The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  Tourists sit in a sturdy boat, watching the tide fall.

  Watching the Yawkleen.

  They are humans, and very wealthy humans at that. The men are beautiful, but the women are always just a little more beautiful, and everyone speaks in clear, almost operatic voices.

  “Lovely,” they sing.

  “Closer,” they urge their boat.

  The boat follows the pointing arms, moving toward the bluish island of ice. Four-winged birds rest on the ice, watching the intruders without interest. Then comes a sound more felt than heard—a staggering roar born somewhere beneath the surface—and the island shatters into unequal pieces, the smaller portion spilling over suddenly, throwing the birds into the sea.

  A big Yawkleen rises to the surface, symbiotic arms grabbing the struggling creatures.

  The humans applaud heartily

  With a few kicks of the great vertical tail, the alien closes on them. Hands hold out the strangled prey. A series of squeaks are translated by the boat’s pilot. “Tell me what is new and fun,” the creature demands.

  “New and fun where?” the humans ask.

  “New to see. Fun to do.” A cackling laugh obscures the sound of water and the surviving birds. “I’m a traveler. I like to see, to do.”

  There were always corners in the ship to explore. The humans mention a dozen new must-see destinations before the Yawkleen announces, “I have been to all of them. They bore me.”

  The rebuke embarrasses and enrages.

  Finally one beautiful man asks, “Well, where would you suggest we go?”

  “The hull,” says the alien.

  That the Yawkleen can travel up there is not news. There are limits on their mobility, yes. But inside a sealed vessel of native water, carried by machines that are powerful and proven … any passenger can be dragged to the surface and carried about …

  “To see the Inkwell,” the alien prompts. “Haven’t you yet been there?”

  “To the trailing hemisphere,” a pretty woman declares, an elegant hand scratching the gap between her lovely and very cold breasts. “I was up there just three years ago, for an entire day—”

  “No, the lead hemisphere,” the Yawkleen urges. “That is a view worth the trouble. The shields. The lasers firing. And sometimes, if you’re as lucky as me, a chunk of something will slip past and strike on the horizon.”

  Few tours visit the leading face. There are reasons of security, and at least as important, reasons of fear. What if just that sort of accident let a piece of ice strike you on the head? Risk was fun, but only so far as you weren’t in real danger.

  “The Satin Sack,” says the alien.

  The humans are tiring of this Yawkleen.

  “If you considered the Inkwell as being black … well, you should see the Satin Sack. As if plunging into the deepest coldest sea, we are.”

  “Where do you want to go next?” a man asks the lovely-breasted woman.

  “Home,” she decides.

  The boat complies instantly.

  “Look at the Sack and try not be changed,” the cetacean shouts to the fleeing humans. “Think of what it means. Think of the dangers there. Your little brains need to feel more little, if you ask me … !”

  The sea lifts with the tides and spills over a brink, falling now.

  It is cleaned of wastes and salts, and falls on.

  Then it is a river again, plunging down a steeply tilted cylinder. More thousands of kilometers have to be fallen through before the final bottom, and then the great pumps will grab the water, lifting it and dividing it into a myriad of springs and grand rivers and trickles and warm rains. But here, where the long flow has still barely begun, many thousands live and make their livelihoods. Odd fish dart about within a river that tumbles at a forty-five-degree tilt. Terraces and airborne reefs have built patches of flat ground where shops thrive, catering to the locals and the occasional visitor. The neighborhood is mixed in terms of species and wealth. It is newer than most neighborhoods but still a hundred centuries old. Everyone knows everyone. Humans are rare but generally respected. And an AI can sell flavored and tailored waters to a wide array of clients.

  In the midst of a quiet night, an alien enters the shop.

  “What may I do for you?” the shopkeeper inquires.

  Only then does she look up, spying a creature that is not quite familiar. What precise kind of organism are you?

  But the question is lost somewhere inside the swift tiny mind.

  “Water,” the alien requests.

  “Of course. But what precise type, my sir?”

  “Pure,” says the client. “Absolutely pure.”

  An easy enough task. The machine fills what seems like an appropriate container, and after watching it sit untouched between them, a feeling takes hold of her.

  “It is all a mess,” says the alien.

  She knows what is a mess. She feels it deeply.

  “The captains are fools.”

  With conviction, the shopkeeper agrees. “The future certainly looks awful.”

  Then the alien seems to laugh at her. “No, the future looks wonderful,” it declares. Then it adds, “Forget that I said those words.”

  The shopkeeper sits quietly waiting for something to happen.

  She is alone, entirely by herself, listening hard for no good reason, and except for the endless sound of water plunging past her front door, she hears nothing worthy of a name.

  Eighteen

  One of her early husbands was a great mathematician and cosmologist—a little Tilan man who brought his relentless genius to every morning table. He would drink strong tea, salted and chilled, and eat nuts dipped in cold sweet oil, and with a voice that struggled to remain patient, he would again try to explain the universe to his old and very foolish wife.

  “If nothing else, the equations with which I work are beautiful,” he maintained. “Before all else, they must possess elegance and a graceful balance, and they are always honest. They have no choice but to remain true to their nature. Do you understand, Mere?”

