Marrow

by Robert Reed

  The gruesome face was furious.

  An indignant voice assured her, “It’s true what they say. You’ve got the ugliest soul of any of them.”

  Quietly and furiously, Miocene said, “Enough.”

  She informed Orleans, “This tour is finished. Take me back to Port Erinidi. And in a straight line this time. If I see one more memorial, I promise, I’ll carve you out of that suit myself. Here, and now.”

  * * *

  IN AN ACCIDENTAL fashion, the Remoras were Miocene’s creation.

  Ages ago, as the Great Ship reached the dusty edge of the Milky Way, there was a critical need to repair the aged hull and protect it from future impacts. The work swamped the available machinery—shipborn and human-built. It was Miocene who suggested sending the human crew out into the hull. The dangers were obvious, and fickle. After billions of years of neglect, the electromagnetic shields and laser arrays were in shambles; repair teams could expect no protection from impacts and precious little warning. But Miocene created a system where no one was asked to take larger risks than anyone else. Gifted engineers and the highest captains served their mandatory time, dying with a laudable regularity. Her hope was to patch the deepest craters with a single warlike push, then the surviving engineers would automate every system, making it unnecessary for people ever to walk the hull again.

  But human nature subverted her meticulous plans.

  A low-ranking crew member would earn negative marks. They might be minor violations of dress, or moments of clear insubordination. Either way, those offenders could clean up their files by serving extra time on the hull. Miocene looked on it as an absolution, and she gladly sent a few souls “upstairs.” But a few captains confused the duty for a punishment, and over the course of a few centuries, they banished thousands of subordinates, sometimes for nothing worse than a surly word heard in passing.

  There was a woman, a strange soul named Wune, who went up onto the hull and remained there. Not only did she accept her duties, she embraced them. She declared that she was living a morally pure life, full of contemplation and essential work. With a prophet’s manipulative talents, she found converts to her newborn faith, and her converts became a small, unified population of philosophers who refused to leave the hull.

  “Remora” began as an insult used by the captains. But the insult was stolen by the unexpected culture, becoming their own proud name.

  A Remora never left his lifesuit. From conception until his eventual death, he was a world onto himself, elaborate recyke systems giving him water and food and fresh oxygen, his suit belonging to his body, his tough genetics constantly battered by the endless flux of radiations. Mutations were common on the hull, and cherished. What’s more, a true Remora learned to direct his mutations, rapidly evolving new kinds of eyes and novel organs and mouths of every nightmarish shape.

  Wune died early, and she died heroically.

  But the prophet left behind thousands of believers. They invented ways to make children, and eventually they numbered in the millions, building their own cities and artforms and passions and, Miocene presumed, their own odd dreams. In some ways, she had to admire their culture, if not the individual believers. But as she watched Orleans piloting the skimmer, she wondered—not for the first time—if these people were too obstinate for the ship’s good, and how she could tame them with a minimum of force and controversy.

  That’s what Miocene was thinking when the coded message arrived.

  They were still a thousand kilometers from Port Erinidi, and the message had to be a test. Black level; Alpha protocols? Of course it was a test!

  Yet she followed the ancient protocols. Without a word, she left Orleans, walking to the back of the cabin and closing the lavatory door, scanning the walls and ceiling, the floor and fixtures, making sure that not so much as a molecule-ear was present.

  Through a nexus-link buried in her mind, Miocene downloaded the brief message, and within her mind’s eye, she translated it. No emotion showed on her face. She wouldn’t let any leak out. But her hands, more honest by a long ways, were wrestling in her long lap—two perfectly matched opponents, neither capable of winning their contest.

  * * *

  THE REMORA DELIVERED her to the port.

  Sensing the importance of the moment, Miocene tried to leave Orleans with a few healing words. “I’m sorry,” she lied. Then she placed a hand on the gray lifesuit, its psuedoneurons delivering the feel of her warm palm to his own odd flesh. Then quietly and firmly, she added, “You made valid points. The next time I sit at the Master’s table, I’ll do more than mention today’s conversation. That’s a promise.”

  “Is that what it’s called?” said the blue tongues and rubbery mouth. “A promise?”

  The obnoxious shit.

  Yet Miocene offered him a little stiff-backed bow, in feigned respect, then calmly slipped off into the port’s useful chaos.

  Passengers were rolling into a tall capsule-car. They were an alien species, each larger than a good-sized room, and judging by their wheeled, self-contained lifesuits, they were a low-gravity species. She nearly asked her nexuses about the species. But she thought better of it, lowering her gaze and moving at a crisp pace, appearing distracted as she slipped between two of them, barely hearing voices that sounded like much water pushed through a narrow pipe.

  “A Submaster,” said her implanted translator.

  “Look, see!”

  “Smart as can be, that one!”

  “Powerful!”

  “Look, see!”

  Miocene’s private cap-car waited nearby. She passed it without a glance, stepping into one of the public cars that had brought the aliens up to Port Erinidi. It was a vast machine, empty and perfect. She gave it a destination and rented its loyalties with anonymous credits. Once she was moving, Miocene removed her cap and her uniform, habit making her lay them out on top of a padded bench. She couldn’t help but stare at the uniform, examining her reflection, her face and long neck borrowing the folds and dents of that mirrored fabric.

