Harsh Oases (13 page)

“Ah, that’s the very reason I sought you out, Klom. I did not miss the landing at all. I was standing as close to the overseers as I could get, while the ship came down. Those lousy terabases and four-strands are damnably suspicious of eavesdroppers, though! It was all I could do to avoid rousing their majestatics.”

“You didn’t take any chances, did you?” asked Sorrel, looking alarmed.

Airey patted her hand. “Not at all. I have no desire to be drilled through the heart by an angry busybee, believe me! But I was able to overhear the high and mighty ones discussing the origin of this ship. It’s a Vixen craft. Most recently made the circuit among Bastiaan, Meuse and Greengage for centuries. But it’s much older than that. Parts of it were decommissioned over a thousand years ago. That’s where I’d head first if I were you, Klom. Deva knows what goodies you’ll find there!”

Klom considered the information, ruminating over it in his slow, stolid fashion. Any idea introduced into Klom’s brain met with a laborious reception, but frequently he ground a notion to a finer intellectual dust than the more quick-witted Airey ever could, with surprising results.

“I’ll do that, Airey. Anything special I should look for?”

“Oh, I don’t know … What about the Book of Forgetting?”

Sorrel laughed, but sourly this time. “Why not hope to find a globe of Mazarine isinglass, or a Ledan swanrobe or a map to the treasures of Mount Sumeru while you’re at it?” Here she broke mockingly into a snatch of song: “‘The fields of pleasure, the seas of love/Heavenly eyes that peer from above .…’ And how would anyone even recognize the mythical Book of Forgetting?”

“Oh, if half of what’s said about it is true, I suspect the finder would quickly realize what he’d found. The legends are evocative, though not precise. The Book is nothing less than the universal anodyne for all our mortal suffering—”

Suddenly the crowd surged forward en masse, breaking around Klom’s immovable bulk, which protected his companions as well.

“What’s happening?” asked Klom.

“I assume the marabouts are about to invoke a deva to bless the proceedings,” said Airey.

“Lift me up,” Sorrel said, “and I’ll tell you what I can see.”

Klom’s hands encircled Sorrel’s torso just as her O-ring bracelets encircled her wrist. His fingers and thumbs met across her span. In half a second she stood on his shoulders, her sandaled feet finding plenty of purchase on Klom’s broad frame, while he braced her behind her thighs. Canopying her hands, Sorrel shielded her eyes against the triple sunlight

“Yes, I see it all now. Several marabouts are riding a lifter out to the ship. Oh, how beautiful their robes are, billowing in the wind! Oops, one’s lost his miter! They’ve stopped now, not far from the ship. They’re making the sacrifice. I think they’re using a Redskull ox.” A tremulous bellow cut short drifted across the waters. “Now they’re feeding power to the prayer wheels. Get ready for the boomtube—”

Airey covered his ears, as did Sorrel. Klom seemed unconcerned, but in any case did not cease supporting Sorrel.

If the might of the tidal surge hitting the baffles had produced a noise akin to the collapse of a small house, then the manifestation of the deva’s boomtube generated a soundwave resembling the demolition of one of Voyule’s cloudscraper towers. The whole crowd staggered backward, with some losing their footing. Klom barely rocked, while he kept Sorrel anchored.

Now above the floating ship hung the deva: a silvery distortion in the air, in which the minds of lesser beings discerned varying images, depending on both physiology and cultural conditioning.

The majority of sapients in the galaxy—Humans, Foambones, Weepers, Hyenas, Gadabouts, Crickets, Leatherheads, Cygnets, as well as a thousand others and all their miscegenous offspring—encoded their genomes in some variation of DNA: two helical strands of nucleotides on the order of three billion basepairs. But there were higher orders of natural beings as well, those whose longer evolutionary histories had achieved more. Their genomes consisted of four, six, or even eight strands, featuring trillions of basepairs. These terabase beings exhibited emergent properties, sophistications of mind and body unattainable by the two-strands and gigabases.

The devas were sentients who had bootstrapped themselves entirely out of conventional spacetime thanks to their cellular complexity: decastranders, yotta- and zettabases. The subtle cosmic fields that supported life simply kicked the devas up to a different quantum level of existence.

