Those were the last human words spoken to Amund’s face.
When he reached the Port Alpha, a few low-ranking machines took the trouble to offer the same advice. Deep space was full of obstacles. One shard of comet could slip past his streakship’s defenses, and the impact would slow their trajectory by several hundred meters a second. And when that happened, the liquid bodies inside would continue forward at several hundred meters every second. Thrown against the walls, Amund would be turned into dead goo. Nobody wanted that. “Sleep through the journey out, enjoy a fine adventure on the target world, and then you’re free of this ridiculous obligation,” they told him. “Another good sleep, get swaddled in kinetic buffers, and who’s bigger than you when you come home?”
And all those pretty girls waiting, no doubt.
Amund listened to every word, but what he heard were the selfish fears:
These machines didn’t want their human wasted, and they certainly didn’t want to lose the four new worlds that his tiny death was going to buy.
Washen never mentioned cold bottles, and perhaps she didn’t know what her officers were suggesting. Her last moments with Amund were spent introducing the two-person crew, then with warm touches, reiterating her boundless appreciation for what one noble man was doing.
Rococo never brought up the topic of freezing anyone. What mattered was boasting about his infinite skills as a diplomat and how he would face down the rivers. “Saving a young man’s life,” he said.
Except he didn’t say, “Saving a graying, half-spent man’s life.” Did he?
In a day jammed with the unforeseen, the greatest surprise was Mere. So tiny next to the captains and diplomats and everyone else. So plainly, ridiculously different. Amund didn’t think of her as pretty, yet he couldn’t stop staring at the little face that looked starved because it was starved. This body and those enormous bottomless eyes were born on a crippled starship. Amund heard that story. With a rush of words, Rococo told how she crashed on an alien world where she was tormented like a demon and worshipped like a god. Mere was human only in the most glancing fashion … but wait, she wasn’t human. Amund forgot what was obvious. This was another immortal machine who couldn’t be trusted. Those wrong eyes were full of sympathy, or she was pretending to care. Either way, she offered very few words. No talk about cold bottles or her thanks for his sacrifice or even the particulars of the mission. She just took hold of him, her hand hot and his hand suddenly feeling cold. Mere gripped him just enough to prove her unnatural strength, and then she smiled in the saddest fashion, confessing, “I like very little about this mission. Just so you understand.”
Mere wasn’t beautiful, but gods didn’t have to wear beauty. It was enough that they were powerful, ageless entities deserving adoration and long stares, and any mortal would be stupid not to be thrilled to live in their shadows.
The low-ranking machines were the ones that argued for the cold bottle. Those would-be deities were scrambling for anything that smelled like power. “We’re going to save you,” they promised. As if they had any role in future events. “A kidney, a hand. You give the rivers a gift, and they let the rest of you return home again. You won’t be half a year older, and then you’re the young hero leading your people to the new world.”
How simple/stupid did they think he was?
“No bottles,” he told them emphatically, and just once. The entities had perfect recall, after all. Let them remember the words and his blatant scorn. “I’m going to live a few years, and then I’ll die one way or another,” he said. “But you’re not fooling me into hope. Because there isn’t any hope. And that’s the same for all of you. Machines don’t run forever, no matter how much you try to fool yourselves.”
The voyage proved even more grueling than expected. Regardless of painkillers and cushions, the hard acceleration made Amund ache, and each new day was desperate to repeat every day that came before. The ship’s mess could generate any food, but he usually ate the same reliable meals. He knew where he would lie down and what he would think about when he let his mind wander, and for those early months, Amund thought about ex-lovers and the cavern that had seemed so tiny until he came to live here.
Those left-behind people were obviously thinking about him. Good wishes kept arriving, and there were some elaborate, intimate messages buried among the clichés. Responding to everybody was tedious, and he gave up that chore soon enough. But a few people received his thanks along with observations about a dreary life inside a machine-infested closet, and sure enough, that honesty helped diminish the inflow until a week might pass without noise from home.
One of the later messages was memorable. A girl who Amund had never met sent him a long video of herself. She resembled Mere, undersized and big-eyed. But she was also a child through and through, and a youngster’s enthusiasm was on display. Grinning, she told him that she had studied the river’s video very closely, the same video shown to everybody in the Highland. She realized that Amund saw only a few moments before he ran downstairs to volunteer. “Everybody knows your story,” she said. But the rest of the video was far, far more impressive. “Don’t you think so?” Of course the
