Mallow

by Robert Reed

  'Far away,' was his verdict.

  Then sensing her mood as any good First Chair should, he added. 'It was an alien influence.' Several species were named, all local and all suspicious. 'They could have bribed our captains, or kidnapped them. Then smuggled them off the ship.' 'Why those captains?'

  Ego made him say, 'I don't know why. Madam.'

  It wasn't a matter of talent, he seemed to be claiming. Even though both of them knew otherwise.

  'You should trust your new security measures.' Earwig was dragging the conversation back toward the amnesty issue. 'We can watch each of these forgiven captains. If they disappoint, we act appropriately. You can act, madam. There is absolutely no chance of a repetition of these events, madam.'

  'Am I worried about a repetition?'

  'Maybe I am,' he replied. Then he remembered to smile, looking at the list of fallen captains, at the name that the Master had firmly under her finger.

  Quietly, he said, 'Pamir,' aloud.

  She watched her First Chair, then asked. 'Do you really believe that a general amnesty would work? That a man like Pamir would give up his freedom for this uniform?'

  'Give up his freedom?' Earwig sputtered, not understanding those words.

  Then, struggling to please the Master, he added, 'I remember Pamir. He was a talented, natural captain. Sometimes abrasive, yes. But whatever else is said about him, madam . . . Pamir was adept at wearing our uniform . . .'

  THE AMNESTY WAS well advertised in the more discreet venues, and it was given a life span of exactly one century.

  During its first two minutes, half of the imprisoned and AWOL captains accepted its terms, begging forgiveness for their various crimes. Quietly but openly, each was returned to service, given a modest rank and obscure responsibilities, and after jive decades of reliable service, they were awarded small promotions of pay and station.

  Pamir hadn't appeared.

  The Master was disappointed but not surprised. She had known that man forever, it seemed. In a passing sense, she even understood him. It wouldn't be like Pamir to join that first wave of supplicants. A laudable mistrust was part of his makeup, true. But more importantly, he was a creature of tremendous, almost crippling pride. In the amnesty's final years, as more lost souls came forward, Pamir's absence grew more notable. Even the Master decided that if he was still alive and still living on the ship — two enormous suppositions - then it would take a gift sweeter than forgiveness to bring him home to her.

  Twenty minutes before the amnesty ended, a large man wearing a contemplator's robe and sandals and loosely fitting Pamir's description strolled into the security office at Port Beta, sat with a casual calm, and told everyone in earshot, 'I've gotten bored out there, I want my job back, or something halfway close to it.'

  Deep scans matched him to the missing captain.

  'You need to beg for the Master's forgiveness,' he was told. With twenty tough purple and black clad police officers sitting and standing on all sides of the big unhandsome man, the resident general explained. 'It's a basic term of the amnesty. In fact, it's the only term. She can see you and hear you. Beg now. Go on.'

  Pamir wouldn't.

  Several thousand kilometers removed, the Master watched the man shake his head, telling his audience. 'I won't apologize for any of it. And you might as well not tire your mouth by asking.'

  Stunned, the general blinked and said, 'You don't have any choice, Pamir.'

  'What was my crime?' he replied.

  'You allowed a dangerous entity on board. And you were implicated in the destruction of one of our finest waste-treatment plants.'

  'And yet,' Pamir shrugged his shoulders, then admitted,’ I don't feel particularly guilty. Or even a little bit sorry.'

  Thousands of kilometers away, the Master watched. Listened. And behind the great flat of her hand, she smiled.

  'I did what was right,' he added. Then he looked past his accusers, guessing where the security eye was hiding. Speaking only to the Master, he pointed out, 'I can't ask for forgiveness, real forgiveness, if I don't feel guilt.'

  'True enough,' she whispered to herself.

  The officers were less appreciative. One after another, they shook their heads in disgust, and the angriest man — a long-armed fellow laced with ape genes and a graceless temper — made a stupid threat.