Sorrel shivered atop Klom. “I see a Trundler Demon. This is a bad omen.”

“Nonsense,” said Airey. “I can plainly discern the smiling face of a Hovaness Lamb. Nothing could be a better sign. Klom, what do you see?”

Klom did not speak immediately. “I—I don’t know the name for what I’m seeing.”

“Can you describe it?”

“It’s—it forgives everything.”

Airey made a dismissive noise. “Oh, that’s helpful, all right”

A bolt of silver energy lanced out from the deva and splattered across the ship: a token of beneficence. A joyous shout went up from the crowd at this blessing. Then the deva silently snapped out of their ontological plane.

“Okay, Klom, you can put me down now.”

Klom complied effortlessly. Airey tugged straight his best white tunic, which had been disarrayed by the boomtube’s blast, and said, “Well, I think this event calls for a drink. Shall we go to Thrash’s for a flagon of toadchunder?”

“Who’s paying?” asked Sorrel.

Airey clapped Klom on the shoulder. “Why, Klom of course. He’s the one who saw the unknowable face of the deva. He’s the one who’s going to get rich!”

The gangboss for Klom’s shift was a Quetzal from Muntjac, named Rapaille. The amputation of Rapaille’s wings necessitated by a clumsy curandero after a barroom brawl had long ago left the avianoform ill-tempered and unforgiving. As meager compensation for his lost wings, Rapaille spent every last spare taka and paisa to adorn his priapic cockscomb with a variety of gaudy baubles. Today, setting out for their first foray to the Vixen hulk, Rapaille wore several sparkling garnets and a lozenge of nightmare amber piercing his fleshy ruff.

Aboard one of the wallowing, unroofed ocean transports, still docked, Rapaille marshaled his workers, a motley pack of hard-limbed bmisers representing a dozen heterogeneous races. Mounting one of the grimy seats to command more attention, Rapaille commenced a small speech. His beak clacked between syllables, and his narrow orange tongue stabbed the air.

“Listen closely, you scuzz-buckets! This ship has already been partially stripped by its former owners. They’ve taken most of the furnishings and fixtures. You won’t find any old nesting materials to sniff, nor any dainty female undergarments to hug to your bosom.”

An anonymous voice called out, “How about wings? Any chance of glomming a pair of those onboard?”

Rapaille scrunched his beady eyes and gurgled wordlessly, before regaining his self-control. “Quiet! The next wisecrack will earn someone a lost shift! Pay attention! It is equally unlikely you’ll discover any valuable personal trinkets or artwork, although I don’t rule out a few overlooked nanosculptures or parasite jewelry. So you might as well just forget about such easy booty. Any individual performance rewards will come from the neat and speedy accumulation of well-known structures. We’re after control ganglia, matter-modems and entertainment nodes, for instance. Nexial splitters pay well too. Several teams have already been dispatched to handle the disentanglers and decoherers. Other groups have been assigned the bridge. But aside from those areas, we have free access to the rest of the ship. Our goal is to finish over the next few months at the same time as the others, so that we can all move on to breaking up the hull itself. Do you all have your downloaded ship schematics?’’

Several breakers held aloft their industrial-grade readers, battered boxes good for little more than displaying pre-formatted audiovisual files. No ensouled devices were to be found on Asperna, at least among the lower castes.

“All right, then! Take your seats, and we’ll be off!”

Before Rapaille could step off his own bench, Klom pushed forward through his fellows to confront the gangboss. Strapped across Klom’s massive torso were various prybars, clamps, spreaders, holdfasts, desiccant packs and other tools. Slung in a holster at one hip was his bulky watercutter.

Even atop his seat, Rapaille found himself staring at Klom’s chest rather than his face, until he raised his scale-rimmed eyes. “Yes, our big empty-headed man-ape from Chaulk. What do you want?”

“Are we allowed to go into the decommissioned areas?”

Rapaille let out a tweet of amazement. “The decommissioned areas? What are you interested in? Dust and bones? Faded signage and outmoded tech? Slavering senescent slop? That’s all you’ll find there!”

