by Robert Reed
It was a swift, decidedly strange journey. Diu rode beside Washen. He made that request, just as he’d requested being part of her team. Their shielded car began by retreating back up the access tunnel, into the garage, acquiring some distance before flinging itself downward. Then it streaked through the buttresses while a trillion electric fingers reached through the superfluid shields, then through their thin skulls, momentarily playing with everyone’s sanity.
The car reached the upper atmosphere, and braked, the terrific gees bruising flesh and shattering minor bones. Emergency genes awoke, weaving protein analogs and knitting the most important aches in moments. The bridge was rooted in a hillside of cold rusting iron and black jungle. Despite a heavily overcast sky, the air was brilliant and furnace-hot, every breath tasting of metals and nervous sweat. The captains unloaded their supplies. As team leader, Washen gave orders that everyone already knew by heart. Their car was led from the bridge, then reconfigured. Their new vehicle was loaded and tested, and the captains were tested by their autodocs: newly implanted genes were already churning away, helping their flesh adapt to the heat and metal-rich environment. Then Miocene, sitting in a nearby encampment, gave her blessing, and Washen lifted off, steering toward their appointed study site.
The countryside was broken and twisted, split by fault lines and raw mountains and countless volcanic vents. The vents had been quiet, some for a century, some for a decade, or in some cases, for days. Yet the surrounding terrain was alive, adorned with pseudotrees reminiscent of enormous mushrooms, each pressed flush against its neighbors, their lacquered black faces feeding on the dazzling blue light.
Marrow was at least as durable as the captains flying above it. Growth rates were phenomenal, and for more reasons than the abundant light or a hyperefficient photosynthesis. Early findings supported an early hypothesis: the jungle was also feeding through its roots, the chisellike tips forcing their way through fissures, finding hot springs fat with thermophilic bacteria.
But were the aquatic ecosystems as productive? That was Washen’s little question, and she had selected a small, metal-choked lake for study. They arrived on schedule, and after circling the lake twice, she set down on a slab of frozen black slag. The rest of the day was spent setting up their lab and quarters, and specimen traps, and as a precaution, installing a defense perimeter—three paranoid AIs that did nothing but think the worst of every passing bug and spore.
Night was mandatory.
Despite the perpetual light, Miocene insisted that each captain sleep four full hours, then invest another hour in food and ritual chores.
On schedule, Washen’s team climbed into their six pop-up shelters, stripped out of their field uniforms, then lay awake, listening to the steady buzzing of the jungle, counting the seconds until it was time to rise again.
They sat in the open at breakfast, in a neat circle, and gazed up at the sky. A shifting wind had carried away the clouds, bringing hotter, drier air and even more light. The chamber’s distant wall was silvery-white and smooth and remote. The captains’ base camp was a dark blemish visible only because of the clear air. With the distance and the glare, the bridge had vanished. If Washen was careful, she could almost believe they were the only people on the world. If she was lucky, she forgot that elaborate telescopes were watching her sitting on her aerogel chair, eating her scheduled rations, and now, with her right hand, scratching the damp back of her very damp right ear.
Diu sat on her right, and when she glanced at him, he smiled wistfully, as if reading her thoughts.
“I know what we need,” Washen announced.
Diu asked, “What do we need?”
“A ceremony. Some little ritual before we can start.” She rose and walked down to the lake, not sure why until she arrived. Blackish water lapped against rusting stones. Bending at the knees, she let one of her hands dip beneath the surface, feeling its easy heat, and between the fingers, the greasy presence of mud and life. A stand of dome-headed bog plants caught her gaze, and beside it was a specimen trap. Filled, as it happened. Washen rose and wiped her hand dry against her uniform, then carefully unfastened the trap and brought it back to camp.
On Marrow, pseudoinsects filled most animal riches.
