The Greatship Read online

  Seventeen millennia and thirty-seven years passed, and then with a thunderous thud, one hatch burst inward. Unsealed for the first time, the open door let in a screaming wind and a brigade of machines—enormous swift and fearless assemblages of muscle and narrow talents that knew their purpose and had only so much time to work.

  Alone was terrified, and enthralled. Believing he could escape at will, he retreated to the chamber’s center. But then the other hatches exploded, including a big opening at the apex of the ceiling. Machines burrowed into the ice and strung lights, and they carved the black walls, reshaping the volume before building a second, lower ceiling. And all the while they were leaking enough raw heat that the ancient glacier began to melt everywhere, transformed into fizzy water and gas.

  Alone huddled inside rotting shards of the ice.

  His emergency exists were either blocked or too close to active machines. The chamber floor was quality hyperfiber, difficult to pierce without creating a spectacle. Alone pretended to belong to the floor. For the next awful week, he did nothing but remain still. Then all of the ice had melted and the first wave of machinery had vanished, replaced by different implements that worked rapidly in smaller ways, yet with the same tenacious purpose.

  Mimicking one common machine, he floated to the new lake’s surface.

  Cultured wood and young purple corals and farm-raised shellfish were being assembled like a puzzle, a new shoreline laid across beds of glassy stone filled with artificial fossils—ancestors to the chamber’s new residents. Humans stood beside aliens, the species speaking through interpretive AIs. The aliens wore broad purple shells, and they were happiest when their gills lay in the newly conditioned water. The humans wore uniforms of various styles, different colors. One uniform had the bright reflective quality of a mirror, and the woman inside it was saying, “Beautiful, yes.” Then she knelt down and sucked up a mouthful of the salted, acidic water. Spitting with vigor, she said, “And a good taste too, it is.”

  The aliens swirled their many feet and the fibrous gills, stirring up their lake. Then chittering answers were turned into the words, “We are skeptical.”

  “To your specifications,” said the woman. “I pledge.”

  The aliens spoke of rare elements that needed to be increased or abolished. Proportions were critical. Perfection was the only satisfactory solution.

  “It shall be done,” the captain promised.

  The aliens claimed to be satisfied. Confident of success, they slithered into the deeper water, plainly enjoying their new abode.

  The captain looked across the lake, spying one machine that was plainly doing nothing.

  With a commanding tone, she said, “This is Washen. We’ve got a balky conditioner sitting in the middle. Do you see it?”

  Alone eased beneath the surface, changing his shape, merging with the glassy sediment. His disguise was good enough to escape the notice of watching humans and machines. Waiting, he gathered enough power to make a sudden explosive escape. But then the artificial day faded, a bright busy night taking hold, complete with the illusion of scattered stars and a pale red moon; and it was an easy trick to assume the form one shelled alien, mimicking its motions and chattering tongue, casually slipping out through the public entrance into a side tunnel that led to a multitude of fresh places, all empty.

  8

  Twenty centuries of steady exploration, and still the cavern had no end. Its wandering passageways were dry and often cramped, unlit and deeply chilled. The granite and hyperfiber were deliciously sterile. Neither humans nor their alien passengers wished to live in places like this. Machine species set up a few networks, but their tiny communities were easily avoided. Once more, the habit of walking returned to this life. To help track his own motions as well as the passage of time, Alone would count his strides until he reached some lovely prime number, and then he would mark the nearest stone with slashes and dots that only he could interpret—apparently random marks that would warn him in another hundred years that he had passed this way before, moving from this tunnel into that chamber, and if at all possible, he should avoid repeating that old route.

