But there were many states between full life and true death.

  He was sprawled out on the shop floor, and standing over him, somebody said, “Done.”

  Then he felt himself being lifted.

  A woman said, “Hurry.”

  G’lene?

  His body was carried, but not far. There was a maze of storage hangers beneath the shop. Pamir assumed that he was taken into one of those rooms, and once set down again he found the strength to strike a careless face, once and then twice again before someone shoved a fat tube down his ruined throat.

  Fiery chemicals cooked his flesh.

  Too late, he tried to engage his nexuses. But their voices had been jammed, and all that came back to him was white noise and white deathly light.

  In worse ways than strangling, his body was methodically killed.

  Deafness took him, and his sense of smell was stripped away, and every bit of skin went numb. In the end, the only vision remaining was imagination. A body couldn’t be left inside a storage hanger. Someone would notice. That’s why he imagined himself being carried, probably bound head to toe to keep him from fighting again. But he didn’t feel any motion, and nothing changed. Nothing happened. Lying inside blackness, his thoughts ran on warehoused power, and when no food was offered those same thoughts began to slow, softening the intensities of each idea, ensuring a working consciousness that could collapse quite a bit farther without running dry.

  The streakship’s launch was never noticed, and the long, fierce acceleration made no impression.

  But Pamir reasoned something like that would happen. Clues and a captain’s experience let him piece together a sobering, practical story. If any Kajjas ship was wandering near the Great Ship, it would have been noticed. That news would have found him. And since it wasn’t close, and since the universe was built mostly from inconvenient trajectories, the streakship would probably have to burn massive amounts of fuel just to reach the very distant target—assuming it didn’t smash into a comet while plunging through interstellar space.

  This kind of mission demanded small crews and fat risks, and Pamir was going to remain lost for a very long time.

  “Unless,” he thought. “Unless I’m not lost at all.”

  Paranoia loves darkness. Perhaps this ugly situation was a ruse. Maybe the relentless AI hunters had finally found him, but nobody was quite sure if he was the runaway captain. So instead of having him arrested, the captains decided to throw the suspect inside a black box, trying to squeeze the secrets out of him.

  Bioceramic minds were tiny and dense and utterly unreadable.

  But a mind could be worn down. A guilty man or even an innocent man would confess to a thousand amazing crimes. Wondering if prison was better than dying on some bizarre deep-space quest, Pamir found the temptation to say his old name once, just to see if somebody had patched into his speech center. But as time stretched and the thoughts slowed even more, he kept his mind fixed on places and days that meant something to a man named Jon. He pictured Port Beta and the familiar machinery. He spoke to colleagues and drank with them, the routine, untroubled life of the mechanic lingering long past his death. Then when he was miserably bored, he imagined Where-Peace-Rains, spending the next years with a life and beliefs that before this were worn only as camouflage.

  For the first time, he missed that life that he had never lived.

  * * *

  Decades passed.

  Oxygen returned without warning, and flesh warmed, and new eyes opened as a first breath passed down his new throat.

  A face was watching him.

  “Hello, Jon,” said the face, the hint of a smile showing.

  Pamir said, “Hello,” and breathed again, with relish.

  G’lene appeared to be in fine health, drifting above the narrow packing crate where his mostly dead body had been stowed.

  Pamir sat up slowly.

  A thoroughly, wondrously alien ship surrounded them. Its interior was a cylinder two hundred meters in diameter and possibly ten kilometers long. Pamir couldn’t see either end of this odd space. The walls were covered with soft glass threads, ruddy like the native Kajjas grass, intended to give the Kajjas good purchase for kicking when they were in zero gravity, like now. But when the ship’s engines kicked on, the same threads would come alive, lacing themselves into platforms where the crew could work and rest, the weaves tightening as the gees increased. That was standard Kajjas technology. Kajjas machines were scattered about the curved, highly mobile landscape, each as broken as it was old. There were control panels and what looked like immersion chambers, none of them working, and various hyperfiber boxes were sealed against the universe. Every surface wore a vigorous coat of dust. Breathing brought scents only found in places that had been empty forever. Rooms onboard the Great Ship smelled this way. But the air and the bright lights felt human, implying that his abductors had been onboard long enough to reconfigure the environment.

  G’lene kept her distance. “How do you feel, Jon?”

  “Can you guess?” he asked.

  She laughed quietly, apparently embarrassed.

  In the distance, three entities were moving in their direction. Two of them were human.

  “Our autodoc just spliced a fast-breaker pipe into your femoral,” she said. “You’ll be strong and ready in no time.”

  Pamir studied legs that didn’t look like his legs, and he looked at a rib-rich chest and a stranger’s spidery hands. Starvation and nothingness had left him eroded, brittle and remarkable.

  “Our captain wants you to start repairing the pulse drive,” G’lene said.

  “And I imagine that our captain wants enthusiasm on my part.”

  She blinked. She said, “Hopefully.”

