O’Layle originally wished for an impact course. That would make him a threat, which would force the natives to deal with his presence, in one fashion or another. But eventually he settled on a less aggressive and possibly more compelling scheme: In his first twenty months on board the blister, he had reworked the beacon’s endless message. What began as a general plea for help delivered in a thousand popular languages was now an elaborate set of promises and lies, implications and subtle miscues.
“I am a very important person,” he told the stars.
In honest terms, he described the ship that he had abandoned—its majesty and great age and the powerful display of technologies aboard—and then with a rugged assurance, he painted himself as being one of the very best experts about the Great Ship. “I have explored it in full,” he lied. “And I was a member of the crew for the last long while. I am a qualified engineer possessing a robust working knowledge of the ship’s enormous engines and its reactors and the various means by which the highest-grade hyperfiber can be produced in planetary quantities.”
His fable gained a backbone through the use of little details—the harvest of a long life spent sharing tables with wiser, more informed souls. In particular, he borrowed from a human named Perri—an expert explorer who was said to know the ship better than even the captains knew it, and who had walked or floated or flown through as much as one or two percent of the ship’s considerable volume.
“It is a wonder, my ship,” he proclaimed.
“I want to show it to you,” he told the silent stars. “Come help me, and I will give you everything that I know about this ancient wonder.”
Would that be enough bait?
For another few months, he thought so. But then the doubts began to gnaw, and after some considerable reflection, he decided to build on those rather pedestrian lies. During his last few hours on board the ship—in the midst of the panic and the desperate fight to save it—a wild rumor had found its way to O’Layle. By then, everybody knew about the secret world buried at the center of the ship, but inside Marrow were more secrets. Greater mysteries, claimed the fresh rumors. In fact, according to a onetime lover who had recently spoken with Perri, there was the distinct and momentous possibility that the Great Ship had been built to entomb something from the very beginnings of the universe. Something tiny, but powerful. Something with a soul and intentions and the capacity to reach out of its abode, influencing the thoughts of the lesser souls within its ethereal grasp.
O’Layle borrowed parts of that very odd rumor.
But he decided to downplay the entity’s malicious nature. His unseen audience needed to feel curiosity, not fear.
For more years, the beacon’s central message was about the ancient and powerful soul riding aboard the ship—the ship he knew so well. And that was why O’Layle could entertain a genuine optimism about his prospects. Alien or human, every sentient organism was inflicted by a measure of greed. His long, comfortable life had been spent using that innate quality, slaking his own considerable thirsts. Perhaps the creatures living on the first world wouldn’t respond, but there would be plenty of opportunities in the future. He would spend another few thousand years inside the galaxy or on its fringes … there was no way to know how many worlds would hear his pleas and promises … and surely someone would launch an armada to save the little man who could deliver the Great Ship to them … !
How likely this was, O’Layle couldn’t guess.
But the plan gave him hope, and hope became a habit, and the habit brought a kind of rugged happiness that made it possible for him to open the diamond eyes on an irregular basis, inviting the glories of the universe to trickle down inside his very tiny world.
In darkness, O’Layle saw nothing but stars and the blackness between. Relativistic velocities made the retreating suns turn redder than normal, and there was some distortion. But in most ways, he saw nothing too strange and nothing in any great hurry to change. Before him were few visible suns, blued by their approaching velocity, and beyond lay the deep black mass of dust and gas that blocked an increasingly huge portion of the sky. Pass through the nebula, and there were some thick bands of stars. His navigational charts promised as much. If he could just pierce the cloud of dust and gas without suffering a significant collision, then everything seemed possible.
Even salvation.
“I am important,” he told the universe. “And I know about things far more important than me.”
The beacon’s tiny voice sang and sang.
And then came the day when O’Layle awoke from his usual dreams, and after a tidy little meal of cold, heavily sugared fats, and after a sip of distilled water and squirt of urine into the appropriate orifice, he told the diamond eyes to open.
“Show me the universe,” he whispered.
But instead of the stars and the nebula, he saw something else entirely, and for a very long while he just drifted in the middle of his tiny world, startled and puzzled, laughing in that nervous, almost joyous, way people use when they feel as if they should be scared, but really, they can’t quite tell why.
Four
Washen was failing, spinning wildly downward into a perfect blackness, silent and boundless. This was a dream, and an old dream at that, and after a few moments of acceleration, she tried to yank herself awake. But even then, she felt her body plunging into the coal black depths. Long legs kicked while arms lashed out, reflexively clutching for handholds. Then the sheets took hold of her, reassuring with their firm embrace and instant warmth, and possessed by that narrow clarity that comes after sleep, Washen realized that she was lying in her own bed, safe as safe could be, and that she was far from being alone.
But if Pamir noticed her unseemly little episode, he had the good manners or the sturdy indifference to pretend sleep. He lay in his customary pose—naked on top of the sheets, on his back, hands tucked firmly behind his head. Something in that simple posture betrayed an innate defiance, or perhaps a brute indifference. Any sort of enemy might lurk in this darkness, but he proclaimed with his body that he truly did not care.
Quietly, Washen gasped.
Wishing for any distraction, she triggered a service nexus, and her apartment delivered to her bedside a chilled glass of water and another of pawpaw juice.
The bedroom was a substantial chamber, the floor tiled with slowly changing views teased out of the Mandelbrot fractal, the surrounding black brick wall rising toward a high domelike ceiling. Dimly illuminated, the ceiling displayed a present-time view delivered from the ship’s armored prow. Blue-shifted light and the relentless shimmer of the shields had been carefully scrubbed away. What remained was a ring of stars that lay at the bottom of the ceiling—the eye able to peer hundreds of light-years through the heart of the Milky Way. But directly above were far fewer suns, most of them rather small and all of them close by, and beyond those points of light was a different species of blackness, deeper and much stronger, possessing a palpable mass and a distinct chill that any experienced starfarer would recognize at a glance.
Washen did more than glance at the nebula.
Carefully, she sat up. She allowed her sheets to wick away her perspiration, and her pillows built a little chair against which she could sit and sip at her cold water, then the juice.
Enormous telescopes had once stood near the ship’s prow—great fields of eyes probing the space to come. But when the Remoras fought the Waywards, they needed a trap. They had lured their enemies out onto the ship’s leading face, then destroyed the lasers and shields, bringing down a rain of dust and comets that obliterated an entire army, plus every mirror and each of the hundred-kilometer dishes. The entire system had to be built again from nothing, including support facilities and key upgrades. This was eighteen years after the war’s end, and only now were enough eyes and ears ready to give the First Chair an honest view of what was to come.