  The enigmatic voice found him more often now, yet it was quieter and harder to comprehend. Sometimes a whisper emerged from some slight hole or side passage—like one neighbor calling to another from an unfathomed distance. But more often the voice was directly behind him, and it didn’t so much speak as offer up emotions, raw and uninvited. The shared sadness was deep and very old, but those black moods were preferable to the sharp, sick terror it gladly shared. One dose of panic was enough to make the next hundred days painful. Something here was horribly wrong. The voice kept infusing him with horror—no explanations; no root causes. Yet these moods were preposterous, foolish and eventually dreary. After all, Alone’s solitude was secure. No captains or engineers were chasing after him. Occasionally he slipped into a deep corner of the cavern and for several months would hide away, waiting for whatever might pass by. But nothing was tracking him, and nothing was sliding in the opposite direction. The voice was wrong, was mistaken. Alone was utterly safe inside this private, perfect catacomb, and he welcomed no opinion that dared claim otherwise.

  One day, walking an unexplored passageway, he happened upon a vertical shaft. Normally he might have avoided the place. A human had been here first, leaving behind tastes of skin and bacteria and human oils. Leaking a faint glow, Alone spied machinery abandoned by this anonymous explorer: A winch perched on the edge of the deep shaft, anchored by determined spikes. The sapphire rope was broken. The drum was almost empty, but the winch continued to turn—an achingly slow motion that fascinated the first soul to stand here in a very long while.

  Several days of study were needed before Alone touched the drum, and that slight friction was enough to kill what power remained inside the superconductive battery. How long had it been here, spinning without purpose? And what was inside the hole, waiting at the other end of the broken blue thread?

  Alone wrenched loose two of the winch’s titanium handles and uncoiled the remaining sapphire rope, tying one end to one handle. Then he dropped the weight into the dark shaft. Two hundred meters, and there was no extra rope and no bottom. He lashed the rope’s free end to the winch and climbed down. The shaft turned to hyperfiber, slick and vertical and comforting. Then its walls pulled away. When Alone couldn’t reach from one side to the other, he let go of the rope, falling and making his body brighter as he fell, watching the handle streak past. He made no sound, and listening, he heard nothing. And feeling nobody here but himself, he lit the entire chamber with his finest golden fire.

  A human shape lay upon the flat floor.

  Alone turned black and cold again, and he built long gliding wings that dropped him at a safe distance, allowing him to creep closer to the motionless figure.

  For three days, nothing changed.

  Then he brightened, just slightly, straddling the figure. The human male hadn’t moved in decades, perhaps longer. There was enough rope on the winch to put him down here, but it must have broken unexpectedly. The hyperfiber floor showed blood where the man struck the first time, hard enough to shatter his tough bones and shred muscles. But humans can recover from most injuries. This stranger would have healed and soon stood up again, and probably by a variety of means, he had worked to save himself.

  Most of the Ship’s passengers carried machines that allowed them to speak with distant friends. Why didn’t this man beg for help? Perhaps his machinery failed, or this hole was too deep and isolated, or maybe he simply came to this empty place without the usual implements.

  Reasons were easy, answers unknowable.

  Whatever happened, the man had lived inside this hole for some months and perhaps several years. He brought food and water, but not enough of either to last long. The cold that Alone found pleasant would have stolen the body’s precious heat, and the man starved while his flesh lost its moisture, reaching a point where it could invent no way to function.
Yet the man never died. With his last strength, he stripped himself of his clothes and made a simple bed, his pack serving as his pillow, and with that he stretched out on his back, eyes aimed at the unreachable opening, his face turning leathery and cold and blind.

  The eyes remained open but dry as stone. They might not have changed for centuries, and nobody had ever found this man, and perhaps no one even noticed his absence.

  Alone considered the implications of each option.

  Eventually and with considerable caution, he opened the pack and thoroughly inventoried its contents. He studied what was useful in detail. Key was a sophisticated projection map showing the cavern and the surrounding tunnels. Then he carefully returned each item to where he found it and laid the pack beneath the unaware head. That frozen, wasted body weighed nearly nothing. A good hard shake might turn the dried muscle to dust. Yet he was careful not to disturb anything more than absolutely necessary, and without a sound, he retreated to a respectful distance. The lower length of sapphire lay nearby, coiled into a neat pile. He tied one end to the second handle, and despite the distance and darkness managed a perfect toss on his first attempt, the two handles colliding and dancing, then wrapping together, and he climbed past the rough knot, pulling it loose and letting the lower rope fall away before he continued his ascent from the hole.

