Decades passed, and the reformed Luddite acquired responsibilities and then rank, becoming a dependable cog in the Tan-tan-5 crew.

  Then the decades were centuries.

  One millennium and forty-two years had steadily trickled past. Port Beta remained a vast and hectic facility, and the Great Ship pushed a little farther along its quarter-million year voyage around the galaxy, and this man that everybody knew seemed to have always been at his station. His abandoned family had died long ago. If he felt any interest in the generations still living inside Where-Peace-Rains, he kept it secret. Skill lifted him to the middle ranks, and he was respected by those that knew him, and the people who knew him best never bothered to imagine that this burly, plain-faced fellow might actually be someone of consequence.

  2

  His name used to be Pamir.

  Wearing his own face and biography, Pamir had served as one of the Great Ship’s captains. Nothing about that lost man was cog-like. In a vocation that rewarded charm and politics, he was an excellent captain who succeeded using nothing but stubborn competence. No matter how difficult the assignment, it was finished early and without fuss. Creativity was in his toolbox, but unlike too many high-gloss captains, Pamir used rough elegance before genius. Five projects wearing his name were still taught to novice captains. Yet the once-great officer had also lost his command, and that was another lesson shared with the arrogant shits who thought they deserved to wear the captains’ mirrored uniform: For thousands of years, Pamir was a rising force in the ranks, and then he stupidly fell in love with an alien. That led to catastrophes and fat financial losses for the Ship, and although the situation ended favorably enough, passengers could have been endangered, and worse than that, secrets had been kept from his vengeful superiors.

  Sitting out the voyage inside the brig was a likely consequence, but dissolving into the Ship’s multitudes was Pamir’s solution. The official story was that the runaway captain had slipped overboard thirty thousand years ago, joining colonists bound for a new world. As a matter of policy, nobody cared about one invisible felon. But captains forgot little, and that’s why several AIs were still dedicated to Pamir’s case—relentless superconductive minds endlessly sifting through census records and secret records, images dredged up from everywhere, and overheard conversations in ten thousand languages.

  Every morning began with the question, “Is this the day they find me?”

  And between every breath, some piece of that immortal mind was being relentlessly suspicious of everyone.

  * * *

  “Jon?”

  Tools froze in mid-task, and the mechanic turned. “Over here.”

  “Do you have a moment?”

  “Three moments,” he said. “What do you want, G’lene?”

  G’lene was human, short and rounded with fat—a cold-world adaptation worn for no reason but tradition. One of the newest trainees, she was barely six hundred years old, still hunting for her life’s calling.

  “I need advice,” she said. “I asked around, and several people suggested that I come to you first.”

  The man said nothing, waiting.

  “We haven’t talked much before,” she allowed.

  “You work for a different crew,” he said.

  “And I don’t think you like me.”

  The girl often acted flip and even spoiled, but those traits didn’t matter. What mattered was that she was a careless technician. It was a common flaw worn by young immortals. Carelessness meant that the other mechanics had to keep watch over her work, and the only question seemed when she would be thrown out of the program.

  “I don’t know you much at all,” said Pamir. “What I don’t like is your work.”

  She heard him, took a quick breath, and then she pushed any embarrassment aside. “You’re the Luddite, aren’t you?”

  There were various ways to react. Pamir told the nearest tool to pivot and aim, punching a narrow hole through the center of his palm.

  Blood sprayed, and the hole began to heal instantly.

  “Apparently not,” he said.

  G’lene laughed like a little girl, without seriousness, without pretense.

  Pamir didn’t fancy that kind of laugh.

  “Jon is a popular name with Luddites,” she said.

  Pamir sucked at the torn flesh. He had worn “Jon” nearly as long as he had worn this face. Only in dreams was he anybody else.

  “What kind of advice are you chasing?” he asked.

  “I need a topic for my practicum.”

  “Ugly-eights,” he said.

  “That’s what you’re working on here, isn’t it?”

  He was rehabilitating the main drive of an old star-taxi. Ugly-eights were a standard, proven fusion engine. They had been pushing ships across the galaxy longer than most species were alive. This particular job was relentlessly routine and cheap, and while someone would eventually find some need for this old ship, it would likely sit inside a back berth for another few centuries.

  “Ugly-eights are the heart of commerce in the galaxy,” said Pamir.

  “And they’re ugly,” she said.

  “Build a new kind of ugly,” he said. “Tweak a little function or prove that some bit or component can be yanked. Make this machine better, simpler or sexier, and a thousand mechanics will worship you as a goddess.”

  “Being worshipped,” she said. “That would be fun.”

  She seemed to believe it was possible.

  The two of them were standing in the middle of an expansive machine shop. Ships and parts of ships towered about them in close ranks. Port Beta was just ten kilometers past the main doors, and the rest of Pamir’s crew and his boss were scattered, no other face in sight.

  “I know what you did for your practicum,” said G’lene. “You built a working Kajjas pulse engine.”

  “Nobody builds a working Kajjas pulse,” he said. “Not even the Kajjas.”

  “You built it and then went up on the hull and fired the engine for ninety days.”

  “And then my luck felt spent, so I turned it off.”

