Marrow

by Robert Reed

  A hyperfiber dome burst from the iron.

  Lasers fired, consuming a dozen of the Bleak. Then the dome dove under the iron again, whale-fashion.

  The Bleak brought reinforcements, then struck again. Missiles carried antimatter deep into the iron, seeking targets. Marrow shook and twisted, then belched fire and searing plasmas. Maybe the Bleak had won, killing the last of the Builders. Maybe the Great Ship was theirs. But the Builders’ revenge was in place. Was assured. The Bleaks’ forces pressed on, filling the narrow sky with their furious shapes. Then the buttresses ignited, bringing their blue-white glare. Suddenly the monsters seemed tiny and frail. Before they could flee, the lightning storm—the Event—swept across the sky, bright enough to make every eye blink, dissolving every wisp of matter into a plasma that hung overhead as a superheated mist that would persist for millions of years, cooling as Marrow contracted and enlarged again, the world beating like a great slow heart, cooling itself gradually, a temporary crust covering the blistering iron.

  A billion years passed in a moment.

  The Bleaks’ own carbon and hydrogen and oxygen became Marrow’s atmosphere and its rivers, and those same precious elements slowly gathered themselves into butter bugs and virtue trees, then became the wide-eyed children standing in the present, in that natural depression, weeping in the deep, perfect darkness.

  On a signal, the canopy was torn open, the gold foil splitting and falling in great long sheets that shimmered in the skylight.

  Washen opened her watch, measuring the minutes.

  Into that wide-eyed present, Miocene called out, “There is more. Much more.” Her voice was urgent. Motherly. She stared only at Till, explaining, “Other recordings show how the ship was attacked. How the Builders retreated into Marrow. This lump of iron … this is where they made their final stand … whoever they were…!”

  A hundred thousand bodies stirred, making a softly massive sound.

  Till wasn’t awestruck. If anything, he seemed merely pleased, grinning as if amused by this vindication of a vision that needed no vindication.

  For a slim moment, their eyes met. Then obeying some unspoken pact, mother and son looked away again. Indifference in one face; in the other, a wrenching pain.

  The pained face glared at the sky. “We never see the Builders themselves,” Miocene announced. “But this thing, this gift that Washen and I have brought to you … it’s given us a better, fuller understanding of the species…”

  Till contemplated the same sky, saying nothing.

  “Listen to me,” Miocene cried out, unable to contain her frustrations. “Don’t you understand? The Event that trapped us here, in this awful place … the Event was an ancient weapon. An apocalyptic booby trap that we probably triggered ourselves by sending our teams across Marrow … and that might have … probably did … kill and consume everyone above us, leaving the ship empty, and us trapped here…!”

  Washen imagined a hundred billion vacant apartments and the long ghostly avenues and seas turned to a lifeless steam; once again, the ship was a derelict, plying its way blindly among the stars.

  If true, it was a horrible tragedy.

  Yet Till’s reaction was different, singular. “Who is trapped?” he called out, his voice carrying farther than his mother’s, buoyed up with a smooth, unnerving calm. “I’m not trapped. No believer is. This is exactly where we belong.”

  Miocene’s eyes betrayed her anger.

  Till conspicuously ignored her, shouting to the audience, “We are here because the Builders called to the captains. They lured the captains to this great place, then made them stay, giving them the honor to give birth to us!”

  “That’s insane,” the Submaster growled.

  Washen scanned the crowd, searching for Diu. Again and again, she would recognize his features in a Wayward’s face, or eyes, or his nervous energy. But not the man himself. And they needed Diu. An intermediary with an intimate knowledge of both cultures, he could help everyone … and why hadn’t Diu been invited to this meeting…?

  A cold dread took Washen by the throat.

  “I know where you got this nonsense.” Miocene said the words, then took a long step toward Till, empty hands lifting into the air. “It’s obvious. You were a boy, and you stumbled across a working vault. Didn’t you? The vault showed you the Bleak, and you hammered together a ridiculous story … this crazy noise about the Builders being reborn … and you conveniently at the center of everything…”

  In a mocking, almost pitying fashion, Till grinned at his mother.