  “You know a little something about machines,” he said. “How does the old engine look?”

  “I’m no expert, as you like to tell me. But it looks like the last crew put everything to sleep in the best ways. Unfortunately there’s no fuel onboard, and none of the maintenance equipment is functioning.”

  “I hope our captain considered these possibilities.”

  “We brought extra fuel and tools, yes.”

  “Enough?”

  She stared at his skinny legs.

  Pulse engines, like flesh, were adaptable when it came to nutrition. Any mass could be fed through the collars, transformed into plasma and light.

  Pamir wiggled his bare toes.

  The other crewmembers were kicking closer.

  “I’m guessing that the Kajjas crew is also missing,” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “How long missing?”

  The question made her uneasy.

  “How long have we been here?” he asked.

  That was another difficult topic, but she nodded when she said, “Nineteen days.”

  The autodoc beneath him was a small field model, serviceable but limited. Pamir studied it and then the girl, and then he flexed one leg while leaving the other perfectly still. Asked to work, the atrophied muscles took the largest share of the new food, and the leg grew warmer, sugars burning and lipids burning until the slippery blood began to glow.

  “How about the sovereigns?” he asked.

  “Sovereigns?”

  “The ship’s AIs.” Most species patterned their automated systems after their social systems, and the Kajjas preferred noble-minded machines in charge of the automated functions.

  “We’ve tried talking to the AIs,” said G’lene. “They don’t answer.”

  Tossing both legs out from the tiny growth chamber, Pamir dragged the fast-break pipe with them. “And what are we? A salvage operation?”

  She said, “Yes.”

  “And at the end of the fun, am I paid? Or am I murdered for good?”

  “Paid,” she blurted. “The offer from me was genuine, Jon. There’s a lot of money to be made here.”

  “For a badly depleted Kajjas ship,” he said, sighing. “It’s more than hopeful, believing this derelict can earn much on the open market.”

  She said nothing.

  “But it is exceptionally old, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what our captain says.”

  “Sure, the Kajjas sent missions everywhere,” he said. “They were even happy to poke far outside the Milky Way.”

  “Which makes this a marvelous relic,” she said.

  “To a species inflicted with hard times. Nobody with a genuine purse would give a little shit about this lost wreck.”

  The two other humans were arriving—a woman and a man. They were closely related, or they loved to wear faces that implied some deep family bond.

  “This is Maxx,” G’lene said, referring to the man.

  “And I’m Rondie,” the woman offered.

  Powerful people, each as muscular as G’lene was round, their every motion and the flash of their eyes proved they were youngsters.

  Pamir wondered whose hands had strangled him.

  “It’s great to finally meet you,” Maxx said, nothing but pure, undiluted happiness in his voice. “We keep hearing that you can make this ship healthy again.”

  “Who says that?” Pamir asked.

  “The only one who matters,” the fellow said, laughing amiably.

  What was more disturbing: Being kidnapped for a mission that he didn’t want to join, or being trapped in the company of three earnest, inexperienced near-children?

  Next to the humans, the drive-mechanic was utterly ancient.

  But compared to their captain, Pamir was a newborn.

  “Hello to you, Jon,” said the Kajjas.

  “Why me?” Pamir asked. “You should know how to fix your own beast.”

  One last kick made the glass crinkle and flow, bringing the captain into the group. The sound of grinding iron preceded the words, “I have never mastered the peculiar genius to be a worthy engineer.”

  “Too bad,” said Pamir.

  Then Tailor touched his own head above the eyes. “And to learn the necessary talents now would require empty spaces inside my head, which means discarding some treasured memories. And how could I do such to pieces of my own self?”

  5

  Pamir knew that nobody was clever enough or worthy enough, much less lucky enough to truly disappear.

  The tiniest body still possessed mass and volume, shadow and energy.

  And a brilliant mind was never as clever as three average minds sniffing after something of interest.

  The wise fugitive always kept several new lives at the ready.

  But every ready-made existence carried risks of its own, including the chance that someone would notice the locker jammed with money and clothes, the spare face and a respectable name never used.

  Like real lives, each false life had its perfect length, and there was no way to be sure how long that was.

  No matter how compromised the current face, transitions always brought the most perilous days.

  Paranoia was a fugitive’s first tool.

  But panic could make the man break from cover at the worst possible moment.

  Love meant trust, which meant that no face should be loved.

  Most of all, the wanted man should be acutely suspicious of the face in the mirror.

  Patterns defined each life, and old patterns were trouble.

  Except acquiring the new walk and voice, pleasures and hates was the most cumbersome work possible. And even worse, fine old strategies could be left behind, and the best instincts were corroded by the blur of everything new.

  In a crowd of ten million strangers, nobody cared about the human who used to be many things, including a captain. And among the millions were four exceptions, or perhaps one hundred and four, or just that one inquisitive soul standing very close.

