Robert Reed - The Well of Stars

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The Well of Stars

Robert Reed

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed

in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

THE WELL OF STARS

A slightly different version of this novel was published in England in 2004

by Orbit, an imprint of Time Warner Books UK.

or portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Edited by James Frenkel

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reed, Robert.

The well of stars / Robert Reed.--1st ed.

p. cm.

"A Tom Doherty Associates book."

ISBN 0-765-30860-6 (alk. paper)

EAN 978-0765-30860-3

1. Spaceships--Fiction. 2. Life on other planets--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3568.E3696W45 2005

813'.54--dc22

2004058861

First Edition: April 2005

Printed in the United States of America

0987654321

to my wife, Leslie Renee

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THE GREAT SHIP

I have no voice that explains where I began, no mouth to tell why I was imagined or how I was

assembled, and I have no idea who deserves thanks for my simple existence, assuming that thanks are

appropriate. I recall absolutely nothing about my exceptionally murky origins ... but I know well that for

a long cold while I was perfectly mute and only slightly more conscious than stone, sliding through the

emptiest, blackest reaches of space, my only persistent thought telling me that I was to do nothing but

wait ... wait for something wondrous, or something awful ... wait for some little event or a knowing

voice that would help answer those questions that I could barely ask of myself....

For aeons and a day, I felt remarkably, painfully tiny. Drifting through the cosmos, I imagined myself

as a substantial but otherwise ordinary species of cosmic dust. Compared to the vastness, I was nothing.

How could I believe otherwise? Unobserved, I passed through intricate walls woven from newborn

galaxies--magnificent hot swirls of suns and glowing dust, each revolving around some little black prick

of collapsed Creation--and among that splendor, I was simply a nameless speck, a twist of random grit

moving at an almost feeble speed, my interior unlit and profoundly cold, my leading face battered and

slowly eroded by the endless rain of lesser dusts.

Through space and through time, I drifted.

Galaxies grew scarce, and the void was deeper and ever colder ... and when I might have believed that I

would never touch sunlight again ... when my fate seemed to be blackness and the endless silence ... I

found myself falling toward a modest disk of stars and dust and little living worlds....

By chance, a young species--the human species--noticed me while I was still descending through the

outskirts of their Milky Way. Brave as fools and bold as gods, they built an armada of swift little ships

and raced out to meet me, and to my utter amazement, I discovered that I was enormous--bigger than

worlds, massive and enduring, and in their spellbound eyes, beautiful.

Humans were the first species to walk upon my face, and with a quick and efficient thoroughness, they

explored my hollow places. To prove my considerable worth, they fought a little war to retain their hold

on me. According to law and practicality, I was salvage, and I was theirs. In careful stages, they began to

wake me, rousing my ancient reactors, my vast engines and life-support systems, repairing the damage

left by my long, long sleep. And they gave me my first true voice--in a fashion. A thousand mouths were

grafted on to me. Radio dishes and powerful lasers, neutrino beacons and spinning masses of degenerate

matter endowed me with the power to shout at every approaching sun and all the living worlds. "Here I

am," I would announce. "See me! Study me! Know me, then come visit me!" In a multitude of

languages, my new mouths claimed, "I hunger for your company, your friendship, and your infinite

trust." I asked, "Are you, like so many technological species, a functional immortal?" Then I promised,

"For a fair fee, I will carry your ageless and precious soul to a distant world. Or in half a million years,

after circumnavigating the Milky Way, I will bring you home again. Can you imagine a greater, more

ennobling adventure than to journey once around our galaxy? Or for a still greater payment, I can

become your permanent home--a vast, ever-changing realm offering more novelty and sheer wonder

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than any other body in Creation." Then with a barker's teasing laugh, I would ask, "What kind of

immortal would you be if you didn't wish for such a splendid, endless fate...?"