  Miocene raised her hands still higher, and she spun in a slow circle, a majestic rage helping her scream, “Understand me! All of this is a lie!”

  Silence.

  Then Till shook his head, assuring everyone, “I didn’t find any vault or artifact.” He made his own turn, proclaiming, “I was alone in the jungle. Alone, and a Builder’s spirit came to me. He told me about the ship and the Bleak. He showed me everything that this vault contains, and more. Then he made me a promise: when this long day ends, as it must, I will learn my destiny, and your destinies as well…!”

  His voice trailed off into the enraptured silence.

  Locke unfastened the umbilical from the vault, and glancing at Washen, his flat, matter-of-fact voice told her, “We’ll bring the usual payment to Happens River.”

  Miocene roared.

  “What do you mean? The usual payment…? But this is the best artifact yet!”

  The Waywards gazed at her with a barely restrained contempt.

  “This one functions. It remembers.” The Submaster was stabbing at the air, reminding everyone, “The other vaults were just empty curiosities!”

  Till said, “Exactly.”

  Then, as if it were beneath their leader to explain the obvious, Locke stepped forward, telling them, “Vaults are usually crypts. They hold the Builders’ souls. And the ones you sold us were empty because their souls have found better places to reside.”

  Till pulled his blood-and-piss mask back over his face again, hiding everything but his bright eyes.

  Every Wayward repeated the motion, a great rippling reaching to the top of the amphitheatre. And Washen had to wonder if this elaborate meeting, with all of its pagentry and rich emotion, was intended not for a hundred thousand devoted souls, but for two old and very stubborn captains.

  With his face obscured, Locke approached his mother.

  A premonition made her mouth dry.

  “Where is he?” she inquired.

  Her son’s eyes changed. Softened, sweetened.

  “His soul is elsewhere now,” he replied, as a Wayward should. Then he gestured at the hard iron ground.

  “Elsewhere?”

  “Eight years ago.” There was a sadness in his body and his voice. “There was a powerful eruption, and he was taken.”

  Washen couldn’t speak, or move.

  A warm hand gripped her by the elbow, and a caring voice asked, “Are you all right, Mother?”

  She took a breath, then told the truth.

  “No, I’m not all right. My son’s a stranger, my lover’s dead, and how should I damn well feel…?”

  She pulled free of his hand, then turned away.

  Miocene—the cold, untouchable Submaster—dropped to her knees on the hard iron, hands clasped before her weeping face. Their promising mission was ending with this. With Miocene pleading.

  She said, “Till,” with genuine anguish. “I’m so very, very sorry, darling. I was wrong, hitting you that way … and I wish you would try to forgive me … please…!”

  Her son nodded for a moment, saying nothing.

  Then as he turned, preparing to leave, Miocene used her final plea.

  “But I do love the ship,” she told him. And everyone. “You were wrong then, and you’re still wrong. I love and cherish the ship more than you ever could! And I’ll always love it more than I love you, ungrateful little bastard…!”

  Twenty-one

  A CADRE
OF captains and gifted architects had designed the Grand Temple, and for a thousand years the best artisans had labored over it, while every adult Loyalist gave time and willing hands to its construction. Even half-finished, the Temple was a beautiful structure. Six gold-faced domes were arranged in a perfect circle. Graceful parabolic arches of tinted steels straddled the domes, riding higher and higher on each other’s backs. The central tower was the tallest structure on Marrow, and the deepest. Its foundation already reached a full kilometer into the cold iron, and in its basement was a reservoir of pure water where the occasional neutrino would collide with a willing nucleus, the resulting explosion producing a lovely cone of light that proved to priests and to children what every Loyalist needed to accept without question: Marrow was a small part of a much greater Creation, a Creation invisible to the eye but not to the believing mind.

  The Wayward defector had asked to be brought to the temple, which was a perfectly ordinary request.

