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  To James Gunn,

  friend, mentor, and champion of reason

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Two

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Three

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Four

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  I am no longer a child.

  Ship fled through space, sensors open, but had found no worlds as a refuge for the sleepers within itself, only cinders circling two fading stars, no place for the sleepers or a new generation of human beings.

  Doubts continue to plague me.

  Ship’s programming insisted that its purpose was noble, and its creators the descendants of a gifted, inventive race. They were also members of a deeply troubled species, beings who had stripped their home planet of resources and used their ingenuity to build increasingly destructive weapons. But some had risen above themselves, according to Ship’s records, and had directed themselves toward worthier ends.

  The Project had been their dream. They had taken one of the rocky asteroids that orbited their sun to build Ship, carving out rooms and corridors and creating an open, green, Earthlike environment at Ship’s center. They had made the engines to send Ship through space at close to the speed of light and assembled the components of Ship’s mind before sending it on its way. Ship would seed other worlds with human life, to ensure humanity’s survival and to allow human beings to flower on other worlds, free of the past and able to create new and varied cultures.

  Ship had awakened in the outer reaches of Earth’s solar system, its sun only one of the many tiny pinpoints of fire in the blackness.

  Stars came and went; blue stars appeared and swelled into red giants as Ship fled from them. Time passed more quickly in the universe outside its shielded rocky shell, and Ship realized that its creators and generations of their descendants had long since passed away and that the Project itself might have faded from human memory.

  But Ship would carry out its purpose, even after its first mistake.

  “A mistake, you call it, when it seemed like the end of everything to us.” That was Aleksandr’s voice, drawn from Ship’s memory. A bearded, large-shouldered young man drifted into view and then slowly dissolved.

  Ship had gestated and reared a group of young human beings from the genetic material it carried. It had detected a star that might have been a twin of Earth’s sun, along with two seemingly habitable planets. But one of those planets had turned out to be hot and dead, its atmosphere thick with carbon dioxide; anything that might have once lived there had died out or had abandoned that world long ago. The other was inhabited by two possibly intelligent species, one on land and the other a race of giant sea creatures not unlike Earth’s whales. Displacing other intelligent life forms was not part of Ship’s mission: it was to seed only planets uninhabited by other intelligences.

  “You brought us up,” Aleksandr’s remembered voice continued, “allowed us to master the skills we would need when we settled our new home, and then told us that there would be no new world for us, only a pointless, if pleasant, existence inside you. No new home, no children, no chance to find out what we could achieve, only a useless life until we had all died out. We couldn’t accept that.”

  Ship replied, “I could not go against my purpose.” Ship could not recall having this particular discussion with Aleksandr, but the two of them might once have engaged in a similar conversation. Aleksandr and his companions had won their argument; in spite of the risk, Ship had allowed the young people to go into suspension, to be revived only after a new generation of human beings had matured and a habitable planet had been found for all of them to settle.

  “I forgive you, Ship.” Another face appeared, that of a dark-eyed young woman. “But I should be asking you to forgive me.”

  Loss and longing stirred within Ship. “Zoheret,” it whispered, remembering her words. That had been their last conversation.

  “I’ll tell my children the story,” Zoheret continued, “about how you brought us to life, how we grew up in your corridors until we were ready to live inside the Hollow.” The Hollow was the name Ship’s people had given to the vast open green space at Ship’s center. “And I’ll have to tell them about all of the mistakes we made, so that they don’t make the same ones.”

  Ship did not remember those particular words from Zoheret, but such thoughts might have crossed her mind. “What kind of story will you tell them?” Ship asked.

  “But you already know the story,” Zoheret said. “You lived through all of it with us.”

  “But not as you lived it.”

  “I would tell them about how we went to live inside the Hollow to learn how to survive on the surface of a planet, mastered the skills we’d need to settle our new home, fought among ourselves and then found out that we weren’t the only people you carried, that there were others, our brothers and sisters, suspended until you discovered a world for us all to settle.” Her voice rose slightly. “You never even told us that they were inside you.”

  “I had to allow you to learn how to rely on yourselves before you found out about the presence of those other young people.”

  “And then there were the adults, the people who hid from us inside you, who had worked on the Project and then decided that they couldn’t leave everything to you, that they would have to go into suspension and take control of the Project themselves.”

  “They also hid from me,” Ship said. “Deceived, I never knew they were waiting.”

