by Robert Reed
The captains already lived on board. Maybe Pamir meant to injure them, or worse. But once the possibility of revenge became the reality, his anger dissolved into a pure, unalloyed self-loathing.
He had never felt this way.
It was the drugs in his system; he wanted to believe nothing else. But if anything, those chemicals were only flattening his emotions, distorting all reason, forcing him to keep searching for his pain's watershed.
Luckier, more talented engineers were working in the main habitats.
Pamir crept up a long dead-end shaft.
At the end of its voyage, this starship would be among the finest ever built by human hands and human minds. But not his hands, he knew. Inside that dark, choking hole, he discovered that he didn't care about this ship. All that mattered was the ship. That dead relic that was plummeting from nowhere, heading straight for him . . . !
Maybe it was the drugs, or the despair. Or maybe it was exactly as it seemed to him just then. But the morions of his life - leaving home when he did; traveling with the Elassia, then as a corpse; and the remarkable good luck that caused him to be found - these unlikely events suddenly looked like Fate and Grand Design. Every important event in his life, and the tiny ones, had occurred in order to put him here, hunkering down in this unseemly place, and in that drunken, drugged, and self-possessed state, nothing seemed more obvious to Pamir than his personal destiny.
He had to find some means of staying on board.
But a stowaway couldn't stay hidden for long. Not for a century, much less for thousands of years.
The only solution was obvious; it was inevitable.
Few other men could have done what Pamir did next. To a human given thousands and perhaps millions of years of uninterrupted life, the idea of placing such a treasure in mortal danger was unthinkable.
But Pamir had died before.
Twice.
Not only did he power up the laser, but his hands were steady as stone. He found himself growing happier by the moment, by the breath. He carefully positioned his body at the back of the cramped tunnel, taking time to judge how the tarlike carbonaceous crap would melt and flow around his incinerated corpse, and how its blackness would merge and conceal his own.
In the end, for a slender instant, he felt afraid.
He wasn't a singing man. But waiting for the laser to charge, then fire, he heard his own rough voice pushing its way through an old Whistleforth melody that, if memory served, his mother used to sing to him, and to her dear two-headed dragon.
'All of the universe,' she would sing, 'and I am the only one.
'All of Creation, and there's only this one of me. 'All of Everything, and what I am now will never come again.
'With every step I change. "With every step, I die.
'Always and forever, here, here, here, I be . . . !'
Twenty-nine
PAMIR HAD NEVER seen the Master's station in such turmoil.
Demon doors were at full strength, armored hatches sealed and locked. Brigades of security troops wore imposing weapons and bullying faces. An infectious, intoxicating paranoia hung in the bright damp air. Pamir was interrogated by two captains and a Submaster. How many searches of his body and uniform were carried out discreetly, he couldn't say. He was asked point-blank about Washen and Miocene. What had he seen? What had he heard? And what, if anything, had he said to their missing officers? He volunteered all of it, no detail too mundane. Then in a by-the-way tone, he confessed that a fat twenty seconds had passed before he contacted the Master, informing her that a pair of ghosts had appeared to him, and learning that those same apparitions had spoken to her first.
'They may be dead,' he offered, 'but they still respect the pecking order.'
Pamir was asked about his route to the ship's bridge, his mode of transportation, and whether he had seen anything even a little bit peculiar.
No journey through the ship, no matter how brief, lacked for oddities. Pamir described watching a pair of blue-necked ruffians copulating in plain view, and seeing a school of Hackaback squids that had gotten their rolling bubble caught in a shop's doorway, and mentioned that while his priority cap-car approached the ship's bridge, he had spotted a lone human male wearing nothing but a simple handwritten placard that declared:
The End Is Here!
Each interrogator recorded every oddity. Later, their staffs would rank these events by presumed importance, and where necessary, investigate.
It was a magnificent, spellbinding waste of minds and time.
The last hatch was opened, and Pamir stepped onto the station itself. And AI staffer glared at him through a rubber face, then with a jittery glee said, 'Finally' It turned all of itself but its face and shouted, 'Follow me! At a run!'
Pamir sprinted the length of the station.
The ship's administrative center was three kilometers long and half as wide, great arches of green olivine overhead, a webwork dangling from the ceiling, captains and their assistants, human and otherwise, clinging to their work stations, chattering in the station's compressed dialect. They were talking about the missing captains. Pamir heard noise about this sweep and that sweep, all deep inside the ship. Security teams had just finished, and new sweeps were to commence, and when the humans paused to breathe, the AIs continued talking in their own cluttering tongues, manipulating oceans of warm data to find anything that could be confused for a useful pattern.
Ghosts make a pair of holocalls, and look at the mayhem it brings.
The rubber face inflated as they covered the last hundred meters, and the AI warned, 'She wants honesty today. Nothing but.'
Normally, the Master didn't approve of too much truth-telling. But Pamir took a deep breath, then said, 'Don't worry.'
'But that's my job,' the AI replied, wounded now. 'Worryis.'
They pulled up in front of the Master's quarters. Pamir removed his cap and let his uniform straighten and clean itself of sweat and grime. Then after a calming gasp, he stepped up to the hyperfiber door, and it pulled open, exposing several dozen security generals — men and women cloaked in armored black uniforms, each of their professionally fierce faces regarding the newcomer with a mixture of mistrust and practiced disgust.
In their minds, Pamir would always be the traitor: the treacherous captain who had forced their Master into granting him a full pardon, complete with his old, much dishonored rank.
Towering over her generals, the Master stared in Pamir's general direction, wide brown eyes seemingly lost. Then she closed her eyes and waved both arms, telling everyone else, 'For now, there's nothing. No one and nothing. But keep searching, and report everything immediately. Am I understood?'
'Yes, madam,' said thirty bowing faces.
In an instant, it was just the two of them, and a thousand hidden AIs, and a multitude of simple instinct machines.
The Master's quarters were smaller than most. Even Pamir's apartment seemed spacious by comparison. She required only half a hectare divided into a multitude of little rooms, each decorated with the blandest of living rugs and wall hangings of no artistic worth and potted jungles composed of standard terran species and the jungle-colored furnishings intended for nothing but the uninspired comfort of her visitors.
The Master dominated every room, which was the way she wanted it. She loomed over Pamir now, and from all the possible expressions to show him, she decided on a wide warm smile ending just short of flirtatious.
The smile took him by surprise.
Then a warm voice said, 'Pamir,' with fondness.
But he hid his surprise, giving the customary bow and saying, 'Madam,' while staring at her long, long feet, bare and fleshy-gold, and the snowy marble floor in which those same feet had worn soft ruts over the course of their voyage.
'How may I help you?' he inquired. Then again, 'Madam.'
'I've studied your account of events,' she told him. 'Excellent, thorough work. As usual. I'm sure you left nothing out.'
'Nothing.' He l
ooked at her uniform, then at the reflection of his own puzzled face. 'Have you found either of them, madam?'
'No.'
Would she tell him if she had?
'No,' she repeated, 'and I'm beginning to believe that there's nobody to find. At least not among my missing captains.'
He blinked, considering those words.
'So it wasn't Washen who spoke to us . . .'
'It was, I suppose, someone's idea of a wicked joke.' She wasn't smiling at Pamir so much as she was smiling at that simple notion. It was a reassuring possibility, and in its contrived fashion, almost rational. 'Holoprojections. Synthetic personalities. We've traced the source to a certain waystation that was destroyed moments later. Obviously in order to give this fiction even greater credibility.'
Pamir waited for a moment, then said, 'You're wrong. Madam.'
She watched him, waiting.
'I saw Washen,' he assured. 'I recognized her, but she had definitely changed. The smokey-colored skin, and that crude uniform of hers—'
'I remember how about both of them looked. Yes, thank you.'
'Besides,' he continued,'why would any person, or alien, or whoever—'
'Fake her and Miocene's reappearance?'
The Master was playing one of her games. What she believed was secondary to what she wanted from Pamir, and her wishes would be revealed only at her convenience. Or perhaps, never.
'An enemy could have managed this trick,' she offered, nodding with a sudden surety. 'Someone who's eager to make myself and my great office look like utter fools.'
Pamir said nothing.
'Authentic or not,' the Master continued, 'these ghosts contacted only the two of us. I can see why I would be singled out. And you, of course. You've always claimed to have seen Washen after her disappearance. Haven't you?'
He said, 'Yes.'
Nothing else.
'That shit-world. Marrow,' the Master quoted. Pamir waited.
'Does that word have any significance to you?'
'Where blood is born. And that's all it means to me.'
She gestured at a bank of AIs. 'They've listed every known world with that name or some permutation. In alien tongues, typically. But none of our suspects are near us. Not now, and rarely in the past.'
'It's an odd detail,' Pamir observed. 'If you're making a joke, that is.'
Now the Master decided to remain quiet; it was her turn to wait.
Pamir knew what she wanted. 'I don't know anything, madam. Seeing Washen and Miocene ... it was a complete and total shock . . .'
'I believe you,' she replied, without conviction.
Then with a hard glare, she asked, 'What do you believe? Based on your total ignorance, naturally'
With his heart pounding and an invisible hand to his throat, Pamir told her, 'They were genuine, these ghosts were. And I think they're still on the ship. Washen. Submaster Miocene. And presumably the other missing captains, too.'
'Each is free to his opinion.'
He bristled, secretly.
'Twice,' she said. 'Once, and again. Twice.' 'Pardon me, madam?'
'I have taken my chances with you. Do you remember, Pamir?' The smile was wide and malevolent. 'I nearly forgot the first time. But you remember it, don't you? In the beginning, when the engineers uncovered your ruined carcass ... they wanted to leave you in that state until you could be delivered to an appropriate prison facility . . .'
'Yes, madam.'
'But I saved you.' She said it with a mixture of bitterness and sublime pleasure. 'I decided that a soul who wanted to be with us that badly had to be valuable, regardless of his talents. Which was why I ordered you reborn. And when your fellow engineers refused to accept you, wasn't I the wise one who invited you to become a captain . . . ?'
Not precisely. Joining the captains' ranks was his idea and his initiative. But he knew better than to debate the point, nodding without kowtowing, saying to her big bare feet, 'I have tried to serve you and the ship.'
'With a lapse or two thrown in.'
'One lapse,' he replied, refusing to fall into simple traps. 'You honestly know nothing about these prank calls. Do you?'
'Or even if they are pranks, no. I don't, Madam.' 'Which puts us where, Pamir? I want to hear this from you.'
With a quiet, firm voice, he told the Master, 'If you wish. If I might. I could hunt the ship for Washen. For all those missing captains. In an official capacity, or otherwise.'
Eyes lifted. 'You'd be willing to do that?'
'Gladly,' he said, meaning it.
'I suppose you're qualified,' she remarked. Then taking delight in old wounds, she pointed out, 'You did manage to evade my security teams for a long, long while. And apparently without much effort.'
He could do nothing but glance at her face, holding tight to his breath.
'And since you mentioned it,' she continued, 'I could use a little more reassurance. About your loyalty, if nothing else.' She paused for a half-moment, then added, 'If you find Washen, perhaps I can stop watching every step you take. Understood?'
It was easy to forget why he had rejoined the captains' ranks.
Showing the Master a thin, cool smile, Pamir said, 'Madam.'
Then he bowed slightly, pointing out, 'If I find these lost captains, and they're alive, then you'll be too busy worrying about them to bother with me . . .
'Madam . . . !'
Thirty
PAMIR SAT IN the darkened garden room, on the fragrant stump of a dusk pinkwood. The garden was at the heart of a luxury apartment set inside one of the oldest and finest of the human districts. A peculiar couple shared its spacious rooms and hallways — a man and woman married back in the early millennia of the voyage - and throughout Pamir's visit, the lovers would hold hands and whisper into each other's ears, causing their gruff visitor to suffer the sour beginnings of envy.
