by Robert Reed
With a worried hopefulness, Pamir slipped inside the vast chamber. The original recycling machinery was now augmented with a forest of tailored fungi—a scene that couldn’t help but remind the captain of his mother’s long ago home. Mushrooms towered overhead, feasting on the waste of a thousand species. A village of low huts and smoky fires was exactly where he expected to find it—a human colony not on any map, official or otherwise. Slowly and carefully, he approached the nearest hut, and after a good deep breath, he stepped out and smiled at the woman standing in the open doorway.
He recognized the face. Without doubt, she resembled a one-time engineer who had helped build the Belters’ starship, then later joined the captains’ ranks.
“Aasleen?” he asked, stopping at a throw’s distance.
The face was mostly unchanged, yes: a rich lustrous black over smooth, elegant features, with a radiant yellowy-white smile. Her smile was very much the same, too. The longer Pamir stared at the apparition, the more certain he felt.
She said, “Hello,” quietly, almost too quietly to be heard.
“I’m Pamir,” he blurted. “Remember me, Aasleen?”
“Always,” she replied, and the smile brightened.
Her voice was too soft and too slow. It wasn’t the right voice, yet what if some creature had mutilated her in some elaborate fashion…? With each word, the voice grew a little closer to what he remembered, to what he expected. Pamir found himself enjoying this illusion, stepping closer and watching as the face continued to change, evolving until it was very much the ex-lover’s face.
He asked, “What are you thinking, Aasleen?”
Her mouth opened, but no sound emerged.
“Do you know how you got here?” He stepped even closer, smiling as he repeated the question. “Do you know how?”
“I do,” she lied. “Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“By accident,” she replied. “That’s what it had to be.”
Pamir reached for her face, and when she tried to back away, he said, “No. Let me.” Then his wide hand passed through a projection of light and ionized dust. The fungus hut and the fires were equally unreal. This wasn’t a community, it was an entertainment. Someone had thrown away their empathic AI, probably in the morning shit, and somehow it had survived the fall and the sterilization procedures, eventually landing in the goo beneath his feet.
Pamir left the entertainment where he found it, unmapped.
He abandoned the search zone, traveling halfway around the ship to a place that would mean plenty to Washen and Aasleen. He climbed inside the antimatter tank where the Phoenixes once lived. As he expected, the facility was empty. Utterly clean and empty. Not even one of Washen’s ghosts was waiting for him. Standing at the bottom, on a floor of slick, ageless hyperfiber, Pamir found himself staring up at the vastness, the tank making him feel tiny even as a knowing part of him warned that this was nothing, that the ship dwarfed this little cylinder, and the universe dwarfed the ship, and all these grand designs and silver wonders were nothing set against the endless reaches through which everything soared.
Eighteen years and three weeks had been invested in a careful, thorough search for the captains, and nothing had come of it.
Nothing.
Out of simple habit, Pamir referred to his original list of searchable sites, each site carefully deleted over the years, tired eyes tracking down to that final odd word:
“leech.”
This would be the last place he ever looked. Years of labor and hope had been wasted, nothing learned but that nothing wanted to be learned. Making the long fall to the alien habitat, Pamir decided that Washen and Aasleen, and Miocene, weren’t waiting around any proverbial curve. He could suddenly believe those theories that the Master held close to her heart. Another species had hired away her best captains, or more likely, kidnapped them. Either way, they were off the ship, and lost. And Washen’s mysterious reappearance was someone’s peculiar joke, and the Master was cunning-wise not to let herself be distracted by a sick, misguided humor.
The leech would be a suitable end, he decided.
As he stepped out of the hub, out into that planar grayness, Pamir nearly dismissed the site out of hand. Washen would never remain here. Not for a year, much less for several millennia. Already feeling his mind eroding, his will and heart deflating with every little breath, Pamir was quite sure that no other captain would willingly live inside this two-dimensional realm.
Two steps, and he wanted to run away.
