by Greg Bear
She paused on the rise, bent to adjust her leggings and the socks that had slumped around her ankles. “Then, after eight years, all by itself, Martha began giving up and fading away. At night we heard what my husband called garbage trucks, the size of elephants, rolling down the naked hills into the ocean. There, they exploded like huge balloons, scattering half dissolved remnants to the waves and currents. The ecos took itself apart hectare by hectare, in an orderly fashion. I believe she knew she was dying, and wanted to leave the island clean after she was gone. I realize that is very anthropomorphic of me...” She glanced at us, face saddened by these memories. “We missed her being curious about us. We had taken comfort in those seasonal nips, those little samplings.
“We even came to believe the ecos watched over us, that she accepted us as independent parts ... But that was my husband's idea, mostly.
“Five years ago, Yeshova suffered a stroke, or something like a stroke. Something went badly wrong inside of his head. No doctors, no clues. The ecos didn't save him. He died after twelve days of paralysis. I buried him, but scavengers dug him up and put him with the other scraps, and carted him out to sea. Martha has always kept herself clean, very clean.”
We entered the grove as large drops of rain fell, drumming on the fine-fringed arborid leaves and dappling our clothes. “These are decadents,” Nimzhian said, touching the fringe of leafy growths with a gnarled hand. “They are barren, of course, like old bees dying on a dry rock.”
She pushed on, ignoring the rain, and the captain kept up with her, using his stick to prod aside brown creepers that writhed across our path. Salap peered at the leaves through a pocket magnifier, observing their reaction to the rain. “Ser Nimzhian,” he called up the line, just as we reached the house, “I believe this small silva takes all its water from the spring. Am I correct?”
“You are correct,” she responded, her voice rising over the hiss of falling drops.
Salap nodded in satisfaction and wiped moisture from his brow.
Nimzhian climbed to the porch and addressed us in the narrow courtyard. We were soaked by now, but the rain was subsiding, though thick gray curtains still cloaked the slopes of Mount Jiddermeyer. “I have something to show you,” she said. “You can't all come in at once, but you're all welcome.”
We took our turns, in groups of six, climbing the steps and shaking hands with her, at which point she introduced us to her true treasures—cabinets filled with hundreds of watercolor sketches done by herself and her husband. Salap was speechless, and stayed inside with Keyser-Bach as each group came through, staring again and again at the paintings as Nimzhian revealed them, a new group for each party. She glowed with pride.
“When the silva was healthy,” she said, “it covered most of the center of the island, in two similar groupings, two silvas actually, as Jiddermeyer and Baker and Shulago saw ... As we saw when we first arrived. The mountains were more active then. There were even earthquakes a few times a year, and the beach where you landed was rich with fumaroles venting sulfur.”
The watercolors glowed with delicate life, revealing as much about their creators as they did about Martha's Island, sketched in with meticulous care using very fine pens cut from the central stalks of arborid leaves, colored by dyes taken from vermids and phlox trees high up in the mountains.
“We recorded all we could on the slate left to us by Shulago,” she said. “But it soon stopped taking data. We learned how to make a kind of paper, and taught ourselves how to paint. Martha was very generous. She supplied everything—pigments, stems for brush handles, even brush hairs.
“We ate her scions, and we painted her as a kind of gift ... Not that it was any true bargain.”
A set of paintings showed the vernal efflorescence in the high mountain valleys, when the arborids and phytids shed old growth and produced bright new leaves of vivid reds and oranges, sky blue, and dark purple. The ecos itself seemed to have a painterly plan, the hills covered with zebra stripes of purple against red and sky blue. “The air smelled like the sweetest, finest wine in the spring,” Nimzhian said, her fingers caressing the paintings, lifting them from their folders and replacing them with religious care.
Some of the paintings were of specimens of the largest arborids, named yggdrasils: hollow-cored nets of stiff creepers rising in fat cylinders up to a hundred meters high, throwing out tiers of purple-black sun-absorbing leaves. Yeshova had climbed into the hollow trunk of an yggdrasil and depicted it from the inside, like an intricate weavework narrowing to an open circle of sky.
