Eight

“At last count,” said Pamir. And then he said nothing else, glancing toward Washen and the Master Captain before gazing out at the rest of his audience, his expression shifting from a veneer of professional focus into what seemed to be a rugged little smile. His big soul wore a matching voice, and after that pause was finished, he remarked, “But there is no last count. Or any first count, as it happens. Our data are so imprecise and subjective, our basis for opinions so badly defined, that if you wanted to fix a number to what we know, you’re misleading yourself. Or you’re some species of fool.”

That declaration brought a sturdy silence, forcing others to peer into elaborate files that they had already digested, sometimes for more than a decade.

Washen knew exactly what Pamir planned to say, yet she felt the same surprise that she saw in the other faces. Years of expert research were being discounted, at least for this moment. It was a shock, and it made an old soul nervous, and to hide an anxious grin, she firmly clenched her jaw.

But the Master Captain nodded appreciatively. Sitting between her First and Second Chairs, she said, “Exactly,” and an instant later, with a polish resulting from ages of determined practice, she steered the meeting back onto its expected rail. “But perhaps, Submaster Pamir. Perhaps you might give us a brief and tidy summary of these imprecise, subjective, and very foolish numbers.”

“Of course, madam. Of course.”

The room was not large, the furnishings were minimal, and until less than an hour ago, this space had been just an anonymous bubble tucked inside the bottom reaches of the ship’s hull. Random protocols had chosen the room from a hundred thousand candidates. The audience had been ordered to come to the ship’s bridge, and except for the top three captains, each had his journey interrupted by a single security officer wearing civilian garb. The officers brought them here, and until the meeting was finished and its participants had dispersed, the same officers were to remain inside an adjacent room, every last one of their nexuses disabled for the duration.

Secrecy was a reasonable precaution. But more to the point, secrecy was terribly easy to accomplish, which was why the Master had insisted on taking these effortless precautions.

“Besides,” she had argued, “my experience is that if you dress someone up in the pomp and circumstance of deep secrets, he will have no choice but to consider himself as essential to some critical undertaking. Which isn’t a bad thing. Making the soul feel as if it matters … well, that almost always helps you …”

Washen remembered the conversation, then Pamir’s voice brought her back to the present.

With a firm but impressed voice, Pamir explained, “At last count, we have 306 separate accounts of life inside the Inkwell. Yes, that’s two more accounts than you have in your files. Which is part of the reason we’re here today. A good fat part, yes.”

Faces stared him, a little anxious as they waited.

“About the other 304 accounts. Records. Legends, and what have you.” He shrugged. “The commonality is the variation. We’ve always noticed that. How every species living near the Inkwell has a murky but distinctly individual vision of what lives inside the nebula. Plus this tendency, this odd reflex … of picturing their neighbor as being simply a larger, grander version of themselves.”

The room was furnished with chairs grown for this occasion and a long table adorned with uneaten and entirely ignored foods. Beside the longest wall was a simple squidskin pane into which Pamir poured a variety of images. There were towering machines and beetly giants and ruby-colored lizards and apish creatures plainly evolved for zero-gee conditions, plus a wide assortment of starships from the Inkwell, and little shuttles, and probes too small to carry more than a lone human heart. To date, the Great Ship had collected accounts from a volume fifty light-years to a side. And even more impressive, the oldest accounts had been supplied not by witnesses or their descendants, but through the stolid work of paleoscientists—researchers digging into buried homes and bunkers on worlds formerly inhabited by technological species. On three occasions, they uncovered files or stone-etched records, copies of which had been sent to the Great Ship in good faith; and according to the scientists who discovered the relics, each was at least as old as the human species.

“The pattern holds,” Pamir assured. “Whatever lives inside the nebula, it shows itself to others as being rather like themselves.”

Examples continued to parade across the squidskin.

“And this holds for the 305th example, too.” Pamir triggered a deeply encrypted file, and the screen went blank except for a lone sun, ruddy and extremely small. “This M-class dwarf is a little less than two light-years from the outer margin of the dust. But unlike most of the local suns, it’s cutting rapidly through the galactic plane.”

Their perspective leaped closer. These images had been built year by year, a great rain of photons gathered and condensed by the giant mirrors, then refined by an army of single-minded AIs and gifted navigators. Not only had they drawn out every conceivable detail, they had also reached back along the star’s course, pinpointing where the wandering mass had emerged from the black dust, and before that, where it had probably first burrowed into the Inkwell’s body.

“It was a glancing collision,” Pamir observed. “We still can see the dust roiling about. Where the sun reemerged into open space, for instance. Here.”

From the audience, a male voice said, “Sir?”

Pamir was staring at the various images, the rough face concentrating with the same intensity shown by every other face. It was as if he had never seen these files. It was as if he was interested and completely at a loss for any opinion, and there was a brief pause where it seemed as if he hadn’t heard the voice calling to him. But he had heard it. And without looking away from the squidskin, he calmly said, “Perri. What is it?”

Sitting in the front row of chairs was a boyish-faced man of no particular age. Perri was something of a minor celebrity. It was said, with good reason, that he knew the ship better than anyone but those who built it. He certainly knew its passageways and habitats better than any other living passenger, and probably more than anyone in the captains’ ranks, too. He was smart and effortlessly charming. Among his detractors, who were many, there were those who claimed that Perri was nothing but a cheap thrill-seeker and a slippery manipulator. But when the Waywards appeared, he and his wife joined the rebellion. While his detractors hid or joined the enemy ranks, the self-taught expert on every function of the ship had proved instrumental in its salvation.

“That little sun has only the one planet,” Perri remarked.

Pamir answered with a crisp, half-distracted nod.

“But of course, that could be tied to its velocity. I’m assuming some kind of near collision in its past. Maybe an ejection from a multistar system.”

Again, the Submaster nodded.

“Which would have stripped away any other planets, I suppose. But what I’m seeing here, at first glance …”

His voice trailed away.

“By all means,” Washen prodded.

The young face grinned, pleased to have the First Chair watching him. Then he gripped the hand of his wife—a beautiful, ancient woman named Quee Lee—and with a half laugh, he mentioned, “That’s an oddly ordinary orbit for a single world. If there were other worlds in the past, I mean. And if they were stripped free of this little sun during some old mayhem.”

Pamir grinned slightly. “Too far out, you mean?”

“And too circular,” Perri added. “I’d expect something more elliptical. A scarred orbit, I’d want to see.”