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Their wings were powered by thumb-sized reactors and guided both by the wearer’s muscles, and more importantly, by elaborate sensors and embedded reflexes. For the next ten days, humantime, they were to live among the Phoenixes as observers and as delegates. Since no portion of the facility lay out of surveillance range, there wasn’t any overt danger. Regardless how thick the intervening clouds or how loud the thunder, the children couldn’t do anything that wasn’t observed, and recorded, every one of their well-intended words spoken to a larger, infinitely suspicious audience.

  Perhaps that’s why Snowfeather took Manly as her lover.

  It was a provocative and defiant and absolutely public act, and she could only hope that news of it slinked its way to her parents.

  Or set aside the cynicism. Maybe it was something like love, or at least lust. Maybe it was stirred by the alien himself, and the gorgeous dreamy-strange scenery, and the sheer sensual joy that came with those powerful wings and the feel of wind slipping across your naked flesh.

  Or deny love, leaving curiosity as the root cause.

  Or put aside curiosity, and call it a deeply political act brought on by courage, or idealism, or the simplest, most wicked forms of naivety.

  Whatever the reason, she seduced Manly.

  On the summit of an airborne jungle, with her long back pressed against the warm and slick skin of a vegetable bladder, Snowfeather invited the alien’s affections. Demanded them, even. He was quick to finish and quick to begin again, and he was tireless, his powerful, furnacelike body held over her with an impossible grace. Yet their geometries didn’t mesh. In the end, she was the one who begged, “Enough. Stop. Let me rest, all right…?”

  Her body was damaged, and not just a little bit damaged.

  Curious but plainly untroubled, her lover watched the blood flow from between her exhausted legs, crimson at first but turning black in the hyperoxygenated air. Then her blood clotted, and the ripped flesh began to heal. Without scars and with minimal pain, what would have been a mortal wound in an earlier age had simply vanished. Had never been.

  Manly grinned in the Phoenix way, saying nothing.

  Snowfeather wanted words. “How old are you?” she blurted. And when there wasn’t an answer, she asked it again. Louder this time. “How old?”

  He answered, using the Phoenix calendar.

  Manly was a little more than twenty standards old. Which was middle-aged. Late middle-aged, in fact.

  She grimaced, then told her lover, “I can help you.”

  He sang a reply, and his translator asked, “In what fashion, help?”

  “Medically. I can have your DNA replaced with better genetics. Your lipid membranes supplanted with more durable kinds. And so on.” She surprised herself more than him, telling him, “The techniques are complicated, but proven. I have friends whose doctor-parents would adore the chance to reconfigure your flesh.”

  The squawk meant, “No.”

  She recognized that defiant sound before the translator said, “No,” with a cold, abrasive tone.

  Then he roared, “Never,” as those lovely golden feathers stood on end, making his face and great body appear even larger. “I do not believe in your magic.”

  “It’s not magic,” she countered, “and most species use it.”

  “Most species are weak,” was his instant reply.

  She knew she should let the topic drop. But with a mixture of compassion and pity, plus a heavy dose of hopeful defiance, she warned her lover, “Changes aren’t coming soon. Unless you can extend your life, you’ll never be anywhere but here, inside your little prison.”

  Silence.

  “You’ll never fly on another world, much less your home world.”

  There was a musical whine, feathers swirling in a Phoenix shrug.

  “One home is enough for a true soul,” the translator reported. “Even if that home is a tiny cage.”

  Another whine.

  Manly told her, “Only the weak and the soulless need to live for aeons.”

  Snowfeather didn’t bristle, or complain. Her voice was steady and grave, remarking, “By that logic, I’m weak.”

  “And soulless,” he agreed. “And doomed.”

  “You could try to save me, couldn’t you?”

  The alien face was puzzled, if anything. The beak came close, the girl smelling the windlike breath, and for the first time, for a terrible instant, Washen was disgusted by that rich, meat-fed stink.

  “Am I not worth saving?” she pressed.

  The green eyes closed, supplying the answer.

  She shook her head, human-fashion. Then she sat up and swirled her wings, her thick, aching voice asking, “Don’t you love me?”

  A majestic song roared out of him.

  The box fixed on his muscled chest efficiently reduced all that majesty and passion to simple words.

  “The Great Nothingness conspired to make me,” he informed her. “He intended me to live for a day. As He intends for each of us. I am a selfish, loud, arrogant, manly man, yes. But if I stay alive for two days, I am stealing another’s life. Someone meant to be born but left without room. If I live for three days, I steal two lives. And if I lived as long as you wish … for a million days … how many nations would remain unborn…?”

  There was more to the speech, but she heard none of it.

