by Robert Reed
He shook his head sadly, then said, “Good. Good.”
Together, they watched a pair of children—probably brothers—running hard on the blue-bricked walkway. There was no railing or wall between them and the river. So when the older brother decided to shove the younger, the smaller boy stumbled and fell over the brink, his screaming face leading the way into the toxic waters.
Washen rose immediately.
But then their parents appeared, and while the mother reprimanded, the father scrambled down the face of the steel retaining wall, balancing on rocks as he fished his battered son out of a rancid goo, both of them filthy and angry, the father handing him up to his brother’s hands, then shouting, “Showers cost! Good water’s never cheap!”
Emotional equations suddenly changed. A potential disaster had turned petty. Washen made herself sit again, telling her companion, “I used to drown.”
“Did you?”
“A few times,” she allowed. “I was little. I had a pet whale. I would ride him across the Alpha Sea—”
“I remember the story, Washen.”
“Did I tell you? How I used to make him dive deep, down where the great squids lived, and the pressure would crush me until I was unconscious and in a coma that lasted for hours. Sometimes for a full day.”
He stared as if seeing a stranger. A worrisome, possibly insane stranger.
“My parents were pissed. As you can imagine.” She narrowed her eyes, wondering where to take this story. “My argument was that I couldn’t die, really die, just from being underwater. But carelessness bred carelessness, they said, and what if I was swept off my whale, too? What if nobody found my body?”
Something in those words made Diu laugh quietly, privately.
Washen shook her head, adding, “I just had this other memory. All of a sudden. And it’s a strange one.”
“Oh,” he said. “A strange one.”
She ignored the tone, looking off toward the new buildings across the river and seeing none of them. Instead, she saw the city where she was born, and the Master Captain was sitting with the original Submasters. For some reason, Washen was brought to them. But she was just a tiny girl. For some unimaginable reason, the Master spoke to her, asking some question. Washen couldn’t recall the question, much less her reply. But she clearly remembered sitting in the Master’s chair. And when she climbed out of it, a gust of wind had come out of nowhere, knocking the chair off its feet.
She reported that recollection, then asked, “What does it mean?”
“It didn’t happen,” Diu replied. Instantly, without doubts.
“No?”
“And even if it happened,” he added, “it means nothing.”
For a moment, she heard something in his voice. Then Washen blinked and looked back at the rugged face, hairless save for the thick dark eyebrows, and she found a smile waiting—a broad smile in the mouth if not in those bright steel-gray eyes.
* * *
WITHIN EACH OF the ancient vaults, buried inside its uranium ballast, was an elegant little device, apparently useless and mostly ignored. One day, an empty vault was being fed test data while a piece of nearby machinery, purely by coincidence, emitted a low-frequency sound. The sound triggered an echo, a powerful and instantaneous throb noticeable for kilometers in every direction. A homing signal, perhaps? If so, it would only work with an operational vault, and there was no such creature. But to be thorough, the Loyalists sent the appropriate pulses into the crust, then listened for the hypothetical “Here I am” returns.
Because their equipment was crude, the first positive returns went unnoticed. But then a soft, imprecise echo was identified, and debated, and most observers denied the data, arguing on technical grounds while emotional reasons went unmentioned.
Newer, more sensitive microphones were designed, and built, and found wanting.
But the third generation of sensors produced not only a definite return, they also confidently supplied a location. The echo came from a point a little more than nine kilometers deep, from inside a quiet eddy of molten iron.
A small, hopefully secret project was born. Under the camouflage of a new mantle-based geothermal works, lasers began boring a series of deep holes. The local crust was a fat three kilometers thick. Beneath the crust, ceramic pipes and pumps were employed. The red-hot iron had to be lifted to the surface, and cooled, and set out of the way. Since the mantle was far from rigid, their target had a nagging habit of wandering. The grandchildren likened the adventure to putting an arm into lake muck, trying to grab one of those hot black winklewarts that just had to be down there.
