Free The Greatship by Robert Reed Page A

cavern.  There was a stubborn lack of physical evidence, but even that absence made true believers dance.  Harper reasoned that the Builders were secretive and powerful organisms, and of course no slippery wise and important creature would leave traces of its passing.  Skin flakes and odd tools were never found in the deep caves, much less one genuine body, because if hard evidence did exist, then the quarry wouldn’t be the true Builders.  Would they?
    One of the files focused on the Remora’s ghost.
    On Alone.
    Hundreds of sightings and endless conjecture made for years of unblinking study.  Absorbing every word, every murky image, Alone was fascinated by the mystery that he had walked through.  According to self-proclaimed experts, he was as real as the Whispers that haunted a mothballed spaceport.  But Harper gave more credence to the Clackers who supposedly swam inside the Ship’s fuel tanks, and the Demon-whiffs that were made of pure dark matter.  Many thousands of years after the event, Alone watched the recording of himself standing inside the empty hyperfiber tank—a swirl of cobalt light that could mean anything, or nothing—and he wondered if perhaps he wasn’t entirely real.  Only recently, after billions of steps and missteps, had the phantom acquired that rare and remarkable capacity to stand apart from Nothingness.
    For every place on the hull where Alone was seen, the Remoras and others had spied at least ten more examples of the ghost wandering beneath the stars.
    What if more than one of him was wandering loose?
    Alone didn’t know what to believe.  The sightings had diminished after he abandoned the hull, and no Remora claimed to have spotted Wune’s mysterious friend.  No file mentioned Aasleen and the nightmare inside one of the Ship’s engines, which meant that the captains and crew were talented at keeping secrets, and what else did they know?  A related file focused on shape-shifting machines currently lurking in dark corners and deep wastes.  Alone’s cavern was prominent but far from the most important.  Dozens of sprawling, empty locations were named, but the only cavern to capture Alone’s imagination was named Bottom-E.  Again and again, he found sketchy accounts of tourists wandering down an empty passageway, and glancing over their shoulder, they spied a smear of dim light silently racing out of view.
    Bottom-E was a much larger cavern even than Alone’s old home, and if nothing else, it would provide the perfect next home.
    But what if a second entity like him already lived there?
    Two decades of study and consideration led to one difficult choice.  Various humans had tried to contact Harper on his return.  Most were small figures, many with criminal records and embarrassing public files.  But despite those same limitations, one man had all the qualifications to give aid to an acquaintance that he hadn’t seen for ages.
    With Harper’s face and voice, Alone sent a polite request.
    Eighteen days passed before any reply was offered.  The recorded digital showed a smiling man sitting inside what looked like a diamond bubble.  He began with an apology, explaining, “I was wandering through The Way of Old.  It’s an ammonia-hydroxide ocean, on a small scale but still a hundred cubic kilometers of murk and life.  That’s why I couldn’t get back to you right away, Harper.  Nexus are outlawed.  And since I’m going back under in another two minutes, I thought I could try to give your questions a few rubs to start with.”
    Perri was the man’s name.
    “So you’re interested in Bottom-E,” the message continued.  “I can’t promise much in the way of help.  I haven’t seen more than one tenth of one percent of the place.  But there is one enormous room that’s worth the long walk.  Its floor is hyperfiber, and a fine grade at that.  And the ceiling is kilometers overhead and inhabited by the LoYo.  They’re machines, not sentient as individuals