  “Honesty,” she would repeat, her human mouth wrapped around the alien sounds. Then for herself, she said, “They are faithful.”

  “Faithful to themselves,” he added.

  “Of course.”

  Tilans were tiny bipeds. Even Mere’s stunted body dwarfed most of the species. But luck and natural selection had given that species swift, acrobatic minds. Their neurons were formed from intricate tangles of proteinaceous crystals. Buried inside each neuron were forests of long, slender tubules—features narrow enough to feel the fuzzy borders of time and space. The Tila thought rather like a quantum computer thinks. Most sentient organisms could manage that trick on occasion, intuition and inspiration springing from the tiniest possible events. But for the Tila, intuition was the relentless heart of all life. Every conscious moment was dripping with the sense that the universe was ultimately and tirelessly vague. A trillion other universes, each as vital and real as their own, lay closer than the width of a busy electron. They felt it from their birth to their inevitable death, and like all natural philosophers, death was many things to them other than the end.

  “My equations are beautiful,” he would say.

  “And they are faithful and honest,” Mere would add, licking her own bowl clean of the sweet oil.

  “You are very beautiful,” he proclaimed.

  She didn’t entirely believe him, but she smiled as a happy Tilan wife should smile. “Thank you for thinking so.”

  “The river is beautiful, too,” he said.

  On occasion, she had thought so.

  “And the mountains, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “And our twin suns are very beautiful.”

  The suns were falling into one another, soon to destroy this helpless world. But she made an agreeable sound, adding with a bitter humor, “They are the most beautiful suns in our sky, yes.”

  “Four beauties,” he pointed out. “All valid. And ea
ch example is entirely different from the other three.”

  He had a point to make, but she knew better than to ask, “What do you mean?”

  “Do you know what I mean?” he inquired.

  “Barely.”

  “There are many ways to be beautiful.”

  “Granted.”

  “And many different mathematics describe our universe. They explain the Creation. And each delineates the true shape of Everything.” He finished his tea with a hearty sip, black eyes smiling at his extraordinarily ancient bride. “Using very different means, they answer all of our questions. Our existence is an inescapable residue. Yet there are other realms, too, and about them, the mathematics is much less certain.”

  “What other realms?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer immediately.

  “Do you mean sister worlds?” Unlike humans, Tilans easily believed that the universe was a great quantum stew. A trillion, trillion husbands precisely like him were sitting with their alien wives right now. Some were describing their lovely work. Some were quarreling with their spouses. And some great multitude was right now making love on the tabletop—an image that sprang into Mere’s simple mind, causing her to smile.

  “Are there mirror realities?” asked her husband.

  He could feel them, couldn’t he?

  “But are these other worlds real, or simply shadows of the one existence which is real? Which is us.” He laughed, enjoying his playful brilliance. “Or perhaps we are just one of the shadows cast by what is genuine and true?”

  “I don’t like that idea,” she confessed.

  “But some equations claim that all possibilities are correct.”

  Mere was dubious. “Okay,” she said, “we should carry out tests. In labs, in the sky. Create some experiment where we can tell—”

  “We cannot,” he interrupted.

  “No?”

  “The energies required are prohibitive. The conditions are too extreme. To study the truths of Creation and Everything requires reaching outside our own little reality. And honestly, I doubt if any species commanding any technology could do the kind of work you want to attempt.”

  The truth was that Mere didn’t want much of anything just now.

  “Is there such a thing as the future?” he asked.

  “Not one future,” she replied immediately. “At least that is what I have been told ever since I can remember. Tomorrow is not set. A countless multitude of futures are possible, and each is inevitable.”

  Mere sounded Tilan, and to a point, she believed what she said.

  “All right,” her husband continued. “But is there one past? One history? One story that leads up to this good moment?”

  What did he mean?

  “Sometimes my equations claim there is no single past,” he confessed. “What we think of as yesterday is exactly as unknowable and imprecise as what we think of as tomorrow.”

  She laughed at her husband. What choice did she have?

  But he absorbed her laughter without complaint. “Sometimes, darling … my love … sometimes it seems to me as if we exist as a great assemblage of moments. Imagine time reduced to its smallest, most perfect unit. Then there is no such thing as time. We are a specific arrangement of matter and energy, each one equally precise but endowed with subtly different arrangements of matter and of energy—”

  “But what about the past?” she interrupted. “I wasn’t born a few moments ago, like you. I remember things that happened centuries ago.”

  “But you don’t recall everything about those times,” he pointed out. “And despite your considerable memory, I would guess that some of what you remember … little details and exactly when the big things happened … well, I could imagine that you can remember no single day with a perfect clarity.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The past is fundamentally unknowable. That’s what my work tells me, on certain days.”

  “The past is sloppy, you mean.”

  “I prefer to consider it rich with potential.” He meant that. Picking up his crystal bowl, he admitted, “This is a difficult subject,” before he began licking out the last sticky bit of sweet oil.

  Finally, Mere saw what this lecture was about. She wasn’t smart in the same ways as her husband, but her mind was relentless enough to finally discern what was obvious. “Why just on some days?” she asked.

