Precious Mental
Robert Reed
1
The man came to Port Beta carrying an interesting life.
Or perhaps that life was carrying him.
Either way, he was a strong plain-faced human, exceptionally young yet already dragging heavy debt. Wanting honest, reliable employment, he wrestled with a series of aptitude tests, and while scoring poorly in most categories, the newcomer showed promise when it came to rigor and precision and the kinds of courage required by the mechanical arts. Port Beta seemed like a worthy home for him. That was where new passengers arrived at the Great Ship, cocooned inside streakships and star taxis, bombtugs and one-of-a-kind vehicles. Long journeys left most of those starships in poor condition. Many were torn apart as salvage, but the valuable and the healthiest were refurbished and then sent out again, chasing wealthy travelers of every species.
A local academy accepted the newcomer, and he soon rose to the most elite trade among technicians. Bottling up suns and antimatter was considered the highest art. Drive-mechanics worked on starship engines and dreamed about starship engines, and they were famous for jokes and foul curses understandable only to their own kind. Their work could be routine for years, even decades, but then inside the monotony something unexpected would happen. Miss one ghost of a detail and a lasting mistake would take hold, and then centuries later, far from Port Beta, a magnificent streakship would explode, and the onboard lives, ancient and important, were transformed into hard radiation and a breakneck rain of hot, anonymous dust.
That was why drive-mechanics commanded the highest wages.
And that was why new slots were constantly opening up in their ranks.
According to official records, the academy's new student was born on the Great Ship, inside a dead-end cavern called Where-Peace-Rains. Peculiar humans lived in that isolated realm, and they usually died there, and to the soul, they clung to preposterous beliefs, their society and entire existence woven around one linchpin idea: The multiverse was infinite.
There was no denying that basic principle. Quantum endlessness was proven science, relentless and boundless and beautiful. Yet where most minds saw abstractions and eccentric mathematics, those living inside Where-Peace-Rains considered infinity to be a grand and demanding gift. Infinity meant that nothing could exist just once. Whatever was real, no matter how complicated or unlikely, had no choice but to persist forever.
In that way, souls were the same as snowflakes.
A person's circumstances could seem utterly, yet he was always surviving in limitless places and dying in limitless places, and he couldn't stop being born again in every suitable portion of the All.
Life had its perfect length. Most humans and almost every sentient creature believed in living happily for as long as possible. But the archaic souls inside that cave considered too much life to be a trap. One or two centuries of breathing and sleeping were plenty. Extend existence past its natural end, and the immortal soul was debased, impoverished, and eventually stripped of its grandeur. Only by knowing that you were temporary could life be stripped of illusion and the cloaks of false-godhood, and then the blessed man could touch the All, and he could love the All, and if his brief existence proved special, a tiny piece of his endless soul might earn one moment of serene clarity.
Where-Peace-Rains constantly needed babies. Like primitive humans, its citizens were built from water and frail bone and DNA full of primate instincts. The outside world called them Luddites—an inadequate word, part insult and part synonym for madness. But the young drive-mechanic was remarkable because he grew up among those people, becoming an important citizen before relinquishing their foolish ways.
Stepping alone into the universe, the man was made immortal.
But immortality was an expensive magic.
It had to be.
Archaic muscles and organs needed to be retrofitted. The body had to be indifferent to every disease, ready to heal any wound. Then the soggy soft and very fragile human brain was transformed into a tough bioceramic wonder, complex enough to guarantee enough memory and quick intelligence to thrive for eons.
But transformation wasn't the only expense. The boundless life never quit needing space and food and energy. Eternal, highly gifted minds relished exotic wonders, yet they also demanded safety and comfort—two qualities that were never cheap. That's why the Great Ship's captains demanded huge payments from immortals. Passengers who never died would never stop needing. And that was why the one-time Luddite was impressive: Fresh inside his new body, consumed by his many debts, he was using a new brain to learn how to repair and rebuild the most spectacular machines built by any hands.
