Marrow

by Robert Reed

  “What about my motivation?” asked Washen. “Why would I tell such a story?”

  With a chill delight, Miocene said, “Greed.”

  “Toward who?”

  “Believe me, I understand.” The sullen eyes narrowed, silver glints in their corners. “If Till is insane, your son stands to gain. Status among his peers, at the very least. And eventually, genuine power.”

  Washen glanced at Diu.

  They hadn’t mentioned Locke’s role as informant, and they’d keep it secret as long as possible—for a tangle of reasons, most of them selfish.

  They were inside the Submaster’s one-room house. The place felt small and crowded, its nervous air nearly too hot to breathe. There was a shabbiness here, despite the fact that Miocene kept every surface as clean as possible. A shabbiness, and a deep weariness, and in the darkest corners, there was a cold, living fear. Washen could almost see the fear staring out at her with its dim red eyes.

  She couldn’t help herself. “Ask Till about the Builders,” she insisted. “Ask what he believes.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  The woman took a moment, vainly picking at the barbed spores and winged seeds that were trying to root in her sweat-dampened uniform. Then with a cutting logic, she said, “If your story is a lie, he will say it’s a lie. And if it’s true and he lies, then he’ll just say that I shouldn’t believe you.”

  “But what if he admits to it?”

  “Then Till wants me to know.” She stared at Washen as if she were the worst kind of fool. Her hands had stopped picking at the seeds, and her voice was angry and sturdy and perfectly cold. “If he confesses, then he wants me to find out, Washen. Darling. And you’re just serving as his messenger.”

  Washen took a breath and held it tight.

  Then Miocene looked through her open door, out into the public round, adding, “And that isn’t a revelation that I want delivered at his convenience.”

  * * *

  THERE HAD BEEN warnings.

  A rising chorus of tremors were noted. Little spore storms reminded the captains of blizzards on cold worlds. The discharge from half a dozen hot springs changed color, a vivid and toxic blueness spreading into the local streams. And a single Hazz tree had wilted, pulling its well-earned fat and water deep underground.

  But as warnings went, they were small, and the highest-ranking captains were too distracted to pay attention.

  Three ship-days later, while the encampment slept, a great hand lifted the land several meters, then grew bored and flung it down again. Captains and children stumbled into the public rounds. Within moments, the sky was choked with golden balloons and billions of flying insects. Experience said that in another twelve hours, perhaps less, the land would blister and explode, and die. Moving like a drunken woman, Washen began running through the aftershocks, moving from one round to its neighbor, finally reaching a certain tidy home and shouting, “Locke,” into its empty rooms.

  Where was he?

  She moved along the edge of the round, finding nothing but empty houses. A tall figure stepped from Till’s tiny house and asked, “Have you seen mine?”

  Washen shook her head. “Mine?”

  Miocene said, “No,” and sighed. Then she strode past Washen, shouting, “Do you know where he is?”

  Diu was standing in the center of the round.

  “Help me,” the Submaster promised, “and you’ll help your son, too.”

  With a nod and quick bow, Diu agreed.

  A dozen captains rushed off into the jungle. Left behind, Washen forced herself to pack their household’s essentials and help other worried parents. New quakes came in threes and fours. Hours passed in a well-rehearsed chaos. The crust beneath them had been shattered, fissures breaking up the rounds and a worrisome heat percolating to the surface. The gold balloons had vanished, replaced with clouds of iron dust and the fat-blackened stink of burning jungle. The captains and youngest children stood in the main round, waiting nervously. Sleds and balloon carts had been loaded, but the ranking Submaster, giddy old Daen, wouldn’t give the order to leave. “Another minute,” he kept telling them. Then he would carefully hide his crude clock inside his largest pocket, fighting the urge to watch the relentless turning of its tiny mechanical hands.

  When Till stepped into the open, he was grinning.

  Washen felt a giddy, incoherent relief.

