Leading the group were a pair of Belter women—one tall and the other taller, the latter rumored to be the front-runner for the Master Captain’s chair.
Her companion, knife-faced and magisterial, noticed Pamir drifting by himself.
She nodded in his direction, then said, “This one, madam. He’s the gentleman who survived the Elassias disaster.”
Centuries had passed, yet they still remembered.
Pamir returned the nod, saying nothing. And the debate about the tunnel’s angle came to an abrupt, embarrassing halt.
The future Master smiled, then decided that this moment required a graceless touch.
“I’d like to have this one with us,” she proclaimed. “He’d bring us luck!”
But the knife-faced captain had to disagree. “The luck was his, madam. He didn’t share it with his ship.”
Pamir felt an easy hatred for the woman. Peering through the black dust, he read her nameplate. Miocene, he read. What did he know about her?
She was young, said the rumors. And ambitious like no one else.
The future Master winked at her lowly engineer. “Are you interested, darling? Would you like to leave the galaxy behind?”
He thought, Thank you, no.
But there was something about the circumstances, about the drifting dust and the two captains and this talk about luck… all of those factors, and more, combined inside him, making him say, “Yes, I want to go. Absolutely.”
“Good,” the giant woman replied. “We can use all the luck we can put on board. Even if you hoard it for yourself.”
It was a joke, and a bad one. Pamir couldn’t make himself laugh, even though the other captains and architects and rock experts were giggling themselves sick.
The only other person unmoved was Miocene.
“Who goes,” she reminded everyone, “are the people who deserve to go. Nobody else. Since our ship is going to be built on the way, without anyone’s help, we haven’t space or the patience for those who aren’t the very best.”
In that instant, Pamir realized that he had made the right choice; he wanted nothing but to be part of this grand mission. For the next year, he worked without complaint, never fighting with commanders, and leading his little teams with a quiet competence. But as the deadline approached, an uneasiness took hold. Disquiet evolved into a massive black dread. Pamir knew exactly what he was. He was a good engineer, and nothing more. The men and women around him cared more for machinery than people. They told jokes about fusion engines and gossiped about each other’s designs, and their best friends were machines. A few engineers openly and happily lived with robots of their own design, their physical forms doctored only to a point, their machineness obvious under the warm rubber glands and those worshipful, doll-like faces.
When the final roster was released, dread turned to resignation.
But Pamir went through the ritual of hunting for his name, and despite knowing better, he felt a numbing surprise not to see “Pamir” on that list.
Surprise descended into a low-grade anger made worse by two days and nights of strong drink and the ingestion of several potent drugs. In his altered haze, revenge seemed like a sweet possibility. With a harum-scarum’s logic, Pamir fashioned a weapon from a laser drill, cutting off the safeties and retiming its frequencies. Then with the laser dismantled and hidden, Pamir drifted past the security troops, entering the half-born starship, thinking of Miocene when he muttered to himself, “I’ll show her some luck.”
The captains already lived on board. Maybe Pamir meant to injure them, or worse. But once the possibility of revenge became the reality, his anger dissolved into a pure, unalloyed self-loathing.
He had never felt this way.
It was the drugs in his system; he wanted to believe nothing else. But if anything, those chemicals were only flattening his emotions, distorting all reason, forcing him to keep searching for his pain’s watershed.
Luckier, more talented engineers were working in the main habitats.
Pamir crept up a long dead-end shaft.
At the end of its voyage, this starship would be among the finest ever built by human hands and human minds. But not his hands, he knew. Inside that dark, choking hole, he discovered that he didn’t care about this ship. All that mattered was the ship. That dead relic that was plummeting from nowhere, heading straight for him…!
Maybe it was the drugs, or the despair. Or maybe it was exactly as it seemed to him just then. But the morions of his life—leaving home when he did; traveling with the Elassia, then as a corpse; and the remarkable good luck that caused him to be found—these unlikely events suddenly looked like Fate and Grand Design. Every important event in his life, and the tiny ones, had occurred in order to put him here, hunkering down in this unseemly place, and in that drunken, drugged, and self-possessed state, nothing seemed more obvious to Pamir than his personal destiny.
He had to find some means of staying on board.
But a stowaway couldn’t stay hidden for long. Not for a century, much less for thousands of years.
The only solution was obvious; it was inevitable.
Few other men could have done what Pamir did next. To a human given thousands and perhaps millions of years of uninterrupted life, the idea of placing such a treasure in mortal danger was unthinkable.
But Pamir had died before.
Twice.
Not only did he power up the laser, but his hands were steady as stone. He found himself growing happier by the moment, by the breath. He carefully positioned his body at the back of the cramped tunnel, taking time to judge how the tarlike carbonaceous crap would melt and flow around his incinerated corpse, and how its blackness would merge and conceal his own.
In the end, for a slender instant, he felt afraid.
He wasn’t a singing man. But waiting for the laser to charge, then fire, he heard his own rough voice pushing its way through an old Whistleforth melody that, if memory served, his mother used to sing to him, and to her dear two-headed dragon.
“All of the universe,” she would sing, “and I am the only one.
“All of Creation, and there’s only this one of me. “All of Everything, and what I am now will never come again.
“With every step I change. ‘With every step, I die.
“Always and forever, here, here, here, I be…!”
Twenty-nine
Pamir had never seen the Master’s station in such turmoil.
Demon doors were at full strength, armored hatches sealed and locked. Brigades of security troops wore imposing weapons and bullying faces. An infectious, intoxicating paranoia hung in the bright damp air. Pamir was interrogated by two captains and a Submaster. How many searches of his body and uniform were carried out discreetly, he couldn’t say. He was asked point-blank about Washen and Miocene. What had he seen? What had he heard? And what, if anything, had he said to their missing officers? He volunteered all of it, no detail too mundane. Then in a by-the-way tone, he confessed that a fat twenty seconds had passed before he contacted the Master, informing her that a pair of ghosts had appeared to him, and learning that those same apparitions had spoken to her first.
“They may be dead,” he offered, “but they still respect the pecking order.”
Pamir was asked about his route to the ship’s bridge, his mode of transportation, and whether he had seen anything even a little bit peculiar.