  But the Submaster had reviewed the field reports as well as the transcripts of both official interrogations, and the only certainty was that nothing else about this defection was ordinary, much less simple.

  The temple administrator was a nervous woman made more so by events. Wearing the soft gray robes of her office and a tortured expression, she greeted Miocene with a crisp, “Madam,” and a cursory bow, then blurted out, “It is an honor,” even as she prepared to complain what a great disruption this business was.

  Miocene didn’t give her the opportunity. Firmly and not too gently, she said, “You’ve done a marvelous job, so far.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “So far,” she repeated, reminding her subordinate that failure was always just one misstep away. Then with a softer voice, she asked, “Where’s our guest?”

  “In the library.”

  Of course.

  “He wants to see you,” the administrator warned. “He practically demands that I bring you to him.”

  They were standing at one of the minor entranceways, the heavy door carved from a single virtue tree, ancient and gigantic. Because she refused to be rushed by anyone, Miocene paused, letting one hand caress the old wood, dark as clotted blood and perforated with spongelike holes where nodules of battery fats had been. Her guards—a pair of trunklike men with quick, suspicious eyes—stood nearby, watching the quiet side street. For an instant, Miocene’s mind was elsewhere. She found herself thinking about the ship, and in particular, her wood-lined apartment not five hundred meters from the Master’s quarters. Then she blinked and gave a sigh, feeling a familiar little sadness, and a knot of secret fears …

  “Well, then,” she muttered, straightening her back, then the creases of her uniform. “Take me to our new friend.”

  Public services were being held in each of the six main chambers. Citizens elected their priests, and as a result, each had his own style and perspective. Some spoke endlessly about the Great Ship. Its beauty, its grace; its unfathomable age, and its endless mystery. Others readied parishioners for the glorious day they would meet their first aliens. And an ecletic few dwelled on more abstract and far-reaching topics: the stars and living worlds and the Milky Way, and the vast universe that dwarfed everything that humankind could see and touch or even pretend to comprehend.

  One service was wrestling with such cosmic wonders. A satin-voiced gentleman was singing praises of G-class suns. “Warm enough to bring life to more than many worlds at a time,” he called out, “and long enough lived to feed a creative evolution. Our home world, the great Earth, was born beside such a golden sun. Like the seed of a virtue tree, it was. It is. And our universe is full of billions of seeds. Life in its myriad forms is everywhere. Life thick and life lovely, and life forever.”

  “Forever,” chanted the small audience, in careless unison.

  Ceramic arches and potted flycatchers separated the hallway from the chamber. A few faces happened to glance to one side, noticing the Submaster striding past. Murmurs rose, spread. But the priest standing up front, leaning hard against the diamond podium, ignored the noise, pressing on with his speech.

  “We must prepare, sisters and brothers. The day is waning, gradually but inexorably, and we will see the time when each of us is needed. Our hearts and hands, and our minds, will be thrown into the construction of the bridge.”

  “The bridge,” some repeated. While others, distracted by the concrete and the present, watched Miocene and her guards pass behind the altar, followed closely by the flustered administrator. The altar was built from native diamonds mounted in a tube no wider than a human arm. At its base was an intricate mock-up of the city and the finished temple. The tube rose up to the domed ceiling that was painted to resemble a darker sky, and where the ragged stump of the first bridge clung tight, the diamond bridge joined seamlessly, flecks of bright light forever streaking upward, showing the migration of the loyal multitudes—their glorious reward for so much sacrifice and enthusiastic hope.

  Miocene barely glanced at the parishioners.

  It was perfectly acceptable for her to visit the temple, and she didn’t want them noticing anything remarkable in her manner or her eyes.

  “When the time is right,” the priest shouted, “we shall climb. Climb!”

  Then he whirled, his gray robe fluttering and one arm beginning an overly dramatic gesture at the diamond spire, and when he noticed the Submaster and her tiny entourage, his surprise collapsed into instant ritual.

  Bowing, he cried out, “Madam.”

  The audience behind him shouted, “Madam,” and fell forward in their iron seats.