  Relief collapsed into shock, and terror. The young man’s chest cavity had been wrenched open with a knife, the first wound healing but a second wound deeper, lying perpendicular to the first. Ripped, desiccated flesh fought to knit itself. Shockingly white ribs lay in plain view. Till wasn’t in mortal danger, but he wore his agony well. With an artful moan, he stumbled, then managed to right himself for an instant before collapsing, slamming against the bare iron just as his mother emerged from the black jungle.

  Miocene was unhurt, and she was thoroughly, hopelessly trapped.

  Numbed and sickened, Washen watched as the Submaster knelt beside her boy, gripping his thick brown hair with one hand while the other hand carefully slipped her blood-drenched knife back into its steel hilt.

  What had Till said to her in the jungle?

  How had he steered his mother into this murderous rage?

  Because that’s what he must have done. As each event happened in turn, Washen realized this was no accident. There was an elaborate plan reaching back to the instant when Locke told her about the secret meetings. Her son had promised to take her and Diu to one of the meetings. But whom had he promised? Till, obviously. Till had conscripted Locke into joining this game, ensuring that Miocene would eventually learn of the meetings, her authority suddenly in question. And it was Till who lay in his mother’s arms, knowing exactly what would happen next.

  Miocene stared at her son, searching for some trace of apology, some faltering of courage. Or perhaps she was simply giving him a moment to contemplate her own gaze, relentless and cold.

  Then she let go of him, and she picked up a fat wedge of dirty black iron—the quakes had left the round littered with them—and with a calm fury, she rolled Till onto his stomach and shattered the vertebrae in his neck, then swung harder, blood and shredded flesh flying, his head nearly chopped free of his paralyzed body.

  Washen grabbed an arm, and yanked.

  Captains leaped on Miocene, dragging her away from her son.

  “Let me go,” she demanded.

  A few backed away, but not Washen.

  Then Miocene dropped the lump of bloody iron and raised both arms, shouting, “If you want to help him, help him. But if you do, you don’t belong with us. That’s my decree. According to the powers of rank, my office, and my mood…!”

  Locke had just emerged from the jungle.

  He was first to reach Till, but barely. Children were pouring out from the shadows, already in a helpful sprint, and even a few of those who hadn’t vanished in the first place now joined ranks with them. In a blink, more than two thirds of the captains’ offspring had gathered around the limp, helpless figure. Sober faces were full of concern and resolve. A stretcher was found, and their leader was made comfortable. Someone asked which direction the captains would move. Daen stared at the sky, watching a dirty cloud of smoke drifting in from the west. “South,” he barked. “We’ll go south.” Then with few possessions and no food, the wayward children began to file away, conspicuously marching toward the north.

  Diu was standing next to Washen.

  “We can’t just let them get away,” he whispered. “Someone needs to stay with them. To talk to them, and listen. And help them, somehow…”

  She glanced at her lover, her mouth open.

  “I’ll go,” she meant to say.

  But Diu said, “You shouldn’t, no,” before she could make any sound. “You’d help them more by staying close to Miocene.” He had obviously thought hard on the subject, arguing, “You have rank. You have authority here. And besides, Miocene listens
to you.”

  When it suited her, perhaps.

  “I’ll keep whispering in your ear,” Diu promised. “Somehow.”

  Washen nodded, a stubborn piece of her reminding her that all this pain and rage would pass. In a few years or decades, or maybe in a quick century, she would begin to forget how awful this day had been.

  Diu kissed her, and they hugged. But Washen found herself looking over his shoulder. Locke was a familiar silhouette standing at the jungle’s margins. At this distance, through the interlocking shadows, she couldn’t tell if her son was facing her or if she was looking at his back. Either way, she smiled and mouthed the words, “Be good.” Then she took a deep breath and told Diu, “Be careful.” And she turned away, refusing to watch either man vanish into the gloom and the gathering smoke.

  Miocene stood alone, almost forgotten.

