Marrow

by Robert Reed

  The car hovered for a thoughtful instant, then dropped and settled.

  The outside air was cool enough to breathe, if only in quick little sips. Following the mission’s protocol, everyone took samples of the burnt soil and likely rocks, and they cut away pieces of things alive and dead. But mostly this was an excuse to experience this hard landscape, once strange and now, after weeks of work, utterly familiar.

  Promise and Dream were examining a broad white tree stump.

  “Asbestos,” Promise observed, fingers rubbing against the powdery bark. “Pulled from the ground or out of the air, or maybe just cooked up fresh. Then laid around the roots, see? Like a blanket.”

  “The trunk and branches were probably lipid rich,” her brother added. “A living candle, practically.”

  “Meant to burn.”

  “Happy to burn.”

  “Born to burn.”

  “Out of love.”

  Then they giggled to themselves, enjoying their little song.

  Washen didn’t ask what the words meant. These ditties were ancient and impenetrable; even the siblings didn’t seem sure where they came from.

  Kneeling beside Dream, she saw dozens of flat-faced shoots erupting from the ravaged trunk. On Marrow, blessed with so much energy and so little peace, vegetation didn’t store energy as sugars. Fats and oils and potent, highly compressed waxes were the norm. Some species had reinvented batteries, stockpiling electrical energies inside their intricate tissues. How much time would it take for chance and caprice to do this elaborate work? Five billion years? At the very least, she guessed. There weren’t any fossils to ask, but the genetic surveys showed a fantastic diversity, implying a truly ancient beginning. They were in a garden that could be, perhaps, ten or fifteen billions years old. With that latter estimate verging on the preposterous.

  Whatever was true, leaving Marrow was wrong.

  Washen couldn’t stop thinking it, in secret.

  To the siblings, she said, “I’m curious. Judging by their genes, what two species are the two most dissimilar?”

  Promise and Dream grew serious, unwinding their deep, efficient memories. But before either could offer a guess, there was a hard jolt followed by a string of deep shudders, and Washen found herself unceremoniously thrown back on her rear end.

  She had to laugh, for a moment.

  Then somewhere nearby, two great masses of iron dragged themselves against each other, and piercing squealing roars split the air, sounding like monsters in the throes of some terrific fight.

  When the quake passed, Washen stood and casually adjusted her uniform. Then she announced, “Time to leave.”

  But most of her team was already making for the car. Only Diu waited, looking at her and not quite smiling when he said, “Too bad.”

  She knew what he meant, nodding and adding, “It is.”

  * * *

  THEIR EIGHT-DAY-OLD map was a fossil, and not a particularly useful fossil, at that.

  Washen blanked her screen, flying on instinct now. In another ten minutes, maybe less, they would reach their destination. No other team would travel this far. Drawing a sturdy little satisfaction from the thought, she started to turn, ready to ask whoever was closest to check on their champagne.

  Her mouth opened, but a distorted, almost inaudible voice interrupted her.

  “Report … all teams…!”

  “Who’s that?” asked Broq.

  Miocene. But her words were strained through some kind of piercing electronic wail.

  “What do … see…?” the Submaster called out.

  Then, again, “Teams … report…!”

  Washen tried for more than an audio link, and failed.

  A dozen other team leaders were chattering in a ragged chorus.

  Zale boasted, “We’re on schedule here.”

  Kyzkee observed, “Odd com interference … otherwise, systems nominal…”

  Then with more curiosity than worry, Aasleen inquired, “Why, madam? Do you see something wrong?”

  There was a long, jangled hum.

  Washen linked her nexuses to the car’s sensor array, finding Diu already there. With a tight little voice, he said, “Shit.”

  “What—” Washen cried out.

  Then a shrill roar swept away every voice, every thought. And the day brightened and brightened, fat ribbons of lightning flowing across the sky, then turning, moving with a liquid purpose, aiming straight for them.

  From the far side of the world came a twisted voice:

  “The bridge … is it … do you see it … where…?”

