Nen Yim pushed up through the clear membrane and stroked the pale, feathery coils of the ship’s brain, the rikyam, with her shaper’s hand. She trembled, her specialized fingers twitching. Once those digits had been the legs of a crustaceanlike creature, bred for no other purpose but to be hands to shapers. Its animal origins were still obvious; her fingers—narrower, slimmer, and stronger than those of the average Yuuzhan Vong—protruded from beneath a dark, flexible carapace that now served as the back of her hand. Two of the “fingers” ended in pincers; another had a retractable blade. All were studded with small, raised sensory nodes that tasted anything they touched. Nen Yim’s training as a shaper required that she know by taste all elements and more than four thousand compounds and their variants. She had known the quick, nervous flavor of cobalt with those fingers, savored the pungency of carbon tetrachloride, wondered at the complex and endless variations of amino acids.
And now she trembled, for the scent here was morbid.
“The rikyam is dying,” she murmured to the novice at her side. “It is more than half dead.”
The novice—a young man named Suung Aruh—twitched the tendrils of his headdress in dismay.
“How can that be?” he asked.
“How can it be?” Nen Yim repeated, anger creeping into her voice. “Look around you, Novice. The luminescent mycogens that once sheathed our halls in light now cling in sickly patches. The capillaries of the maw luur are clotted with dead or mutated recham forteps. The Baanu Miir worldship is dying, Initiate. Why should the brain be any different?”
“I’m sorry, Adept,” Suung said, his tendrils knotted in genuflection. “Only … what is to be done? Will a new rikyam be grown?”
Nen Yim narrowed her eyes. “Under whom were you trained before my arrival?”
“I—the old master, Tih Qiqah.”
“I see. He was the only master shaper here?”
“Yes, Adept.”
“And where are his adepts?”
“He trained no adepts in his last year, Adept Nen Yim.”
“Nor did he really train any initiates, it seems. What did you do for him?”
“I …” His mortification deepened.
“Yes?”
“I told him stories.”
“Stories?”
“Crèche-tales, but with adult overtones. He insisted.”
“He used you merely to amuse himself? As personal servants?”
“Essentially, Adept.”
Nen Yim closed her eyes. “I am assigned to a dying ship. At the mere rank of adept, I am the highest member of my caste, and I haven’t even a trained initiate.”
“I have heard,” Suung said, “that the lack is due to the need for shapers in the battle against the infidels.”
“Of course,” Nen Yim replied. “Only the senile, inept, and disgraced remain to tend the worldships.”
“Yes, Adept,” Suung said.
“Aren’t you going to ask which I am?” Nen Yim snarled.
The novice hesitated. “I know you were once part of one of the holy programs,” he said cautiously.
“Yes. A program that failed. My master failed. I failed. We failed the Yuuzhan Vong. The honor of death was denied me, and I have been sent here to do what I can for our glorious people.” Sent? she thought in her cloistered mind. Exiled.
Suung made no answer, but waited for her to continue.
“Your training begins now, Initiate,” Nen Yim said. “For I have need of you. To answer your question, no, we cannot grow a new rikyam for the ship. Or, rather, we could, but it would do the ship no good.”
She glanced around. The inner torus of the worldship was sharply curved in floor and ceiling, the color of old bone, illuminated only by the lambents the two shapers carried with them. She looked back up at the rikyam, or what she could see of it. Its numberless coils of neurons grew in the still center of the ship, where neither up nor down existed—unlike the more affluent worldships, the Baanu Miir got its gravity from spin, not dovin basals, which had to be fed. Encased in multiple layers of coral-laced shell perforated by osmotic membranes, the brain could be accessed from the inner torus of the ship, where only shapers were allowed. Here, where the ship’s spin only imparted a vague rumor of artificial gravity, the membrane could be exposed by stroking a dilating valve in the shell. Only the hand of a shaper could pass through the membrane to the nerve curls within.
“This ship is almost a thousand years old,” she told Suung. “The organisms that make it up have come and gone, but the brain has always been here. It has managed the integration of this ship’s functions for all of those years, developing outrider ganglia where they were needed, shaping the ship in its own unique way. It is for this reason that our worldships live so well, for so very long. But when the brain sickens, the ship sickens. Things can be done, but ultimately the ship, like all things, must embrace death. Our duty, Novice, is to keep this ship from that desired embrace for as long as possible, until new worldships can be grown or planets settled. In the case of this ship, we must await the former; Baanu Miir could never stand the strain of faster-than-light travel. It would take us decades or centuries to reach a habitable world.”
“Couldn’t the habitants be transferred to a new world on swifter, smaller vessels?” Suung asked.
Nen Yim smiled tightly. “Perhaps when the galaxy has been cleansed of infidels and the warriors no longer need every vessel available to carry on their war.”
“Is there anything to be done now, Adept Nen Yim?” Suung asked. He had a certain eagerness in his voice that amused and even slightly heartened her. It wasn’t Suung Aruh’s fault he knew nothing.
“Go to the qahsa, Initiate, where the knowledge and history of our people are kept. There you will find the protocols of shaping. Your scent and name will give you access to them. You will memorize the first two hundred and recite them to me tomorrow. You should be able to recall them by name, by indications, by applications. Do you understand?”
His tendrils scarcely managed the genuflection, so disarrayed with excitement had they become. “Yes, Adept. It shall be done.”
“Go now and leave me to contemplate this matter.”
“Yes, Adept.”
A moment later, she was alone in the inner torus. Even so, she looked about furtively before peeling down the front of the living oozhith that clung to her body and served to cover most of it from sight. Beneath the oozhith, clinging to her belly, was a film-flat creature. It retained the vestigial eyes of its fishlike ancestor but otherwise resembled an olive-and-black mottled pouch, which was more or less what it was—a very special sort of container.
She reached back through the osmotic membrane to touch the fractal coils of the rikyam again. With the pincer on her smallest finger, she clipped off four discrete pieces of the brain and placed them in the pouch. The material closed lovingly around the coils, lubricating them with oxygen-rich fluids that would keep them healthy until she reached her laboratory and a more permanent way of keeping the neurons alive.
She took a deep breath, contemplating the enormity of what she was about to do. The shapers were guided and strictured by the protocols, the thousands of techniques and applications given them by the gods in the misty past. To experiment, to try to invent new protocols, was heresy of the first order.
Nen Yim was a heretic. Her master, Mezhan Kwaad, had been as well, before the Jeedai child Tahiri took her brilliant head from her neck. Together Nen Yim and she had dared to formulate hypotheses and test them. With her death, Mezhan Kwaad had absorbed most of the blame for both the heresy and the failure. Even so, Nen Yim had been spared only because shapers were already too scarce.
Baanu Miir was dying, as a single glance at its decaying chambers made clear her first day within it. For a brain this ill, no protocol she knew would serve, and as an adept she could not access the mysteries beyond the fifth cortex of the qahsa. She would have to make her own protocol, despite already being tainted with heresy, despite the fact that she was certainly being watched.
Her first duty was not to the calcified shaper codes, but to her people. The gods—if they existed at all—must understand that. If the worldship failed, twelve thousand Yuuzhan Vong would die—not in glorious battle or sacrifice, but smothered in carbon dioxide or frozen by the chill of space. She was not going to let that happen, even if it meant this would be her last shaping and her last act in this life.
She replaced the pouch-creature on her abdomen and rolled the oozhith back over it, feeling the tiny cilia of the garment digging into her pores and resuming their symbiotic relationship with her flesh. Then she left the dying brain and returned through dim and opalescent chambers and corridors to her laboratory suite.