  'We'll arrest you, then. A trial, a quick conviction. And you spend the rest of this long long voyage sitting in the tiniest, darkest cell'

  Pamir regarded the angry man, nothing showing on his face.

  Then he rose to his feet, pointing out, 'The amnesty has another eight minutes. I can still leave. But I suppose you could forget the time and wrestle me down. If that's what you've got your hearts and stomachs set on, that is.'

  Half of the officers were thinking about tackling him.

  As if to tease, Pamir took a long step toward the office door. Then he pretended second thoughts. He halfway laughed, halfway turned. Looking back at the security eye again, at the Master, he said, 'Remember all those vanished captains? The ones who, according to that ridiculous story of yours, left us on that secret mission . . . ?'

  No one spoke, or moved, or remembered to breathe.

  'A week after she'd dropped out of sight . . . I saw one of your captains . . .'

  The ship's trillion voices went silent.

  Suddenly the Master heard nothing but Pamir, and she saw no one else. From her quarters just beneath Port Alpha, she shouted, 'Whom did you see?'

  At lightspeed, it seemed to take forever for her voice to reach its audience. But it boomed nonetheless, causing every head but one to jerk in surprise.

  'Leave the room,' she roared. 'Everyone but Captain Pamir leaves!'

  For an instant, Pamir let the police see his smile. They bristled, made hard fists, and filed away. Then it was just the two of them, and the Master severed every input and output save one, and she appeared before him as shaped light and a panicky voice, demanding from the man, 'Which of my captains did you see?'

  Quietly, and appearing almost amused, he said, 'Washen.'

  Pamir and Washen had been close friends, if memory served.

  For that wide instant, she wasn't the Master any longer. The trillion voices were forgotten, the Great Ship left to drift through space without her direction, and the effect, if anything, was pleasant. Bracing, buoyant. Welcome.

  'Where did you see Washen?'

  In crisp, certain detail, Pamir told enough to be believed.

  Then with a wise grin, he added, 'I want my old rank back. You don't have to pay me or trust me. But I'd be bored and useless if I were a millionth-grade captain.'

  She was almost startled. With her own forced grin, she asked, 'Why do you deserve any consideration?'

  'Because you need talent and experience,' he replied with a cold certainty. 'And because you don't know what Washen was doing, or where she's gone. And since I know more than a little bit about vanishing, maybe I can help you find her. Somehow, someday. Maybe.'

  It was the rarest of moments:

  The Master Captain, ear to every voice, didn't knoiv what to say.

  Then Pamir shook his head, and unth an unwelcome prescience, he said, 'Madam.' He bowed and said, 'No disrespect intended,

  madam. But the ship is a very big place, and frankly, you don't know it half as well as you think you do.

  'And it doesn't know you a quarter as well as you think it should . .:

  Twenty-eight

  PAMIR WAS BORN on a shabby little colony world. His father was barely thirty years old, a near child in these immortal times; while his mother, a self-proclaimed priestess and seer, was thousands of years their senior. Mother had a mercurial beauty and an almost incalculable wealth, and with those blessings she could have taken almost any local man, plus a fair fraction of the local women, too. But she was a singularly odd woman, and for some compelling reason, she decided to court and marry an innocent boy. And in their own peculiar ways, those two badly mism
atched people became a stable, even happy couple.

  Mother had a fondness for alien faiths and alien gods. The universe was built from three great souls, she believed: Death, and Woman, and Man. As a boy, Pamir was taught that he was an embodiment of Man, and Woman was his partner and natural ally. That's why Death was rarely seen anymore. Working together, the two gods had temporarily suppressed the third, leaving it weakened and ineffectual. But stability was an illusion in a triad. Death was plotting its return, Mother assured him. Someday, in some deeply clever fashion, Death would seduce Man or Woman, and the balances would shift again. Which was natural, and right. She said that each god was just as beautiful as the others, and each deserved its time to reign ... or the universe would collapse under the weight of the grand imbalance . . .

  For months and years, Pamir lay awake every night, wondering if Death would come to his bed after he fell asleep, whispering to him in his dreams, and if he would find the strength to resist Death's horrible charms.

