by Robert Reed
But they had it now, and that was something.
The prize proved to be a little larger than a big person tucked into a tight ball, and it was stubbornly massive. Moving that much mass proved to be hard work, particularly while it was still radiating the iron’s heat. But later, after several kilometers of practice and the crushing of two makeshift sleds, the grandchildren learned that simply rolling their prize was easiest. Whatever the object was—and it could have been just about anything—the cold metal ground didn’t seem to dent it or even smudge its mirrored face.
They were halfway home when they were discovered. A lone figure appeared on the main trail, jogging up into the shadow of a virtue tree, then standing motionless, watching as they worked their way closer.
At a distance, it was obvious that this was a captain. A woman, wasn’t she? She wore a captain’s clothes and a captain’s disapproving face, but when everyone saw whose face it was, they gave a collective sigh of relief.
“Hello, Madam Washen!’ a dozen voices called out.
With another captain, there would have been immediate miseries. But not with smart old Washen. She had a reputation for understanding what was perfectly obvious to any happy grandchild, and for knowing how to punish without killing the happiness, too.
“Having fun?” she inquired.
Of course they were. Didn’t it look as if they were having fun?
“Not entirely,” the ancient woman admitted. She looked at each of their faces, saying, “I count twelve,” with an ominous tone.Then she sighed and shook her head, asking, “Where’s Blessing Gable? Was she with you?”
“No,” they said together, with a mixture of surprise and relief. Then one of the boys explained, “She’s way too old to float with us.”
The girl who liked Remoras realized what had happened. “Blessing has gone missing, hasn’t she?”
The captain nodded.
“To the Waywards, maybe?” Blessing was a quiet girl, and if she was too old for them, she was the perfect age for that nonsense.
“Maybe she’s left us,” Washen admitted with a sad, resigned tone. Then without another word, she stepped past the grandchildren.
Their prize sat in the middle of the trail, bright despite the tree’s shadows.
Someone asked, “See what we found?”
“No,” said Washen. As a joke. Then her long fingers played across the still-warm surface, the dark old eyes staring at her own distorted reflection.
“Do you know what it is?” asked the boy who wanted to live by the sea.
Washen fingered the knobs, and instead of answering, she asked. “What do you think it is?”
“A piece of the old bridge. The one you came down on.” The boy had given the matter some thought, and he was proud of his careful reasoning. “After it tumbled down, the iron swallowed this piece and kept it until now. I think.”
Several others voiced their agreement. Wasn’t it obvious?
The captain didn’t seem to think so. She looked at the Remora girl, then with her calm and smooth and happy voice asked, “Any other guesses?”
Someone asked, “Is it hyperfiber?”
“I don’t know what else it would be,” Washen admitted.
“But the bridge was ruined by the Event,” the Remora girl offered. “In our history books, it says it was made brown and weak, somehow, and all its little bonds kept breaking apart. Somehow”
Washen winked, making the girl feel important, and smart.
“And it isn’t just hyperfiber,” the girl added, talking too quickly now. “Because it’s so heavy, and hyperfiber isn’t. Is it?”
Washen shrugged, then said, “Tell me how you found it. And where.”
The girl tried. And she meant to be perfectly honest, though she never mentioned sex, and the story came charging out of her mouth as if she were taking credit for everything.
Her one-time lover protested. “I saw the stupid thing first,” he complained. “Not you.”
“Good eyes,” Washen offered. “Whoever was using them.”
The girl bit her own stupid, careless tongue.
“What does this look like?” asked Washen.
“A piece of the sky,” said the boy. “Sort of, it does.”
“Except it’s brighter,” another boy offered.
“And bumpy,” another girl offered.
With the salty taste of blood in her mouth, the Remora girl observed, “It’s sort of like a tiny, tiny version of the Great Ship. Those knobs are the rocket nozzles, see? Except they aren’t really big enough. Not like the nozzles in the paintings.”
“But there is a resemblance,” Washen conceded. Then she stood and wiped her hand on the leg of her uniform, and looking off toward the doomed High Spines, she said, “Honestly.” Her voice was gentle. “I don’t know what this is.”
Eighteen
For the next one hundred and eight years, the artifact lay in storage, wrapped within a clean purple woolbark blanket and tucked inside a steel vault designed to hold nothing else. Aasleen and her engineers had been given the fun of divining its secrets. But at least one Submaster had to be present whenever studies were undertaken, and if the artifact was to be moved, as it was during two eruption cycles, a Submaster as well as a platoon of picked and utterly trustworthy guards accompanied the relic, weapons politely kept out of sight but a palpable air of suspicion obvious to all.
For many reasons, that century was dubbed The Flowering.