“We used the few pieces of laboratory equipment, over and over again, until all was broken or ruined and we could only look and see and taste ... And sometimes what we tasted made us sick, and we noted the symptoms.” She shook her head ruefully. “Our own bodies became our laboratories. And then...” She flipped through sketches of barren lava, slumped and tangled yggdrasils, until the style became much simpler, cruder: the work she had done by herself, after the death of Yeshova.
The captain's eyes filled with tears and he dabbed at them with his knuckles, glancing around in some embarrassment. When all of us had seen the sketches, Nimzhian stood by the unglazed window, staring at the small grove circling the spring, her voice hoarse and cracking with weariness. “I need to rest before we do the next part of the tour.”
“Of course,” said the captain, and he ordered food brought out of our backpacks. We set up a picnic lunch around the house and on the porch, and Ser Nimzhian presided like a true matriarch, resting on her chair assembled from fallen yggdrasil leaf stems. She wore a broad, battered woven fiber hat to shade her eyes against the infrequent glare of sun peeping between the clouds.
“Captain,” she said, “I give all our work to you. I see it all in my head, and it can only be useful taken away from this island. I won't be alive much longer, and the weather would only break in again and ruin everything.”
The captain waved his hand as if dismissing her confession of mortality, and was about to speak, but she continued, “Four years ago, we lost fifty-nine sketches when the roof leaked. Months and months of work. Lamarckia is indifferent. And so was Martha, I suspect, but we loved her even so. They were comforting delusions, ghosts of benevolence and care when we were so alone.”
We rested in the flowing patches of sun and cloud shadow, alternately warmed and cooled, surrounded by the rustling furred leaves of the grove. Salap and the captain and Randall sat on the porch with Nimzhian, who had closed her eyes and slumped in her chair, her breast rising and falling evenly beneath the folds of her robe and jacket.
Shirla and Shimchisko lay on either side of me, Shirla on her back, eyes tracking the clouds above, Shimchisko dozing lightly.
“I'd like to sneak off and explore,” Shirla said. “I've been bunking on the ship too long, with the mate watching every tickle.” She rolled on her side facing me. “Shall we run off to the hills?”
I smiled. “No flarking,” I said. Shirla surveyed me critically, one eye half-closed, and lay back again.
“It's a bold offer,” said Shimchisko, waking from his doze. “What do you see in him?”
“I can't help myself,” she said lightly. “It's his mystery. Where did you come from? I know ... from Jakarta, before you lost yourself in Liz. But you don't talk like a Jakartan, and you don't act like anybody I know ... There's a coolness about you.”
“If mystery gets me out of cleaning the shithouse, I'll be mysterious.”
“Well said,” Shirla commented. “Droll defense. Come with me,” she whispered conspiratorially into my ear, “inland to the hills,” she lifted her chest and tucked in her chin, “and you'll see my tits.”
I nearly choked on my laugh, and she laughed with me. But her eyes had fixed on mine. “The old woman's going to walk us somewhere. I'd love to run away behind everybody and sneak back in later. If you don't want to see my tits, okay, but keep me company.”
The heat in me almost overrode my sense of duty—if that was what it
was now. Duty had transmuted into a burning curiosity and a rush of other conflicting emotions: fascination, anxiety, even a kind of patriarchal concern. “I'd love to,” I said.
“Soterio will dock us,” she said. “You might be cut back to apprentice. Am I worth it?”
Shirla had never gone quite this far in her coquettishness.
“You are without doubt the loveliest creature on the ship,” I said.
“Tell me more,” she said.
“Much lovelier than Shimchisko here.” Shimchisko opened one eye, then closed it again. “And you're much too smart to ruin a good sea career.”
She poked her tongue out between her lips like a forgetful cat and broke our gaze, looking again at the clouds. “One day,” she said, “I will see your secret nakedness, and I will gloat.”
