by Robert Reed
It was a trap. She was setting a clumsy, stupid trick to grab his emotions.
But Pamir heard himself grunt, 'I promise.'
Mother pretended pleasure, something in her big pale eyes conveying, of all things, an absurd, overwelling awe.
'Thank you,' she told him, kneeling before him, sinking into her own pee.
Her conjoined dragons hissed and took a step toward Pamir. And because he had always wanted to do it, he made a fist and swung at the head that he didn't trust, snapping it back with a clean sharp thunk, then feeling the dull steady pain as a broken finger began to heal.
Again, softer this time. Mother chanted in that alien tongue.
'Why can't you be normal?' was the last thing he ever said to the woman.
Then he turned and walked away, following his own footprints through the sickly-sweet, black-as-night manure.
THERE WASN'T SUCH a creature as Immortality.
But modern life, infused with its technical wonders and medical prosperity, had a strength, a genuine stubbornness, that carried its citizens through disasters as well as simple indifference.
On three occasions in the next two thousands years, Pamir stepped as near to Death as possible, just enough of his soul coming out of the mayhem for his body to be recultured, his memories awakened, and his belligerent nature kept pure.
As the bomb-wagon dropped into orbit, a gift was delivered from his mother. A tidy sum was accompanied by an odd note claiming, 'I chanted; I saw. This is precisely how much you will need. Of money.'
It wasn't a fortune, which was why Pamir became an engineer's apprentice. There wasn't any salary with the post, but it meant a free-passage; what's more, if one of the genuine engineers quit or died, an apprentice would be ready to step into the gap, already trained by the starship's library and drilled numb by his superiors.
The lowest-ranking engineer was a harum-scarum -the human name for a humanoid species famous for its ugly moods.
Pamir decided that he wanted the alien's job.
Knowing the dangers, he visited the creature's large cabin, sat without asking permission and made his pitch. 'First of all,' he remarked, 'I'm a better engineer than you. Agreed?'
Silence. Meaning 'agreed.'
'Second, the crew likes me. They prefer me to you in about every way. Am I right?' Another agreeable silence.
'And finally, I'll pay you to resign.' He named a carefully calculated sum, then added, 'You'll be making enough.’
And at our next port, you'll find a new crew that doesn't care what a shitty pain you are.'
From his eating hole, the harum-scarum made a low, slightly wet sound.
From the other facial hole — the one that breathed and spoke - came a harsh squeal containing its blunt reply.
'Fuck your ape self,' said the translator.
'You are an idiot,' Pamir assured him.
The alien rose to his feet, towering over the large human.
'All right, fine,' Pamir conceded. 'Give yourself a year to think, then I'll make the same offer. With less money in the pot, next time.'
Insulting a harum-scarum brought revenge, without exception. But the suddenness and the scope of the attack took the young Pamir by surprise.
'A scuttlebug's gone missing,' the Master Engineer reported. It was twelve hours later, and with a mischievous wink, she added, 'Sounds like a good chore for you. Last we heard, it was down near the push-plate, somewhere near the navel.'
On better ships, scuttlebugs hunted for their own kind. But they could be expensive machines, and on an old bomb-wagon, they were normally in short supply. Squeezing into a lifesuit meant for a smaller man, then donning a second suit of hyperfiber and a satchel of secondhand tools, Pamir was ready for the chore. It was a three-kilometer drop to the stem, the last half kilometer accomplished on foot. The push-plate was a vast dish originally built from metal-ceramic alloys, but patched with diamond armors, then cheap-grade hyperfibers, as gaps and fractures developed over the centuries. Minimal, shock-resistant passageways allowed access. The plate itself shuddered beneath him - a blurring tremor caused by the constant detonation of small nukes. In that realm, a weak, unreliable man became claustrophobic, and his bored mind invented faces and voices to fill the drudgery. As much as anything, this duty was a test of character, and Pamir accepted the test without complaint, reminding himself that sooner or later he would have the power to send an apprentice down this same awful corridor.
