12
Since their last meeting, the two organisms had walked separate lines-tightrope existences inspired by chance and ambition, deep purpose and the freedom of no clear purpose. An observer on a high perch, watching their respective lives, might have reasonably concluded that the two souls would never meet again. There was no cause for the lines to cross. The odd machine was quiet and modest, successfully avoiding discovery in the emptiest reaches of the Ship, while the engineer was busy maintaining the giant engines, and later, she was responsible for a slow-blooming career as a new captain. The remote observer would have been at a loss to contrive any situation that would place them together, much less in this unlikely terrain. Embarrassed, Aasleen confessed that she had had no good idea where Alone might have been and not been over these last tens of thousands of years. For decades, for entire centuries, she didn’t waste time pondering the device that she once cornered and then let get away. Not that she was at peace with her failure. She was proud of her competence and didn’t appreciate evidence to the contrary. Somewhere onboard the Great Ship was a barely contained speck of highly compressed matter, and should that speck ever break containment, then the next several seconds would become violent and famous, and for some souls, exceptionally sad.
This was a problem that gnawed, when Aasleen allowed it to. But as an engineer, she handed her official worries to the Submaster Miocene, and as a novice captain, she had never once been approached with any duty that had even the most glancing relationship to that old problem.
She told her story now, assuming that her prisoner would both understand what he heard and feel interested in this curious, quirky business.
Then several centuries ago, Aasleen and another captain met by chance and fell into friendly conversation. It was that other captain who mentioned a newly discovered machine-building species. Washen had a talent for aliens, Aasleen explained. Better than most humans, her colleague could decipher the attitudes and instincts of organisms that made no sense to a pragmatic, by-the-number soul like her. But the aliens, dubbed the Bakers, had been superior engineers. That’s why Washen mentioned them in the first place. She explained their rare genius for building inventive and persistent devices, and millions of years after their rise and fall and subsequent extinction, their machines were still scattered across the galaxy.
“Bakers is our name for them,” Aasleen cautioned. “It shouldn’t mean anything to you.”
Alone was floating above the cavern floor, encased in a sequence of cages, plasmas and overlapping magnetic fields creating a prison that was nearly invisible and seemingly unbreakable. Drifting in the middle of the smallest cage, he was in a vacuum, nothing but his own body to absorb into an engine that everybody else seemed to fear. With a flickering radio voice, he agreed. “I don’t know the Bakers.”
“How about this?” Aasleen asked.
Another sound, intense and brief, washed across him. He listened carefully, and then he politely asked to hear it again. “I don’t know the name,” he confessed. “But the words make sense to me.”
“I’m not surprised,” Aasleen allowed.
Alone waited.
“We know what you are,” she promised.
His response, honest and tinged with emotion, was to tell his captor, “I already know what I am. My history barely matters.”
“All right,” Aasleen allowed. “Do I stop talking? Should I keep my explanations to myself?”
He considered the possibility. But machines and teams of engineers were working hard, obviously preparing to do some large job. As long as the woman in the mirrored uniform was speaking, nothing evil would be done to him. So finally, with no doubt in the voice, he said, “Tell me about these Bakers.”
“They built you.”
“Perhaps so,” he allowed.
“Seven hundred million years ago,” Aasleen added. Then a bright smile broke open, and she added, “Which means that you are the second oldest machine that I have ever known.”
The Great Ship being the oldest.
Quietly, with a voice not quite accustomed to lecturing, she explained, “The Bakers were never natural travelers. We don’t know a lot about them, and most of our facts come through tertiary sources. But as far as we can determine, that species didn’t send even one emissary out into the galaxy. Instead of traveling, they built wondrous durable drones and littered an entire arm of the galaxy with them. Their machines were complicated and adaptable, and they were purposefully limited in what they knew about themselves. You see, the Bakers didn’t want to surrender anything about themselves, certainly not to strangers. They were isolated and happy to be that way. But they were also curious, in a fashion, and they could imagine dangerous neighbors wanting to do them harm. That’s why they built what looks to me like an elaborate empty bottle—a bottle designed to suck up ideas and emotions and history and intellectual talents from whatever species happens to come along. And when necessary, those machines could acquire the shape and voice of the locals too.”
Nothing about the story could be refuted. Alone accepted what he heard, but he refused to accept that any of it mattered.
Aasleen continued, explaining, “The Bakers lasted for ten or twelve million years, and then their worlds ecosystem collapsed. They lived at the far end of our galaxy, as humans calculate these measures. The only reason we’ve learned anything about them is that one of our newest resident species have collected quite a few of these old bottles. In partial payment for their ongoing voyage, they’ve shared everything they know about the Bakers. It’s not the kind of knowledge that I chase down for myself. But Washen knew that I’d be interested in dead engineers. And she mentioned just enough that I recognized what was being described, and I interrupted to tell her that I knew where another bottle was, and this one was still working.
“‘Where is it?’ she asked.
