Marrow

…a sleep, sweet as Death… time traversed, and an incalculable distance… and then a splash of light emerged from the dark and the cold, its warming touch slowly explaining itself to me, showing suns and little worlds and great swirls of colored gas and angry, roaring dust.

A barred spiral galaxy, this was.

Possessing such beauty, and a majesty, that I could not help but stare. And wrapped within that majesty, a frailty, ignorant and vast.

The galaxy’s path and mine were plain. Without question, we would collide.

My gaze was sure to be returned by many more gazes. I knew that, just as I had known that this day was inevitable. Yet when I saw that tiny first machine racing toward me, I was surprised. So soon! And yes, the machine could see me. I watched its mirrored eyes focus on my scarred old face. I watched it fire tiny rockets, exhausting itself in order to pass nearer to me. Then it spat out a minuscule device whose only duty was to collide with my face, undoubtedly followed by a trail of data and new questions. At nearly half the speed of light, we met. Only I survived. Then the mother machine swept past, turning its eyes, watching my trailing face, a part of me imagining its wondrous surprise.

My backside is adorned with rocket nozzles.

Bigger than worlds, and more ancient, my engines are as chilled and quiet as this ancient universe of ours.

Hello, I said.

Without a voice.

Brother machine, hello.

My friend continued on its way, and for a little while, I was alone again. Winch was when I first sensed just how deep my loneliness had grown.

Ignoring caution, denying every duty, I began wishing for another visitor. What would be the harm? A little robotic companion, transitory and incompetent… how could a mere device present any hazard to me…?

But it wasn’t one probe sent to greet me. No, the machines came in flocks and fleets. Some serenely committed suicide, diving into my leading face. Others flew near enough to feel my tug, curling around my backside, enjoying a close quick took at my great engines. Their shape and basic design were the same as the first probe, implying a shared maker. Following their trajectories back through space and time, I discovered a tell-tale intersection. A single yellowish sun lay at the nexus. It and its neighboring suns had spawned the machines. I slowly accepted the unlikely answer that a single species had seen me before any other. But clearly, this galaxy was not a simple place. As time passed and the intervening distances shrank, other devices arrived from a multitude of places. I watched a parade of machines built of simple metals and sculpted gas and encased in hydrogen ice, and from hundreds of thousands of suns came every sort of electromagnetic noise, in soft squirts and squawks, elaborate songs and brazen shouts.

“Hello,” the voices shouted. “And who are you, friend?” Who I appear to be, I am. “And what, friend, do you mean to us?” Just what I appear to mean, I told them. With silence. In every way, what you sec in me is most definitely what I am.

Animals came from someplace between me and that yellowish sun.

Their first vessel was tiny, and simple, and extraordinarily frail. Enormous bravery must have taken them this far. “Die creatures had to leave the brightness of their own galaxy, and at mid-voyage, they stopped themselves, turned and started home again, their little engines pushing and pushing, matching my terrific velocity at the perfect moment. Then they slowed again, just slightly, letting me catch up to them, and maintaining a smart cautious distance, they coaxed themselves into a useful orbit.

As I watched, a thousand automated machines descended on me.

Hovered, then set down.

My scars and my trajectory implied my age.

No galaxies lay behind me. Not even a dark, half-born galaxy of consequence. Tliat kind of emptiness has few obstacles. Comets are rare, suns rarer, and even simple dusts are scarce. Yet my leading face was cratered and cracked, implying to the curious animals that I had come a terrific way, and I was as old as their home world.

At the very least.

“This ship is cold,” their machines reported. “Most definitely asleep, and quite possibly dead.” A derelict, in simple terms.

Between my leading face and the trailing face lay great ports, empty and closed, and securely locked. But smaller hatches and doorways could be opened with a determined push, and after begging for instructions, that was what several machines did. They eased open doors that had been closed almost forever, and behind them they found descending passageways and neat, unworn stairs perfectly suited for a humanoid’s graceful, long-legged gait.

The animals themselves made their last little leap.

When feet had last descended my stairs, I could not recall. But here came the humans, in twos and tens, entering my interior with a cautious sense of purpose. At first, they wore bulky suits and carried weapons and spoke in soft radio voices, using elaborate codes. But as they moved deeper, the old air thickened around them, and tests showed oxygen left to breathe, a multitude of life-support systems still at work, coaxing my guests to remove their helmets, sniffing once, then breathing deeper, and in that human fashion, smiling.

The first voice said, “Hello,” and heard only its own nervous echo in reply.

Beneath my armored hull was a vast cold ocean of stone laced with grand passageways and abrupt dead ends and rooms too vast to be absorbed in a single look, or even a lifetime. The darkness was thorough, relentless. But every wall and ceiling had its lamps and holoprojectors, their machinery transparently simple and easily ignited; plus there were armies of local reactors waiting to be brought from their slumber modes to furnish power.

In little places, then larger ones, I was awakened.

And still, I had no voice.

Did I ever possess the power of speech?

Perhaps not, I realized. Perhaps what I remember as my voice is actually another’s. But whose? And how can any span of time rob such a basic, essential knowledge?

Most of the humans now boarded me.

With care and fondness, I counted them. Twelve to the fourth power, plus a few more. Which was a tiny, almost negligible number compared to my vastness.

But then more ships arrived—an armada coming from other suns, other human worlds. These newer vessels had more powerful, efficient engines. And I realized that even if these were animals, they could adapt quickly. Which had to be a good thing.

But why was it good?

With all of my new energies, I tried to shout at my innocent companions, begging them to please listen to me. Yet I was mute.

Save a whispering wind, and the crackle if random energy in a granitic wall, and the dry clatter of gravel preceding the touch of a human foot, I could make no sound.

The human population increased another twelvefold.

And for a little while after that, nothing changed.

The explorers had all arrived. With a crisp efficiency, they mapped every tunnel and crevice, giving each a precise designation.

Every large room and cavernous chamber was honored with a special name. Great seas of water and ammonia, methane and silicone, were found in my interior, at many depths. Banks of machinery could manipulate their chemistry, making them suitable for a wide range of life-forms. Understandably, the humans adjusted one of the water seas as an experiment, its salts and acidity made to their liking, its temperature warm on the surface and cold beneath; and with a bid toward permanence, they built a little city overlooking the sea’s black-bouldered shore.

Whatever the humans discovered inside me, I discovered, too.

Until that moment, I had never fully comprehended my greatness, or my own glorious, well-worn beauty.

I wanted to thank my guests, and could not. Just as I couldn’t make them hear my plaintive warnings. But I was growing more comfortable with my muteness. Everything has its reason, and no matter how great and glorious I am, I am nothing compared to the wise ones who created me… and who am I, a mere machine, to question their boundless wisdom…?

Beneath my watery seas were still larger oceans of liquid hydrogen.

Fuel for my sleeping engines, no doubt.

Humans learned how to repair my pumps and giant reactors, and they managed to activate one of the great engines, an experimental burst of high-velocity plasmas proving hotter than expected, and more powerful.

By then, we were plunging into their galaxy.

It was named for a mother’s secretions, this Milky Way.

I began to taste its dusts, and its feeble heat warmed my old skin. A quarter of a trillion suns were below me, plus a hundred trillion worlds, living and otherwise. From nothingness, I was falling into the cosmopolitan heart of the universe. Tens of thousands of species had seen my arrival, and naturally a few sent their own tiny ships, orbiting me at the usual respectful distance, using many voices as they asked to be allowed onboard, or bluntly demanded to be given possession of me.

The humans refused everyone. Politely at first, then less so.

I heard their cold officious words about interstellar law and the status of derelict ships. Then came a careful, calculated silence.

One of the interlopers decided on action. Without warning, it attacked, turning the human starships into light and pulverized debris.

Unprepared for war, most species made a graceless retreat. Only the most violent few remained, unleashing their weapons against my armored hull. But if I can withstand a giant comet impacting at a fat fraction of lightspeed, their tritium bombs and X-ray lasers could do nothing. Nothing. The humans, safely inside me, went about their lives, ignoring the bombardment, repairing and recalibrating my old guts while their enemies exhausted themselves against my great body.

One after another, the starships gave up the fight and left for home.

Desperate to establish any claim, the last species attempted a hard landing. Their captain plunged toward my leading face, dipping in and out of craters while streaking toward the nearest port. It was a brave and bold and foolhardy act. A network of shield generators and lasers and antimatter cannons lay inside deep bunkers. In some lost age, they must have worked to protect me from comets and other hazards. As they had with my other systems, the humans had discovered the machinery and made repairs. And with a mixture of retribution and charity, they used the lasers to destroy the attackers’ engines, and their weapons, and they made prisoners out of the survivors.

