Before the Goliath Sinks, Act One: What My Mother Left Me Was a Starship That Would Never Sink

My mother once told me that the Goliath was a star-charting ship that would never sink.

The Keibir nebula was once the homeland of the star cartographers. Sixteen stellar epochs ago it was wiped into the dust of history by the explosion of a planet. From that time the people of Keibir became gypsies wandering the universe. They left their ruined kingdom aboard one starship after another, each ship its own company, and set out on journeys with no known end.

From then on, Keibir became another word for star cartographer. They recorded everything they met on the road, in every detail: the grandeur of the high-energy radiation clouds thrown off by a dying star, the gloom of a gamma-ray storm covering hundreds of systems, even the brilliant curtain of rain a comet collision draws across the night once in several thousand years. All of it, terrible or magnificent, the Keibir kept. With the fine senses they are born with they stroke every inch of this universe’s body, feel the heartbeat of each star with their soft fingertips, and then, with an organ unique to them, seal away one by one the sensations that cannot be put into words.

Over ages beyond counting, the footsteps of the Keibir have stretched across innumerable groups of galaxies. Patiently they sketch out the shape of the universe, describing map after map in close-drawn lines. They trade the charts they make for food, for energy, for anything at all that will keep them alive. And then they board their ships again and set foot in the barren regions nobody knows, looking for the boundaries that might exist and the forms life might take.

Some say they keep apart from everyone, that they are solitary and unsettling, because they are friends with no race and are absolutely neutral. Disagreeable as they may be, in every system — from research vessels and conquerors down to homesteaders and adventurers — everybody depends on the maps the Keibir draw. And so the Keibir can pass safely between two fleets in the middle of a battle. From the staff at the bow flies the flag that belongs to them: six bright stars. Others say they live their whole lives aboard a ship handed down through the family, eating there, sleeping there, mating there, bearing children there, growing there, and at last dying there, as though they lived on a miniature Keibir. That is not quite true. Since leaving their homeland some of the Keibir have grown tired of drifting, and have stopped on a nearby world, lived among a friendly race, and then merged with it, until the two cannot be told apart and the wandering Keibir part of them has been wiped out entirely. And then they are no longer Keibir.

By that reckoning, my mother was wholly Keibir. Just as the stories say, she was born on this ship, grew up on it, and became a cartographer wandering between the stars. Again and again she took the Goliath towards the unknown, traced the unknown with her antennae, and made of it something solid that she kept in her memory. She drifted like a fallen leaf on water, until she drifted past a star called the Sun. There she met the creature who might have become my father. She invited him to come with her; he begged her to stay and stop being Keibir. In the end she left alone, carrying me, who was still a seed.

I have never seen my father since I came into existence, and I never will. Yes — as the people of Earth say, a man cannot step into the same river twice. The Keibir do not step into the same star system twice either, because what has already been recorded on a map means nothing to us.

My mother carried me along endless routes, looking for sights that had never been recorded. She would tell me stories from her travels — her own, or her mother’s, or the things her mother’s mother had lived through. She would put the antennae at her ears against mine, and those memories, glorious or astonishing or painful, would come into my mind, seeping slowly into my spirit the way water seeps into soil, wetting the inside of me. Those old memories and feelings were like sealed seeds: the instant they touched water they began to revive, they drew on my thinking for nourishment, and in the world of my spirit they put down roots and sprouted, and began a second life.

This too is a way of surviving. My mother passed everything to me through her dreams, and on that journey with no visible end I came slowly to understand her, to become her, until I too was wholly Keibir.

When our journey reached its two hundred and sixty-third stellar year, my mother left me the Goliath and all the star charts she had drawn, and disappeared. Perhaps that is how the Keibir die, I thought.

Before she went out of my life, she told me this:

The Goliath is a star-charting ship that will never sink — unless it sails into the Silent Sea.

Perhaps the hunger for the unknown is cut into Keibir blood and bone. I took over everything of my mother’s and began to travel alone.

In that shoreless sea of a universe I drifted like a fallen leaf on water, measuring this world with my own body, finding the places nobody had yet set foot in.

On those journeys, my only companions were the faithful Goliath and those vast, strange, gorgeous dreams. It is said that the dreams of the Keibir are joined; that they are a world all the Keibir have made together, beyond time and space, holding every memory and every possibility. On a road with no end in sight, I spent half my time inside the dream — living in the dream, learning in the dream, alive in the dream. With my eyes and my antennae I took in regions I had never gone to, and let feeling and memory run into my spirit. When I woke again, the sights and the knowledge of those unknown worlds were as clear to me as if I had been there myself.

Only, in that dream which is said to hold everything this universe knows, I have never seen the ancient country of the Keibir — the Keibir nebula, dead long ago. For me, my homeland is this endlessly travelling Goliath.

