Mallow

by Robert Reed

  Washen winked, making the girl feel important, and smart.

  'And it isn't just hyperfiber,' the girl added, talking too quickly now. 'Because it's so heavy, and hyperfiber isn't. Is it?'

  Washen shrugged, then said, 'Tell me how you found it. And where.'

  The girl tried. And she meant to be perfectly honest, though she never mentioned sex, and the story came charging out of her mouth as if she were taking credit for everything.

  Her one-time lover protested. 'I saw the stupid thing first,' he complained. 'Not you.'

  'Good eyes,' Washen offered. 'Whoever was using them.'

  The girl bit her own stupid, careless tongue.

  'What does this look like?' asked Washen.

  'A piece of the sky,' said the boy. 'Sort of, it does.'

  'Except it's brighter,' another boy offered.

  'And bumpy,' another girl offered.

  With the salty taste of blood in her mouth, the Remora girl observed, 'It's sort of like a tiny, tiny version of the Great Ship. Those knobs are the rocket nozzles, see? Except they aren't really big enough. Not like the nozzles in the paintings.'

  'But there is a resemblance,' Washen conceded. Then she stood and wiped her hand on the leg of her uniform, and looking off toward the doomed High Spines, she said, 'Honestly.' Her voice was gentle. 'I don't know what this is.'

  Eighteen

  FOR THE NEXT one hundred and eight years, the artifact lay in storage, wrapped within a clean purple woolbark blanket and tucked inside a steel vault designed to hold

  nothing else. Aasleen and her engineers had been given the fun of divining its secrets. But at least one Submaster had to be present whenever studies were undertaken, and if the artifact was to be moved, as it was during two eruption cycles, a Submaster as well as a platoon of picked and utterly trustworthy guards accompanied the relic, weapons politely kept out of sight but a palpable air of suspicion obvious to all.

  For many reasons, that century was dubbed The Flowering.

  There were finally enough grandchildren, mature and educated and inspired, that something resembling an industrialized nation was possible. A lacework of good smooth roads was built between the cities and largest villages, then rebuilt after each eruption. More important were the crude smear-signal transmitters, hung high on mountain peaks and steel poles, that network allowing anyone to speak with anyone within a thousand-kilometer zone. Clumsy carbide drills gnawed through the crust, reaching the molten iron, then simple-as-can-be geothermal plants were erected, supplying what seemed to be a wealth of power to the labs and factories and increasingly luxurious homes. Life on Marrow remained a hard, crude business. But that wasn't what the captains said in public. In front of the grandchildren, they mustered up every imaginable praise for the new biogas toilets and the cultured bug-based meats and the frail, fixed-wing aircraft that could, if blessed with good weather, crawl all up into the cold upper reaches of the atmosphere. They weren't trying to mislead so much as encourage. And really, they were the ones who needed most of the encouragement. Life here might not match the serene pleasures found inside the ship, but to a youngster barely five centuries old, it was obvious that his world had grown more comfortable in his lifetime, and more predictable, and if he could have known about the captains' real disappointments, he would have felt nothing but a pitying, even fearful puzzlement.

  The Flowering culminated with a clumsy but muscular laser, designed from Aasleen's recollections and adapted to local resources, then helped along with her staff's countless inspirations and other making-dos.

  Hundreds attended the first full-strength firing of the laser.

  The artifact was its target. The hyperfiber shell was presumably ancient, but it had to be a premium grade. To slice a hair-wide hole through the shell meant an enforced blackout, the power from some fifty-odd geothermal plants fed directly into Aasleen's newest laboratory, into a long cramped room built for this precise moment, a series of microsecond pulses delivered in what sounded like a monster's roar, lending drama to the moment as well as jarring quite a few nerves.

  Miocene sat in the control room, hands tied together in a tense lump.

  'Stop!' she heard Aasleen bark. Finally.

  The laser was put to bed. Then an optical cable was inserted into the fresh hole, and the engineer peered inside, saying nothing, forgetting about her audience until Miocene asked, 'Is there anything?'

  'Vault,' Aasleen reported.

  Did she want the artifact set back into its vault?

  But before anyone could ask, she added, 'It looks a lot like a memory vault. Not human-made, but not all that strange, either.'

  With an impatient nod, Miocene said, 'What else?'

  'A standard bioceramic matrix, with some kind of holo-projector. And a dense ballast at the center.' Aasleen looked in the general direction of her audience, blind to everything but her own quick thoughts. 'No power cells, from what I can tell. But what good would they be after a few billion years? Even the Builders couldn't make a battery that would ignore this kind of long-term heat . . .'

  'But does this vault still work?' Miocene growled.

  'Too soon to tell,' Aasleen replied. 'I've got to peel back the shell and feed power to the systems . . . which will mean . . . hey, what's the date . . . ?'

  Twenty voices told her. Counting from the first day of the mission, up in the leech habitat, the date was 619.23.

  'Working at night, making one cut at a time . . . and of course I'll have to refurbish the laser once every week or so ... so maybe by 621 or 621.5. Maybe . . . ?'

  The Submasters were openly disappointed.

  Miocene spoke for them, asking, 'Is there any way to speed up this process?'