Then with a roaring voice, they shouted at the Milky Way.

“This ship is ours!’ they shouted.

“Ours!”

“Now, and always! The Ship belongs to us…!”

Set on top of a great black boulder were black wooden chairs, and sitting on those chairs, enjoying the false sunshine, were the Master Captain and her closest staff, each dressed in his or her fanciest mirrored uniform.

“Now that we’ve won,” began the Master, “what have we won?”

No one spoke.

“We’ve got title to the largest starship ever,” she continued, gesturing at a blue ceiling and the warm surf and the warmer basaltic rock. “But governments and corporations paid for our mission here, and they aren’t unreasonable to expect some return on their fat investments.”

Everyone nodded, and waited. They knew the Master well enough to hold tight to their opinions, at least until she looked at them and said their names.

“This ship is moving awfully fast,” she pointed out. “Even if we could rotate one hundred and eighty degrees and fire its engines until the tanks are dry, we’d still be moving too fast to dock anywhere. You can’t make twenty Earth masses dance for you. Can you?”

Silence.

She chose a narrow, coolly professional face. “Miocene?” Her assistant said, “Yes, madam.”

“Ideas? Any?”

“We can’t stop ourselves, madam. But we could use our engines to adjust our course.” Miocene was a tall, perpetually calm woman. She glanced at the compad on her lap, then let her walnut-colored eyes lift and meet the Master’s impatient gaze. “Tiiere is a white dwarf ahead of us. A three-day burn starting now would take us past it at relatively close range, and instead of slicing through the galaxy, we would be turned. The ship would pass through human space, then continue on into the heart of the galaxy.”

“But to what end?” asked the Master.

“To give us more time to study this technology. Madam.”

A few of her fellow captains risked little nods of agreement.

Bui for some reason, the Muster wasn’t convinced. With a sharp creaking of wood, she rose to her feet, towering over even the tallest of her subordinates. For a long while, she did nothing. She let them watch as she did nothing. Then she turned and stared across the open water, studying the wind-driven waves as they broke against the basalt, her colorless swift mind trying to distill what was best from everything that was possible.

Out in the surf, a whale appeared.

It was a tailored minke whale-a popular species on terraformed worlds—and riding the saddle on its dark broad back was a single child. A girl, judging by her build and the wind-thinned giggle. Quietly, the Master asked, “Whose child is that?”

With the war finished, the captains and crew had produced the occasional child, setting roots deeper into the ship.

Miocene rose and squinted at the bright water, then admitted, “I’m not sure about the parents. But the girl lives nearby. I’m sure that I’ve seen her.”

“Get her. Bring her to me.”

Captains are captains because they can accomplish any chore, and usually with a minimum of fuss. But the girl and her whale proved difficult to catch. She ignored the orders coming across her headset. When she saw the skimmer approaching, she gave a loud giggle, then made her friend dive, both using their hydrolizing gills to breathe, staying out of easy reach for another full hour.

Finally a parent was found, then convinced to coax his daughter to the surface, where she was captured and dressed in an oversized robe, her long black hair dried and tied before she was ushered to the top of the great boulder.

The Master rose, offering her captive her own enormous chair. Then she sat on a knob of basalt, her mirrored uniform brilliant in the afternoon light, her voice almost as friendly as it was firm.

“Darling,” she asked, “why do you ride that whale?”

“For fun,” the youngster replied instantly.

“But swimming is fun,” the Master countered. “You can swim, can’t you?”

“Better than you, ma’am. Probably.”

When the Master laughed, everyone else did as well. Except for Miocene, who watched this interrogation with a growing impatience.

“You’d rather ride than swim,” the Master said. “Am I right?”

“Sometimes.”

“When you’re clinging to your friend, do you feel safe?”

“I guess. Sure.”

“Safe.” The word was so important that it needed to be repeated. The Master said it a third time, then a fourth. Then again, she looked at the girl, smiled, and told her, “Fine. Thank you. Go on off and play some more, darling.”

“Yes, madam.”

“By the way. What’s your name?”

“Washen.”

“You’re a beautiful young woman. Thank you, Washen.”

“For what?”

“For your help, of course,” the Master purred. “You’ve been absolutely vital.”

Everyone was puzzled. The captains watched the girl walk away in that careful, slow way that children use when they know they are being watched. But before Washen had gone, Miocene blurted, “What does all this mean, madam?”

“You know perfectly well. Interstellar travel is less than safe.” A broad, bright grin spread across the Master’s golden face. “Even our largest, most durable starship can be obliterated by a chunk of nothing no larger than my fist.”

True, of course. Always.

“But inside this great ship, the passenger is perfectly safe. Today and forever, she is protected by hundreds of kilometers of high-grade hyperfiber, and protected by lasers and shields, and served by a cadre of the finest captains anywhere.” The Master paused for an instant, enjoying the drama. Then speaking over the rumble of the surf, she announced, “We are going to sell passages on this great ship. Passages for a journey around the galaxy—a journey like no other—and every wealthy customer will be welcome. Human, alien, or machine!’ Suddenly, the wind gusted.

The Master’s empty chair was pushed over on its side.

A dozen captains fought for the privilege of righting the chair, while Miocene, knowing what was best, joined the Master instead, bowing and smiling as she said, “What a fine and perfect and wonderful idea… madam…!”

One

Washen was a captain of consequence.

Fashionably tall, with an ageless strong body, she possessed handsome features wrapped around wise chocolate eyes. Her long obsidian hair was worn in a sensible bun, streaked with just enough white to lend authority. She conveyed a sense of easy confidence and relaxed competence, and with a little look or a gentle word, she lent her confidence to whoever deserved it. In public, she wore her mirrored captain’s uniform with a regal bearing and gentle pride. Yet she had the rare gift of keeping others from feeling jealous of her station or intimidated by her presence. And even rarer was Washen s talent for embracing the instincts and customs of truly alien species, which was why, at the Master Captains insistence, one of her duties was to greet their strangest passengers, explaining what the strip was and what it expected from its cherished guests.

Her day, like so many days, began at the bottom of Port Beta.

Washen adjusted the tilt of her cap, then gazed upward, watching as a kilometer-long taxi was lowered from the airlock. Stripped of its rockets, the bulky fuel tanks, and wide armored prow, the taxi resembled a great needle. Its hyperfiber hull glittered in the port’s brilliant lights as skilled mates and their AIs controlled its descent with hair-thin cable and squid-limbs, bringing it down with the smoothness of a descending cap-car.

Which was a mistake. Through an implanted nexus, Washen called for the mates’ boss. “Let it drop,” she advised. “Right now.”

An ice-white human face grimaced.

“But madam…?”

“Now,” she demanded. “Let it fall on its own.”

A captain’s word weighed more than any mates caution. Besides, the taxi’s hull could absorb much worse abuse, and both of them knew it.

With a low crackle, the squid-limbs pulled free.

For an instant, the needle seemed unaffected. Then the ship’s gravity—much more than earth-standard—took hold and yanked it down into the cone-shaped berth reserved for it. The impact was jarring, but muted by the hyperfiber floor and a heavy dose of antinoise. Washen felt the collision in her toes and knees, and she let herself smile for a moment, imagining the passengers’ delicious surprise.

“I need to fill out an accident report,” growled the white face.

“Naturally,” she replied. “And I’ll accept all the blame you can give me. Agreed?”

“Thank you… Captain…”

“No. Thank you.”

Washen strolled toward the berth and taxi, her smile fading, replaced with a theatrical grimness appropriate to this job.

The passengers were disembarking.

Flounders, they had been dubbed.

At a glance, Flounders resembled thick woolly rugs carried on dozens of strong and very short legs.They came from a superterran world, accustomed to five times the port’s gravity, and like many species from such worlds, they demanded a thicker, richer atmosphere than what they found here. Implanted compressors aided their quick, shallow breathing. Pairs of large, eerily human eyes were rooted at one end of each long body, staring up at Washen from what, for lack of a better term, was their heads.

“Welcome,” Washen announced.

Her translator made a low rumbling sound.

“I despise each of you,” she bellowed. Then, following the advice of exopsychologists, she bent over, making eye contact as she reminded these newcomers, “You have no status here. None. A word from me, and you are crushed in the most horrible ways.”

Human politeness had no place in that alien society.

Flounders—whose real name was a series of poetic ticks—equated kindness with intimacy. And intimacy was afforded only family members, by blood or by ceremony. The exopsychologists were adamant. If Washen couldn’t intimidate the Flounders, they would feel uneasy, much in the same way that a human would feel uneasy if a stranger approached, referred to her by a lover’s nickname, then delivered a sloppy wet kiss.

