The Well of Stars

by Robert Reed

  But then with a quiet, tight voice, Washen suggested, “You should try your front door. Maybe you’ll find that it’s unlocked.”

  Thirty-one

  Two centuries earlier, the man managed to reclaim both his job and rank, and later his original name, which was Easterfall, and his nature-given face. He was so grateful for the pardon that he would tell his story to anyone. “The First and Second Chair found me,” he would begin. “I was hiding inside my sister’s house, of all places.” Then with a well-practiced shame, he admitted, “I wasn’t just a coward. I was stupid, too. Imagine, believing that I could hide in such an obvious place. And I don’t know why I did any of it. Honestly, I must have been crazy.”

  Some people didn’t believe his story. It seemed ridiculous: two of the most important humans out for a lazy stroll and by accident stumbling over him. Even if Washen grew up inside that house—and the storyteller learned to keep plenty of proof on hand—what were the odds? Long, by any measure. Preposterous, and obviously this human, this technician, was some species of liar, and a very poor liar at that.

  “They didn’t have to pardon me,” he would boast. “But they did. For abandoning my post during and after the Wayward War, I was granted a probationary sentence, and then my record was swept free of red. See? Ever since, my job ratings have been as high as possible, or nearly so.”

  He had been a stupid coward, his story claimed. But now he was the most loyal and devoted member of the crew, and even after two centuries of uncomplaining service, Easterfall still reveled in his good fortune. No, he didn’t tell his story often anymore. At least not to strangers, who generally didn’t care to hear it, or to his dearest friends, who already knew it by heart. But the moment had been so frightening, ominous, and awful, that the subsequent kindness of the captains had remained something for which he would always feel grateful. “A million years from now,” he liked to boast, “and wherever the Great Ship finds itself, I’m going to be standing at my post, doing whatever it is that Washen and Pamir ask of me, and doing it to the best of my ability.”

  Of course these years had been inordinately quiet. An expert in the servicing of most kinds of starships, Easterfall found himself with little work in a given day. There was no passenger traffic or commerce, and each of the ports was set into a maintenance-only state. The one major mission originated from his port—Port Alpha—but that streakship had been refitted by other teams. Then when the ship returned again, it was wrapped under the strictest quarantine protocols, and later still, other technicians were responsible for its mothballing.

  Secrecy was the watchword at both ends of the mission, and Easterfall couldn’t feel any serious insult for being passed over. His record might be clear of red blotches, but you weren’t a captain unless you had a long, precise memory. There were thousands of candidates, and of course he always had something to occupy his time—usually a distant corner of the port to keep clean and ready, waiting for the day when they finally escaped from the Inkwell and the damned polypond.

  But in the subsequent years, once the Great Ship was burrowing through the nebula, Easterfall’s assignments began to change.

  First, there were the briefings. Minor captains would speak to him and his associates, explaining a little of this and a sliver of that without revealing the bulk of the secrets—secrets they probably didn’t understand in full. But certain tendencies were easy enough to see: The high captains were making contingency plans; defensive systems were being built beneath the hull and around each of the vital ports; no alien, polypond or otherwise, would be able to slip inside the biozones, much less conquer the ship’s interior.

  Then came the great rain of living polyponds, and the original defenses were adapted and updated, a series of elaborate and inspired tricks applied to the presence of so much water and life … and still, Easterfall’s mood as well as the mood of his associates remained confident, even brazen.

  There was only one polypond, they learned. One vast organism that seemed ready to steal what was theirs.

  “Fuck you,” the technicians would shout, fists brandished at the vast wet monster rolling above their heads.

  “This ship is ours!” they proclaimed.

  Then with big laughs, they added, “And you’re going to be our puddle, when we’re done with you.”