Like every proud child, I spoke obsessively about myself. Addressing species that I had never met, I

defined my terms and described my dimensions, my depths, and my laudable talents. I was lovely

igneous stone and ancient iron buttressed with hyperfiber bones, and my skin was a thick armor of high-

grade hyperfiber capable of shrugging off the impacts of interstellar gravel and full-bodied comets. I was

swimming through the Milky Way at one-third the velocity of unencumbered light. My engines were as

big as moons, and I was bigger than most of my patrons' home worlds: twenty Earth masses, and fifty

thousand kilometers in diameter, with a hull covering nearly eight billion square kilometers. But my skin

was nothing compared to my spongelike meat. Whoever built me had the foresight to give me endless

arrays of wide caverns and neat tunnels, underground seas and chambers too numerous to be counted. I

could conjure up any climate, replicate any odd biosphere. To travelers who appreciate robust numbers,

I spat out an impressive figure. "Twenty trillion cubic kilometers." That was the combined volume of my

hollow places. On a simple world such as the Earth--a world I will never see, except perhaps in passing--

there are barely 200 million square kilometers of living space. Life exists in two dimensions, not three;

trees and buildings reach only so high. Only the top fringe of the ocean and the little zones by the rifting

plates are productive habitats. "Not with me," I said with a seamless arrogance. My new voice was

designed to sound prideful, sharp, and confident. "With me, every little room is a potential paradise. I

can give you the perfect illusion of any sunlight and the exact atmosphere that you find most pleasant,

unless you need a hard vacuum, which I can achieve just as easily. I can manufacture soils to fit the most

delicate chemistry and fluids enough to slake any thirst, and by an assortment of means, you can wander

through my public areas--my shops and auditoriums, religious sites and scenic vistas--unless it is your

preference to live entirely by yourself, which is your right. If solitude is your nature, I will honor your

noble choice.

"I accept all species," I claimed. Which was true, to a degree. I would welcome every sentient soul, but

my ageless human captains always retained the final word. My voice never entirely mentioned the

possibility that travelers could come some great distance, and at no small risk to themselves, only to be

informed that they could not afford passage, or less likely, that they were deemed too unstable or too

dangerous to be allowed to live among my more docile passengers.

Always, always, I sang endless praises of my human caretakers. They were my captains, my engineers,

my guiding hands and crafty fingers. They owned me, I admitted with a voice that couldn't have sounded

more thrilled. Better than any other species, the humans knew my depths, understood my potentials, and

were fully prepared to hold tight to me until the end of Creation.

Perhaps I believed those boastful words, but my truest feelings remained secret, even from myself,

I am rich in many tilings, but particularly in those things that are unknown.

Washen was one of the first children born inside me, and that earliest little portion of her considerable

life was spent in a modest house overlooking one of my warm blue seas. Her loving parents were

engineers, by training and by deepest conviction, meaning that not only did they know how to build

every possible structure and every conceivable machine, they also possessed the clear unsentimental and

pragmatic outlook of true engineers: the universe--their universe--was rich with an elegant beauty,

known elements and reliable forces playing against each other in ancient, proven ways. If there were

questions of consequence needing to be solved--a dubious possibility, at best--then those questions didn't

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involve people of their particular caliber. Engineering was a finished profession. The galaxy was

adorned with many wise old species that long ago had mastered Nature's basic tricks. Humans were

virtual newcomers. With nothing but science and intuition to guide them, human engineers had managed

to teach themselves how to build lasers and fusion reactors and bioceramic materials. Given time, they

might have invented much of the rest of what was possible. But during their twenty-first century, a

moonbound observatory glanced at a particularly rich portion of the sky, for a few perfect moments,

intercepting a tight-beamed broadcast from a distant civilization that was bound for an even more distant

world.

Inside that dense and highly structured burst of blue light were enough tricks and fancies to fuel a

dozen intellectual revolutions. Hyperfiber was perhaps the greatest of the alien gifts. Built from

deceptively ordinary materials, it was a lightweight and potentially immortal substance that could endure

almost any abuse, and do so while shouldering almost any burden.

There were many reasons not to expect to find a great ship wandering on the fringes of the Milky Way.

But no competent engineer was surprised to learn that my skin and bones were composed of hyperfiber.

What else would a godly power employ in such an enormous construction? Perhaps my particular

hyperfiber was a better grade than what people and most other species had cultured in the past, or even

in the brilliant present. And yes, the scale and perfection of my spherical body demanded resources and

quality controls that not even a thousand worlds working together could achieve. But nothing about me

seemed genuinely impossible, much less threatening to the status quo. Yes, I was grand and highly

unlikely, and marvelous, and enigmatic, but I still resided firmly in the grasp of an engineer's venerable,

often-proved theories.

