“What did I give you?”
“None of it. Don’t you remember?”
“Then I must have cheated you,” Alone observed.
“‘Cheat’ doesn’t do it justice,” Mr. Jan insisted.
Alone wasn’t certain what word to offer next.
“Look,” said Mr. Jan. “What I did…I was just trying to scare you. Taking you that deep, down where your nexuses couldn’t reach anybody. And then cutting the sapphire before you went down into that room. It looks bad, if you look at things that way. But it was meant to be a warning. Nothing else.”
“You were trying to scare me,” Alone guessed.
“Don’t you remember? I spelled out all of my reasons afterwards.” Mr. Jan looked at the granite floor and then the matching ceiling. With a stiff, self-absorbed voice, he said, “You heard me calling down to you. I know you heard, because you answered me. I told you that I was going to let you sit there and commune with the Great Ship until you promised to give me everything that I was owed.”
“I remember,” Alone lied.
“Money and respect. That’s what I wanted, that’s what I deserve. And that’s why I did what I did.” The walls were only partly tiled. Like the rest of the tiny apartment, the hallway was far from finished. Mr. Jan leaned against the shifting quasicrystals, beginning to cry. “All you needed to do…I mean this…was to say a few words to me. You could have just told me another lie. I never wanted to leave you down there. I’m not cruel like that. If you’d made any promises, anything at all, I’d have pulled you right out of there. Yes, I would have saved you in an instant.”
The voice faded.
“I should have done that,” Alone agreed. “Lying would have been right.”
“Well, I don’t know if that’s quite true.” The weeping man looked at his nemesis—a ghost that had stalked him for eons. “But listen, Harper. You have no respect for anyone but you. Yelling those insults up at me. Yes, you hurt me. Words like that…they last forever. They’re cutting me still, those awful things that you said to me.”
“I was wrong,” Alone agreed.
Mr. Jan looked at him. He took three steps forward, and when the other figure didn’t complain, he admitted, “I came back to the hole. You don’t realize that, but I did. I went there to check on you. After you fell into the coma, I used a little lift-bug to reach your body.”A trembling hand tugged at the braided hair. “I meant to bring you out, but I got scared. It looks bad, what happened, and I didn’t want trouble. So I scrubbed away every trace of me, from your field recorders and in here too. Then I convinced your apartment that I never existed and that you were always coming home tomorrow. In case anybody became curious about your whereabouts.”
“People can be curious,” Alone agreed.
Mr. Jan smiled grimly. Then he wiped at his eyes, adding, “I was always your best friend.”
Alone said nothing.
“You know, when you suddenly vanished, nobody noticed. Oh, they might ask me about you. Since they knew we were close. For several years, they’d wonder if I’d heard any noise from Crazy Harper and where you might have gone.”
“‘Crazy Harper’?”
“That’s what some of them called you. I never did.”
Alone made no remark.
For a long while, Mr. Jan concentrated on his mind, searching for courage to say, “I’m a little curious. How did you finally climb out of that hole?”
“There is a story,” Alone admitted. “But I don’t wish to tell it.”
Mr. Jan nodded, lips mashed together. Then he asked, “Does anyone know the story? About us, I mean.”
Silence.
Mr. Jan wrapped his arms around his chest and squeezed. “Not that you’re in terrible shape now. I mean, it’s not as if I murdered anybody.” He paused, dwelling for a moment on possibilities. Then he pointed out, “You lost time. I know, it was quite a lot of time. But here you are, aren’t you? And everything is back where it belongs.”
“I’ve told no one about my years.”
With a deep sigh, Mr. Jan said, “Good.”
“No one knows anything. Except for you, of course.”
The human nodded. He tried to laugh, but his voice collapsed into soft sobs. “I won’t tell, if you don’t.”
“I don’t know what I would say.”
Wiping at his wet face, Mr. Jan quietly asked, “What can I do? Please. Tell me how to make this up to you.”
Alone said nothing.
“I was wrong. I’ve done something criminal, and I’ll admit that much, yes.
And you should deliver the punishment. That’s the right solution. Not the captains, but you.” The smile was weak, desperate. “I promise. I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”
Alone had no idea what to say, but then a memory took hold. He thought to smile, nodding knowingly. Then with quiet authority, Alone explained, “You will leave me. Leave here and climb to the Ship’s hull. Since you’re a criminal, you need to be where criminals belong. Live under the stars and help keep the hull in good repair.” Alone took a small step forward, adding, “The work is vital. The Great Ship must remain strong. There is no greater task.”
Mr. Jan straightened his back. “What?” He didn’t seem to understand. “You want me to work with the Remoras? Is that your punishment?”
“No,” said Alone. “I wish you to become a Remora.”
“But why would I?”
“Because if you do otherwise,” Alone replied, “other people, including the captains, will hear what you did to your good friend, Crazy Harper.”
The demand was preposterous. Mr. Jan shook his head and laughed for a full minute before his frightened, slippery mind fell back to the most urgent question. “How did you get out of that hole?”
Alone didn’t answer.
“Somebody helped you. Didn’t they?”
“The Great Ship helped me.”