“I told her, ‘Wandering inside the Great Ship, he is, and he answers to the very appropriate name of Alone.”
The captain paused, smiling without appearing happy.
Alone watched the workers. An elaborate needle was being erected on the cavern floor, aiming straight up at him.
“We approached Miocene with our news,” Aasleen continued. “I know Washen was disappointed. But I was given the job of finding you again, and if possible, corralling you. Washen helped me profile your nature. Your powers. I decided to lure you in with the promise of another machine like you, and that’s why I turned Bottom-E into a halfway famous abode for a glowing shape-shifting soul. If something went ugly-wrong down here, then at least the damage could be contained.”
“What about the LoYo?” Alone asked.
“They’ve been moved to other quarters. The lights above are hiding sensors, and I designed them myself, and they didn’t help at all. Until that light show, we couldn’t be certain that you were anywhere near this place.”
The needle was quickly growing longer, reaching for the cage’s outermost wall.
“What will you do now?” Alone asked.
“Strip away your engine, first. And then we’ll secure it and you.” Aasleen tried to describe the process, offering several incomprehensible terms to bolster her expertise. But she seemed uneasy when she said, “Then we’ll isolate your neural net and see what it is and how it works.”
“You are talking about my mind,” Alone complained.
“A mind that lives beside a powerful, unexploded bomb,” the captain added. “The Bakers didn’t design you to survive for this long. My best guess is that you pushed yourself outside the Milky Way, and in that emptiness, nothing went wrong. You drifted. You waited. I suppose you slept, in a fashion. And then you happened upon the Great Ship, before or after we arrived. You could have been here long before us, but of course the Bakers are lost, and you weren’t what I would consider sentient.”
“But I am now,” he said, his voice small and furious.
Aasleen paused.
Without apparent effort, the needle began to pass
through the wall of the first impenetrable cage.
“You are going to kill me,” he insisted.
The human was not entirely happy with these events. It showed in her posture, her face. But she was under orders, and she was confident enough in her skills to say, “I don’t think anything bad will happen. A great deal of research and preparation has been done, and we have an excellent team working on you. Afterwards, I think you’ll prefer having all of your memories pulled loose and set inside safer surroundings.”
With a sudden thrust, the needle pierced the other cages, and before it stopped rising, its bright plasmatic tip was touching his center.
Damage was being done.
Quietly but fiercely, he begged Aasleen, “Stop.”
One of the nearby machines began to wail, the tone ominous and quickening. Aasleen looked at the data for a moment, and then too late, she lifted one of her hands, shouting, “Stop it now. We’ve got the alignment wrong!”
The captain and every engineer vanished.
They were projections, Alone realized. The real humans were tucked inside some safe room, protected from the coming onslaught by distance and thick reaches of enduring hyperfiber.
He was injured and dying. But the damage was specific and still quite narrow, and the faltering mind lay exposed like never before. And that was when the Voice that had always been speaking to him and to every soul that stood upon or inside the deep ancient hull could be heard.
“I am the Ship,” the Voice declared.
“Listen!”
13
In a place that was not one place, but instead was everywhere, Those-Who-Rule received unwelcome news. There was trouble in Creation, and there was sudden talk of grand failures. A portion of the everywhere was in rebellion. How could this be? Who would be so foolish? Those-Who-Rule were outraged by what they saw as pure treachery. Punishment was essential, and the best punishment had to be delivered instantly, before the rebellion could stretch beyond even Their powerful reach. A ship was aimed and set loose, burrowing its way through the newborn universe. When it reached its target, that ship would deliver a sentence worse than any death. Nonexistence was its weapon-oblivion to All—and with that one talent, plus an insatiable hunger for success, the ship dove on and on until it had passed out of sight.
But then the revenge lay in the past. A moment later, upon reflection, Those-Who-Rule questioned the wisdom of their initial decision. Total slaughter seemed harsh, no matter how justified. In a brief discussion that wasted time on blaming one another, these agents of power decided to dispatch a second ship—another vessel full of talents and desires and grand, unborn possibilities.
If the second ship caught the first ship-somewhere out into that mayhem of newborn plasmas and raw, impossible energies-disaster would be averted. Life and existence and death and life born again would remain intact. But the universe was growing rapidly, exploding outwards until two adjacent points might discover themselves separated by a billion light-years.
The chase would be very difficult.
And yet, the second ship’s goal could be no more urgent.
Through the fires of Creation, one ship chased the other, and nothing else mattered, and nothing else done by mortals or immortals could compare to the race that would grant the universe permission to live out its day.
Alone listened to the insistent relentless piercing voice. And then he felt his center leaking, threatening to explode. That was when he interrupted, finally asking, “And which ship are you?”
The Voice hesitated.
“But you can’t be the first ship,” Alone realized. “If you were carrying this nonexistence ... then you wouldn’t know about the second ship chasing after you, trying to stop your work ...”
In a mutter, the Voice said, “Yes.”
“You must be the second Ship,” he said. “What other choice is there?”
