Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (6 page)

The bulb drifted beside him, unnoticed.

Pamir cracked his bulb, sipping the liquor as he waited.

Then the eyes cleared, but Tailor continued to stare into the machinery.

"I have two questions," said the human.

"And I have many," the Kajjas said. "Too many."

" 'The army is one body masquerading as many,' " Pamir quoted. " 'You are at war with one puzzle, and it just seems like a multitude.' "

"Whose expression is that?"

"Harum-scarums use it," Pamir said.

"I know a few harum-scarums," said Tailor. "They are a spectacularly successful species."

"You should have hired them, not us."

"Perhaps I should have."

Pamir sipped the rum again.

"I'm not oblivious, blind, or stupid," the alien said. "I understand that you have taken control of my ship and its future."

"Your plans were weak, and I did what was necessary. Do you approve?"

"Have I contested this change?"

"Here is your chance," said Pamir.

Tailor steered the conversation back where it began. "You wish to ask two questions."

"Yes."

Tailor claimed the other bulb, sipping deeply. "You wish to know if I am making progress."

"I don't care," Pamir said.

"You are lying."

"I have a talent in that realm."

Iron crashed against iron, leaving the air ringing. "Well, I am enjoying some small successes. According to the rough evidence, this is a cargo vessel transporting something precious. But the various boxes and likely cavities are empty, and the sovereigns' language began ancient and then changed over time, and meanwhile these machines have descended into codes or madness, or both."

"How old are you?" Pamir asked.

The Kajjas' three eyes were clear as gin, and each one reached deep inside the head, allowing light to pour into a shared cavity where images danced within a tangle oflenses and mirrors, modern neurons and tissues older than either species.

"You have posed that question before," Tailor said. "You've asked more than once, if my instincts are true."

Pamir confessed how many times they had met over drinks.

"Goodness." Laughter followed, and a sip. "I have noticed. You are suddenly acting and sounding like a captain. Maybe that was one of your disguises, long ago."

"There was no disguise," he said. "I was a fine captain."

"Or there was, and you were fooled as well."

Pamir liked the idea. He didn't believe it, but the meme found life inside him, cloying and frightening and sure to linger.

"I'm a few centuries older than ninety-three million years," Tailor said. "And while I can't claim to have walked your earth, I have known souls—Kajjas and other species—who saw your dinosaurs stomping about on your sandy beaches."

"Lucky souls."

The Kajjas preferred to say nothing.

"I'm waking our engine tomorrow," Pamir said.

"According to your own schedule, that's far too soon."

"It is. But I've decided that we can fly and cut apart the streakship at the same time. We'll use our hydrogen stocks until they're nine-tenths gone, and then we'll throw machine parts down the engine's mouth."

"Butchering the other ship will be hard work, under acceleration."

"Which brings me to my second question: Will you help my crew do the essential labor?"

"And give my important work its sleep," Tailor said.

"Unless you can do both at once."

The mouth opened to speak, but then it closed again, saying nothing as two eyes clouded over.

Pamir finished his drink, the bulb flattened in his hand.

Tailor spoke. Or rather, his translator absorbed the soft musical utterances, creating human words and human emotions that struggled to match what could never be duplicated. Honest translations were mythical beasts. On its best day, communication was a sloppy game, and Pamir was lucky to know what anyone meant, including himself.

"This starship," said the alien. "It is older than me."

"How do you know?"

"There are no markings, no designations. I have looked, but there is no trace of any name. Yet the ship is identical to vessels built while my sun was far outside the galaxy. Those ships were designed for the longest voyages that we could envision, and then they were improved beyond what was imaginable. They had one mission. They were to carry brave and very patient crews into the void, out beyond where anyone goes, in an effort to discover our galaxy's sovereigns."

"Our galaxy's sovereigns," Pamir repeated. "I don't understand."

"But the concept is obvious."

"Someone rules the galaxy?"

"Of course someone does."

"And how does leaving the galaxy prove anything?"