“This is my ship,” she told her audience.

Several hundred aliens were in shouting range, tiny ears tilted high, absorbing her voice as well as the thunderous rumble of her translator.

“You have paid for my patience as well as a berth,” said Washen. “Paid with new technologies, which we have already received, mastered, and improved upon.”

Long whiskers stroked each other, the aliens conversing by feel.

Again, she stared into a pair of eyes. Cobalt-blue, utterly alive. “My rules are simple, little monster.”

Whiskers suddenly grew still.

Her audience held its collective breath.

“My ship is the ship’ she explained. “It needs no other name. It is remarkable and enormous, but it is not infinite. Nor empty. Thousands of species share its labyrinths with you. And if you do not treat your fellow passengers with complete respect, you will be discarded. Evicted. Rung overboard, and forgotten.”

The breathing resumed, quicker than ever.

Was she playing this game too well?

But instead of holding back, Washen kept pressing. “An empty chamber has been prepared for you. As you begged us to do. Sealed, and pressurized. With plenty of space, and your ugly foods in abundance. In this new home, you may do as you wish. Unless you wish to procreate, which requires permission from me. And fresh payments. Since children are passengers, their status is negotiable. And if I have reason, I will personally throw them overboard. Is that understood?”

Her translator asked the question, then with a soft, sexless voice, offered a sampling of the aliens’ replies.

“Yes, Lord Captain.”

“Of course, Lord.”

“You scare me, Lord!”

“When does this show end, Mother? I am hungry!”

Washen strangled a laugh. Then after her own quick breaths, she admitted,’It has been forever since I last threw anyone off the ship!

Other captains did the banishing. In humane ways, naturally. Taxis or other starships would take the troublesome species home again, or more likely, to obscure worlds where they had a better than fair chance of survival.

“But make no mistake!’ she roared. “I love this ship. 1 was born here, and I will die here, and in the long time between I will do whatever I can to protect its ancient halls and noble stone, from anything or anyone that shows it less than perfect respect. Do you understand me, you little fools?”

“Yes, Your Lord.”

“Your Goddess!”

“But is she finished yet? My tongues are numb from hunger!”

“I am nearly finished,” she told the aliens. Then even louder, she said,” But I will be watching. From this moment, I am hovering over you like Phantom Night.”

That brought a respectful silence.

Phantom Night was a Flounder god, the name translated into a rugged little squawk that brought a chill even to Washen’s spine.

With a practiced haughtiness, she turned and strode away.

The quintessential captain. One of the lords of the galaxy.

And now, for this blunt moment, she was a mythical monster who would steal the souls of those who dared sleep.

long ago, Washen reached that age where the past is too large to embrace, where even the sharpest, most efficient memory has to slough off little details and entire centuries, and where even the most cherished childhood has been stripped down, nothing left but a series of fragmentary recollections and a few diamond-hard moments that no amount of time, not even ten million years, can dilute to any degree.

Washen’s first aliens were dubbed the Phoenixes.

That was when the ship was still outside the Milky Way. Washen was more a child than not, and her parents—engineers who had come on board the first starship—were part of the large unhappy team who fashioned a habitat for the Phoenixes.

Those aliens were unwelcome. They had tried to conquer the ship, after all. It was an ineffectual invasion, but people found it difficult to forgive them anyway. Washen’s father, usually charitable to a fault, openly stated that his work was a waste, and worse, it was a crime. “Give the shits a tiny catacomb, enough water and some minimal food, then forget they’re there. That’s my little opinion.”

Washen couldn’t recall her mother’s precise opinion; even Washen’s own early biases were lost to time. And she couldn’t recall why she first visited the prison. Was she looking for her parents? Or was it later, after their work was finished, and youngsters like herself were pulled there by simple curiosity?

Whatever the reason, what she remembered today was the funeral.

Washen had never seen Death. In her short happy life, not one human had died on board the ship. Age and disease had been tamed, and the modern body could absorb even horrific injuries. If a person was cautious, and sober, she didn’t need to die. Ever.

But Phoenixes embraced a different set of beliefs. They evolved on a small hot world. Gills augmented a trio of large, black-blooded lungs; their metabolisms were quick and fierce. Where most winged aliens were gliders or soarers, passive and efficient, the Phoenixes were the ecological equivalent of human-sized peregrines. Skilled hunters and determined warriors, they possessed a broad heritage older than any human culture. Yet despite a wealth of advanced technologies, they didn’t approve of the immortalities that most species simply took for granted.

Inside a human mouth, their name was an unsingable string of notes.

“Phoenix’ was pulled from some ancient Earth myth. Or was it a Martian myth? Either way, the name was only partly appropriate. They weren’t birds, after all, and they didn’t live for five hundred years. Thirty standards was too long for most of them, physical infirmities and senility leaving their elderly incapable of flight, or song, or the smallest dignity.

Upon death, the body and a ceremonial nest were burned. But instead of a sweet resurrection, the cold white ashes were carried high by family and friends, then released, winds and wingbeats spreading the soft remains to the ends of their enormous and lovely prison cell.

Their home wasn’t built out of simple charity. The Master, taking her usual long aim, decided that if the ship was to attract alien passengers, her crew needed to know how to tweak and twist the ship’s environmental controls, turning raw cavities into abodes where any sort of biology would feel at home. That’s why she ordered her top engineers to make the attempt. And aeons later, when she came to understand the Master, Washen easily imagined the woman’s impatience with someone like her father -a talented employee who dared grumble about his job, unable to appreciate the long-term benefits of this apparently misplaced beneficence.

The Phoenix habitat was once someone’s magnetic bottle.

It could have been an antimatter containment tank, though at its best this remark was an authoritative, utterly wild guess.

Five kilometers in diameter and better than twenty kilometers deep, the prison was a column of dense warm air punctuated by thick clouds and masses of floating vegetation. Biological stocks from the Phoenix starship had been cultured, then adapted. Since the original tank lacked lights, ship-style sky lamps were built from scratch, their light tuned to the proper frequencies. Since there wasn’t room for jet streams or typhoons, the air was assaulted with an array of hidden vents and other engineering tricks. And to hide the tall cylindrical walls, an illusion of endless clouds covered every surface—an illusion good enough to seem real to humans, but not to the Phoenixes who flew too close.

The prison was meant to hold the defeated and the evil, but both sorts of prisoners quickly grew old and passed away.

It was one of the old warriors whose funeral Washen saw. It seemed unlikely today, but she could remember standing on a platform built against that great round wall, herself and a thousand other humans with their hands locked on the railing, watching winged shapes rising toward them, then higher, flying with a wondrous precision and singing loudly enough to be heard over the constant whis-de of wind.

When the ashes were dropped, the bereaved were too distant to be seen.

Intentionally, no doubt.

The young Washen contemplated the funeral. That next day, or perhaps next year, she proposed, “We can let the rest of them go free, since the bad ones have died.”

Her father felt otherwise.

“If you haven’t noticed, Phoenixes aren’t human.” He warned his soft-hearted daughter, “The creatures have a saying. ‘You inherit your direction before your wings.’ Which means, dearest, that the children and grandchildren are just as determined to slaughter us as their ancestors ever were.”

“If not more determined,” said Mother, with an unexpectedly dark tone.

“These creatures hold a grudge,” Father continued. “Believe me, they can make their hatreds fester and grow.”

“Unlike humans,” said their sharp-witted daughter.

Her irony went unmentioned, and perhaps unrecognized.

If there was more to that argument, it went unremembered. The modern brain is dense and extraordinarily durable—a composite of bioceramics and superconducting proteins and ancient fats and quantum microtubules. But like any reasonable brain, it has to simplify whatever it learns. It straightens. It streamlines. Instinct and habit are its allies, and even the wisest soul employs the art of extrapolation.

When she concentrated, Washen could recall dozens of fights with her parents. Childhood issues of freedom and responsibility never seemed to change, and she remembered enough of their politics and personalities to picture little spats and giant, ugly explosions—the sorts of emotional maelstroms that would make good engineers sit in the dark, quietly asking themselves how they had become such awful, ineffectual parents.

To Washen and her closest friends, the Phoenixes became a cause, a rallying point, and an extraordinarily useful thorn.

A ragged little political movement was born. Its bravest followers, including Washen, publically protested the prison. Their efforts culminated in a march to the Masters station. Hundreds chanted about freedom and decency. They held holosigns showing wingless Phoenixes bound up in black iron chains. It was a brave, remarkable event, and it ended in a small victory: little delegations were free to visit the prison, observe conditions firsthand, and speak to the pitiable aliens under the careful gaze of the captains.

