by Robert Reed
But the time they reached the river bottom, everyone was breathless.
The path bled into a wider, well-worn trail, but they had to slow again, panting as they jogged, coming around every bend with a jittery sense of anticipation.
In the end, they were the ones with surprised faces.
The six captains were trotting in the bright shadows. Some trick of the light hid the woman standing before them. The light and her mirrored uniform kept Washen from seeing her until the familiar face seemed to pop into existence. Miocene’s face, unchanged at first glance. She looked regal and well chilled. “It took you long enough,” the Submaster deadpanned. And only then was there a smile and an odd tilt to the face, and she added, “It’s good to see you. All of you. Honestly, I’d given up all hope.”
* * *
WASHEN SWALLOWED HER anger along with her questions.
Her companions asked the obvious question for her. Who else was here? they wondered. How were they making do? Did any machinery work? Had the Master been in contact with them? Then before any answers could be offered, Diu inquired, “What sort of relief mission is coming for us?”
“It’s a cautious mission,” Miocene replied. “So cautious that it fools you. It makes you believe that it doesn’t even exist.”
Her own anger was rich and strong, and well practiced.
The Submaster beckoned them to follow, and as they walked in the bright shade, she explained the essentials. Aasleen and others had cobbled together several telescopes, and at least one captain was always watching the base camp overhead. From what they could see, the diamond blister was intact. Every building was intact. But the drones and beacons were dead, and the reactor was off-line. A three-kilometer stub of the bridge was next to the blister, and it would make the perfect foundation for a new structure. But Miocene shook her head, quietly admitting that there wasn’t any trace of captains, or anyone else, trying to mount any sort of rescue attempt.
“Maybe they think we’re dead,” said Diu, desperate to be charitable.
“I don’t think we’re dead,” Miocene countered. “And even if we were, someone should be a little more interested in our bones, and in answers.”
Washen didn’t say one word. After three years of hard work, lousy food, and forced hopefulness, she suddenly felt sick and desperately sad.
The Submaster slowed her pace, working her way back through the questions.
“Every machine was ruined by the Event,” she explained. “That’s our little name for that very big phenomenon. The Event. From what we’ve pieced together, the buttresses merged. Those beneath us, and those above us. And when it happened, our cars and drones, sensors and AIs, were left as so much fancy trash.”
“Can’t you fix them?” asked Promise.
“We can’t even be sure how they were broken,” Miocene replied.
People nodded, and waited.
She offered a distracted smile, admitting, “We are surviving, however. Wooden shelters. Some iron tools. Pendulum clocks. Steam power when we go to the trouble. And enough homemade equipment, like the telescopes, that lets us do some toddler-type science.”
The trail made a slow turn.
The jungle’s understory had been cut down and beaten back, leaving the mature trees to give precious shade. The new encampment stretched out on all sides. Like anything built by determined captains, the community was orderly. Each house was square and strong, built from the gray trunks of the same kind of tree, iron axes squaring them up and notching them and the little gaps patched with a ruddy mortar. The paths were lined with smaller logs, and someone had given each path its own name. Center. Main. Leftbehind. Rightbehind. Golden. And every captain was in uniform, and smiling, standing together in careful lines, trying to hide the weariness in their eyes and their sudden voices.
More than two hundred captains shouted, “Hello!”
In a practiced chorus, they shouted, “Welcome back!”
Washen could smell their sweet perspiration as well as an assortment of home-brewed perfumes. Then the wind gusted, bringing her the rich, very familiar odor of bug flesh broiling over a low fire.
A feast was being prepared, in their honor.
She spoke, finally. “How did you know we were coming?”
“Your bootprints were noticed,” Miocene reported. “Up by the bridge.”
“I saw them,” said Aasleen. She stepped forward, glad to take credit. “Counted them, measured them. Knew it was you, and came home to report.”
“There’s a quicker route than the one you found,” Miocene cautioned.
“Quicker than three years?” Diu joked.
An embarrassed laughter blossomed, then fell away. Then Aasleen felt like telling them, “It’s been closer to four.”
She had a clever quick face, skin black as band iron, and among her peers, she seemed the only happy soul—this one-time engineer who had gradually become a captain, and who now had the responsibility of reinventing everything that humans had ever accomplished. Starting from scratch, with minimal resources … and she couldn’t have looked more contented …
“You didn’t have clocks,” she warned them. “You were living by how you felt, and humans, left without markers, fall into thirty- or thirty-two-hours days.”
Which wasn’t a surprise to anyone, of course.
Yet Saluki exclaimed, “Four years,” and marched into the brightest patch of light, glancing up through a gap in the canopy, perhaps trying to find the abandoned base camp. “Four long years…!”
If only a single captain had stayed behind at the base camp. One warm body could have called for help, or at least made the long climb to the fuel tank and !eech habitat, then to the Master’s quarters … assuming, of course, that there was someone up there to find …
Thinking the worst, Washen recoiled. And finally, with her most careful voice, she forced herself to ask, “Who isn’t here?”
Miocene recited a dozen names.
