Free The Greatship by Robert Reed

criminals belong.  Live under the stars and help keep the hull in good repair.”  Alone took a small step forward.  “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 said.
    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.”
    “But how long will that take?”
    Alone hesitated.  Then quite suddenly he was laughing.  “I am sorry, Mr. Jan.  I don’t know the timetable.  Even with me, it seems, the Great Ship refuses to explain much about anything.”

10
    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 living inside his modest, half-finished 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.  Privacy proved remarkably easy to keep.  For twenty busy years, Alone remained inside the 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 ate or drank or slept.  Mr. Jan had damaged the machine’s minimal intelligence.  A full month was invested in dismantling and mapping his companion’s mental functions, and all that while Alone 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 self-feeding files in his home, each possessed by one broad topic and a set of tireless goals.  Those files had grown exponentially while the master was mission—anecdotes about ghosts and monsters and odd lost aliens.  After thousands of years, one thin joke of a Builder waving hello to the first scout team had mutated into a string of third-hand testimonies and conspiracies among the captains.  Add to that rumors and misunderstandings as well as a river of compelling lies and buoyant blatant fakes, and it would take the busy soul centuries just to discount each and every tale.
    Set doubt aside, even for a moment, and it would be impossible 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.
    And each resident species had its preferred Builder.
    Humanoids liked to imagine ancient humanoids; cetaceans pictured enormous whales; machine intelligences demanded orderly, nonaqueous entities.  But fashions shifted easily and usually in confusing directions, dictating the key elements to the most recent fables.  Each millennium had its favorite phantom and its most popular