  “I want to do something like that,” she said. “I want something unusual.”

  “No,” he said. “You do not, no.”

  She didn’t seem to notice his words. “It’s too bad that we don’t have any Kajjas ships onboard. Wouldn’t it be fun to refab one of those marvels?”

  Kajjas space had been left behind long ago. Not one of their eccentric vessels was presently berthed inside Beta. But the Great Ship had five other ports, reserved for the captains and security forces. Did G’lene know facts that weren’t public knowledge? Was the girl trying to coax him into some kind of borderline adventure?

  “So you want to play with a real Kajjas ship,” Pamir said.

  “But only with your help. I’m not a fool.”

  Pamir had never given much thought to G’lene’s mind. What he realized then, staring at that pretty ageless and almost perfectly spherical face, was that she didn’t seem to be one thing or another. He couldn’t pin any quality to his companion.

  “The Kajjas are famous explorers,” she said.

  “They used to be, but the wandering urge left them long ago.”

  “What if I knew where to find an old Kajjas starship?”

  “I’d have to ask where it’s hiding.”

  “Not here,” she said.

  The way she spoke said a lot. “Not here.” The “here” was drawn out, and the implications were suddenly obvious.

  “Shit,” said Pamir.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “It’s not on the Great Ship, is it?”

  The smile brightened, smug and ready for the next question.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Exactly who I seem to be,” she said.

  “A lipid-rich girl who is going to fail at the academy,” he said.

  To her credit, she didn’t bristle. Poise held her steady, and she let him stare at her face a little longer before saying, “Maybe I was lying.”

  “You aren’t talking about your practicum, are you?”

  “Not really,” she said. “No, I have friends who need to hire a drive-mechanic.”

  “Friends,” he said.

  “Best friends,” she said. “And like all best friends, they have quite a lot of money.”

  Pamir said, “No.”

  “Take a leave of absence,” she said. “The bosses like your work. They’ll let you go. Then in a little while … well, a long while … you can come back again with enough money to wipe away all of your debts.”

  “What do you know about my debts?”

  The smile sharpened. “Everything,” she said.

  “No, I don’t want this,” he said.

  Then a little meanness crept into her laugh. “Is it true what they say?”

  “It often is.”

  “Luddite minds are better than others,” she said. “They work harder because they have to start out soft and simple.”

  “We all start simple,” he said.

  “You need to go with me,” she insisted.

  There was a threat woven into the words, the tone. Pamir started to gauge his surroundings as well as this peculiar creature, but he never heard the killer’s approach. One moment, the drive-mechanic was marshaling his tools for some ad hoc battle, but before he was ready, two impossibly strong hands were clasped around his neck, reaching from behind, calmly choking the life out of a thousand year-old body.

  3

  The Kajjas home sun was a brilliant F-class star circled by living worlds, iron-fattened asteroids, and billions of lush comets. Like humans, the Kajjas evolved as bipeds hungry for oxygen and water, and like most citizens of the galaxy, biology gave them brief lifespans and problematic biochemistries. Independent of other species, they invented the usual sciences, and after learning the principles of the Creation, they looked at everything with new eyes. But their solar system happened to be far removed from the galactic plane. The nearest star was fifty light-years away. Isolated but deeply clever, the Kajjas devised their famous pulse engines—scorching, borderline-stable rockets built around collars of degenerate matter. Kajjas pulses were as good as the best drives once they reached full throttle, but stubborn physics still kept them from beating the relativistic walls. Every voyage took time, and worse still, those pulse engines had the irksome habit of bleeding radiation. Even the youngest crew would die of cancers and old age before the voyage was even half-finished.

  Faced the problem of spaceflight, every species realized that there were no perfect answers, at least so long as minds were mortal and the attached bodies were weak.

  A consensus was built among the Kajjas. Alone, they began reengineering their basic nature. With time they might have invented solutions as radical as their relentless star-drives, but not long after the project began, a river of laser light swept out at them from the galaxy’s core—a dazzling beacon carrying old knowledge, including the tools and high tricks necessary to build the bioceramic mind.

  A similar beacon would eventually find the Earth, unleashing the potentials of one wild monkey.

  But that event was a hundred million years in the future.

  Human history was brief and complicated—a few hundred thousand years of competing, combustible civilizations. By comparison, the Kajjas built exactly one technological society. War and strife were unimaginable. Unity rode in their blue blood. Once armed with immortal minds and the infamous engines, their starships rained down across a wide portion of the galaxy, setting up colonies and trade routes while poking into ill-explored corners. The Kajjas were curious and adaptable explorers, and it was easy to believe that they would eventually rule some fat portion of local space. But the species reached its zenith while the dinosaurs still ran over one tiny world, and then their slow decline began. Colonies withered. Their starships began keeping to the easy, well-mapped routes. Some of the Kajjas never even went into space. And what always bothered Pamir, and what always intrigued him, was that these ancient creatures had no clear idea what had gone wrong.

  * * *

  A few Kajjas rode onboard the Great Ship. They were poorer than the typical passenger, but each had a love for brightly lit taverns, and in moderation, drinks made from hot spring waters and propanol salted liberally with cyanide.