That’s where Washen met her first alien.

Phoenix males were always beautiful, but he was exceptionally so. What passed for feathers were a brilliant gold fringed with the darkest black, and an elegant, efficient face seemed to be all eyes and beak. The eyes were a lush copper^’ green, bright as polished gemstones.The beak was a vivid jade color, hard and obviously sharp. It was open when he sang, and it remained open afterward, always gulping down the liters of air that he required just to perch in one place and live.

The apparatus on his chest translated his elaborate song.

“Hello,” he said to Washen. Then he called her ‘human egg-bearer’.”

Several young humans were in the delegation, but Washen was their leader. Following Phoenix protocol, she fielded every question and spoke for the others, following a shopping list of subjects agreed upon weeks ago.

“We want to help you,” Washen promised.

Her translator sang those words in a half-moment, if that.

“We want you free to move and live wherever you wish on board the ship,” she told them.” And until that can happen, we want to make your life here as comfortable as possible.”

The Phoenix sang his reply.

“Fuck comfort,” said his box.

A deep unease passed through the human delegation. “What is your name, human egg-bearer?”

“Washen.”

There was no translation, which meant that it was an impossible sound. So the young Phoenix gulped a breath and sang a note that came out as ‘Snowfeather’.”

She liked the name, and said so. Then she thought to inquire, “What’s your name?”

“Supreme-example-of-manhood,” he replied.

Washen laughed, but only for a moment. Then quietly, carefully, she said, “Manly. May I call you Manly?”

“Yes, Snowfeather. You may.” Then the feathers around the jade beak lifted—a Phoenix smile, she recalled—and he reached out with one of his long arms, reaching past Washen’s shoulder, a strong Little hand gently, ever so gently, caressing the leading edge of her own great wing.

Everyone in the delegation wore strap-ons.

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, human-time, 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, furnace-like 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 hyper-oxygenated 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 five 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, super-chilled 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 Masters 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 pseudoteeth 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 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!

Quietly 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.”

In 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 centuries, 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 world onto himself, elaborate recycle 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 Remora 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 believers. 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 honest by a long ways, were wrestling in her long lap—two perfectly matched opponents, neither capable of winning their contest.

The REMORA 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 series of new destinations and odd little 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 finally, it eased into a quiet neighborhood 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 importantly, 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.

Since the Phoenixes, no one had tried to invade the Great Ship. But in a voyage that would circumnavigate the Milky Way, it didn’t pay to throw away any tool that might, in some unexpected way, help the Master’s hand.

What if the unforeseen had happened?

Miocene was sitting in a tiny cafe, safely disguised, when she noticed a dozen black-clad security officers interviewing the local foot traffic. A standard business in this kind of district, yes. But it made her wonder about the other captains. How many besides her had been called away by the Master’s explicit orders?

There was a temptation to use secret tools to count the missing. But her probes might be noticed and tracked, and ignorance was infinitely more seemly than being caught in someone’s clumsy net-Half of the security team was working its way toward the cafe. They were perhaps two hundred meters away when a dose of paranoia took hold of Miocene. She left her sausage cakes and iced coffee unfinished, but she rose to her feet with a casual grace, then chose the most anonymous direction before slipping out of sight. In this district, every avenue was a touch less than a hundred kilometers long, and it was exactly one thousandth as wide and one ten-thousandth as tall. There were a thousand identical avenues set carved into the local rock, aligned with a clean geometric precision.

The original guess, formulated by the first survey teams, was that these geometric relationships were fat with meaning. The ship’s builders were at least as clever as the people who had discovered it, and an accurate map of every room and avenue, fuel tank and rocket nozzle, would reveal an ocean of mathematical clues. Perhaps a genuine language could be built from all those intricate proportions. In simple terms, the Great Ship supplied its own explanation… if only enough data and enough cunning could be applied to this wondrous and slippery problem…

Miocene had always doubted that logic.

Cleverness was an uneven talent at best. Imagination, she believed, was something that would fool its owner, luring her to waste her time chasing every wishful possibility. That’s why she long ago predicted that no AI and no human, or any other sentient soul, would find anything particularly important in the ship’s architecture. This was one of those circumstances where the boring and the unclever provided the best answers. These thousand avenues, plus every other hollow place within the Great Ship, had been chiseled out by sterile machines following equally sterile plans. That would explain the repetitive, insect-like patterns.And more importantly, it offered a telling clue as to why no expedition had ever found the tiniest trace of left-behind life.

Not one alien corpse.

Or unexplained microbe.

Or even a molecular knot that was once someone’s once-dear protein.

Where imagination saw mystery, Miocene saw simplicity. Obviously, this ship was built not to travel between the stars, but to cross from galaxy to galaxy. Its designers, whoever they were, had employed sterile machines at every stage of construction. Then for reasons unknown, the builders never stepped on board their creation.

The easy guess was that some natural catastrophe had struck. Most likely it would be something vast, and horrific.

When the universe was young, and quite a bit denser, galaxies had the nagging habit of exploding. Seyferts. Quasars. Cascading series of supernovae. All were symptoms of a dangerous youth. There was ample evidence showing the Milky Way had a similar history. Life born in its youth was extinguished by the amoral pulse of gamma radiation: once, twice, or a thousand times.

What the dullest, most credible experts proposed—and what Miocene believed today without question—was that an intelligent species arose in the past, in some peaceful and extremely remote backwater.The species predicted the coming storm. A crash program of self-replicating machines were sent- to a jovian-class world, probably a world drifting inside a dusty nebula, far from any sun. Following simple, buglike programs, that world was rebuilt. Its hydrogen atmosphere was burned to give it velocity. Slingshot flybys added still more. But by the time it came streaking past the homeworld, there was no one left to save. Empty avenues waited for humanoids already killed by a Seyfert’s fire, and for the next several billion years, the ship waited, empty and patient, plying a blind course between galaxies, slowly degrading but managing to endure until it reached the Milky Way.

No one had ever indentified the parent galaxy.

Looking back along the ship’s trajectory, one couldn’t find so much as a dim dwarf galaxy that seemed a likely mother.

And there was also that nagging issue about the ship’s age.

Five billion years was the official verdict. A huge span, but comfortably huge, demanding no great rewriting of the universe’s early history.

The trouble was that the parent rock could be older than five billion years. Before it solidified, the granite and basalt were doctored. The telltale radionuclides had been harvested by some hyper-efficient means. To mask its age, or for some less conspiratorial purpose? Either way, it left the rock cold and hard, and it was just one means by which the ship’s builders had left behind a hard puzzle for today’s scientists.

Earnest, imaginative people, filled with cocktails and braver drugs, liked to claim that eight or ten or twelve billion years was a more likely age for the ship. And twelve billion years wasn’t the upper estimate, either. Enjoying the imponderables, they argued that this derelict had come from that fine distant sprinkle of little blue galaxies which covered the most distant skies, all born at the beginnings of time. How humanoids, or anything, could have evolved so early was left unanswered. But since mystery was their passion, they found this entire business more intoxicating than any drink.

Miocene didn’t enjoy vast questions or ludicrous answers, particularly when neither were necessary.

She saw a simpler explanation: the ship was a youthful five billion years old, and somewhere between galaxies, probably soon after its birth, its course was deflected by an invisible black hole or some unmapped dark-matter mass. That explained why it was an orphan in every sense.

Thinking otherwise was to think too much and to do it in the wrong places.

This had been an orphan and a derelict, and then human beings had found it.

And now it was theirs; was Miocenes, at least in part.

Walking that long, long avenue, Miocene smelled a hundred worlds. Humanoids and aliens of other shapes were enjoying the false blue sky, and most were enjoying one another. She heard words and songs and sniffed the potent musks of pheromonal gossips, and occasionally, as the mood struck, she would wander into one of the tiny shops, browsing like anyone with nowhere else to be.

No, she wasn’t as imaginative as some people.

In most circumstances, Miocene would make that confession, without hesitation. Yet in the next breath, always, she would add that she had imagination enough to revel in the ship’s majesty, and its cosmopolitan appeal, and sufficient creativity to help rule this very original and precious society.

Nursing a well-deserved pride, she worked her way along the avenue.

Alien wares outnumbered human wares, even in human shops. Entering a likely doorway, she could always expect to be noticed. And when she wasn’t, Miocene would recall that she wasn’t a Submaster now. Out of uniform, free of responsibilities, she possessed an anonymity that seemed an endless surprise.

From a spidery machine intelligence, she purchased an encyclopedia written entirely about the Great Ship.