Eleven of them had been Washen’s friends and associates. The last name was Hazz—a Submaster and a voyage-long colleague of Miocene’s. “He was the last to die,” she explained. “Two months ago, a fissure opened, and the molten iron caught him.”
A silence fell over the little village.
“I watched him die,” Miocene admitted, her eyes distant, and damp. And furious.
“I’ve got one goal now,” the Submaster warned. Speaking in a grim, hateful voice, she said, “I want the means to return to the world above. Then I will go to the Master myself and I’ll ask her why she sent us here. Was it to explore this place? Or was this just the best awful way to be rid of us…?”
Thirteen
BITTERNESS SERVED THE woman well.
Miocene despised her fate, and with a searing rage, she blamed those unconscionable acts that had abandoned her on this horrible, horrible world. Every disaster, and there were many of them, helped feed her emotions and fierce energies. Every death was a tragedy erasing an ocean of life and experience. And each rare success was each a minuscule step toward making right what was plainly and enormously wrong.
The Submaster rarely slept, and when her eyes dipped shut, she would descend into vivid, confused nightmares that eventually shook her awake, then lingered, left in the mind like some sophisticated neurological toxin.
Her immortal’s constitution kept her alive.
Ancestral humans would have perished here. Exhaustion or burst vessels or even madness would have been the natural outcome of so little sleep and so much undiluted anger. But no natural incarnation of humanity could have lived a single day in this environment, subsisting on harsh foods and ingesting every sort of heavy metal with each breath and sip and bite. Once it was obvious that the Master wasn’t pulling her fat carcass down the tunnel to rescue them, it also become plain that if Miocene were to escape, it would take time. Deep reaches of time. And persistence. And genius. And luck, naturally. Plus everyone else’s immortal constitution, too.
Hazz’s dea
th had driven home every hard lesson. Two years later, she still couldn’t stop seeing him. A gregarious, Earthborn man who loved to talk about bravery, he was nothing but brave at the end. Miocene had watched helplessly as a river of slag-covered iron trapped him on a little island of old metal. Hazz had stood up tall, looking at the fierce slow current, breathing despite the charring of his lungs, putting on a grimacing sort of smile that seemed, like everything else in this awful place, utterly useless.
They tried desperately to save him.
Aasleen and her crew of engineer-minded souls had started three separate bridges, each melting before they could finish. And all that time, the iron river got deeper, and swifter, shrinking the island down to a knob on which the doomed man managed to balance, using one foot until it was too badly burned, then using the other.
He was like a heron bird, in the end.
Then the current surged, and the thin black slag burst open, a red-hot tongue of iron dissolving Hazz’s boots, then boiling away both of his feet and setting fire to his flesh. But the engines of his metabolism found ways to keep him alive. Engulfed in flames, he actually managed to stand motionless for a long moment, the grimacing smile getting brighter and sadder, and very tired. Then with every captain watching, he said something, the words too soft to be audible, and Miocene screamed, “No!,” loudly enough that Hazz must have heard her voice, because suddenly, on boiling legs, he made an heroic attempt to walk himself across the slag and molten metal.
His tough, adaptable body reached its limits. Quietly and slowly, Hazz slumped forward, his mirrored uniform and his smiling face and a thick tangle of blondwhite hair bursting into dirty flames. The water inside him exploded into steam and rust and hydrogen. Then there was nothing left but his shockingly white bones, and a wave of hotter, swifter iron pulled the skeleton apart and took the bones downstream, while a rising cloud of blistering fumes drove the other captains away.
Miocene wished that she could have retrieved the skull.
Bioceramics were tough, and the tough mind could have survived that heat for a little while longer. And weren’t there stories of miracles being accomplished by autodocs and patient surgeons?
But even if he was past every resurrection, Miocene wished she had Hazz’s skull now. In her dreams she saw herself setting it beside one of the Master’s golden busts, and with a deceptively calm voice, she would tell the Master who this had been and how he had died, and then with a truer, angrier voice, she would explain to the captains’ captain why she was a disgusting piece of filth, first for every awful thing that she had done, then for every good thing that she had failed to do.
Bitterness brought with it an incredible, fearless strength.
More and more, Miocene trusted that strength and her resolve, and more than at any time in her spectacularly long life, she found herself with a focus, a pure, unalloyed direction to her life.
Miocene relished her bitterness.
There were moments, and there were sleepless nights, when she wondered how she had ever succeeded in life. How could anyone accomplish anything without this rancorous and vengeful heart that would never, no matter what the abuse, stop beating inside its blazing, fierce chest?
* * *
WASHEN’S RETURN HAD been an unexpected success. And like most successes, it was followed by disaster. The nearby crust rippled and tore apart, a barrage of quakes shattering the river bottom as well as the nearby hillside. The old remnant of the bridge pitched sideways, and with a creaking roar, its sick hyperfiber shattered, the debris field reaching across fifty kilometers of newborn mountains.
The fall of the bridge was momentous, and unseen.
The captains’ encampment had already been obliterated by a mammoth geyser of white-hot metal. The neat houses were vaporized. Two more captains died, and the survivors fled with a bare minimum of tools and provisions. Lungs were cooked during the retreat. Hands and feet were blistered. Tongues swelled and split wide, and eyes were boiled away. The strongest dragged the weakest on crude litters, and finally, after days of stumbling, they wandered into a distant valley, into a grove of stately blue-black trees that lined a deep pool of sweet rainwater, and there, finally, the captains collapsed, too spent to curse.
