by Greg Bear
The melancholy that filled us was universal and difficult to explain. In a sodden mass at the bottom of the chambers lay half-formed larvae of arborids and phytids. Leached of color, mingling with their silvan cousins, were pterids with thin segmented bodies and leathery wings as delicate as sodden tissue paper, hundreds of them, each no more than twenty centimeters across. Salap lifted one on a piece of close-weave net and said, “These might have been Martha's eyes and ears. I think they are the same as Nimzhian's arthropterids.”
“Samplers,” I suggested.
“Perhaps. But are they all nascent, or were they brought back here for disassembly?”
“Nascent,” I said. “Remember, Nimzhian saw the dead scions being tossed out to sea.”
“Did Martha still have hope enough to make more children, then?” Salap asked. Ridjel and Kissbegh and Cham, standing in the pools or on the crumbling walls, said little as we passed up fragments of carapace, lengths of rubbery muscle cable, horny claws, brown “bones” arranged as long slender rods or delicate basket weaves, hanks of fibrous insulation. Clearly, some of the larval forms were pelagic. They might have patrolled Martha's offshore waters, guarding against intrusions and maintaining the sterile zone around the island.
Equally clear was the strong relationship between these scions and those in other ecoi; however independent the ecoi might have been, through convergent design or copying, many scions resembled their counterparts.
When Baker and Shulago had visited the island, however, years of isolation had produced many unique scions, some of unknown utility. We found early-stage remains of some of these in Cleopatra's chambers: legged balls connected by tough cables to form ambulatory chains; great drums with ridged grips along the rims and tight-fitting lids, perhaps to haul nutrients from one location to another, or to convey volumes of microscopic scions from the palaces; tiny four-limbed creatures with three equilateral snipping jaws that Salap called muscids.
By the end of the day, when we crawled out of the palace and rested on the barren hillside, we had cataloged seventy different kinds of scions, and found fragments of perhaps twenty more, too difficult to quickly reassemble and visualize. Of the seventy, twenty had been cataloged by Baker and Shulago, and forty-five more by Nimzhian and Yeshova. Five no one had ever seen before.
“Martha was creative to the very last,” Salap said, back propped against a boulder, lifting a jar filled with bony fragments and feather-edged scraps.
Early the next morning, Shatro stumbled into camp in the dark, awakening Salap first by nearly falling over him, and then shining his lantern on all of us. “Isabel,” he said, sucking in lungfuls of air. “Number five. Ser Randall says come quickly.” He knew nothing about what was so important, and his hike in the darkness across the rough terrain had taken his breath away. We packed quickly and refilled our canteens; there had been little rain the last few days, and there were not likely to be water-filled reservoirs in the rocks. Shatro led us back along the path in the dawn light.
Mount Bedouin stood between us and the sunrise, a black serrated triangle against the brightening sky. One small moon rose over the northern slope of the old volcano, and after a kilometer or so, we turned toward the moon and that slope, where Isabel lay. It was a ten-kilometer hike from Cleopatra, through what had once been impenetrable silva, and we reached the fifth palace by late morning. Randall and his team had drained the chambers and surveyed most of them by the end of the previous day, leaving only three chambers to breach. With a little energy left over, Randall and Cassir had decided to knock a hole in the wall of an inner chamber, to get a head start on the next morning's work.
“We were about to return to our tents when Cassir shined a lantern into the chamber,” Randall explained, taking us down into the bowl. We carefully avoided the crumbling supports for the roof beams, crawled through a succession of holes knocked through the chamber walls, and came to the second-to-last chamber. Randall had no words to describe what they had seen. He entered the chamber reluctantly behind Salap. Above, standing gingerly on the walls, Shimchisko—the only sailor present—waved down at me, but with little energy and no cheer.
