Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

“I was wrong,” Alone agreed.

Mr. Jan looked at him. He took three steps forward, and when the other figure didn’t complain, he admitted, “I came back to the hole. You don’t realize that, but I did. I went there to check on you. After you fell into the coma, I used a little lift-bug to reach your body.”A trembling hand tugged at the braided hair. “I meant to bring you out, but I got scared. It looks bad, what happened, and I didn’t want trouble. So I scrubbed away every trace of me, from your field recorders and in here too. Then I convinced your apartment that I never existed and that you were always coming home tomorrow. In case anybody became curious about your whereabouts.”

“People can be curious,” Alone agreed.

Mr. Jan smiled grimly. Then he wiped at his eyes, adding, “I was always your best friend.”

Alone said nothing.

“You know, when you suddenly vanished, nobody noticed. Oh, they might ask me about you. Since they knew we were close. For several years, they’d wonder if I’d heard any noise from Crazy Harper and where you might have gone.”

“‘Crazy Harper’?”

“That’s what some of them called you. I never did.”

Alone made no remark.

For a long while, Mr. Jan concentrated on his mind, searching for courage to say, “I’m a little curious. How did you finally climb out of that hole?”

“There is a story,” Alone admitted. “But I don’t wish to tell it.”

Mr. Jan nodded, lips mashed together. Then he asked, “Does anyone know the story? About us, I mean.”

Silence.

Mr. Jan wrapped his arms around his chest and squeezed. “Not that you’re in terrible shape now. I mean, it’s not as if I murdered anybody.” He paused, dwelling for a moment on possibilities. Then he pointed out, “You lost time. I know, it was quite a lot of time. But here you are, aren’t you? And everything is back where it belongs.”

“I’ve told no one about my years.”

With a deep sigh, Mr. Jan said, “Good.”

“No one knows anything. Except for you, of course.”

The human nodded. He tried to laugh, but his voice collapsed into soft sobs. “I won’t tell, if you don’t.”

“I don’t know what I would say.”

Wiping at his wet face, Mr. Jan quietly asked, “What can I do? Please. Tell me how to make this up to you.”

Alone said nothing.

“I was wrong. I’ve done something criminal, and I’ll admit that much, yes.

And you should deliver the punishment. That’s the right solution. Not the captains, but you.” The smile was weak, desperate. “I promise. I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”

Alone had no idea what to say, but then a memory took hold. He thought to smile, nodding knowingly. Then with quiet authority, Alone explained, “You will leave me. Leave here and climb to the Ship’s hull. Since you’re a criminal, you need to be where criminals belong. Live under the stars and help keep the hull in good repair.” Alone took a small step forward, adding, “The work is vital. The Great Ship must remain strong. There is no greater task.”

Mr. Jan straightened his back. “What?” He didn’t seem to understand. “You want me to work with the Remoras? Is that your punishment?”

“No,” said Alone. “I wish you to become a Remora.”

“But why would I?”

“Because if you do otherwise,” Alone replied, “other people, including the captains, will hear what you did to your good friend, Crazy Harper.”

The demand was preposterous. Mr. Jan shook his head and laughed for a full minute before his frightened, slippery mind fell back to the most urgent question. “How did you get out of that hole?”

Alone didn’t answer.

“Somebody helped you. Didn’t they?”

“The Great Ship helped me.”

“The Ship?”

“Yes.”

“The Ship pulled you out from that hole?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Jan looked at the sober face, waiting for any hint of a lie. But nothing in the expression gave hope, and he collapsed to the stone floor. “I just don’t believe you,” he sobbed.

But he did believe.

“The Ship needs you to walk on the hull,” Alone explained. “It told me exactly that. Until you are pure again, you must live with the followers of Wune.”

“For how long?”

“As long as is necessary.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

Alone hesitated. Then quite suddenly he was laughing, admitting, “I’m sorry, Mr. Jan. I don’t know either. Even with me, it seems, the Great Ship refuses to explain much about anything.”

Harper must have been a difficult, solitary man. No one seemed to have missed his face or companionship, and his sudden return caused barely a ripple of interest. Word spread that somebody was again living inside his apartment, and the apartment’s AI dutifully reported communications with acquaintances from the far-flung past. But the greetings were infrequent and delivered without urgency. Maintaining his privacy proved remarkably easy. For twenty busy years, Alone remained inside those small, barely furnished rooms. And the apartment never asked where its only tenant had been or why he had been detained, much less why this new Harper never needed to eat or drink or sleep. The machine’s minimal intelligence had been damaged by Mr. Jan. Alone spent a month dismantling and mapping his companion’s mental functions, and all that while he wondered if he was the same, his mind incomplete, mangled by clumsy, forgotten hands.

Harper had painted himself as an important explorer and an exceptionally brave thinker. Inside his pack, he had carried dated records about mysterious occurrences inside the Great Ship. But there were larger files at home, each one possessed by one broad topic and a set of tireless goals. In the man’s long absence, those files had grown exponentially. Alone uncovered countless stories about ghosts and monsters and odd lost aliens. Over thousands of years, one thin rumor of a Builder being seen by the first scout team had become a mass of rumors and third-hand testimonies, plus a few more compelling lies, and several blatant fakes that had been discounted but never quite set aside.

Believe just a fraction of those accounts, and it would be difficult not to accept that the Great Ship was full of ancient, inscrutable aliens—wise souls born when the Earth was just so many uncountable atoms cooking inside a thousand scattered suns.

Each resident species had its preferred Builder.

Humanoids like to imagine ancient humanoids; cetaceans pictured enormous whales; machine intelligences demanded orderly, nonaqueous entities. But fashions shifted easily and in confusing directions, dictating the key elements to the most recent fables. Each century seemed to have its favorite phantom, its most popular unmapped cavern, or one mysterious phenomenon that was fascinating yet never rose to a point where physical evidence could be found. But even a stubborn lack of evidence was evidence. Harper had reasoned that the Builders had to be secretive and powerful organisms, and of course no slippery wise and important creature would leave any trace of its passing. Skin flakes and odd tools were never found in the deep caves, much less a genuine body, because if hard evidence did exist, then the quarry wouldn’t be the true Builders. Would they?

One file focused on the Remora’s ghost.

On Alone.

He had discovered references about himself in Harper’s field recorder. But in his absence, new sightings and endless conjecture made for years of unblinking study. Alone absorbed every word, every murky image, fascinated by the mystery that he had walked through. According to most accounts, he was more real than the Whispers that haunted a mothballed spaceport. But people like Harper generally preferred the Clackers who supposedly swam inside the Ship’s fuel tanks, and the Demon-whiffs that were made of pure dark matter. Tens of thousands of years after the event, Alone watched the recording of him standing inside the empty hyperfiber tank—a swirl of cobalt light that could mean anything, or nothing—and he began to wonder if perhaps he wasn’t quite real back then. Only recently, after all of the steps and missteps, had he acquired that rare and remarkable capacity to stand apart from Nothingness.