Mallow (4 page)

The rest of the Remoras body was hidden inside his lifesuit.

What it looked like was a mystery without solution. Remoras never removed their suits, even when they were alone with each other.

Yet Orleans was human. By law, he was a treasured member of the crew, and in keeping with his station, this human male was entrusted with jobs that demanded skill and a self-sacrificing duty.

Again, with an intentional gravity, Miocene told her subordinate, 'There are no quotas.'

'My fault,' he replied. 'Entirely, and always.'

The great mouth seemed to smile. Or was it a toothy grimace?

'And,' the Submaster continued, 'there were future considerations at stake. A brief danger now is better than a prolonged distant one. Wouldn't you agree?'

The hairs of each eye pulled closer together, as if squinting. Then the deep voice said,
'No, frankly. I don't agree.'

She said nothing. Waiting.

'What would be best,' Orleans informed her, 'would be for us to get the flick out of this spiral arm, and away from every damned obstacle. That's what would be best, sir. If you don't mind my saying.'

She didn't mind, no. By definition, an inconsequential sound can easily be ignored.

But this Remora was pressing her more than tradition allowed, and more than her nature could permit. She gazed across the bland landscape of hyperfiber, the very distant horizon perfectly flat, and the sky filled with swirling purples and magentas, the occasional burst of laser light visible as it passed through the ship's shields. Then with a quiet, calculating rage,
she told the Remora what he already knew.

'It's your choice to live up here,' she said.

She said, 'It's your calling and your culture. You're Remoran by choice, as I recall, and if you don't want responsibility for your own decisions, perhaps I should take possession of your life for you. Is that what you want, Orleans?'

The hairy eyes pulled into hard little tufts. A dark voice asked, 'What if I let you, madam? What would you do to
me?'

'Take you below, then cut you out of your lifesuit. To begin with. Rehabilitate your body and your mangled genetics until you could pass for human. And then, to make you especially miserable, I would turn you into a captain. I'd give you my uniform and some real authority, plus my massive responsibilities. Including these occasional tours of the hull.'

The gruesome face was furious.

An indignant voice assured her, 'It's true what they say. You've got the ugliest soul of any of
them!

Quietl
y and furiously, Miocene said, 'Enough.'

She informed Orleans, 'This tour is finished. Take me back to Port Erinidi. And in a straight line this time. If I see one more memorial, I promise, I'll carve you out of that suit myself. Here, and now.'

I
n an accidental
fashion, the Remoras were Miocenes creation.

Ages ago, as the Great Ship reached the dusty edge of the Milky Way, there was a critical need to repair the aged hull and protect it from future impacts.The work swamped the available machinery — shipborn and human-built. It was Miocene who suggested sending the human crew out into the hull. The dangers were obvious, and fickle. After billions of years of neglect, the electromagnetic shields and laser arrays were in shambles; repair teams could expect no protection from impacts and precious little warning. But Miocene created a system where no one was asked to take larger risks than anyone else. Gifted engineers and the highest captains served their mandatory time, dying with a laudable regularity. Her hope was to patch the deepest craters with a single warlike
push
,
then the surviving engineers would automate every system, making it unnecessary for people ever to walk the hull again.

But human nature subverted her meticulous plans.

A low-ranking crew member would earn negative marks. They might be minor violations of dress, or moments of clear insubordination. Either way, those offenders could clean up their files by serving extra time on the hull. Miocene looked on it as an absolution, and she gladly sent a few souls 'upstairs* But a few captains confused the duty for a punishment, and
over the course of a few centu
ries, they banished thousands of subordinates, sometimes for nothing worse than a surly word heard in passing.

There was a woman, a strange soul named Wune, who went up onto the hull and remained there. Not only did she accept her duties, she embraced them. She declared that she was living a morally pure life, full of contemplation and essential work. With a prophets manipulative talents, she found converts to her newborn faith, and her converts became a small, unified population of philosophers who refused to leave the hull.

'Remora' began as an insult used by the captains. But the insult was stolen by the unexpected culture, becoming their own proud name.

A Remora never left his lifesuit. From conception until his eventual death, he was a wor
ld onto himself, elaborate recycl
e systems giving him water and food and fresh oxygen, his suit belonging to his body, his tough genetics constantly battered by the endless flux of radiations. Mutations were common on the hull, and cherished.
What's more, a true Re
mora learned to direct his mutations, rapidly evolving new kinds of eyes and novel organs and mouths of every nightmarish shape.

Wune died early, and she died heroically.

But the prophet
left behind thousands of belie
vers. They invented ways to make children, and eventually they numbered in the millions, building their own cities and artforms and passions and, Miocene presumed, their own odd dreams. In some ways, she had to admire their culture, if not the individual believers. But as she watched Orleans piloting the skimmer, she wondered — not for the first time — if these people were too obstinate for the ship s good, and how she could tame them with a minimum of force and controversy.

That's what Miocene was thinking when the coded message arrived.

They were still a thousand kilometers from Port Erinidi, and the message had to be a test. Black level; Alpha protocols? Of course it was a test!

Yet she followed the ancient protocols. Without a word, she left Orleans, walking to the back of the cabin and closing the lavatory door, scanning the walls and ceiling, the floor and fixtures, making sure that not so much as a molecule-ear was present.

