by Robert Reed
Then she glanced up, smiling now, her very round, very old-fashioned face lit up by the map’s glow.
Again, Pamir thought that she was a beautiful woman.
“Look at the ship’s core,” she advised.
Quietly and almost politely, the two men enjoyed a good long laugh at poor Quee Lee’s expense.
Thirty-one
PAMIR CONSTRUCTED A list of promising sites, then made foot-and-eye searches of each, always in disguise, always taking the sort of time and obsessive care that comes naturally to an immortal working alone. Over the next few years, he uncovered an ocean of sharp rumor, slippery lies, and dreamy half-sightings. As far as he could determine, the only certainty was that every sentient organism had seen the missing captains at least once, and judging by the sightings, the captains were everywhere. Even Pamir was infected with the hysteria. Missing colleagues appeared without warning. Old lovers, usually. Washen, more than not. Without warning, he would see a tall human woman casually strolling down a busy avenue, her gait and color and the bun of her gray and brown hair recognizable from half a kilometer away. Pamir would break into a sprint, and as he drew closer, a dead run. But by the time he reached Washen, she had turned into another handsome woman, flustered and perhaps a little flattered to have a strange man tugging on her arm. On a different occasion, he spotted Washen sitting cross-legged in the middle of an otherwise empty chamber, nude and elegantly beautiful. But in the time it took Pamir to approach, she turned into a statue twenty meters tall, and just when he convinced himself that this was his first genuine clue, her statue became nothing but a suggestive pile of badly lit rubble. Then it was a year later, and Washen was kneeling on a ledge among the purple epiphytes growing above the grave bar where Pamir had made camp. Glancing up, he saw her familiar face smiling at him, watching as he baked a fresh-killed chinook salmon. Then the wind gusted, and he heard Washen’s voice asking, “Enough for two?” But by then Pamir knew his mind, and he didn’t allow himself excitement. A gust of wind lifted, and Washen’s face turned to a knot of dead leaves. And Pamir shook his head, smiled at his own foolishness, then set the fish closer to the sputtering fire.
Passengers and the crew learned about his hunt, and for every conceivable reason, they led him astray.
Some wanted money for their lies.
Others begged for attention, for praise and love and fame.
While a few were so genuinely eager to please, they didn’t know they were lying, inflating half-memories with wishful thoughts, building coherent epics that could withstand every battery of physiological testing.
The missing captains were living with radical luddites somewhere in the Bottoms.
They had formed their own luddite community hidden inside an unmapped chamber somewhere beneath the Gossamer Sea.
They had been abducted by the Kajjan-Quasans—a tiny part-organic, part-silicon species who kept them as slaves and rode them like livestock.
A gel flow in the Magna district had entombed them.
Or there was the common, almost plausible story of bitter, vengeful aliens. Phoenixes were the preferred villains, though there were many worthy candidates. Whoever they were, they had returned to the ship in secret, and in retribution for the Master’s ancient crimes, they murdered her best captains.
One earnest human claimed that an unknown alien had carved away the captains’ high mental functions, then left the brain-damaged survivors living inside a local sewage-treatment plant. Unlikely as it sounded, the witness remembered seeing a woman identical to Washen. “I talked to her,” he swore. “Poor lady. Dumb as can be now. Poor lady.”
With a worried hopefulness, Pamir slipped inside the vast chamber. The original recycling machinery was now augmented with a forest of tailored fungi—a scene that couldn’t help but remind the captain of his mother’s long-ago home. Mushrooms towered overhead, feasting on the waste of a thousand species. A village of low huts and smoky fires was exactly where he expected to find it—a human colony not on any map, official or otherwise. Slowly and carefully, he approached the nearest hut, and after a good deep breath, he stepped out and smiled at the woman standing in the open doorway.
He recognized the face. Without doubt, she resembled a one-time engineer who had helped build the Belters’ starship, then later joined the captains’ ranks.
“Aasleen?” he asked, stopping at a throw’s distance.
