The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  That promise startled the woman. She took a deep breath, and her face turned, whispering a few words to someone unseen. And then because she couldn’t believe Washen—because no little passenger could stand in the way of a Submaster—she dropped her head in resignation and slowly backed away from the door, allowing the two great captains to step inside.

  By law, the structure’s interior had to maintain certain historic standards. And for her trouble, the resident was granted some fat financial benefits. Washen naturally assumed that the standards weren’t being maintained. That would almost explain the woman’s brittleness. But if there were discrepancies, they were subtle ones. Without tapping the old data banks, Washen couldn’t find anything worse than a few little rooms that had been remodeled to make several kinds of alien guests feel comfortable.

  The house covered only a hectare of ground, and the walking tour took a matter of minutes. She and Pamir strolled through entertainment rooms and social rooms and an old-fashioned library, complete with glass books and paper books sealed behind sheer diamond screens. An indoor pond triggered memories. “I learned to swim in there,” Washen mentioned. Then she showed Pamir each of the three rooms that she had claimed for herself, at various stages of her childhood, the last one as far from her parents’ room as possible. Finally, they entered the big ancient kitchen where a person, if she was so moved, could cook without the aid of robots or smart-meals. Stoves big enough to feed a brigade stood against one long wall, ignored but ready. Pots and tubs made of steel and hyperfiber hung from copper pipes lashed to the high ceiling. And in the middle of the room, sitting before a simple wooden table, was a stranger. He was a smallish man taking a last deep sip of a thick hot narcotic drink. When the Submasters entered the room, he moaned. When they looked at him, he threw his glass down and sobbed, then dropped his face, nose mashed against the yellow wood. The half-covered mouth offered a squeak before muttering, “Forgive me.”

  The woman stood in a different doorway. In the yard, squinting through the windows, were maybe half a hundred curious neighbors.

  “I’m very sorry,” the little man whispered.

  Pamir laughed.

  Softly but furiously, he asked, “After what you’ve done? Why shouldn’t we just kick you to pieces?”

  The man trembled, saying nothing.

  Washen settled into a facing chair. Her expression was distracted, but she heard enough to say, “Tell us,” as she cupped her hands before her. Holding nothing, she stared at her hands, and said, “The entire story. Tell us.”

  The man made his confession in what seemed like a single breath. He was a lifelong technician who had worked in the Alpha port, and when the Waywards came, he had abandoned his post. He went into hiding. He bought a new face and body, then the war came and went, and he decided to change his face twice more, building a new identity that should have been perfect. But it obviously hadn’t been. He was staying here with his sister, which must have been his mistake. But it wasn’t the security troops that had found him, no. Who could imagine it? The First Chair and Second Chair had both come here, which meant that for some incredible reason he must be regarded as an enormous criminal.

  Pamir smiled, loving the whole string of coincidences that had conspired to produce this very unexpected moment.

  But Washen barely noticed. Her cupped hands pulled apart, dropping the nothingness that they had held, and she watched the nothingness roll off the tabletop, her head tipped to one side, as if listening for an echo nearly as old as herself.

  “Stand,” Pamir commanded.

  The technician jumped to his feet and almost fell over.

  “Sober up,” the Second Chair advised. “And then return to your post. Today. If you can do those two things—sobriety and work—and if you can remember how to do your work, I’ll speak to the Master Captain about clemency. Is that understood?”

  “You would do that for me?”

  “I’m not doing this for you. This is for the ship’s own good.” With his nexuses and his personal authority, Pamir had both identified this woman and tracked down her missing brother, and he was already wiping the record clean. Technicians were precious, particularly today. The man hadn’t joined the Waywards, which was a fat plus. And besides, it would make this moment considerably less funny if he had the criminal thrown into the brig.

  “Thank you,” said the grateful technician. “Sir. Madam.”

  With the scrape of wood against tiles, Washen pushed back her chair and stood again. If she had heard a word in the last couple minutes, she didn’t mention it. Instead, she adjusted the tilt of her mirrored hat, and with a distant little smile, she asked, “How long have you lived here?”