If nothing had gone wrong, I would certainly have lived like a true Keibir: born on this charting ship, and dying here when the long river of time closed over me.

I thought so a great many times, until the journey reached its five hundred and forty-eighth stellar year. The Goliath put in at a flourishing system. At that time the star that had brought life there was in its prime, burning steadily and feeding what it had made.

The children of that star made up a solid, industrious race. They were good with their hands and they were excellent interstellar builders. In a few dozen stellar years, using the energy the star gave them, they had turned a country of wilderness into the hub of the whole system. Before long, being friendly and shrewd, the builders had drawn in a great many travellers and merchants.

Perhaps because a busy hub is long accustomed to comings and goings, nothing was rejected there. Some races might be spat on behind their backs, or called vermin of the stars, but it did not stop anyone from being pleasant to their faces. Even I, a Keibir, traded charts easily enough for fuel, for power, and for every part needed to refit the Goliath.

But a place of such mixed company, if it has the advantage of taking all rivers in, naturally has the disadvantage of too many mouths. The one who took my charts did not keep his word. On the second night he came back with a party of others, and half threatening and half forcing, took me to their ship. It was a vessel I had only ever seen in imagination, standing in the shadow behind the star like some enormous beast; beside it, my Goliath was a toy in a child’s hand.

— Colonel, we have brought it.

Soldiers in identical uniforms stood in ranks before the man in the black robe like copied and pasted shadows. When he turned round, what appeared in front of me was a yellow eye I had seen in a dream. A Decci. The destroyers who had conquered numberless systems.

— I need you, cartographer.

The Colonel came straight to it. He moved a scaled hand and unrolled a star chart I knew. One glance and I recognised it: it was the map of the Derokaila system that my mother had drawn, the fine script carefully marking the position of every star, the extent of every nebula. That system is called the Decci system now, and the memory of the Derokaila, like a white dwarf gone out, has turned to dust in the slow current of history.

— For a fair price I can provide any chart you require.

The Keibir, always neutral, never refuse a request, and care still less how the maps are used. The Decci storm may sweep the whole world away, but the home of the Keibir fell long ago, and so I obediently brought out every chart I had.

But the Colonel did not so much as glance at any of them. That yellow eye stayed on me, and he asked me for something I could not easily give.

— I do not want charts. I want a navigator.

He told me the Decci road of conquest had already run further than anyone’s, and that in order to bring a still wider territory into their empire they were going to look for the legendary weapon, the power that could destroy anything.

— I do not know that I can meet your expectations.

— You will, because the Keibir are the finest star cartographers there are, and because that place is one nobody has ever set foot in.

The Colonel’s finger pointed towards a far sea of stars wrapped in cold darkness. Deep beneath that unbroken surface, something nobody had ever seen lay buried. What I want is there, said the Colonel. Take us to the Silent Sea.

Once every thousand stellar years the Silent Sea appears in this world, and wherever it goes, everything is annihilated.

Nobody has ever seen what that legendary ocean looks like — or rather, every living thing that ever knew the truth of it has gone from the world. In the Keibir dream I have seen the traces the Silent Sea left behind: the place that was once called the Keibir nebula, how many stellar years ago I do not know, is now only a cold stillness where every fire of life has been put out.

This was, no doubt, a journey with no way home. But then, for the Keibir, which journey has ever had a way home? So I stopped hesitating.

— I will take you to it.

Looking straight into that yellow Decci eye, I made a Keibir’s promise.

After the sixth night had gone by at the hub, we set out. On this journey I did not travel aboard the Goliath. It was made into a lifeboat, tethered to the side of that huge vessel.

The black soldiers, dutiful as worker ants, stuffed provisions and energy beyond counting into the holds. The creatures at the docks watched in astonishment as the great ship drew in its supports; the radiation wave it threw off destroyed a tall building. With our backs to those blinding stars, we set off into the boundless dark. Soon we swept past the vast spiral arms of the system and fell like a grain of sand into the void.

Everywhere we went was somewhere I had never physically been, and still the memory in the dream was clear, and it guided me to draw, inside my head, the road to the Silent Sea.

— To be precise, the Silent Sea is not a fixed place. It is more of a name for something.

— I understand. On Earth we would call it the Bermuda. A word for a region governed by some unknown matter or mysterious force, that swallows every creature and every ship that goes into it.

The linguist aboard the Decci ship answered me pleasantly. Among all the researchers on that vessel, she seemed to be one of the very few who would speak to me at all. The biologist from Filia loathed me; when I passed him his tail would turn the colour of refusal. The historian from Jiebi feared me; the first moment she saw me she shrank herself down and slipped out through the gap under the door. The physicist from Litan touched my fingers in greeting, and washed his own hand six times the moment he turned away. As for the engineer from the Wanderer, he behaved as though I did not exist — no, perhaps he was the one without a body at all… Only the linguist, at our first meeting, greeted me kindly in Keibir.

