Like every proud child, I spoke obsessively about myself. Addressing species that I had never met, I defined my terms and described my dimensions, my depths, and my laudable talents. I was lovely igneous stone and ancient iron buttressed with hyperfiber bones, and my skin was a thick armor of high-grade hyperfiber capable of shrugging off the impacts of interstellar gravel and full-bodied comets. I was swimming through the Milky Way at one-third the velocity of unencumbered light. My engines were as big as moons, and I was bigger than most of my patrons’ home worlds: twenty Earth masses, and fifty thousand kilometers in diameter, with a hull covering nearly eight billion square kilometers. But my skin was nothing compared to my spongelike meat. Whoever built me had the foresight to give me endless arrays of wide caverns and neat tunnels, underground seas and chambers too numerous to be counted. I could conjure up any climate, replicate any odd biosphere. To travelers who appreciate robust numbers, I spat out an impressive figure. “Twenty trillion cubic kilometers.” That was the combined volume of my hollow places. On a simple world such as the Earth—a world I will never see, except perhaps in passing—there are barely 200 million square kilometers of living space. Life exists in two dimensions, not three; trees and buildings reach only so high. Only the top fringe of the ocean and the little zones by the rifting plates are productive habitats. “Not with me,” I said with a seamless arrogance. My new voice was designed to sound prideful, sharp, and confident. “With me, every little room is a potential paradise. I can give you the perfect illusion of any sunlight and the exact atmosphere that you find most pleasant, unless you need a hard vacuum, which I can achieve just as easily. I can manufacture soils to fit the most delicate chemistry and fluids enough to slake any thirst, and by an assortment of means, you can wander through my public areas—my shops and auditoriums, religious sites and scenic vistas—unless it is your preference to live entirely by yourself, which is your right. If solitude is your nature, I will honor your noble choice.
“I accept all species,” I claimed. Which was true, to a degree. I would welcome every sentient soul, but my ageless human captains always retained the final word. My voice never entirely mentioned the possibility that travelers could come some great distance, and at no small risk to themselves, only to be informed that they could not afford passage, or less likely, that they were deemed too unstable or too dangerous to be allowed to live among my more docile passengers.
Always, always, I sang endless praises of my human caretakers. They were my captains, my engineers, my guiding hands and crafty fingers. They owned me, I admitted with a voice that couldn’t have sounded more thrilled. Better than any other species, the humans knew my depths, understood my potentials, and were fully prepared to hold tight to me until the end of Creation.
Perhaps I believed those boastful words, but my truest feelings remained secret, even from myself.
I am rich in many things, but particularly in those things that are unknown.
Washen was one of the first children born inside me, and that earliest little portion of her considerable life was spent in a modest house overlooking one of my warm blue seas. Her loving parents were engineers, by training and by deepest conviction, meaning that not only did they know how to build every possible structure and every conceivable machine, they also possessed the clear, un-sentimental, and pragmatic outlook of true engineers: The universe-their universe-was rich with an elegant beauty, known elements and reliable forces playing against each other in ancient, proven ways. If there were questions of consequence needing to be solved-a dubious possibility, at best—then those questions didn’t involve people of their particular caliber. Engineering was a finished profession. The galaxy was adorned with many wise old species that long ago had mastered Nature’s basic tricks. Humans were virtual newcomers. With nothing but science and intuition to guide them, human engineers had managed to teach themselves how to build lasers and fusion reactors and bioceramic materials. Given time, they might have invented much of the rest of what was possible. But during their twenty-first century, a moon-bound observatory glanced at a particularly rich portion of the sky, for a few perfect moments, intercepting a tight-beamed broadcast from a distant civilization that was bound for an even more distant world.
Inside that dense and highly structured burst of blue light were enough tricks and fancies to fuel a dozen intellectual revolutions. Hyperfiber was perhaps the greatest of the alien gifts. Built from deceptively ordinary materials, it was a lightweight and potentially immortal substance that could endure almost any abuse, and do so while shouldering almost any burden.
There were many reasons not to expect to find a great ship wandering on the fringes of the Milky Way. But no competent engineer was surprised to learn that my skin and bones were composed of hyperfiber. What else would a godly power employ in such an enormous construction? Perhaps my particular hyperfiber was a better grade than what people and most other species had cultured in the past, or even in the brilliant present. And yes, the scale and perfection of my spherical body demanded resources and quality controls that not even a thousand worlds working together could achieve. But nothing about me seemed genuinely impossible, much less threatening to the status quo. Yes, I was grand and highly unlikely, and marvelous, and enigmatic, but I still resided firmly in the grasp of an engineer’s venerable, often-proved theories.
When Washen was a young girl, her parents helped first culture the finer grades of hyperfiber, using my hull’s armor as their inspiration. They taught themselves to do the magic in sufficient quantities to patch my old craters and the occasional deep wound. Their house was littered with scraps and useless shards—failed experiments brought home from the factories—and sometimes Washen would pick up one of the bright pieces, staring at her own reflection. She was a slender girl, a pretty girl, a little tall for her age, her black hair worn long and oftentimes damp from swimming in the sea. Even though she was the offspring of deeply committed engineers, she lacked their narrow curiosity. One day while sitting at the breakfast table and staring at a ball of sweet new hyperfiber, she suddenly inquired, “Where did this come from?”
Her father was a handsome man, young-faced but in his second millennium of life, and even on his most poetic day, he was a literal soul. With a calm, studied voice, he explained what was obvious and essential. A nanoscale foundation was laid down in the factory. Each atom had to be doctored before it was set in its perfect space, aligned with its neighbors, then every quark allowed to find its perfect resonance. Then if a certain standard was achieved, the entire batch was turned into a quasi fluid, thick and gray and ready to fill molds or one of the ancient craters scattered across the ship’s hull. The material’s final grade depended on subtle, oftentimes invisible, factors. Unfair as it seemed, luck played a powerful role. But he didn’t wish to bore his daughter with dense technical terms. Using a few convoluted sentences, he had answered her question, adding, “That’s where this comes from,” as he gestured at a mirror-faced ball barely bigger than the hand that was holding it.
Washen nodded agreeably. Her question had been answered, if not in the manner she had hoped. There was no reason to act rude or complain. No, she realized the best course was to turn in her chair, turn and smile, and ask her mother the same essential question.