  In the taverns, after work and before, tech crews discussed the ongoing war. Gossip and the latest captain sightings were repeated in detail, expert voices relentlessly dissecting what was true from the great roaring muddle. And in those next intense weeks, something awful emerged. One middle-ranked captain had said a few words in passing, using an inadequately secured nexus, and a technician who may or may not have had permission to work on that channel happened to hear everything. Then after a sleepless night, she came to breakfast late, eating nothing, sitting alone at the end of one of the long granite tables where technicians had sat for millennia.

  “The alien wants our cargo,” she muttered.

  Easterfall happened to be sitting closest to her. Surprise made him a little stupid, and without thinking, he asked, “What cargo?”

  Then he remembered, and with an embarrassed blink of the eyes, he said, “The prisoner under Marrow. I forgot. »

  “This is about the universe,” she muttered.

  Others began to listen. A whispering rumble preceded a perfect cold silence; then every tech was leaning across the varnished granite, fighting for a good view of her miserable face.

  She said, “The universe,” again. Then she repeated a few old equations—the sorts of musty mathematics that most hadn’t heard since school, and none of them had ever needed. “It believes this,” she claimed with a pained little voice. “The universe was never born. The Creation was suspended. Denied. That’s why everything is emptiness. Except for the dark energies, which keep building every moment … everywhere …”

  “What did you hear?” Easterfall asked. Then with a tight little voice, he suggested, “Maybe you didn’t hear it right.”

  She gave him a hard, impatient stare.

  “The polypond doesn’t want to possess the ship,” she remarked. “It wants to destroy the ship, and then free its passenger, and after all these billions of years, finish the Creation.”

  Destruction was a very different goal. Everyone at the table saw it instantly, and most could appreciate the worst of the possibilities. But one stubborn soul, sitting at the table’s far end, cried out, “It doesn’t matter. We’re practically invulnerable in here. So what?”

  Easterfall grimaced, saying nothing.

  A fourth voice—a little fef who had joined their team just forty years ago—lifted the middle of his body, and with a voice translated into an impatient growl, he pointed out, “We are flying inside a nebula, and blind. Our opponent has proved that it can move significant masses across enormous distances, and who can say what lies before us?”

  Entire worlds could be waiting, was the implication.

  “But the big engines are moving us,” the doubter insisted. “We’re dancing, as best we can. A little two-meter jump to one side now means that we miss these worlds, if they exist, by a hundred thousand kilometers down the line.”

  Easterfall pushed away his breakfast and breathed heavily on the cool pink tabletop.

  Then in the moisture of his own breath, he drew the ship and its course.

  And he breathed again, erasing his first drawing. The second film of water was the nebula, he decided. If the nebula was millions of years old, and if it had always been wandering through this portion of the galaxy … and if the polypond had spent the last several million years acquiring every potential tool and weapon that happened to wander into its awful cold darkness …

  “Not worlds,” he muttered.

  But his voice must have been louder than he realized. Looking up, he saw nearly a hundred faces, human and otherwise, staring at him.

  Quieter this time, he said, “There’s a better, worse weapon. Than worlds, I mean.”

>   Did he just say that?

  “If I were trying to destroy the Great Ship,” he added, probably too late. His reputation as the captains’ loyal puppy was taking a beating now. But he couldn’t help himself, spitting out calculations as well some rough facts. “Nothing can pass through hyperfiber,” he reminded them. “And ‘nothing’ comes in several forms. A mass with enough velocity or stupid bulk, when impacting, creates a jet of plasma hot enough to become a powerful near-nothing, burrowing into the best grades of hyperfiber. Or nothing comes as lasers or other EM displays, which have no resting mass, and which can slowly erode the fiber’s bonds. And neutrinos are almost nothing, which means that they do a masterful job of punching through our hull and through Marrow and out the other side again.”

  He paused, knowing that everyone had already leaped to his final candidate.

  But he didn’t want anyone else to say it. This was his stage and his drama, and with the same relish that he had used years ago to describe his own salvation, Easterfall said what everyone else was thinking.