The face was mostly unchanged, yes: a rich lustrous black over smooth, elegant features, with a radiant yellowy-white smile. Her smile was very much the same, too. The longer Pamir stared at the apparition, the more certain he felt.
She said, “Hello,” quietly, almost too quietly to be heard.
“I’m Pamir,” he blurted. “Remember me, Aasleen?”
“Always,” she replied, and the smile brightened.
Her voice was too soft and too slow. It wasn’t the right voice, yet what if some creature had mutilated her in some elaborate fashion…? With each word, the voice grew a little closer to what he remembered, to what he expected. Pamir found himself enjoying this illusion, stepping closer and watching as the face continued to change, evolving until it was very much the ex-lover’s face.
He asked, “What are you thinking, Aasleen?”
Her mouth opened, but no sound emerged.
“Do you know how you got here?” He stepped even closer, smiling as he repeated the question. “Do you know how?”
“I do,” she lied. “Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“By accident,” she replied. “That’s what it had to be.”
Pamir reached for her face, and when she tried to back away, he said, “No. Let me.” Then his wide hand passed through a projection of light and ionized dust. The fungus hut and the fires were equally unreal. This wasn’t a community, it was an entertainment. Someone had thrown away their empathic AI, probably in the morning shit, and somehow it had survived the fall and the sterilization procedures, eventually landing in the goo beneath his feet.
Pamir left the entertainment where he found it, unmapped.
He abandoned the search zone, traveling halfway around the ship to a place that would mean plenty to Washen and Aasleen. He climbed inside the antimatter tank where the Phoenixes once lived. As he expected, the facility was empty. Utterly clean and empty. Not even one of Washen’s ghosts was waiting for him. Standing at the bottom, on a floor of slick, ageless hyperfiber, Pamir found himself staring up at the vastness, the tank making him feel tiny even as a knowing part of him warned that this was nothing, that the ship dwarfed this little cylinder, and the universe dwarfed the ship, and all these grand designs and silver wonders were nothing set against the endless reaches through which everything soared.
Eighteen years and three weeks had been invested in a careful, thorough search for the captains, and nothing had come of it.
Nothing.
Out of simple habit, Pamir referred to his original list of searchable sites, each site carefully deleted over the years, tired eyes tracking down to that final odd word:
“!eech.”
This would be the last place he ever looked. Years of labor and hope had been wasted, nothing learned but that nothing wanted to be learned. Making the long fall to the alien habitat, Pamir decided that Washen and Aasleen, and Miocene, weren’t waiting around any proverbial curve. He could suddenly believe those theories that the Master held close to her heart. Another species had hired away her best captains, or more likely, kidnapped them. Either way, they were off the ship, and lost. And Washen’s mysterious reappearance was someone’s peculiar joke, and the Master was cunning-wise not to let herself be distracted by a sick, misguided humor.
The !eech would be a suitable end, he decided.
As he stepped out of the hub, out into that planar grayness, Pamir nearly dismissed the site out of hand. Washen would never remain here. Not for a year, much less for several millennia. Already feeling his mind eroding, his will and heart deflating with every little breath, Pamir was quite sure
that no other captain would willingly live inside this two-dimensional realm.
Two steps, and he wanted to run away.
Halting, Pamir took a deep breath, then made certain that the hub’s lone doorway was locked open. Then he knelt and opened a sack of tiny scuttlebugs and dog-noses and peregrine-eyes.
Set loose, the sensors fanned out along two dimensions.
With access to certain secure files, Pamir asked for background on the !eech. What was given him was sketchy, unyielding. The exophobes had lived in this intentionally bland habitat for six hundred years, then the entire species had disembarked, their vessel carrying them off into a molecular dust cloud that had long since been left behind.
The !eech were gone before the captains vanished.
“Good-bye,” he whispered. Then he lifted his head, his voice magnified by the floor and ceiling, that single word racing out in a perfect circle that ended with the distant round wall, then returned to him again, loud and deep and mutated into a stranger’s voice.
“Good-bye,” the room shouted at him.
As soon as I can, he thought. The moment I am done.
