The polyponds were self-maintaining Gaian worlds.

Supposedly.

Like old trees in a great forest, the largest of them dominated their local landscape, while the babies were born in dense little groves removed from the rest. But unlike trees, individuals such as the Blue World seemed able to generate their own energy. With a whim, they could build continents and populate them with whatever organisms they felt they needed. Which begged the question:

What products would they trade with one another?

It could be politics, Mere reasoned. Neural bodies representing some mother world would journey out to visit the neighbors, like emissaries, achieving in person what coded communications couldn’t accomplish.

It could be a slow, proven means of teaching one another.

Or it was a ritual of great age and undeniable importance: an exchange of tissues and minds, perhaps tied into some unending process that won friendship and solidarity from all of the polyponds.

Or it was nothing but gossip, ugly and simple.

From her vantage point, with her limited eyes, Mere couldn’t see far or particularly well. Like a hiker in a deep forest, she had a wondrous view of the trail under her feet, but the gloom kept most of the woods hidden. Inside the Inkwell, and particularly now, deeply embedded within the Satin Sack, she felt as if she was halfway blind. Features barely half a light-year distance had to be enormous to be seen, or very bright, and nothing here seemed particularly big or brilliant.

Where did the polypond ship begun its voyage? And to where was it heading when it was killed?

Good candidates were tough to find, answers impossible. But during these last few weeks, as Mere dove into the increasingly dense Sack, she was remembering what she had noticed aeons ago while walking through a Tilan jungle: Trees were only the largest, showiest citizens, and no matter how impressive, they were always outnumbered a thousandfold by things tiny, and, in their own way, quite astonishing.

Scanning the nearby blackness, she was making her own thorough map of objects too tiny and too distant for the captains to notice. Everywhere she looked, she saw the telltale signs of little machines working in patient cold ways. Sometimes her ship moved in unexpected directions, betraying the touch of a small mass close enough to give her a faint, brief tug. Just as her own feeble mass was tugging at each of them.

Another stew of problems, that.

“What am I to think?” she muttered quietly to the dead caramelized lump. “Is there anything here that bites or stings?”

She laughed for a moment, softly. Then her thoughts began to wander, and for the first time in months, Mere found herself thinking about one of her favorite Tilan husbands—the great genius of Creation. Which was when her slow-minded AI announced finally, “I am finished with my work.”

“Is it genuine?”

“The message is. Yes.”

“But is it interesting?”

There was a pause. It was a long, thoughtful pause according to a machine’s compressed sense of time. Then the AI reported, “This is a fascinating message from the Great Ship, I believe.”

Washen had sent the communication, not the Master Captain. Just that was an alarming detail. The holo of the First Chair smiled at her good friend, and with a cool and strong but decidedly puzzled voice, she reported, “Some of these baby polyponds—the buds—are picking themselves up and moving.”

An elaborate new chart began to unfold before her.

“You probably can’t see them yet,” Washen mentioned. “It’s happening at the Sack’s farthest reaches first. And of course, we have some difficulty seeing the other side of the Sack, so we can’t be sure what’s there. But what we do know is an enormous surprise.”

Mere focused on the chart, and in particular, on one of the little polyponds. A vast fusion engine had grown from one hemisphere, and the entire body was accelerating at a brutal cost. Just a glance showed her how much energy was involved, and a second hard look told her the eventual velocity and at what point it would intersect with the Great Ship.

“These are the most distant buds,” Washen repeated. Then with a friendly grin, she added, “But you can see the implications for yourself, I’m sure.”

Mere nodded.

“So what do you think?” asked a voice speaking across great reaches of cold and darkness. “Any ideas?”

Again, she nodded.

“I’m not all that surprised,” Mere whispered to herself. Then she laughed at herself, adding, “But why am I not surprised? Now that’s the question worth answering!”

Nineteen

Every morning, Washen slipped free of her clothes and abandoned the little schooner, swimming until she reached the point where there was nothing to see but the jade-colored sky and the smooth, empty, and utterly flat face of the ocean. Except for the occasional faint cloud, the sky was empty, and besides her body and its resident microbes, the water was nearly devoid of life. Waste heat from factories and reactors warmed the surface waters. For the last hundred millennia, these deep caverns had been left immersed in darkness. The illusory sun was an enormous expense, and building it for a single person was extraordinary, and of course she had fought the entire concept. For five months, practically from the day that the emissary died, Washen dismissed every suggestion of a holiday. But it wasn’t only Pamir who had pushed her into this empty time. The Master Captain argued, “You’ve worn yourself to dust, darling.” Speaking at the last banquet, gazing out at every captain, the Master shook her head soberly, reminding her audience, “We need to make ourselves fresh and ready for what comes. But a few of us, I’m afraid, are working our finite souls into a frail, stupid, and useless kind of numbness.” Then she pointed an accusing finger at her First Chair, adding, “I order you to take time off. Now. Turn off your nexuses, darling. Peel away that uniform. And for the sake of the ship and yourself, get some rest!”

It was an order that Washen simply couldn’t accept.

Pamir repeated the argument on several occasions. He was stubbornly persuasive, and she was charmingly evasive. “I’m coping. I’m sane. Test me, darling. Any way you wish, and I promise, you’ll go away pleased.”

Then he turned blunt, bordering on defiant, and Washen leaned against good rational arguments. “I can’t leave my job now,” she professed. “Just today, another fifteen polypond nurseries are moving. And those are the ones we can optically resolve. At last count, fifty thousand buds are on a rendezvous course with us.”

“A rendezvous that won’t happen for years,” Pamir mentioned.

“While the grown polyponds have stopped talking to us,” she continued, nothing about her voice or manner betraying the true depth of her worries. “And while the Blue World and several dozen other adults are on the move, too.”

“Listen to your own propaganda,” he countered. “We’re dealing with an isolated species of committed hermits who have no choice but to deal with us, and who have done everything they promised to help our voyage.”

She shook her head. “What happened to the famous Pamir paranoia?”

“When I need it, I’ll bring it out to dance.”

Washen laughed for a long moment.

“Are you done?”

“Hardly,” she promised.

Pamir bristled, saying nothing.

Then Washen continued laying out the obvious dangers as well as her meaty fears. “Most of this is conjecture. We know nothing, and so everything is possible. And we’re doing just about everything we can do, preparing ourselves for whatever we can imagine.”

“We’ll win any war,” Pamir muttered.

“But doing just about everything isn’t doing everything, and don’t even pretend that we can imagine all the possibilities—”