  He paused with his licking. “Pardon?”

  “These equations,” she said. “They sound awfully fickle.”

  “A good word for it. Yes. Fickle.”

  “One day there is a clear past, but the next morning … what? The past becomes vague and crazy now?”

  “In a sense,” he agreed. “Although ‘crazy’ is not the best—”

  “And some days, these parallel worlds are real. While some days, they’re just shadows. Right?” Then she laughed, her own intuitive nature surfacing for a moment. “Or maybe we’re the shadows, and someone else is real.”

  “Different days, different answers,” he claimed.

  “Why? Because you work with different equations?”

  The moment demanded silence. The black eyes stared across the table, a keen delight fighting to the surface of the round white face. Thousands of years later, in an entirely different portion of the galaxy, Mere would recall the moment with the kind of clarity that convinced her that it was the genuine past, solid and eternal, and residing in that immortal moment of time, she was still sitting with her husband and lover, waiting for him to tell her:

  “This is what I have noticed.

  “On two different mornings, I can begin with the same thought. The same first equation. The same pen, and the same quality of parchment. My mood is equally relaxed and ready for my day. Yet by the time our suns our setting, my work has taken me to an entirely different conclusion. Even with the same initial steps, I cannot predict what I will make of the universe by the time I rise into sleep again.”

  Again, silence and the staring eyes.

  Then with a low, plainly awed laugh, he added, “Sometimes I wonder. Perhaps there are many answers to the great questions, and like people drowning at sea, the answers struggle endlessly with one another, fighting for the chance to push through the surface, crazed by that slender, fragile hope of being seen.”

  A WARNING WOKE Mere, teasing her away from the Tila.

  “The flow is at an end,” the AI declared with a minimum of energy. “As you predicted, and exactly on schedule, the ice river has lost its containment. The polyponds are letting it die.”

  She continued to wake herself, lifting her slight metabolism until she found enough vigor to review the telemetry and give a few quick commands. Years ago, when the streakship had approached while returning from the Blue World, Pamir had shoved her scattered pieces of ship in the same useful direction. According to plans drawn up decades ago, Mere and her disheveled home dove into black dusts, effectively vanishing from everyone’s view. The walls of the passageway proved denser than much of the Inkwell. The polyponds had cleared the way for the streakship, but like a Tilan broom sweeping at a dirt floor, they had pushed the dirt out of the way but no farther. Those next few days meant impacts, some of them major. Her original habitat was severely damaged, and she had to partly thaw her body and risk moving to the secondary habitat. From there, she carefully assembled all the pieces of her ship, fashioning a vessel that ended up looking rather different from the original schematics. Impacts and ever-changing circumstances required hard choices. Every surviving system from the first habitat was ripped loose, and then she disassembled what remained, tearing it down to individual atoms that she ionized and flung out ahead of her, slowing her progress at an infinitesimal rate.

  In a brief ceremony, she christened her new ship:

  The Osmium.

  Old husbands needed the occasional honor, she felt. And she knew that the harum-scarum would appreciate the gesture when he learned about it.

  Her new trajectory and t
he diminishing velocity set her on a collision course with the Great Ship. But that assumed both that the ship and the Osmium would successfully cross the Inkwell, neither changing its present velocity in any significant way.

  Like all good plans, this plan failed soon after it began. Polypond eyes were supposed to see Mere as a cold empty fuel tank jettisoned centuries ago from a distant streakship. Her ion drive was too sluggish and slight to be obvious, and if necessary, she could kill the engine for days at a time, doing no lasting damage to her trajectory. But what no one predicted was what her own eyes would see. And that her ears would hear things that piqued her curiosity. And that, given the chance, she would take enormous risks to earn a better look and a closer listen.

  In quiet, coded voices, the polyponds spoke endlessly to one another.

  And using massive slow ships, they constantly sent little pieces of themselves from one warm world to another.

  The ships were minimally armored. Nothing inside them seemed to be valuable enough to shroud in hyperfiber or protect with lasers. She focused on a transmission from a ship moving in the blackness ahead of her, unleashing all of her quantum code-breakers in a bid to make sense out of its dense, Gordian-like signal. Then at one point, the signal changed its nature. The coding sputtered abruptly and failed, and in the next millisecond, a lone voice sadly told its audience, “I have found unfortune—”

  The ship exploded into a cloud of hydrogen gas and tiny fragments.

  Mere replayed the collision a thousand times, measuring the spreading cloud’s progress through the endless dark. And after considering various possibilities, she sent home her new flight plan and began rebuilding the Osmium once again.

  Every pretense to being only an empty fuel tank ended. The new configuration was sturdy and purposeful if not particularly large. Inside the new engine, tucked inside a magnetic cask, was a substantial mass of anti-iron. The new engine was as advanced and expensive as anything known, and astonishingly efficient, and it had a kick and raw arrogance about it. To hide herself, the best Mere could manage was to fire up the engine whenever the shrouding dusts were thicker than normal. And she used it in hard brutal bursts, shoving herself into a slower, slightly different trajectory that eventually took her through the ruined ship.