  “If I wanted to kill the ship,” he called out. “I’d use the worst bits of nothing. I’d charge up those bits and drag them out in front of us, and by one means or another, I’d try to gain control over the ship’s trajectory, nudging us into the best path so that I could hit my target perfectly …

  “That’s what I would do,” he told the room. “If it was that important, if I really believed that I could finish the Creation …”

  Then with a quiet laugh, he added, “If I thought the universe was left unfinished, that is. Which is one thing that I have always hated to do … leaving any job unfinished … !”

  AN HOUR BEFORE the Blue World struck, Easterfall was awakened by an unannounced guest. His team was living in temporary quarters far removed from Port Alpha. Nobody had given them explicit orders, but they were obviously being held in reserve, waiting for the worst to happen. In the face of enormous damage, local or otherwise, they would be dispatched to critical areas. Using skills honed in the repair of brutalized starships, they would patch wounds and reroute key functions, making the way safe for slower, more thorough repair crews, and, when necessary, autodocs and living physicians. And then they would pull out again, waiting again for the next inevitable blow.

  He was asleep, but in another few moments, he would have been awake.

  The hand that touched his jaw was rough and strong, and after a moment’s pressure, it decided to give him a little slap.

  Easterbrook was suddenly alert, and dumbfounded.

  “Sit up,” Pamir told him.

  The flustered man tried to stand.

  “Just stay seated,” the Second Chair warned. Then with a strange hint of a smile, he asked, “Do you remember? I did you a favor once.”

  “Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I—?”

  “Listen. Now.”

  The technician fell silent.

  “I have a new assignment for you. And for a few others.”

  Easterfall nodded, feeling both honored and terrified.

  “You’re in charge of this new team,” Pamir promised. Then with a secure nexus, he delivered a list of names and species: two fefs and a Remora and a harum-scarum and three other humans, none of them familiar to him. “Go to Port Alpha. Now. Start working today. This is the ship and the berth, and this is what I want done to it.”

  The technician closed his eyes, seeing everything.

  Then with a small, slightly dubious voice, he remarked, “This isn’t right. What you want—”

  A thick finger stabbed him, and a boiling voice said, “Everything I tell you is secret. Everything you think you know is inadequate. I have twenty thousand contingency plans, at the very least, and this is just one last little detail done in our final minute.”

  Easterfall nodded.

  He pursed his lips, inflating his cheeks for a moment.

  Finally, he said, “I understand that, sir. I do. But all I’m saying … what I’m trying to suggest, sir … for this assignment, sir, I believe you need a few more provisions than this …”

  Pamir stared at him.

  “You’re a busy soul,” the technician said with a charitable tone. “But outfitting streakships is my business, and I’m rather good at it, and I’m just offering … sir … that we tweak your shopping list, just a little bit …”

  Thirty-two

  The bombardment was beautiful, scalding and delicate and beautiful. Pricks of light appeared on the surface of the Blue World, each fleck marking the detonation of a hundred-megaton blast, obliterating the sky’s roof and creating jets of white steam and stripped nuclei that rose like fingers out ahead of the shriveled but always enormous creature. Yet the bombs were only nuisances, just some of the brutal preliminary work. Larger nukes dressed inside sleek capsules of high-grade hyperfiber dove into the base of each jet, accelerating to the bottoms of the fluid and temporary craters, then accelerating, cutting deep, their diamond-clad eyes aiming for whatever seemed massive or important.

  To a human eye, the Blue World looked injured. The body recoiled from each blast, submerged organs reflexively retreating, conduits and specialized vessels shredded and useless, while everything else was endowed with a soft wounded pink glow that heartened the Master Captain.

  “It’s dying,” she declared.

  Washen simply nodded.

  “How soon—?” the Master began.

  “Now.”