  Thankfully, she had reached the library stairs. After a hurried wave and the briefest look, Miocene turned and began to climb, leading her guards and them worrying because of it. The senior guard told her, “No, madam,” and unceremoniously slowed her with a strong hand to the shoulder.

  Fine.

  She eased her gait, perhaps more than necessary. The guard passed her as the staircase spiraled its way up through the heart of the great building. If memory served, the stair’s architect was a difficult grandchild with a narrow genius. She had used the shape of DNA as her inspiration. The fact that only a sliver of modern genetics were encoded in that delicate compound made no difference. It had struck the architect as a suitable symbol. Rising through the oldest language to reach the newest … or some equally forced symbolism, wasn’t it…?

  To Miocene, symbols were crutches for the lame. It was a very old opinion for her, and the last three millenia had only reinforced it.

  Like the temple, this quasireligion was thick with symbols. G-class suns were equated with virtue seeds. What nonsense! There were only so many colors in the universe, at least to human eyes. And Miocene had seen many, many Sol-like suns. If she wished, she could warn the parishioners that under no circumstances would a sun and a seed be confused. Not in brightness, or in color. Gold was a simple thing, and sunlight never was. Ever.

  And yet.

  This temple and its cobbled-together faith were as much her idea as anyone’s. And the Submaster hadn’t ordered the temple’s construction for easy cynical reasons. No, the temple would serve as the foundation for the coming bridge. Physically, and otherwise. It was imperative that the Loyalists understood what was going to happen. If they didn’t comprehend and embrace these goals, and keep themselves unswayed by the Waywards’ bizarre faith, there was no point in escaping from Marrow. This temple, and dozens of smaller temples scattered across the land, were meant to be places of education and focus. If people required symbols and sloppy metaphors to build a consensus, then so be it. Miocene just wished that the grandchildren would stop being so inventive, and so earnest, particularly with things about which they knew almost nothing.

  The lead guard slowed, then muttered something to someone around the bend. A full squad waited in the library, all armed with heavy-caliber weapons, all watching with a decidedly unscholarly interest as a boyish man, dressed in common clothes and a Gordian wig, paged his
way through a dense technical synopsis of the ship.

  According to his interrogators, he was named for the tree.

  He went by Virtue.

  Miocene said the name, just once and not loudly. The man didn’t seem to hear, eyes focused on a diagram of an antimatter-spiked fusion reactor. Instead of repeating his name, she stood on the far side of the table, and she waited, watching as the gray eyes absorbed the meaningful words and the elegant lines, these intricate plans drawn from memory by one of her colleagues.

  Slowly, slowly, the defector grew aware of the newcomers.

  He lifted his gaze, and as if emerging from some private fog, he blinked a few times, then said, “Yes.”

  He said, “This is wrong.”

  “Excuse me?” Miocene inquired.

  “It won’t work. I’m certain.” He touched the black corner of the page, and the book moved to the next page. The same reactor was pictured, conjured from the same memory but a different vantage point. “The containment vessel isn’t strong enough. Not by half.”

  Like so many grandchildren, he was a difficult genius.

  With a look and a slashing gesture, Miocene told the guards and soldiers to leave the two of them alone.

  The temple administrator had to ask, “How long will you need the library?” Then to explain her boldness, she added, “Researchers are coming from Promise-and-Dream’s biolabs. They’ve got some priority project—”

  “Make them wait,” she growled.

  “Yes, madam.”

  Then Virtue told everyone, “I don’t know if I’d trust a word in this place.” He spoke loudly and without a hint of charm. “I thought I’d be drinking from some fucking fountain of wisdom, or something. But I just keep finding mistakes. Everywhere I look, mistakes.”

  Mildly, the Submaster told him, “Well. Then it’s a good thing that you happened by.”

  The defector closed his current volume, in disgust.

  To her personal guards, Miocene said, “Out of earshot. Wait.” Then to the administrator, she said, “Go downstairs. Go down and tell all those worshipers that the Submaster would appreciate a long and very loud song.”