Halting, Pamir took a deep breath, then made certain that the hub’s lone doorway was locked open. Then he knelt and opened a sack of tiny scuttle-bugs and dog-noses and peregrine-eyes.
Set loose, the sensors fanned out along two dimensions.
With access to certain secure files, Pamir asked for background on the leech. What was given him was sketchy, unyielding. The exophobes had lived in this intentionally bland habitat for six hundred years, then the entire species had disembarked, their vessel carrying them off into a molecular dust cloud that had long since been left behind.
The leech were gone before the captains vanished.
“Good-bye,” he whispered. Then he lifted his head, his voice magnified by the floor and ceiling, that single word racing out in a perfect circle that ended with the distant round wall, then returned to him again, loud and deep and mutated into a stranger’s voice.
“Good-bye,” the room shouted at him.
As soon as I can, he thought. The moment I am done.
The probes found anomalies.
They always did; nothing about their alarms was unexpected.
Pamir constructed a map of the anomalies, checked for patterns, then began walking in a sweeping pattern, examining each in turn. Nothing was large enough to see with the naked eye. Most of the oddities were dried flakes of human skin. But what struck Pamir as peculiar, even remarkable, was that barely a dozen flakes were waiting to be found. If humans had wandered into this place, wouldn’t they have left a good deal more tissue? Old tissue, when he measured the decay. Abused to where their genetic markers couldn’t be read. And there wasn’t any bacteria clinging to the flakes, either. None of that benign, immortal stuff that had ridden humanity into space.
Cleansing agents or microchines had scrubbed this place to the brink of sterility. Which wasn’t too unlikely. This was an alien home, and its human trespassers could have been mannerly.
Could have been.
One more purple light showed on the map, nestled near the wall.
It was a twist of incinerated flesh. Submerged inside the plastic floor, it must have gone unnoticed by the trespassers. But a scuttlebug hadn’t any trouble finding it, and with its guidance, Pamir used a laser drill, extracting the blackened finger-sized treasure, then inserting it into his field lab.
Quietly, patiently, the gray floor started to patch its fresh hole.
Nearly a kilo of living flesh had been charred down to almost nothing. There were genetic markers, though not enough to match against any of the missing captains. But the caramelized flesh implied a homicidal violence, which offered another reason to explain why visitors might try to cover their traces.
Pamir watched the floor grow flat and slick again, then he measured the gray plastic, carefully mapping a network of fine, almost invisible scars. This tiny portion of the habitat had been damaged. Perhaps recently. The floor had scars, as did the ceiling and the thick gray wall. Some kind of machine had been destroyed here. Pamir found a thin taste of metals inside the smart hydrocarbons. Explosions and lasers had riddled this place. He could make out where determined hands had chiseled out anything that would constitute a clue, the floor healing and healing again, struggling to hold its seal while another force, just as relentless, struggled to erase its crime.
Pamir was sweating, thinking again of ghosts.
What now?
Sitting on an ancient pillow, he turned a full circle, noticing the scuttlebug with its face pressed agai
nst the patched wall.
“Already looked there,” Pamir told it.
But the bug refused to move.
Pamir rose, nearly bumping his head on the ceiling. Walking toward the wall, he asked, “What is it?”
In many species, perhaps even in ancient humans, language evolved as a tool to speak with the dead. Since the living world can read your face and body, only ghosts require those simple first words.
Whose theory was it?
Pamir was trying to remember, thinking of nothing else when he knelt beside the scuttlebug and tapped into its data. Buried deep in the wall—closer to the cold vacuum than to him—was a single metal object. It was round and smooth, and as far as he could see, it couldn’t be more simple.
It’s nothing, thought Pamir. Nothing.
But he used a laser, carving a narrow hole, then widening it enough for the bug to scramble in, then scramble out again.
