Mallow

by Robert Reed

  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 spring, 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 jungles 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 righdy 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.

&n
bsp; 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 setdement 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 assumption. 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.

  Quiedy, 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.'

  'What do you mean, darling?'

  The gift tea was sipped, swallowed. Then Washen seemed to decide that she didn't care what Miocene thought of her. 'It's a cynical calculation, making these kids. They aren't here because of love—'

  'We don't love them?' Miocene's heart quickened, for just a moment.

  'We do, of course. Absolutely. But their parents were motivated by simple pragmatic logics. First, and always. Children offer hands and minds that we can shape, we hope, and those same hands and minds are going to build the next bridge.'

  'According to Aasleen's plans,' Miocene added.

  'Naturally, madam.'

  'And aren't those very important reasons?'

  'We tell ourselves they are.' Marrow had changed Washen's face. The flesh was still smooth and healthy, but her diet and the constant UV-enriched light had changed her complexion, her skin now a brownish-gray. Like smoke, really. And more than her flesh, her eyes were different. Always smart, they looked stronger now. More certain. And the mind behind them seemed more willing than ever to put a voice to its private thoughts.

  'Shouldn't we try to escape?' Miocene pressed.

  'But what happens afterward?' the captain countered. 'We need so many bodies in the next forty-eight hundred years. If we're going to have the industrial capacity that Aasleen envisions, and assuming that Marrow continues to expand, of course. Assuming. Then we're back home again, and let's imagine that we're heroes, and so on . . . but what happens to this raw little nation-state that we've spawned . . . ?'

  'Not everything needs to be decided now,' Miocene replied.

  'Which is the worst problem, I think.' 'Excuse me?'

  'Madam,' said the captain. 'In the end, it's not our place to decide. It's our childrens' and grandchildrens' future.'

  Suddenly, Miocene wished it was time for bed. Then she could excuse herself without losing face, and in her private darkness, she could replicate the day in her diary. A few lines of tiny script were enough. The paper was as thin as technically possible today, but as the years mounted, it was becoming increasingly difficult to carry the burgeoning history.

  'Our ship,' said the Submaster, 'has embraced every sort of passenger. An odd alien is more demanding than our children can ever be.'

  Silence.

  Miocene smoothed her uniform. It was a cool white fabric, porous to their fragrant, endless sweat, and sewn through it were threads of pure silver meant to symbolize the mirrored uniforms of the past. Out on the public round and everywhere else, the children wore nothing but breech-cloths and brief skirts and tiny vests. Miocene long ago accepted their near nudity, if only because it allowed the ancient captains, dressed in their noble garb, to stand apart.

  Bored with waiting, she asked her companion, 'What bothers you, darling?'

  'These children,' said Washen.

  'Yes?'

  'As if they're the only ones.'

  'You mean the Waywards.' Miocene nodded and laughed, and she made a show of finishing her own tea. Then she told the first-grade, 'I just assumed they'd want to remain here, where they're happiest. On Marrow, and we could lock them in here. Nice and tight.'

  A NEW CATAGORY had eased its way into the Submaster's scrupuously accurate tally of gains and losses. There were the born, of course, and the dead. And now, in small but swelling numbers, there were the missing.

  It was presumed, with reason, that these new casualties were slinking away, taking nothing but the provisions and light tools suitable for a good march. If rumor and physical evidence could be believed, the nearest Waywards were a thousand kilometers past the horizon. It was a daunting journey to any reasonable soul, but Miocene could almost believe that children - the most susceptible to go missing - might convince themselves that here was a worthy challenge, an undertaking sure to answer some vague need or a trivial absence in their very brief lives. She could even picture their reasons. Boredom. Curiosity. Political ideas, sloppy or muscular. Or perhaps they didn't see advancement for th
emselves here, inside the Loyalist camp. They were slow, lazy, or difficult people, and maybe the Waywards would be less demanding. Unlikely, but that's what the missing must have told themselves. And off they marched, singly and in little groups, blissfully counting on youth and good fortune to bring them to their just rewards.

  Some died en route.

  Alone, in nameless and temporary' valleys, they were swallowed by the flowing iron, or flash-baked in a burst of fiery gases.

  Miocene's first instinct had been to dispatch search parties, then punish the children for their treachery. But more charitable voices, including her own, cautioned against rough measures. Who mattered were those who remained behind, the willing and the genuinely far-sighted ones.

  Each night, placing her daily entry into its asbestos envelope, then into the asbestos trunk, Miocene rewarded herself with small congratulations. Another day accomplished; another centimeter closer to their ultimate goal. Then she would sit on her little bed, typically alone, and because she often forgot to eat during the arbitrary heart of the day, she would force down a slice of heavily spiced fat. She made herself feed a body that rarely felt hunger anymore, but that needed calories and rest, and at least she was able to give it the former. Then Miocene would lie in the imperfect night, typically on her back, and sometimes she would sleep, and dream, and sometimes she just stared up into the contrived darkness, forcing herself to remain motionless for a full three hours, her mind working with a dreamy vagueness, planning the next day, and the next week, and the five thousand years to come.

  THE FIVE HUNDREDTH was a ripe moment for grand gestures.

  A year-long observance of their lives on Marrow culminated in a week-long celebration, and the celebration peaked with a lavish parade around the Grand Round of Hazz City. Half of the world's Loyalists were in attendance. Painted bodies marched, friends and family locking arms, or they stood in the Round's tent-shrouded center, or they watched the parade from one of the fifty wood and plastic buildings that rimmed the neat outside edge of the public area. Fifty thousand happy, well-fed souls were present, and each one of them looked up as Miocene stepped to the podium, glancing at the clock in one hand as the other hand lifted, a long thin finger dropping as a signal, her strong voice announcing: