by Robert Reed
Again, Pamir used silence. And with it, a hard look.
Perri doctored the map's scale, pulling back and back. Suddenly they were looking at nearly a tenth of one percent of the ship - a vast region, complicated and oftentimes empty, with a hundred thousand kilometers of major passageways blurring into a geometric puzzle too irregular to appear planned, much less attractive, and to any mind large enough to appreciate the distances, this was obviously a puzzle without any worthwhile solution.
Not for the first time, Pamir felt utterly helpless.
'This is how big the sweeps got,' said Perri. 'And people are still talking about them. A couple species living down here have strong feelings about authoritative presences. One hates them, while the other loves them. Those sweeps made them feel important, and they're still singing about them today'
'I can imagine.'
Inside that vast region, Perri's six dozen markers appeared as purple dots of light. With his free hand, he gestured, remarking, 'This is a waste. All of it.'
'Excuse me?'
'You're bright enough, I mean. But really, you and the rest of the uniforms are attacking this problem in all the obvious ways.' Pamir grimaced.
Knowing the captain's temper, Quee Lee leaned forward and smiled as if everything depended on it. 'Are you sure you don't want a fresh drink?'
Pamir shook his head, then echoed the words, '"The obvious ways.'"
'It's about your missing captains. And that's not just a reasonable guess on my part. One of your Master's AIs leaked that news to its psychiatrist, who dribbled it to a lover, who mentioned it in public once ... at least that's the way I heard it happened . . .'
Pamir waited.
'You've been busy since. I know that, too. You've been interviewing all your old contacts . . . for how long now . . . ?'
'Six weeks.'
'So how does my list compare? With the others, I mean.' 'It's thorough. It's reasonable. I'll find what I want in one of those places.'
'Well, I don't think so.'
Quee Lee pulled her hand away from her husband's, and with her short and smooth index finger, she touched the lowest, most isolated of the violet lights.
'What's this place?' she inquired.
Perri said, 'An alien habitat.'
'For the leech,' the captain added. 'It's been abandoned for a long while now'
'Did the Master search it?' asked Perri.
He nodded. Then he added, 'By proxy, and with some security people, too.'
'What I think,' Perri offered, 'is that you have to accept a difficult fact first. Are you listening to me?'
'Always.'
'You know absolutely nothing about this ship.' Suddenly it was as if Perri were angry. This perpetually charming man, who lubricated every social circumstance with a glib shallowness, leaned close enough that his liquored breath mingled with the night odors of the ancient garden. 'Absolutely nothing,' he repeated. 'The same as everyone else.'
'I know enough,' Pamir countered, meaning it.
Perri shook his head, shook his empty hands. 'The fuck you do! You don't know who built this ship, or when, or even where it happened!'
The captain wanted that drink suddenly, but he decided to sit quietly and say nothing, letting his posture and his glare do their worst.
'And worst of all,' said Perri, 'you don't even know why this machine was built. Do you? Without compelling evidence, you can't even pretend to have a workable theory. Just some half-broiled guesses that haven't been changed in a hundred millennia. All of this is someone's galaxy-hopping ship. You hope. Launched too late, or too soon. Although does anyone have any real evidence to say this is so?'
Pamir said, 'No.'
Perri leaned back and grinned like a man who knew that he had just won an important fight, his hands knitted together and stuck behind his head.
Quietly, the captain said, 'Marrow.'
'Excuse me?'
It was the first time that he had said the word since seeing the Master, and the only reason he used it now was to deflect the conversation.
'Do you know anyplace with that name?'
'Marrow?'
'That's what I said. Do you know it?'
Perri closed his eyes, considering the single word until finally, with a grudging conviction, he could admit/Nothing conies to mind. Why? Where did you hear about it?'
'Make a half-broiled guess,' Pamir advised.
The man had to laugh. At himself and his companion, and at everything else, too. 'Is that where the missing captains are?'
'If I only knew . . .'
Then Quee Lee said 'Marrow' in a different way, using an extinct dialect. Straightening her finger, she said, 'Long ago, before human beings were reengineered to live forever . . . back when we were simple and frail, marrow was in the middle of our bones. Not like today. Not laced through our muscles and livers, too.'
Both men turned and stared at her.
'You're too young to remember,' she offered, as if giving them an excuse. Then she turned her finger, pointing down past the deepest purplish lights. 'Marrow sometimes meant the center of things. Their heart. Their deepest core.'
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:
'leech.'
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 leech 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 scuttle-bugs 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 leech. 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 leech 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 caramelized 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 artifacts 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.