As if to bless them, the trees began discharging tiny balloons made from gold. The shady, halfway cool air was filled with the balloons’ glint and the dry music made when they brushed against one another.
“The virtue tree,” Diu called them, snagging one of the golden orbs with both hands, squeezing until he squeezed too hard and it split, hydrogen escaping with a soft hiss, the skin collapsing into a whiff of soft gold leaf.
Miocene set her people to work. New homes and new streets needed to be built, and this seemed an ideal location. With iron axes and their enduring flesh, they managed to hack down half a dozen of the virtue trees. The golden fat inside the wood was nourishing, and the wood itself was easily split along its grain. The beginnings of twenty fine houses were laid out before the hard ground ripped open with an anguished roar.
Wearily, the captains fled again.
Again, they scrambled over ridges sharper than their axes, and the country behind them burned, then melted, consumed by a lake of iron and slag.
Nomadic blood had taken hold.
When they settled again, no one expected to linger. Miocene asked for simple houses that could be rebuilt anywhere in a ship’s day. She ordered Aasleen and her people to build lighter tools, and everyone else stockpiled food for the next migration. Only when those necessities were assured could she risk the next step: they needed to study their world, and if possible, learn to read its fickle moods.
Miocene put Washen in charge of the biological teams.
The first-grade captain picked twenty helpers, including the five from her first team, and with few tools but keen senses and their good memories, they fanned out across the nearby countryside.
Three months and a day later, every team brought home their reports.
“Breeding cycles are the key,” Washen reported. “Maybe there are other keys. But certain cycles are pretty close to infallible, it seems.”
The captains were packed into the long narrow building that served as a cafeteria and meeting hall. The central table was a block of iron dressed with gray wooden planks. Chairs and stools were crowded around the table. Bowls were filled with grilled flame ants and sugarhearts, then ignored. Cold tea was the drink of choice, and it smelled acidic and familiar, mixing with the tired oily sweat of women and men who had been in the field too long.
Miocene nodded, at Washen and at everyone. “Go on, darling. Explain.”
“Our virtue trees,” said the first-grade. “Those gold balloons are their eggs, just as we assumed. But they typically make only one or two in a day. Unless they feel the crust becoming unstable, which is when they use all of their stockpiled gold. In a rush. Since the adults are about to be torched, and the land will be remade—”
“If we see another show,” Diu interrupted, “we’re being warned. We’ve got a day, or less, to get out of here.”
In a grim fashion, the other captains laughed.
Miocene disapproved with a look and a cold silence, but nothing more. Normally, she demanded staff meetings that were disciplined and efficient. But this was a special day, and more special than anyone else had guessed.
Washen’s team spoke about the species worth watching and each warning sign of impending eruptions.
During stable times, certain winged insects transformed themselves into fat caterpillars, some longer than any arm. If they grew new wings, the stability was finished.
At the first sign of trouble, crab-sized, highly social beetles launched themselves in fantastic migrations, thousands and millions scrambling overland. Though, as Dream noted, the herds often went charging off in the very worst direction.
At least three predatory species, hammerwings included, would suddenly arrive in areas soon to be abandoned. Perhaps it was an adaption to
the good hunting that would come when locals rushed out of their burrows and nests.
In dangerous times, certain caterpillars sprouted wings and took up the predatory life.
And slight changes in water temperature and chemistry caused aquatic communities to panic or grow complacent. Just what those changes were, no one was certain. It would take delicate instruments and years more experience to read the signs as easily as the simplest black scum seemed to manage it.
Everything said was duly recorded. A low-grade captain sat at the far end of the table, taking copious notes on the huge bleached wings of copperflies.
Once finished, it was Miocene’s place to invite questions.
“How about our virtue trees?” asked Aasleen. “Are they behaving themselves?”
“As if they’ll live forever,” Washen replied. “They’re still early in their growth cycles, which means nothing. Eruptions can come anytime. But they’re putting their energies into wood and fat, not into gold balloons. And since their roots are deep and sensitive, they know what we can’t. I can guarantee that we can remain here for another two or three, or perhaps even four whole days.”
Again, the grim laughter.
Washen’s confidence was contagious, and useful. Losing her would have been a small disaster. Yet years ago, the Master had sent this talented woman to the far side of Marrow, doing her accidental best to get rid of her.
Miocene nodded, then lifted a hand.
Quietly, almost too quietly to be heard, she said, “Cycles.”
The closest captains turned, watching her.
“Thank you, Washen.” The Submaster looked past her, and shivered. Without warning, she felt her own private eruption. Thoughts, fractal as any quake, made her tremble. Just for the briefest moment, she was happy.
Diu asked, “What was that, madam?”
Again, louder this time, Miocene said, “Cycles.”
Everyone blinked, and waited.
Then she turned to the leader of the geologic team, and with a barely hidden delight, she asked, “What about Marrow’s tectonics? Are they more active, or less?”