  The car lurched as if panicking, losing thrust and lift, then altitude, every one of its AIs failing. Washen deployed the manual controls, and centuries of routine drills made her concentrate, nothing existing now but their tumbling craft, her syrupy reflexes, and a wide expanse of cracked earth and burnt forest.

  The next barrage of lightning was purple-white, and brighter, nothing visible but its wild seething glare.

  Washen flew blind, flew by memory.

  Their car was designed to endure heroic abuse. But every system was dead and its hyperfiber must have been degraded somehow, and when it struck the iron ground, the hull was twisted until its weakest point gave way, and it shattered. Restraining fields grabbed helpless bodies. Then their perfect mechanisms failed. Nothing but padded belts and gas bags held the captains in their seats. Flesh was jerked and ripped, and shredded. Bones were shattered and wrenched from their sockets, slicing through soft pink organs, then slammed together again. Then the seats were torn free of the floor, tumbling wildly across several hectares of iron and cooked stumps.

  Washen never lost consciousness.

  With a numbed curiosity, she watched her own legs and arms break and break again, and a thousand bruises spread into a single purple tapestry, every rib crushed to dust and her reinforced spine splintering until she was left without pain or a shred of mobility. Lying on her back, still lashed to her twisted chair, she couldn’t move her crushed head, and her words were slow and watery, the sloppy mouth filled with teeth and dying blood.

  “Abandon,” she muttered.

  Then, “Ship.”

  She was laughing. Feebly, desperately.

  A gray sensation rippled through her body.

  Emergency genes were already awake, finding their home in a shambles. They immediately protected the brain, flooding what was living with oxygen and antiinflammatories, plus a blanket of comforting narcotics. Trusted, pleasant memories bubbled into her consciousness. For a little moment, Washen was a girl again, riding on the back of her pet whale. Then doctoring genes began rebuilding organs and the spine, cannibalizing meat for raw materials and energy, the captain’s body wracked with fever, sweating perfumed oils and black dead blood.

  Within minutes, Washen felt herself growing smaller.

  An hour after the crash, a wrenching pain swept through her. It was a favorable, almost comforting misery. She squirmed and wailed, and wept, and with weak, rebuilt hands, she freed herself from her ruined chair. Then on sloppy, unequal legs, she forced herself into a tilted stance.

  Washen was twenty centimeters shorter, and frail. But she managed to limp to the nearest body, kneeling and wiping the carnage out of his face. Diu’s face, she realized. He was injured even worse than she. He had shriveled like old fruit, and his face had been driven into a craggy fist of iron. But his features were half-healed. Mixed with his misery was a clear defiance, and he managed a mutilated grin and a wink, his surviving gray eye focusing on Washen, the battered mouth spitting teeth as he lisped, “Wonderful, you look. Madam. As always…”

  * * *

  SALUKI WAS IMPALED on a spar of browned hyperfiber.

  Broq’s legs were severed, and in a numbed anguish, he had dragged himself to the legs and pressed them against the wrong sockets.

  But the siblings were the worst. Dream had slammed into an iron slip-fault, and her brother then impacted against her. Flesh and bone were mixed to
gether. Slowly, slowly, their carnage was separating itself, their healing barely begun.

  Washen repositioned Broq’s legs. Then with Diu’s help, she eased Saluki off the spar and set her in its shade to mend. And with Diu keeping watch over the siblings, she searched the wreckage for anything useful. There were field rations and field uniforms, but the machines wouldn’t operate. She tried to coax them awake, but none of them was well enough to declare, “I am broken.”

  If there was luck, it was that the crust seemed stable for the moment. They could afford to do nothing but heal and rest, eating triple shares of their rations. Later, Saluki even managed to find two pop-up shelters and their survival packs, plus a full diamond flask of champagne. Hot as the ground, by now. But delicious.

  Sitting in the shadow of a pop-up, the six captains drank the flask dry.