* * *
THE PROBES FOUND anomalies.
They always did; nothing about their alarms was unexpected.
Pamir constructed a map of the anomalies, checked for patterns, then began walking in a sweeping pattern, examining each in turn. Nothing was large enough to see with the naked eye. Most of the oddities were dried flakes of human skin. But what struck Pamir as peculiar, even remarkable, was that barely a dozen flakes were waiting to be found. If humans had wandered into this place, wouldn’t they have left a good deal more tissue? Old tissue, when he measured the decay. Abused to where their genetic markers couldn’t be read. And there wasn’t any bacteria clinging to the flakes, either. None of that benign, immortal stuff that had ridden humanity into space.
Cleansing agents or microchines had scrubbed this place to the brink of sterility. Which wasn’t too unlikely. This was an alien home, and its human trespassers could have been mannerly.
Could have been.
One more purple light showed on the map, nestled near the wall.
It was a twist of incinerated flesh. Submerged inside the plastic floor, it must have gone unnoticed by the trespassers. But a scuttlebug hadn’t any trouble finding it, and with its guidance, Pamir used a laser drill, extracting the blackened finger-sized treasure, then inserting it into his field lab.
Quietly, patiently, the gray floor started to patch its fresh hole.
Nearly a kilo of living flesh had been charred down to almost nothing. There were genetic markers, though not enough to match against any of the missing captains. But the carmelized flesh implied a homicidal violence, which offered another reason to explain why visitors might try to cover their traces.
Pamir watched the floor grow flat and slick again, then he measured the gray plastic, carefully mapping a network of fine, almost invisible scars. This tiny portion of the habitat had been damaged. Perhaps recently. The floor had scars, as did the ceiling and the thick gray wall. Some kind of machine had been destroyed here. Pamir found a thin taste of metals inside the smart hydrocarbons. Explosions and lasers had riddled this place. He could make out where determined hands had chiseled out anything that would constitute a clue, the floor healing and healing again, struggling to hold its seal while another force, just as relentless, struggled to erase its crime.
Pamir was sweating, thinking again of ghosts.
What now?
Sitting on an ancient pillow, he turned a full circle, noticing the scuttlebug with its face pressed against the patched wall.
“Already looked there,” Pamir told it.
But the bug refused to move.
Pamir rose, nearly bumping his head on the ceiling. Walking toward the wall, he asked, “What is it?”
In many species, perhaps even in ancient humans, language evolved as a tool to speak with the dead. Since the living world can read your face and body, only ghosts require those simple first words.
Whose theory was it?
Pamir was trying to remember, thinking of nothing else when he knelt beside the scuttlebug and tapped into its data. Buried deep in the wall—closer to the cold vacuum than to him—was a single metal object. It was round and smooth, and as far as he could see, it couldn’t be more simple.
It’s nothing, thought Pamir.
Nothing.
But he used a laser, carving a narrow hole, then widening it enough for the bug to scramble in, then scramble out again.
The artifact was fashioned from dirty silver, and the laser had left it too hot to hold. Pamir set it on top of the bug and ate a small meal of dried whiskey and sweetened coelacanth. Then he examined the artifact’s hinge and its crude latch, using his eyes and fingers. Whatever happened here, the object had been damaged. X-rays showed him a primitive network of gears and empty space. Removing one of the bug’s limbs, he used it as a prick, finally triggering the battered latch. Then as Pamir carefully lifted the lid, the hinge shattered and the lid fell between his long feet, and he stared at the clock’s face, archaic and very simple and wondrously strange.
A crude battery had run itself dry.
The elegant black hands were frozen in place. A dial showed what might be a date. 4611.330, Pamir read. And his heart paused for a long, long moment.
Was it some sort of luddite prop?
Or a child’s toy?
Whatever it was, it had delicate, carefully forged metal workings. Pamir could see the wear of fingers on the bottom and edges of the silver case. As an experiment, he held the clock in his hand, trying to imagine its vanished owner. Then he turned and started toward the wall, and by accident, he kicked the broken lid across the slick gray floor.