  Finally, in despair, Pamir confessed his fears to his father.

  The boyish man laughed and took his son under an arm, warning him, 'You can't believe everything your mother says. She's sick in the mind. We all are, of course. But she's got it worse.'

  'I don't believe you,' the boy growled. He tried to shake off his father's arm, and failed. Then he asked, 'How can anyone be anything but healthy?'

  'You mean, because she's got a modem brain?' Father was a large, ugly man, Caucasian and Aztec heritages bolstered with a stew of cheap, quantum-tiny genetics. 'The sweet truth is that Mom is so old that she lived most of a normal life before being updated. Before they knew how to make flesh and bone halfway immortal. She was living on Earth. She was already a hundred years old and worn out when the autodocs finally started to work on her. She was one of the very first. Which was why they didn't have the technologies quite right. When her old brain was turned into bioceramics and the like, some of her oldness remained with it. Memories were lost, and a bunch of little errors crept in. With a few big errors, too. Although I didn't tell you that, and if you repeat it to anyone, I'll tell the world that you're sick with imagination and can't be trusted.'

  Physically, Pamir was his father's child. But in temperament and emotions, he was very much like his mother.

  Bracing himself, the boy asked, 'Am I crazy like her?'

  'No.' The man shook his head. 'You've got her temper and some of that knife-wit. And things that nobody's found a name for. But those voices she hears belong to her. Alone. And those foolish ideas come straight out of her sickness.'

  'Can she be helped?' the boy asked.

  'Probably not. Assuming she'd want to be helped, that is . . .'

  'But maybe someday . . . ?'

  'The sad, simple truth,' his father continued, 'is that these tricks keeping us young also stop us from changing. Almost without exception. A sick mind, like any good healthy one, has key patterns locked into its ultracortex. Once there, nothing gets them out.'

  Pamir nodded. Without fuss and remarkable little pain, he came to terms with his mother's condition, accepting it as another one of life's burdens. What bothered him more — what eventually kept the young man awake at night — was that persistent and toxic idea that a human being could live for so long and see so much, yet despite standing on all that experience, he still couldn't change his simplest nature.

  If that's true, the boy realized, then we're all doomed.

  Forever.

  PAMIR'S WORLD WAS desert and high desiccated mountains, oxygen-impoverished air and little seas laced with toxic lithium salts. Twenty million years ago, life was abundant, but an asteroid had murdered everything larger than a microbe. Given time, new multicellular life-forms would have evolved, just as they once managed to do on the ancient, pulverized Earth. But humans didn't give the world that opportunity. In a few decades, the colonists had spread widely, immigrants and their children creating instant cities where there was nothing but salt and rock; every sea was scrubbed clean of its toxins, then stocked with slightly tweaked but otherwise ordinary examples of earthly life; and great blue aerogel clouds sucked up the potable water, then rainboys shepherded the clouds inland and squeezed them dry, bringing soft rains to new farms and the young green forests.

  By the time he was thirty, Pamir had decided that his home was a dull place being made duller by the day.

  Sometimes he would lie on a high ridge, the dusty pink sky darkening as night spread, revealing an even dustier mass of cold and distant stars. And he would lift his young hand, holding it up to the sky, dwarfing all those fierce little specks of light.

  That's where I want to be, he thought to himself.

  There.

  As soon as escape was possible, Pamir visited his mother, hungry to tell her that he was emigrating and would never see her again.

  Mother's house was beautiful in odd ways, like its owner. She lived inside an isolated, long-dead volcanic peak. The underground mansion had a contrived, utterly crazy majesty made even more chaotic because it was perpetually under construction. Robots and tailored apes kept the atmosphere full of dusts and curses. Every room was carved from soft rock, according to Mother's volatile plans, and most of the hallways were empty volcanic tubes aligned according to a magmatic logic.