In their trap was a six-winged dragonfly, moonstone blue and longer than a forearm. With the other captains watching, Washen gently eased her victim from the netting, folding back the wings and holding the body steady with her left hand as the right wielded a laser torch. The head was cut free, and the body kicked, then died. Then she stripped the carcass of its wings and its tail, the fat thorax set inside their tiny field kitchen. The broiling took seconds. With a dull boom, the carapace split open. Then she grabbed a lump of the hot blackish meat, and with a grimace, made herself bite and chew.
Diu laughed gently.
Another captain, Saluki, was first to say, “We aren’t supposed to.”
A twelfth-grade named Broq added, “Miocene’s orders. Unless there’s an emergency, we stick to our rations.”
Washen forced herself to swallow.
Then with a wide smile, she told them, “And you won’t want to eat this again. Believe me.”
There weren’t any native viruses to catch, or toxins that their reinforced genetics couldn’t destroy or piss away. Miocene was playing the role of the cautious mother, and where was the harm?
Washen passed out the ceremonial meat.
Wanting to please her team leader, Saluki put the flesh to her tongue, then swallowed it whole.
Broq protested, then managed the same trick.
The next two, ship-born siblings named Promise and Dream, winked slyly at the sky and told Washen, “Thank you.”
Last to accept his share was Diu, and his first bite was tiny. But he didn’t grimace, and he took the rest of the carcass, his white teeth yanking out a fat-rich chunk that he chewed before swallowing.
Then with an odd little laugh, he told everyone, “It’s not too horrible.”
He said, “If my mouth just quit burning, I think I’d almost enjoy the taste.”
Ten
WEEKS OF RELENTLESS work made possibility look like hard fact.
Marrow had been carved from the ship’s heart. Or more properly, it was carved from the core of the young jupiter that would eventually become the Great Ship.
The world’s composition and their own common sense told the captains as much. Whoever the builders were, they must have started by wrenching the uranium and thorium and other radionuclides from the rest of the jupiter, then injecting them into the core. With buttressing fields, the world was compressed, its iron packed closer and closer before the exposed chamber wall was braced with hyperfiber. How that was accomplished, no one knew. Even Aasleen, with her engineering genius, just shook her head and say, “Damned if I know.” Yet billions of years later, without apparent help from the builders or anyone else, this vast machine was still purring along quite nicely.
But why bother with such a marvel?
The obvious, popular reason was that the ship needed to be a rigid body. Tectonics fueled by any internal heat would have melted the chambers and shattered every stone ceiling, probably within the first few thousand years. But why go to so much trouble and expense to create Marrow? If you’ve got this kind of energy at your disposal, why not just lift the uranium out into space where you could put it to good use?
Unless it was used here, of course.
Some captains suggested that Marrow was the nearly molten remnant of an enormous fission reactor.
“Except there are easier, more productive ways to make energy,” others pointed out, their voices more polite than gentle.
But what if the world was designed to store energy?
It was Aasleen’s suggestion: by tweaking the buttresses, the builders could have forced the world to rotate. With patience and power—two resources they must have had in abundance—the builders could have given it a tremendous velocity. Spinning inside a vacuum, held intact by the
buttresses as well as a vanished blanket of hyperfiber, this massive iron ball would have served as a considerable flywheel.
Slowly, slowly, that energy was bled away by the empty ship.
Somewhere between the galaxies, the rotation fell to nothing, and that’s when the ship’s systems eased themselves into hibernation.
Aasleen went as far as creating an elaborate digital, as real to the eye as could be. In the early universe, heavy elements were scarce. The builders harvested the radionuclides from above and buried them here, and as Marrow grew hotter and hotter, its hyperfiber blanket began to decay. Degrade. And die.
Hyperfiber was rich in carbon and oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, every atom aligned just so and every bond strengthened with tiny predictable quantum pulses. Stressed past its limits, old hyperfiber would just fall apart, and the newly reactive elements would start dancing in celebration, giving life a reasonable chance to be born.
“It’s absolutely obvious,” Aasleen declared. “Once you see it, you can’t believe anything else. You just can’t!”
She made that dare at a weekly briefing.