Every student was soon hired as a low-wage trainee. The newcomer did small jobs well, but more importantly, he got out of the way when he wasn't needed. People noticed his plain, unimpressive face. It was a reasonable face; fanatics didn't need beauty. The man could be brusque when displeased, and maybe that quality didn't endear him with his superiors. But he proved to have an instinct for stardrives, and he knew when to buy drinks for his colleagues, and he was expert in telling dry old jokes, and sometimes, in a rare mood, he offered stories about Where-Peace-Rains. Audiences were curious the cavern and its odd folk, the left-behind family and their ludicrous faith. Years later, co-workers thought enough their colleague to attend his graduation, and if the man didn't show enough pride with the new plasma-blue uniform, at least he seemed comfortable with the steady work that always finds those who know what they are doing.
Decades passed, and the reformed Luddite acquired responsibilities and then rank, becoming a dependable cog in the Tan-tan-5 crew.
Then the decades were centuries.
One millennium and forty-two years had steadily trickled past. Port Beta remained a vast and hectic facility, and the Great Ship pushed a little farther along its quarter-million year voyage around the galaxy, and this man that everybody knew seemed to have always been at his station. His abandoned family had died long ago. If he felt any interest in the generations still living inside Where-Peace-Rains, he kept it secret. Skill lifted him to the middle ranks, and he was respected by those that knew him, and the people who knew him best never bothered to imagine that this burly, plain-faced fellow might actually be someone of consequence.
2
His name used to be Pamir.
Wearing his own face and biography, Pamir had served as one of the Great Ship's captains. Nothing about that lost man was cog-like. In a vocation that rewarded charm and politics, he was an excellent captain who succeeded using nothing but stubborn competence. No matter how difficult the assignment, it was finished early and without fuss. Creativity was in his toolbox, but unlike too many high-gloss captains, Pamir used rough elegance before genius. Five projects wearing his name were still taught to novice captains. Yet the oncegreat officer had also lost his command, and that was another lesson shared with the arrogant shits who thought they deserved to wear the captains' mirrored uniform: For thousands of years, Pamir was a rising force in the ranks, and then he stupidly fell in love with an alien. That led to catastrophes and fat financial losses for the Ship, and although the situation ended favorably enough, passengers could have been endangered, and worse than that, secrets had been kept from his vengeful superiors.
Sitting out the voyage inside the brig was a likely consequence, but dissolving into the Ship's multitudes was Pamir's solution. The official story was that the runaway captain had slipped overboard thirty thousand years ago, joining colonists bound for a new world. As a matter of policy, nobody cared about one invisible felon. But captains forgot little, and that's why several AIs were still dedicated to Pamir's case—relentless superconductive minds endlessly sifting through census records and secret records, images dredged up from everywhere, and overheard conversations in ten thousand languages.
Every morning began with the question, "Is this the day they find me?"
And between every breath, some piece of that immortal mind was being relentlessly suspicious of everyone.
"Jon?"
Tools froze in mid-task, and the mechanic turned. "Over here."
"Do you have a moment?"
"Three moments," he said. "What do you want, G'lene?"
G'lene was human, short and rounded with fat—a cold-world adaptation worn for no reason but tradition. One of the newest trainees, she was barely six hundred years old, still hunting for her life's calling.
"I need advice," she said. "I asked around, and several people suggested that I come to you first."
The man said nothing, waiting.
"We haven't talked much before," she allowed.
"You work for a different crew," he said.
"And I don't think you like me."
The girl often acted flip and even spoiled, but those traits didn't matter. What mattered was that she was a careless technician. It was a common flaw worn by young immortals. Carelessness meant that the other mechanics had to keep watch over her work, and the only question seemed when she would be thrown out of the program.
"I don't know you much at all," said Pamir. "What I don't like is your work."
She heard him, took a quick breath, and then she pushed any embarrassment aside. "You're the Luddite, aren't you?"
There were various ways to react. Pamir told the nearest tool to pivot and aim, punching a narrow hole through the center of his palm.
