by Robert Reed
“How big of an increase?”
“I’m witnessing activity levels approximately two hundred and eighteen thousand percent greater than our previous max—”
“Show me,” Pamir grunted.
The neutrino universe engulfed him. Suns were points of light burning in a endless gray haze. The nearest sun was a red giant orbiting a massive black hole, its fiery core and the black hole’s weak accretion disk both bright. But the brightest lights belonged to the ship, tens of thousands of fusion reactors producing the ship’s essential power, the power gridwork looking to his wide eyes like a beautiful and delicate orb composed of many tiny, brightly lit pearls.
Beneath the orb was a region of blackness.
In the neutrino universe, stone and iron were theories, were ghosts, and ordinary matter could rarely be seen, or felt, or believed in.
But beneath the blackness, enshrouding the ship’s core, was a second orb. What Pamir didn’t notice at first glance became obvious, then unmistakable. Eight degrees of the sky was covered with a neutrino-bright object. Staring hard, he heard himself asking, “Could it be an engine firing? An early burn, maybe?”
That would at least explain the neutrinos.
With no small measure of disdain, the AI said, “Sir, no engine is at work, and even if there was, no reaction vessel is properly aligned. Sir.”
Pamir blinked, asking, “Is it getting brighter?”
“Since we began this conversation … it has brightened nine hundred and eleven percent, with no signs of a plateau, sir…”
Softly, to himself, Pamir said, “Shit.”
To the AI, he demanded, “Explanations.”
“I have none, sir.”
But it was a tech-AI, not a theory-spawner. Pamir squinted at the mysterious projection, noting that unlike the ship’s bright pearls of light, this object had a diffuse glow, almost milky, and sourceless, and in its own fashion, lovely.
Then he noticed a brighter splotch.
Ninety degrees removed, which placed it … shit, directly beneath his own deep, deep hole … five hundred kilometers deeper, and what, if anything, did that mean…?
Pamir excused the tech-AI, then contacted his crew.
The AI foremachine answered.
“Where are the captains?” Pamir asked.
“One is sitting with the tenth-grades. The other with the fifteenths. Sir.”
At the Master’s feast, he realized.
“What do you see?” he blurted. Then, narrowing the topic, he asked, “How’s the work progressing?”
“I see everything, and all is nominal. Sir.”
“Do you sense any odd activity?”
“None.”
“Just the same,” he responded, “put yourself and the crew on alert. Understood?”
“I don’t understand, but I will do it, sir. Is that all?”
“For now.”
Pamir cleared the channel, then fought to contact the Master. But her staff were doing their reliable best to protect her on this busy day. A rubber-faced AI glared at him. “The traditional festivities have begun,” it snapped, glass eyes filled with disdain. “Only in the most severe emergencies—”
“I realize—”
“—will I allow you to interrupt the Great Master.”
“Just deliver a message to her security nexuses. Will you do that?”
“Always.”
Pamir squirted the latest data to the Master’s station, then added a quick cautionary note. “I don’t have any idea what’s happening, madam. But something is. And until someone understands it, we’d better try to be careful!”
The AI absorbed the data, the words. Then it volunteered, “If you feel this strongly, perhaps you should deliver the message in person—”
He blanked the channel, gave his cap-car a new destination, and once that destination was registered, he overrode it, effectively masking his plans. Then he sat back, feeling a momentary sense of doubt. The feast would be a waste; he wouldn’t be able to reach the Master’s ears, or mind, for hours. But instead of flying down into the hole and seeing things for himself, which was his first duty, Pamir was returning to the giant fuel tank and his aerogel raft, reasoning that if he could get half a dozen of the detectors on-line, and if he could recalibrate them in the next half-day …
What would happen?
More and better data. And maybe some obvious explanation would take him by the head, and give him a good shake …
* * *
EN ROUTE, HE twice contacted the foremachine in the hole.
Both times, the familiar voice told him, “Nothing is out of the ordinary, sir. And we are digging at the usual furious rate. Sir.”