Klom blinked once, then said, “Are we allowed to go into the decommissioned areas?”

The Quetzal screeched in frustration, his wing stubs twitching beneath his embroidered shirt. “Go anyplace you want, you unreasoning curdled egg! But you’ll never earn more than base pay if you persist in this foolish strategy. And my own bonuses will fall accordingly!”

Klom said, “I will be going into the decommissioned areas then.” He sat down, occupying two seats.

Muttering, Rapaille signaled liftoff to the transport’s pilot—a diminutive Melungeon with one tendril wrapped around a joystick and five others free for the separate controls. The transport lost mass until it floated half a meter above the waves. Surging forward through a channel opened in the baffles, the craft headed toward the Vixen ship. The Great Sun and the Lesser Sun raised the temperature of the air to a comfortable, shirtsleeve level. By the time the Least Sun arose, rendering the muggy atmosphere tropical, the breakers would be taking their lunch deep within the hulk.

The crossing of the kilometer of open water by Klom’s craft and its mates resembled the engulfment of a school of minnows by a leviathan. The minor-city-sized disabled starcruiser—with the waterline halfway up its height, and its lower portions resting on the seabed—thrust out artificial peninsulas and lesser promontories. Once into its shadow and embrace, the transports assumed the insignificance of ticks on the hide of a Dominikono widestrider. Additionally, the ancient interstellar vessel seemed to be reradiating all the immeasurable chill it had accumulated over its millennia of high vacuum service.

It would take the gangs nearly a year to finish stripping the interior of the craft, and another six months to disassemble its hull. Of course, the whole process could have been accomplished in a fraction of that time by employing sufficient swarms of self-replicating majestatics. But such technologies—along with ensouled machines—were forbidden to anyone not at least a fourstrand. And the fourstrands and other galactic elites were both relatively small in number and disdainful of performing any such “labor,” even distanced by layers of autonomic supervisors. With the fecund and subservient twostrands so handy, it only made sense to keep them profitably occupied.

The Yards at Aspema not only saw ships come in, but also go out, as salable constituent pieces. Brokers arrived and departed continuously, both from offplanet and from other parts of Aspema, leaving with cargoes for a hundred thousand destinations. Workers in the warehouse and sales end of the Yards felt their positions to be superior to the gritty, effortful tasks of the breakers and sorters, and a rough caste system existed, further fragmented into various levels according to the perceived crudity of assignments.

Klom’s boat arrived at a sloping paw of the inorganic leviathan. Far, far above them, a different portion of the starliner formed a concave roof. A shoulder of the starliner constituted a distant wall running roughly parallel to the arm. A chaotic illumination came into this partial gallery as sunlight refracted from the bouncing sea.

The Melungeon shut down the lifting units, then secured the transport by a cable to a handy U-bar on the Vixen vessel. The breakers utilized the fractally porous surface of the starcraft’s skin as handholds and toeholds to climb up several gently sloping meters of wall, their tools racketing against each other. Once aboard this small leg of the starliner—broad enough to host a ballgame—they waited for Rapaille’s commands.

“Follow me, you wittolds! The nearest port is just a few minutes’ walk in this direction.”

The paw sloped upward, the roof sloped down, and the shoulder angled in, rendering the passage more tunnel-like the further the breakers progressed.

Klom marched at the head of the line, looking about with a kind of patient curiosity. He had taken apart a dozen ships so far in his career at the Yards, and he fully expected to take apart a few dozen more, before he got too old for the work. Each ship possessed its own personality. Klom assumed that by the time he was done breaking down this vessel, he would know good-sized portions of it as intimately as he knew his mother’s house in Chaulk. Paradoxically, the ship would no longer then exist to be known. Such conundrums did not bother Klom.

Faded Vixen script, each character tall as a man, ran across this segment of the deck. Klom turned to the breaker next to him, a blue-haired, ice-skinned fellow named Nyerephar, a mixed-breed Human and Pinemarten from Frostholm. Nyerephar had a reputation as an intellectual, given his predilection for offshift downloading into his reader of novels of interspecies romance, many of which originated with the Vixens.