Blood sprayed, and the hole began to heal instantly.
"Apparently not," he said.
G'lene laughed like a little girl, without seriousness, without pretense.
Pamir didn't fancy that kind of laugh.
"Jon is a popular name with Luddites," she said.
Pamir sucked at the torn flesh. He had worn "Jon" nearly as long as he had worn this face. Only in dreams was he anybody else.
"What kind of advice are you chasing?" he asked.
"I need a topic for my practicum."
"Ugly-eights," he said.
"That's what you're working on here, isn't it?"
He was rehabilitating the main drive of an old star-taxi. Ugly-eights were a standard, proven fusion engine. They had been pushing ships across the galaxy longer than most species were alive. This particular job was relentlessly routine and cheap, and while someone would eventually find some need for this old ship, it would likely sit inside a back berth for another few centuries.
"Ugly-eights are the heart of commerce in the galaxy," said Pamir.
"And they're ugly," she said.
"Build a new kind of ugly," he said. "Tweak a little function or prove that some bit or component can be yanked. Make this machine better, simpler or sexier, and a thousand mechanics will worship you as a goddess."
"Being worshipped," she said. "That would be fun."
She seemed to believe it was possible.
The two of them were standing in the middle of an expansive machine shop. Ships and parts of ships towered about them in close ranks. Port Beta was just ten kilometers past the main doors, and the rest of Pamir's crew and his boss were scattered, no other face in sight.
"I know what you did for your practicum," said G'lene. "You built a working Kajjas pulse engine."
"Nobody builds a working Kajjas pulse," he said. "Not even the Kajjas."
"You built it and then went up on the hull and fired the engine for ninety days."
"And then my luck felt spent, so I turned it off."
"I want to do something like that," she said. "I want something unusual."
"No," he said. "You do not, no."
She didn't seem to notice his words. "It's too bad that we don't have any Kajjas ships onboard. Wouldn't it be fun to refab one of those marvels?"
Kajjas space had been left behind long ago. Not one of their eccentric vessels was presently berthed inside Beta. But the Great Ship had five other ports, reserved for the captains and security forces. Did G'lene know facts that weren't public knowledge? Was the girl trying to coax him into some kind of borderline adventure?
"So you want to play with a real Kajjas ship," Pamir said.
"But only with your help. I'm not a fool."
Pamir had never given much thought to G'lene's mind. What he realized then, staring at that pretty ageless and almost perfectly spherical face, was that she didn't seem to be one thing or another. He couldn't pin any quality to his companion.
"The Kajjas are famous explorers," she said.
"They used to be, but the wandering urge left them long ago."
"What if I knew where to find an old Kajjas starship?"
"I'd have to ask where it's hiding."
"Not here," she said.
The way she spoke said a lot. "Not here." The "here" was drawn out, and the implications were suddenly obvious.
"Shit," said Pamir.
"Exactly," she said.
"It's not on the Great Ship, is it?"
The smile brightened, smug and ready for the next question.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Exactly who I seem to be," she said.
"A lipid-rich girl who is going to fail at the academy," he said.
To her credit, she didn't bristle. Poise held her steady, and she let him stare at her face a little longer before saying, "Maybe I was lying."
"You aren't talking about your practicum, are you?"
"Not really," she said. "No, I have friends who need to hire a drive-mechanic."
"Friends," he said.
"Best friends," she said. "And like all best friends, they have quite a lot of money."
Pamir said, "No."
"Take a leave of absence," she said. "The bosses like your work. They'll let you go. Then in a little while . . . well, a long while . . . you can come back again with enough money to wipe away all of your debts."
"What do you know about my debts?"
The smile sharpened. "Everything," she said.
"No, I don't want this," he said.
Then a little meanness crept into her laugh. "Is it true what they say?"
"It often is."
"Luddite minds are better than others," she said. "They work harder because they have to start out soft and simple."
"We all start simple," he said.
"You need to go with me," she insisted.
