by Robert Reed
Miocene said, “No, you didn’t,” and laughed gently, her scorn barely showing. Then she told him, “This is a noble tradition. The Master Captain and her loyal staff stand on the open deck, watching as their ship turns in the wind.”
“Noble,” he replied, “and ancient, too.”
“We’ve done it on board this ship,” she promised. “Many, many times.”
What could he say?
Before any answer was offered, she added, “I appreciate what you’re thinking. That we might be too exposed. Too vulnerable. Open to some celestial disaster—”
“Not on the trailing hemisphere, madam. I know that much.”
“Then you’re worried about a closer, more emotional enemy.” Master or mother, her task was to lend confidence. To inspire, and hopefully, instruct. “No one else knows about this venture. There isn’t time to prepare an ambush. And believe me,” she added, a swollen hand lifting into the air between them, “I’m strong enough to defend us from any part of the ship, and anywhere on its enormous hull, too.”
Frantic days had brought a transformation. The new Master sat on the old Master’s bed. She wasn’t as vast as her predecessor, but the trend was obvious. Interlocking networks of nexuses lay beneath her century-old skin, speaking to one another in dense lightspeed languages, and speaking to the ship’s important systems in a tangle of frequencies and coded wisps of laser light. A newborn instinct told Miocene that the reaction chambers were being fueled and readied. She could practically taste the cold compressed hydrogen being drawn from the deep tanks. This giant burn, scheduled millennia ago, would happen without delay or embarrassment. How could anyone doubt that she was in charge? The symbolism was blatant. Nervous passengers would take comfort in the burn. The disgruntled crew would have to admit that this old woman knew what she was doing. And the Milky Way would notice, trillions of potential passengers having even more good reasons to forget the old Master and her incompetent ways.
Soon and in countless ways, Miocene would improve her ship. Efficiencies would jump. Confidence would blossom. The ship’s prestige would swell as a consequence, and with her guiding hand, the knowledge of a million species would be beamed home, enriching humanity as well as the Master’s personal legacy. For the last century, whenever she wanted a taste of pleasure, Miocene had imagined the glorious day when the ship would complete its circuit of the galaxy, approaching the Earth after a half-million-year absence. By then, and mostly because of her work, humanity would dominate their little portion of the universe. And with her loyal, loving son at her side, she would accept every honor and the radiant blessings from a people that would have no choice but see her as a god and savior.
“The universe,” she whispered, speaking to herself.
Till leaned closer, asking, “What did you say, madam?”
“You need to see it for yourself,” she replied. “The stars. The Milky Way. Everything, and in its full glory.”
A shifting expression became simple doubt.’I have seen it,” Till reminded her. “By holographic light, and perfectly rendered.”
“Nothing rendered is perfect,” she countered.
Then before her son could say anything else, she reminded him, “One of us is the Master. The other is her First Chair.”
“I know that, madam.”
With a wide hand, she touched her son on the forehead, the slender nose, then with a single finger, she fondled the handsome strong chin. “Perhaps it’s too much of a risk,” she allowed. “You can make a good argument, yes. So it will be just you and me watching the burn. Is that a worthy compromise?”
He had no choice but to say, “Yes, madam. Yes, Mother’ But as always, Till said the words with a convincing enthusiasm, wrapped right in a smile that couldn’t have been any brighter.
The ship’s hull was thinnest on the trailing face—a few dozen kilometers of original, nearly virginal hyperfiber laced with access tunnels and cavernous pipes and pumps vast enough to move oceans. Aesthetics as well as security issues played a role; Miocene and Till traveled inside one of the main reaction chambers. Nothing lived here, and next to nothing came here. Against the banks of perfect mirrors, there was no place to hide. And since no one but Miocene could fire these engines, they could pass untroubled, their swift little car rising into the craterlike maw of the rocket nozzle, the sky above them illuminated by a billion fires, each of them dwarfing the powers of their magnificent machine.
“The stars,” said Miocene, and she couldn’t help but grin.