The artifact was fashioned from dirty silver, and the laser had left it too hot to hold. Pamir set it on top of the bug and ate a small meal of dried whiskey and sweetened coelacanth. Then he examined the artifacts hinge and its crude latch, using his eyes and fingers. Whatever happened here, the object had been damaged. X-rays showed him a primitive network of gears and empty space. Removing one of the bug’s limbs, he used it as a prick, finally triggering the battered latch. Then as Pamir carefully lifted the lid, the hinge shattered and the lid fell between his long feet, and he stared at the clock’s face, archaic and very simple and wondrously strange.
A crude battery had run itself dry.
The elegant black hands were frozen in place. A dial showed what might be a date. 4611.330, Pamir read. And his heart paused for a long, long moment.
Was it some sort of luddite prop?
Or a child’s toy?
Whatever it was, it had delicate, carefully forged metal workings. Pamir could see the wear of fingers on the bottom and edges of the silver case. As an experiment, he held the clock in his hand, trying to imagine its vanished owner. Then he turned and started toward the wall, and by accident, he kicked the broken lid across the slick gray floor.
The lid lodged beneath one of the hard pillows.
To the ghosts, Pamir said, “It’s mine.”
He knelt and reached under the pillow, pulling out that heavy piece of silver and stronger, more enduring metals, and for a moment, he stared at the top of it, the lid polished and gray as the floor, yet anything but bland. Then as an afterthought, he flipped it over and saw the scratches. No, they were too regular to be scratches. Turning the lid like the hands of a clock, he brought the marks around until they revealed themselves to be letters engraved into the silver by means that humans hadn’t used for aeons.
He read the words to himself.
Then to the ghosts, he read them aloud.
“A piece of the sky. To Washen. From your devoted grandchildren.”
And for a long, long moment, it seemed to Pamir as if the vastness of the room were filled with the echoing beats of his heart.
Thirty-two
The Master whispered a secret command, and an armada of sensor-encrusted robots were dispatched to the leech habitat, hunting for Washen and the other missing captains along every reasonable avenue.
The robots found nothing, and Pamir realized that nothing about this search would ever be obvious or easy.
After his urging, the Master allowed various specialists to sign security pacts, then join his mission. The leech habitat was studied on site by every available means, then samples were delivered to competing laboratories and examined in nanoscopic detail.The giant fuel tank’s shaped-vacuum wall was scanned for flaws and secret doorways. Bursts of sharp sound probed the vast hydrogen ocean, from its surface to its slushy middle depths, and targets that were human-sized or larger were carefully snagged and brought to the surface—a painstaking, time-rich chore made worse by the profound cold and the need for perfect secrecy. Even the mission engineers were given no clear picture of what they were hunting, their genius severely diluted as a consequence. After three hard years of bringing up sunken ships and frozen robots, they rebelled. En masse, they confronted Pamir, explaining what he already knew full well: hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometers of hydrogen remained unexplored; and worse still, the fuel had been tapped over the last few years. Some of it was burned. More cubic kilometers were split between half a hundred auxiliary fuel tanks. And worst of all, strong and highly chaotic currents had flowed through this cold ocean, if only briefly.
“We don’t know what we’re chasing here,” they complained. “Give us an exact shape size and composition, and we can build some reliable models. But until you tell us something useful, we can’t even make better guesses. Do you understand?”
Pamir nodded, one hand grasping the primitive clock, opening the repaired lid and staring at the slow black hands.
In principle, he was the mission’s leader. But the Master demanded instantaneous briefings and made almost every decision, including the routine ones. The two of them had anticipated this very issue; Pamir knew what to tell his staff. “As you’ve probably guessed,” he remarked, “we’re looking for the leech. Dead or otherwise, we think that the aliens are still nearby, and there are some good security reasons for this bit of news to go no farther than here!
He hated to lie, and he did it with a discomforting skill.
“You are a species of paranoid exophobes,” Pamir continued, “and there are several hundred of you, and you want to hide. Perhaps you’re somewhere nearby. Which is the only sort of clue I can give away. Now what new ideas can you give me?”
