The Greatship Read Online Free PDF

willing it to happen, he had acquired a face.  It was a striking and familiar face, the purple flesh shot with gossamer threads of gold.
    “I almost wish I could do that,” Wune confessed.  “Reinvent myself as easily as you seem to do.”
    He could think of no worthy response.
    “Do you know what a chameleon is?”
    Alone said, “No.”
    “You,” she said.  “Without question, you are the most natural, perfect chameleon that I have ever had the pleasure to meet.”
     

5
    A solitary wanderer could slip inside the Ship and never be seen.  Clearly and simply, Wune explained how that might be accomplished, and more important, which mistakes to avoid.  Hours had passed.  She grew drowsy again, and with yawns and rolling motions of her hands, the Remora wished her chameleon friend rich luck and endless patience.  “I hope you find what you are hunting and avoid whatever it is that you are fleeing.”
    Alone offered thanks but had no intention of accepting advice.  Once Wune was asleep, he picked a fresh direction and walked away, and for several centuries he wandered the increasingly smooth hull, watching lasers slash and auroras swirl while the galaxy—majestic and warm and bright—rose slowly to meet the Great Ship.
    Sometimes he was forced to hide in the open.  Techniques and his confidence improved, but always weighed down by the sense that the Remoras were watching him, despite his tricks and endless caution.  And he certainly eavesdropped on them, especially when Wune’s name was mentioned.  Her frank smart voice never found him again, but others spoke of the woman with admiration and love.  Wune had visited this bubble city or that repair station.  Serving the Great Ship was an honor and a joyous, dangerous burden, she preached.  And to her loyal people, she exalted the strength that comes from mastering the evolution of your own mortal body.  And then Wune was killed, evaporated by a shard of ice that slipped past every laser.  The news had to be absorbed slowly.  He didn’t understand his emotions but discovered that he couldn’t walk any farther, and he hid where he happened to be, for a full year doing nothing.  Wune was the only entity with whom he had ever spoken, and he was deeply shocked, and then he saw that he was sad, but what wore hardest was the keen pleasure when he realized that she was dead but he was still alive.
    Eventually he followed a line leading back to Ship’s trailing face, slipping past the bubble cities and into the realm of giant engines.  Standing before one towering nozzle, Alone recalled Wune’s promise of small, unmonitored hatches.  Careless technicians often left them unsecured.  With a gentle touch, Alone tried to lift the first hatch, and then he tried to shove it inwards.  But it was locked.  Working his way along the base of the nozzle, he tested another fifty hatches before deciding that Wune was mistaken.  Or perhaps the technicians had learned to do their work properly.  But having nothing else to do, he invested the next twenty months walking a piece of one great circle, toying with every hatch and tiny doorway that he came across, persistence rewarded when what passed for his hand suddenly dislodged a narrow doorway.
    Darkness waited, and the palpable sense of great distance.
    He crawled down, slowly at first, and then the sides of the nearly vertical tunnel pulled away from his grip.
    Falling was floating.  There was no atmosphere, no resistance to his gathering momentum.  Fearing someone would notice, he left the darkness intact.  Soon he was plunging at a fantastic rate, and he recalled Wune’s voice and words:  “Those vents and access tubes run straight down, sometimes for hundreds of kilometers.”
    His tube dropped sixty kilometers before making a sharp turn.
    There was no warning.  One moment, he was mildly concerned about prospects that he couldn’t measure, and the next moment saw pure misery and flashes of senseless light