  Centuries followed; little if anything changed. But there were a few intuitive moments when the bright gray fear took hold, when some nagging instinct claimed that he was being sloppy, that he was being pursued. Three times, Alone found marks resembling his own but obviously drawn by another hand. And there was one worrisome incident when he slipped aside and waited only thirteen days before a solitary figure followed him down the long tunnel. The biped was towering and massive, covered with bright scales and angry spikes, and the low ceiling forced the creature to bend low inside the passageway, fierce hands carrying an elaborate machine that resembled a second head.

  Mechanical eyes and a long probing nostril studied the rock where Alone had stepped, teasing out subtle cues. With a hunter’s intensity, the creature slowly moved to a place where the second head noticed that the trail had vanished, and the machine whispered a warning, and the harum-scarum turned in time to see an amorphous shape sprout long limbs, and without sound, silently race away.

  After that, Alone adapted his legs and gait, changing his stride, fighting to become less predictable. But he refused to abandon the cavern. His home was far too large to be searched easily or in secret, and he had walked every passageway, every room—a hard-acquired knowledge that he would have to surrender if he journeyed anywhere else.

  Most encounters came through chance, fleeting and harmless. Human numbers had swollen as the millennia passed, but some of the other species plainly outnumbered the Ship’s lawful owners. Aliens wore every imaginable body, and there were always new species stumbling into his path. One glimpse in the dark or some long study at a safe distance didn’t make an expert, but Alone had achieved several rugged little epiphanies: Life must be relentless, and it had to be astonishingly imaginative. Every living world seemed unique, and these blobs and dashes of living flesh were able to thrive on every sort of disgusting food and bitter breath. The beasts that came slipping through his home drank water, salty or clear, acidic or alkaline, or their drinks were chilled and laced with ammonia, or they wore insulated suits and downed pitchers of frigid methane, or they sucked on perchlorates and peroxides, or odd stinking oils, while quite a few machines drank nothing. Yet despite that staggering range of form and function, every creature was pushed by curiosity, peering into black holes, sometimes slipping fingers and antennae into places never touched before—if not hunting for invisible, legendary entities, then at least seeking the simple, precious novelty of Being First.

  Alone watched visitors coupling. One eager pair of humans fell onto a mat of glowing aerogel, naked and busy, and standing just a few meters away, immersed in darkness, Alone watched as they bent themselves into a series of increasingly difficult poses, grunting occasionally, then finally shouting with wild voices that echoed off the distant ceiling. When their violence was finished, the woman said to the man, “Is that all there is?” Her lover answered with a harsh affectionate name, and she laughed, and he laughed, and after drinking the brown alcohol from a treasured bottle, the performance began again.

  More years and more kilometers were slowly, carefully traversed. Then came one peculiar moment when he heard what sounded like a multitude passing through the cavern’s largest entrance. The presence of many was felt; he smelled their collective breath. They might whisper respectfully and try to move like ghosts, but there were too many feet and mouths, too many reasons to praise the solitude and beg their neighbors to be silent. Alarmed, Alone approached the newcomers only to hope that they were leaving. But they were not. Then he followed them, and from a sober distance he watched as they assembled at the center of the cavern’s largest chamber. A quick count found twenty thousand bodies and a staggering variety of species, and once an invisible signal was given, they began to speak in one shared voice. There was rhythmic chanting, sloppily performed songs. By every right he should have fled the pageant, but the strangers were singing about the Great Ship, begging for its blessings and its wisdom. And hope upon hope, they called for the Ship’s voice.

  Using every trick, Alone approached unseen.