  While the captains and the loyal children hurried south together, making for the nearest safe ground, the Submaster remained rooted in the center of the round, speaking with a thin, dry, weepy voice.

  “We’re getting closer,” she declared.

  “What do you mean?” Washen asked.

  “Closer,” she said again. Then she looked up into the brilliant sky, arms lifting high and the hands reaching for nothing.

  With a gentle touch, Washen tried to coax her.

  “We have to hurry,” she cautioned. “We should already be gone, madam.”

  But Miocene picked herself up on her toes, reaching even higher, fingers straightening, eyes squinting, as she leaked a low, pained laugh.

  “But not close enough,” she whimpered. “No, not quite. Not yet. Not yet.”

  Sixteen

  ONE OF THE sweet problems about an exceedingly long life was what to do with your head. How do you manage, after many thousands of years, that chaotic mass of remembered facts and superfluous memories?

  Just among human animals, different cultures settled on a wide range of solutions. Some believed in carefully removing the redundant and the embarrassing—a medical procedure often dressed up in considerable ceremony. Others believed in sweeping purges, more radical in nature, embracing the notion that a good pruning can free any soul. And there were even a few harsh societies where the mind was damaged intentionally and profoundly, and when it would heal again, a subtly new person would be born.

  Captains believed in none of those solutions.

  What was best, for their careers and for the well-being of their passengers, was a skilled, consistent mind filled with minute details. “Forget nothing,” was their impossible ideal. Ruling any ship required mastery over detail and circumstance, and nobody could predict when her trusted mind would have to yank some vital but obscure fact out of its recesses, the captain—if she was any sort of captain—accomplishing her job with the predictable competence that everyone rightly demanded of her.

  Miocene was forgetting how to be a captain.

  Not in a serious or unexpected way. Time and the intensity of her new life naturally shoved aside old memories. But after more than a century on Marrow, she could feel the erosions of small, cherished talents, and she found herself worrying about her eventual return to duty, wondering if she could easily fill her old seat.

  Which captains last earned the Master’s award, and for what?

  Past the most recent fifty winners, she wasn’t certain.

  What was that jellyfish species that lived in the cold ammonia-water Alpha Sea? And that robotic species that lived in special furnaces, and that at room temperature would freeze rigid? And that software species, dubbed Poltergeists for its juvenile sense of humor … where did it come from originally?

  Little details, but to millions of souls, utterly vital.

  There was a human population in the Smoke Canyons … antitechnologest who went by the name of … what…? And they were founded by whom…? And how did they accept living entirely dependent upon the greatest machine ever built…?

  Five course adjustments should have been made in the last hundred-plus years—all previously scheduled, all minor. But even though the ship’s course was laid out with a delicate precision, stretching ahead for twenty millennia, Miocene could bring to mind only the largest of the burns.

  Little more than an informed passenger, she was.

  Of course plenty will have changed before she returned. Ranks and faces, and honors, and perhaps even the ship’s exact course … all were subject to contingencies and hard practicalities, and every important decision, as well as the trivial ones, were being made without Miocene’s smallest touch …

  Or perhaps, no decisions were being made.

  She had heard the whispered speculations. The Event had purged the ship of all life, leaving it as a derelict again. That explained the lack of any rescue mission. The Master and crew and that myriad of ill-matched passengers had evaporated in a terrible instant, every apartment and great hallway left sterile and pure. And if there was a local species that was brave enough or foolish enough to board the ship today, it would probably take aeons for them to find their way down to this horrible wasteland.

  Why was that such an appealing image?

  Because it did appeal to Miocene, particularly in her blackest moments.

  After Till and the other Waywards abandoned her, she found the possibility comforting: total carnage. Billions dead. And what was her own tragedy but a small thing? A sad detail in the ship’s great history. And since it was only a detail, there was the credible, intoxicating hope that she could forget the horrible things that her son had said to her, and how he had forced her to banish him, and she would eventually stop having these poisonous moments when her busy, cluttered mind was suddenly thinking of him.