  The woman swallowed, then confessed, “For the last seventeen centuries. Madam.”

  Washen nodded.

  After a moment’s consideration, she said, “That’s ten times longer than I lived here.” Then Washen smiled, and winked. “This is your house now. Do what you want with it. Remodel it. Tear it down and build another. Whatever you wish to do, you may.”

  “Madam—?”

  “But if you find anything interesting … anything that seems old and odd … please, send it to me, please?”

  Two

  Humans began as perishable apes, but aeons ago they infused their bodies with synthetic genes and bioceramic minds, creating souls more durable than the exposed face of any simple rock. This basaltic hill was a prime example. Since the first day of her rule, the Master Captain and her highest officers had met on this ground, and during that tenure the shoreline had eroded noticeably, the original black boulders gnawed down to mere stones that quietly rolled off into the patient surf. What began as a proud high hill seemed rather less impressive today, and much the same might be said of the Master Captain. To the eye, she looked as everyone would expect—massive and queenly and cold-faced—but her enemies had grievously injured her during the Wayward War. Her body was only recently reborn, golden flesh and tough bone reconstituted beneath her comatose head. Newly minted nexuses had been implanted, her body swelling in response, linking her mind to the widest possible array of systems and sensors. In narrow terms of schematics, she was the same as she had always been. Yet despite her very narrow survival—indeed, because she was fortunate to be alive at all—she had been changed. Transformed, even. The Master sat on the traditional black chair, high-backed and thickly varnished, carved from a single piece of polished kallan teak; but except for a veneer of authority and moral certitude, this was an entirely different person. Reconstituted from the brink of nothingness, she had been reinvented in a thousand ways. And even more important, virtually every one of her Submasters was new to the office, and oftentimes new to the ranks of the captains. Most were human, yes. But not all, and who would have imagined such a thing? A pair of fierce harum-scarums sat on convenient boulders. Dressed in a water suit, a gillbaby stood at mock attention, while a little fef and a Janusian hermaphrodite amiably traded stories of the war. Three decorated members of the AI corps were scattered among the organics, each buried inside a rubbery face and humanoid body. Aliens and machines now wore the mirrored uniforms of captains, each displaying the epaulets of the highest offices—an honor won when they helped defeat the Waywards. But stranger even than their appearance was their mood: In every past meeting, the Master had set the tone and defined the heart of every discussion. Her orders were usually cast beforehand, and sitting on this hilltop was meant to be a tidy dance of ego and pride and enduring traditions. Yet on this bright warm illusion of a day, the reborn Master appeared just a little bit unsure of herself. While her officers talked among themselves, often in nonhuman languages, her vast hands clung to one another, and her new face turned almost transparent, blank eyes gazing off into the distance while a voice that could just be heard above the quiet surf asked nobody in particular—with a distinctly nervous honesty asked nobody in particular—“Where are my first two Chairs?”

  “Approaching,” one of the new Submasters
offered. “Washen took a wrong turn, it seems.”

  The officer was a Remora named Conrad. Barely human, in other words. The Remoras lived on the ship’s hull, their bodies permanently encased in lifesuits woven from hyperfiber. Surrounded by vacuum and raw radiations, they were subjected to endless mutations and odd cancers, but not only did the Remoras accept the damage, they used it. Each mutation was an act of Creation, full of potentials and possibilities. To the good Remora, the body was a ripe and holy vessel meant to be reshaped without end—a perfect canvas on which endless brushstrokes of gaudy paints could be applied at will.

  Conrad’s single eye looked human, but it rode a muscular stalk, allowing it to pivot as he winked at his associates, joking, “It’s not a good sign, having your First Chair lose her way.”

  The Master stared at him while saying nothing.

  “Perhaps,” one of the AIs sang out. “Begin without them?”

  The golden woman shook her massive head, and from a position of utter weakness, she had to say, “No, we’ll wait. We have to wait.”

  Everything was different now.

  Everything.