In a tiny grocery, she bought a harum-scarum’s sin-fruit, its proteins and odd sugars reconfigured for human stomachs.

Eating one purchase, she skimmed over the other. There was a slender hundred-tetrabit entry about Miocene. She read portions, smiling more than not, making mental notes about half a hundred points that the author needed to correct.

From a monkeyish Yik Yik clerk, she bought a mild drug.

Then later, reconsidering this indulgence, she sold it at a profit to a human male who referred to her as “lady” and left her with the advice, “You look tired. Get laid, then get yourself some good sleep.”

He seemed to be offering a service, which she chose to ignore.

Afterward, Miocene spotted another security team. Humans and harum-scarums were disguised as passengers. But what’s more obvious than a police officer on the job? No passenger is that watchful, ever. Yet they never saw Miocene as she slipped into one of the very narrow, very dark passageways leading to a parallel avenue.

Invisible demon doors made the skin tingle. She strolled into a colder climate, the air having a delicious mountain thinness about it.

Another spidery machine was renting dreams and the rooms to use them. Miocene took one of each, then slept for twelve straight hours, dreaming about the ship when it was first discovered, and empty, her dream-self strolling along these darkened avenues, her eyes first to see the polished green olivine walls that would soon be laced with rooms that would become, in a geologic blink, thriving shops.

It was the rented dream, at first.

Then Miocene’s own memories were building images. How many tunnels and rooms had she seen first? No one knew. Not the encyclopedia’s author, or even Miocene herself. And that brought a lingering joy that made her smile the next morning while she sipped icy coffee and ate spiced blubbercakes for breakfast.

Her secret orders had included a destination. And a loose timetable.

Presumably her questions would be answered. But sometimes, particularly in quiedy happy moments like now, Miocene wondered if this business was nothing but the Master’s clever way of giving her favorite Submaster a good rest.

A vacation: that was a simple, boring explanation.

And compelling.

Of course this was a vacation!

Miocene rose to her feet, a thousand faces in easy view, and she began to hunt for yesterday’s boy, reasoning:

My first vacation after a thousand centuries of devotion.

Why not…?

Three

It was an expensive vegetable, particularly when you paid for quality. But Washen knew her audience. She was certain that her old friend would appreciate the voices rising from the plant’s many mouths, the voices filling the empty, almost darkened cavity with a serene, deepest-space melody that his particular ear would find lovely. Her friend wasn’t here just now.

But wherever he was, he would hear the llano-vibra singing about blackness and emptiness and the glorious cold between the galaxies.

In another life, her friend raised the llano-vibra as a hobby, mastering the species’ complex genetics, twisting its elaborate genes to where it sang melodies even more serene than this specimen, and on the open market, infinitely more precious.

But he would never sell his companions.

Then his life and peculiar interests moved in even stranger directions, and he lost interest in his once precious hobby.

Eventually, he lost his post as a rising captain.

Crimes had occurred. Charges were filed. Using the escape route that the Master herself ordered her captains to create, the man went into hiding. The only contact Washen had had with him since was a cryptic note telling her that if she ever wanted to reach him, she should plant a llano-vibra in this empty and very dark corner of the ship, then plant herself in a comfortable seat in the nearest human tavern.

Which for the next two days was what Washen did.

The tavern was dark and mostly empty, but considerably warmer than deep space. She sat in back, in a booth carved from a single petrified oak, and she drank an ocean of various cocktails, thinking about everything, and nothing, finally concluding that it was too much to expect anyone to remember you after this many centuries… deciding that it was time to get on with her mission…

A man appeared, squinting into the cheap darkness, and Washen knew it was him. He was large, just as she remembered. The face was changed, but it was still pleasantly homely. His bearing had lost that captainly arrogance, and he wore civilian clothes with an ease that Washen could only envy. Who knew what name he went by? But ignoring the risks, she cupped a hand against her mouth, shouting across the gloom:

“Hey, Pamir! Over here!”

They had been lovers, but they weren’t well suited as a couple. Captains rarely were. The man was headstrong and confident, and he was smart, and in most circumstances, he was perfectly self-reliant. Yet those qualities that made him a successful captain had also weighed down his career. Pamir had no skill or interest in saying the proper words or giving little gifts to people in higher stations. If it hadn’t been for his considerable talent for being right more than most, the Master would have cut off his professional legs at the beginning, leaving him with a minimal rank and next to no responsibilities. Which might have been for the best, as it turned out.

The big man sat and ordered a pain-of-tears, and staring at the homely face, Washen replayed his tragic fall.

When he was a captain, Pamir befriended a very strange alien. And on this ship, strangeness took some doing. It was a Gaian entity—a small, deceptively ordinary humanoid body with a secret capacity to cover any world with its own self. Its flesh could grow rapidly, forming trees and animals and fungal masses, all linked by a single consciousness.The creature was a refugee. It had lost its home world to a second Gaian. And when that archenemy came on board, a full-scale war erupted, eventually destroying an expensive facility as well as the remains of Pamir’s career.

The Gaians fought to an exhausted draw, but their hatred still burned.

On his best day, Pamir was a difficult man, but he had a gift for seeing what was best inside any hopeless mess. He turned a laser on both Gaians, saving just enough of their tissue to let them begin again. Then he used his own flesh to make a child that embraced what was best in both aliens. And because Washen was Pamir’s friend, and because it was the right thing to do, she raised the Child. That was her name for it. The Child. Like any mother, she kept it safe and taught it what it needed to know, and when it grew too powerful to remain on board the Great Ship, she hugged it and kissed it and sent it off to an empty planet where it could live alone, making ancient wrongs right again.

It seemed as if the Child were sitting with them now, listening as its mother told proud stories and happy stories; and hopefully it could sense how very remarkable it was to see its father weep with joy.

Pamir wept like a captain. Quietly, and always under control. Then he wiped his eyes dry with heavy fingers and summoned up a grim smile, looking at his old friend for too long, reading her clothes and face and how she sat with her back against the backmost wall of this dingy pub.

Finally, he asked, “Are you like me?”

She volunteered nothing.

A thick, effortlessly strong hand reached out, touching her through the sleeve of her silk blouse. Then he quiedy, and firmly, and with certainty said, “No. You aren’t like me. That’s pretty obvious.”

She shook her head. “I’m not a wanted felon, if that’s what you mean.”

“Who is?” he asked. Then he laughed, adding, “I’ve never met a genuine criminal. Ask the worst sociopath if he is, and he says he isn’t. He talks a lot about good reasons and bad circumstances and the unfairness of his luck.”

“Is that what you talk about?” she inquired.

The grin strengthened. “Perpetually”

“Have you heard?” she went on. “Have any other captains vanished?”

“No,” he replied. “No, I haven’t heard.”

She watched his hands.

“Do you know if they have, Washen?”

Carefully, she gave away nothing with her eyes.

“But all of you could vanish, and we wouldn’t notice.” He said it, then gave a low laugh, adding, “And we wouldn’t care. At all.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

A softer laugh. Then he explained. “Living any life but a captain’s teaches you. Among all the good lessons, you learn that captains aren’t as important as they tell yourselves they are. Not in the day-to-day business of running this ship, or even in the big, slow, massive matters, either.”

“I’m crushed,” she replied, and laughed.

He shrugged and said, “You don’t believe me.”

“You’d be astonished if I did believe you.” Washen shook her newest drink—a reliable narcotic exploded with the carbon dioxide bubbles—and after sniffing her fill, she suggested, “You just wish that we were unimportant. But without us doing our important work, everything would collapse. In less than a century. Maybe less than a decade.”

The one-time captain shrugged his shoulders again. The subject bored him; it was time to move on.

Washen agreed. She emptied her glass, then let the silence last for as long as her old friend could stand it.

For almost an hour, as it happened.

Then with a delicate caution, he asked, “Is something wrong? You’ve gone underground… so is there some sort of disaster looming…?”

She shook her head with confidence.

And Pamir, bless him, was still enough of a captain not to ask anything else, or even look too deeply into her wide chocolate eyes.

They spent two full days together, and as many nights. Wanting privacy, they rented a shelter inside an alien habitat, filling their days hiking through a dense violet jungle, special boots allowing them to keep their feet since the only pathways were the thick and slippery slime ribbons left by the passing landlords. During their second night, as something massive dragged itself past their little front door, Washen moved into Pamir’s bed, and with a mixture of nervousness and bawdy zest, they made love until they could fall into a deep sleep.