To reach the aerogel barge required passing through the !eech habitat. An elevator had been grafted into the alien structure, running from its hub down to the calm cold surface of the sea. As his car pulled to a stop in the tunnel above, a thought found him. Again, he contacted the foremachine. Again, it said, “Nothing,” and, “We are digging.” Then he asked the tech-AI for an update on the neutrino activity.
“The counts have tripled since our last words,” the AI replied. “They have reached a plateau that’s holding steady. Sir.”
Pamir climbed from the car and paused, taking a deep, slow breath of air.
He smelled something …
What?
“Is there anything else, sir?” asked the tech-AI.
Pamir began to walk, maintaining contact through his implanted nexuses. “What we’re seeing looks like a sphere of neutrinos, but it doesn’t have to be. Am I right? What we’re seeing could come from a single point inside a refractory container. Like an ancient glass bulb wrapped around an incandescent filament. But instead of light, we see neutrinos. Instead of glass, the neutrinos are emerging from an envelope of hyperfiber—”
“Sir?” the machine squeaked.
“Calculate this for me. Imagine the strongest known hyperfiber, then tell me how thick it would have to be to show what we’re seeing.”
The answer came quickly, wrapped in an easy doubt. “One hundred and ninety-seven kilometers thick, and without purpose. Sir.”
Pamir began to run, one hand and then the other rubbing against the tunnel’s diamond walls. “Assume it’s real,” he barked. “Would that much hyperfiber be strong enough to withstand the ship’s own mass?”
Silence.
“It would be, wouldn’t it?” He ran to his left, then down a narrow steep set of stairs, a !eech grayness taking hold now. And laughing with a giddy nervousness, he told the distant machine, “You’re embarrassed, aren’t you?”
He cried out, “This big old ship still has secrets. Doesn’t she?”
But the AI wasn’t responding, and in that half-moment when curiosity should have turned to concern, Pamir reached the bottom of the stairs, and staring down the last few meters of the gray tunnel, he saw a stranger.
A human, and male.
The stranger had grayish skin and no hair whatsoever, and he seemed to be wearing, of all things, a captain’s uniform. Clenched in his left hand was a tool or weapon, and his right hand and eyes were examining the sealed doorway to the !eech habitat. He must have heard Pamir’s boots on the gray plastic, but he didn’t react. He waited until Pamir was close before he spun around, his face almost smiling, the left hand lifting the device—some kind of soldier-class laser—with a practiced nonchalance.
Pamir pulled to a stop and held his breath.
The stranger indeed wore a captain’s uniform, but with odd embellishments. A rich golden hair was woven into a decorative braid, and there were tall leather boots and a leather belt cluttered with tools, some familiar and some not. He was a short man, but thickly built. A strong finger gripped what was obviously a mechanical trigger, and quietly, almost softly, the man said to him, “Keep still.”
His voice had an unexpected accent.
Pamir told him, “I’m not moving anywhere.”
“Good.”
&nb
sp; There was no way to escape, and very little chance to attack the stranger. Wearing a dress uniform, Pamir had minimal armor. In a whisper, he said, “Emergency channel. Now.”
The stranger shook his head, remarking, “That won’t help.”
Sure enough, no one seemed to hear him.
What was happening?
Pamir curled his toes inside his boots, then uncurled them. And he breathed deeply, twice, before saying, “You look lost, Captain. And frankly, you smell a little odd.”
The man shrugged, then gestured with his right hand. “Open this door for me.”
“Why?”
“I want to see the aliens’ house.” Then with a controlled but palpable alarm, “The house is still there, isn’t it?”
Pamir tilted his head, and smiled.
“It has to be there,” the strange captain decided. “Don’t try to confuse me!”
“I can open the door for you,” said Pamir.
The man had gray eyes that easily turned to suspicion. Some calculation was made, a decision was made. He aimed his laser at Pamir’s chest, telling him, “I don’t need you. I can break your little lock myself.”
