It took a long time for the object to show on the visual monitors. When it did, it was a huge egg, bigger than Mars-Wheel itself, but so black I could only see it as a blot lumbering across the starscape. It was the biggest damned ship my eyes ever saw, and I knew it hadn't been constructed by human hands.

We passed within ten klicks of it, and I did nothing but watch. Never turned on the video recorders. Never called another soul as witness. I don't know why. After the edge dulled on my terror, I was overall calm. I didn't want to share this thing. It was something like a miracle, and I saw it as a promise the run would end all right. Ah, my darling, I was the man in the clipper's crow's nest catching sight of Leviathan itself in the quiet dark, and taking comfort there are great and strange mysteries in the places between shores. The deeps are unfathomable, which is a pun and a promise and a treasure and a truth. Near ten years have passed, but the wonder's still in me. And maybe it'll rub off on you, Colleen, my other wonder. Yes. Yes.

Now we'll mop off this pretty little mouth and say all gone, get rid of the nice bib that Granddah messed up, and then we'll see if we can find where your mother hides the diapers. All right? All right.

VARIATION B: NESSIE

(LENTO)

(SLOWLY)

CONTACT: JULY 2038

My Dear Grandchild Ashworth,

The doctors tell me I shall not live to see you born; and although a sensible man puts as much faith in doctors as he does in palm-readers and politicians, I am inclined to believe them in this particular matter. When I lie awake at night, I can feel the loosening of the strings that tie me to life. They unravel quietly; I have yet to decide if death is being gentle or merely stealthy.

But to the business at hand. Have you read those stories where someone puts a message in a bottle and throws it into the sea? As a boy, I loved those tales. We lived a hundred miles from the coast and had no money for traveling; but one autumn day when I was twelve, I tucked an old wine bottle into my knapsack and thumbed a ride with a lorry heading toward the ocean.

Two hours later I was standing on the edge of a deserted beach where a long cement pier stretched over the water. It was overcast and cold—I hadn't thought to bring a sweater—but my blood was singing with exhilaration. I ran along the sand and danced with the waves, each breaker different, each filled with water from a distant shore. It was one of the two perfect moments in my life.

When I had burned off the hottest fires of my elation, I threw myself down at the end of the pier and watched flotsam nudge against the pylons below me. After a while, I got out my bottle, my pen, and a notepad, and tried to decide what to write for my note. You may laugh at me (I do myself now and then), but I'd given no thought to this aspect of the adventure. The important thing, you see, was just to send some tiny bit of myself off into the unknown…to think that my bottle might be retrieved by a pearl diver off Honshu, or tangle itself in a mackerel net on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, or founder in a storm rounding the Cape of Good Hope. I could point to any spot on the globe and think, there, right there, a part of me could be there.

Do you know what I finally wrote? HA HA. IT'S ME. HELLO!!!

I didn't even sign my name. In the back of my mind, I worried someone might find the bottle, track me down, and say, "Well, boy, your bottle got all the way to Brazil, isn't that splendid?" But it wouldn't be splendid at all. It would collapse my dream to some tiny reality. I wanted the world, not one paltry patch of sand.

Years later, I found myself owner and master of the good ship Coventry, a merchant freighter plying the silent dark between Earth and Mars with cargoes of tea and silk and spice…not to mention toothpicks, pencils, toilet tissue, and other mundane needs of life. It was a staid and genteel existence: months of slow calm followed by a cheerful arrival at the colony, where everyone was your friend and happy to meet you. The Coventry was always eagerly awaited.

Like most lives, I suppose, my life rolled along uneventfully. Our contracts were unashamedly pedestrian—I left to others the dangerous chemicals, the refined fission tubes, the lucrative perishables. Other ships might save money by gambling that an aging guidance system would last one more run; but the owners of those ships didn't ride in them. We spent more money on maintenance than we had to, but we never found ourselves stopped in the middle of a million miles of emptiness.

Except once. And that was by my command.

Halfway through an unexceptional run, I was summoned to the bridge by our second mate, a mercurial sort of woman named Rachel who amused the wardroom by taking up a new hobby on every run: oil painting, algebraic topology, playing the oboe…it was something different each time. This particular trip, she'd been dabbling with some of the new long-range sensor equipment that was just then coming onto the market (Lord knows where she got the money to buy it) and she'd detected a large anomaly some three hundred miles off our course. Did she have my permission to investigate? Well, certainly; our schedule was flexibility itself.

I can't say what we expected to find. Humanity was new enough to spacefaring that we constantly encountered oddities, most of them falling into the category of "yet another oddly pitted rock with a mildly unusual radar profile." However, when we finally closed on the anomaly, we discovered it was anything but mundane.

It was a giant: teardrop-shaped, black as the night it drifted through…all the grandeur and mystery of the universe made solid and riding silently before us. Like meeting the dear old Loch Ness monster—something that ought to exist, even if it's impossible.

Almost twenty years have passed and still I cannot decide if it was a ship or a single giant creature, if it was alive or dead. One thing I know: it was not some oddly pitted rock.

Rachel looked at it with something like terror in her eyes. She could not bring herself to speak.

"Dock by it," I said without hesitation. "Tell the crew it's only a drill. I want this kept secret."

"Is it safe?" she asked.

"Do what I ask, please, Rachel. Let's consider this an order, shall we?"

While she brought the ship about and matched velocities with the anomaly, I put on a Vac/suit and found some chalk. I was in a state of burning excitement, fully alive for the second time in my life.

Yes, child. I went out the airlock, leapt through the void to the anomaly's flesh, and scrawled huge letters on its midnight scales: HA HA. IT'S ME. HELLO!!!

Now I, Gerald Ashworth, own the universe. That's how I feel. Perhaps the mystery will reach some far-off planet and start some new life cycle; perhaps it will fall into a sun or black hole; perhaps it will simply drift on until the great enfolding embrace of the cosmos reunites all matter and energy at the end of time. A little piece of me rides through the universe's depths, and makes them pregnant with possibility.

Only you and I know this secret. I was out of sight of the Coventry when I wrote the message; Rachel must have been curious, but didn't ask questions. I begged her to tell no one what we had seen, and she agreed.

So, you may ask, why am I telling this to an unborn grandchild when I've kept it secret from everyone else? Because you are a complete unknown. Maybe you'll be a great leader, or an artist, or a scientist; maybe you'll be a modest factory worker; maybe you'll be a criminal, or a lunatic, or a doctor. A world of possibility.

I shall put this letter into an envelope and leave it for you to open on your eighteenth birthday. I own the Earth and I own the universe. Through you, I can own the future.