  Mother distrusted sunlight. Windows and atriums were scarce. Instead, she decorated with thick carpets of perfumed compost and manure, synthesized at great cost and leavened with the spores of tailored fungi. Mushrooms became huge in that closed, damp air, leaking a weak light, ruddy and diffuse, from beneath their broad caps. Smaller fungi and puffballs and furlike species produced gold and bluish glows. To keep the forest in check, giant beetles wandered about like cattle. And to keep the beedes under control, dragonlike lizards slithered about in the damp darkness.

  It took Pamir three full days to find his mother.

  She wasn't hiding. Not from him, or from anyone. But it had been nearly five years since his last visit, and the construction crews, following her explicit directions, had closed every hallway leading to her. There was no way in but a single narrow crevice that didn't appear on anyone's map.

  'You look upset,' were Mother's first words.

  Pamir heard her before he saw her. Trudging through the glowing forest, he came around the massive stalk of a century-old deaths-mistress mushroom, finding himself staring at a two-headed dragon. A conjoined twin, and his mother's favorite.

  Mother sat on a tall wooden chair, pretending to hold a gold-chained leash. The dragon hissed with one mouth, while the other - on the head that Pamir had never trusted - tasted the air with a flame-colored tongue.

  Tasting him.

  Mother was ancient, and insane, yet she always managed to look more beautiful than mad. Pamir always assumed that's how she could lure young men to become her husbands. She was small and paler than her fungi, except for a long thick mass of black hair that only made her paleness more obvious. The sharply pretty face smiled, but in a disapproving way. She reminded her son, 'You don't visit me often enough to be a real son. So you must be an apparition.'

  He carefully said nothing.

  The dragon took a sliding step forward, pulling the chain out of its mistress's hands. Both mouths gave low, menacing hisses.

  'They don't remember you,' Mother warned.

  Pamir said, 'Listen to me.'

  His rough voice gave away everything. The woman winced and said,'Oh, no. I don't need any sour news today, thank you.'

  'I'm going to leave.'

  'But you just arrived!'

  'On the next starship, Mother.'

  'You're cruel, saying that.'

  'Wait till I do it. That should really hurt.'

  Her chair was rotting, creaking beneath her, as she lifted herself up on her sticklike arms, not quite standing, breathing in deep regular gulps.

  Finally, in pain, she asked, 'Where are you going?'

  'I don't care.'

  'That next ship is an old bomb-wagon. T
he Elassia! For someone who lived as a recluse, Mother seemed in touch with everything that happened on their world. 'Wait ten years,' she suggested. 'A Belter liner is coming, and it's a nice new one.'

  'No, Mother.'

  The woman winced again, and moaned. Then she told her private voices, 'Quiet,' before she closed her eyes and began to chant, managing a ragged version of a Whistleforth prayer.

  Whistleforths were a neighboring species. Tiny creatures, rather dimwitted and superstitious. A few weak-willed humans believed that the Whistleforths could see into the future as well as the remote past. Using the proper rituals coupled with a pure spirit, any species could accomplish their magic. How many times had Pamir argued the subject with this crazy woman? She didn't understand the alien's logic. What those little beasts believed, more than anything, was that the past was as murky as the future, their chants working in both directions, and never particularly well.

  Regardless, the woman muttered the potent phrases.

  Then she stepped onto the bare black ground, and lifting her long skirt, she pissed between her feet, reading the pattern of the splatters.

  Finally, with a forced drama and a strange, unexpected smile, she announced, 'It's a good thing.'

  She told him, 'Yes, you need to leave. Right away.'

  Pamir was startled, but he fought to keep his mood hidden. Stepping forward, he opened his long arms, ready to offer the old woman a kiss and a long hug. He would never again come to the place, never again see the most important person in his life; the enormity of the moment made him deeply and astonishingly sad, and a real part of him wanted to do nothing but cry.

  'It's your destiny, that ship is.'

  She said those words so earnestly, with such unalloyed conviction, that a part of Pamir couldn't help but believe her.

  'You must do this,' she proclaimed.The smile only grew brighter, and everything about that pale little face became crazier. 'Promise me that you'll leave now.'