The navel wasn't set precisely at the plate's center. A fat fraction of a kilometer across and perfectly round, it served no function whatsoever. A premature detonation had boiled away a great volume of armor, and since the navel was in the thickest portion of the plate, its repair could wait until the next overhaul.
A sputtering blue-white light greeted Pamir.
Pausing, he called up to the Master Engineer, who in turn contacted the Master Captain, requesting an engine shutdown while promising a minimal disruption. Passengers and crew were warned that the sluggish gee-forces were about to vanish. Command programs were unleashed. Then the nukes quit firing, and the quick blue-white light vanished, and in an instant, the plate grew perfectly still.
Pamir made his head and feet exchange places, then he moved to where the passageway's roof had been blasted away, his boots holding fast to the scarred and blackened floor.
The scuttlebug was in the center of the blast crater, which was a strange place to be. Why would the machine wander out there?
It was dead. And worse than that, it was probably useless, too, and he might as well leave it there. But Pamir felt an obligation to be thorough, which was why he lifted his boots and used his squirt-pack, rocketing his way down the shallow crater while clumsy hands reached for the necessary tools that would pop off the machine's head, letting him see if anything inside was salvageable.
Why he looked up, he was never sure.
Later, struggling to replay events, Pamir wondered if he had meant to look at their destination. The bomb-wagon was falling toward a K-class sun and its two young planets, both of which were being terraformed by human colonists. He must have tilted his head because he wanted a naked-eye look. He was a young man admiring his first new sun, and in turn, admiring a life sure to be long and filled with many exotic places . . . and that's why he saw a flash of light, an unexpected nuke ascending . . . and that's why he had just enough time to turn his massive self and aim for the passageway, dropping the tools in both hands as he ordered his squirt-pack to burn every gram of fuel in a fraction of an instant . . .
Pamir was flung back the way he had come.
Too soon, he thought he would escape unscathed, and wouldn't he enjoy seeing the harum-scarum's face now?
But his aim was wrong by half a meter, his left arm and shoulder clipping the blackened armor, his spinning body ricocheting against the opposite wall, precious momentum lost . . . and the nuke detonated with a fantastic light that chased after him, catching him too soon and obliterating very nearly everything . . .
WHAT SURVIVED WAS the heavily armored helmet and a well-cooked, vaguely human skull. But the ship surgeon and onboard autodocs were relatively skilled - a consequence of the ship's questionable safety record — and within three months, Pamir's soul had been decanted into a new mind and a freshly grown body that was recognizable as his own.
As the starship pulled into a berth above the first new world, the Master Engineer slipped into the therapy chamber, watching Pamir finish a two-hour cycle of isometrics. Then quietly, with a mixture of scorn and curiosity, she told him,'Harum-scarums don't appreciate bribes. Ever.'
Pamir nodded, vacuuming the oily sweat from his face and chest.
'You gave him no choice,' said the older, more cautious engineer. 'According to his nature, the poor fellow had to seek vengeance.'
'I knew all that,' he replied. 'I just didn't expect a nuke up my ass.'
'What did you expect?'
'A simple fight.'
'And you thought you'd win?'
'No. I figured that I'd lose.' Then he laughed in a calm, grim fashion. 'But I also figured that I'd survive. And the creature would have to give me his job.'
'But that's my decision to make,' warned the Master.
Pamir didn't blink.
His commander sighed heavily, gazing off in a random direction. 'Your opponent's gone,' she admitted.'Along with half of my staff. These terraformers are paying bonuses for good engineers, and bad ones, trying to make their lumps of rock livable.'
Pamir waited a moment, then asked, 'So did I earn my post?'
The old woman had to nod. 'But you could have done nothing,' she told him. 'Nothing, and you would have gotten what you wanted anyway.'
'That's two different things,' was his response.
'What do you mean?'
'Either you pay for something, or it's charity,' he explained. 'And I don't care how long I live. Everything I get, I pay for. Or my hands won't hold it.'
★ ★ ★
BUOYED BY TALENT and discipline and a disinterest in better work, Pamir eventually rose to the position of Master Engineer.