There was a threat woven into the words, the tone. Pamir started to gauge his surroundings as well as this peculiar creature, but he never heard the killer's approach. One moment, the drive-mechanic was marshaling his tools for some ad hoc battle, but before he was ready, two impossibly strong hands were clasped around his neck, reaching from behind, calmly choking the life out of a thousand year-old body.
3
The Kajjas home sun was a brilliant F-class star circled by living worlds, iron-fattened asteroids, and billions of lush comets. Like humans, the Kajjas evolved as bipeds hungry for oxygen and water, and like most citizens of the galaxy, biology gave them brief lifespans and problematic biochemistries. Independent of other species, they invented the usual sciences, and after learning the principles of the Creation, they looked at everything with new eyes. But their solar system happened to be far removed from the galactic plane. The nearest star was fifty light-years away. Isolated but deeply clever, the Kajjas devised their famous pulse engines—scorching, borderline-stable rockets built around collars of degenerate matter. Kajjas pulses were as good as the best drives once they reached full throttle, but stubborn physics still kept them from beating the relativistic walls. Every voyage took time, and worse still, those pulse engines had the irksome habit of bleeding radiation. Even the youngest crew would die of cancers and old age before the voyage was even half-finished.
Faced the problem of spaceflight, every species realized that there were no perfect answers, at least so long as minds were mortal and the attached bodies were weak.
A consensus was built among the Kajjas. Alone, they began reengineering their basic nature. With time they might have invented solutions as radical as their relentless star-drives, but not long after the project began, a river of laser light swept out at them from the galaxy's core—a dazzling beacon carrying old knowledge, including the tools and high tricks necessary to build the bioceramic mind.
A similar beacon would eventually find the Earth, unleashing the potentials of one wild monkey.
But that event was a hundred million years in the future.
Human history was brief and complicated—a few hundred thousand years of competing, combustible civilizations. By comparison, the Kajjas built exactly one technological society. War and strife were unimaginable. Unity rode in their blue blood. Once armed with immortal minds and the infamous engines, their starships rained down across a wide portion of the galaxy, setting up colonies and trade routes while poking into ill-explored corners. The Kajjas were curious and adaptable explorers, and it was easy to believe that they would eventually rule some fat portion of local space. But the species reached its zenith while the dinosaurs still ran over one tiny world, and then their slow decline began. Colonies withered. Their starships began keeping to the easy, well-mapped routes. Some of the Kajjas never even went into space. And what always bothered Pamir, and what always intrigued him, was that these ancient creatures had no clear idea what had gone wrong.
A few Kajjas rode onboard the Great Ship. They were poorer than the typical passenger, but each had a love for brightly lit taverns, and in moderation, drinks made from hot spring waters and propanol salted liberally with cyanide.
Philosophers by nature and cranky philosophers at that, the Kajjas made interesting company. Pamir approved of their irritable moods. He liked cryptic voices and far-sighting reflections. This was a social species with clear senses of hierarchies. If you wanted respect, it was important to sit near your Kajjas friend, near enough to taste the poison on his breath, and to wring the best out of the experience, you had to act as if he was the master of the table and everyone sitting around it.
Pamir's favorite refugee was ageless to the eye, but eyes were easily fooled.
"We were courageous voyagers," said the raspy voice.
"You were," Pamir agreed.
His companion had various names, but in human company, he preferred to be called "Tailor."
"Do you realize how many worlds we visited?"
"No, Tailor, I don't."
"You do not know, and we can only guess numbers." The words were tumbling out of an elderly, often repaired translator. "Ten million planets? Twenty billion? I can't even count the places that I have walked with these good feet."
The Kajjas suddenly propped his legs on the tabletop.
Knowing what was proper, Pamir leaned between the toe-rich, faintly kangaroo-style feet. "I would tolerate your stories, if you could tolerate my boundless interest."
The alien's head was narrow and extremely deep, like the blade of a hatchet. Three eyes surrounded a mouth that chewed at the air, betraying suspicion. "Do I know you, young human?"
