Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (10 page)

Wild thoughts kept running where they wanted inside the captain's exhausted mind. But he suppressed the worst of them, and he learned to wring 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 never 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 of 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 drive-mechanic, but you're doing a very fine job of pretending.

"And then all of a 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?' "

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 onward, 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 forward, 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 life-suit, 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 experience 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 90 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."