Twenty-three

Life was meant to be a string of abundances, warm glories, and trusted pleasures. O’Layle had always professed that shameless code, but the bald truth was that most of his life had been spent slinking about in shadow, begging and cheating to achieve whatever paltry success was his to enjoy. Only in these final decades had he come to appreciate how tiny and maudlin that old life had been. His transformation began when he escaped from the seemingly doomed ship. In his mind, he had shown both enormous initiative and a dry-eyed bravery. Alone, he had crossed an inhospitable wilderness. Alone, he had met and befriended an alien unlike any other, forging intimate bonds with the Blue World while teaching her about his life and species and about the Great Ship. No one played a more critical role when human emissaries finally met with the polypond. Then O’Layle had gladly returned home. He couldn’t remember it any other way. He left the Blue World willingly and freely, arriving here in triumph, his corner in history secure, the name O’Layle sure to be known for aeons to come, while his adventures were the subject of endless retellings and a boundless, incandescent envy.

True, the voyage home had been less than pleasant. With every day and every breath, he could feel a palpable dislike directed at him by the crew, and worse, the deep mistrust of the Second Chair. O’Layle was also kept from any hero’s welcome, he and that frozen sliver of the Blue World ushered aside, victims of the ugliest, most pointless fears. And there were a few other surprises waiting for him—events and limitations that would rightfully disappoint any person who had accomplished as much as he had accomplished.

The quarantine, for instance.

Why keep him apart from the passengers and crew? Perhaps it was as simple as the captains’ explanation. “This is just a precaution, and temporary,” Pamir had promised, escorting him to a private apartment in a deep, isolated district. “We just want to be sure you aren’t anything more, or less, than what you seem to be.”

What did he seem to be?

Pamir shook his heavy head, smiling with a guarded amusement. “You’re a very lucky man,” he observed. “Maybe the luckiest ever, considering the long odds that you’ve crossed. And believe me, we’re going to keep a lucky man like you happy in your new home.”

In ways good and bad, captains were true to their words: O’Layle was quite happy, yes. The apartment was large enough to suit the needs of the most demanding passenger, more than two hundred spacious rooms knitted together with a delicious maze of curling hallways and little avenues. Its only resident was encouraged to decorate the rooms however he wished, and O’Layle took on that considerable task with more energy than he would have imagined possible. In the end, almost sixty rooms had been transformed, both by his hand and with help from a platoon of compliant robots. Chairs and potted jungles, not to mention nearly half a cubic kilometer of synthetic earth had been purchased on his behalf and brought from distant parts of the ship, passing through a series of airlocks before being ushered down a hyperfiber throat and through his grand front door. Sixty rooms was an enormous accomplishment, and with a keen pride, he would parade his accomplishments to whoever visited him. Of course nobody visited in a physical sense. Even the captains appeared to him as projections. Why these kinds of precautions were necessary or reasonable, O’Layle couldn’t say. Hadn’t he lived among the crew of that streakship? They didn’t have to endure this kind of isolation, yet for months at a time, hadn’t they shared his air and drunk his recycled pee? Besides, O’Layle had already endured a series of exhaustive tests, during the voyage and afterward. His blood and bones, mind and sturdy heart were examined by every available tool, and every measurement, every knowing touch, proved what he knew to be true:

He was still and would always be O’Layle.

The captains’ true logic revealed itself gradually. A onetime lover visited as a hologram. After he showered her with charm and some aggressive begging, she agreed to marry herself with a warm, skin-covered robot. Then O’Layle led her to his favorite bed and climbed on top of her. If she didn’t enjoy the experience, at least she made the appropriate sounds. Then afterward, feeling spent and fine, he sat up and grinned at the machine’s temporary face, asking in an offhand fashion, “When do you think they’ll give up this quarantine nonsense?”

She stared at him for a long moment. Hadn’t she heard the question? Perhaps the link between her immersion chamber and his bed had been severed. But no, she was simply absorbing his query. Then with a snort and a little shake of the head, she said, “Darling,” in a grating fashion. “Don’t you realize? They might call it a quarantine, but what this is … this is a prison cell, darling …”

The idea required time to be digested.

And even when O’Layle believed what she told him, it took more months and years to come to terms with the simple fact.

“How much longer?” he asked.

Pamir was visiting. That this powerful man gave his time and attention proved that O’Layle was no simple felon hidden away in the ship’s brig. “How much longer with your quarantine?” Pamir muttered. “I’ve told you. Once we pull clear of the Inkwell, you get the keys to your door.”

“But that’s all this is?” O’Layle persisted. “A precaution?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not a prisoner?”

“Hardly.”

“You don’t think I’m a criminal?”

The big man snorted, shaking his head. “Why should we?”

“Because I illegally abandoned the ship,” O’Layle offered. “I used illegal moneys to bribe your crew, saving my own precious ass in the process.”

“Prisoners have trials,” Pamir argued. “Do you remember any trial?”

It was a telling point that O’Layle had made to himself, on numerous occasions.

“Criminals, particularly the guilty ones, live in very tiny spaces,” the Second Chair continued. “By law and custom, the ship has to supply only ten thousand cubic meters of livable room.”

A fact O’Layle knew well.

“This doesn’t look like a prison cell, does it?”

They were standing on the shoreline of his largest, most splendid room. Salt water funneled down from the Alpha Sea had flooded most of the chamber, forming a small lake, and beneath the illusion of a high blue sky, robots dressed as polypond bodies swam beneath the rippling surface.

For a moment, O’Layle smiled at the water.

“You miss her,” Pamir observed.

Did he? After years apart and a good deal of determined thought, O’Layle was less than sure about his genuine feelings.

Bristling, he heard himself muttering, “All right, I’m not a prisoner.”

“Agreed.”

“But this isn’t any normal quarantine,” he remarked.

Holos were never perfect, but those eyes certainly seemed to belong to Pamir. With a clear scorn, the bright eyes cut into him, while Pamir’s growling voice asked, “What else could this be?”

“An interrogation,” O’Layle offered.

That brought a hard, dismissive laugh.

“There’s a better word than that,” the Second Chair warned. And then he simply ceased to be.

O’LAYLE WAS ISOLATED but far from ignorant.

Using the captains’ funds, he had built an immersion chamber where he could view any portion of the ship, save those countless places where there were no eyes or cameras or where security restrictions were firmly in place. He could never visit friends and lovers as a holo; that wasn’t allowed. But he could sit on a comfortable chair of living Dallico leather, passively watching people and creatures that he had known forever while they spoke about everything, and nothing.

As a rule, his old friends were boring souls. That sad truth emerged after several years of patience. Since O’Layle couldn’t tell his own stories, there was no choice but to listen to others. Even inside that little window of time, it became obvious that each of the voices had only a handful of stories to share. Names changed, and settings, but the outcomes followed reliable themes that could have been stated at the beginning, saving breath. And every joke was a thin variation on the last thousand jokes, the same few punch lines emerging again and again.