"No," Pamir lied. "We have never met."
He was wearing that new face and the name Jon, and he was cloaked in a fresh life story too.
"You seem familiar to me," said the Kajjas.
"Because you're ancient and full of faces, remembered and imagined too."
"That feels true."
"I beg to know your age," Pamir said.
The question had been asked before, and Tailor's answer was always enormous and never repeated. If the alien felt joyous, he claimed to be youthful forty million years old. But if angry or despairing, he painted himself as being much, much older.
"I could have walked along your Cretaceous shoreline," said Tailor that evening, hinting at a very dark disposition.
"I wish you had," said Pamir.
"Yet I can do that just the same," the Kajjas said, two eyes turning to mist as the mind wove some private image.
Pamir knew to wait, sipping his rum.
The daydream ended, and the elderly creature leaked a high trilling sound that the translator turned into a despairing groan.
"My mind is full," Tailor declared.
"Should I envy you?"
Iron blades rubbed hard against one another—the Kajjas laugh. "Fill your mind with whatever you wish. Envy has its uses."
"Should my species envy yours?"
Every eye cleared. "Are you certain we haven't met?"
"Nothing is certain," said Pamir.
"Indeed. Indeed."
"Perhaps you know other humans," Pamir said.
"I have sipped drinks with a few," Tailor said. "Usually male humans, as it happens. One or two of them had your bearing exactly."
The focus needed to be shifted. "You haven't answered me, my master. Should humans envy your species' triumphs?"
A long sip of poison turned into a human-style nod. "You should envy every creature's success. And if you wish my opinion—"
"Yes."
"In my view, our greatest success is the quiet grace we have shown while making our plunge back to obscurity. Not every species vanishes so well as the Kajjas."
"Humans won't," said Pamir.
"On that, we agree."
"And why did your plunge begin?" the human asked. "What went wrong for you, or did something go right?"
Pamir had drunk with this entity many times over the millennia. Tailor gave various answers to this question, each delivered without much faith in the voice. Usually he claimed that living too long made an immortal cowardly and dull. Too many of his species were ancient, and that antediluvian nature brought on lethargy, and of course lethargy led to a multifaceted decline.
Wearing the Jon face, Pamir waited for that reliable excuse again.
But the alien said nothing, wiggling those finger-like toes. Then with an iron laugh, fresh words climbed free of his mouth.
"I think the secret is our minds," he began.
"Too old, are they?" asked Pamir.
"I am not talking about age. And while too many memories are jammed inside us, they are not critical either."
"What is wrong with your mind?"
"And yours too." Tailor leaned forward. A hand older than any ape touched Pamir's face, tracing the outlines of his forehead. "Your brain and mine are so similar. In its materials and the nanoscopic design, and in every critical detail that doesn't define our natures."
"True, true," said the worshipful Pamir.
"Does that bother you?"
"Not at all."
"Of course not, no," said the alien. "But have you ever asked yourself . . . has that smart young mind of yours ever wondered . . . why doesn't this sameness leave you just a little sick in your favorite stomach?"
4
Choke an immortal man, pulverize the trachea and neck bones and leave the body starved of oxygen, and he dives into a temporary coma. But the modern body is more sophisticated than machines, including star-drives, and within their realm, humans can be far more durable, more self-reliant. Choke the man and a nanoscopic army rises from the mayhem, knitting and soothing, patching and building. Excess calories are warehoused everywhere, including inside the bioceramic mind, and despite the coma and the limp frame, nothing about the victim is dead. Pamir wasn't simply conscious. He was lucid, thoughts roaring, outrage in full stride as he guessed about enemies and their motives and what he would do first when he could move again, and what he would do next, and depending on the enemies, what color his revenge would take.
But there were many states between full life and true death.
He was sprawled out on the shop floor, and standing over him, somebody said, "Done."
Then he felt himself being lifted.
A woman said, "Hurry."
G'lene?