  THE TWO MISSING officers walked a narrow trail, working their way toward the black point of rocks. Pamir’s grin betrayed a rare good humor. He nodded at the security troops standing watch, and with a sly grin, he asked, “What would you guess? If we walked into every house in this city, how many deserters would we trip over?”

  Washen remained silent, concentrating on other matters.

  “Ten or twelve no-goods,” Pamir offered. Then with a genuine laugh, he added, “It’s always been easy, vanishing.”

  “Should we make it more difficult?” she inquired.

  Pamir had considerable experience with desertion. A great portion of his life aboard the ship had been spent hiding, in one fashion or another. Only a general amnesty had coaxed him out of his self-imposed exile. Given the chance, he would be the first to admit that his rise to the Second Chair’s post was astronomically more unlikely than finding a little criminal making himself drunk inside Washen’s childhood kitchen.

  “Perhaps disappearing should be more difficult,” he offered. Then with a breezy laugh, he added, “If only to cull out the amateurs.”

  They were still smiling when they reached the crest of the hill. The Master remained sitting while the other high officers stood. Washen offered a smile and a curt nod, saying, “Madam. All. My apologies. Shall we begin?”

  The Master bristled silently.

  In truth, this had always been Washen’s intention. By arriving late, just this once, she would show her colleagues the new order. The Master couldn’t complain about her tardiness. Washen and Pamir had saved both her life and her command, and she ruled today only because they had decided to allow her golden round face—that very familiar face—to continue to speak for the Great Ship.

  “Welcome,” said that face.

  Humans nodded, and everyone repeated the word, “Welcome.”

  Washen, then Pamir occupied the final two chairs, flanking the Master Captain.

  “We’ll begin with reports,” the golden face continued. “Conrad? Please.”

  The epaulets of the Remora’s new rank had been fastened to his hyperfiber shoulders. The single stalked eye stared out through the diamond faceplate, glancing at each of his equally anointed colleagues. Then with a wide, elastic mouth, he described the state of the ship’s hull. “It’s shit,” he assured them. “We took a huge pounding after the lasers and shields went down. We’ve got some awful craters to patch, and the shields and lasers are barely at half strength. And because our telescopes and other sensors were pounded to dust, we’re flying close to blind now. It’ll take years to rebuild our eyes, and decades more to patch the craters properly. Except for the monster crater, which could eat up a full century of hard work.”

  At the height of the war, after the shields and lasers had abruptly failed, a fat comet had collided with the ship, and at one-third lightspeed, ice and tar and frigid stone had turned into a bubble of white-hot plasma, those wild energies absorbed by the hull until the hyperfiber had no choice but to melt, forming a temporary lake that splashed outward in a kilometer-high wave.

  “We’ve got a genuine mess,” Conrad declared. “The comet struck on top of an old scar. Our biggest scar, as it happens. Where some moon-sized something hit, maybe five billion years ago. Although you know how tough it is to measure anything about hyperfiber. Its age, or when it was damaged. Anyway, my ancestors patched that old crater as fast as humanly possible, with the best grades of hyperfiber available … and because of our lousy luck, this new blast seems to have made the old damage worse …”

  “Are we risking a breach?” the Master inquired.

  “If a Kuiper-class body hit at a greater velocity, at the very worst angle, yes. There’s a small but ugly possibility of a hole punched clear through the hull.”

  But it was a minuscule risk. Through his nexuses, Conrad fed his full report to the others, and for a few moments, he allowed them to ponder his rough estimates and his hand-drawn, surprisingly lovely maps. The new crater was a tiny ring compared to its ancient predecessor, but it overlapped the central blast zone, fractures reaching deep inside the hull, compounding a host of subtle weaknesses made in some ancient, faraway place.

  “Of course work could be done faster,” Conrad promised. “But Remoras don’t have the hands anymore.” The war had decimated their ranks, and if anyone had managed to forget, he reminded them now. “It’s going to take thousands of years and a lot of babies before we match our old demographics. And maybe a million years before we forget these last few days.”

