“I remember everything.”
“Delusions,” she repeated. “Hundreds and thousands of years of daydreams and madness. And then without warning, you found what?”
“Many beginnings,” it argued.
“No. Just one. Probably a lump of tar and ice, which was more than you needed.” She paused, breathing softly while holding her ribs. “You were a single organism equipped with a talented array of machines, and with the machines’ help, you survived. You prospered. Or at least, you managed to replicate your onboard reactors, and you re-formed your little world in some fashion. But without any other species with which to work … with nothing but your own clinically clean body, its narrow genetics and finite number of cells … you gradually, very gradually, managed to invent something that approached a genuine biosphere …”
The jets beneath her gave a kick, the avian streaking faster across the tumbling waves.
“Gaians are rare,” Mere admitted. “But they always emerge from living worlds. Inevitably, they are compilations of many species. Animals and plants, microbes and fungi. Every Gaian I know of, and those very few that I have been lucky enough to meet … they share traits. They are self-centered. Self-obsessed. But they aren’t gods, nor do they pretend to be. Because gods require worship, and worship is not possible for them. They are so utterly self-possessed that the praise and fear of .another entity, small or giant, simply cannot interest them. And the praise of their own pieces … well, that’s like me expecting my own thumbs to deify me …”
She laughed.
“You had a little world,” she said. “You were alone, and you were insane—impoverished in every sense, and probably for tens of thousands of years—but written in your own genetics was the compelling, irresistible need to be with others. You were a social organism. I’m guessing. And following the whispers of your genes, you eventually hit upon the idea of cloning yourself, introducing little tweaks and odd mutations to make each one of you serve some increasingly narrow niche.
“Instead of a Gaian twisting a million species to serve one great function, you eaused a single organism slowly to grow complicated.
“Alone, you began to fill your sky.
“With sufficient tools, this could happen. Not quickly and never neatly. I imagine there were some early disasters and ugly little wars between disagreeing groups of clones. But eventually, you developed tricks and the essential hard-wiring to keep all of your increasingly far-flung pieces joined in spirit. In soul.”
An enormous wave rose up before them, then with a great slow motion, it receded, revealing a round region of ocean that was different—a zone marked by agitated white foam spread across dark, almost black water.
The avian tilted its head and rose higher.
“In the end,” Mere claimed, “there is not much of a distinction. Between what you are and what a Gaian would be. But I’m not talking about ends. Not now, at least. Beginnings. That’s what I keep coming back to.”
The avian tucked in its wings, accelerating upward.
“You believe in a universe that isn’t quite real. That isn’t finished, and that has no lasting consequence. Which is a horrible thing to believe, I think. Most of the souls I know are rather like me. Not you. Which makes me wonder: Why are you so considerably different?
“It’s not enough, blaming your impoverished beginnings. If I was in your place … if I had been born in a starless black, and if I had stumbled on this odd awful theory before any other … well, maybe I would have believed it. But later, when I learned about other species and the stars … I’d like to think that eventually I would have let doubts sink in, and found hope … I would have let the past become something real, full of consequences, and the future would look like a realm where I could live and live happily …”
The white foam had dissolved beneath Mere. For kilometers on every side, the water was calm and dark, like ink in a great bowl.
She was flying above one of the ship’s main ports. Had the alien breached the hull? Or were the captains responsible?
To the best of her abilities, Mere didn’t betray her fears.
Instead, she calmly said, “No.”
Shaking her head, she said, “In another fashion, we couldn’t be more different.”
The avian had attained the high reaches of the atmosphere. Beyond the demon-doors, the air was thin and cold, while beneath lay a great deep realm as black as the sky.
“You weren’t born alone,” she said, with a plain, certain voice.
Then with a grim, sorry nod of the head, she added, “I think there was somebody else. Or many others. I think your oldest memory … the single image that drives to this moment … is that someone very much like you said to you, ‘You are banished. You are not fit to live with us. We banish you for all time.’
“Those others sent you wandering in the nebula, alone.
“You were a child still, or nearly so. And you still remember enough that the memory aches, and it sickens you, and of course you’ll cling to any theory or lame belief that promises you that every awful thing in your past has no consequence.” Mere shook her head, telling the sky, then the water, “If you are sufficiently clever and perfectly ruthless, you have the chance to obliterate everything that has hurt you. You will erase a past that you won’t let yourself believe in, but that you cannot, despite all your cleverness and muscular beliefs, ever get free of … !”
Forty
“I do not know you well, sister.
“The utter pure and perfect truth is that what I know is what the great captains have learned about you. In painstaking detail, they have studied your genetics and the repeating structures inside your cells and organs, your tiny bodies and great. They have teased apart what has been borrowed from aliens, separating it from what seems to be yours. And what they have found—what they have shown to me and explained in some detail—are similarities and stark parallels between your vastness and my little self. We are not the same species, no. Too much time and too many circumstances have been crossed. Your brilliant reinvention of yourself has erased much of what you were. But like me, you possess a cobalt-based blood and a five-carbon sugar metabolism. Like me, your mind is wet and elegant, born inside young tissues set between our largest limbs. We are profoundly conservative souls. In our details and even with the broadest sweeps, we hold true to our natures. Out of all the possible bodies to weave, you have a reflexive need to produce bodies very much like mine. Modified, yes, but true to their origins, and even now, they dance in the lung-wet atmosphere above your great body … like the grin worn by the happy human apes, you cannot help but show your truest, oldest self to others …
“You know me not at all, sister.
“In your presence, I am a baby. Twenty thousand years ago, as this ship counts time, I was born as a finned larva swimming in an ocean world. Ooloo, we call our home. Ooloo is our name. We are a modest species, free of age but not so durable as most, happily scarce and free of ambition. But we are not innocents, and we are not afraid of the company of others. For as long as our history flies, we have produced heroes who gladly abandoned their home skies, riding with the visiting star-travelers to see what else there is to be seen, sending home songs and images and elaborate scents harvested from a thousand worlds, experiences the rest of us can still enjoy today, and embrace.
“This ship we ride upon and within … what do you truly know of it … ?
“I was a baby by every measure when we first heard the Great Ship singing from between the stars. It still lay in the distance, but closing. Using old machines and timeless tricks, we built a tiny starship, and in a race that cares more of form than speed, a thousand babies sought the honor of the journey. I finished second in the competition, which was worse than last. But as happens sometimes, luck took a role. The winner was killed in an accident that was not an accident, and I survived an equally unlikely disaster. Then it was learned that the Ooloo who finished third had conspired against both of us. Guilty of murder, he was sentenced to the ritual doom given to any despicable soul: His wings were chopped free, and his still-living body was saddled with weights, and while I was riding off on my great adventure, he was dropped into the ocean, plunging into the black depths where his wingless form would live out its life alone, slithering about in the deep black mud, subsisting on detritus and his own endless misery.