13
The mad plan was to burn up their original fuel stocks in order to bring them home on a short vector. All that while, they would carve away a portion of the ship's prow, holding back those shards for later. If they survived the boost phase, the ship would be rolled again at the last possible moment, and then the engine's muscle and endurance would be severely tested. Hyperfiber would be shoved into oblivion and expelled before them—a long spike of plasma and radiations slicing through the blackness. Every local eye would see their arrival, and that was part of Pamir's scheme: If someone tried to kill this ship, it would be a loud public act, a revealing act. If some secret power was at large, it would surely prefer to settle this matter in more private ways.
Pamir had explained his plan, and to one degree or another, the others accepted his rule if not his logic. Besides, everyone knew that they were far off course, and at this velocity and in this place, there was simply no other route home.
Every hand was needed. The original crew was at work, infuriating yet predictable. But now a second crew shared the ship with them. The twins could follow their usual script, sometimes for a full day or two. But then the boy suddenly begged to be left alone, please. Except his sister came out of death lonely, famished for more touches than ever and private words known only to her and maybe even the first stirrings of lust for the only object of value in her brief life.
The Kajjas remained the ancient puzzle. Freed of manacles and his studies, Tailor helped slice apart the least critical portions of the ship's armor. But without warning, he would suddenly turn fearless, risking millions of years of existence by stepping onto the open prow. Grains of dust would explode on all sides while he did nothing but sing, throwing old songs into the vacuum, eyes gazing up at the blue-shifted starlight that fell inside his joyous soul.
Even Pamir was two people. Long habit and the ingrained personality usually held him where he belonged—a blunt strong-willed soul that could sleep minutes every day and push three day's work into two. He ruled a minor realm inside the boundless universe governed by faceless, amoral laws. Those laws were too powerful and too perfect to give a shit about little him, and wasn't that the least awful existence imaginable?
But the other Pamir, the new man, was much less certain about everything.
Invisible, potent sovereigns held sway over the galaxy. Except in Pamir's mind, they weren't Kajjas sovereigns. They wore the faces and attitudes of captains. They were bold opinionated creatures looking splendid in their bright uniforms, each one ambitious, each a rival to all of the others, and somewhere there sat a world-sized Master Captain holding a godly feast every million years, just to prove to her nervous self that she was genuinely in charge.
The imagery had its charms, its humor.
Laughing, he could deny everything. One senile alien from a vanquished race was not much of an authority, and there were explanations waiting to be invoked. Their ship was nothing but a derelict, and its sovereigns were crazy, and nothing here was worth two drops of blood or any reputation. Those bits of glass that Tailor found were just that. They were glass. The alien had installed them, and what changed about him? The new boldness was nothing but Tailor's anguish for a thoroughly wasted life. The streakship following them was one mild coincidence, and its detonation was another. And that final attack—the wild flash of laser light—was just some local species running experiments in deep space, or a factory ionizing the dust to harvest it, or maybe someone was trying to kill them. But what did that mean? There were endless reasons to destroy another ship, and saving the universe for the sovereigns was far down on the list.
Wild thoughts kept running where they wanted inside the captain's exhausted mind. But he suppressed the worst of them, and he learned to ring the humor out of the paranoia and push on.
But whatever his burdens, G'lene's were immeasurably worse.
Through his nexuses, Pamir had watched Rondie cut the woman's head off of her boiled corpse. Then she handed the head to Tailor, and he watched what Tailor did with that gift. But the prow was far away and the high-gee acceleration had to be maintained. It took only minutes to carve a fresh hole into G'lene's mind, and then the final thread—one last piece of glass—was implanted.
Change the time or change the circumstances, and Pamir would not have brought her back to life. Better autodocs onboard the Great Ship would repair the damaged intellect first. But he needed G'lene's hands, her back. He fit the surviving pieces inside the growth chamber, and they remembered their original self, knitting together and building connections, swelling with water and fat until the girl emerged on schedule, seemingly unharmed.
Pamir didn't tell her about the rough surgery. As far as he could see, nobody else mentioned it either. The inserted glass had done nothing to change the girl's complaining attitude, and she still had bouts of laziness. But there was a quiet that had gotten inside her and wouldn't let her free. She stopped flirting, and more alarming, she stopped masturbating too.
Dreaming, she wept.
Awake, the girl used her nexuses for most peculiar functions. Everybody was near the prow, everybody carving hyperfiber, but her attentions were focused on textbooks and general how-to files. She used to fitfully study. Now she acted focused if not happy. She said that she was the same, by feeling and by thought, except she had a sudden passion for stardrives and the ships that surrounded those engines. Pamir asked why. Everyone asked. Explaining herself, G'lene claimed that she had to think about something while she was dead. Contemplating her life seemed reasonable. And in the darkness, she told herself: "Quit making a mess of your existence and do your damned work."