Washen hugged the Child in her dreams. She hugged it ferociously, and sadly. But when she woke again, she realized that it wasn’t the Child that she’d held in her dream arms. It was the ship itself. She had reached around that great and beautiful body of hyperfiber and metal and stone and machinery, begging it not to leave her. For absolutely no good reason, she hurt enough to ache now, and in a captainly way, she wept.

Pamir sat up in bed, watching without comment. A sloppy gaze would have missed the empathy in his eyes and in his pressed-together lips.

Washen wasn’t sloppy. She sniffed and wiped at her face with the backs of both hands, then calmly admitted, “I need to be somewhere. I should be there already, honestly.”

Pamir nodded. Then after a deep, bracing breath, he asked, “How long would it take?”

“Would what take?”

“If I happened to turn myself over to the Master, bent low and begged for her forgiveness… how long would she keep me locked up… and how soon could I get back to being some sort of captain…?”

In her mind’s eye, Washen saw the rigid, colder-than-death Phoenix.

Remembering its punishment and appreciating the Master’s quixotic moods, she touched her newest lover on his lips, pressing down as she told him, “Whatever you do, don’t do that.”

“She’d keep me locked up forever. Is that it?”

Washen said, “I don’t know. But let’s not test the woman, all right? Promise me?”

Yet Pamir was too stubborn even to offer a comforting lie. He just pulled away from her hand, and smiled at a faraway point, and said to Washen, or himself, “I still haven’t made my mind up. And maybe I never will.”

Four

There were six primary fuel tanks, each as large as a good-sized moon, set in a balanced configuration deep inside the ship—spheres of hyperfiber and shaped-vacuum insulation far beneath the hull and the inhabited districts, below even the sewage plants and giant reactors and the deepest stomachs of the great engines. Every tank was a wilderness.

Only the occasional maintenance crew or adventurer would visit them. In boats carved from aerogels, they would voyage across the liquid hydrogen, nothing to see but their own cold lights, the frigid and glassy ocean, and beyond, a seamless, soul-searing night that left most visitors feeling profoundly uneasy.

Aliens occasionally asked permission to live inside one of the fuel tanks.

The leech were an obscure species. Ascetic and pathologically secretive, they had built their settlement where they could be alone. Weaving together thick plastics and diamond threads, they dangled their home from the tank’s ceiling. It was a large structure, yet following leech logic, its interior was a single room. The room stretched on forever in two dimensions while the glowing gray ceiling was near enough to touch. Washen would do just that from time to time. She would stop walking and lay both hands against the plastic’s surprising warmth, and she would breathe, shaking off the worst of her claustrophobia. Voices lured her on.

She couldn’t count all the voices, and they were too cluttered to make sense or even tell her which species was speaking.

Washen had never met the leech.

Not directly, she hadn’t.

But she had been part of the delegation of captains who spoke to the leech’s bravest diplomats, nothing between the parties but a windowless slab of hyperfiber. The aliens spoke with clicks and squeals, neither of which she could hear now. But if it wasn’t the leech, who was it? A dim memory was triggered. At one of the Master’s annual dinners—how many years ago now?—some fellow captain had mentioned in passing that the leech had abandoned their habitat.

Why?

For the moment, she couldn’t recall any reason, or even if she had asked for one.

Washen hoped that the leech had reached their destination, disembarking without incident. Or perhaps they had simply found a more isolated home, if that was possible. But there was always the sad chance that some great disaster had struck, and the poor exophobes had perished.

Shipboard extinctions were more common than the captains admitted in public, or admitted to themselves. Some passengers proved too frail to endure long voyages. Mass suicides and private wars claimed others. Yet as Washen liked to remind herself, for every failed guest there were a hundred species that thrived, or at least managed to etch out a life in some little part of this glorious machine.

To herself, in a whisper, she asked, “Who are you?”

An hour had passed since Washen stepped from the simple elevator. She had begun walking in the habitat’s center, passing first through a necklace of cleansing chambers meant to purify the newly arrived. None of the chambers worked, and every doorway was propped open or dismantled. Obviously someone had been here. But there were no instructions, not even a handwritten note fixed to the last door. Washen had covered eight or nine kilometers in this subearth gravity, which was a few steps more than halfway to the habitat’s single circular wall.

She paused again and placed her hands flush against the ceiling, and twisting her head, she judged from where those voices were corning. The acoustics were that fine.

She broke into an easy jog.

The room’s only furnishings were hard gray pillows. The air was warm and stale, smelling of odd dusts and durable pheromones. Colors seemed forbidden. Even Washen s gaudy touristy clothes seemed to turn grayer by the moment.

The voices gradually grew louder, turning familiar. They were human voices, she realized. And after a little while, she could even tell who they were. Not by their words, which were still a tangled mess. But by their tone. Their self-importance. These were voices meant to give orders and to be obeyed instantly, without question or regret.

She stopped. Squinted.

Against the grayness was something darker. A spot, a blemish. Very nearly nothing, at this distance. She called out, “Hello?”

Then she waited for what seemed to be long enough, deciding that no one had noticed her voice, and as Washen started to shout, “Hello,” again, several voices reached her, telling her, “Hello,” and, “This way,” and, “Welcome, you’re nearly late…!’ Yes, she was.

The Master’s orders had given her two weeks to slip down to this odd place. Washen had said her good-byes to Pamir with some time to spare. But afterward, waiting for a cap-car in a little way-station, she had run into security troops who examined her fake identity and her donated generics, then finally let her go again. After that, just to be certain that no one was hiding in her shadow, she had wandered another full day before starting for here.

Washen began to run.

But when the dark spot became people standing in knots and little lines, she slowed to a walk again, aiming for decorum.

A quiet rain of applause began, then fell away.

Suddenly, Washen couldn’t count all the captains spread out before her, and putting on her most captainly smile, she joined them, almost laughing as she asked, “So why, why, why are we here?”

No one seemed to know this had happened. But the captains had obviously spent the last few days talking about little else. Each had a pet theory to offer, and none had the bad taste to defend their words too far. Then that ritual was finished, at least for the moment, and colleagues asked Washen for stories about her travels. Where had she wandered, what marvels had she accomplished, and did she have two or twenty interesting ideas about this whole crazy business?

Washen mentioned a few touristy haunts but avoided any word that could, even by accident, remind anyone of Pamir.

Then with a shrug of her shoulders, she admitted, “I don’t have guesses. I’m presuming this is a necessary business, and gloriously important, but until I have the facts, that’s all that I can assume.”

“Bravo,” said one gray-eyed captain.

Washen was eating. And drinking. The first arrival had followed a steady drip-drip-dripping sound, coming to this place and discovering stacks of sealed rations and a dozen kegs of the ship’s best wine, brought from the Alpha Sea district, raised by the hands and feet of tailored apes. Judging by the size of the drops and the small red puddle, the keg had opened itself the moment that first captain had stepped from the elevator.

Delicious wine, thought Washen.

Again, the captain said, “Bravo.”

She looked at him now.

“Diu,” he said, offering a hand and a wide smile.

She balanced her mug on her plate, then shook his with her free hand, saying, “We met at the Masters banquet. Twenty years ago, was it?”

“Twenty-five.”

Like most captains, Diu was tall for his species. He had craggy features and an easy charm that instilled trust in the human passengers. Even dressed in a simple gown, he looked like someone of consequence.

“It’s kind of you to remember me,” he said. “Thank you.”

“You’re quite welcome.”

Even when he stood still, Diu was moving. His flesh seemed to vibrate, as if the water inside were ready to boil. “What do you think of the Master’s taste?” he inquired, gray eyes brightening. “Isn’t this a bizarre place to meet?”

“Bizarre,” Washen echoed. “That’s the word.”

For the moment, they looked at their surroundings. The ceiling and floor ended with a plain gray wall punctuated with a very rare window.

Bracing herself, ‘ Washen asked, “Whatever happened to the leech? Does anyone remember?”

“They leaped into the sea below,” said Diu. “No,” she muttered.

“Or we got them to their destination.”

“Which was it?”

“Both,” he reported. “Or something else entirely. They’re such a strange species. Apparently, they can’t take any course without pretending to go a hundred other places at the same time.”

To confuse their imaginary enemies, no doubt. “Wherever they are,” Diu assured her, “I’m sure they’re doing well.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Washen replied, knowing what was polite. In the face of ignorance, a captain should make positive sounds.

Diu hovered beside her, smiling as his flesh shivered with nervous energy.

Twenty-five years since they met… and what, if anything, did Washen remember about the man…?

Her thoughts were interrupted.

A sudden voice, familiar and close, told her, “You were nearly late, darling. Not that anyone noticed.” Miocene.

