Then she went blind, her eyes were boiled away with a soft, unfelt laser, and her mouth was a vapor of bone shards and dim echoes bouncing inside the tiny, almost poisonous cabin.

Her skull was evaporated.

Her bioceramic brain lay exposed.

But even her small old mind was too massive, too cumbersome. What the autodoc took away next required several days and a fine touch that was only possible in deep space and nearly perfect zero gee. With a laser chisel and a nanoscopic precision, the machine removed the bulk of what was extra and what was standard. Half of Mere’s soul was surrendered to the oblivion, and what was left—hopefully the most learned, wisest half—was placed into a thin iron envelope and eased out of the Osmium, riding that fine long tail as it twisted and curled, slowing her still-terrific momentum until she fell into the path of the oncoming alien.

A FEW DAYS later, the polypond sensed the heat and saw the flash of something piercing her sky-skin. At first, she assumed that the object had been nothing but the usual detritus. But then one of her stomachs began to digest the free iron, and what lay inside was too intricate and lovely to be natural.

By a thousand means, she attempted to reconstitute the creature that must have belonged to this odd, battered mind.

Then she found instructions etched into the mind itself.

In the polypond language, as it happened.

Tiny symbols written with single atoms told the creature where to begin and how to proceed, and after some lengthy but relatively straightforward work, a newly reconstituted creature lay on the surface of the living sea.

“Who are you?” her savior inquired.

The woman kicked and lay back, and after a long pause and some very deep breaths, she said, “You. That’s who. I am you.”

Thirty-four

Riding inside a tissue-thin jacket of hyperfiber, guided by electrostatic charges and a practiced hand, the black hole had been nudged into position and fixed in space. Stripped of every eye and its minimal power to maneuver, the Great Ship had plunged into the waiting hazard at one-third lightspeed. The entire event barely filled an entire second. The jacket collapsed like a balloon, and freed of containment, the black hole burrowed its way through the hull, entering at a point some eight thousand kilometers east of the bow. Hyperfiber parted around the tiny, asteroid-mass body. A fingerwide channel was born, fiercely hot and sloppy wet. Then the weapon passed through rock and lesser grades of hyperfiber, and the channel grew larger. But the worst damage came inside the open places, the apartments and long avenues and four little seas that were trapped in its path. A fleck of infinite matter dove through water and living tissue, and everyone nearby died from the heat and the wallop of hard radiations. Bodies and pieces of bodies from ten thousand passengers and crew were stolen away. Two first-line fuel pumps were taken off-line, plus half a dozen subsidiary reactors. The worst damage came to a deep sea inside the ship’s trailing hemisphere: A blue bolt of Cherenkov light erupted on the sea’s floor, and the only city built by a species of slow chemoautotrophs was obliterated. The Worms-of-heaven lived beside deep vents, and if the Master hadn’t ordered them to disperse, they would have gone extinct. But nearly half had remained at home—sometimes illegally—and in a fraction of a microsecond, they were torn apart by the tide and the light and a fierce heat that left their bodies stripped of their shells, a soulless gray-white fluid drifting at the edges of what was now a red-hot lake of molten basalt and superheated seawater.

“No closer, madam.”

In a battle zone, security troops held first authority.

“Madam,” the harum-scarum said once more. Then with a tight, impatient voice, she asked, “What if this is what our enemy wants? Create a lead hole, then kill the curious and the compassionate with an even larger infinity?”

“Infinity” was a literal translation of the harum-scarum’s name for a “black hole.”

Washen intended to respond. But Aasleen spoke first, reminding the cautious officer, “That would be a very difficult shot, at best.”

The infinity’s trajectory had been anything but perfect. Even with gigatons of mass and a terrific velocity, it had changed course while slicing through the ship. Hyperfiber was to blame. To thank. Even as the hull melted away in the assault, the ancient bonds had fought to retain their hold. Chaotic interactions between the severed bonds gave birth to intense EM pulses. The infinity had acquired an intense charge of its own, and as it continued slicing through the hull, it twisted in response to the opposing and entirely unpredictable charges that burst into life around it.

A half-degree deflection, in the end.

And critical.

But neither captain discussed the good news. This was a tour of the damage, critical for a multitude of reasons, most of which were wrapped around simple decency. After fifty thousand years on board the ship, a species of passenger had suffered an enormous disaster, and standing here was the right thing to do.

Again, the security officer said, “No closer, madam.”

Washen stopped and knelt.

The chief engineer knelt next to her, watching the cooling stone, then the lightless water above. Then after a respectful silence, they stood again and began walking across the seafloor, surrounded by a platoon of soldiers.

“When I was a girl.”

Aasleen blinked. “What was that?”

“I was a girl,” Washen said again. In her diamond glove was a rounded lump of warm basalt. “Around my house, everywhere I looked … were these intricate models of the ship …”

“Life with engineers,” her friend said with an appreciative nod.

“Not every model was theirs.” Washen offered the stone to her friend. “But the best ones were. And if they were digital, and if I enlarged little portions—key portions—I’d find the ancient scars. The same kinds of scar that this will leave, if we don’t repair it everywhere.”

Even in the emptiest depths of space, Creation had produced trillions of tiny black holes. On occasion, the ship had collided with those natural hazards. But the hull had always repaired itself. Hyperfiber had that talent, that passion. Severed bonds continued to fight for purchase, and across the width of a single finger, the bonds always found one another again. The shiny gray material spent a fraction of its latent energies, and before it lost its wetness, it flowed inward, linking and rebuilding until it was merely ten thousand times stronger than diamond.

Rock showed more damage. But even then, the pressure of kilometers of stone pressing on all sides would soon close up the wounds. And of course atmospheres and various liquids would shrug the damage aside soon enough. Even the Worms-of-heaven would eventually recover, in numbers and vigor. The only genuine relic of this impact might be the black hole itself, drifting and highly charged, its new trajectory eventually carrying it out of the Inkwell.

“I had this idea,” Washen confessed. “When I was girl, I thought that if we could count the scars, we could better guess the age of the Great Ship.”

“That was your idea?” her friend teased.

“I thought of it,” she said. “But I didn’t know hundreds of others had already imagined it and tried it.”

The concept was sound, but there were too many problems. The hyperfiber hid its oldest wounds best, and no one was sure of the true density of microholes in the distant universe. Looking back along the ship’s course helped only to a point. Like the estimates arrived at by twenty other means, the Great Ship was definitely older than the Earth and presumably younger than the Creation. “At least that’s what my father told me,” said Washen. “But he did it sweetly, if I remember. Then and a hundred other times, he had to break it to me that my exceptionally clever idea wasn’t really my own.”