Pamir wouldn’t.
Several thousand kilometers removed, the Master watched the man shake his head, telling his audience. “I won’t apologize for any of it. And you might as well not tire your mouth by asking.”
Stunned, the general blinked and said, “You don’t have any choice, Pamir.”
“What was my crime?” he replied.
“You allowed a dangerous entity on board. And you were implicated in the destruction of one of our finest waste-treatment plants.”
“And yet,” Pamir shrugged his shoulders, then admitted,’ I don’t feel particularly guilty. Or even a little bit sorry.”
Thousands of kilometers away, the Master watched. Listened. And behind the great flat of her hand, she smiled.
“I did what was right,” he added. Then he looked past his accusers, guessing where the security eye was hiding. Speaking only to the Master, he pointed out, “I can’t ask for forgiveness, real forgiveness, if I don’t feel guilt.”
“True enough,” she whispered to herself.
The officers were less appreciative. One after another, they shook their heads in disgust, and the angriest man—a long-armed fellow laced with ape genes and a graceless temper—made a stupid threat.
“We’ll arrest you, then. A trial, a quick conviction. And you spend the rest of this long long voyage sitting in the tiniest, darkest cell”
Pamir regarded the angry man, nothing showing on his face.
Then he rose to his feet, pointing out, “The amnesty has another eight minutes. I can still leave. But I suppose you could forget the time and wrestle me down. If that’s what you’ve got your hearts and stomachs set on, that is.”
Half of the officers were thinking about tackling him.
As if to tease, Pamir took a long step toward the office door. Then he pretended second thoughts. He halfway laughed, halfway turned. Looking back at the security eye again, at the Master, he said, “Remember all those vanished captains? The ones who, according to that ridiculous story of yours, left us on that secret mission…?”
No one spoke, or moved, or remembered to breathe.
“A week after she’d dropped out of sight… I saw one of your captains…”
The ship’s trillion voices went silent.
Suddenly the Master heard nothing but Pamir, and she saw no one else. From her quarters just beneath Port Alpha, she shouted, “Whom did you see?”
At lightspeed, it seemed to take forever for her voice to reach its audience. But it boomed nonetheless, causing every head but one to jerk in surprise.
“Leave the room,” she roared. “Everyone but Captain Pamir leaves!”
For an instant, Pamir let the police see his smile. They bristled, made hard fists, and filed away. Then it was just the two of them, and the Master severed every input and output save one, and she appeared before him as shaped light and a panicky voice, demanding from the man, “Which of my captains did you see?”
Quietly, and appearing almost amused, he said, “Washen.”
Pamir and Washen had been close friends, if memory served.
For that wide instant, she wasn’t the Master any longer. The trillion voices were forgotten, the Great Ship left to drift through space without her direction, and the effect, if anything, was pleasant. Bracing, buoyant. Welcome.
“Where did you see Washen?”
In crisp, certain detail, Pamir told enough to be believed.
Then with a wise grin, he added, “I want my old rank back. You don’t have to pay me or trust me. But I’d be bored and useless if I were a millionth-grade captain.”
She was almost startled. With her own forced grin, she asked, “Why do you deserve any consideration?”
“Because you need talent and experience,” he replied with a cold certainty. “And because you don’t know what Washen was doing, or where she’s gone. And since I know more than a little bit about vanishing, maybe I can help you find her. Somehow, someday. Maybe.”
It was the rarest of moments:
The Master Captain, ear to every voice, didn’t knoiv what to say.
Then Pamir shook his head, and unth an unwelcome prescience, he said, “Madam.” He bowed and said, “No disrespect intended, madam. But the ship is a very big place, and frankly, you don’t know it half as well as you think you do.” And it doesn’t know you a quarter as well as you think it should…
Twenty-eight
Pamir was born on a shabby little colony world. His father was barely thirty years old, a near child in these immortal times; while his mother, a self-proclaimed priestess and seer, was thousands of years their senior. Mother had a mercurial beauty and an almost incalculable wealth, and with those blessings she could have taken almost any local man, plus a fair fraction of the local women, too. But she was a singularly odd woman, and for some compelling reason, she decided to court and marry an innocent boy. And in their own peculiar ways, those two badly mismatched people became a stable, even happy couple.
Mother had a fondness for alien faiths and alien gods. The universe was built from three great souls, she believed: Death, and Woman, and Man. As a boy, Pamir was taught that he was an embodiment of Man, and Woman was his partner and natural ally. That’s why Death was rarely seen anymore. Working together, the two gods had temporarily suppressed the third, leaving it weakened and ineffectual. But stability was an illusion in a triad. Death was plotting its return, Mother assured him. Someday, in some deeply clever fashion, Death would seduce Man or Woman, and the balances would shift again. Which was natural, and right. She said that each god was just as beautiful as the others, and each deserved its time to reign… or the universe would collapse under the weight of the grand imbalance…
For months and years, Pamir lay awake every night, wondering if Death would come to his bed after he fell asleep, whispering to him in his dreams, and if he would find the strength to resist Death’s horrible charms.
Finally, in despair, Pamir confessed his fears to his father.
The boyish man laughed and took his son under an arm, warning him, “You can’t believe everything your mother says. She’s sick in the mind. We all are, of course. But she’s got it worse.”
“I don’t believe you,” the boy growled. He tried to shake off his father’s arm, and failed. Then he asked, “How can anyone be anything but healthy?”
“You mean, because she’s got a modem brain?” Father was a large, ugly man, Caucasian and Aztec heritages bolstered with a stew of cheap, quantum-tiny genetics. “The sweet truth is that Mom is so old that she lived most of a normal life before being updated. Before they knew how to make flesh and bone halfway immortal. She was living on Earth. She was already a hundred years old and worn out when the autodocs finally started to work on her. She was one of the very first. Which was why they didn’t have the technologies quite right. When her old brain was turned into bioceramics and the like, some of her oldness remained with it. Memories were lost, and a bunch of little errors crept in. With a few big errors, too. Although I didn’t tell you that, and if you repeat it to anyone, I’ll tell the world that you’re sick with imagination and can’t be trusted.”