Through a nexus-link buried in her mind, Miocene downloaded the brief message, and within her mind's eye, she translated it. No emotion showed on her face. She wouldn't let any leak out. But her hands, more h
onest by a long ways, were wrestl
ing in her long lap — two perfectly matched opponents, neither capable of winning their contest.

The
R
EMORA
delivered
her to the port.

Sensing the importance of the moment, Miocene tried to leave Orleans with a few healing words. 'I'm sorry,' she lied. Then she placed a hand on the gray lifesuit, its psuedoneurons delivering the feel of her warm palm to his own odd flesh.Then quietly and firmly,
she added.'You made valid points.The next time I sit at the Master's table, I'll do more than mention today's conversation. That's a promise.'

'Is that what it's called?' said the blue tongues and rubbery mouth. 'A promise?' The obnoxious shit.

Yet Miocene offered him a little stiff-backed bow, in feigned respect, then calmly slipped off
into the port's useful chaos.

Passengers were roiling into a tall capsule-car.
They were an alien species, each larger than a good-sized room, and judging by their wheeled, self-contained lifesuits, they were a low-gravity species. She nearly asked her nexuses about the species. But she thought better of it, lowering her gaze and moving at a crisp pace, appearing distracted as she slipped between two of them, barely hearing voices that sounded like much water pushed through a narrow pipe.

'A Submaster,' said her implanted translator.

'Look, see!'

'Smart as can be, that one!'

'Powerful!'

'Look, see!'

Miocene's private cap-car waited nearby. She passed it without a glance, stepping into one of the public cars that had brought the aliens up to Port Erinidi. It was a vast machine, empty and perfect. She gave it a destination and rented its loyalties with anonymous credits. Once she was moving, Miocene removed her cap and her uniform, habit making her lay them out on top of a padded bench. She couldn't help but stare at the uniform, examining her reflection, her face and long neck borrowing the folds and dents of that mirrored fabric.

'Look, see,' she whispered.

She accessed command accounts set up by and known only to her. The compliant cap-car found itself with a seri
es of new destinations and odd littl
e jobs. Waiting at one location was a small wardrobe of nondescript clothes.

Miocene left the clothes untouched for now. During the next hour and over the course of several thousand kilometers, she picked up a pair of sealed packages. The first package contained a small fortune in anonymous credits, while the other opened itself, revealing a scorpionlike robot free of manufacturer's codes or any official ID.

The robot leaped at the single passenger.

With a patient concern, the car asked, 'Is something wrong, madam? Do you need help?'

'No, no,' Miocene replied, trying to lie still on a long bench.

The scorpions tail reached into her mouth, then shoved hard enough to split modern bone. Her naked body straightened, in shock. For an instant, in little ways, the Submaster died. Then her disaster genes woke, fixing the damage with a crisp efficiency. Bone and various neurological linkups were repaired. But the nexuses that had been buried inside Miocene, part of her for more than a hundred millennia, had been yanked free by the titanium hooks of that narrowly designed robot.

The robot ate the nexuses, digesting them in a plasma furnace.

It did the same with the Sub master's elaborate uniform.

Then the furnace turned itself inside out, and with a flash of purple-white light, what was metal turned to a cooling puddle and a persistent stink.

A tiny amount of spilled blood needed to be burned away. Once that chore was finished, Miocene dressed in a simple brown gown that could have belonged to any human tourist, and from the attached satchel, she pulled out bits of false flesh that quivered between her cool fingers, begging for the opportunity to change the appearance of her important face.

Three more times, the car stopped for its odd passenger.

It stopped inside a major arterial station, then at the center of a cavern filled with bowing yellowish trees and a perpetual wind. And final
ly, it eased into a quiet neigh
borhood of well-to-do apartments,
the
resident humans and aliens among the wealthiest entities in the galaxy, each owning at least a cubic kilometer of the great ship.

Where the passenger disembarked, the car didn't remember, much less care.

After that, it hurried toward its initial destination. But those coordinates had always been an impossibility, and the AI pilot was too impaired to realize that this was a foolhardy task. Empty and insane, it streaked down the longest, largest arterials, hard vacuums allowing enormous speeds. Circumnavigating the ship many rimes in the next days, the car stopped only when a security team crippled it with their weapons, then burst on board, ready for anything but the emptiness and an utter lack of clues.

A
week later,
eating breakfast and watching passersby, Miocene asked herself why now, at this exact moment, was it so important for her to vanish? What did the Master intend?

The basic plan was ancient and rigorously sensible. After the wars with the Phoenixes, the Master had ordered her captains to prepare routes into anonymity. If the ship was ever invaded, their enemies would naturally want to capture its captains, and probably kill them. But if each captain kept a permanent escape route, and if no one else knew the route - including the Master - then perhaps the brightest blood in the ship would remain free long enough to organize, then take back the ship in their own counter-invasion.

'A desperate precaution,' the Master had dubbed this plan.

Later, as life on board the ship turned routine, the emergency routes were kept for other robust reasons.

As a form of testing, for instance.

Young, inexperienced captains were sent a coded message from the Master's office. Were they loyal enough to obey the difficult order? Did they know the ship well enough to vanish for
months or years? And most impor
ta
ntly
, once they vanished, did they continue to act in responsible, captainly ways?

Simple bureaucratic inertia was another factor. Once established, escape routes were easily maintained. Miocene invested a few minutes each year to keep hers open, and she was probably much more thorough than most of her subordinates.

And the final reason was the unforeseen.