The engineers dreamed up a secret city. Thermally and acoustically buffered, the city could be buried deep inside the fuel tank, down where the hydrogen was a rigid and pure and nearly impenetrable solid. But that kind of technology meant power, which implied fusion power, which meant a detectable stream of neutrinos. A large array of state-of-the-art detectors were built, then floated on the ocean’s surface. Even though he believed that this was a very, very, very unlikely answer, Pamir was nervously hopeful, activating the detection system with the Master on his shoulder, watching the data flow, the machinery’s soft, insistent alarm telling him and the Master, “I see something. Something. Down there!
But the ship was laced with fusion reactors, each producing its own radiant stream of neutrinos, and every stream was deflected and diluted whenever it passed through the megabonds of hyperfiber. Separating the important from the superfluous was hard, slow work. Six months of meticulous drudgery followed; ninety-eight-plus percent of the neutrinos were excluded from consideration, leaving a trickle that might or might not be important.
Then with a delicious abruptness, the detectors were forgotten.
Two of Pamir’s engineers had gone off by themselves, wanting more than a little privacy. Like a thousand robots before, they followed an obscure fuel line, moving deeper into the ship, finally reaching a point where for no apparent reason, the hyperfiber wall looked younger. Fresher. Wrong.
Robots would have dismissed such data as unimpressive. Obviously, the fuel line had been patched. But that sort of work was common in the early days of the voyage, and much of it was accomplished without records being kept. And since there were no seams or signs of traffic—nothing here but a good strong wall—the robots had lingered for only a few microseconds, then continued their plunge.
But the lovers were intrigued.
They lingered for a full hour, making sensitive probes before returning to their cramped car for another round of clumsy sex. Then in the afterglow, one of them said, “Wait. I know what this is.”
“What’s what?” said his lover.
“It’s a hatch. A nice big hatch.”
The other man said. “And look, here’s my nice big penis!”
“No, listen to me,” said the first man. Then he was laughing, adding, “What is it, it’s a secret hatch. That’s why this hyperfiber looks wrong.”
“Okay.
But we’d see the seams along the edge. Wouldn’t we?”
“Not if the hatch itself is small. And not if the seams are perfect.”
Which left his lover with another doubt. “How could the leech manage that sort of trickery?”
It would be a difficult task, yes. But they made more tests, finally sniffing out a nanoscopic flaw that intersected with approximately another twelve billion other flaws that created a hatch just large enough for a small cap-car to pass through. Perhaps. Armed with their fresh data, they returned to Pamir. The mission leader met them on the aerogel barge drifting in the middle of the hydrogen sea, surrounded by darkness and a perpetual chill, and with matching darkness, he listened to the engineers, then nodded, and quiedy told both men,’Thank you. On behalf of the Master and myself, thank you.”
The first engineer had to ask, “But what about the leech?”
“What about them?”
“We didn’t realize they had the means to build that sort of doorway, much less fool us for this long.”
“Yet fooled we were,” Pamir replied.
He stared out at the smooth, untroubled face of the hydrogen ocean, his thoughts turning back to Washen. If they had ever left her. Nobody else in his long life had been a better friend. In his gut, Pamir knew that Washen was waiting for him. She needed him, or she was dead. Either way, it was imperative that he find her, and with that thought burning inside him, he dismissed the two men and contacted the Master; and three minutes later, the engineers’ mission was officially terminated, handshakes and fat bonuses given along with warnings that no one else needed to learn anything more about this strange cold business.
What captains could build, captains could comprehend; and if it came to that, what they could build they could also break.
Thirty Submasters and high-grade regulars, most with engineering experience, were briefed in full and assembled inside an abandoned pumping complex above the secret doorway. Special scuttlebugs and smart-dust probes examined the area, then undertook an equally exhaustive search of every similar fuel fine. But there was only the one doorway, and every test confirmed that it was real, that it hadn’t been opened for at least several years, and to the limits of their technology, there were no watchdog sensors or any sort of booby trap lying in wait.