  Pretending it was night, they huddled and discussed tomorrow, options named and weighed, and most of them discarded.

  Wait, and watch; that was their collective decision.

  “We’ll give Miocene three days to find us,” said Washen. Then she caught herself trying to access her implanted timepiece, out of pure habit. But every one of her implants, every minuscule nexus, had been fried by the same electric fire that had ripped them out of the sky.

  In a world without night, how long was three days?

  They made their best guess, then waited an extra day, in case. But there wasn’t any trace of Miocene or any other captain. Whatever had crippled their car must have left everyone else powerless. Seeing no choice in the matter, Washen looked at each of her companions, and she smiled as if embarrassed, and she admitted to them, “If we want to get home, it looks as if we’re just going to have to walk.”

  Twelve

  DO SOMETHING NEW, and do nothing else, and do that one thing relentlessly—particularly if it is painful and dangerous and utterly unplanned—and your memory begins to play one of its oldest, sneakiest tricks.

  Washen couldn’t remember being anywhere else.

  She would find herself standing at the base of a tall newborn mountain, or deep within some trackless black-bellied jungle, and it was as if everything she remembered about her former life was nothing but an elaborate, impossible dream, more forgotten than remembered, and those memories, at their heart, utterly ridiculous.

  This hike was a deadly business. Covering any distance was slow and treacherous work, even when the captains learned little tricks and big ones to keep themselves moving in what they prayed was the right direction.

  Marrow despised them. It wanted them dead, and it didn’t care how it achieved their murder. And the hatred was obvious to everyone. Washen felt its mood every waking moment, yet she refused to admit it, at least in front of the others. Except for cursing, which didn’t count. “Fucking mountain, fucking wind, fucking shit-eating fucking weeds…!” Everyone had their favorite insults, saving the most savage words for the worst challenges. “Stupid shit iron, I hate you! Hear me? I hate you, the same as you hate me!”

  Each day was a hard march punctuated with the constant search for food. What they had eaten before as a ceremony became their standard fare: they caught giant insects, ripped loose their wings, and broiled them over hot fatty fires. The strong meat held enough calories and nutrients to put the captains back to full size again, and very nearly their old health. Washen slowly learned which insects tasted the least awful. A desperate descendant of hunting apes, she taught herself the bugs’ haunts and the best ways to catch them, and after what might have been the first year—or a little less, or maybe a little more—Washen didn’t fall asleep hungry anymore. No one had to live famished. Promise and Dream sampled the lush vegetation, vomiting what was bitter beyond words, but mastering the slow careful cooking of everything else.

  Where the tongue adapts, the soul follows.

  Early in that second year, there was a good day. Genuinely, truly good. Simple wakefulness began it for Washen and the others. The captains’ first meal was filling. Then the six of them began to jog toward the horizon, their few possessions carried on their hips and their wide wet backs. They were retracing their flight path. Without digital maps, they had to rely on shared memories of odd volcanic peaks and twisted black gorges and the occasional mineral-stained sea. Marrow enjoyed draining its seas and detonating its mountains, and that brought confusion, doubts, and delays. Where new barriers had been heaved skyward, they had to make long detours. At the first sign of being lost, the captains had to stop and reconnoiter. Without stars or a sun, there was always the risk of becoming profoundly and embarrassingly lost. But on that very good day, they held their course throughout. Diu found a knifelike ridge where field boots found easy running, and the sky was pleasantly overcast with a thin cooling drizzle falling over them, keeping them nearly cool. Pressing until comfortably exhausted, they ran to the next landmark—a vast black escarpment that loomed over them by day’s end.

  Camp was made in the deepest shadows of a likely valley. A rainwater stream danced down a jerky narrow bed probably not fifty years old. Rainwater was always better than springwater. True, they could taste the iron in every swallow. And there was usually a sulfurous residue. But it wasn’t the mineral-choked, bacteria-choked stew that came from underground. In fact, it was cool enough for bathing, which was a genuine luxury. Washen scrubbed herself raw, then dressed—except for her battered boots—and she stretched out beneath an enormous umbrella tree, studying her long bare feet and the busy water and noticing an unexpected emotion that was inside her. It was an emotion that seemed, against all odds, to resemble contentment. Even happiness, in a diluted fashion.