  The celebration was joyous and senseless. How could they hear any voice inside their own roar? But he felt the urgency and earnest passion. At least a hundred alien species were represented. But the lighting was minimal, and hovering at the edges, it was impossible to observe the full crowd, much less comprehend more than a fraction of what was being said.

  “We thank the Ship,” he heard.

  Then from someplace close, one enormous voice chanted, “For the home and safety You give to us, we thank You!”

  “You are a mystery,” farther souls declared. “You are the mystery.”

  Alone hovered at the edge of the mayhem, unnoticed but near enough to touch backs and feel the leaked heat of bodies.

  A hill of smooth basalt stood on the cavern floor, and perched on the summit was a human male. “For so long and for so far,” he cried out. “You have journeyed. We cannot measure the loneliness You endured in Your wanderings. But in thanks for Your shelter, we give You our companionship. For Your speed, we give You purpose. After the countless years of being empty and dead, we have made You into a vibrant, thriving creature. At long last, the Great Ship lives! And we hear Your thanks, yes! In our dreams and between our little words, we hear You!”

  Just when Alone started to flee, he couldn’t say.

  Which word triggered the furor was unclear, even as he was rushing away from the room and its densely packed bodies…even as a few of the less devoted worshippers heard what might have been a moan and turned in time to notice the faint but undeniable glow, red as a dying ember, racing off on legs growing longer by the stride.

  9

  Ten thousand and forty-eight years after discovering the hole, Alone returned. The winch remained fixed in place, but someone else had visited, and possibly more than once. Boot prints showed in the dust. He smelled and tasted signs of a second human. But nobody had stood on this ground for long, and when he went below, he found the body exactly where he had left it—only more dried, more wasted. More helpless, if that was possible.

  Once again, Alone emptied the pack of its belongings, but this time he tenaciously studied the design and contents of even the most prosaic, seemingly useless item. He taught himself to read. He mastered the old, once-treasured machines that had thoroughly recorded one life. The mummified man had a long, cumbersome name, but he answered easiest to Harper. Eyes pressed against digital readers, Alone marveled at scenes brought from the distant earth—glimpses of brightly lit humans, the toothy faces of a family, and a sequence of wives. But all of his people and every lover were left behind when Harper sold his possessions, surrendering his h
ome and safety for a ticket to ride the Great Ship—embarking on a glorious voyage to circumnavigate the Milky Way.

  Between the man’s arrival at Port Alpha and this subsequent disaster, barely fifty years had passed. Fifty years was no time at all. What’s more, Harper had filled his days with a single-minded hunt for the Ship’s ancient builders. Infused with a maniacal hunger, the human not only presumed that a grand purposeful force had built the derelict starship, but the same force was still onboard, hiding in an odd corner or unmapped chamber, biding its time while waiting for that brave, earnest explorer who would discover its lair.

  Harper intended to be that very famous man.

  Every aspect of the lost life was studied. There were gaps in the records, particularly near the end. But Alone wasn’t familiar enough with human ways to appreciate that another hand might have blanked files and entire days, erasing his presence from the story. What mattered was digesting the full nature of this alien beast, learning Harper’s manners and looks and duplicating his high, thin voice. Then Alone refilled the pack. But this time, he left the hole with the lost man’s possessions carried under what looked like a human arm.

  At the top of the hole, he transformed his face, his body.

  There are many ways to be alone. The next weeks were spent duplicating the voice and gestures found on the digitals. Only then did Alone abandon the safety of the cavern. The local time was night, as he planned. Obeying customs learned only yesterday, Alone summoned a cap-car that silently carried him halfway around the Ship. He paid for the service with funds pulled from an account that hadn’t been touched for thousands of years. The modest apartment hadn’t seen this face for as long, but its AI said, “Welcome.” The master’s sudden reappearance didn’t cause suspicion or curiosity. Entering a home that he didn’t know, Alone spent the next ten days and nights continuing his studies of the lost man. Then his apartment announced, “You have a visitor, sir.”