The lid lodged beneath one of the hard pillows.
To the ghosts, Pamir said, “It’s mine.”
He knelt and reached under the pillow, pulling out that heavy piece of silver and stronger, more enduring metals, and for a moment, he stared at the top of it, the lid polished and gray as the floor, yet anything but bland. Then as an afterthought, he flipped it over and saw the scratches. No, they were too regular to be scratches. Turning the lid like the hands of a clock, he brought the marks around until they revealed themselves to be letters engraved into the silver by means that humans hadn’t used for aeons.
He read the words to himself.
Then to the ghosts, he read them aloud.
“A piece of the sky. To Washen. From your devoted grandchildren.”
And for a long, long moment, it seemed to Pamir as if the vastness of the room were filled with the echoing beats of his heart.
Thirty-two
THE MASTER WHISPERED a secret command, and an armada of sensor-encrusted robots were dispatched to the !eech habitat, hunting for Washen and the other missing captains along every reasonable avenue.
The robots found nothing, and Pamir realized that nothing about this search would ever be obvious or easy.
After his urging, the Master allowed various specialists to sign security pacts, then join his mission. The !eech habitat was studied on site by every available means, then samples were delivered to competing laboratories and examined in nanoscopic detail. The giant fuel tank’s shaped-vacuum wall was scanned for flaws and secret doorways. Bursts of sharp sound probed the vast hydrogen ocean, from its surface to its slushy middle depths, and targets that were human-sized or larger were carefully snagged and brought to the surface—a painstaking, time-rich chore made worse by the profound cold and the need for perfect secrecy. Even the mission engineers were given no clear picture of what they were hunting, their genius severely diluted as a consequence. After three hard years of bringing up sunken ships and frozen robots, they rebelled. En masse, they confronted Pamir, explaining what he already knew full well: hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometers of hydrogen remained unexplored; and worse still, the fuel had been tapped over the last few years. Some of it was burned. More
cubic kilometers were split between half a hundred auxiliary fuel tanks. And worst of all, strong and highly chaotic currents had flowed through this cold ocean, if only briefly.
“We don’t know what we’re chasing here,” they complained. “Give us an exact shape size and composition, and we can build some reliable models. But until you tell us something useful, we can’t even make better guesses. Do you understand?”
Pamir nodded, one hand grasping the primitive clock, opening the repaired lid and staring at the slow black hands.
In principle, he was the mission’s leader. But the Master demanded instantaneous briefings and made almost every decision, including the routine ones. The two of them had anticipated this very issue; Pamir knew what to tell his staff. “As you’ve probably guessed,” he remarked, “we’re looking for the !eech. Dead or otherwise, we think that the aliens are still nearby, and there are some good security reasons for this bit of news to go no farther than here.”
He hated to lie, and he did it with a discomforting skill.
“You are a species of paranoid exophobes,” Pamir continued, “and there are several hundred of you, and you want to hide. Perhaps you’re somewhere nearby. Which is the only sort of clue I can give away. Now what new ideas can you give me?”
The engineers dreamed up a secret city. Thermally and acoustically buffered, the city could be buried deep inside the fuel tank, down where the hydrogen was a rigid and pure and nearly impenetrable solid. But that kind of technology meant power, which implied fusion power, which meant a detectable stream of neutrinos. A large array of state-of-the-art detectors were built, then floated on the ocean’s surface. Even though he believed that this was a very, very, very unlikely answer, Pamir was nervously hopeful, activating the detection system with the Master on his shoulder, watching the data flow, the machinery’s soft, insistent alarm telling him and the Master, “I see something. Something. Down there.”
But the ship was laced with fusion reactors, each producing its own radiant stream of neutrinos, and every stream was deflected and diluted whenever it passed through the megabonds of hyperfiber. Separating the important from the superfluous was hard, slow work. Six months of meticulous drudgery followed; ninety-eight-plus percent of the neutrinos were excluded from consideration, leaving a trickle that might or might not be important.