It was easy to accept the girl's reasoning. Pamir took the role of tutor, if only to keep close tabs on her progress. Each month, G'lene researched a different drive, exhausting its basics before trying to master some subsystem that other drive-mechanics found cumbersome or boring. She wasn't notably smarter than before, and her memory was no sharper. She would still be one of the weakest students in any class. But G'lene was focusing her skills on rockets and power sources, and the months became several years, and then suddenly, without comment, she quit accessing the texts and manuals.
Pamir mentioned the change.
The girl shrugged and finished polishing the latest slip of hyperfiber. Then she stepped away, saying, "I realized. I'll never be good doing your job."
"No?"
With a slow, untroubled voice, she said, "If we survive this, I will quit the program."
Her captain had ever seen her make any smart choice, until now.
During those intense years, their ship ate the last of its hydrogen stocks and the final bits of the streakship guts, and then most the streakship's hyperfiber was tossed into oblivion. No invisible hand tried to murder them. No truly vital system failed. The ship's huge prow was degraded, pierced with tunnels and little caverns, and several lumps of comet ice managed to punch deep. But the frame remained sound, and the engine was in fair shape when they gave it one fast rest, and as the slow final roll-over began, the captain decided that this was the moment when their ship deserved to finally wear some kind of name.
He let Tailor master the honor.
A moment of consideration led to a Kajjas phrase—an honored term meaning wisdom and deep, profound sanity. Then with a most respectful voice, the translator said, "Precious Mental."
They wrote that name on various bare surfaces, in a thousand distinct languages.
"I don't know this tongue," G'lene said.
She was reading over Pamir's shoulder. "The language is mine," he said. "It's the dialect we use inside Where-Peace-Rains."
She touched the lettering, and a painful murmur came out of her.
"I've been watching you," he said.
"All of you keep staring at me."
"Do you know why?"
"Because you're worried."
"There's a lot to worry about," he said.
She tried to leave.
"Stay here," he said.
"Is that an order?"
"If it keeps you here, it is." Pamir didn't want to touch her, but a hand to the shoulder seemed important. Then he forgot that he was holding her, saying, "I know what you're studying now."
"You know everything," she said, bristling slightly.
"Mathematics," he said.
"Yes."
"But not just any numbers," Pamir said. "You're dabbling with the big, scary conundrums, the old problems about existence and the shape of the universe."
"Yes," she said.
He kept quiet, waiting.
"What's wrong with that?" she asked.
"Why are you?" he asked.
She shrugged. "I've also developed a taste for poetry."
"Bleak poems about death," he said. "Yeah, I'm eavesdropping. Each of us is worried about you, G'lene."
"Including me."
He waited for a long moment. Then he quietly asked, "What happened? When you were dead in the box, what happened?"
"I thought about you," she said calmly. "I could have killed you on the gangway, and you could have killed me. Again and again, I relived all of that. And then at the end, just before you put me inside the autodoc—just before the darkness broke—this idea came to me. From the middle of my regrets and stupidity, it came."
"What idea?"
She shook her head.
"Tell me," Pamir insisted.
She looked at her captain and then at the archaic words—white lines smoothly drawn across a coal-black housing. "Have you ever noticed, sir? There are so many ways to push a ship across space. Dozens of engines are popular, and thousands have been tried at least once. But most of us wear the same basic brain. And shouldn't thought be more important than action?"
"Is that your epiphany?" he asked.
"No," she said. "That's me wishing that my brain was smarter."
He nodded, weighing his next words.
But then she pushed aside her doubts. "I was alive but only barely, trapped inside a room without light or ends," she said. "I was thinking about you, Jon. You're not the person that you pretend to be. You're no Luddite or drivemechanic, but you're doing a very fine job of pretending.
"And then all of the sudden, out of nowhere, I thought: 'What if everyone is the same as Jon?
"What if everything is that way? 'Not just people, but the universe?' I thought. 'What if everything we see and everything we know is one grand lie, an extraordinary mask, and waiting behind the mask is something else entirely?' "
14
The Great Ship was close enough to see and close enough to fear.
Approaching from behind, the Kajjas ship was tracing a rigorous line, a very peculiar line, and if nothing changed their tiny vessel would miss every Port and the emergency landing sites on the hull. If the pulse engine never fired, the five of them would pass in front of their home and continue onwards, eventually leaving the galaxy for places that not even Tailor's charts would show.
But if their engine ignited, a collision was possible. That's why they were studied, and that's why various voices called out to them. Captains demanded to know the ship's history and intentions. The Great Ship's best weapons were directed forwards, fending off lost moons and the like. But there was ample firepower on the backside, ready to eviscerate their little craft. Pamir assured his crew that crosshairs were locked on them, probably for some time. He also confessed that ignoring the first pleas was his strategy. Those captains needed to feel ignored, which made them worry. There was a tradition to command and rank and the corrosive strategies of those who wore the mirrored uniforms. Worry was what helped the five of them. A captain's responsibilities grew heavier when nobody was listening. And then at the ripe moment, Pamir told their audience a story—a sweet balance of truth and lie, pieces of it practiced for a thousand years.