A full eight years were invested in the drilling.
When success was imminent, a coded message was sent to Miocene. But before she arrived, something solid was ingested, and the pumps mindlessly pulled and pulled, bringing the vault to the surface. It looked the same as the other vaults—a simple replica of the Great Ship. Yet it was nothing like the others. Everyone sensed it. Even the captain in attendance—an unimaginative, hardworking man named Koll—felt a surge of anticipation, watching as his crew and a squad of robots yanked the treasure out of that wet iron, then immersed it in a deep basin of ice water.
Blinking against the steam, Koll ordered the treasure moved indoors.
Who knew who was watching?
The pump station was a suitable hiding place. A large, rambling building without the tiniest window, it held the rarest thing on Marrow. Darkness. Koll walked beside the mechanical walker that was carrying the vault, the false rocket nozzles pointed upward. A young granddaughter was at the helm. As soon as they were inside, Koll ordered the door closed behind them, and locked. He intended to call for the lights. “A soft setting,” he would have told the main computer. But after sixteen hundred years in endless daylight, Koll had learned to cherish anything that resembled night. Standing with his eyes open and blind, he noticed that glow. Soft, and colored. Not coming from the vault, no. The light seemed to be spilling from everywhere else.
Ancient systems had been triggered.
The uranium ballast served as a kind of battery. There was just enough power remaining to make a weak, ghostly projection. And Koll, a stolid, hard-to-impress man, stared at the images, a full minute passing before he remembered to breathe again.
“Do you see this?” he asked the woman.
“I do,” she replied weakly. “Yes.”
She was sitting on the walker, silhouetted against flashes of light, her face wearing a look of stunned awe.
After another minute, she asked Koll, “What does this mean?”
There was no point in lying. He told her simply, “I don’t know what it means.” In circumstances like this, who could know?
The woman said, “Goodness.”
She laughed nervously, then said, “You don’t suppose—?”
“Maybe it’s nothing,” the captain interrupted. Then he said, “Nothing,” once again, with a genuine hopefulness. But because he was a rigorously honest man, he added, “Yet it could be very important. Which, I suppose, makes this a very important day.”
Twenty
STRIPPED OF ITS hyperfiber shell, the device seemed elegant but not particularly impressive. Various ceramics were knitted into a white buckeyball sphere, rather like an oversized child’s kick ball. The vault rode on the floor in front of Miocene, and she touched it lightly, and with a flat, matter-of-fact voice, she reported, “I feel confident. About how things will go from here, I mean. Basically, essentially confident.”
Washen nodded, then faced forward again. With both hands on the controls, she repeated the word, “Confident.”
“I am,” the Submaster promised. “With luck and some care, this should help heal the old rifts.”
“With luck,” Washen echoed, knowing it would take a lot of that mecurial substance.
She was steering a large walker. Behind them, the latest incarnation of Happens River was dropping over the horizon. What passed for a road would soon become a starved trail, then
nothing but jungle and raw mountains. They were already approaching Wayward lands, yet it would be another two hundred kilometers before the rendezvous. Nobody with an official invitation had ever moved this deep into their territory, and it had been at least three centuries since the uninvited had last passed here.
As the day progressed, Washen kept tabs on the walker’s progress. The latest AI pilots still weren’t particularly smart or adaptable, and it wouldn’t impress anyone to have their machine—the culmination of sixteen centuries of technical wizardry—trip over a piece of mountain, ending up on its back like a clumsy crap bug.