  “Look, see,” she whispered.

  She accessed command accounts set up by and known only to her. The compliant cap-car found itself with a series of new destinations and odd little jobs. Waiting at one location was a small wardrobe of nondescript clothes. Miocene left the clothes untouched for now. During the next hour and over the course of several thousand kilometers, she picked up a pair of sealed packages. The first package contained a small fortune in anonymous credits, while the other opened itself, revealing a scorpionlike robot free of manufacturer’s codes or any official ID.

  The robot leaped at the single passenger.

  With a patient concern, the car asked, “Is something wrong, madam? Do you need help?”

  “No, no,” Miocene replied, trying to lie still on a long bench.

  The scorpion’s tail reached into her mouth, then shoved hard enough to split modern bone. Her naked body straightened, in shock. For an instant, in little ways, the Submaster died. Then her disaster genes woke, fixing the damage with a crisp efficiency. Bone and various neurological linkups were repaired. But the nexuses that had been buried inside Miocene, part of her for more than a hundred millennia, had been yanked free by the titanium hooks of that narrowly designed robot.

  The robot ate the nexuses, digesting them in a plasma furnace.

  It did the same with the Submaster’s elaborate uniform.

  Then the furnace turned itself inside out, and with a flash of purple-white light, what was metal turned to a cooling puddle and a persistent stink.

  A tiny amount of spilled blood needed to be burned away. Once that chore was finished, Miocene dressed in a simple brown gown that could have belonged to any human tourist, and from the attached satchel, she pulled out bits of false flesh that quivered between her cool fingers, begging for the opportunity to change the appearance of her important face.

  Three more times, the car stopped for its odd passenger.

  It stopped insi
de a major arterial station, then at the center of a cavern filled with bowing yellowish trees and a perpetual wind. And finally, it eased into a quiet neighborhood of well-to-do apartments, the resident humans and aliens among the wealthiest entities in the galaxy, each owning at least a cubic kilometer of the great ship.

  Where the passenger disembarked, the car didn’t remember, much less care.

  After that, it hurried toward its initial destination. But those coordinates had always been an impossibility, and the AI pilot was too impaired to realize that this was a foolhardy task. Empty and insane, it streaked down the longest, largest arterials, hard vacuums allowing enormous speeds. Circumnavigating the ship many times in the next days, the car stopped only when a security team crippled it with their weapons, then burst on board, ready for anything but the emptiness and an utter lack of clues.

  * * *

  A WEEK LATER, eating breakfast and watching passersby, Miocene asked herself why now, at this exact moment, was it so important for her to vanish?

  What did the Master intend?

  The basic plan was ancient and rigorously sensible. After the wars with the Phoenixes, the Master had ordered her captains to prepare routes into anonymity. If the ship was ever invaded, their enemies would naturally want to capture its captains, and probably kill them. But if each captain kept a permanent escape route, and if no one else knew the route—including the Master—then perhaps the brightest blood in the ship would remain free long enough to organize, then take back the ship in their own counterinvasion.

  “A desperate precaution,” the Master had dubbed this plan.

  Later, as life on board the ship turned routine, the emergency routes were kept for other robust reasons.

  As a form of testing, for instance.

  Young, inexperienced captains were sent a coded message from the Master’s office. Were they loyal enough to obey the difficult order? Did they know the ship well enough to vanish for months or years? And most importantly, once they vanished, did they continue to act in responsible, captainly ways?

  Simple bureaucratic inertia was another factor. Once established, escape routes were easily maintained. Miocene invested a few minutes each year to keep hers open, and she was probably much more thorough than most of her subordinates.

  And the final reason was the unforeseen.

  Since the Phoenixes, no one had tried to invade the Great Ship. But in a voyage that would circumnavigate the Milky Way, it didn’t pay to throw away any tool that might, in some unexpected way, help the Master’s hand.

  What if the unforeseen had happened?

  Miocene was sitting in a tiny cafe, safely disguised, when she noticed a dozen black-clad security officers interviewing the local foot traffic. A standard business in this kind of district, yes. But it made her wonder about the other captains. How many besides her had been called away by the Master’s explicit orders?

  There was a temptation to use secret tools to count the missing. But her probes might be noticed and tracked, and ignorance was infinitely more seemly than being caught in someone’s clumsy net.

  Half of the security team was working its way toward the cafe. They were perhaps two hundred meters away when a dose of paranoia took hold of Miocene. She left her sausage cakes and iced coffee unfinished, but she rose to her feet with a casual grace, then chose the most anonymous direction before slipping out of sight. In this district, every avenue was a touch less than a hundred kilometers long, and it was exactly one thousandth as wide and one ten-thousandth as tall. There were a thousand identical avenues carved into the local rock, aligned with a clean geometric precision.

  The original guess, formulated by the first survey teams, was that these geometric relationships were fat with meaning. The ship’s builders were at least as clever as the people who had discovered it, and an accurate map of every room and avenue, fuel tank and rocket nozzle, would reveal an ocean of mathematical clues. Perhaps a genuine language could be built from all those intricate proportions. In simple terms, the Great Ship supplied its own explanation … if only enough data and enough cunning could be applied to this wondrous and slippery problem …

  Miocene had always doubted that logic.