Early on, Pamir had considered making a full confession.
But what would that help? A nervous captain might believe him too well, and smelling commendations, sprinkle the space between them with arrest warrants and nuclear mines.
No, he was still Jon. He was the drive-mechanic hired to bring home one lost ship. Playing to every bias held by those mirrored uniforms, he admitted that he was an idiot far from his native habitat. Taking no credit for himself, he thanked his AIs for finding this odd route home. Captains would always accept genius in machines before genius in a tool-bearing grunt. Then as the pivotal moment approached, Pamir added a long, faintly sentimental message aimed at his descendants wearing his blood and his name. And for no reason but that it felt true, he told Where-Peace-Rains that he was miserably sorry for his crime of living far too long.
The rest of Pamir's crew was in place, waiting. Each wore the best available lifesuit, and each suit was set on a tall bed of shock absorbers. Those beds would do almost nothing, and the glassy grass heaped around them was mostly for show. Gee-forces of this magnitude would kill most machines. Hyperfiber and bioceramics would survive, if barely. There was only the slenderest of room for error, but then again, as experienced showed, some guesses were pessimistic, and if you took a risk, sometimes the results were golden.
Pamir was inside his suit, securing himself to his bed.
Nearby, Rondie said private words to Maxx.
Her brother responded with silence.
Injured, she said his name twice, and then Maxx spoke out, but not to her. "So Jon," he said with a loud, clear voice. "For the record, what's your real name?"
He said it. For the first time in decades, he said, "Pamir," aloud, and then added, "If you survive and I survive, turn me in. There's going to be an ample reward."
The man laughed. "If I survive, that's the reward."
Mournfully, Rondie said, "Maxx."
"If we live, I mean," he said.
Then the twins were talking again, dancing with words devised in just the last few hours.
Tailor was closer to him, and G'lene was the closest.
"Thank you," said the Kajjas. "Without you, nothing ends properly."
Pamir made polite noise about helping hands and interesting conversations.
G'lene said nothing.
Pamir said her name.
Nothing.
He repeated the word, but with a captain's tone behind it.
She sniffed once, and then very quietly, almost sweetly, she admitted, "I can't get comfortable yet. How much longer will this be?"
Quite a lot occurred, most of it happening slowly.
And seven months later, a famous man returned to his childhood home.
Every citizen wanted to see him, but of course that was impossible. A lottery identified the luckiest few, and certain people of power bought slots or invented places for themselves, and of course there were cameras in position, feeding views to every apartment and tavern and even the hospital beds. The energy demands were enormous. The old stardrive was laboring at ninety percent capacity. But if anything should go wrong, some joked, at least they had an expert on hand who could fix the machine, probably with his eyes closed.
Yet despite fame and warm feelings, Jon sensed the doubts that came with the crowd. They were staring at a creature that had left their ranks long ago. Every face resembled his face, except he was something else. He was a machine. He was a monster and a traitor to the most suspicious ones, and Pamir was ready to admit as much to anyone who wanted to start a brawl.
"I'm not like you," he began. "And anymore, after everything, I don't know who I resemble."
The story they wanted was spectacular, and like most good stories, it was already known to everyone, here and throughout the Great Ship. So that's where Pamir began: He was a lump of tissue and fear inside a lifesuit, and following preprogrammed instructions, the Kajjas ship let loose with its one old engine. But unlike every other firing, there were no millisecond breaks between each sliver of fuel. Tons and tons of hyperfiber passed through the collars and out the magic wine bottle, and a blaze that rivaled the Great Ship's engines slowed their descent, twisting their motion into a course that could be adjusted only in the tiniest, most fractional ways.
The storyteller remembered nothing after the first damning jerk of the engine.
Encased inside hyperfiber, his body turned to mush and then split apart, dividing according to density. Teeth settled at the bottom of the suit, pulverized bits of bone laid over them. And floating on top was the water that began inside his body, inside his cells—a dirty brew distinctly unlike the stuff that ran out of pipes and that fell as rain, denser and stranger in a realm where gravity was thousands of times stronger than was right.
In the end, good wise captains were debating what to do about this unwelcomed piece of museum trash. Do they shoot it apart to be careful, or shoot it apart as a warning to whoever tried to repeat this maneuver? But Pamir had been very careful about his aim, and once his destination was assured, the argument ended. A few moments later, Precious Mental rode down on the last gasps of its engine, entering the centermost nozzle of the Ship's own rockets.
Each nozzle was impervious to these whiffs of heat and raw light.