Till looked very young, standing with his hands holding each other behind his back, his back arched and his boot-clad feet slightly apart, his uniform and cap and the wide brown eyes reflecting the brilliance of the universe.
For a moment, he seemed to smile.
Then he closed his eyes and turned to her, and he opened his eyes again, admitting, “They’re lovely. Of course.”
Of course.
Disappointment grabbed Miocene. Had she really believed that a naked-eye look at the Milky Way would cause a revelation? That Till would throw up his arms and drop to his weak knees in a wonderstruck rapture?
She was disappointed, and worse, she was infuriated.
Perhaps sensing her mood, Till asked, “Do you remember when, Mother? When you looked into a nanoscope and saw your first naked proton?”
She blinked, then confessed, “No.”
“One of the essential bones of the universe,” he chided. “As vital as the stars, and in its own way, more spectacular. But it was real to you before you saw it. Intellectually, and emotionally, you were prepared.”
Miocene nodded, saying nothing.
“From the moment that I was reborn and for every day since, people have talked about the stars. Describing their beauty. Explaining their physics. Assuring me that the simple sight of a sun will fill me with awe…”
What would it take to impress Till?
“Frankly, Mother. After such an enormous buildup, I think the sky looks rather thin. Almost insubstantial. Which is doubly disappointing, since we’re close to one of the galaxy’s big arms. Aren’t we?”
If Miocene ignited the engine beneath them, Till would be impressed.
For a fiery instant, yes.
Smiling in a thin, almost mocking fashion, she looked ahead. Their car swerved abruptly, heading for the parabolic nozzle. Ancient hyperfiber had been blackened by corrosive plasmas, leaving a featureless wall that appeared close when it was distant, then remote as they slowed and suddenly passed through a camouflaged hatchway. Engineers had added this feature. The hatchway led into a small tunnel that passed through the nozzle, ending with a blister of diamond suspended a thousand kilometers above the hull.
Only an imbecile couldn’t be impressed by this view.
Mother and son remained inside the armored car, and the car floated inside the blister. The Great Ship possessed fourteen giant rocket nozzles: one in the center, four ringing the one, and nine more nozzles surrounding the first five. Theirs was one of the four, and on the horizon, standing side by side, were two of the outer nozzles, fueled and waiting the command to fire. Morphing metals and lakes of hydraulic fluids had tilted the nozzles, giving them a fifteen-degree angle. The ten-hour-and-eleven-second burn would change the ship’s trajectory just enough that in another two weeks it would pass near a red giant sun, then plunge even closer to the sun’s companion—a massive yet essentially calm black hole.
In less than a day, the ship’s course would be tweaked twice. Instead of leaving this dense region of suns and living worlds, they would continue following the galaxy’s arm, moving into new and lucrative places.
There was a soft, impressed “Hmm.”
Till wasn’t staring at the stars or the giant nozzles. Instead, he was looking down, and with a slightly contemptuous voice, he remarked, “There’s certainly a lot of them!
Lights were sprinkled across the hyperfiber landscape. But unlike the pleasant disorder of the stars, these lights had defining princi
ples, connected into lines and circles and dense masses that glowed with a cumulative light. Yes, there were a lot of them. Probably more than there were five thousand years ago, and certainly more than the last time she visited that place. Miocene shook her head and said, “Remoras,” with a growling tone. “They build their cities on the trailing face. More cities all the time.”
Till smiled, and with a charming wink, he observed, “You don’t like Remoras. Do you, madam?”
“They’re stubborn and exceptionally strange.” But she allowed, “They do important work. We would be hard-pressed to replace them.”
Her son made no comment.
“Twenty seconds,” she announced.
Till said, “Yes,” and politely looked up, those bright brown eyes squinting against the anticipated glare of the engines.
And with Till momentarily distracted, Miocene slipped away.
The room never changed.