In the next sixteen hundred years, the old ship underwent two rehabilitations. The final rehab stripped away its outdated bomb drive, a fusion drive installed in its place, complete with merry-go-round nozzles and antimatter spiking. They were running ten thousand colonists out to an Earth-class world. Ahead of them were the thick fringes of another sun's Oort cloud. Oorts were lousy places for starships. Obstacles were too scarce to map, too common to ignore. But the risks were usually slight, and because of time and a fat debt riding with them, the Master Captain decided to cut through the fringes.
When the ship was rehabilitated, the old push-plate was stripped of its extra mass and bolstered with new grades of hyperfiber, and the whole clumsy apparatus was fastened to the nose. The plate absorbed dust impacts. Railguns obliterated pebbles and little snowballs, while the old bomb drive launched nukes at the largest obstacles, vaporizing them at what was hopefully a safe distance.
An engineer was necessary to oversee sudden, unexpected repairs of key systems. On most starships, the Master Engineer delegated the job. As a young man, Pamir might have had the stomach for that kind of bullying. But he had lived most of his life on this cranky ship, and he knew it better than anyone else. That's why he dressed in a life-suit and armor, then walked up into the push-plate's familiar passageways, living inside his suit for twenty-five lull days, half a dozen malfunctions cured because of his quick, timely work.
Pamir never saw the incoming comet.
His only warning was the rapid, almost panicked firing of railguns and nukes.Then the nukes quit launching when the target was too close, and with a mathematical clarity, Pamir realized that the impact was coming, and for no useful reason, he pulled himself into a ball, hands over his knees and a deep last breath filling his lungs— Then, blackness.
More empty than any space, and infinitely colder.
EVERYONE HOVERING AROUND him was a stranger, and none wanted to tell him about the passengers, the crew, or the fate of his ship.
Finally, a well-intentioned Eternitist minister let out the news. 'You're a fortunate, fortunate man,' he proclaimed, his smiling face matching his smiling, almost giddy voice. 'Not only did you survive, dear man. But a ship of kind Belters found your remains inside that old push-plate.'
Again, Pamir's body was being decanted from almost nothing. Still unfinished and desperately weak, he was lying in a white hospital bed, inside a zero-gee habitat, a soft webbing strung over his naked body, bristling with sensors that tirelessly marked his steady progress.
Despite his weakness, he reached for the minister.
Thinking it was a gesture of need, the man tried to take the hand with his hands. But no, the hand slipped past and closed on the nearest shoulder, then yanked at the heavy black fabric of his robe. And with a voice too new to sound human, Pamir grunted, 'What about . . . about the rest of them . . . ?'
With a blissful surety, the minister said, 'Long, happy lives received their deserved rest. Which is precisely as it should be.'
Pamir clamped his hand around the exposed neck. The minister tried removing the hand, and failed. 'All of them died in a painless instant,' he croaked. 'Without
worry. Without the slightest suffering. Isn't that the way you, in your time, would wish to die?'
The hand tightened, then let up again. And with that new voice, Pamir said, 'No,' as the newborn eyes gazed off into the distance, losing their focus. 'I want suffering. I want worry. When you see Death — soon, I hope - I want you to tell It. I want the worst It has. The shittiest worst. I want it all the way till the miserable end . . .'
CENTURIES HAD PASSED while Pamir's body drifted between the stars. He found himself living in a thinly colonized region of human space, among scattered settlements reaching to the brink of the Milky Way. Only one event of consequence had occurred in his absence, and it was enormous. Pamir learned that an alien starship had been discovered between the galaxies. No one knew where it came from or why it was here. But every important world and species were marshaling resources to reach it and claim it for themselves.
By simple luck, humans had seen it first. They had the jump. The Belter guild, vast in its reach and rich with experience, had opted to build a fleet of swift ships. And to get a lead on the other groups, the guild would launch its first ships before they were finished - small asteroids chosen for the proper mix of metals and carbonaceous goo and water ice, minimal tunnels cut through them, durable habitats built deep and safe, then engines and vast fuel tanks strapped to the raw exterior.