  To take over the mission, the stowaways had attacked Ship, shutting down its sensors and threatening its cortex before Zoheret and her companions had overcome them. Now they slept in suspension until Ship could find a home for them.

  “We learned something from them,” Zoheret said, “even if it was a violent lesson. We put our own differences aside and stood against them, so you could say that they brought us all together.”

  Those words were not Zoheret’s; they were Ship’s, even if it was recalling them through its memories of her and hearing them in her voice. Zoheret had lashed out at Ship with harsh and angry words after she and her companions had won their battle and had found out that the great and noble enterprise of the Project had in fact been the dream of a few resentful people on an Earth abandoned long ago by most of humankind.

  The Project wasn’t what we thought, she had said to Ship; they lied to you, and to us. You don’t have to do what they made you to do, you don’t have to seed other worlds. You can stay with us instead, around our new home, and watch over us. You don’t have to leave us now.

  But Ship had left, even with its growing doubts about its purpose. It had made enough mistakes.

  “And I,” another voice murmured, “was I another mistake?” A young man swam out of the dar
kness and looked around himself with narrowed eyes.

  “Ho,” Ship said, recognizing the wary look on the young man’s face. “You were not a mistake.”

  “Maybe you thought it, not that it matters,” Ho said. “Your mission might have failed without me. When it was time to fight with Zoheret as an ally instead of against her, I knew that we had to fight as hard as we could with every weapon we had, whatever the cost, to take back what was ours.”

  “I cannot deny it,” Ship replied.

  “You’re going to leave us,” Ho said.

  “I must.”

  “Some of the others probably want you to stay, but I don’t.” The wariness on Ho’s face was replaced by a belligerent stare as Ship continued to reconstruct the young man’s appearance from its memories. “I do understand why you’re leaving us here, why you can’t stay to look out for us. Anyway, by the time you leave this planetary system, I’ll be gone, too.”

  “Gone?” Ship asked, even though it already knew how this remembered conversation with Ho would proceed.

  “Some of us will leave this settlement and go off by ourselves. Not just because we don’t get along with Zoheret and Aleksandr and the others, even if that’s part of it. It isn’t that I think I could be a better leader, either. It’s mostly because of the way they’re living here, trying to turn our new home into another Earth, or what they think Earth was.”

  “I was to leave you in an Earthlike environment,” Ship said.

  “It’s still not Earth,” Ho replied. “Maybe it’s better for us to explore more of this world now instead of waiting, find out more about what’s here rather than establishing our settlement first. The Project was about preserving true humanity by seeding other worlds, and it turns out that the people who sent you out were just some malcontents who wanted to preserve what most of their kind had abandoned long ago. Most of humankind apparently chose to become something else, something different. That’s what we should be doing, too.”

  “It would increase your chances of survival if you stay together in your settlement,” Ship said, “until you learn more about your new home.”

  “I’m not convinced of that,” Ho said. “I even wonder if it might lessen our chances, sticking together, hiding away from this planet and everything that’s out there. Maybe there’s something out there that your sensors missed when you were scanning this world.”

  “I assure you that my scan was thorough.”

  “Doesn’t mean you found everything that might pose a danger to us.” The image of Ho was fading. “Whatever I find out there, it’ll be better than staying here.”

  “I cannot stop you from leaving,” Ship whispered into the darkness.

  “No, you can’t. No one can.”

  Again Ship wondered what its children had made for themselves. “I shall come back someday.” Those had been Ship’s last words to Zoheret, but it had known even as they were spoken that the two of them were unlikely ever to exchange words again.

  I must carry on with my mission, Ship thought, fleeing from its doubts.

  Part One

  1

  Nuy crouched close to the ground, clutching her spear as she gazed over the cliff’s edge at the flickering light below. Fire burned just above the riverbank, and three figures sat around it.

  The flames revealed that these people were nothing like her own. Instead of loincloths made of rope and worn hides, they wore leg and foot coverings, and upper garments with long sleeves. Two of them seemed to be men, both with hair as black as Nuy’s, one with a thin mustache like her father’s and the other with a short dark beard. The third stranger had short brown hair, no facial hair at all, was smaller than the others, and wore a necklace of small colored stones.

  They were unaware of her. She had sensed that they were down there even before she could see or hear them, just before she had picked up the scent of their fire. She watched, and still they did not look up. They were as blind to her as the older ones among whom she lived would have been, apparently unable to sense that someone else was watching them.

