Mallow (38 page)

'Excuse me?'

'You're bright enough, I mean. But really, you and the rest of the uniforms are attacking this problem in all the obvious ways.' Pamir grimaced.

Knowing the captain's temper, Quee Lee leaned forward and smiled as if everything depended on it. 'Are you sure you don't want a fresh drink?'

Pamir shook his head, then echoed the words, '"The obvious ways.'"

'It's about your missing captains. And that's not just a reasonable guess on my part. One of your Master's AIs leaked that news to its psychiatrist, who dribbled it to a lover, who mentioned it in public once
...
at least that's the way I heard it happened . . .'

Pamir waited.

'You've been busy since. I know that, too. You've been interviewing all your old contacts . . . for how long now . . . ?'

'Six weeks.'

'So how does my list compare? With the others, I mean.' 'It's thorough. It's reasonable. I'll find what I want in one of those places.'

'Well, I don't think so.'

Quee Lee pulled her hand away from her husband's, and with her short and smooth index finger, she touched the lowest, most isolated of the violet lights.

'What's this place?' she inquired.

Perri said, 'An alien habitat.'

'For the leech,' the captain added. 'It's been abandoned for a long while now'

'Did the Master search it?' asked Perri.

He nodded. Then he added, 'By proxy, and with some security people, too.'

'What I think,' Perri offered, 'is that you have to accept a difficult fact first. Are you listening to me?'

'Always.'

'You know absolutely nothing about this ship.' Suddenly it was as if Perri were angry. This perpetually charming man, who lubricated every social circumstance with a glib shallowness, leaned close enough that his liquored breath mingled with the night odors of the ancient garden. 'Absolutely nothing,' he repeated. 'The same as everyone else.'

'I know enough,' Pamir countered, meaning it.

Perri shook his head, shook his empty hands. 'The fuck you do! You don't know who built this ship, or when, or even where it happened!'

The captain wanted that drink sudde
nly, but he decided to sit quietl
y and say nothing, letting his posture and his glare do their worst.

'And worst of all,' said Perri, 'you don't even know why this machine was built. Do you? Without compelling evidence, you can't even pretend to have a workable theory. Just some half-broiled guesses that haven't been changed in a hundred millennia. All of this is someone's galaxy-hopping ship. You hope. Launched too late, or too soon. Although does anyone have any real evidence to say this is so?'

Pamir said, 'No.'

Perri leaned back and grinned like a man who knew that he had just won an important fight, his hands knitted together and stuck behind his head.

Quietl
y, the captain said, 'Marrow.'

'Excuse me?'

It was the first time that he had said the word since seeing the Master, and the only reason he used it now was to deflect the conversation.

'Do you know anyplace with that name?'

'Marrow?'

'That's what I said. Do you know it?'

Perri closed his eyes, considering the single word until finally, with a grudging conviction, he could admit/Nothing conies to mind. Why? Where did you hear about it?'

'Make a half-broiled guess,' Pamir advised.

The man had to laugh. At himself and his companion, and at everything else, too. 'Is that where the missing captains are?'

'If I only knew . . .'

Then Quee Lee said 'Marrow' in a different way, using an extinct dialect. Straightening her finger, she said, 'Long ago, before human beings were reengineered to live forever . . . back when we were simple and frail, marrow was in the middle of our bones. Not like today. Not laced through our muscles and livers, too.'

Both men turned and stared at her.

'You're too young to remember,' she offered, as if giving them an excuse.
Then she turned her finger, pointing down past the deepest purplish lights. 'Marrow sometimes meant the center of things. Their heart. Their deepest core.'

Then she glanced up, smiling now, her very round, very old-fashioned face lit up by the map's glow.

Again, Pamir thought that she was a beautiful woman.

'Look at the ship's core,' she advised.

Quietl
y and almost politely, the two men enjoyed a good long laugh at poor Quee Lee's expense.

Thirty-one

P
amir constructed a
list of promising sites, then made foot-and-eye searches of each, always in disguise, always taking the sort of time and obsessive care that comes naturally to an immortal working alone. Over the next few years, he uncovered an ocean of sharp rumor, slippery lies, and dreamy half-sightings. As far as he could determine, the only certainty was that every sentient organism had seen the missing captains at least once, and judging by the sightings, the captains were everywhere. Even Pamir was infected with the hysteria. Missing colleagues appeared without warning. Old lovers, usually. Washen, more than not. Without warning, he would see a tall human woman casually strolling down a busy avenue, her gait and color and the bun of her gray and brown hair recognizable from half a kilometer away. Pamir would break into a sprint, and as he drew closer, a dead run. But by the time he reached Washen, she had turned into another handsome woman, flustered and perhaps a little flattered to have a strange man tugging on her arm. On a different occasion, he spotted Washen sitting cross-legged in the middle of an otherwise empty chamber, nude and elegantly beautiful. But in the time it took Pamir to approach, she turned into a statue twenty meters tall, and just when he convinced himself that this was his first genuine clue, her statue became nothing but a suggestive pile of badly lit rubble. Then it was a year later, and Washen was kneeling on a ledge among the purple epiphytes growing above the grave bar where Pamir had made camp. Glancing up, he saw her familiar face smiling at him, watching as he baked a fresh-killed chinook salmon. Then the wind gusted, and he heard Washen's voice asking, 'Enough for two?' But by then Pamir knew his mind, and he didn't allow himself excitement. A gust of wind lifted, and Washen's face turned to a knot of dead leaves. And Pamir shook his head, smiled at his own foolishness, then set the fish closer to the sputtering fire.