  She wasn’t Snowfeather anymore; she was a young human again. Finding herself standing, she interrupted the translator’s blather with a raucous laugh. Then scorn took hold, making her cry out, telling the Supreme-example-of-manhood, “You know what you are? You’re a stupid, self-absorbed turkey!”

  His box hesitated, fighting for a translation.

  Before it could speak, and without a backward glance, Washen leaped off the bladder, spreading the mechanical wings and plunging fast, her chest perilously close to the forest’s blue-black face before a rising wind claimed her, helping carry her to the observation deck.

  On her feet again, Washen unstrapped the almost-new wings and shoved them over the railing. Then she quietly returned home. That day, or sometime during those next few months, she approached her parents, asking what they would think of her if she applied to the captains’ academy.

  “That would be wonderful,” her father purred.

  “Whatever you want,” said her mother, her feelings coming with a relieved smile.

  No one mentioned the Phoenixes. What her parents knew, Washen never learned. But after her acceptance to the academy, and under the influence of a few celebratory drinks, Father gave her a squidlike hug, and with wisdom and a drunk’s easy conviction, he told her, “There are different ways to fly, darling.

  “Different wings.

  “And I think … I know … you’re choosing the very best kind…!”

  * * *

  WASHEN HAD ALWAYS lived in the same apartment nestled deep inside one of the popular captains’ districts. But that wasn’t to say that her home hadn’t changed during this great march of a life. Furniture. Artwork. Cultivated plants, and domesticated animals. With several hectares of climate-controlled, earth-gravity terrain to play with, and the resources of the ship at her full disposal, the danger was that she would make too many changes, inspiration ruling, never allowing herself enough time to appreciate each of her accomplishments.

  While returning home from Port Beta, Washen composed her daily report, then studied the next passengers scheduled to board the ship: a race of machines, superchilled and tiny, eager to build a new nation inside a volume smaller than most drawers.

  Whenever she grew bored, Washen found herself dreaming up new ways to redecorate the rooms and gardens inside her home.

  She would do the work soon, she told herself.

  In a year, or ten.

  The cap-car delivered her to her private door. Stepping out of the car, she decided that things had gone well today. A thousand centuries of steady practice had made her an expert in alien psychologies and the theatre that went into handling them, and like any good
captain, Washen allowed herself to feel pride, knowing that what she did she did better than almost anyone else on board.

  If there was anyone better, of course.

  She wasn’t consciously thinking about her long-dead lover, or the Phoenixes, or that fateful day that helped make her into a captain. But everything that she was now had been born then. The young Washen had no genuine feel for any alien species, much less for Manly. She never suspected what the Phoenixes were planning. Events had come as a complete surprise, and a revelation, and it was only luck and Washen’s popularity that kept her from being tainted by the whole ugly business.

  Several youngsters besides Washen had taken lovers. Or the Phoenixes had allowed themselves to be taken. Either way, emotional bonds were built on top of political hopes, and slowly, over the course of the next years, the humans helped their lovers in ways that were at first questionable, then illegal, and finally, treasonous.

  Along a thousand conduits, forbidden machines entered the prison.

  Under the watchful gaze of AI paranoids and suspicious captains, weapons were designed and built, then stored inside the floating bladders—invisible because the captains’ sensors were sabotaged by the sympathizers.

  When it came, the rebellion gave no warning. Five captains were murdered, along with nine hundred–plus mates and engineers and young humans, including many of Washen’s one-time friends. Their bodies and bioceramic brains were obliterated by laser light, not a memory left to save. The Great Nothingness had reclaimed a few of its weakest children—an accomplishment that must have made Manly intensely proud—and for a moment in time, the ship itself seemed to be in peril.

  Then the Master Captain took charge of the fight, and within minutes, the rebellion was finished. The war was won. Unrepentent prisoners were forced back into their chamber, and its ancient machinery was awakened for the first time in at least five billion years. The temperature inside the great cylinder dropped. Frost turned to hard ice, and numbed by the cold, the Phoenixes descended to the prison floor, huddling together for heat, cursing the Master with their beautiful songs, then with their next labored breath, their flesh turned into a rigid glassy solid, undead, and with an accidental vengeance, they were left glancingly immortal.

  Millennia later, as the Great Ship passed near Phoenix space, those frozen warriors were loaded into a taxi like cargo, then delivered home.

  Washen herself had overseen the transfer of the bodies. It wasn’t an assignment that she had requested, but the Master, who surely possessed a record of the young woman’s indiscretions, thought it would be a telling moment.

  Maybe it had been.