  The Master remained silent, angered by his tone but forbidden to say so.

  Washen turned to another of the new Submasters. “Aasleen,” she said. “Perhaps you have something to offer here.”

  Aasleen had been placed in charge of the entire engineer corps. She was one of the captains who had gone to Marrow, and unlike some, she had remained loyal to the ship. Rising to her feet, she showed the humans a warm smile, gave the harum-scarums a well-received glare, and spoke for a little while about the sorry state of certain engines and the various reactors that supplied power to billions of passengers and crew. Then with a genuine affection, she reminded them, “We are, however, sitting inside a marvel, an ingenious mix of design and craftsmanship. Whoever the Builders were, they created a machine that seems meant to be repaired, refurbished, and when necessary, remodeled. I can have every reactor in full service inside eight months and the engines within eighteen. Then my engineers can start helping the Remoras.”

  As a rule, Remoras accepted no aid from outsiders. The hull was their realm and their responsibility, and their only home, which was why it was a surprise to hear Conrad mutter, “Any good hand would be a blessing.”

  Just how badly damaged was the hull?

  Silently, with a renewed paranoia, the other Submasters began reexamining the report. And lifting her tail, the little fef happily said, “My species will help. Many hands at the ready!”

  The single eye closed, and opened.

  “Of course,” said the Remora. “And thank you.”

  Days ago, Washen had met alone with her chief engineer, Conrad, and the fef. This little moment was the outcome of reason and blunt commands delivered during that earlier meeting. The hull was weakened slightly and would remain vulnerable for decades, regardless what was decided today. But the hull was not the point. Washen wanted to build cooperation among these diverse souls and establish what would serve as her personal authority, and she had to achieve both goals while honoring the best of their hoary traditions.

  The mood improved, at least a little bit.

  With an appreciative nod, Washen invited the Master to speak again.

  “Security,” said the reborn woman. “I’d like to hear its report now.”

  One of the harum-scarums held that critical station. His name was Osmium—a massive and utterly imposing biped
sitting comfortably on a rough lump of gray-black stone. Speaking loudly through his breathing mouth, he described the ongoing hunt for the last of their enemies and the reestablishment of a trusted security corps, pausing long enough for his eating mouth to consume an odd blond nut pulled from a leather sack set on a long-toed foot. Then with a low, gravelly voice, he announced, “I want the ban on new passengers to hold. And I want the authority to do what is necessary to give that ban a gizzard.”

  Nothing bothered the Master more than having this particular species sitting in her inner circle. Harum-scarums were a difficult species, prone to violence and simple childish grudges. True, they were instrumental in saving the ship. But they were too fierce, too easily angered, and if anything, too much like the worst elements of human beings. She preferred nearly every other species before them. She could even embrace the idea of AIs joining the ranks of captains. But when her new security chief asked for more authority, the Master felt a keen appreciation. A genuine bond. She and the alien both understood what was important: that for as long as there had been a universe, nothing mattered as much as power.

  “But there won’t be any new passengers,” the other harum-scarum remarked, sharply disagreeing with her colleague. “We are off course. Our ship has suffered civil insurrections and considerable damage, and in a few thousand years, we might leave the galaxy entirely. Unless he was an idiot, why would any simple traveler put his precious flesh at risk with us now?”

  “Agreed,” the Master said.

  Washen remained silent.

  The Master nearly looked at her First Chair. Then with a visible tightening of her shoulders, she added, “Yet in the same vein, I think we should loosen our restrictions on emigrants. If a passenger wishes to leave us, and if we can come to an agreeable financial resolution, then perhaps a critical exception or two might be allowed.”

  Pamir leaned forward.

  “Madam,” he said, that single word dripping with an unusual respect. Then in the next breath, he explained, “Yesterday, I took a census of both passengers and crew—by an assortment of means, I counted everyone. We have more than a hundred billion souls on board. Depending on your definition of sentience, there might be many more than a hundred billion.” The heavy face nodded, eyes squinting. “I counted minds with my census, and I tried to ascertain the general moods of those minds—”