When Washen was a young girl, her parents helped first culture the finer grades of hyperfiber, using

my hull's armor as their inspiration. They taught themselves to do the magic in sufficient quantities to

patch my old craters and the occasional deep wound. Their house was littered with scraps and useless

shards--failed experiments brought home from the factories--and sometimes Washen would pick up one

of the bright pieces, staring at her own reflection. She was a slender girl, a pretty girl, a little tall for her

age, her black hair worn long and oftentimes damp from swimming in the sea. Even though she was the

offspring of deeply committed engineers, she lacked their narrow curiosity. One day while sitting at the

breakfast table and staring at a ball of sweet new hyperfiber, she suddenly inquired, "Where did this

come from?"

Her father was a handsome man, young-faced but in his second millennium of life, and even on his

most poetic day, he was a literal soul. With a calm, studied voice, he explained what was obvious and

essential. A nanoscale foundation was laid down in the factory. Each atom had to be doctored before it

was set in its perfect space, aligned with its neighbors, then every quark allowed to find its perfect

resonance. Then if a certain standard was achieved, the entire batch was turned into a quasi fluid, thick

and gray and ready to fill molds or one of the ancient craters scattered across the ship's hull. The

material's final grade depended on subtle, oftentimes invisible, factors. Unfair as it seemed, luck played

a powerful role. But he didn't wish to bore his daughter with dense technical terms. Using a few

convoluted sentences, he had answered her question, adding, "That's where this comes from," as he

gestured at a mirror-faced ball barely bigger than the hand that was holding it.

Washen nodded agreeably. Her question had been answered, if not in the manner she had hoped. There

was no reason to act rude or complain. No, she realized the best course was to turn in her chair, turn and

smile, and ask her mother the same essential question.

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"Where did we get this?"

Washen's mother had different gifts, different strengths. She was very much an engineer, but she

possessed a more rarefied appreciation for theory and high mathematics. Quietly and with a seamless

patience, the woman explained. "We call it hyperfiber for good straightforward reasons. The name refers

to the hyperdimensions that we can't actually see. Dimensions other than up or over or back. Dimensions

other than time, which isn't a true dimension anyway. You see, it takes eleven dimensions to build the

universe. Or thirteen. Or twelve. The exact number depends on which Theory of All you happen to

subscribe to. But in every important way, the answers are the same. Some of these invisible dimensions

are enormous and others are quite tiny, and what you are holding there ... that very tiny piece of

hyperfiber ... well, its fibers stretch into these other dimensions, both physically and through deep subtle

forces...."

The full lecture continued for a long while. The woman could be pleasantly loquacious, and Washen

accepted her mother's nature just as she accepted the fact that she couldn't understand what was being

said. But she nodded politely. She sometimes smiled. When bored, she looked at her own skeptical

reflection. Perhaps she had thought her question was very simple, and it plainly wasn't simple, and how

could she make herself understood?

"When you strike a piece of hyperfiber," her mother continued, "the impact forces don't spread just

through our three dimensions, no. They dissipate through all eleven of them. Or thirteen. Or twelve. Or

twenty-three. There are approximately seven distinct universal theories. Your father and I like the eleven-

dimension theory, but all give the same conclusion: liven when hyperfiber fractures, a quantum echo

lingers in the upper-dimensional realms. What you're holding there ... it's really a much larger object

than you can see. It extends out into every corner of the universe, in all of its manifestations, and even if

you could grind that ball down to dust, the ball remains intact. If only as a theory, of course. As a

delicious mathematical concept existing in the shadow realms--"

"No," the young girl blurted, finally interrupting.

Offended, her mother stiffly asked, "What is the matter, dear?"

"What's wrong?" the old man growled. "Darling, you're talking nonsense, that's what's the matter. The

girl's barely half-grown, and what are you doing? Jabbering about quantum mechanics and ghostly

physics...!"

"I know she's young."

"Hell," he said. "Your song barely makes sense to me. And I passed the same classes you passed."

"You didn't have my grades," her mother countered.

"Who remembers that?" he snarled. "Besides you, I mean."

There was an ugly, much-practiced pause, then a gnawing discomfort. It was unseemly to argue in front

of a child, even one of your own. The two old people stared at each other, making their apologies with

the tiniest of winks, and into that silence came the stubborn voice of someone demanding an answer to

her insistent little question.

"Where did this come from?" Washen repeated.

Then she explained, "I don't mean how we cook it up, or why it works. I just want to know where we

got it in the first place."

"Oh," her parents said, with a shared voice.

"Hyperfiber was a gift," Father replied. "An accidental gift from an alien civilization."

"The Sag-7 signal gave us the essential recipe," Mother added.

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