Turning with a respectful haste, Washen found a face that she knew better than most. The Submasters face was as narrow as an axe blade and less warm, and every bone beneath the taut flesh had its own enduring sharpness. Amused, the dark eyes had a chilly brightness. The short brown hair was streaked with snow. Taller than anyone else, Miocene’s head brushed against the ceiling. Yet she refused to dip her head, even for the sake of simple comfort.

“Not that you know any more than the rest of us,” said the tall woman. “But what do you believe the Master wants?”

Others grew quiet. Captains held their breath, secretly delighted that someone else had to endure the woman’s scrutiny.

“I don’t know anything,” said Washen, with conviction. “I know you,” Miocene reminded her. “You have a guess, or ten.”

“Perhaps…”

“Everyone’s waiting, darling.”

Washen sighed, and gestured. “I count several hundred clues here.”

“And they are?”

“Us.”

Their group stood near one of the rare windows—a wide slit of thick, distorting plastic. Nothing was outside but blackness and vacuum. The ocean of liquid hydrogen, vast and calm and unforgivably cold, lay fifty kilometers below their toes. Nothing was visible in the window but their own murky reflections. Washen glanced at herself, at her handsome, ageless face, her raven-and-snow hair pulled back in a sensible bun, her wide chocolate eyes betraying confidence as well as a much-deserved pleasure.

“The Master selected us,” she offered. “Which means that we are the clues.”

Miocene glanced at her own reflection. “What do you see, darling?”

“The elite of the elite.” Washen began singing off names, listing bonuses and promotions earned over the last millenia. “Manka is a new second-grade. Aasleen was in charge of the last engine upgrade, which came in below budget and five years early. Saluki and Westfall have won the Master’s Award more times than I can recall—”

“I bet they remember,” someone called out.

The captains laughed until they ran out of breath.

Washen continued. “Portion is the youngest Submaster.

Johnson Smith jumped three grades with his last promotion. And then there’s Diu.” She gestured at the figure beside her.” Already an eleventh-grade, which is astonishing. You boarded the ship—correct me if I’m wrong—as a passenger. An ordinary tourist. Is that right?”

The energized man winked, saying, “True, madam. And bless you for remembering.”

She shrugged, then turned.

“And there’s you, Madam Miocene. One of the Master’s oldest, most loyal and cherished assistants. When I was a little girl living in By-the-sea, I’d see you and the Master Captain sitting on the rocks together, planning our glorious future.”

“I’m an old hag, in other words.”

“Ancient,” Washen concurred. “Not to mention one of only three Submasters with first-chair status at the Master’s table.”

The tall woman nodded, drinking in the flattery.

“Whatever the reason,” said Washen, “the Master wants her very best captains. That much is obvious.”

With an amused tone, the Submaster said, “But darling. Let’s not forget your own accomplishments. Shall we?”

“I never do,” Washen replied, earning a healthy laugh from everyone. And because nothing was more unseemly in a captain than false modesty, she admitted, “I’ve heard the rumors. I’m slated to become the next Submaster.”

Miocene grinned, but she didn’t comment on rumors.

Which was only right.

Instead she took an enormous breath, and with a strong, happy voice, she asked everyone, “Can you smell yourselves?”

The captains sniffed, in reflex.

“That’s the smell of ambition, my dears. Pure ambition.” The tall woman inhaled again, and again, then with a booming voice admitted, “No other stink is so tenacious, or in my mind, even half as sweet…!”

Five

Another two captains arrived to applause and good-natured abuse. No one else was coming, though there was no way to know it at the time. Some hours later one of the last-comers was using the leech latrine—little more than a dilating hole in a random, suitably remote part of the room—and peering off in an empty direction, he noticed motion. With eyes sharper than any old-styled hawks, he squinted, finally resolving a distinct something that seemed to be growing larger, moving toward him from a new, unexpected direction.

With both decorum and haste, the captain ordered his trousers back on and jogged back to the others, telling the ranking officer what he had seen.

Miocene nodded. Smiled. Then said, “Fine. Thank you.”

“But what should we do, madam?” the young captain blurted.

“Wait,” the Submaster replied. “That’s what the Master would want.”

Washen stared into the distance, ceiling and floor meeting in a perfect line. After a long while, the perfection acquired a bump. A swollen bright bit of nothing was moving toward them, covering distance with a glacial patience. Everyone stood together, waiting. Then the bump split into several unequal lumps. The largest was bright as a diamond. The others spread out on either side, and that’s when the captains began to whisper, It is. Her.”

Saying, “Finally,” under their breaths.

An hour later, the undisputed ruler of the ship arrived.

Accompanied by a melody of Vestan horns and angcl-voiced humans, the Master crossed the final hundred meters. While her officers still wore civilian disguises, she had the mirrored cap and sturdy uniform that her office demanded. Her chosen body was broad and extraordinarily deep. Partly, that body was a measure of status. But the Master also needed room to house a thoroughly augmented brain. Thousands of ship functions had to be monitored and adjusted, without delays, using a galaxy of buried nexuses. As another person might walk and breathe, the Master Captain unconsciously ruled the ship from wherever she stood, or sat, or found a spacious bed where her needy parts could sleep.

A vast hand skated along the oyster-gray ceiling, keeping the Master’s head safe from being unceremiously bumped.

She had soft bright golden skin—a shade popular with many non-terran species—and fine white hair woven into a Gordian bun, and her pretty face was so round and smooth that it could have belonged to a toddler. But the radiant brown-black eyes and the wide grinning mouth conveyed enormous age and a flexible wisdom.

Every captain bowed.

As was custom, the Submasters dropped farthest.

Then a dozen low-grade captains began dragging the hard leech cushions toward her. Diu was among the supplicants, on his knees and smiling, even after the great woman had strolled past.

“Thank you for coming,” said a voice that always took Washen by surprise. It was a very quiet voice, and unhurried, perpetually amused by whatever those wide eyes were seeing. “I know you’re perplexed,” she assured, “and I trust that you’re concerned. A good sensible terror, perhaps.” Washen smiled to herself.

“So let me begin,” said the Master. Then the child’s face broke into its own smile, and she said, “First let me tell you my reasons for this great game. And then, if you haven’t been struck dead by surprise, I’ll explain exactly what I intend for you.”

Accompanying the Master were four guards.

Two humans; two robots. But you never knew which were the machines dressed as humans, or the humans with a machine’s sense of purpose—an intentional ruse making it more difficult for enemies to exploit any weakness.

One guard released a little float-globe that took its position beside the Master.

The gray glow of the ceiling diminished, plunging the room into a late-dusk gloom. Then the amused voice said. “The ship. Please.”

A real-time projection swallowed the float-globe. Built from data channeled through the Master’s internal systems, the ship reached from the floor to the ceiling. Its forward face looked at the audience. The hull was slick and gray, cloaked in a colorful aurora of dust shields, a thousand lasers firing every second, evaporating the largest hazards. On the horizon, a tiny flare meant that another starship was arriving. New passengers, perhaps. Washen thought of the machine intelligences, wondering who’d meet them in her absence.

“Now,” said the Master, “I’m going to peel my onion.”

In an instant, the ship’s armor evaporated. Washen could make out the largest caverns and chambers and the deep cylindrical ports, plus the hyperfiber bones that gave the structure its great strength.

Then the next few hundred kilometers were removed. Rock and water, air and deeper hyperfiber were exposed.

“The perfect architecture,” the Master declared. She stepped closer to the shrinking projection, its glow illuminating a grinning face. Resembling an enormous young girl with her favorite plaything, she confessed, “In my mind, there’s no greater epic in history. Human history, or anyone else’s.”

Washen knew this speech, word for word.

“I’m not talking about this voyage of ours,” the Master continued. “Circumnavigating the galaxy is an accomplishment, of course. But the greater adventure was in finding this ship before anyone else, then leaving our galaxy to reach it first. Imagine the honor: to be the first living organism to step inside these vast rooms, the first sentient mind in billions of years to experience their majesty, their compelling mystery. It was a magnificent time. Ask any of us who were there. To the soul, we consider ourselves nothing but blessed.”

An ancient, honorable boast, and her prerogative.

“We did an exemplary job,” she assured. “I won’t accept any other verdict. In that first century—despite limited resources, the shadow of war, and the sheer enormity of the job—we mapped more than ninety-nine percent of the ship’s interior. And as I could point out, I led the first team to find their way through the plumbing above us, and I was the first to see the sublime beauty of the hydrogen sea below us…”

Washen hid a smile, thinking, A fuel tank is a fuel tank is a fuel tank.

“Here we are,” the Master announced.