  The memory came like a rebellion. Stepping through her apartment door, she suddenly remembered that long-ago chore, and in particular, the look of a certain male Phoenix caught in mid-breath, his gills pulled wide and the blackness of the blood still apparent after thousands of years of dreamless sleep. Still lovely, Manly was. All of them were lovely. And just once, for an instant, Washen had touched the frozen feathers and the defiant beak with the sensitive glove of her lifesuit.

  Washen tried to remember what she was thinking as she touched her lost love. There had to be some leftover sadness and an older person’s acceptance of things that would never change, and there had to be a captain’s genuine relief that she had survived the assault. The ship was a machine and a mystery, and it was filled with living souls who looked on her to keep them safe … And at that instant, stepping into the familiar back hallway of her apartment, her thoughts were interrupted by the apartment’s voice.

  “Message,” she heard.

  The entranceway was footworn silk-marble, its walls currently wearing tapestries woven by a communal intelligence of antlike organisms. Before Washen could take a second step, she heard, “A priority message. Coded. And urgent.”

  She blinked, her attentions shifting.

  “Black level,” she heard. “Alpha protocols.”

  This was a drill. Those protocols were intended only for the worst disasters and the gravest secrets. Washen nodded, engaging one of her internal nexus links. Then after several minutes of proving that she was herself, the message was decoded and delivered.

  She read it in full, twice. Then she sent away for the essential confirmation, knowing this was an exercise, and the Master’s office would thank her for her timely and efficient response. But the unthinkable occurred. After the briefest pause, the word “Proceed” was delivered to her.

  She said it aloud, then whispered the rest of those incredible words.

  “Proceed with your mission, with utmost caution, beginning immediately.”

  It took a lot to astonish an old woman. Yet here was one old woman who felt astonished to the point of numbness, and perhaps a little afraid, not to mention incandescently happy to have this abrupt, utterly unexpected challenge.

  Two

  REMORAS WORKED TIRELESSLY to make Miocene feel ill at ease, and without exception, their best efforts failed.

  Today’s attempt was utterly typical. She was making one of the ritual tours of the outer hull. Her guide, a glancingly charming and notorious elder named Orleans, steered the skimmer across the ship’s leading face, passing as many markers and statues and tiny memorials as physically possible. He did it without subtlety or apology. What passed for a mouth kept smiling at the Submaster, and a gloved hand would gesture at each site, the deep wet voice reporting how many had died at this place and how many had been his good friends or members of his enormous, cantankerous family.

  Miocene made no comment.

  Her spare face wore an expression that might be confused for compassion, while her thoughts centered on those matters where she could actually accomplish genuine good.

  “Twelve died here,” Orleans reported.

  Then later, “Fifteen here. Including a great-grandson of mine.”

  Miocene wasn’t a fool. She knew Remoras lived a hard existence. She felt a measure of sympathy for their troubles. But there were many fine fat reasons not to waste a moment grieving for these supposed heroes.

  “And here,” Orleans trumpeted, “the Black Nebula killed three whole teams. Fifty-three dead, in the space of a single year.”

  The hull beneath them was in good repair. Wide stretches of fresh hyperfiber formed a bright, almost mirrored surface, reflecting the swirling colors of the ship’s shields. The three memorials were bone-colored spires no more than twenty meters tall—visible for an instant, then gone as the shuttle streaked past each one in the blink of an eye.

  “We got too close to that nebula,” Orleans informed her.

  Miocene showed her feelings by closing her eyes.

  Brazen like all Remoras, her guide ignored the simple warning. “I know the good reasons why,” he growled. “A lot of wealthy worlds near that nebula, and inside. We needed to pass close enough to lure new customers. After all, we’re a fifth of the way through our great voyage, and we still have empty berths and quotas to fill—”

  “No,” Miocene interrupted. Then slowly, with a contemptuous sigh, she opened her eyes and stared at Orleans, telling him, “There is no such monster as a quota. Not officially, and not otherwise.”

  “My mistake,” said Orleans. “Sorry.”

  Yet the man’s expression seemed doubtful.

  Dismissive, even.

  But what did any Remoran face mean? What she saw was intentionally gruesome: the broad forehead was a waxy white with thick beads of grease aligned in neat rows. Where human eyes should have returned her gaze, there were twin pits filled with hair; each hair, she assumed, was photosensitive, all joined together as a kind of compound eye. If there was a nose, it was hidden. But the mouth was a wide rubbery affair, never able to close entirely. It was hanging agape now, so large that Miocene could count the big pseudo-teeth and two blue tongues, and in the back of that yawning mouth, what seemed to be the white image of an old-fashioned human skull was plainly visible.

  The rest of the Remora’s 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 fuck 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.”