“The Ship?”
“Yes.”
“The Ship pulled you out from that hole?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Jan looked at the sober face, waiting for any hint of a lie. But nothing in the expression gave hope, and he collapsed to the stone floor. “I just don’t believe you,” he sobbed.
But he did believe.
“The Ship needs you to walk on the hull,” Alone explained. “It told me exactly that. Until you are pure again, you must live with the followers of Wune.”
“For how long?”
“As long as is necessary.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Alone hesitated. Then quite suddenly he was laughing, admitting, “I’m sorry, Mr. Jan. I don’t know either. Even with me, it seems, the Great Ship refuses to explain much about anything.”
10
Harper must have been a difficult, solitary man. No one seemed to have missed his face or companionship, and his sudden return caused barely a ripple of interest. Word spread that somebody was again living inside his apartment, and the apartment’s AI dutifully reported communications with acquaintances from the far-flung past. But the greetings were infrequent and delivered without urgency. Maintaining his privacy proved remarkably easy. For twenty busy years, Alone remained inside those small, barely furnished rooms. And the apartment never asked where its only tenant had been or why he had been detained, much less why this new Harper never needed to eat or drink or sleep. The machine’s minimal intelligence had been damaged by Mr. Jan. Alone spent a month dismantling and mapping his companion’s mental functions, and all that while he wondered if he was the same, his mind incomplete, mangled by clumsy, forgotten hands.
Harper had painted himself as an important explorer and an exceptionally brave thinker. Inside his pack, he had carried dated records about mysterious occurrences inside the Great Ship. But there were larger files at home, each one possessed by one broad topic and a set of tireless goals. In the man’s long absence, those files had grown exponentially. Alone uncovered countless stories about ghosts
and monsters and odd lost aliens. Over thousands of years, one thin rumor of a Builder being seen by the first scout team had become a mass of rumors and third-hand testimonies, plus a few more compelling lies, and several blatant fakes that had been discounted but never quite set aside.
Believe just a fraction of those accounts, and it would be difficult not to accept that the Great Ship was full of ancient, inscrutable aliens—wise souls born when the Earth was just so many uncountable atoms cooking inside a thousand scattered suns.
Each resident species had its preferred Builder.
Humanoids like to imagine ancient humanoids; cetaceans pictured enormous whales; machine intelligences demanded orderly, nonaqueous entities. But fashions shifted easily and in confusing directions, dictating the key elements to the most recent fables. Each century seemed to have its favorite phantom, its most popular unmapped cavern, or one mysterious phenomenon that was fascinating yet never rose to a point where physical evidence could be found. But even a stubborn lack of evidence was evidence. Harper had reasoned that the Builders had to be secretive and powerful organisms, and of course no slippery wise and important creature would leave any trace of its passing. Skin flakes and odd tools were never found in the deep caves, much less a genuine body, because if hard evidence did exist, then the quarry wouldn’t be the true Builders. Would they?
One file focused on the Remora’s ghost.
On Alone.
He had discovered references about himself in Harper’s field recorder. But in his absence, new sightings and endless conjecture made for years of unblinking study. Alone absorbed every word, every murky image, fascinated by the mystery that he had walked through. According to most accounts, he was more real than the Whispers that haunted a mothballed spaceport. But people like Harper generally preferred the Clackers who supposedly swam inside the Ship’s fuel tanks, and the Demon-whiffs that were made of pure dark matter. Tens of thousands of years after the event, Alone watched the recording of him standing inside the empty hyperfiber tank—a swirl of cobalt light that could mean anything, or nothing—and he began to wonder if perhaps he wasn’t quite real back then. Only recently, after all of the steps and missteps, had he acquired that rare and remarkable capacity to stand apart from Nothingness.
For every portion of the hull where he was seen, Remoras and other crew-members and passengers had spotted at least ten more examples of the ghost wandering beneath the stars.
What if there was more than one Alone wandering loose?
He didn’t know what to believe. After he abandoned the hull, those sightings fell to the level of occasional, and no Remora pretended to have spotted Wune’s mysterious friend. In no file was there mention of Aasleen and the nightmare inside one of the Ship’s engines. Which meant that the captains and crew were good at keeping secrets, and what else did they know? A related file focused on shape-shifting machines currently lurking in the dark corners and deepest wastes. Alone’s cavern held a prominent but far from dominating place. Other realms seemed to be haunted by his kind. Dozens of sprawling, empty locations were named. But the only cavern to capture Alone’s imagination was named Bottom-
E. Again and again, he found sketchy accounts of tourists wandering down an empty passageway, and when they glanced over their shoulder, a smear of dim light was silently racing out of view.
Bottom-E was an even larger cavern than Alone’s old home. And if nothing else, it would provide the perfect next home.
But what if another entity like him already lived there?
After two decades of study and consideration, Alone made one difficult choice. He identified the humans who had tried to contact Harper on his return. Most were small figures, many with criminal records and embarrassing public files. But despite those same limitations, one man had all the qualifications to give aid to an acquaintance that he hadn’t seen for ages.
With Harper’s face and voice, Alone sent a polite and brief request.