“So do it.”
“Stand still,” the stranger advised, gray eyes narrowing. “I’ll cripple you if you behave. If not, I’ll have to kill you.”
Reflexively, Pamir took a half-step backward.
Then those gray eyes dropped, and quietly, with a mixture of surprise and thick awe, he asked, “What is that?”
Pamir slowly unfastened the silver clock, then opened it.
“What are you doing with that?” he asked. “Did my mother give it to you—?”
“Washen’s your mother?” he blurted.
The stranger nodded, then asked, “Where is she?”
“Why? Don’t you know?”
The man couldn’t help but glance at the sealed doorway, and that was the moment when Pamir threw the watch, aiming for the shaved back of the head, and with all of his speed and desperation, he threw himself, too.
Thirty-four
THE GRAND HALL was a hemispherical compartment more than a kilometer tall at its apex and exactly twice as wide. Its ceiling had arching bands of hyperfiber riding next to the greenish olivine, the former lending a glittery brightness to the room’s floating lights and to every echoed sound. The original floor was simple stone, but the humans had pulverized it, then mixed compost into the rock dust, creating a rich deep soil in which grew ornamental trees from a thousand worlds, and a soft green grass known as Kentucky for no reason other than that it had always been. For most of the year, the room was a public garden. In a ship jammed with spectacles, this was a quiet, sober place where frayed nerves found solice and a few despairing souls had gone to attempt suicide. But as the captains’ feast drew near, robots set up tables and chairs in careful patterns, and the tables were covered with intricate linen designed for this single occasion, and ten thousand place settings were arranged according to conventions older than anyone could calculate. Plates whiter than bone were flanked by heavy goldware utensils, and perfumed cloth was folded in artful patterns, waiting to wash dirty faces and fingers. Crystal goblets filled themselves through hidden nipples, every liquor and molten drug grown somewhere inside the ship, and every sip of chilled water was brought up from the famous artesian wells next to the Alpha Sea, celebrating the first impromptu captains’ feast held more than a hundred millenia ago.
Each captain had her place, or his, marked with a handwritten placard, the Master Captain’s loud script obvious at a distance. The placement of one’s chair was everything. Rank mattered, but so did the quality of the officer’s year. Captains to be bestowed new honors sat near the Master’s own table. Captains who needed humiliation were assigned more distant seats than expected, the worst of them set behind a bank of walkyleen flycatchers. The meal itself was meant to be a surprise, and in an attempt to honor their passengers, it was usually an array of alien dishes, their amino acids and stereochemistry left untouched—a grand tradition that made a few bellies uncomfortable, and some years, more than a few.
Today’s meal was cold uncooked fish from the sunless depths of the harum-scarum sea. Vast dead eyes stared up at the hungry captains. The eating mouths were clamped shut while the gill mouths slowly opened and closed, the flesh too stubborn to stop its useless search for oxygen. Inside every fish stomach was a salad of purple vegetation and sour fruits and ten-oil dressing that resembled, in texture and in odor, unrefined petroleum. Hidden elsewhere inside the corpse was a golden worm, smaller than any finger and treasured by the harum-scarum as a delicacy to be consumed one lucious segment at a time.
Every active captain had a place set for her and for him.
Even the absent captains were given a plate, a fish, and the honor of a seat. Though cynics liked to complain that the apparent honor only underscored their absence, giving their snobbish peers the opportunity to say whatever they wished about those who weren’t present to defend themselves.
Centuries ago, when the captains vanished abruptly, their seats remained, and placards with their names written by one of the Master’s automated hands, and their meals were prepared in the captain’s galley, delivered by crew members in dress uniforms, and left there for the flies.
For years, the Master would rise to her feet, beginning the evening with a vague yet flowery toast to those missing souls, wishing them well as they fulfilled the mysterious duties of some unmentionable assignment.