  Philosophers by nature and cranky philosophers at that, the Kajjas made interesting company. Pamir approved of their irritable moods. He liked cryptic voices and far-sighting reflections. This was a social species with clear senses of hierarchies. If you wanted respect, it was important to sit near your Kajjas friend, near enough to taste the poison on his breath, and to wring the best out of the experience, you had to act as if he was the master of the table and everyone sitting around it.

  Pamir’s favorite refugee was ageless to the eye, but eyes were easily fooled.

  “We were courageous voyagers,” said the raspy voice.

  “You were,” Pamir agreed.

  His companion had various names, but in human company, he preferred to be called “Tailor.”

  “Do you realize how many worlds we visited?”

  “No, Tailor, I don’t.”

  “You do not know, and we can only guess numbers.” The words were tumbling out of an elderly, often repaired translator. “Ten million planets? Twenty billion? I can’t even count the places that I have walked with these good feet.”

  The Kajjas suddenly propped his legs on the tabletop.

  Knowing what was proper, Pamir leaned between the toe-rich, faintly kangaroo-style feet. “I would tolerate your stories, if you could tolerate my boundless interest.”

  The alien’s head was narrow and extremely deep, like the blade of a hatchet. Three eyes surrounded a mouth that chewed at the air, betraying suspicion. “Do I know you, young human?”

  “No,” Pamir lied. “We have never met.”

  He was wearing that new face and the name Jon, and he was cloaked in a fresh life story too.

  “You seem familiar to me,” said the Kajjas.

  “Because you’re ancient and full of faces, remembered and imagined too.”

  “That feels true.”

  “I beg to know your age,” Pamir said.

  The question had been asked before, and Tailor’s answer was always enormous and never repeated. If the alien felt joyous, he claimed to be youthful forty million years old. But if angry or despairing, he painted himself as being much, much older.

  “I could have walked along your Cretaceous shoreline,” said Tailor that evening, hinting at a very dark disposition.

  “I wish you had,” said Pamir.

  “Yet I can do that just the same,” the Kajjas said, two eyes turning to mist as the mind wove some private image.

  Pamir knew to wait, sipping his rum.

  The daydream ended, and the elderly creature leaked a high trilling sound that the translator turned into a despairing groan.

  “My mind is full,” Tailor declared.

  “Should I envy you?”

  Iron blades rubbed hard against one another—the Kajjas laugh. “Fill your mind with whatever you wish. Envy has its uses.”

  “Should my species envy yours?”

  Every eye cleared. “Are you certain we haven’t met?”

  “Nothing is certain,” said Pamir.

  “Indeed. Indeed.”

  “Perhaps you know other humans,” Pamir said.

  “I have sipped drinks with a few,” Tailor said. “Usually male humans, as it happens. One or two of them had your bearing exactly.”

  The focus needed to be shifted. “You haven’t answered me, my master. Should humans envy your species’ triumphs?”

  A long sip of poison turned into a human-style nod. “You should envy every creature’s success. And if you wish my opinion—”

  “Yes.”

  “In my view, our greatest success is the quiet grace we have shown while making our plunge back to obscurity. Not every species vanishes so well as the Kajjas.”

  “Humans won’t,” said Pamir.

  “On that, we agree.”

  “And why did your plunge begin?” the human asked. “What went wrong for you, or did something go right?”

  Pamir had drunk with this entity many times over the millennia. Tailor gave various answers to this question, each delivered without much faith in the voice. Usually he claimed that living too long made an immortal cowardly and dull. Too many of his species were ancient, and that antediluvian nature brought on lethargy, and of course lethargy led to a multifaceted decline.

  Wearing the Jon face, Pamir waited for that reliable excuse again.

  But the alien said nothing, wiggling those finger-like toes. Then with an iron laugh, fresh words climbed free of his mouth.

  “I think the secret is our minds,” he began.

  “Too old, are they?” asked Pamir.

  “I am not talking about age. And while too many memories are jammed inside us, they are not critical either.”

  “What is wrong with your mind?”

  “And yours too.” Tailor leaned forward. A hand older than any ape touched Pamir’s face, tracing the outlines of his forehead. “Your brain and mine are so similar. In its materials and the nanoscopic design, and in every critical detail that doesn’t define our natures.”

  “True, true,” said the worshipful Pamir.

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Of course not, no,” said the alien. “But have you ever asked yourself … has that smart young mind of yours ever wondered … why doesn’t this sameness leave you just a little sick in your favorite stomach?”

  4

  Choke an immortal man, pulverize the trachea and neck bones and leave the body starved of oxygen, and he dives into a temporary coma. But the modern body is more sophisticated than machines, including star-drives, and within their realm, humans can be far more durable, more self-reliant. Choke the man and a nanoscopic army rises from the mayhem, knitting and soothing, patching and building. Excess calories are warehoused everywhere, including inside the bioceramic mind, and despite the coma and the limp frame, nothing about the victim is dead. Pamir wasn’t simply conscious. He was lucid, thoughts roaring, outrage in full stride as he guessed about enemies and their motives and what he would do first when he could move again, and what he would do next, and depending on the enemies, what color his revenge would take.