  As Washen spoke, the world changed its look. In an instant, a vigorous blue light bled out of its depths, the illusion of strength and youth and astonishing vigor born with the sudden discharge of hundreds of weapons. Simple nukes were mixed with gamma-ray generators and antimatter mines and a few bottles filled with laser pulses—intense barrages of coherent light that until now were suspended in slowing matrixes, perched on the brink of absolute zero. Great twisting bubbles of steam expanded and collapsed again, the violent cavitation creating a prolonged roar that shattered distant structures, making soup from tissues and intricate machines. The Blue World shook and roiled, the blueness quickly collapsing into a muddy gray glow that continued to soften, edging gradually toward blackness.

  “Die,” the Master coaxed.

  She was pacing inside one of the auxiliary bridges. Her image was pacing beside Washen, who was standing alone on the original bridge. Each woman was trying to absorb information drawn from a multitude of sources, discounting what was suspect, concentrating on the tiny cues and glimmers that had importance. In this elaborate, enormous game, the Master was the expert. The genius. Washen had always recognized her own novice capacity in this difficult realm. Which was why she had set up a series of hardened and deeply encoded links with the woman, wanting to know the worst, and the best, as soon as possible.

  Yet the Master kept asking her questions.

  “Is it dead, Washen?”

  She couldn’t tell.

  “What do you think, my dear?”

  Even if the Blue World had died—

  Then the apparition beside her said, “Damn. We were close, but no!”

  What did The Master see? Washen began racing through the data and the AI extrapolations … and finally she noticed something much simpler. On the surface of the Blue World, between those round zones where the water continued to boil, vigorous tendrils were pulling together an assortment of metal-foam islands and machinery—the mangled detritus stirred out of the depths by the heavy blasts.

  Again, the Master cursed.

  “What?” Washen asked.

  The illusion of a giant human pivoted on one foot, capturing the giant woman’s unexpected grace. Then with a teacher’s warning, she said, “If you want to rule the ship, darling … if you genuinely wish to sit in my chair someday … you have to learn how to watch every little place at once …”

  The little place was tucked inside the shadow of one towering rocket nozzle. Almost unnoticed, a wave had begun to build. Across a thousand kilometers of churning, mud-colored polypond, muscles were f
lexing, elaborate neural systems firing in succession, a sudden, vast, and very graceful power lending momentum to the water. The wave pushed away from the nozzle, gathering speed. Security troops fired little nukes, cutting a few of the muscles. But not enough, obviously. At a velocity many times the speed of sound, one hundred kilometers of living fluid grew to twice that depth, then twice again.

  “The center engine,” a voice cried out.

  Aasleen.

  “Three waves,” she reported.

  From a distance of thousands of kilometers, a trio of identical ripples was gathering, water and muscle and things less easily named suddenly reaching out of the newborn atmosphere. Fluid mechanics were being pushed to the limit. Energies gathered for this single assault were spent in moments, and lost. Scaffoldings of plastic and rubber and pressurized goo managed to give each one of the waves a backbone, and then as if to prove the impossibility of this assault, one of the waves collapsed. Hundreds of kilometers from its target, the liquid mountain split open and flattened, shreds of tissue already being gathered and sorted as the water rolled in all directions, hunting for the lowest point.

  But the other two waves held together, and again, they rose up.

  The Master cursed.

  Washen didn’t have any breath left in her.

  It was Aasleen, sitting in a distant auxiliary bridge, who quietly mentioned, “This is what we guessed. Worst case—”

  But now, a second wave crumbled and died.

  How many times could the polypond generate these waves? If they kept battering her fusion reactors and cutting neurons … when would the enemy grow tired and have no choice but to stop trying … ?

  The last wave pulled itself toward its middle, lifting its mass into a narrow, impossible column that stood far above the atmosphere. Simple friction and the heat leaking from all those frantic machines and muscles caused the water to boil, then explode. Jets of white steam raced out into the vacuum. For a last long while—six impossible minutes—the wave continued forward, the vapor finally feeling the tug of the ship, allowing itself to plunge back down as it cooled and froze, the strangest snow falling, then melting against the face of the polypond.