The projection had shrunk by nearly half. The ship’s main fuel tanks were emerging from the frozen mantle, appearing as six tiny bumps evenly spaced along the ship’s waist—each tank set directly beneath one of the main ports. The leech habitat was beneath the Master’s straightened finger, and on this scale, it was no larger than a fat protozoan.

“And now, we vanish.”

Without sound or fuss, another layer of stone was removed. Then, another. And deeper slices of the fuel tanks revealed great spheres filled with hydrogen that changed from a peaceful liquid into a blackish solid, and deeper still, an eerily transparent metal.

“These hydrogen seas have always been the deepest features,” she commented. “Below them is nothing but iron and a stew of other metals squashed under fantastic pressures.”

The ship had been reduced to a smooth black ball—the essential ingredient in a multitude of parlor games.

“Until now, we knew everything about the core.” The Master paused, allowing herself a knowing grin. “Clear, consistent evidence proved that when the ship was built, its crust and mande and core were stripped of radionuclides.The goal, we presumed, was to help cool the interior. To make the rock and metal still and predictable. We didn’t know how the builders managed their trick, but there was a network of narrow tunnels leading down, branching as they dropped deeper, all reinforced with hyperfiber and energy buttresses.”

Washen was breathing faster now. Nodding.

“By design or the force of time, those little tunnels collapsed.” The Master paused, sighed, and shook her golden face. “Not enough room for a microchine to pass. Or so we’ve always believed.”

Washen felt her heart beating, a suffused and persistent and delicious joy building.

“There was never, ever, the feeblest hint of any hidden chamber,” the Master proclaimed. “I won’t allow criticism on this matter. Every possible test was carried out. Seismic. Neutrino imaging. Even palm-of-the-hand calculations of mass and volume. Until some fifty-three years ago, there wasn’t one sane reason to think that our maps were in any sense incomplete.”

A silence had engulfed the audience.

Quietly, smoothly, the Master said, “The full ship. Please.”

Again, the iron ball was dressed in cold rock and hyper-fiber.

“We pivot ninety,” she said.

As if suddenly bashful, the ship’s leading face turned away from her. Rocket nozzles swung into view, each large enough to cradle a moon. None were firing, and according to the schedule, none would fire for another three decades.

“The impact, please.”

Washen stepped closer, anticipating what she would see. Fifty-three years ago, passing through the Black Nebula, the ship collided with a swarm of comets. Nobody was surprised by the event. Brigades of captains and their staff had spent decades making preparations, mapping and remapping the space before them, searching for hazards as well as paying customers. But avoiding those comets would have cost too much fuel. And why bother? The swarm wasn’t harmless, but it was believed to be as close to harmless as possible.

Gobs of antimatter were thrown at the largest hazards.

Lasers evaporated the tumbling fragments.

The captains watched the drama play out again, in rigorous detail: off in distant portions of the room, little suns flickered in and out of existence. Gradually the explosions moved closer, and finally, too close. Lasers fired without pause, evaporating trillions of tons of ice and rock. The shields brightened, moving from a dull blanket of red into a livid purple cloak, fighting to push gas and dust aside. But debris still peppered the hull, a thousand pinpricks dancing on its silver-gray face. And at the bombardment’s peak, there was a blistering white flash that dwarfed the other explosions. The captains blinked and grimaced, remembering the instant, and their shared sense of utter embarrassment.

A mountain of nickel-iron had slipped through their vaunted defenses.

The impact rattled the ship. Gelatin dinners wiggled on their plates, and quiet seas rippled, and the most alert or sensitive passengers said, “Goodness,” and perhaps grabbed hold of something more solid than themselves. Then for months, Remoras had worked to fill the new crater with fresh hyperfiber, and the nervous and bored passengers talked endlessly about that single scary moment.

The ship was never in danger.

In response, the captains had publicly paraded their careful schematics and rigorous calculations, proving that the hull could absorb a thousand times that much energy, and there would still be no reason to be nervous, much less terrified. But just the same, certain people and certain species had insisted on being afraid.

With a palpable relish, the Master said, “Now the cross section. Please.”

The nearest hemisphere evaporated. In the new schematic, pressure waves appeared as subtle colors emerging from the blast site, spreading out and diluting, then pulling together again at the stern, shaking a lot of the ship’s plumbing before the waves met and bounced, passing back the way they had come, back to the blast site where they met again, and again bounced. Even today, a thin vibration was detectable, whispering its way through the ship as well as the captains’ own bones. “AI analysis. Please.”

A map was laid over the cross section, everything expected and familiar. Except for the largest feature, that is.

“Madam,” said a sturdy voice. Miocene’s voice. “It’s an anomaly, granted. But doesn’t that feature… doesn’t it seem… unlikely…?”

“Which was why I thought it was nothing,” the Master concurred. “And my most trustworthy AI—part of my own neural net—agreed with me. This region defines some change in composition. Or in density. Certainly nothing more.” She paused for a long moment, carefully watching her captains. Then with a gracious, oversized smile, she admitted, “The possibility of a hollow core has to seem ludicrous.”

Submasters and captains nodded with a ragged hopefulness.

But they hadn’t come here because of anomalies. Washen knew it, and she stepped closer. How large was that hole? Estimates were easy, but the simple math created some staggering numbers.

“Ludicrous,” the Master repeated. “But then I thought back to when I was a baby, barely a century old. Who would have guessed then that a jovian world could be made into a starship, and that I would inherit such a wonder for myself?”

Just the same, thought Washen, some ideas will always be insane.

“Madam,” Miocene said with a certain delicacy. “I’m sure you realize that a chamber of these proportions would make our ship considerably less massive. Assuming we know the densities of the intervening iron, naturally…”

“But you’re assuming that our hollow core is hollow.” The Master grinned at her favorite officer, then at everyone. Her golden face was serene, wringing pleasure out of her audience’s confusion and ignorance. Calmly, she reminded them, “This began as someone else’s vessel. And we shouldn’t forget that we still don’t know why our home was built. For all we can say, this was someone’s cargo ship, designed for moving things other than people, and here, finally, we’ve stumbled across the ships cargo hold.”

Most of the captains shuddered.

“Imagine that something is hiding inside us,” the Master commanded. “Cargo, particularly anything substantial, has to be restrained, protected. So imagine a series of buttressing fields that would keep our cargo from rattling around every time we adjusted our course. Then imagine that these buttresses are so powerful and so enduring that they can mask whatever it is that’s down there—”

“Madam,” someone shouted.

After a pause, the Master said, “Yes, Diu.”

“Just tell us, please… what in hell is down there…?”

“A spherical object,” she replied. And with a slow wink, she added, “It is the size of Mars, about. But considerably more massive.”

Washen’s heart began to gallop.

The audience let out a low, wounded groan.

“Show them,” the Master said to her AI. “Show them what we found.”

Again, the image changed. Nestled inside the great ship was another world, black as iron and distinctly smaller than the surrounding chamber. The simple possibility of such an enormous, unlikely discovery didn’t strike Washen as one revelation, but as many, coming in waves, making her gasp and shake her head as she looked at her colleagues’ faces, barely seeing any of them.

“This world—and it is a genuine world—has an atmosphere.” The Master was laughing quietly, and her quiet voice kept offering impossibilities. “Despite the abundance of iron, the atmosphere has free oxygen. And there’s enough water for small rivers and lakes. All of those delicious symptoms that come with living worlds are present here—”

“How do you know?” Washen called out. Then, in reflex, “No disrespect intended, madam!”

“I haven’t visited the world, if that’s your question.” She giggled like a child, telling everyone, “Yet fifty years of hard, secret work have paid dividends. Using self-replica ting drones, I’ve been able to reopen one of those collapsed tunnels. And I’ve sent curious probes to the chamber for a first look. That’s why I can stand here, assuring you that not only does this world exist, but that each of you are going to see it for yourselves.”

Washen glanced at Diu, wondering if her face was wearing the same wide smile.

“By the way, I named this world.” The Master winked and said, “Marrow.” Then again, she said, “Marrow.” Then by way of explanation, she said, “It’s a very old word. It means ‘where the blood is born.’ ”

Washen felt her own blood coursing through her trembling body.

“Marrow is reserved for you,” the Master Captain promised.

The floor seemed to pitch and roll beneath Washen’s legs, and she couldn’t remember when she last took a meaningful breath.

“For you,” the giant woman proclaimed. “My most talented, trustworthy friends…!”

Washen whispered, “Thank you.”

Everyone said the words, in a ragged chorus.

Then Miocene called out, “Applause for the Master! Applause!”

But Washen heard nothing, and said nothing, staring hard at the strange black face of that most unexpected world.