Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 09_ Edge of Victory 02_ Rebirth - J. Gregory Keyes [13]
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