Each of the team leaders was sitting in the illusion of a Master’s conference room, each perched in an black aerogel chair, sweating in Marrow’s heat. The surrounding room was sculpted from light and shadow, and sitting at the head of the long pearlwood table, between imposing gold busts of herself, was the Master’s projection. She seemed alert but remarkably quiet. The expectation for these briefings was for crisp reports and upbeat attitudes. Grand theories were a surprise. But after Aasleen had finished, and after a contemplative pause, the Master smiled, telling her imaginative captain, “That’s an intriguing possibility. Thank you, darling. Very much.”
Then to the others, “Considerations? Any?”
Her smile brought a wave of complimentary noise.
Washen doubted they were exploring someone’s dead battery. But this wasn’t the polite moment to list the problems with flywheels and life’s origins. Besides, the bioteams were reporting next, and she had her own illuminations to share.
A tremor interrupted the compliments.
The image of one captain shook, followed by others. Knowing who sat where made it possible to guess the epicenter. When Washen felt the first jolt, then the rolling aftershocks, she realized it was a big quake, even for Marrow.
An alert silence took hold.
Washen was suddenly aware of her own sweat. A sweet oil, volatile and sweetly scented, rose up out of her nervous pores, then evaporated, leaving her flesh chilled despite the endless heat.
Then the Master, immune to the quake, lifted her wide hand, announcing in a smooth, abrupt way, “We need to discuss your timetable.”
What about the bioteams?
“You’re being missed up here. Which is what you hope to hear, I’m sure.” The woman laughed for a moment, alone. Then she added, “Our delegation fiction isn’t clever enough, or flexible enough, and the crew are getting suspicious.”
Miocene nodded knowingly.
Then the Master lowered her hand, explaining, “Before I have a panic to fend off, I need to bring you home again.”
Smiles broke out.
Some of the captains were tired of the discomforts; others simply thought about the honors and promotions waiting above.
Washen cleared her throat, then asked, “Do you mean everyone, madam?”
“For the moment. Yes.”
She shouldn’t have been surprised that the cover story was leaking. Hundreds of captains couldn’t just vanish without comment. And Washen shouldn’t have felt disappointment. Even during the last busy weeks, she found herself wishing that the fiction was real. She wanted her and her colleagues off visiting some high-technology exophobes, trying to coax them into a useful trust. That would a difficult, rewarding challenge. But now, hearing that their mission was finished, she suddenly thought of hundreds of projects worth doing with her little lake—enough work to float an entire century.
As mission leader, it was Miocene’s place to ask:
“Do you want us cutting our work short, madam?”
The Master set one hand on one of the busts. For her, the room and its furnishings were genuine, and the captains were illusions.
“Mission plans can always be rewritten,” she reminded them. “What’s vital is that you finish your surveys of both hemispheres. Be sure there aren’t any big surprises. And I’d like your most critical studies wrapped up. Ten ship-days should be adequate. More than. Then you’ll come home again, leaving drones to carry on the work, and we can take our time deciding on our next important step.”
Smiles wavered, but none crumbled.
Miocene whispered, “Ten days,” with a tentative respect.
“Is there a problem?”
“Madam,” the Submaster began, “I would feel a little more at ease if we could be sure. That Marrow isn’t a threat. Madam.”
There was a pause, and not just because the Master was thousands of kilometers removed from them. It was a lengthy, unnerving silence. Then the captain’s captain looked off into the illusionary distance, asking, “Considerations? Any?”
It would be a disruption.
The other Submasters agreed with Miocene. To accomplish that work in ten days, with confidence, would require every captain’s help. That included those with the support teams. The base camp might have to be abandoned, or nearly so. Which was an acceptable risk, perhaps. But those mild, conciliatory words were obscured by clenched hands and distant, unsettled gazes.
The Master absorbed the criticisms without comment.
Then she turned to her future Submaster, saying, “Washen,” with a certain razored tone. “Do you have any considerations to add here, darling?”
Washen hesitated as long as she dared.