“I've never heard of ecoi eating humans,” Cassir said, his voice quiet in the shadowed stillness. We splashed carefully between piles of odorless, colorless brown and white bones. From the walls, uncataloged scions the size of soccer balls, shriveled limbs tightly curled close, like dead spiders, hung from twisted brown cords. Drops fell from these into the dark, cloudy puddles below.
Salap pushed aside the piles to see what Cassir and Randall had spied from above. It lay half submerged, empty eye sockets staring at the sky, toothless lower jaw slumped to one side, giving it a grimly joking expression. Salap hesitated before stooping, and held his hands out for several long seconds before touching the round shape, or the scatter of slumped and broken bones and a section of feeble gray carapace, like a tarnished cuirass, covering what might have once been a chest or thorax.
“It's small,” Salap said. “Less than a meter long.”
“A child,” Randall said, his voice shaky.
“Never a child,” Salap said, shaking his head. “Not a human child.”
“The skull,” Shatro said loudly, lips curled as if offended.
“Leg bones and ... hands,” Cassir said.
I knelt beside Salap and turned my attention to the hands. They had five fingers, but the fingers were unjointed, flexible as rubber. The wrist was likewise one unit, and the joint that connected it to a long, two-boned forearm—the bones given one twist around each other, with a smooth cartilaginous material between—was not the joint of any human.
“I've doubted her story from the beginning,” Shatro said. “Why would they leave her here? What could she and Yeshova have done—or did she bury her husband—”
“This isn't Yeshova, or any other human, and there's been no murder here,” Salap concluded, standing and coughing. “Whatever it is, it isn't fully grown. It's unfinished.”
Randall's face became even more pale, his eyes staring at us as if we were dreadful angels. “My God, what, then?”
“Made here,” Salap said. He held up his left hand imperiously, palm up, and coughed again into his other hand. Something in the cloudy water irritated him. Then he looked between Randall and me, and said, “Get the largest jars. Throw other specimens out if you have to.” He suddenly swore under his breath and glared at the men and woman standing on the walls overhead, and peering through the hole gouged in the chamber. “Not a word of this to Nimzhian, and not a word to anyone on board ship. We will tell them after we've studied the specimen, and in our own good time. Master Randall, will you guarantee this for me?”
Randall nodded, face still pale.
“Good.”
Digging around the bottom of the chamber, within an hour we found three of the unfinished scions—if indeed that was what they were. I helped Salap photograph the remains, using our hands and a metric ruler for size comparison, in case the specimens disintegrated, as some already had. “Send down some hot wax,” Salap instructed as the glass jars were lowered. I filled the jars with water from the chamber, and one by one, we lifted the fragile remnants and lowered them delicately into the jars, through the muddy fluid to the bottom.
As he sealed the jars with paraffin, Salap looked up at me and said, “A fair imitation, no?” He gave me a grin that seemed more than a little ghoulish.
We stored the specimen jars in a small volcanic cave near the beach, out of the sun, and covered them with wet tarps to keep them cool. Leaving us to guard them, Salap and Randall took the longboat to the Vigilant and spent several hours offshore. Shatro and Cassir became involved in an argument about what the humanlike remains signified. Shatro was arguing for some sort of conspiracy between Nimzhian and the ecos queen; he had made some ridiculous elaborations on the captain's obsession.
Shatro, I saw, would always limit himself to the opinions of those in authority, and rather than improve upon those o
pinions, he would make them seem ridiculous.
Shimchisko had fallen into a silent funk, head bowed, staring at the sand between his feet as he sat near the cave entrance. I sat beside him, concerned that his cynical cheer had vanished so completely.
“Olmy, this is the worst thing that's ever happened,” he confided.
“Why?”
“It's going to tear us apart. Salap can't keep it secret forever. Randall doesn't like it; I don't like it.” He shook his hand loosely at Cassir and Shatro, as if dismissing them. “The first time we're in port...”
I was content just to listen for the moment. In truth, I was stunned myself.