Sitting along each wall, wearing the symbolic bodies and white togas of wizened old scribes, were dozens of sophisticated AIs. Each was a little different from its neighbor, in abilities and aesthetic sensibilities. In this realm, differences were a blessing. The reason for their existence was a single question—a question requiring utter concentration as well as a fondness for novelty. Every day or week or month, one of the scribes would propose some new solution, or a variation on an old solution, and with a boundless youth, the machines would discuss and debate, and occasionally shout at one another. Inevitably they would find some critical flaw in the elaborate mathematics, or the logical assumptions, and the proposal would be given a quick funeral, its corpse placed on an electronic shelf next to millions of failed hypotheses—proof of their zeal, if not their genius.
In the room’s center was a dense and extremely precise map of the ship. The map didn’t portray the ship as it was today, but the ship as it existed when the first captains arrived: Every vast chamber and long tunnel, tiny crevice and grand ocean, was displayed in all of its abandoned glory.
Yet a substantial, perhaps critical feature was missing.
Into that ignorance, the new Master appeared.
The AI scribes regarded her with a cold scorn. They were conservative souls, by nature. They didn’t approve of mutinies, even mutinies justified on legal grounds. With a machine’s humor, one scribe said, “Who are you? I don’t recognize you.”
The others laughed in low, disgusted voices.
Miocene said nothing for a long second. Then her image pretended to sigh, and in a passing fashion, she mentioned, “I can improve this map of yours. I know things that the old Master couldn’t have imagined.”
Doubt bled into interest.
Then, curiosity.
But one of the scribes shook its rubber face, warning her, “Your predecessor has to be put on trial. A fair and public trial, as mandated by the ship’s own laws. Otherwise we will not work with you.”
“Haven’t I promised trials?” she replied. “Examine my fife. Any profile you wish. When have I been anything but a champion of the ship’s laws?”
The scribes did as Miocene advised, and just as she expected, they grew bored. Her life wasn’t a puzzle. It held no interest for them. One after another, their gazes returned to their elaborate, mysterious map.
“If I give you this information,” she told them, “you cannot share it with anyone else. Is that understood?”
“We understand everything,” the first scribe warned.
“And if you find a possible solution, tell no one but me. Me.” She stared at each set of their glass eyes. “Can you embrace those terms?”
In a voice, they said, “Yes.”
Into the map, Miocene inserted the newest parameters: she drew the hyperfiber shell surrounding the core, then set Marrow inside the shell, and finally she showed what was inside Marrow. Then she caused Marrow to expand and contract, a flood of data explaining how energy cycled through the iron body, how the buttresses kept it firmly in place, and anything else of potential interest that she had absorbed over the horrible centuries.
In a fraction of a second, old faces grew enthralled.
Miocene felt the faint shudder as the ship’s engines began throwing plasma out into the cold, cold universe.
The physical portion of her sat beside her son, watching as he turned and showed her another good smile.
“It’s lovely, yes,” he admitted.
The plasma river was a wide column moving at near lightspeed, only a tiny portion of its energies given off as visible light, but still bright enough that the stunning glare caused the stars to vanish in their blinking, tearing eyes.
“May we leave now, madam?” he asked quietly, like a bored little boy.
The other part of her, the holoimage, was equally disappointed. She was surrounded by scribes who whispered at lightspeed, able to accomplish miracles inside an instant.
Then with a calm, knowing face, one of the scribes gave her a tentative and ridiculously simple solution to the great puzzle.
“That?” she cried out. “That’s your answer?”
The first scribe spoke for its peer, admitting, “That’s an artistic solution. Not a hard mathematical one. Madam.”
“Obviously.’Then as she vanished, she growled, “Tell no one, just the same. And keep working at it. Will you do that for me?”
“No,” the scribe replied, speaking to empty air.
“We do it for ourselves,” said its neighbors.
And they were whispering again, using those quick dessicated voices, their plaything-puzzle suddenly transformed, everything about their tiny universe made fascinating again, and inside this stuffy room, everything was enormous.
Forty
To watchful eyes, they were another anonymous repair crew: several dozen Remoras happily imprisoned inside their bulky lifesuits, sitting shoulder to shoulder inside one of their tough old skimmers, every face different from its neighbors’s faces, everyone telling good filthy Remoran jokes as they made their way toward the ship’s leading face.