Then came the inevitable dinner when she announced with a booming, yet sorrowful voice that the captains’ vessel had struck a shard of comet, and they would not be seen again. Her toast was made with vinegary wine—the standard drink for such gloomy occasions—and dinner itself was the funeral feast borrowed from a species of cold deep-space aliens. The captains destroyed their mouths with a ritualistic bite of a methane-ice fruit. That was the last year when places were set for their vanished colleagues. For Miocene, and Hazz. And Washen. And for the rest of the much-honored dead.
More than forty-eight centuries had passed since the Vanishing.
One hundred and twenty-one feasts had been held since two ghosts had appeared suddenly, talking about a nonexistent world called Marrow.
Nothing had come of it. Someone’s stupid and very cruel joke had thrown the Master into an unseemly panic, and she had spent the last century trying to convince everyone that the apparitions were anything but real. They had to be someone’s cruel illusion. Because what other choice did she have? A Master Captain’s first duties were to her chair and her ship, and what kind of Master would she be if a holoimage and a handful of vague clues were to steer her away from traditions that had served both ship and chair for more than a hundred millennia…?
No, she didn’t want to think about the Vanished. Not tonight, or ever again. But she seemed unable to stop herself, and trying to purge her mind, to make herself stronger and inflexible, only seemed to make the ghosts stronger, too.
The Master’s long table was set on a grassy ridge, affording a view that improved when she slowly, majestically rose to her feet. Her goblet was filled with a blood-colored harum-scarum wine. Was that why she was thinking of the dead? Or was it because directly in front of her, practically mocking her, was the empty chair reserved for Pamir? Absent again. Just like last year, and the year before. What was wrong with that captain? Such a talent … questionable but quick instincts married to an admirable, almost transcendent tenaciousness … and despite his ugly temperament, a captain able to inspire his subordinates and the average passenger …
Yet he couldn’t let himself bend for these little captainly rituals.
It was a weakness of character, and spirit, that had always, even in the best times, crippled his chance to rise into the ship’s highest ranks.
“Where’s Pamir?” she asked one of her security nexuses.
“Unknown,” was the instant response.
“Are there any messages from him?”
T
he next response was slow in coming, and odd. The nexus’s sexless voice asked her, “Where do you think that captain might be?”
In frustration, she killed that bothersome channel.
Sometimes the Master found herself thinking that she had lived too long and too narrowly, and the simple grind of work had worn away the genius that had earned her this high office. If everyone in this room were suddenly set equal, she almost certainly wouldn’t be named the Master Captain. Even in her most prideful moments, she understood that others could fill her chair as well as she could, or better. Even when she felt utterly in control, like now, a wise and ageless and extremely weary part of herself wished that one of these worshipful faces would tell her, “Sit elsewhere. Let yourself relax. I’ll take the helm for you, at least for a little while.”
But the rest of the woman seethed at the idea of it.
Always.
It was the steely, self-possessed part of her that was standing now, gazing across the hectares of smiling faces and mirrored uniforms and cold dead fish. For this feast, the local birds and the louder insects had been lured into cages, then taken away. Everything that could know better knew to be quiet. An unnatural silence hung over the room. With her right hand, the Master grasped the crystal goblet. She swirled the wine once, a dark red clot dislodging from the rim and turning slowly as she lifted the goblet to her face, inhaling the aroma before the hand raised the goblet higher, up over her head, as she said, “Welcome,” in a thunderous voice. “All of you who cared enough to be here today, welcome. And thank you!”
A self-congratulating murmur passed through the audience.
Then again, silence.
The Master opened her mouth, ready to deliver her much anticipated toast. Captains who dealt with the newest alien passengers were to be singled out this year. She would sing praises for their excellence, then demand improvements in the coming decades. The ship was entering a region thick with new species, new challenges. What better way to ready your staff than by feeding them congratulatory words, then showing them your hardest gaze?
But before the first word found its way out of her mouth, she hesitated. Her breath came up short, and some obscure sense tied to one of her security nexuses started to focus on something very distant, and small, and wrong.