“It shakes my faith,” Shimchisko said. “First, that this island has died. Now, that it was trying to make one of us...” He shrugged. Shimchisko was crafty, but not a quick thinker about large issues. “Why?” he stared directly at me.
“I don't know,” I said.
“They all sample us,” Shimchisko continued, frowning deeply. “They steal from each other—are they going to steal from us now?”
The captain came ashore with Salap an hour later. They entered the cave alone and Salap showed him the jars and described what was in them. When they emerged from the cave the captain seemed feverish. His face was flushed and he lurched a little and took Salap's arm. Looking at Randall and me, he said in a gruff voice, “We need to set sail in two days. We'll take a direct course to Jakarta. We don't know what we have. We could stay here and study for years. Primary science. But we don't have the luxury. Tell Nimzhian we'll be leaving. We'll deliver the supplies we promised tomorrow.”
“Should we tell her anything?” Shatro asked, deep into his suspicions of conspiracy. Everyone ignored him, and he lowered his head, staring at us sullenly.
The captain whispered in Randall's ear. Randall turned to Shimchisko and Shatro, lifted his hand, and swung it to include Cassir and me in the sweep of his orders. “Back to the boat. We need to talk in private.”
Thornwheel did not seem happy to be left behind.
“Let Olmy stay,” Salap said. “I'll need him.” The captain blinked at him, but did not argue. When Shatro's eyes met mine, he closed them and looked away in pure disgust. He joined the others as they walked toward the captain's boat.
“I wish I could talk to the good Lenk or some of his officers about this,” the captain continued. He pounded the black sand with his walking stick, staring out across the blue expanse of sterile sea. The sand made little barking noises with each poke. “What the radio messages say is that Lenk is on a ship to Jakarta right now. Brion himself is going to meet him there. There's going to be a conference. For now, we can't talk to Lenk, even if the airways are clear.”
Randall had apparently heard of this, but Salap had not.
“Why should we consult with Lenk?” Salap asked cautiously, puzzled by the captain's line of reasoning.
Keyser-Bach's face reddened to a shade of sienna, his cheeks and chin a brighter pink. “We have a responsibility here, and not just as scientists.”
Realization dawned on Salap but still eluded me. I had not worked with the captain very long and did not know his attitudes. Salap was ahead of me and Randall as well.
“You perceive this as a threat?” Salap asked.
“What else would it have been, if the ecos had survived? And for that matter, how do we know it hasn't merely gone dormant? Hidden the queen somewhere, encysted to ride out some condition or another...”
“I do not agree these are possibilities,” Salap said. “The grove is truly orphaned.”
“The danger is immense,” the captain said. “We've learned more on this expedition than any before us, in all the decades we've been on Lamarckia. And what we've learned burns.”
“Perhaps it is innocuous!” Salap argued, heat rising. Randall saw the argument coming and tried to intervene, but Salap and the captain both raised their hands, fending him off.
“Ser Salap, how can it be innocuous or innocent that an ecos seeks to mimic us?”
“They have always been curious!” Salap said. “We are strangers, a new kind of scion, but we do not evoke the responses that guard against thieves or spies ... We do not smell as a scion from another ecos would smell, perhaps. The samplers study our shape, take samples of every individual, carry them ... someplace, we assume for analysis. But these samples are much more enigmatic than the tissues of a scion from another ecos. The language of our genes is different in its very grammar. It takes a long time to puzzle out, even for a master ... or a mistress.” Salap's eyes burned with enthusiasm, as if he expressed his own secret dream or nightmare—a religious hope, perhaps. “Somewhere, there is a part of the ecos, a seed-mistress or queen, or many of them, examining the problem, studying our genetic material, laboring over the puzzles of human DNA, trying to understand the functions it codes for and duplicate them, beginning with the simplest proteins. They have so many problems to solve—there is an immense gulf between a megacytic scion and a many-celled organism.”
I pictured secret factories hidden in the silvas—perhaps in organic fortresses much like the palaces—where unknown intelligences worked tirelessly for decades...
