“But I saved you.” She said it with a mixture of bitterness and sublime pleasure. “I decided that a soul who wanted to be with us that badly had to be valuable, regardless of his talents. Which was why I ordered you reborn. And when your fellow engineers refused to accept you, wasn’t I the wise one who invited you to become a captain…?”
Not precisely. Joining the captains’ ranks was his idea and his initiative. But he knew better than to debate the point, nodding without kowtowing, saying to her big bare feet, “I have tried to serve you and the ship.”
“With a lapse or two thrown in.”
“One lapse,” he replied, refusing to fall into simple traps. “You honestly know nothing about these prank calls. Do you?”
“Or even if they are pranks, no. I don’t, Madam.”
“Which puts us where, Pamir? I want to hear this from you.”
With a quiet, firm voice, he told the Master, “If you wish. If I might. I could hunt the ship for Washen. For all those missing captains. In an official capacity, or otherwise.”
Eyes lifted. “You’d be willing to do that?”
“Gladly,” he said, meaning it.
“I suppose you’re qualified,” she remarked. Then taking delight in old wounds, she pointed out, “You did manage to evade my security teams for a long, long while. And apparently without much effort.”
He could do nothing but glance at her face, holding tight to his breath.
“And since you mentioned it,” she continued, “I could use a little more reassurance. About your loyalty, if nothing else.” She paused for a half-moment, then added, “If you find Washen, perhaps I can stop watching every step you take. Understood?”
It was easy to forget why he had rejoined the captains’ ranks.
Showing the Master a thin, cool smile, Pamir said, “Madam.”
Then he bowed slightly, pointing out, “If I find these lost captains, and they’re alive, then you’ll be too busy worrying about them to bother with me…
“Madam…!”
Thirty
Pamir sat in the darkened garden room, on the fragrant stump of a dusk pinkwood. The garden was at the heart of a luxury apartment set inside one of the oldest and finest of the human districts. A peculiar couple shared its spacious rooms and hallways—a man and woman married back in the early millennia of the voyage—and throughout Pamir’s visit, the lovers would hold hands and whisper into each other’s ears, causing their gruff visitor to suffer the sour beginnings of envy.
Quee Lee was a wealthy and extraordinarily ancient woman. Born on the Earth, she had inherited her fortune from a Chinese grandfather who made his money through shipping and legal drugs. On other occasions, she would talk about their home world with both fondness and horror. She was nearly as old as Pamir’s mother would be today, though he never mentioned that crazy woman. Quee Lee was old enough to remember when spaceflight was anything but routine and people counted themselves fortunate, or cursed, to live for a single century. Then came the day when the first alien broadcasts fell from the sky, washing away the Earth’s isolation. By the time she was middle-aged, everything had changed. Twenty technologically adept species were known, and their knowledge, coupled with a home-brewed intellectual explosion, brought things like star drives and eternal generics, and the probes that would leave the Milky Way, and eventually, this great and ancient and undeniably wondrous ship in which they rode in luxurious splendor.
Her young husband was born on the ship. Perri had been a Remora, one of those strange souls who lived on the ship’s hull. But he decided to leave that bizarre culture, preferring the greater strangeness of the ship’s interior. When Pamir was a captain on the rise, the two men were enemies. But after Pamir had abandoned his post, taking on new faces and identities, Perri had slowly evolved into an ally and an occasional friend.
Only certain specialist AIs knew the ship better than Perri.
A masculine face, more pretty than handsome, was studying a series of holomaps.The occasional glowbat was gently waved out of the way, then the same hand adjusted the maps’ controls, changing the perspective, or the district being examined, or the scale of everything that he was examining with a perfect concentration.
“Another drink?” asked Quee Lee.
Pamir looked at his empty glass. “Thank you. No.”
She was a beautiful woman in any light. An ageless face was wrapped around ancient, warm eyes. She had a fondness for one-color sarongs and ornate, exceedingly alien jewelry. Clinging to one of her husband’s hands, she looked at the map, and with a gentle sigh, she confessed, “I always forget.”
“How big the ship is,” said Perri, completing her thought.
“It is,” she echoed, looking up at their guest. “It’s wonderfully huge.”
Perri marked a likely cavern, then moved to the next district. He didn’t volunteer why that place was worth a look. Instead, he asked the obvious question.
“Who are you hunting?”
Then with a smile that couldn’t have been more charming, he gave the answer. “It’s those missing captains, I bet. I bet.”
Familiarity was a powerful tool.
Pamir didn’t need to reply. He simply held his mouth closed and gave his head a slight, somewhat suggestive tilt.
Reading his posture, Perri nodded and grinned with a private satisfaction. Then again, he marked a location. “There’s a little river running through a practically bottomless canyon. Honestly, there might be a million square kilometers down there. All of it vertical. Black basalt and epiphyte forests. I know two settlements. Neither human. Between them, there’s room for a few hundred thousand people. If they were careful, and a little lucky, nobody would ever know they were there.”
Quee Lee regarded her husband with fond eyes.
“That canyon was searched last month,” Pamir replied. “By security robots, and thoroughly”
“Captains would know tricks,” said Perri. “Shit, you’ve used those same tricks. It would be easy enough to make the machines see nothing but rock and clingweed.”
“You think I should look there?”
“Maybe.”
In other words: “I don’t see why they would be there.” Pamir said nothing.
Again, the map changed districts. Suddenly Perri was staring at a deeply buried city, nothing about its selection random. A wealth of colors and complicated shapes showed the presence of alien species. With a knowing touch, he moved past the catacombs and main arteries, following an obscure capillary to a waystation that appeared as a strong golden light, open for operation, welcoming all visitors.
Perri marked the waystation, then giggled.
“What’s funny?”
He smiled at the captain, saying, “This. What I know is what the gossip says.That someone destroyed this nowhere place. It was a random, meaningless act. Isn’t that the official verdict? Yet within minutes, the Master ordered a thorough sweep of a hundred districts centered on that single station.”
Again, Pamir used silence. And with it, a hard look.
Perri doctored the map’s scale, pulling back and back. Suddenly they were looking at nearly a tenth of one percent of the ship—a vast region, complicated and oftentimes empty, with a hundred thousand kilometers of major passageways blurring into a geometric puzzle too irregular to appear planned, much less attractive, and to any mind large enough to appreciate the distances, this was obviously a puzzle without any worthwhile solution.
Not for the first time, Pamir felt utterly helpless.
“This is how big the sweeps got,” said Perri. “And people are still talking about them. A couple species living down here have strong feelings about authoritative presences. One hates them, while the other loves them. Those sweeps made them feel important, and they’re still singing about them today”