Mallow (37 page)

In an instant, it was just the two of them, and a thousand hidden AIs, and a multitude of simple instinct machines.

The Master's quarters were smaller than most. Even Pamir's apartment seemed spacious by comparison. She required only half a hectare divided into a multitude of little rooms, each decorated with the blandest of living rugs and wall hangings of no artistic worth and potted jungles composed of standard terran species and the jungle-colored furnishings intended for nothing but the uninspired comfort of her visitors.

The Master dominated every room, which was the way she wanted it. She loomed over Pamir now, and from all the possible expressions to show him, she decided on a wide warm smile ending just short of flirtatious.

The smile took him by surprise.

Then a warm voice said, 'Pamir,' with fondness.

But he hid his surprise, giving the customary bow and saying, 'Madam,' while staring at her long, long feet, bare and fleshy-gold, and the snowy marble floor in which those same feet had worn soft ruts over the course of their voyage.

'How may I help you?' he inquired. Then again, 'Madam.'

'I've studied your account of events,' she told him. 'Excellent, thorough work. As usual. I'm sure you left nothing out.'

'Nothing.' He looked at her uniform, then at the reflection of his own puzzled face. 'Have you found either of them, madam?'

'No.'

Would she tell him if she had?

'No,' she repeated, 'and I'm beginning to believe that there's nobody to find. At least not among my missing captains.'

He blinked, considering those words.

'So it wasn't Washen who spoke to us . . .'

'It was, I suppose, someone's idea of a wicked joke.' She wasn't smiling at Pamir so much as she was smiling at that simple notion. It was a reassuring possibility, and in its contrived fashion, almost rational. 'Holoprojections. Synthetic personalities. We've traced the source to a certain waystation that was destroyed moments later. Obviously in order to give this fiction even greater credibility.'

Pamir waited for a moment, then said, 'You're wrong. Madam.'

She watched him, waiting.

'I saw Washen,' he assured. 'I recognized her, but she had definitely changed. The smokey-colored skin, and that crude uniform of hers—'

'I remember how about both of them looked. Yes, thank you.'

'Besides,' he continued,'why would any person, or alien, or whoever—'

'Fake her and Miocene's reappearance?'

The Master was playing one of her games. What she believed was secondary to what she wanted from Pamir, and her wishes would be revealed only at her convenience. Or perhaps, never.

'An enemy could have managed this trick,' she offered, nodding with a sudden surety. 'Someone who's eager to make myself and my great office look like utter fools.'

Pamir said nothing.

'Authentic or not,' the Master continued, 'these ghosts contacted only the two of us. I can see why I would be singled out. And you, of course. You've always claimed to have seen Washen
after
her disappearance. Haven't you?'

He said, 'Yes.'

Nothing else.

'That shit-world. Marrow,' the Master quoted. Pamir waited.

'Does that word have any significance to you?'

'Where blood is born. And that's all it means to me.'

She gestured at a bank of AI
s. 'They've listed every known world with that name or some permutation. In alien tongues, typically. But none of our suspects are near us. Not now, and rarely in the past.'

'It's an odd detail,' Pamir observed. 'If you're making a joke, that is.'

Now the Master decided to remain quiet; it was her turn to wait.

Pamir knew what she wanted. 'I don't know anything, madam. Seeing Washen and Miocene
...
it was a complete and total shock . . .'

'I believe you,' she replied, without conviction.

Then with a hard glare, she asked,
'What do you believe? Based on your total ignorance, naturally'

With his heart pounding and an invisible hand to his throat, Pamir told her, 'They were genuine, these ghosts were. And I think they're still on the ship. Washen. Submaster Miocene. And presumably the other missing captains, too.'

'Each is free to his opinion.'

He bristled, secretl
y.

'Twice,' she said. 'Once, and again. Twice.' 'Pardon me, madam?'

'I have taken my chances with you. Do you remember, Pamir?' The smile was wide and malevolent. 'I nearly forgot the first time. But you remember it, don't you? In the beginning, when the engineers uncovered your ruined carcass
...
they wanted to leave you in that state until you could be delivered to an appropriate prison facility . . .'

'Yes, madam.'

'But I saved you.' She said it with a mixture of bitterness and sublime pleasure. 'I decided that a soul who wanted to be with us that badly had to be valuable, regardless of his talents. Which was why I ordered you reborn. And when your fellow engineers refused to accept you, wasn't I the wise one who invited you to become a captain . . . ?'

Not precisely. Joining the captains' ranks was his idea and his initiative. But he knew better than to debate the point, nodding without kowtowing, saying to her big bare feet, 'I have tried to serve you and the ship.'

'With a lapse or two thrown in.'

'One lapse,' he replied, refusing to fal
l into simple traps. 'You honestl
y know nothing about these prank calls. Do you?'

'Or even if they are pranks, no. I don't, Madam.' 'Which puts us where, Pamir? I want to hear this from you.'

With a quiet, firm voice, he told the Master, 'If you wish. If I might. I could hunt the ship for Washen. For all those missing captains. In an official capacity, or otherwise.'

Eyes lifted. 'You'd be willing to do that?'

'Gladly,' he said, meaning it.

'I suppose you're qualified,' she remarked. Then taking delight in old wounds, she pointed out, 'You did manage to evade my security teams for a long, long while. And appare
ntly
without much effort.'

He could do nothing but glance at her face, holding tight to his breath.

'And since you mentioned it,' she continued, 'I could use a little more reassurance. About your loyalty, if nothing else.' She paused for a half-moment, then added, 'If you find Washen, perhaps I can stop watching every step you take. Understood?'