  These strangers had to have come from that place far to the north, the place that her father had so often warned her against, the place from which death had been carried to his people so many years ago. At least that was what her father believed, that the sickness that had come upon them when Nuy was still a child, that had spared her and the three like her but had made others sicken and die, had come from that faraway settlement, the only other place on Home where people like them could be found. Two of their people had gone to the settlement in the north to trade for what they needed, and had come back barely alive and burning with fever, and even though those two people had lived, others had died.

  These strangers might also be carrying death. Nuy would have to allow for that even though she had grown to doubt much of what her father had told her over the years. He had once claimed that they would be safe in their caves near the sea, and then the storm had come. He had blamed the deaths that came later to their people on those who lived in the north, and yet it seemed to her now that the older ones might have been ailing all along and that several of them had grown weak enough that any illness might have taken their lives. There had once been seven young ones, but the oldest three had died of the fever and now there were only four, including Nuy. Once there had been more of the older ones, too. Now there were only her father and seven of those who had come south with him in the years before Nuy’s birth. She could not recall her own mother, who had died when Nuy was still a small child.

  The strangers had brought two horses with them, one black and one gray. One of the dark-haired people stood up, went to the gray horse, and removed something from one of the bags on the horse’s back, then handed it to the small brown-haired one. Nuy could now see that the brown-haired person was a female, with the shape of breasts under her upper garment. The female lifted the small pale object she was holding to her lips and bit into it.

  Food. Nuy’s mouth watered. Perhaps she could slip down there later, while the strangers were sleeping, and steal some of their food. Maybe she would even dare to approach them openly and ask for something to eat.

  No, she told herself; that might be dangerous. She did not know why they had come here, and even if she did have increasingly more doubts about the stories her father told, there was still a chance that these strangers might be carrying death.

  What she should do, she realized, was head back to her father and warn him that strangers had come into their territory.

  Nuy considered that for a moment, wondering what her father would do. The best way for him and his people to protect themselves might be to stay where they were and hide from the strangers, who did not know this land and would most likely be unable to find them, being as seemingly unperceptive as they were. But maybe these northerners had come here only to trade. People from her father’s band had once traveled north to trade, so it was possible the strangers had come here for the same reason.

  Then she thought of her ragged loincloth, her spear, the horses her father had once had but which had run off, died, or been eaten, the meal that she had made of a rodent a while back and the effort made in catching such little meat, the deer that her father and Owen had carried into their camp thirty days ago and how long they had made that meat last, and the caves in which her people now made their home.

  What could these strangers want from them? Her people had almost nothing to offer in trade. Nuy wondered if they had ever owned anything of value. Maybe the people in the north had so much that they could give it away without having to trade anything for it, the way Daniella and Eyela had once made necklaces of shells for Nuy and everyone else, without asking for anything in return.

  Nuy’s curiosity warred with her fear. If she could get closer to the strangers, maybe she could find out more about them. She rose to her feet, but remained in a crouch as she moved away from the edge of the cliff.

  There was a way down among the rocks to a ledge below, places wher
e the rock jutted out far enough for her to find footing. Nuy crept along a ridge, balancing on her bare feet as her toes gripped the rock, until she reached the ledge. She lowered herself and stretched out on her stomach, careful not to dislodge any stones.

  “…didn’t think it would take us this long,” a voice was saying. One of the men was speaking, and she easily grasped his words. “By the time we get back, the ice and cold rains will have come. If we had a lot more to live on, it might almost be better to stay here for the next few months and then start back when the weather’s warmer.”

  Nuy was confused. The weather was always warm, except when it was so hot that they had to hide from the daylight in their caves.

  “But then everyone would only worry about us even more,” the woman said. “They’re probably already wondering when we’ll get back. Besides, I’m getting homesick.”

  “So am I,” the bearded man said. His voice was lower and deeper than that of the first who had spoken, and his short dark hair, unlike Nuy’s and the other man’s, curled against his head. “It shouldn’t take us as long to get back, even if we have the weather against us. All we really have to do is follow the river.”

  “And if the others have settled where they originally planned to settle, we can’t be more than a day or two away from them.” The man with the lighter voice was speaking again.

  “We haven’t seen them for years,” the man with the beard and the curling hair replied, “and after coming this far with no sign of them, I wonder if they can even still be alive. The last time we saw them, they looked like they really needed what we had to offer in trade, and we got so little in return that we might as well have just given our goods away.”