His body was carried, but not far. There was a maze of storage hangers beneath the shop. Pamir assumed that he was taken into one of those rooms, and once set down again he found the strength to strike a careless face, once and then twice again before someone shoved a fat tube down his ruined throat.
Fiery chemicals cooked his flesh.
Too late, he tried to engage his nexuses. But their voices had been jammed, and all that came back to him was white noise and white deathly light.
In worse ways than strangling, his body was methodically killed.
Deafness took him, and his sense of smell was stripped away, and every bit of skin went numb. In the end, the only vision remaining was imagination. A body couldn't be left inside a storage hanger. Someone would notice. That's why he imagined himself being carried, probably bound head to toe to keep him from fighting again. But he didn't feel any motion, and nothing changed. Nothing happened. Lying inside blackness, his thoughts ran on warehoused power, and when no food was offered those same thoughts began to slow, softening the intensities of each idea, ensuring a working consciousness that could collapse quite a bit farther without running dry.
The streakship's launch was never noticed, and the long, fierce acceleration made no impression.
But Pamir reasoned something like that would happen. Clues and a captain's experience let him piece together a sobering, practical story. If any Kajjas ship was wandering near the Great Ship, it would have been noticed. That news would have found him. And since it wasn't close, and since the universe was built mostly from inconvenient trajectories, the streakship would probably have to burn massive amounts of fuel just to reach the very distant target—assuming it didn't smash into a comet while plunging through interstellar space.
This kind of mission demanded small crews and fat risks, and Pamir was going to remain lost for a very long time.
"Unless," he thought. "Unless I'm not lost at all."
Paranoia loves darkness. Perhaps this ugly situation was a ruse. Maybe the relentless AI hunters had finally found him, but nobody was quite sure if he was the runaway captain. So instead of having him arrested, the captains decided to throw the suspect inside a black box, trying to squeeze the secrets out of him.
Bioceramic minds were tiny and dense and utterly unreadable.
But a mind could be worn down. A guilty man or even an innocent man would confess to a thousand amazing crimes. Wondering if prison was better than dying on some bizarre deep-space quest, Pamir found the temptation to say his old name once, just to see if somebody had patched into his speech center. But as time stretched and the thoughts slowed even more, he kept his mind fixed on places and days that meant something to a man named Jon. He pictured Port Beta and the familiar machinery. He spoke to colleagues and drank with them, the routine, untroubled life of the mechanic lingering long past his death. Then when he was miserably bored, he imagined WherePeace-Rains, spending the next years with a life and beliefs that before this were worn only as camouflage.
For the first time, he missed that life that he had never lived.
Decades passed.
Oxygen returned without warning, and flesh warmed, and new eyes opened as a first breath passed down his new throat.
A face was watching him.
"Hello, Jon," said the face, the hint of a smile showing.
Pamir said, "Hello," and breathed again, with relish.
G'lene appeared to be in fine health, drifting above the narrow packing crate where his mostly dead body had been stowed.
Pamir sat up slowly.
A thoroughly, wondrously alien ship surrounded them. Its interior was a cylinder two hundred meters in diameter and possibly ten kilometers long. Pamir couldn't see either end of this odd space. The walls were covered with soft glass threads, ruddy like the native Kajjas grass, intended to give the Kajjas good purchase for kicking when they were in zero gravity, like now. But when the ship's engines kicked on, the same threads would come alive, lacing themselves into platforms where the crew could work and rest, the weaves tightening as the gees increased. That was standard Kajjas technology. Kajjas machines were scattered about the curved, highly mobile landscape, each as broken as it was old. There were control panels and what looked like immersion chambers, none of them working, and various hyperfiber boxes were sealed against the universe. Every surface wore a vigorous coat of dust. Breathing brought scents only found in places that had been empty forever. Rooms onboard the Great Ship smelled this way. But the air and the bright lights felt human, implying that his abductors had been onboard long enough to reconfigure the environment.
G'lene kept her distance. "How do you feel, Jon?"
"Can you guess?" he asked.
She laughed quietly, apparently embarrassed.