We might as well call them queens.
“That much is obvious,” the captain said. “They feel threatened by us. We steal their scions, we cut them down and make ships of them, or we harvest them and eat them. We have the potential to fill Lamarckia and take all resources ... A queen would sense this, with whatever instinct she has. She would know. Ser Salap, didn't you expect to find something like the palaces, someday?”
“Yes, yes, of course! It was my great hope,” Salap said.
“I know what we have to do,” Keyser-Bach insisted. “We cannot take chances. We must make certain that Martha is dead.”
Salap seemed ready to spit. He walked back and forth on the beach, glaring at the captain, at us. “You would have us destroy all we have studied?”
“We keep our own samples, to show Lenk. But we burn the grove and try to find the hidden queen.”
“There is no hidden queen!” Salap shouted. He had lost all of his restraint and spittle flecked his black mustache. “Martha is dead!”
The captain flinched at this outburst. He set his stick down on the sand and squatted, laying his arms across his knees. Salap knelt beside him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“It is not necessary to act with such brashness,” Salap said, some of his calm returning. “Whatever Martha set out to do, clearly it has come to a stop for now. It appears at least to be dead, or so weakened and reduced that it might as well be dead. We have time to think and to consult. We go to Jakarta, we explain our discovery to Lenk. You can request an audience, even when he is busy with Brion. And you can ask Lenk and his councilors what should be done.
“They cannot deny us now,” he said. “Our own curiosity is not a luxury. We must answer our questions. We must understand these processes.”
The captain's face had come back from its dangerous color, and his anger and anxiety had cooled. “Do you think Nimzhian knew?” he asked.
“Shatro is a fool. She knew nothing,” Salap said. While the captain had cooled, Salap had become infected by an enthusiasm that he took some pains to hide. He knew he could win this argument and gain an advantage in a larger war. He approached me and said, loudly enough for the others to hear, “How ambitious are you, Ser Olmy?”
“I'm eager to learn,” I said.
“The captain and I, and the master Randall, have tried for ten years to make our case, that ignorance is dangerous, that we live on a dangerous world, however calm and benign it may seem. There are many more dangers than starvation.”
The captain looked up at his chief researcher with an expression mixing irritation, puzzlement, and wonder, one eye squinted, one hand pulling on his chin. Whatever his connections, Keyser-Bach had never been much of a political thinker. Salap, however, more than made up for that lack.
“We have fought and been denied to
o many times,” Salap said. “Our victory with this expedition—one ship, and a crew barely adequate—was a small one. But Martha has left a legacy more frightful than anything seen on Lamarckia. And more precious to us than any mountain of metals.”
The captain returned to the ship with Shimchisko, Shatro, and Cassir. The necessity for silence had been impressed on all by Salap. Shimchisko took the warning with a somber expression.
As they pushed the boat off, the captain said, “Give my farewells to Ser Nimzhian.”
“I will,” Salap said.
“Tell her...”
“I will tell her what she needs to hear,” Salap said. The captain seemed satisfied, and relieved not to have to come up with the words himself.
“Why doesn't he want to talk with her?” I asked Salap and Randall. Randall shrugged, but Salap's energy had spilled over, and as he went to prepare Nimzhian for our departure, he gave a long discourse on the captain's character.
“He is a scholar,” he said. “He is a shy man, actually, and sometimes a fearful one. He was raised by stern parents, as I was, but by and large my parents were correct; his were a little mad, I think. He has a fondness for hidden motivations that surfaces during the worst times. It's made his talks with Lenk's administers even more difficult. I believe he still holds the opinion that Nimzhian must be involved with this.”
“How could she be?” I asked.
“It is not my opinion, so I will not explain or defend it,” Salap said. “Although Shatro expresses it succinctly. Sometimes, he is like a younger, stupider version of the captain, with few of his redeeming qualities.” He glared at Randall. “You should not have brought him aboard.”