  Now look into that sea of faces, stare at humans and aliens, machines and the hybrids between. Look hard at everything while pointing one finger—a finger that has been worn for some little while—and now against some very long odds, pick out which of those souls should be feared.

  * * *

  Humans found the derelict machine drifting outside the Milky Way, and after claiming the Great Ship as their own, loyal robots proceeded to map the interior. Each cavern was named using elaborate codes. Even excluding small caves and holes, there were billions of caverns on the captains’ maps. Positions and volumes were included each name, but there was also quite a lot of AI free verse poetry. Then as the Great Ship entered the galaxy, one paronomasia-inspired AI savant was ordered to give a million caverns better designations—words that any human mouth could manage—and one unremarkable hole was named:

  Where-Peace-Rains.

  Peace ruled inside the dark emptiness, but there was no rain. Remote and unspectacular, the cavern remained silent for long millennia. Communities of archaic humans were established in other locations. Some failed, others found ways to prosper. Mortal passengers had one clear advantage; being sure to die, they paid relatively small sums to ride the Great Ship. And unlike their eternal neighbors, they could pay a minimal fee to have one child. Three trifling payments meant growth, and the captains soon had to control populations through laws and taxes as well as limiting the places where those very odd people could live.

  Forty-five thousand years ago, human squatters claimed Where-Peace-Rains, setting up the first lights and a hundred rough little homes in the middle of the bare granite floor. They told themselves they were clever. They assured each other that they were invisible, stealing just a trickle of power from the Ship. But an AI watchdog noticed the theft, and once alerted to the crime, the Master Captain sent one of her more obstinate officers to deal with the ongoing mess.

  Pamir was still a captain—an entity full of authority and the ready willingness to deploy his enormous powers.

  Wearing a mirrored uniform, he walked every street inside the village, telling the strangers that they were criminals and he wasn’t happy. He warned that he could order any punishment that could be imagined, short of genocide. Then he demanded that the Luddites meet him in the round at the village’s heart, bags packed, and ready for the worst.

  Three hundred people, grown and young, assembled on the polished red granite.

  “Explain your selves,” the captain demanded.

  A leader stepped forward. “We require almost nothing,” the old/young man began, his voice breaking at the margins. “We are simple and small, and we ask nothing from the captains or the sacred Ship.”

  “Shut up,” said Pamir.

  Those words came out hard, but what scared everyone was the captain’s expression. Executions weren’t possible, but a lot of grim misery lay between slaughter and salvation, and while these people believed in mortality, they weren’t fanatics chasing martyrdom or some ill-drawn afterlife.

  Nobody spoke.

  Then once again, the captain’s voice boomed.

  “Before anything else, I want you to explain your minds to me. Do it now, in this place, before your arbitrary day comes to an end.”

  Nobody was allowed to leave and reset the sun. With little time left, a pretty young woman was pressed into service. Perhaps the other squatters thought she would look appealing to the glowering male officer. Or maybe she was the best, bravest voice available. Either way, she spoke about the limits of life and the magic of physics and the blessings of the eternal, boundless multiverse. Pamir appeared to pay attention, which heartened some. When she paused, he nodded. Could they have found an unlikely ally? But then with a low snort, he said, “I like numbers. Give me mathematics.”

  The woman responded with intricate, massive numbers wrapped around quantum wonders, invoking the many worlds as well as the ease with which fresh new universes sprang out of the old.

  But the longer she spoke, the less impressed he seemed to be. Acting disgusted, then enraged, Pamir told the frightened community, “I know these theories. I can even believe the crazy-shit science. But if you want this to go anywhere good, you have to make me believe what you believe. You have to make me trust the madness that we aren’t just here. There are an infinite number of caves exactly like this stone rectum, and infinite examples of you, and there is no measurable end of me. And all of us have assembled in these endless places, and this meeting is happening everywhere exactly as it is here.

  “Convince me of that bullshit,” he shouted.

  The woman’s infinite future depended on this single performance. Tears seemed like a worthy strategy. She wept and begged, dropping to her knees. Her skin split and the mortal blood flowed against the smooth stony ground, and every time she looked up she saw an ugly immortal dressed in that shiny garb, and every time she looked down again, the world seemed lost. No words could make this blunt, brute of a man accept her mind. No action or inaction would accomplish any good. Suddenly she was trying only to make herself worthy in the eyes of the other doomed souls, and that was the only reason she stood again, filling her body with pride, actively considering the merits of rushing the captain to see if she could bruise that awful face, if only for a moment or two.

  Yet all that while, Pamir had a secret:

  He had no intention of hurting anyone.

  This was a tiny group. A captain of his rank had the clout to give each of them whatever he wished to give them. And later, if pressed by his superiors, Pamir could blame one or two colleagues for not adequately defending this useless wilderness. Really, the scope of this crime was laughably, pathetically tiny—a mild burden more than an epic mess, regardless what these bright terrified eyes believed.