  * * *

  MIOCENE’S DIARY BEGAN as an experiment, an exercise that she gave little hope. At the arbitrary end of each day, sitting alone in the shuttered darkness of her present house, she would fill the long stiff tail of a tasserbug with fresh ink, then using her smallest legible print, she would record the day’s important events.

  It was an ancient, largely discredited trick.

  As a means of enhancing memory and recording history, the written word had been supplanted by digitals and memochips. But like everything else in her immediate life, this technology had been resurrected, if only for this little while.

  “I hate this place.”

  Those were her first words and among her most honest.

  Then to underscore her consuming hatred, she had listed the captains who were killed by Marrow, and the horrible causes of death, filling the rough bone-colored paper with livid details, then folding each sheet and slipping it inside an asbestos pouch that she would carry with her when this house and settlement were abandoned.

  The experiment gradually became a discipline.

  Discipline bled into a sense of duty, and after ten years of fulfilling her duty, without fail, Miocene realized that she truly enjoyed this writing business. She could tell the page whatever she wished, and the page never complained or showed doubt. Even the slow, meticulous chore of drawing each letter had a charm and a certain pleasure. Each evening, she began with the day’s births and deaths. The former outnumbered the latter by a fat margin. Many of her captains were having new children, and their oldest offspring—the rare ones who had proved loving and loyal—were throwing themselves into their own brave spawning. Marrow was a hard world, but productive, and its humans had become determined and prolific. Births outnumbered deaths by twentyfold, and the gap was only growing. It was the rare captain who didn’t offer eggs or sperm to the effort. Of course if there was a shortfall, Miocene would have commanded total compliance. Even quotas. But that wasn’t a necessary sacrifice, thankfully. And more to the point, that freedom allowed Miocene to be one of the captains who chose not to offer up another son or daughter to this demographic tidal wave.

  Once was ample; more than ample, frankly.

  Another captain scarred by her experience was Washen. At least that was Miocene’s assumpti
on. Both had sons running with the Waywards. Both knew the dangers inherent in giving birth to another soul. This was why humans so often embraced immortality, Miocene had decided. They wanted to keep responsibility for the future where it belonged, with finished souls who were proven and trustworthy.

  “That’s not my excuse,” Washen had replied, anger framed with a careful half-smile.

  Quietly, firmly, Miocene had repeated that inappropriate word. “Excuse?” she said. “Excuse?” Then she shook her head and took a sip of scalding tea, asking, “What exactly do you mean by ‘excuse’?”

  It had been an unusual evening. Washen happened by, and on a whim, the Submaster asked the woman to join her. Sitting on low stools outside Miocene’s house, they watched the nearly naked children, full grown and otherwise, moving about the public round. A low canopy of fabric and interwoven sticks supplied shade. But there were holes and gashes left by gnawing insects, little places where the skylight fell through. That light had barely diminished in the last one hundred and eighty years. It was still bright and fiercely hot, and on occasions, useful. The Submaster had set a parabolic steel bowl beneath one hole, focusing the raw energies on a battered, much-traveled teapot. The rainwater was coming to a fresh boil, and for her guest, Miocene used a rag, preparing a big mug of tea. Washen accepted the gift with a nod, remarking, “I already have a son.”

  Miocene didn’t say what she thought first. Or what she thought next. Instead, she simply replied, “You do. Yes.”

  “If I find a good father, I’ll have another one or two.”

  Washen had difficulty picking lovers. Diu was a traitor. How else to describe him? But he was a useful traitor, finding ways to feed them information on the Waywards activities’ and whereabouts.

  Washen said, “Mass-producing offspring … I just don’t believe that’s best…”

  Miocene nodded, telling her, “I agree.”

  “And I find myself…” She hesitated, a smooth political sensibility causing her to shape her next words with care.

  “What?” the Submaster prodded.

  “The morality of it. Having children, and so many of them, too.”