  Cleverness was an uneven talent at best. Imagination, she believed, was something that would fool its owner, luring her to waste her time chasing every wishful possibility. That’s why she long ago predicted that no AI and no human, or any other sentient soul, would find anything particularly important in the ship’s architecture. This was one of those circumstances where the boring and the unclever provided the best answers. These thousand avenues, plus every other hollow place within the Great Ship, had been chiseled out by sterile machines following equally sterile plans. That would explain the repetitive, insect-like patterns. And more importantly, it offered a telling clue as to why no expedition had ever found the tiniest trace of left-behind life.

  Not one alien corpse.

  Or unexplained microbe.

  Or even a molecular knot that was once someone’s once-dear protein.

  Where imagination saw mystery, Miocene saw simplicity. Obviously, this ship was built not to travel between the stars, but to cross from galaxy to galaxy. Its designers, whoever they were, had employed sterile machines at every stage of construction. Then for reasons unknown, the builders never stepped on board their creation.

  The easy guess was that some natural catastrophe had struck. Most likely it would be something vast, and horrific.

  When the universe was young, and quite a bit denser, galaxies had the nagging habit of exploding. Seyferts. Quasars. Cascading series of supernovae. All were symptoms of a dangerous youth. There was ample evidence showing the Milky Way had a similar history. Life born in its youth was extinguished by the amoral pulse of gamma radiation: once, twice, or a thousand times.

  What the dullest, most credible experts proposed—and what Miocene believed today without question—was that an intelligent species arose in the past, in some peaceful and extremely remote backwater. The species predicted the coming storm. A crash program of self-replicating machines were sent to a jovian-class world, probably a world drifting inside a dusty nebula, far from any sun. Following simple, buglike programs, that world was rebuilt. Its hydrogen atmosphere was burned to give it velocity. Slingshot flybys added still more. But by the time it came streaking past the home-world, there was no one left to save. Empty avenues waited for humanoids already killed by a Seyfert’s fire, and for the next several billion years, the ship waited, empty and patient, plying a blind course between galaxies, slowly degrading but managing to endure until it reached the Milky Way.

  No one had ever indentified the parent galaxy.

  Looking back along the ship’s trajectory, one couldn’t find so much as a dim dwarf galaxy that seemed a likely mother.

  And there was also that nagging issue about the ship’s age.

  Five billion years was the official verdict. A huge span, but comfortably huge, demanding no great rewriting of the universe’s early history.

  The trouble was that the parent rock could be older than five billion years. Before it solidified, the granite and basalt were doctored. The telltale radionuclides had been harvested by some hyperefficient means. To mask its age, or for some less conspiratorial purpose? Either way, it left the rock cold and hard, and it was just one means by which the ship’s builders had left behind a hard puzzle for today’s scientists.

  Earnest, imaginative people, filled with cocktails and braver drugs, liked to claim that eight or ten or twelve billion years was a more likely age for the ship. And twelve billion years wasn’t the upper estimate, either. Enjoying the imponderables, they argued that this derelict had come from that fine distant sprinkle of little blue galaxies which covered the most distant skies, all born at the beginnings of time. How humanoids, or anything, could have evolved so early was left unanswered. But since mystery was their passion, they found this entire business more intoxicating than any drink.

&nbs
p; Miocene didn’t enjoy vast questions or ludicrous answers, particularly when neither were necessary.

  She saw a simpler explanation: the ship was a youthful five billion years old, and somewhere between galaxies, probably soon after its birth, its course was deflected by an invisible black hole or some unmapped dark-matter mass. That explained why it was an orphan in every sense. Thinking otherwise was to think too much and to do it in the wrong places.

  This had been an orphan and a derelict, and then human beings had found it.

  And now it was theirs; was Miocene’s, at least in part.

  Walking that long, long avenue, Miocene smelled a hundred worlds. Humanoids and aliens of other shapes were enjoying the false blue sky, and most were enjoying one another. She heard words and songs and sniffed the potent musks of pheromonal gossips, and occasionally, as the mood struck, she would wander into one of the tiny shops, browsing like anyone with nowhere else to be.

  No, she wasn’t as imaginative as some people.

  In most circumstances, Miocene would make that confession, without hesitation. Yet in the next breath, always, she would add that she had imagination enough to revel in the ship’s majesty, and its cosmopolitan appeal, and sufficient creativity to help rule this very original and precious society.

  Nursing a well-deserved pride, she worked her way along the avenue.

  Alien wares outnumbered human wares, even in human shops. Entering a likely doorway, she could always expect to be noticed. And when she wasn’t, Miocene would recall that she wasn’t a Submaster now. Out of uniform, free of responsibilities, she possessed an anonymity that seemed an endless surprise.

  From a spidery machine intelligence, she purchased an encyclopedia written entirely about the Great Ship.

  In a tiny grocery, she bought a harum-scarum’s sin-fruit, its proteins and odd sugars reconfigured for human stomachs.