Quee Lee was a wealthy and extraordinarily ancient woman. Born on the Earth, she had inherited her fortune from a Chinese grandfather who made his money through shipping and legal drugs. On other occasions, she would talk about their home world with both fondness and horror. She was nearly as old as Pamir's mother would be today, though he never mentioned that crazy woman. Quee Lee was old enough to remember when spaceflight was anything but routine and people counted themselves fortunate, or cursed, to live for a single century. Then came the day when the first alien broadcasts fell from the sky, washing away the Earth's isolation. By the time she was middle-aged, everything had changed. Twenty technologically adept species were known, and their knowledge, coupled with a home-brewed intellectual explosion, brought things like star drives and eternal generics, and the probes that would leave the Milky Way, and eventually, this great and ancient and undeniably wondrous ship in which they rode in luxurious splendor.
Her young husband was born on the ship. Perri had been a Remora, one of those strange souls who lived on the ship's hull. But he decided to leave that bizarre culture, preferring the greater strangeness of the ship's interior. When Pamir was a captain on the rise, the two men were enemies. But after Pamir had abandoned his post, taking on new faces and identities, Perri had slowly evolved into an ally and an occasional friend.
Only certain specialist AIs knew the ship better than Perri.
A masculine face, more pretty than handsome, was studying a series of holomaps.The occasional glowbat was gently waved out of the way, then the same hand adjusted the maps' controls, changing the perspective, or the district being examined, or the scale of everything that he was examining with a perfect concentration.
'Another drink?' asked Quee Lee.
Pamir looked at his empty glass. 'Thank you. No.'
She was a beautiful woman in any light. An ageless face was wrapped around ancient, warm eyes. She had a fondness for one-color sarongs and ornate, exceedingly alien jewelry. Clinging to one of her husband's hands, she looked at the map, and with a gentle sigh, she confessed, 'I always forget.'
'How big the ship is,' said Per
ri, completing her thought.
'It is,' she echoed, looking up at their guest. 'It's wonderfully huge.'
Perri marked a likely cavern, then moved to the next district. He didn't volunteer why that place was worth a look. Instead, he asked the obvious question.
'Who are you hunting?'
Then with a smile that couldn't have been more charming, he gave the answer. 'It's those missing captains, I bet. I bet.'
Familiarity was a powerful tool.
Pamir didn't need to reply. He simply held his mouth closed and gave his head a slight, somewhat suggestive tilt.
Reading his posture, Perri nodded and grinned with a private satisfaction. Then again, he marked a location. 'There's a little river running through a practically bottomless canyon. Honestly, there might be a million square kilometers down there. All of it vertical. Black basalt and epiphyte forests. I know two settlements. Neither human. Between them, there's room for a few hundred thousand people. If they were careful, and a little lucky, nobody would ever know they were there.'
Quee Lee regarded her husband with fond eyes.
'That canyon was searched last month,' Pamir replied. 'By security robots, and thoroughly'
'Captains would know tricks,' said Perri. 'Shit, you've used those same tricks. It would be easy enough to make the machines see nothing but rock and clingweed.'
'You think I should look there?'
'Maybe.'
In other words: 'I don't see why they would be there.' Pamir said nothing.
Again, the map changed districts. Suddenly Perri was staring at a deeply buried city, nothing about its selection random. A wealth of colors and complicated shapes showed the presence of alien species. With a knowing touch, he moved past the catacombs and main arteries, following an obscure capillary to a waystation that appeared as a strong golden light, open for operation, welcoming all visitors.
Perri marked the waystation, then giggled.
'What's funny?'
He smiled at the captain, saying, 'This. What I know is what the gossip says.That someone destroyed this nowhere place. It was a random, meaningless act. Isn't that the official verdict? Yet within minutes, the Master ordered a thorough sweep of a hundred districts centered on that single station.'