Every engineer in the region had been put under contract by the Belters: for their know-how and their hands, and oftentimes, just to keep the talent pool dry, making life hard for their competitors.
His deep-space experience meant that Pamir was included on the lead team.
Rumors promised that some fraction of the team would be included on the great mission. At first, Pamir assumed that he would be invited to join the Belters, and that he would refuse. The alien ship was interesting enough, but this district was a virtual wilderness. A man with wealth and his own starship could visit dozens of alien worlds, none of which had ever seen a human face before. As adventures went, he believed that was the bigger one. And with that decided, Pamir believed his future was set.
One early morning, he found himself floating inside a grimy, dust-choked tunnel, ignoring a heated discussion between architects and bolidologists. The precise angle of this very minor tunnel was the subject, and Pamir couldn't have been more bored. Prayers for a distraction, any distraction, were answered suddenly. A hundred captains appeared, drifting along in a loose chain, each having just arrived from places deep inside the Milky Way and all wearing the new mirrorlike uniforms that had been invented specifically for this one great mission.
Leading the group were a pair of Belter women - one tall and the other taller, the latter rumored to be the front-runner for the Master Captain's chair.
Her companion, knife-faced and magisterial, noticed Pamir drifting by himself.
She nodded in his direction, then said, 'This one, madam. He's the gentleman who survived the Elassias disaster.'
Centuries had passed, yet they still remembered.
Pamir returned the nod, saying nothing. And the debate about the tunnel's angle came to an abrupt, embarrassing halt.
The future Master smiled, then decided that this moment required a graceless touch.
'I'd like to have this one with us,' she proclaimed. 'He'd bring us luck!'
But the knife-faced captain had to disagree. 'The luck was his, madam. He didn't share it with his ship.'
Pamir felt an easy hatred for the woman. Peering through the black dust, he read her nameplate. Miocene, he read. What did he know about her?
She was young, said the rumors. And ambitious like no one else.
The future Master winked at her lowly engineer. 'Are you interested, darling? Would you
like to leave the galaxy behind?'
He thought, Thank you, no.
But there was something about the circumstances, about the drifting dust and the two captains and this talk about luck ... all of those factors, and more, combined inside him, making him say, 'Yes, I want to go. Absolutely.'
'Good,' the giant woman replied. 'We can use all the luck we can put on board. Even if you hoard it for yourself.'
It was a joke, and a bad one. Pamir couldn't make himself laugh, even though the other captains and architects and rock experts were giggling themselves sick.
The only other person unmoved was Miocene.
'Who goes,' she reminded everyone, 'are the people who deserve to go. Nobody else. Since our ship is going to be built on the way, without anyone's help, we haven't space or the patience for those who aren't the very best.'
In that instant, Pamir realized that he had made the right choice; he wanted nothing but to be part of this grand mission. For the next year, he worked without complaint, never fighting with commanders, and leading his little teams with a quiet competence. But as the deadline approached, an uneasiness took hold. Disquiet evolved into a massive black dread. Pamir knew exactly what he was. He was a good engineer, and nothing more. The men and women around him cared more for machinery than people. They told jokes about fusion engines and gossiped about each other's designs, and their best friends were machines. A few engineers openly and happily lived with robots of their own design, their physical forms doctored only to a point, their machineness obvious under the warm rubber glands and those worshipful, doll-like faces.
When the final roster was released, dread turned to resignation.
But Pamir went through the ritual of hunting for his name, and despite knowing better, he felt a numbing surprise not to see 'Pamir' on that list.
Surprise descended into a low-grade anger made worse by two days and nights of strong drink and the ingestion of several potent drugs. In his altered haze, revenge seemed like a sweet possibility. With a harum-scarum's logic, Pamir fashioned a weapon from a laser drill, cutting off the safeties and retiming its frequencies. Then with the laser dismantled and hidden, Pamir drifted past the security troops, entering the half-born starship, thinking of Miocene when he muttered to himself, 'I'll show her some luck.'