“Perhaps Marrow was a flywheel,” she finally allowed. Ignoring every puzzled face, she nodded and said, “Madam.”
“Is this a joke?” the Master responded, her voice devoid of amusement. “Aren’t we discussing your timetable?”
“But if this was a flywheel,” Washen continued, “and if these magical buttresses ever weakened, even for an instant, Marrow would have thrown itself to pieces. A catastrophic failure. The hyperfiber blanket wouldn’t have absorbed the angular momentum, and it would have shattered, and the molten iron would have struck the chamber wall, and the shock waves would have passed up through the ship.” She offered a series of simple, coarse calculations. Then avoiding Aasleen’s glare, she added, “Maybe this was an elaborate flywheel. But it also might have made an effective self-destruct mechanism. We just don’t know, madam. We don’t know the builders’ intentions. We can’t even guess if they had enemies, real or imagined. But if there are answers, I can’t think of a better place to look.”
The Master’s face was unreadable, impenetrable. Giant brown eyes closed, and finally, slowly, she shook her head, smiling in a pained fashion. “Since my first moment on board this glorious vessel,” she proclaimed, “I have nourished one guiding principle: the builders, the architects, whoever they were, would never have endangered their marvelous creation.”
Washen wished for the same confidence.
Then that apparition of light and sound rose to her feet, leaning across the golden busts and the bright pearlwood, and she said, “You need a change of duty, Washen. You and your team will take the lead. Help us explore the far hemisphere. If it’s there, find your telltale clue. Then once your surveys are finished, everyone comes home.
“Agreed?”
“As you wish, madam,” said Washen.
Said everyone.
Then Washen noticed Miocene’s surreptitious glance, something in her narrowed eyes saying, “Nice try, darling.”
And with that look came the faintest hint of respect.
Eleven
ON THREE DISTINCT occasions, flocks of pterosaur drones had intensively mapped this region. Yet as Washen retraced the machines’ path, she realized that even the most recent
survey, completed eight days ago, was too old to be useful.
Battered by quakes, a once-flat landscape had been heaved skyward, then split open. Torrents of molten iron ran down the new slopes. Over the hushed murmur of the engine, she could hear the iron’s voice, deep and steady, and massive, and fantastically angry. Washen flew parallel to the fierce river, and where three maps showed a great oxbow lake, the iron pooled, consuming the last of the water and the mud. Columns of filthy steam and hydrogen gas rose skyward, then twisted to the east. As an experiment, Washen flew into the steam. Samples were ingested by the car’s airscoops, then passed through filters and a hundred sensors and even a simple microscope, and peering into the scope, Diu started to giggle, saying, “Wouldn’t you know? Life.”
Riding inside the steam were spores and eggs and half-born insects, encased in tough bioceramics and indifferent to the blistering heat. Inside the tip of one needle flask, too small to be seen with the naked eye, were enough pond weeds and finned beetles to conquer a dozen new lakes.
Catastrophe was the driving force on Marrow.
That insight struck Washen every day, every hour, and it always arrived with a larger principle in tow:
In one form or another, disaster had always ruled the universe.
The steam could dispersed abruptly, giving way to the sky’s blue light, the chamber wall hanging far overhead, and beneath, stretching as far as Washen could see, lay the stark black bones of a jungle.
Fumes and fire had incinerated every tree.
Every scrambling bug.
The carnage must have been horrific. Yet the blaze had passed days ago, and new growth was already pushing up from the gnarled trunks and fresh crevices, thousands of glossy black umbrellalike leaves shining in the superheated air.
Diu said something in passing. Broq leaned over Washen’s shoulder, repeating the question. “Should we stop? And have a look, maybe?”
In another fifty kilometers, they would be as far from the bridge as possible. The proverbial end of the world. Chilled champagne and some stronger pleasures waited for that symbolic moment. They would have to wait patiently, Washen decided, and through an implanted subsystem, she asked the car to find a level cool piece of ground where six captains could enjoy a little stroll.