Passengers and the crew learned about his hunt, and for every conceivable reason, they led him astray.

Some wanted money for their lies.

Others begged for attention, for praise and love and fame.

While a few were so genuinely eager to please, they didn't know they were lying, inflating half-memories with wishful thoughts, building coherent epics that could withstand every battery of physiological testing.

The missing captains were living with radical luddites somewhere in the Bottoms.

They had formed their own luddite community hidden inside an unmapped chamber somewhere beneath the Gossamer Sea.

They had been abducted by the Kajjan-Quasans — a tiny part-organic, part-silicon species who kept them as slaves and rode them like livestock.

A gel flow in the Magna district had entombed them.

Or there was the common, almost plausible story of bitter, vengeful aliens. Phoenixes were the preferred villains, though there were many worthy candidates. Whoever they were, they had returned to the ship in secret, and in retribution for the Master's ancient crimes, they murdered her best captains.

One earnest human claimed that an unknown alien had carved away the captains' high mental functions, then left the brain-damaged survivors living inside a local sewage-treatment plant. Unlikely as it sounded, the witness remembered seeing a woman identical to Washen. 'I talked to her,' he swore. 'Poor lady. Dumb as can be now. Poor lady'

With a worried hopefulness, Pamir slipped inside the vast chamber. The original recycling machinery was now augmented with a forest of tailored fungi — a scene that couldn't help but remind the captain of his mother's long
ago home. Mushrooms towered overhead, feasting on the waste of a thousand species. A village of low huts and smoky fires was exactly where he expected to find it — a human colony not on any map, official or otherwise. Slowly and carefully, he approached the nearest hut, and after a good deep breath, he stepped out and smiled at the woman standing in the open doorway.

He recognized the face. Without doubt, she resembled a one-time engineer who had helped build the Belters' starship, then later joined the captains' ranks.

'Aasleen?' he asked, stopping at a throw's distance.

The face was mostly unchanged, yes: a rich lustrous black over smooth, elegant features, with a radiant yellowy-white smile. Her smile was very much the same, too. The longer Pamir stared at the apparition, the more certain he felt.

She said,'Hello,' quietly, almost too quietly to be heard.

'I'm Pamir,' he blurted. 'Remember me, Aasleen?'

'Always,' she replied, and the smile brightened.

Her voice was too soft and too slow. It wasn't the right voice, yet what if some creature had mutilated her in some elaborate fashion . . . ? With each word, the voice grew a little closer to what he remembered, to what he expected. Pamir found himself enjoying this illusion, stepping closer and watching as the face continued to change, evolving until it was very much the ex-lover's face.

He asked, 'What are you thinking, Aasleen?'

Her mouth opened, but no sound emerged.

'Do you know how you got here?' He stepped even closer, smiling as he repeated the question. 'Do you know how?'

'I do,' she lied. 'Yes.'

'Tell me.'

'By accident,' she replied. 'That's what it had to be.'

Pamir reached for her face, and when she tried to back away, he said, 'No. Let me.' Then his wide hand passed through a projection of light and ionized dust. The fungus hut and the fires were equally unreal.
This wasn't a community, it was an entertainment. Someone had thrown away their empathic AI, probably in the morning shit, and somehow it had survived the fall and the sterilization procedures, eventually landing in the goo beneath his feet.

Pamir left the entertainment where he found it, unmapped.

He abandoned the search zone, traveling halfway around the ship to a place that would mean plenty to Washen and Aasleen. He climbed inside the antimatter tank where the Phoenixes once lived. As he expected, the facility was empty. Utterly clean and empty. Not even one of
Washen's ghosts was waiting for him. Standing at the bottom, on a floor of slick, ageless hyperfiber, Pamir found himself staring up at the vastness, the tank making him feel tiny even as a knowing part of him warned that this was nothing, that the ship dwarfed this little cylinder, and the universe dwarfed the ship, and all these grand designs and silver wonders were nothing set against the endless reaches through which everything soared.

Eighteen years and three weeks had been invested in a careful, thorough search for the captains, and nothing had come of it.

Nothing.

Out of simple habit, Pamir referred to his original list of searchable sites, each site carefully deleted over the years, tired eyes tracking down to that final odd word:

'leech.'

This would be the last place he ever looked. Years of labor and hope had been wasted, nothing learned but that nothing wanted to be learned. Making the long fall to the alien habitat, Pamir decided that Washen and Aasleen, and Miocene, weren't waiting around any proverbial curve. He could suddenly believe those theories that the Master held close to her heart. Another species had hired away her best captains, or more likely, kidnapped them. Either way, they were off the ship, and lost. And Washen's mysterious reappearance was someone's peculiar joke, and the Master was cunning-wise not to let herself be distracted by a sick, misguided humor.

The leech would be a suitable end, he decided.

As he stepped out of the
hub, out into that planar gray
ness, Pamir nearly dismissed the site out of hand. Washen would never remain here. Not for a year, much less for several millennia. Already feeling his mind eroding, his will and heart deflating with every
little
breath, Pamir was quite sure that no other captain would willingly live inside this two-dimensional realm.

Two steps, and he wanted to run away.

Halting, Pamir took a deep breath, then made certain that the hub's lone doorway was locked open. Then he knelt
and opened a sack of tiny scuttl
e-bugs and dog-noses and peregrine-eyes.

Set loose, the sensors fanned out along two dimensions.

With access to certain secure files, Pamir asked for background on the leech. What was given him was sketchy, unyielding. The exophobes had lived in this intentionally bland habitat for six hundred years, then the entire species had disembarked, their vessel carrying them off into a molecular dust cloud that had long since been left behind.