There were finally enough grandchildren, mature and educated and inspired, that something resembling an industrialized nation was possible. A lacework of good smooth roads was built between the cities and largest villages, then rebuilt after each eruption. More important were the crude smear-signal transmitters, hung high on mountain peaks and steel poles, that network allowing anyone to speak with anyone within a thousand-kilometer zone. Clumsy carbide drills gnawed through the crust, reaching the molten iron, then simple-as-can-be geothermal plants were erected, supplying what seemed to be a wealth of power to the labs and factories and increasingly luxurious homes. Life on Marrow remained a hard, crude business. But that wasn’t what the captains said in public. In front of the grandchildren, they mustered up every imaginable praise for the new biogas toilets and the cultured bug-based meats and the frail, fixed-wing aircraft that could, if blessed with good weather, crawl all up into the cold upper reaches of the atmosphere. They weren’t trying to mislead so much as encourage. And really, they were the ones who needed most of the encouragement. Life here might not match the serene pleasures found inside the ship, but to a youngster barely five centuries old, it was obvious that his world had grown more comfortable in his lifetime, and more predictable, and if he could have known about the captains’ real disappointments, he would have felt nothing but a pitying, even fearful puzzlement.
The Flowering culminated with a clumsy but muscular laser, designed from Aasleen’s recollections and adapted to local resources, then helped along with her staff’s countless inspirations and other making-dos.
Hundreds attended the first full-strength firing of the laser.
The artifact was its target. The hyperfiber shell was presumably ancient, but it had to be a premium grade. To slice a hair-wide hole through the shell meant an enforced blackout, the power from some fifty-odd geothermal plants fed directly into Aasleen’s newest laboratory, into a long cramped room built for this precise moment, a series of microsecond pulses delivered in what sounded like a monster’s roar, lending drama to the moment as well as jarring quite a few nerves.
Miocene sat in the control room, hands tied together in a tense lump.
“Stop!’ she heard Aasleen bark. Finally.
The laser was put to bed. Then an optical cable was inserted into the fresh hole, and the engineer peered inside, saying nothing, forgetting about her audience until Miocene asked, “Is there anything?”
“Vault,” Aasleen reported.
Did she want the artifact set back into its vault?
But before anyone could ask, she added, “It looks a lot like a memory vault. Not human-made, but not all that strange, either.”
With an impatient nod, Miocene said, “What else?”
“A standard bioceramic matrix, with some kind of holo-projector. And a dense ballast at the center.” Aasleen looked in the general direction of her audience, blind to everything but her own quick thoughts. “No power cells, from what I can tell. But what good would they be after a few billion years? Even the Builders couldn’t make a battery that would ignore this kind of long-term heat…”
“But does this vault still work?” Miocene growled.
“Too soon to tell,” Aasleen replied. “I’ve got to peel back the shell and feed power to the systems… which will mean… hey, what’s the date…?”
Twenty voices told her. Counting from the first day of the mission, up in the leech habitat, the date was 619.23.
“Working at night, making one cut at a time… and of course I’ll have to refurbish the laser once every week or so… so maybe by 621 or 621.5. Maybe…?”
The Submasters were openly disappointed.
Miocene spoke for them, asking, “Is there any way to speed up this process?”
“Absolutely,” Aasleen responded. “Take me back upstairs, and I can do everything in three minutes. At the most.”
“Upstairs’ was the latest term for the ship. Informal, and by implication, a place that was relatively close by.
Miocene was disgusted, and happy to show her feelings. She shook her head and rose to her feet. Half a hundred of the captains’ children and grandchildren were in attendance. After all, this was their mystery, too. Facing them, she asked the engineer, “What are the odds that this memory vault remembers anything at all?”
“After being immersed in liquid iron for several billion years…?”
“Yes.”
Aasleen chewed on her lower lip for a thoughtful moment, then said, “Next to none. Madam.”
Disappointment hung in the air, thick and bitter.
“But that’s assuming that the bioceramics are the same as the grades seen before, of course. Which might be unlikely, since the Builders always seemed to know just how good their machines needed to be.”
Disappointment wrestled with a sudden hope.
“Whoever they were,” Aasleen reported, “the Builders were great engineers.”
“Undoubtedly,” Miocene purred.
“Begging to differ,” someone muttered. Who? Washen? Miocene gave her a quick glance and a crisp, “And why not, darling?”
“I’ve never known an engineer, great or lousy, who didn’t leave behind at least one plaque with her name on it.”
When Aasleen laughed, almost everyone began to laugh with her.
Giggling, nodding her happy face, the engineer admitted, “That’s the truth. That’s exactly how we are!”
Maybe the Builders were clever and rich with foresight, but the artifact—the ancient memory vault—was found empty of anything other than a few shredded, incoherent images. Shades of gray laid over a wealth of blackness.
The sorry news was delivered by one of Aasleen s genuine grandsons.
It was five days before the year 621 began. The speaker, named Pepsin, was a stocky, vivacious man with an easy smile and blue-black skin and a habit of talking too quickly to be understood. As evidence mounted that nothing of consequence waited in the vault, Pepsin had inherited the project from his famous grandmother. And like the good descendant of any good captain, he had taken this dead-end project and made it his own, carefully and thoroughly wringing from it everything that was important.
A small group of disappointed captains and Submasters were in attendance. No one else. Miocene herself sat in the back, reviewing administrative papers, barely noticing when that fast, fast voice announced, “But information comes in many delicate flavors.” What was that?
Pepsin grinned and said, “The hyperfiber shell degraded over time. Which gives us clues about its entombment.”