Three kilometers off target, the old ship touched down and split wide, the debris field larger than the floor of this old cavern.
Jon was pulled from the rubble, his lifesuit cracked but intact.
Four more suits were found, but only two other survivors.
"My friend Tailor died," he told his audience. "And my very good friend G'lene was killed too. Their minds had recently undergone surgery. The nanofractures spread and grew, and everything shattered. Bioceramic is a wonderful substance, right up until it breaks. And nothing brings anyone back from that kind of damage."
His sadness was theirs. His grief and anguish made every face hurt. At that point, Pamir could have ended this chore. His plan was to walk out of this place and invent his death, using a stand-in body and fake damage from the crash landing. But the earnest smart watchful faces didn't want him to leave, and he didn't want solitude just now.
He was standing in the middle of the red granite round.
At the edge of the crowd was one young woman. She was Jon's relative. This many generations after his leaving, everybody was part of his family. And in her hand was a teapot that someone had remembered. Careful hands had taken it off its shelf and cleaned it up, and there was even cold tea inside, ready to be given in some little ceremony devised for this very peculiar occasion.
Pamir smelled the tea, and at that moment, for endless good reasons, he confessed.
No, he didn't name himself. Nor did he mention that his namesake died more than ten centuries ago. What he told them was the story that he had revealed only in pieces to the investigators and the overseeing captains. He told about Tailor's quest for enlightenment, and he described a fleet of exploratory ships racing out to neighboring galaxies. With minimal detail and words, he explained how the Kajjas was afraid of invisible sovereigns, and Jon admitted that he was temporarily sick with that fear, but then at the end, waiting for the engine to fire once more, he decided that there was no ground or heart to any of these wild speculations.
It took weeks for his pulverized body to be made into something living, and then into a man's shape, and finally into his old body.
After months of care, he was finally awake again. He was eating again. His attendant was a harum-scarum. The alien told him that two of his companions were sharing a room nearby, each a little farther in the healing than he was, and when the human asked about the other two, a grave sound emerged from the attendant's eating mouth. Then she explained that both had died instantly, and they had felt nothing, which was a sorry way to die, oblivious to the moment.
But his two wonderful friends had not died, of course.
In that bed, restrained by lousy health and the watchful eyes of doctors, Jon could suddenly see everything clearly. G'lene's own words came back to him. Why would the galaxy have a thousand stardrives but only one basic mind? And how can the thousand or ten thousand original civilizations all vanish together in the remote past? Why can't there be forces at work and different minds at work, hidden in myriad ways?
Jon paused.
Where-Peace-Rains listened to his silence.
He coughed weakly into a shaking fist, and the girl, urged by others, started forward with her offering of cold water infused with ordinary tea.
He stopped her.
"It's like this," he said. "If there are hidden captains, and in one measure or another they are steering our galaxy, then how can I deny the possibility—the distinct probability—that they would be naturally curious about some one hundred million year-old vessel that was getting washed up on our shore? Tailor believed that this mission was his, but that doesn't make it so. Maybe it never was. And in the end, our masters got exactly what they wanted, which was a viable sample of novel technologies, and with G'lene, a creature with whom they could talk to and perhaps learn from."
When did the man begin to cry?
Jon wasn't certain, but he was definitely crying now.
Encouragement was offered, and once again, the girl and the tea came forward. She had a nice smile. He had seen that same smile before, more than forty millennia ago. He was crying and then he had stopped crying, wiping his face dry with a sleeve, and he said to the girl, "Give me the pot. I want to hold, like old times."
She was happy to relinquish the chore.
But as she pulled back, she saw what was in her hands now. She felt the glass threads squirming of their own volition. Laughing nervously, she said, "What are these things?"
He offered his best guess.
Everybody wanted to see, including the cameras.
But he waved the others off, and then just to her, he muttered, "They could be a danger. G'lene had one inside her, and it made her halfway crazy. Tailor found several hundred more before we crashed, but on my own, on the sly, I found a few. I never told anybody, and that's five of them. You keep them. Put them somewhere safe, and give them to your next thousand generations. Please."
The girl nodded solemnly, putting the threads into her best pocket.
"What if?" he said.
"What if what, Jon?" she asked.
He sighed and nodded.
"What if this brain of mine is designed to be stupid?" he asked. "What if the obvious and important can't be seen by me, or by anyone else?"
A sorrowful face made her prettier. She wasn't yet twenty, which was nothing. It was barely even born by the man's count. But after struggling for something to say—something kind or at least comforting—she touched the man with her cool little hand. "Maybe you're right," she said. "But when you talk about that poor friend of yours, the girl and her suffering . . . I wonder if perhaps there is no treachery, no conspiracy. Maybe it is a kindness, making all of you a little foolish.
"Letting you forget the awful truth about the universe.
"Isn't that what you do with children, lending them the peace that lets them sleep through their nights . . . ?"