In the distance, three entities were moving in their direction. Two of them were human.
"Our autodoc just spliced a fast-breaker pipe into your femoral," she said. "You'll be strong and ready in no time."
Pamir studied legs that didn't look like his legs, and he looked at a rib-rich chest and a stranger's spidery hands. Starvation and nothingness had left him eroded, brittle and remarkable.
"Our captain wants you to start repairing the pulse drive," G'lene said.
"And I imagine that our captain wants enthusiasm on my part."
She blinked. She said, "Hopefully."
"You know a little something about machines," he said. "How does the old engine look?"
"I'm no expert, as you like to tell me. But it looks like the last crew put everything to sleep in the best ways. Unfortunately there's no fuel onboard, and none of the maintenance equipment is functioning."
"I hope our captain considered these possibilities."
"We brought extra fuel and tools, yes."
"Enough?"
She stared at his skinny legs.
Pulse engines, like flesh, were adaptable when it came to nutrition. Any mass could be fed through the collars, transformed into plasma and light.
Pamir wiggled his bare toes.
The other crewmembers were kicking closer.
"I'm guessing that the Kajjas crew is also missing," he said.
"Oh, yes," she said.
"How long missing?"
The question made her uneasy.
"How long have we been here?" he asked.
That was another difficult topic, but she nodded when she said, "Nineteen days."
The autodoc beneath him was a small field model, serviceable but limited. Pamir studied it and then the girl, and then he flexed one leg while leaving the other perfectly still. Asked to work, the atrophied muscles took the largest share of the new food, and the leg grew warmer, sugars burning and lipids burning until the slippery blood began to glow.
"How about the sovereigns?" he asked.
"Sovereigns?"
"The ship's AIs." Most species patterned their automated systems after their social systems, and the Kajjas preferred noble-minded machines in charge of the automated functions.
"We've tried talking to the AIs," said G'lene. "They don't answer."
Tossing both legs out from the tiny growth chamber, Pamir dragged the fast-break pipe with them. "And what are we? A salvage operation?"
She said, "Yes."
"And at the end of the fun, am I paid? Or am I murdered for good?"
"Paid," she blurted. "The offer from me was genuine, Jon. There's a lot of money to be made here."
"For a badly depleted Kajjas ship," he said, sighing. "It's more than hopeful, believing this derelict can earn much on the open market."
She said nothing.
"But it is exceptionally old, isn't it?"
"That's what our captain says."
"Sure, the Kajjas sent missions everywhere," he said. "They were even happy to poke far outside the Milky Way."
"Which makes this a marvelous relic," she said.
"To a species inflicted with hard times. Nobody with a genuine purse would give a little shit about this lost wreck."
The two other humans were arriving—a woman and a man. They were closely related, or they loved to wear faces that implied some deep family bond.
"This is Maxx," G'lene said, referring to the man.
"And I'm Rondie," the woman offered.
Powerful people, each as muscular as G'lene was round, their every motion and the flash of their eyes proved they were youngsters.
Pamir wondered whose hands had strangled him.
"It's great to finally meet you," Maxx said, nothing but pure, undiluted happiness in his voice. "We keep hearing that you can make this ship healthy again."
"Who says that?" Pamir asked.
"The only one who matters," the fellow said, laughing amiably.
What was more disturbing: Being kidnapped for a mission that he didn't want to join, or being trapped in the company of three earnest, inexperienced near-children?
Next to the humans, the drive-mechanic was utterly ancient.
But compared to their captain, Pamir was a newborn.
"Hello to you, Jon," said the Kajjas.
"Why me?" Pamir asked. "You should know how to fix your own beast."
One last kick made the glass crinkle and flow, bringing the captain into the group. The sound of grinding iron preceded the words, "I have never mastered the peculiar genius to be a worthy engineer."
"Too bad," said Pamir.
Then Tailor touched his own head above the eyes. "And to learn the necessary talents now would require empty spaces inside my head, which means discarding some treasured memories. And how could I do such to pieces of my own self?"