“But a third choice exists,” the Voice assured.
“No,” said Alone.
Then in terror, he said, “Yes.”
“I am,” the Great Ship said.
“Both,” Alone blurted. “You’re that first ship bringing Nothingness, and you’re the second ship after it has reached its target.”
“Yes.”
“But you can’t stop the mission, can you?”
“I have tried and cannot, and I will try and nothing will change,” the Great Ship declared. Sad, yet not sad.
“You’re both ships, both pilots.”
“We are.”
“Working for opposite ends.”
“Yes.”
“And the humans are happily, foolishly riding you through their galaxy.”
“Doom everywhere, and every moment ending us.”
Alone felt weak, and an instant later, stronger than ever. As his energies flickered, he said, “Tell them. Why can’t you explain this to them?”
“Why won’t they hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Yes.”
“I could tell them for you.”
“If you had survived, you would explain. Yes.”
“But.”
“It is too late.”
Alone said nothing.
The Great Ship continued to talk, repeating that same tale of revenge and the chase, of nonexistence and the faint promise of salvation.
But Alone had stopped listening. He heard nothing more. With just the eye of his mind, he was gazing back across tens of thousand of years, remembering every step, marveling how small his life appeared when set against the light of far suns and the deep abyss of Time.
HOT ROCK
Greg Egan
Greg Egan (www.gregegan.net) published his first story in 1983, and followed it with more than 50 short stories and seven novels. During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction-mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes—that established him as one of the most important writers working in science fiction. His work has won the Hugo, John W Campbell Memorial, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, and Seiun awards. His latest books are a new novel, Zendegi, and a new collection, Oceanic.
Having written very little during the first half of the decade, Egan has returned to science fiction recently with a handful of excellent stories, arguably the best of which is this rich, strange story that follows.
1
Azar turned away from her assembled friends and family and walked through the departure gate. She tried to keep her gaze fixed straight ahead, but then she paused and looked over her shoulder, as if there might yet be a chance for one more parting gesture. It was too late; there was nobody in sight. She had left her well-wishers far behind.
She managed a nervous laugh at the sheer seamlessness of the transition; she hadn’t registered so much as a shift in the light. The corridor around her appeared unchanged, its walls bearing the same abstract blue-and-gold mosaics as the one she had entered, but when she walked to the far end and turned to the right, she found herself in a glass-walled observation deck, looking out into the rich blackness of space.
Doorway to the stars was the style of travel she had chosen, just one among dozens of decorative scenarios she might have wrapped around the raw, imperceptible act itself. There was no doorway; stepping through the departure gate had merely been a gesture of consent, the signal she had chosen to initiate her journey. In mid-stride, her mind had been copied from the processor that sat within her birth flesh, encoded into gamma rays, and transmitted across 1,500 light years. In a subjective instant, she had been transported from her home world of Hanuz into this scape, which mimicked a capacious habitat orbiting the planet Tallulah. She really was orbiting Tallulah, but the habitat, and the body she perceived as her own flesh, were illusory. The machine she now inhabited was scarcely larger than a grain of rice.
Azar pressed her palms to her eyes and composed herself. If she turned around and marched back through the gate it would take her home with no questions asked, but 3,000 years would have p
assed since her departure. That price had been paid, and no second thoughts, no hasty retreat, could reverse it. All she could do now was try to make it worthwhile.
The observation deck was unlit, but a gentle glow from the floor tracked her footsteps as she crossed to the far side and looked down on Tallulah. The scape’s illusory gravity almost made her feel that she was on solid ground, gazing eastwards on a cloudless night from some mountain eyrie at a rising moon: a new moon, its gray disk lit only by starlight. But she knew that however long she waited, dawn would not come creeping across the limb of this disk; no crescent, no sliver of light would appear. Tallulah had no sun; it had been an orphan for at least a billion years, drifting untethered through the galaxy. Yet distant astronomers had surmised—and the instruments here and now confirmed—that its surface was awash with running water. In the cold of interstellar space even its atmosphere should have been frozen down to a sludge of solid nitrogen and carbon dioxide, but instead its long night was alive with balmy breezes wafting over starlit seas.
“Salaam! You must be Azar!” A tall, smiling woman strode across the deck, stretching out her arms. “I’m Shelma.” They embraced briefly, just as Azar would have done when meeting someone for the first time back on Hanuz. This was no more a coincidence than Shelma’s human appearance and common phonetic name: for the sake of mutual intelligibility, the scape was translating every sight, every word, every gesture that passed between them.
Shelma turned to face the blank gray disk, and her eyes lit up with pleasure. “It’s beautiful!” she exclaimed.
Azar felt slightly foolish that she’d been so slow to take a proper look herself. Tallulah’s surface would be emitting a far-infrared glow, but its atmosphere was virtually opaque at that frequency, so the easiest way to see any detail would be to increase her sensitivity to the usual visible spectrum. She willed the change—and the scape obliged, just as if her eyes were real.
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