Every rational soul had panicked. O’Layle reminded his companions that each of them had imagined the worst, and in those next minutes and hours, the worst had seemed inevitable. Everybody here had done their frantic best to escape, but with the fighting and damage, and the general martial law, the rest of them had failed. O’Layle was the lucky exception. Though it wasn’t exactly luck that bought him passage to the open hull, nor did good fortune give him that little escape blister and enough momentum to carry him off into the deep and cold and relatively safe depths of space.
With a sadness that was mostly genuine, he would tell his ex-lover, “I couldn’t take you with me.”
She would pretend not to hear him.
“How could I take you? The blister’s tiny, and your mass would have doomed both of us.”
In his dreams, his arguments sounded logical and noble, and he was always surprised when the sweet young face glanced in his direction, those white eyes growing hot as a matching voice spat, “Fucking coward.” Then she would stand abruptly, and everybody at the little table would rise. Each might glance at O’Layle, using expressions laced with scorn and hatred and sometimes a pained pity. Then they would leave him sitting alone, and he would hear his own sorry voice explaining why he was the most reasonable and practical creature in the galaxy.
“Just to do what I did … it took every resource I had! The contacts. The ridiculous bribes. I had to slip past the security patrols, get myself up to the launch site. Most were broke before they even got on top of the hull. And even then, there were more of us than there were blisters, and the crew in charge of the whole operation just laughed at us, saying, ‘Guess what? There’s going to be a surcharge.’ Which I’d halfway expected, and I was ready. Faster than others, I could transfer the last of my money into ghost accounts, and what did I get for a lifetime’s savings? A tiny, tiny blister. A hyperfiber ball barely two meters in radius. With an iron collar around its waist, and me strapped inside it, and I was plopped down on one of the only magrails to survive the war. We were on the backside of the ship. Did I mention that? On the ship’s stern, with the red sun already behind us, the black hole still over the horizon. They set my blister on the little rail, and I draped an old crush-web over my body, and they started to accelerate me. A huge, bone-snapping acceleration. ‘We’ll send you toward a nice living world,’ the voice in my head promised. Then I died. I became a comatose pulp lying beneath the crush-web, and unknown to me, there was a power surge. A hiccup. I found out later. I wasn’t even a thousand kilometers into the launch cycle, and there was a sudden disruption … and you well know, you can’t do anything wrong at the beginning of an engineless voyage, or your chances of getting to your destination fall away to nothing …
“I would have aborted, if I’d known. But by then I was a wet smear and a blind brain held together by the web.
“Then after another seven thousand kilometers, I roared out into the shadow of the ship, and my blister was released from the rail, my iron collar fell off, and my body slowly, slowly began putting itself back together. I’ve never been so dead before. It took days just to remake my bones, my organs and skin. When I was conscious again, the first thing I did was look out through my little diamond windows. The black hole had fallen behind, and I was free. I watched the ship. I watched you. Honestly, I hoped you would survive. Why wouldn’t I want the best for all of you? My thousands of good friends, and of course I was thrilled when you changed course just enough … for days and days, I watched you fighting … a gray ball getting smaller and duller … slower than me by a long ways and with a slightly different trajectory … and then I couldn’t see you anymore, except inside my head …”
The dream always ended there. O’Layle would stop explaining himself, and as he glanced up and down the avenue, he discovered that he was alone. Not only had his friends vanished, but the multitudes of strangers had evaporated, too, and the air had turned stale and dark, and there were no more shops or little forests to enjoy. The ship was as empty as the moment it was discovered, a palpable loneliness hanging over the vastness, making it almost easy for the man to open his eyes, looking at the tiny but comforting space that was his world.
O’LAYLE’S WORLD WAS a blister of moderate-grade hyperfiber punctuated with little diamond eyes—a nearly perfect sphere enclosing layers of recycling equipment and automated beacons, finger reactors and streamlined libraries, plus a minimal navigational system and a single holo projector. Damp air lay at the hollow center, and a naked human body was the only substantial inhabitant. O’Layle’s minimal diet had triggered an assortment of lifeboat genes, reducing his metabolism to the bare minimum. One little meal every other day was ample, and he cleared his bowels less than once each week. Sleep filled sixteen hours out of his typical day, and his waking time was spent reading projected books and speaking quietly to himself, or he did nothing but contemplate his circumstances and the elaborate path that had brought him to this place. Then on those rare moments when he could coax himself into a halfway buoyant mood, O’Layle would use the diamond eyes, peering out into the increasingly black universe.
More than anything, O’Layle was amazed how quickly he had adapted to his new and extremely tiny life. Before this, he was a comfortable if not quite wealthy human, and if every day had seemed like every other, at least the mornings brought the possibility of doing one or two or a thousand entirely new things. The ship was a wonderland of diversions and raw surprise. Sitting in any public avenue, he could watch inhabitants from a fat fraction of the galaxy as they strolled past. Or rolled past. Or glided overhead on long, powerful wings. And if he wished, he could spend the day exploring the Great Ship. There were endless caverns laced with rivers and deep cold lakes, and dozens of genuine oceans, and because there were so many passengers busily making homes for themselves, the caverns and big rooms were changing every few centuries. Every wandering would feel new and strange, and memorable, and why hadn’t he done more of that when he had the chance?
Because there was always time, he had believed. Tomorrow was an endless parade, and he was comfortable where he sat, and so why go to so much sweaty trouble today?
It was a mistaken assumption, yes.
A long life thoroughly wasted.
But still, O’Layle couldn’t remain angry or forlorn. Against so many odds, the ship had survived, and he was alive, too. Both of them had won, at least temporarily. And wasn’t there a small but genuine chance of being saved? Perhaps he might even one day return to the ship and rejoin his circle of friends and lovers—provided that enough time had passed for them to forgive his abandonment, or at least forget their own rage. Then he would have a spectacular story to share. How many souls had ever traveled between the stars alone, inside a tiny cocoon of hyperfiber, with no companion but their own tiny soul?
The chance of that future—survival followed by redemption—was fantastically small. On the brink of impossible, frankly. His tiny lifeboat had no engines, thus there was no way to adjust its course. Its launch had been hurried and flawed, and the navigational equipment was consistent in its expert pessimism. O’Layle would miss his target sun by almost a tenth of a light-year, which was a considerable distance. Someone would have to be listening for his beacon, and that same someone would need to launch their own ship at a fantastic velocity. His lifeboat lacked engines, but it had the momentum of the Great Ship plus the punch that had been delivered by the electromagnetic rail. He was streaking through the heavens at nearly half lightspeed, which would be a challenge for the best star-travelers to match. Even if he had remained on course, few could have caught him, and fewer still would have bothered. His passage through any solar system would take less than a long morning, unless it ended with his fiery impact against someone’s suddenly boiling sea.