Eighteen days passed before any reply was offered. The recorded digital showed a smiling man who began with an apology. “I was off. Wandering in The Way of Old. It’s an ammonia-hydroxide ocean. On a small scale, but it’s still a hundred cubic kilometers of murk and life, and that’s why I couldn’t get back to you, Harper.”
The man was named Perri.
“So you’re interested in Bottom-E,” the message continued. “I can’t promise much in the way of help. I haven’t seen more than one-tenth of one percent of the place. But there is one enormous room that’s worth the long walk. Its floor is hyperfiber, and a fine grade at that. And the ceiling is kilometers overhead and inhabited by the LoYo. They’re machines, not sentient as individuals but colonial in nature. A few thousand of their city-nests hang free from the rafters, and that’s one of the reasons for going down there.”
The grinning man continued. “The LoYo give that big room a soft, delicious glow. I’ve got good eyes, but even after a week in that, I couldn’t see far. The immediate floor and what felt like a distant, unreachable horizon. Once, maybe twice, I saw a light in the distance. I can’t say what the light was. But you know me, Harper. Don’t expect ghost stories. Usually the truth is a lot more interesting than what we think we want to see…
“Anyway, what I like best about Bottom-E, and that huge room in particular…what makes the trip genuinely memorable…is that when you walk on that smooth hyperfiber, and there’s nothing above you but the faint far-off glow of what could be distant galaxies…well, it’s easy to believe that this is exactly how it would have felt and looked just a couple billion years ago, if you were strolling by yourself, walking across the hull of the Great Ship.
“Understand, Harper? Imagine yourself out between the galaxies, crossing the middle of nothing.
“I think that’s an experience worth doing,” Perri said.
Then with a big wink, he added, “By the way. I know you keep to yourself. But if you feel willing, you’re more than welcome to visit my home. For a meal, let’s say. For conversation, if nothing else. I don’t think you ever met my wife. Well, I’ll warn you. Quee Lee likes people even more than I do, if you can believe that.”
Perri paused, staring at his unseen audience.
“You were gone a very long time,” he mentioned. “Jan claimed you were off chasing Clackers, and that’s what the official report decides too. Lost in the fuel tanks somewhere. But I didn’t hear any recent news about bodies being fished out of the liquid hydrogen, which makes me wonder if our mutual friend was telling another one of his fables.
“Anyway, good to hear from you again, Harper. And welcome back to the living!”
11
As promised, Bottom-E held one enormous room, and except for the occasional smudge of cold light on the high arching ceiling, the room was delightfully dark. Each step on the slick floor teased out memories. That lost and now beloved childhood returned to him, and Alone wasn’t just content, but he was confident that the next step would bring happiness, and the one after, and the one after that.
More than twelve hundred square kilometers of hyperfiber demanded his careful study. Unlike the hull, there was an atmosphere, but the air was oxygen-starved and nearly as cold as space. Like before, Alone’s habit was to follow a random line until an oddity caught his attention. Then he would stop and study what another visitor had left behind—a fossilized meal or frozen bodily waste, usually—and then he would attack another random line until a new feature caught his senses, or until a wall of rough feldspar defined the limits of this illusion.
For almost two years, he walked quietly, seeing no one else.
The LoYo were tiny and weakly lit, and there was no sign that they noticed him, much less understood what he was.
Perri’s mysterious glow failed to appear. But Alone soon convinced himself that he’d never hoped the story would prove real. One step was followed by the next, and then he would pause and turn and step again, defining a new line, and then without warning, there was a sliver of time when that si
mple cherished pattern failed him. He suddenly caught sight of a thin but genuine reddish light that his big eyes swallowed and studied, examining the glow photon by photon, instinct racing ahead of his intelligence, assuring him that this new light was identical to the glow he leaked when he was examining a fossilized pile of alien feces.
On his longest, quietest legs, Alone ran.
Then the voice returned. Decades had passed since the last time Alone felt its presence, yet it was suddenly with him, uttering the concept, “No,” wrapped inside a wild, infectious panic.
His first impulse was to stop and ask, “What do you want?”
But the red glow was closer now, and Alone’s voice, even rendered as a breathless whisper, might be noticed. If that other entity heard him, it could become afraid, vanishing by some secret means. The moment was too important to accept that risk. The end of a long solitude might be here, if only Alone was brave enough to press on. That’s what he had decided long ago, imagining this unlikely moment. He would accept almost any danger to make contact with another like him. But only now, caught up in the excitement, did Alone realize how much this mattered to him. He was excited, yes. Thrilled and spellbound. Every flavor of bravery made him crazy, and he refused to answer the voice or even pay attention when it came closer and grew even louder, warning him, “Do not.” Telling him, “No. They want, but they will not understand. Do not.”
The light was still visible, but it had grown weaker.
The intervening distance had grown.
The other Alone must have noticed something wrong. A footfall, a murmur. Perhaps his brother heard the voice too, and the wild, unapologetic fear had taken possession of him. Whatever the reason, the light was beginning to fade away, losing him by diving inside a little tunnel, abandoning this room and possibly Bottom-E because of one irresistible terror.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5 Page 22