The jungle path lifted up onto a wide, newborn plateau, then vanished. A hard hot rain was falling on the open ground, collecting in little basins and pools where black algae grew in silky blankets. In another year, all of this would be a vigorous young jungle. But which species would dominate? Sixteen hundred years of research gave Washen the expertise to admit that she didn’t know how the succession would progress. Not on this ground, or any other. Chemical makeups varied from vent to vent, and even within a single flow. Rains were common but no longer reliable. Little droughts and hard floods could change initial conditions. Plus there was the pure creative randomness of the spores and seeds and eggs that would come here. A chance wind could bring a flotilla of gold balloons that might, or might not, lead to a lofty forest of pure virtue trees. Or the fickle wind would steer the balloons somewhere else. To an established jungle and their deaths, most likely, where hungry mouths waited in abundance. At least a hundred native species loved to chew on the gold foil, incorporating the metal into their own elaborate carapaces, showing the world and their prospective mates both a beauty and a gaudy strength.
Initial conditions were critical. That was essential in jungle ecologies, and in human ecologies, too.
What if Miocene were a better parent? More patient, and nurturing, and just a little more forgiving? If she and Till had been closer, resolving their differences in private, civilized ways, the history of Marrow would certainly have been much quieter. And if she had been a worse mother, she would have murdered her son. Then driven by the other captains’ outrage, Miocene would have been ousted, another Submaster named their leader. Daen, perhaps. Or more likely Twist. Which would have radically changed the evolution of their ad hoc civilization …
The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.
The young plateau gave way to a younger volcanic cone, now sleeping. Dirty iron and nickel had frozen into a rough-faced slag. As the machine scrambled up the naked slope, the rains slackened, and the clouds were shoved far ahead, allowing Washen to glance over her shoulder, looking back across the swollen face of the world.
The sky was dimmer than ever.
As the buttresses weakened, the ambient light fell away proportionally. Still brilliant, but not the same cutting-to-the-bone brilliance. Temperatures were following the same smooth curve downward. Gravity weakened as the world expanded, subtly changing the architecture of plants and mountains and the largest, most important buildings. The atmosphere was growing cooler and quieter but not deeper, since it was spreading across more and more surface area. Likewise, there was only a finite amount of water. The metallic lavas were parched, bringing up nothing but rare earths and heavy metals. Less rain was falling and rivers were smaller, and if these various trends continued apace, there was the promise of long, hard droughts.
Near the horizon, far too small to be seen by the naked eye, was the sky’s only flaw. The original base camp still clung to the silvery hyperfiber, its modern buildings and diamond walkways still empty and alone. And in another thirty-four centuries, the camp would remain just as empty, but it would gaze down on a radically different world. The buttresses’ light would have fallen away to nothing, revealing a lovely starlike sparkle marking cities and well-lighted lanes.
That was the instant when a person could escape. And thinking that, Washen glanced at the vault again, feeling a cold, unnerving pain.
“We don’t know if it’s true,” she muttered to herself.
Miocene glanced at her, nearly asking, “What did you say?”
But the Submaster thought better of it, placing both hands on that ball of smooth gray-white ceramics, the gesture protective, hands and her tilting body conveying a strange fondness for the terrible artifact.
* * *
AN UNMAPPED RIVER of iron meant a prolonged detour.
They were an hour behind schedule when they arrived at the appointed clearing. Three in the morning, ship time, according to Washen’s silver clock.
The clearing began as a lava plain, but when its molten heart retreated underground, the flat countryside collapsed into a natural amphitheatre. A great flat slab was the stage, and the black iron rose up on all sides, in oversized stairsteps. The shadowless play of the light and the angle of the slopes made everything appear closer than it was. As instructed, Washen parked in the middle of the stage, both captains climbing into plain view, and with two of its jointed limbs, the walker carefully lowered the vault to the iron. Then the first Waywards appeared, mere dots against the blackness. Even trotting at a respectable pace, it took them forever to work their way down the long slope. Besides breechcloths, each wore an ornamental mask made from soft leather stretched over a framework of carved bone. Leather made from their flesh; bone torn from their own enduring bodies. Every mask was painted with blood and with urine. Each showed the same wild, almost fluid face. Like electricity with eyes but no mouth. A Builder’s face, Washen recalled. How they had arrived at that imagery, she didn’t know. Diu claimed that Till was preyed upon by visions. The Wayward’s leader was convinced that the Builders were visiting him, and in some ways, they were his only true friends.
