With a wet gasp, the man began to dream. Under his lids, the eyes jumped back and forth, and with a shameless ease, his penis began to stiffen, the vivid dark blood pooling inside a structure older than the species. That thought drew Washen into thinking about people in general: Why was it that with all the tools and tricks at their disposal, people still looked like people? Artificial genetics and bioceramic materials were discovered ages ago, yet in most cases, people had applied these extraordinary technologies to enhance their traditional bodies. They made themselves immortal, and also, immortally human. And it wasn’t just human beings. Harum-scarums were a considerably older species, scattered across thousands of light-years and a wide array of worlds, yet they cherished their ancient appearance and most of their instincts. The majority of the passengers were the same. Reach a certain point in development, and the sentient species ceased to change. When you could look and act in any fashion, you tended to gravitate toward familiar bodies and old manners, leading lives that you willingly let carry you for the next million years.
Washen reached for the ancient penis. But her hand stopped short, and with a whisper, she said, “Radio. Laser light. Any artificial signal.”
The ceiling took on a new appearance.
As expected, the nebula was riddled with modulated noise. Tightly focused beams and weak lasers jumped from little world to little world. What they could see from the Great Ship was the occasional trace of leakage—millions of brief examples collected over the last several years. And what they had learned from this vast puddle of data was nothing. Or nearly nothing. What lived inside the nebula used deeply encrypted tools for every kind of chatter, and that secrecy, taken alone, might be a clue. A harbinger.
The nebula had its official designation. But every species seemed to have its own name for that dark and cold and rather mysterious smear. Some passengers used any of twenty common labels: The Cloud. The Deep Dark. The Dust. And on a few occasions, The Face of God. But a name employed by the Master Captain, almost in passing, had been accepted by the captains, and as the years passed, it was gaining favor elsewhere.
“When I was a very young girl,” the Master said at her most recent banquet, “there was an artifact in the possession of one of my relatives.” Standing before a silent and increasingly alien audience, she had recounted an age very close to the beginnings of human civilization. “My grandfather had this antique sitting on his desk. It was a very simple container. Heavy glass upon which sat a silver lid. A fancy object, perhaps, but not ornate. A couple centuries old already, which made it seem deliciously ancient to me. Inside that little basin was an intense and thick black ink derived from the excretions of a certain sea creature. A beautiful animal with a close resemblance to several of our honored passengers.” The woman had grinned at some portion of that memory, or perhaps just to show her audience that she could feel sentimental about her long-ago childhood. “What humans would do, back in ancient times … they would grip a metal-and-wood tool in one hand, dipping it into the ink, and with that they would compose some of the oldest, finest works in our literature …
“That artifact was called an inkwell,” she continued. “A little bath of potential from which great and hopeful things were born …”
AGAIN PAMIR ROLLED onto his back, his dream ending.
For a while, with a haphazard discipline, Washen attempted to fall back to sleep. The inkwell and its neighboring suns lay overhead again, looking much as a motionless human eye would see them, and she soon reached that point where thousands of years of habit and every inborn reflex were coaxing her back into a light, dream-stirred sleep. But it didn’t last. She was awake again, suddenly and utterly, her mind tripping over another one of her endless obsessions.
Silently, she sat up in bed.
Without an audible sound, she told her nexuses what she wanted. Immersion eyes were all-spectrum cameras tied into AI overseers that could never blink. Nearly twenty thousand kilometers beneath her apartment was a single immersion eye. Between it and her was a sealed, secured channel. No one but Washen could connect with it on a whim, and perhaps no one else could care half as much. In an instant, she and her bed as well as her blissfully ignorant partner were stuck to a surface of high-grade hyperfiber, and above her was an entire world held suspended from the chamber walls by an ethereal array of mighty buttresses.
Marrow.
The war had left it badly mauled, but alive. Eighteen years later, the planet’s atmosphere was still choked with dust and ash, and the vacuum above was gradually growing dark, some kind of night approaching within the next couple centuries. Directly beneath the tiny eye, where the once great Hazz City had stood, an ocean of molten iron and nickel still bubbled and spat at the sky. But there was solid ground elsewhere, and liquid water. The immersion eye could see the telltale signs of photosynthesis and oxygen metabolisms. Waywards had survived, in some battered fashion, along with the native life-forms, enduring and strange in their own right. More than Washen could let on, she missed that odd world. She had lived there for better than forty-six centuries. Those people were her own desperate grandchildren, and she was their absent grandmother who had set her allegiance to the surrounding ship, leaving them to weather these horrors by themselves.
Washen was still crying when Pamir woke.
The whisper from a nexus told him it was morning. The urging of ancient biorhythms made him ready for his day. His grunt was soft and disgusted. Looking up, he said, “If you want, I could cut out your heart. Would that make you feel better?”
“You might as well.”
“The Waywards picked that war with us,” he reminded her. Then with a glowering expression, he added, “Besides, this is where you belong. For the moment, you can’t help anyone as much as you can help us.”
“You’re nice to say that.”
“I’m never nice,” he countered, laughing.
“You’re a mean old shit,” she said.
“Absolutely!”
“Except you aren’t,” she remarked. Then with her own warning glower, she said, “We each have our weakness. Marrow is mine. And yours is you.”
“I’m not as tough as I pretend. Is that it?”
With a thought, she severed the com-line. Now there was nothing above them but a dome of polished green olivine stained over the last thousand centuries, the dampness of Washen’s breath doing most of the damage.
With an easy fondness, she took hold of Pamir’s morning erection.
“When a species gains total control over its body and its mortality,” she began, “it typically improves its sexual organs. But it never, ever edits them out. Hearts, on occasion. Limbs, sometimes. But never has a man been born—”
“Who willingly surrenders his prick,” Pamir said, finishing the old truism:
“Ever wonder why?”
“Never,” he replied with a perfect honesty. “Not once, ever. Never. And no.”
Five
Excerpts from tight-beam broadcast received 119.55 post-Wwar—Origin K-class sun 8.2 light-years from the Inkwell—Apparent source Streakship Calamus, Acting Captain Lorkin (Former rank: Tech-agent, Class-C)—Security status of transmission: For the perusal of .Master, Submasters only; zero exceptions.
AN OPEN LETTER:
Until this evening, we honestly did not know your fate, Good Master. None of us could imagine anything but the worst for you and our good colleagues, what with the Wayward invasion and subsequent conquest of the ship, and the suicidal fight between Waywards and Remoras … a battle that threatened every vessel berthed at Port Denali, I should add … and then our subsequent maneuvers around the dying and dead suns, placing considerable resources and valuable property in mortal danger … Naturally my crew and I had no choice but to save whatever lives and property we could. Thankfully, we were able to pluck nearly one hundred passengers from the mayhem, along with myself and 311 handpicked crew members … at a time when the reconquest of the ship seemed quite impossible, I should add … and naturally, afterward, we were thrilled to see the Great Ship survive both its close approach with the red giant and its dance with the black hole … but until this evening, while conversing with our new friends, the Pak’kin, we never imagined that your forces, Good Master, had actually won the war, regaining full control over the helm and all the facilities within our wondrous home …