— Knowing every language that exists, or ever existed, is a linguist’s work.

— Thank you for your kindness, but in fact there is no language in the civilisation of the Keibir.

I explained to her that the Keibir communicate through waves put out by an internal organ, and that more often we exchange information and experience through dreams. People think the Keibir use language only because, once we were driven out onto the roads, we began to come into contact with other species; to accommodate creatures who speak, the Keibir made a language.

— An astonishing fact.

While the linguist was writing all this down in admiration, we were passing beside a briefly gathered cluster of galaxies. Those enormous masses, bound by gravity, turned in the dark; the hot gas they threw off and the dark matter formed turbulence, roaring past in the distance. Like some unknown creature tearing matter apart in its stomach and spitting out a piece of a river of stars that was gone in an instant. The linguist watched that storm quietly, and asked me a question.

— Do you think there is life in that cluster?

— It is hard to say.

— People from Earth often say that different environments give rise to different forms of life. But in fact it may be that forms of life change in order to fit an environment — the way the Keibir made a language, because after leaving Keibir they needed to talk to other species. If Keibir had never been destroyed, you would have no need for a tool as inefficient as language, would you?

She thought for a moment, and asked again.

— Have you ever seen Keibir?

— No. I have never seen the real Keibir.

— I have never seen the real Earth either.

She told me that after the Sun’s system died, the people of Earth migrated to a settlement in a nearby system and named that narrow patch of ground New Earth. But in truth, not one life born on New Earth has ever seen with its own eyes the place that made their species.

— Earth is not even a memory. It is a hallucination we hold in common.

Perhaps it was because of what she said that, when I went into the dream, I saw again through my mother’s memory the Earth as it was before it vanished: a beautiful water-blue planet carrying life by the hundred million. It said nothing. It watched me, turning quietly in the dark.

As real as the recordings people made of the original Earth. Those images play on a loop across the sky of the new settlement, creating the illusion that we still long for home. The linguist told me that by the third century after the migration the people of Earth had already become a concept in history; as cultures and genes crossed and merged, the real people of Earth died away with time.

Once we were through the storm of the cluster, we came into a graveyard made of drifting meteor fragments and the wreckage of planets. On the most recent chart, it was still a settlement gathered around a group of stars — but with the withering of the first star the heat and the energy began to go, and those bright stars cooled one by one, dimmed, and became at last a group of extinguished white dwarfs.

The Colonel had the shadow soldiers steer the great vessel carefully past the rubble and the dark matter, and we stumbled through the darkness, making slow, hard progress.

— What sort of place is the Silent Sea?

The linguist asked again.

— It is a particular kind of thing in this universe. Once every thousand stellar years it appears regularly in certain places, stays a while, and disappears again. We know almost nothing about it. The one thing we can know is that every living thing that has gone near the Silent Sea has been taken, without one cry for help or one wail, gone without trace into the silence. And so every star cartographer marks carefully the places where it may appear, to warn travellers away.

— Could there be life inside the Silent Sea?

— No, that is impossible. The forming of life depends on a stable, ordered structure in the universe. I mean that the continuation of life requires an energy gradient running from high to low, and complex molecular structures require a stable environment… The Silent Sea, according to the few pieces of data we have, has extremely high entropy. There is only disorder there. The conditions under which life could form naturally simply do not exist.

Before I could speak, the biologist answered the linguist’s question with perfect clarity. His tail swung slightly and flickered; he appeared to have considerable confidence in his answer.

— It is precisely because the Silent Sea can destroy life that the Colonel wants to find it, is it not?

The historian said quietly, agreeing.

— If that is a high-entropy universe, does that not mean it contains an infinity of possibilities? Do not underestimate the variety of the forms life takes. If it exists, it is reasonable; and equally, if it is reasonable, it must exist.

The linguist held to her view.

— I did not come here as the rest of you did, for glory, or because I was threatened.

Hearing that, I began to understand why she was as unwelcome as I was. But it seemed that this linguist from Earth did not care what anybody thought of her.

— I came here to see with my own eyes what this universe is capable of.

— You are practically a Keibir.

Perhaps anger had gone to his heart; a blue light flickered across the physicist’s face. In a moment the blue was gone, and as he turned back to the quiet green he finally realised there is a point of social etiquette called saying the wrong thing.

— What I mean is, you love the unknown the way the Keibir do. It is admirable.

The others dispersed. The huge ship went quiet again, and moved slowly on towards the unknown.

Perhaps the linguist was right; or perhaps her view came from nothing more than some nameless reverie. But on the ninety-sixth day of the voyage, we saw the Silent Sea floating quietly far off. And then a message the receiver picked up broke the calm aboard the Decci ship.