at him through a rubber face, then with a jittery glee said, “Finally’ It turned all of itself but its face and shouted, “Follow me! At a run!”

  Pamir sprinted the length of the station.

  The ship’s administrative center was three kilometers long and half as wide, great arches of green olivine overhead, a webwork dangling from the ceiling, captains and their assistants, human and otherwise, clinging to their work stations, chattering in the station’s compressed dialect. They were talking about the missing captains. Pamir heard noise about this sweep and that sweep, all deep inside the ship. Security teams had just finished, and new sweeps were to commence, and when the humans paused to breathe, the AIs continued talking in their own cluttering tongues, manipulating oceans of warm data to find anything that could be confused for a useful pattern.

  Ghosts make a pair of holocalls, and look at the mayhem it brings.

  The rubber face inflated as they covered the last hundred meters, and the AI warned, “She wants honesty today. Nothing but.”

  Normally, the Master didn’t approve of too much truth-telling. But Pamir took a deep breath, then said, “Don’t worry.”

  “But that’s my job,” the AI replied, wounded now. “Worryis.”

  They pulled up in front of the Master’s quarters. Pamir removed his cap and let his uniform straighten and clean itself of sweat and grime. Then after a calming gasp, he stepped up to the hyperfiber door, and it pulled open, exposing several dozen security generals—men and women cloaked in armored black uniforms, each of their professionally fierce faces regarding the newcomer with a mixture of mistrust and practiced disgust.

  In their minds, Pamir would always be the traitor: the treacherous captain who had forced their Master into granting him a full pardon, complete with his old, much dishonored rank.

  Towering over her generals, the Master stared in Pamir’s general direction, wide brown eyes seemingly lost. Then she closed her eyes and waved both arms, telling everyone else, “For now, there’s nothing. No one and nothing. But keep searching, and report everything immediately. Am I understood?”

  “Yes, madam,” said thirty bowing faces.

  In an instant, it was just the two of them, and a thousand hidden AIs, and a multitude of simple instinct machines.

  The Master’s quarters were smaller than most. Even Pamir’s apartment seemed spacious by comparison. She required only half a hectare divided into a multitude of little rooms, each decorated with the blandest of living rugs and wall hangings of no artistic worth and potted jungles composed of standard terran species and the jungle-colored furnishings intended for nothing but the uninspired comfort of her visitors.

  The Master dominated every room, which was the way she wanted it. She loomed over Pamir now, and from all the possible expressions to show him, she decided on a wide warm smile ending just short of flirtatious.

  The smile took him by surprise.

  Then a warm voice said, “Pamir,” with fondness.


  But he hid his surprise, giving the customary bow and saying, “Madam,” while staring at her long, long feet, bare and fleshy-gold, and the snowy marble floor in which those same feet had worn soft ruts over the course of their voyage.

  “How may I help you?” he inquired. Then again, “Madam.”

  “I’ve studied your account of events,” she told him. “Excellent, thorough work. As usual. I’m sure you left nothing out.”

  “Nothing.” He looked at her uniform, then at the reflection of his own puzzled face. “Have you found either of them, madam?”

  “No.”

  Would she tell him if she had?

  “No,” she repeated, “and I’m beginning to believe that there’s nobody to find. At least not among my missing captains.”

  He blinked, considering those words.

  “So it wasn’t Washen who spoke to us…”

  “It was, I suppose, someone’s idea of a wicked joke.” She wasn’t smiling at Pamir so much as she was smiling at that simple notion. It was a reassuring possibility, and in its contrived fashion, almost rational. “Holoprojections. Synthetic personalities. We’ve traced the source to a certain waystation that was destroyed moments later. Obviously in order to give this fiction even greater credibility.”

  Pamir waited for a moment, then said, “You’re wrong. Madam.”

  She watched him, waiting.

  “I saw Washen,” he assured. “I recognized her, but she had definitely changed. The smokey-colored skin, and that crude uniform of hers—”

  “I remember how about both of them looked. Yes, thank you.”

  “Besides,” he continued, “why would any person, or alien, or whoever—”

  “Fake her and Miocene’s reappearance?”

  The Master was playing one of her games. What she believed was secondary to what she wanted from Pamir, and her wishes would be revealed only at her convenience. Or perhaps, never.