As the first Waywards approached, they slowed to a dignified walk and lifted their masks back up on top of their heads.
Nearly fifteen centuries had passed since Washen last saw Till. Yet she knew him immediately. She knew him from the drawings and from a captain’s crisp memories. But she also recognized his mother in his face and in his measured, imperious stride.
He was a smaller, prettier version of Miocene.
The rest of the party—the finest priests and diplomats and cabinet members—followed at a respectful distance. They were staring at the prize. Washen had plugged an umbilical into the vault, and the walker’s generator was feeding it. A smooth living hum came from within, infusing the air with a palpable hint of possibilities.
Only Till wasn’t staring at the prize. He watched Miocene. Wariness was mixed with other, less legible emotions. For an instant, his mouth opened. Then he took a quick breath and turned to Washen, asking, “May I examine the device?”
“Please,” she told him; she told all of them.
Locke was standing closest to Till. It was a sign of rank, perhaps, and as always, that brought Washen an unexpected pride.
“How have you been, Mother?” he inquired. Always polite; never warm.
“Well enough,” she allowed. “And how are you?”
His answer was an odd wincing smile, and silence.
Where was Diu? More of the Waywards were climbing up on the stage, and she looked at each man as he lifted his mask, watching their faces, assuming that Diu was somewhere close, hidden by the growing crush of bodies.
Till was kneeling, caressing the vault’s slick surface.
Miocene studied him, but her eyes seemed empty. Blind.
A few thousand honored Waywards had gathered around the stage. All were nursing women, each with at least one infant sucking on their swollen breasts. A thick, oddly pleasant scent lay on the breeze. Tens of thousands more streamed out of the jungle, from every direction, moving purposefully and quietly, footfalls and breathing making a sound, soft and vast, like the beating of a distant surf that grew closer. Something about the sound was irresistible, and beautiful, and at the heart of things, frightening.
Among them were Locke�
��s children and grandchildren.
In principle, Washen could have a hundred thousand descendants among these people. Which wasn’t a small accomplishment for one old woman who could claim only one child of her own.
The vault’s hum grew louder, increased in pitch, then stopped altogether. It was Locke who lifted an arm, shouting, “Now,” to the multitude.
Everyone else repeated the gesture, the word. A great shared voice rippled its way to the top of the amphitheatre, and then a sudden smear of gold appeared along one edge, expanding rapidly, bright in the skylight as hundreds of strong bodies dragged it forward. Countless golden balloons helped hold the fabric aloft. It was a foil of gold, hectares in size and pounded thin and strengthened … how…? Whatever the trick, it was strong enough and light enough to be pulled across the entire amphitheatre, enclosing everyone, creating a temporary, impermeable roof.
The sky fell dark.
Sensing the perfect darkness, the vault opened itself, revealing a new sky and a younger world. Marrow was suddenly barren and smooth, and it was covered with a worldwide ocean of bubbling, irradiated iron.
The audience found itself standing on that ocean, unwarmed, watching an ancient drama play itself out.
The Builders’ enemies appeared.
Without warning, the hated Bleak squirmed their way through the chamber’s walls, emerging from the countless access tunnels—insectlike cyborgs, each one enormous and cold and frighteningly swift. Like angry jackwasps, they dove at Marrow, spitting out gobs of antimatter that slammed into the molten surface. Scorching white-hot explosions rose up and up. Liquid iron swirled and lifted, then collapsed again. In the harsh shifting light, Washen glanced at her son, trying to measure his face, his mood. Locke was spellbound, eyes wide and his mouth ajar, his muscular body drenched with a glossy, almost radiant perspiration. Almost every face and body was the same. Even Miocene was enthralled. But she was staring at Till, not at the spectacle overhead, and if anything, her rapture was worse than the others’. While her son, in stark contrast, seemed oddly unmoved by these glorious, holy images.