“You may see my nakedness any time,” I said, “by appointment.”
On Thistledown, I had been successful with women, too much so. I had come to think of them as delightful and valuable commodities, worth much effort, but not like me in any serious respect. I could see now, middled in this dreamlike experience, that my attitude carried a taint of youth and foolishness. Shirla was very much like me; Shimchisko was not, nor was the captain or Salap.
A steady patch of sun had settled over us, a long gap between clouds making the sun seem to roll down a race course, occasionally fetching up against a wall of cloud and flashing it bright yellow-white. “I'm too stupid,” I said.
“See?” Shirla said. “Nakedness. Show me more.”
I poked her calf with the toe of my boot. “Don't provoke me,” I grumbled.
Nimzhian had stood up from her chair. “I'm rested,” she announced. The captain, Salap, and Randall rose beside her like reverent servants. “Come with me,” she said, and descended the porch steps.
“You missed your chance,” Shirla said, getting to her feet.
“Foolish Olmy,” Shimchisko said with a grin.
The billows and runnels of clouds had fled towards the southeast. We marched inland, up the northern rise of Nimzhian's valley, the last preserve of Martha's motherless scions. The grove ended at the rim of the valley, and on the slopes of Mount Jiddermeyer and the hills and mountains beyond, we found the trails and roads of the dismantling. Nimzhian pointed out various features as we walked on the path she and Yeshova had trained through the silva over their first eight years on Martha's Island: here, the site of the yggdrasil that had stood nearest the valley and their house, now a conical depression ten meters across, filled with sterile chunks of lava and a bottom of fine silty mud, cracking in the sun; there, the beginning of the path to the top of Mount Jiddermeyer, where they had found phytids and vermids suitable for making watercolor dyes; here again, a kilometer on, a lean-to they had made in case they were caught in a storm far from the house, now fallen to ruin, with nothing left to lean against. Higher still, in the cup between Mount Jiddermeyer and the central Mount Tauregh, after an hour of hiking, we stood for a moment in what had once been the thickest silva on the island.
“Millions of yggdrasils and tripod oaks,” Nimzhian said, shading her eyes at the glare. In a few hours, the floor of this décolletage between the mountains would rise to meet the sun, and all would be in shade. For now it was bright gray desolation, kilometer after kilometer of conical depressions filled with mud.
Shimchisko rubbed his knees as we paused and looked up at Shirla and me. “Suicide,” he said darkly. “The queen chose for her ecos to die. Out of shame.”
Shirla curled her lip. She had little use for Shimchisko's mystical theories.
The captain, Salap, the researchers, and Randall took in the view with puzzled awe. They could no more explain what had happened here than Shimchisko. I looked to the summit of Mount Jiddermeyer, however, and wondered at the dog that did not bark in the night: no more steam, no more earthquakes, no more sulfur from the fumaroles near the southern beaches.
Nimzhian sighed and waved us on. She took the lead, her long, scrawny legs pumping steadily, her tireless gait marked by a lean to the left with one step, a lean to the right with another. From ten or twelve paces behind, I listened to her exchanges with the captain and Salap.
Shimchisko complained beneath his breath about the altitude and the effort, about the shame of all this destruction; I shushed him so I could listen to Nimzhian, and he regarded me with mild resentment.
“We came to this place two years ago, before Martha finally died,” she said. “Yeshova and I toured around the island then, going where we could never have gone when the silva was so thick. With the phlox arborids and most of the phytids gone, we could go practically anywhere we pleased, and it was here we first came upon structures unlike any we had seen before, in any ecos. Yeshova named them palaces. I thought it a misleading word. Still, it's his.”
Between lava boulders worn smooth by rock grinders and the ceaseless rubbing growth and procession of the silva's tree-forms, we looked out across a deep bowl cut from the side of Mount Tauregh. “There are five other palaces, all similar to this one. When they died, Yeshova believed, Martha died as well. These ruins and the orphaned grove are the only monuments.”