"That's a third question," Tailor pointed out.

"It's your query, not mine. Not once in my life have I ever thought that way."

"And which life is that?"

"Talk," said Pamir.

"Onboard your Great Ship, I once met a Vozzen historian of considerable age and endless learning. The two of us spent months discussing the oldest species of intelligent life, those bold first examples of technological civilizations, and what caused each to lose its grip on Forever and die away. The historian's mind was larger and far wiser than mine. I admit as much. But you can appreciate how the same principles are at work inside both of us, and inside you. The bioceramic mind is the standard for civilized worlds. It was devised early, and several founding worlds have been given credit, although none of them exist anymore. And since the mind's introduction into the galaxy, no one has managed more than incremental improvements on its near-perfection."

"The brain works," said Pamir.

"One basic design is shared by twenty million species. Of course intellect and souls and the colors of our emotions vary widely, even inside the human animal. At first look and after long thought, one might come to the conclusion that it is as you say: We have what's best, and there isn't any reason to look farther."

"We don't look farther," Pamir agreed.

"Humans don't. But the Kajjas once did. That is the point: Our nameless fleet was buried inside a great frozen dwarf world, every pulse engine blazing, driving that shrinking world toward our Second Eye, your Andromeda. The survivors of that epic were under orders to investigate what kind of minds those natives employed, and if another, perhaps worthier mind was found, the fleet would return home immediately.

"At the very most," said Tailor, "that mission would have demanded eight million years. I was born near the end of that period, and I spent my youth foolishly watching for those heroes to return and enlighten us. But they did not appear, even as an EM whisper. Ten and twenty and then fifty million years passed, yet just by their absence, much was learned. We assumed that they were dead and the ships were lost, or the explorers had pushed farther into the void, seeking more difficult answers.

"Few civilizations ever attempt such wonders. I have always believed that, and the Vozzen happily agreed with my assessment.

"Don't you find that puzzling? Intriguing? Wrong? The resources of a galaxy in hand, and few of us ever attempt such a voyage.

"But my brethren did. And afterward, living inside my galaxy, I have tried my best to answer the same questions. It is the burden and blessing of being Kajjas: Each of us knows that he rules only so much, and every ruler has worthy masters of his own, wherever they might hide."

"Sovereigns to the galaxy," said Pamir, his voice sharpening.

"You don't believe in them," Tailor said.

"Have you found them?"

"Everywhere, and nowhere. Yes." The laugh was brief, accompanied by a sad murmuring from the translator. "Everywhere that I travel, there are rumors of deeds that claim no father, legends of creatures that wear any face and any voice. There is even talk about invisible worlds and hidden realms, conspiracies and favored species and species that diminish and succumb to no good opponent.

"About our masters, I have little to say. Except that they terrify me, and because I am Kajjas, I wish that I could lie between their mighty feet and beg for some little place at their table."

Pamir had too many questions to ask or even care about. His crew was noticing his absence. One nexus rewarded him with a string of obscenities from the twins, and with those words, promises to turn him over to the Great Ship's captains as soon as they arrived home.

It was no secret that Pamir could hear them, and Rondie and Maxx didn't care.

And all that while, G'lene said nothing.

"Suddenly," said Tailor, almost shouting the word.

"What?"

"Just two million years ago, suddenly and with the barest of warnings, our old fleet began to return home."

Pamir nodded, and waited.

"The ships appeared as individuals. I won't explain how a person might know in advance where such a derelict will show itself, but there is a pattern and we have insights, and there have been some little successes in finding them before anyone else. The crews are always missing. Dead, we presume. But 'missing' is a larger, finer word. Empty ships return like raindrops, scattered and almost unnoticed, and their AIs are near death, and nothing is learned, and sometimes tragic events find the salvage teams that come out to meet these relics."

"Your enemies strike," Pamir said.

"Yet disaster isn't certain," the alien said. "That might imply that there are no masters of the galaxy. Or it means that they are the ultimate masters, and better than us, they know what is and is not a threat to their powers."