Washen was sitting in the front. She noticed that Miocene wasn’t paying attention, which was why she took it upon herself to ask, “What do you mean?”
“Madam,” he replied, “I mean what I say.”
Sarcasm caused the Submaster to lift her head. “But I didn’t hear you,” she growled. “And this time, darling, talk slowly and look only at me.”
The young engineer blinked and licked his lips, then explained. “Even the best hyperfiber ages, if stressed. As I’m sure you know, madam. By examining cross sections of the vault’s shell, at the microscopic level, we can read a crude history not only of the vault, but of the world that embraced it, too.”
“Marrow,” the old woman growled.
Again, he blinked. Then with a graceless cleverness, added, “Presumably, madam. Presumably”
With her quietest voice, Miocene advised, “Maybe you should proceed.”
Pepsin nodded, obeyed.
“The hyperfiber has spent the last several billion years bobbing inside liquid iron. As expected. But if there were no breaks in that routine, the degradation should be worse than observed. Fifty to ninety percent worse, according to my honorable grandmother.” A glance at Aasleen; no more. “Hyperfiber has a great capacity to heal itself. But the bonds don’t knit themselves quite as effectively at several thousand degrees Kelvin. No, what’s best is chilly weather under a thousand degrees. Deep space is the very best. Otherwise, the hyperfiber scars, and it scars in distinct patterns. And what I see in the microscope, and what everyone else here sees… measuring the scan, we have evidence of approximately five to fifteen hundred thousand distinct periods of high heat. Presumably, each of those periods marks time spent in Marrows deep interior—”
“Five to fifteen billion years,” Miocene interrupted. “Is that your estimate?”
“Basically. Yes, madam.” He licked his lips, and blinked, and conjured up a wide contented smile. “Of course we can’t assume that the vault was always thrown to the surface, and there surely have been periods when it was submerged several times during a single cycle.” Again, the lips needed moisture. “In different words, this is a lousy clock. But being a clock whose hands have moved, it points to what we have always assumed. For my entire little life, and this last brief chapter in your great lives…”
“Just say it,” Aasleen snarled at her grandson.
“Marrow expands and contracts. Again, we have evidence.” He grinned at everyone, at no one. Then he added, “Why this should be, I don’t know. And how it does this trick is difficult for me to conceive.”
Miocene couldn’t leave those mysterious words floating free.
With a quiet certainty, she said, “Our standard model is that the buttressing fields squeeze Marrow down, then relax. And when they relax, the world expands.”
“Until when?” asked Pepsin. “Until it fills the chamber?”
“We shall see,” the Submaster conceded.
“And what about the buttresses?” he persisted. Foolish, or brave, or simply intrigued, he had to ask the great woman, “What powers them?”
It was an old, always baffling question. But Miocene employed the oldest, easiest answer. “Hidden reactors of some unknown type. In the chamber walls, or beneath our feet. Or perhaps in both places.”
“And why go through these elaborate cycles, madam? I mean, if I was the chief engineer, and I needed to keep Marrow firmly in place, I don’t think I’d ever allow my fancy buttresses to fall halfway asleep. Would you, madam? Would you let them fall partway asleep every ten thousand years?”
“You don’t understand the buttresses,” Miocene replied. “You admitted it just a few breaths ago. Nobody knows how they refuel themselves, or regenerate, or whatever is happening. These mysteries have worked hard to remain mysteries, and we should give them our well-deserved respect.”
Pepsin hugged himself, nodding as if the words carried a genuine weight. But the eyes betrayed distance, then a revelation. Sudde
nly they grew wide, and darker somehow, and with an embarrassed grin, he said, “You’ve already had this debate with my grandmother. Haven’t you?”
“A few times,” the Submaster conceded.
“And does Aasleen ever win?” the young man inquired.
Miocene waited an instant, then told Pepsin, and everyone, “She always wins. In the end, I always admit that we haven’t any answers, and her questions are smart and valid and vast. And sadly, they are also quite useless to us here.
“A waste of breath, even.”
Then Miocene pulled a new piece of paper to the top of the pile, and dipping her head, she added, “Get us home, darling. That’s all that matters. Then I will personally give you the keys to a first-class laboratory, and you can ask all these great questions that seem to be keeping you awake nights.”
A quiet little party followed Pepsin’s announcement. Talk centered more on new gossip than grand speculations: who was sleeping with whom, and who was pregnant, and which youngsters had slipped away to the Waywards. Washen quickly lost interest. Claiming fatigue, she escaped, walking past the security stations, and alone, walking home to the newest Hazz City.
A rugged metropolis of eighteen thousand, the Loyalist capital lay in the bottom of a wide, flat, and well-watered rift valley. Every home was sturdy but read)’ to be abandoned. Every government building was just large enough to impress, bolted to its temporary foundation of bright stainless steel. With the late hour, the streets were nearly empty. Thunderheads were piled high in the western sky, stealing heat from a dying lava flow; but the winds seemed to be shoving the storms elsewhere, making the city feel like a quiet, half-abandoned place being bypassed by the world’s great events.