It was easy to forget why he had rejoined the captains' ranks.

Showing the Master a thin, cool smile, Pamir said, 'Madam.'

Then he bowed slightly, pointing out, 'If I find these lost captains, and they're alive, then you'll be too busy worrying about them to bother with me . . .

'Madam . . . !'

Thirty

P
amir
sat
in
the darkened garden room, on the fragrant stump of a dusk pinkwood. The garden was at the heart of a luxury apartment set inside one of the oldest and finest of the human districts. A peculiar couple shared its spacious rooms and hallways — a man and woman married back in the early millennia of the voyage - and throughout Pamir's visit, the lovers would hold hands and whisper into each other's ears, causing their gruff visitor to suffer the sour beginnings of envy.

Quee Lee was a wealthy and extraordinarily ancient woman. Born on the Earth, she had inherited her fortune from a Chinese grandfather who made his money through shipping and legal drugs. On other occasions, she would talk about their home world with both fondness and horror. She was nearly as old as Pamir's mother would be today, though he never mentioned that crazy woman. Quee Lee was old enough to remember when spaceflight was anything but routine and people counted themselves fortunate, or cursed, to live for a single century. Then came the day when the first alien broadcasts fell from the sky, washing away
the Earth's isolation. By the t
ime she was middle-aged, everything had changed. Twenty technologically adept species were known, and their knowledge, coupled with a home-brewed intellectual explosion, brought things like star drives and eternal generics, and the probes that would leave the Milky Way, and eventually, this great and ancient and undeniably wondrous ship in which they rode in luxurious splendor.

Her young husband was born on the ship. Perri had been a Remora, one of those strange souls who lived on the ship's hull. But he decided to leave that bizarre culture, preferring the greater strangeness of the ship's interior. When Pamir was a captain on the rise, the two men were enemies. But after Pamir had abandoned his post, taking on new faces and identities, Perri had slowly evolved into an ally and an occasional friend.

Only certain specialist AIs knew the ship better than Perri.

A masculine face, more pretty than handsome, was studying a series of holomaps.The occasional glowbat was
gently
waved out of the way, then the same hand adjusted the maps' controls, changing the perspective, or the district being examined, or the scale of everything that he was examining with a perfect concentration.

'Another drink?' asked Quee Lee.

Pamir looked at his empty glass. 'Thank you. No.'

She was a beautiful woman in any light. An ageless face was wrapped around ancient, warm eyes. She had a fondness for one-color sarongs and ornate, exceedingly alien jewelry. Clinging to one of her husband's hands, she looked at the map, and with a
gentle
sigh, she confessed, 'I always forget.'

'How big the ship is,' said Perri, completing her thought.

'It is,' she echoed, looking up at their guest.
'It's wonderfully huge.'

Perri marked a likely cavern, then moved to the next district. He didn't volunteer why that place was worth a look. Instead, he asked the obvious question.

'Who are you hunting?'

Then with a smile that couldn't have been more charming, he gave the answer. 'It's those missing captains, I bet. I bet.'

Familiarity was a powerful tool.

Pamir didn't need to reply. He simply held his mouth closed and gave his head a slight, somewhat suggestive tilt.

Reading his posture, Perri nodded and grinned with a private satisfaction. Then again, he marked a location. 'There's a
little
river running through a practically bottomless canyon. Honestly, there might be a million square kilometers down there. All of it vertical. Black basalt and epiphyte forests. I know two settlements. Neither human. Between them, there's room for a few hundred thousand people. If they were careful, and a little lucky, nobody would ever know they were there.'

Quee Lee regarded her husband with fond eyes.

'That canyon was searched last month,' Pamir replied. 'By security robots, and thoroughly'

'Captains would know tricks,' said Perri. 'Shit, you've used those same tricks. It would be easy enough to make the machines see nothing but rock and clingweed.'

'You think I should look there?'

'Maybe.'

In other words: 'I don't see why they would be there.' Pamir said nothing.

Again, the map changed districts. Suddenly Perri was staring at a deeply buried city, nothing about its selection random. A wealth of colors and complicated shapes showed the presence of alien species. With a knowing touch, he moved past the catacombs and main arteries, following an obscure capillary to a waystation that appeared as a strong golden light, open for operation, welcoming all visitors.

Perri marked the waystation, then giggled.

'What's funny?'

He smiled at the captain, saying, 'This. What I know is what the gossip says.That someone destroyed this nowhere place. It was a random, meaningless act. Isn't that the official verdict? Yet within minutes, the Master ordered a thorough sweep of a hundred districts centered on that single station.'

Again, Pamir used silence. And with it, a hard look.

Perri doctored the map's scale, pulling back and back. Suddenly they were looking at nearly a tenth of one percent of the ship - a vast region, complicated and oftentimes empty, with a hundred thousand kilometers of major passageways blurring into a geometric puzzle too irregular to appear planned, much less attractive, and to any mind large enough to appreciate the distances, this was obviously a puzzle without any worthwhile solution.

Not for the first time, Pamir felt utterly helpless.

'This is how big the sweeps got,' said Perri. 'And people are still talking about them. A couple species living down here have strong feelings about authoritative presences. One hates them, while the other loves them.
Those sweeps made them feel important, and they're still singing about them today'

'I can imagine.'

Inside that vast region, Perri's six dozen markers appeared as purple dots of light. With his free hand, he gestured, remarking, 'This is a waste. All of it.'