Pamir drifted closer, placing his body in a submissive pose.

Long feet pulled away from the display panel, surrounding the human head. "The old fleet had one additional command," Tailor said. "If no equal or at least different mind could be found in the wilderness, then the Kajjas had to assemble at some sunless world, preferably a large moon stirred by a brown dwarf sun, and there, free of interference and ordinary thoughts, our finest minds would build a colony. Then in that nameless place, they and their offspring would kill preconceptions and create something else.

"They were to build a different way of thinking, yes.

"And that is what they were to send home, however they could and in the safest way possible."

Approximating the Kajjas language, the human said, "Shit."

Tailor stroked the panel with one hand, watching a thousand shades of blue swirl into fancy shapes that collapsed as soon as the fingers lifted. "I don't know this language," he said. "It is older than me and full of odd terms, and maybe it has been corrupted. There are fine reasons to believe that there is no meaning inside these machines. But it is possible, weak as the chance seems, that the truth stands before me, and my ordinary mind, and yours, are simply unable to see what it is."

The alien was insane, Pamir hoped.

The hand released the display, and Tailor said, "Yes."

"Yes what?"

"I will help make the ship ready for flight. Obviously, nothing I do here can be confused for good."

A brick of metallic hydrogen plunged into the first collar, the widest collar, missing the perfect center by the width of a small cold atom. Compression accompanied the hard kick of acceleration, and then a second collar grabbed hold, flinging it through ten of its brothers. Neutronium wire wrapped inside high-grade hyperfiber made the choke points, each smaller and more massive than the ones before, and the cycle continued down to where the brick was burning like a sun—a searing finger of dense plasma that still needed one last inspiration to become useful, reliable fuel.

Pulse engines relied on that final collar of degenerate matter. From outside, the structure looked like a ceramic bottle shaped by artisan hands—a broad-mouthed bottle where it began, then tapering to a point that magically dispensed the ultimate wine. Plasma flowed into the bottle's interior, clinging to every surface while being squeezed. But what was smooth to the eye was vast and intricately shaped at the picometer scale—valleys and whorls, high peaks and sudden holes. Turbulence yielded eddies. The birth of the universe was replicated in tiny realms, and quantum madness took hold. Casimir fields and antiproton production triggered a lovely apocalypse that ended with the obliteration of mass and a majestic blast of light and focused neutrinos.

Then the next moment arrived, bringing another brick of hydrogen.

Twelve thousand and five bricks arrived in order. There were no disasters, but the yields proved fickle. Then the ship's captain killed the engine, invoking several wise reasons for recertifying a control system that was, despite millions of years of sleep, running astonishingly well.

But who knew what a healthy pulse engine could accomplish?

The human captain wasn't sure, and he confessed that loudly, often and without any fear of looking stupid.

Pamir had settled into a pattern. His nameless ship would accelerate hard, pushing at four gees for ten minutes or three days. Bodies ached. Muscles grew in response to the false weight. Then they would coast for a few minutes or for an hour, except the time they drifted for a week, every easy trajectory slipping out of reach.

The ship's sovereigns must have done this good work once, but they remained uncooperative. The streakship's AIs had been salvaged to serve as autopilots, but they weren't confident of their abilities. Pamir gave his crew reasons that wanted to be believed. He offered technical terms and faked various solutions that were intended to leave the children scared of this ancient, miserably unhappy contraption. Tailor required a bit more honesty, and that was why the captain invoked the Kajjas' faceless enemies. Pamir explained that he didn't want other eyes knowing where they would be tomorrow and thirty years from now. "The wounded bandelmoth is hunted by a flock of ravenous tangles," Pamir explained. "The moth flies a quick but utterly random course, letting chance help fend off the inevitable."

"Why not tell the others what you tell me?" the Kajjas asked. "Why invent noise about 'damned stuck valves' and 'damned chaotic flows'?"