“How many captains does it take to fuck?” one asked.
“Three,” the others shouted. “Two to do it, while the third captain hands out the appropriate awards and citations!”
“Where does the Master send her shit?” asked another.
Everyone pointed at the nearest of the rocket nozzles, then broke into a familiar, half-amused giggle.
Then Orleans leaned forward, asking, “What’s the difference between the new Master and the old one?”
There was an abrupt silence. Everyone knew the question, but nobody recognized the joke. Which wasn’t surprising, since the old man had just dreamed it up.
His newest mouth pulled into an enormous smile, short tusklike teeth tapping against the faceplate. “Any ideas? No?” Then he let off a big laugh, telling them, “Our new Master came back from the dead. While the old one was never alive.”
Polite, if somewhat nervous laughter gave way to silence.
Pivoting his helmet, Orleans showed his face to the crew. On a public channel, he told them, “It wasn’t very funny. You’re right.” But on a scrambled private channel, he said, “Don’t dwell on things.” He told them, “We’ll be dead soon enough. Relax.”
Nervousness mutated into a useful determination. No, they were thinking, they wouldn’t die. His crew’s outlook was betrayed by their straight-backed postures and defiant fists. These were mostly youngsters, and most still believed they could fool death by culturing a positive attitude along with their innate cleverness and deserved good fortune. “Not me,” each thought.’I won’t die today.” Then one after another, they turned their faces toward the rocket’s nozzle, looking at its vastness, and at the brilliant column of fight—the new Master’s farts—the light dwarfing everything else, splitting the universe neatly in two.
Only Orleans ignored the spectacle. He kept his amber eyes focused on the blisterlike buildings that flanked the wide roadway. In a rare mood, he found himself feeling sentimental,
recalling that when he was a youngster, he thoroughly expected to be dead by now. Vaporized by an impact comet, probably. The idea that he could outlive everyone in his generation… well, it didn’t seem like a possibility then. Such an impossibly long life would prove a Remora’s cowardice, or at least a crippling sense of caution. Yet Orleans was neither a coward nor a worrier, and he had a sharp disrespect for luck, good and otherwise.
Over the centuries, then the millenia, he had seen friends die without warning or a fair chance. He had outlived children and grandchildren, then descendants who carried a tiny fraction of his unique seeds. But it wasn’t luck that had carried him this far. Not good luck, or its evil mate. What was to blame, undoubtedly, was the universe’s own magnificent, seamless indifference.
Orleans was too small to be noticed.
Too insignificant to send a comet plummeting his way.
His was a faith rich with logic and an ascetic’s beauty, and until this moment, it seemed to be a durable, determined faith. But suddenly a second possibility had crawled into view. Perhaps, just perhaps, some great Fate had long ago taken Orleans under its protective shroud, saving him for this day and this moment, making it possible for him to make this inconspicuous journey across the ship’s vast and stark and enchanting hull.
The city wasn’t even a name when Orleans was born. But today it was large enough that leaving it seemed to take forever. Building after blister-shaped building streaked past. Hyperfiber homes, for the most part. Minimalist places with walls and a roof, hard vacuum and ample privacy, where couples and other mating configurations contributed their seeds, babies born inside hyperfiber wombs that expanded as needed, both child and machine developing hands and legs, and a head, and deemed “born” during a day-long celebration that culminated when a fully functioning reactor and recycle system were strapped onto the Remora’s wide back.
Between the homes were the rare shops hawking what few wares could entice citizens who had absolutely no need for food or drink, and who disapproved of most possessions. Other structures were assembled from clear diamond, and unlike buildings, they were sealed against the vacuum. Sealed and stocked with a variety of species, terran and otherwise. Every organism was nominally immortal, and under the rain of hard radiations and the force of simple time, they had mutated in chaotic fashions, yielding a wild assortment of shapes and unlikely colors, and unexpected, sometimes entertaining behaviors.