The bowl stretched eighty meters edge to edge. Within, curving piers and crossbeams the color of old ivory radiated from the center of the bowl like giant rib bones arranged by an ancient hunting party. Dried shreds of membrane still clung to them. In the bottom of the bowl, beneath the tilted and fallen ribs, hexagonal chambers had been carved in the old lava flow. Rainwater pooled in the bottom of the chambers.
We gathered abreast, in a line along the rim of the bowl. The captain's face was pale. He prodded his jaw forcibly with an index finger and his lips twitched. Salap stood with arms crossed, lost in concentration, as if remembering a long-ago game of chess.
“The queen's chambers,” the captain mused. “What do you think?” he asked Salap.
“Perhaps.” The more intensely interested Salap became, the less he showed any reaction whatever.
“By the Good Man,” Shatro said tentatively, looking to the others to determine the depth of his own reaction.
“Bilge,” Nimzhian commented. “Hardly a queen's chambers. I never did like the word ‘palace,’ so misleading. We found five of these, all dead, all the same. The ‘queen’ theory allows only one.”
“Here,” said the captain, pointing to the chambers and vents in the rock along the outer walls of the chambers, “is where the scions are made and released. Given birth ... There must be outlets. We should search for them.”
“Night's coming in an hour, Captain,” Randall reminded him gently.
“Yes. Of course. But if we found the outlets—or even if we don't find them ... Here is where the central controller, the seed-mistress, or mistresses...” He turned to Nimzhian, who regarded him skeptically. “If there are five, what of it? If there is no central and unique site, no single palace, what of it? I'm not wedded to the notion of a lone and exclusive seed-mother. If there were five of them ... we might think of the others as chambermaids, helpers ... One might be larger.”
“They're all the same size, give or take a meter,” Nimzhian said. “All the same structure.”
“But you did not see them alive!” the captain fairly shouted. “One might have been festooned, plumed, with bright decorations, signifying her status, highest of all; the others secondary. There must have been... one controller, one head, one authority!”
He was still wedded to the queen, after all. Nimzhian tapped her walking stick on the ground, irritated in a way reserved for those who have been alone for a long while and are now subject to contrary company. “Have it your way,” she muttered.
The captain ordered Shatro and Thornwheel to begin measuring the palace and gathering samples of whatever remnants of tissue remained. Shatro gave me a lizard-lidded glance of satisfaction as he stepped past. I felt like punching him, not because the captain had chosen him for this task, but because he put so much store in it, and seemed to think I might
care.
“Water from the bottom of the chambers...” the captain mused, oblivious of this brief interchange. “Might be tissues, residues, genetic material there still. We can preserve it now, read it later.”
Shatro, Thornwheel, and Cham began to climb down the rough scree to the chambers at the bottom of the bowl. A surveyor's measure was pulled from the equipment box, to be sited on by the captain's slate for later comparisons.
Randall glanced at the sun and then over his shoulder at the long, winding walk back to the beach.
“Captain, Ser Nimzhian probably wants to return to her house ... And we should get word back to the ship.”
Keyser-Bach stopped, his hands and shoulders quivering with excitement. His face screwed up like a little boy's. I thought for a moment he would pitch a tantrum, but he sat abruptly on a nearby lump of lava and clapped his hands on his knees. “All right,” he said softly, then, shouting to the men on the path down the slope, “Wait! We'll come back tomorrow. We'll bring more equipment ... Let's do this right.”
Randall nodded. Shirla and the rest of the crew were obviously glad not to be spending a night in this desolation. Shimchisko stared at the palace with dread. He would not tell Shirla or myself what made him so uneasy until we were back on the trail, walking through the empty conical pits in the failing light. “It's ugly,” he finally murmured, following a few paces behind me. “I thought they would be beautiful. Queens. But it's just like an old collapsed meeting hall. Roof-beams and rooms. Nothing more than a hotel.”
“We don't know what it looked like when it was alive,” Shirla said. “It might have been lovely.”