  Diu appeared. One moment, Washen was utterly alone, and then Diu came from no particular direction, the top of his uniform removed, dangling behind him like the spent carapace of a growing insect. Under one arm, he carried his dinner—a beetlelike apparition, black as band iron and longer than a forearm—and he turned and smiled at Washen in a way that implied that he already knew where she was. He smiled, and his dinner moved its eight legs in a steady, complaining fashion. He ignored the legs. Stepping closer, he offered a nebulous laugh, then asked, “Would you like to share?”

  For a captain, he was pretty. Diu had a pretty chest, hairless and sculpted by the last hard year. And his gray eyes had a sparkle that only grew brighter when he stepped into the shadow of the umbrella tree.

  Washen said, “Fine. Thank you.”

  Diu just kept smiling.

  For an instant, Washen felt uncomfortable, ill at ease. But when she searched for reasons, she discovered only that here was another one of those odd moments that she couldn’t have predicted. A thousand centuries old, yet she had never imagined that she would be sitting in a place like this, under these hard circumstances, staring at a man named Diu, her mouth genuinely growing wet from the anticipation.

  For a well-cooked beetle, or for something else?

  Washen surprised herself, admitting to both of them, “I can’t remember the last time I was this happy.”

  Diu giggled for a moment.

  “It’s been a good, good day,” she confessed.

  He said, “Yes,” in a certain way.

  Then Washen heard herself saying, “Tie your friend down. For now, would you?” Then she threw him her best handmade rope, adding, “Only if you want. If you don’t mind. I want to see you out of those clothes, Mr. Beetleman.”

  * * *

  THE BRIDGE WAS their final landmark.

  In the brilliant light, looking out from high on a windy ridge, the landmark resembled a rigid thread, dark and insubstantial against the silver-white chamber wall. Sheered off in the stratosphere, it was hundreds of kilometers too short. There was no escape route for them. But it was their destination. More than three years had been invested in reaching this place, and that was enough reason to keep marching past the usual fatigue. Yet this was exceptionally rough country, even for Marrow. And worse, the captains were traveling across the grain of every local fault and s
tream, and the little stretches of flat ground were choked with old jungles and elaborate deadfalls.

  Reaching the last high ridge, they found more ridges waiting in ambush, and the bridge was a fatter thread, but still agonizingly distant.

  They collapsed under the next ridge.

  It wasn’t a true camp. They were lying where they fell in a rust-cushioned bowl surrounded by raw nickel, and when a mist turned into a hard rain, they ignored it. Thousands of zigzagging kilometers and three years had made Washen and her team indifferent to this little dose of weather. They lay on their backs, breathing when they needed, and quietly, with soft exhausted voices, they made themselves mutter hopeful words.

  Imagine the other captains’ surprise, they told each other.

  Imagine, they said, when we come out of the jungle tomorrow…! Won’t all this be worth it, just to see the surprise on their noble faces…?

  Except no one was waiting to be caught off guard. Late that next day, they arrived at the bridge and found a long-abandoned encampment, overgrown and forgotten. The solid, trusted hilltop where the bridge was rooted had been split open by quakes, and the hyperfiber was a sickly, degraded black. The structure itself was tilting precariously away from them. Dead doors were propped open with a simple iron post. A makeshift ladder reached up the dark inner shaft, but judging by the frosting of soft rust, no one had used the ladder for months. If not for several years.

  Circling through the jungle, Broq found a sketchy path. They picked a random direction and followed the path until it was swallowed by the black vegetation. Then they turned and retraced their course until the path was wide enough that a person could jog, then run, relaxing because someone had been down this way. Someone was here. And suddenly Washen was in the lead, streaking ahead at a full sprint.