  'Absolutely,' Aasleen responded. 'Take me back upstairs, and I can do everything in three minutes. At the most.'

  'Upstairs' was the latest term for the ship. Informal, and by implication, a place that was relatively close by.

  Miocene was disgusted, and happy to show her feelings. She shook her head and rose to her feet. Half a hundred of the captains' children and grandchildren were in attendance. After all, this was their mystery, too. Facing them, she asked the engineer, 'What are the odds that this memory vault remembers anything at all?'

  'After being immersed in liquid iron for several billion years . . . ?'

  'Yes.'

  Aasleen chewed on her lower lip for a thoughtful moment, then said, 'Next to none. Madam.'

  Disappointment hung in the air, thick and bitter.

  'But that's assuming that the bioceramics are the same as the grades seen before, of course. Which might be unlikely, since the Builders always seemed to know just how good their machines needed to be.'

  Disappointment wrestled with a sudden hope.

  'Whoever they were,' Aasleen reported, 'the Builders were great engineers.'

  'Undoubtedly,' Miocene purred.

  'Begging to differ,' someone muttered. Who? Washen? Miocene gave her a quick glance and a crisp, 'And why not, darling?'

  'I've never known an engineer, great or lousy, who didn't leave behind at least one plaque with her name on it.'

  When Aasleen laughed, almost everyone began to laugh with her.

  Giggling, nodding her happy face, the engineer admitted, 'That's the truth. That's exactly how we are!'

  MAYBE THE BUILDERS were clever and rich with foresight, but the artifact — the ancient memory vault — was found empty of anything other than a few shredded, incoherent images. Shades of gray laid over a wealth of blackness.

  The sorry news was delivered by one of Aasleen s genuine grandsons.

  It was five days before the year 621 began. The speaker, named Pepsin, was a stocky, vivacious man with an easy smile and blue-black skin and a habit of talking too quickly to be understood. As evidence mounted that nothing of consequence waited in the vault, Pepsin had inherited the project from his famous grandmother. And like the good descendant of any good captain, he had taken this dead-end project and mad
e it his own, carefully and thoroughly wringing from it everything that was important.

  A small group of disappointed captains and Submasters were in attendance. No one else. Miocene herself sat in the back, reviewing administrative papers, barely noticing when that fast, fast voice announced, 'But information comes in many delicate flavors.' What was that?

  Pepsin grinned and said, 'The hyperfiber shell degraded over time. Which gives us clues about its entombment.'

  Washen was sitting in the front. She noticed that Miocene wasn't paying attention, which was why she took it upon herself to ask, 'What do you mean?'

  'Madam,' he replied, 'I mean what I say.'

  Sarcasm caused the Submaster to lift her head. 'But I didn't hear you,' she growled. 'And this time, darling, talk slowly and look only at me.'

  The young engineer blinked and licked his lips, then explained. 'Even the best hyperfiber ages, if stressed. As I'm sure you know, madam. By examining cross sections of the vault's shell, at the microscopic level, we can read a crude history not only of the vault, but of the world that embraced it, too.'

  'Marrow,' the old woman growled.

  Again, he blinked. Then with a graceless cleverness, added, 'Presumably, madam. Presumably'

  With her quietest voice, Miocene advised, 'Maybe you should proceed.'

  Pepsin nodded, obeyed.

  'The hyperfiber has spent the last several billion years bobbing inside liquid iron. As expected. But if there were no breaks in that routine, the degradation should be worse than observed. Fifty to ninety percent worse, according to my honorable grandmother.' A glance at Aasleen; no more. 'Hyperfiber has a great capacity to heal itself. But the bonds don't knit themselves quite as effectively at several thousand degrees Kelvin. No, what's best is chilly weather under a thousand degrees. Deep space is the very best. Otherwise, the hyperfiber scars, and it scars in distinct patterns. And what I see in the microscope, and what everyone else here sees . . . measuring the scan, we have evidence of approximately five to fifteen hundred thousand distinct periods of high heat. Presumably, each of those periods marks time spent in Marrows deep interior—'

  'Five to fifteen billion years,' Miocene interrupted. 'Is that your estimate?'

  'Basically. Yes, madam.' He licked his lips, and blinked, and conjured up a wide contented smile. 'Of course we can't assume that the vault was always thrown to the surface, and there surely have been periods when it was submerged several times during a single cycle.' Again, the lips needed moisture. 'In different words, this is a lousy clock. But being a clock whose hands have moved, it points to what we have always assumed. For my entire little life, and this last brief chapter in your great lives . . .'

  'Just say it,' Aasleen snarled at her grandson.

  'Marrow expands and contracts. Again, we have evidence.' He grinned at everyone, at no one. Then he added, 'Why this should be, I don't know. And how it does this trick is difficult for me to conceive.'

  Miocene couldn't leave those mysterious words floating free.

  With a quiet certainty, she said, 'Our standard model is that the buttressing fields squeeze Marrow down, then relax. And when they relax, the world expands.'

  'Until when?' asked Pepsin. 'Until it fills the chamber?'

  'We shall see,' the Submaster conceded.

  'And what about the buttresses?' he persisted. Foolish, or brave, or simply intrigued, he had to ask the great woman, 'What powers them?'

  It was an old, always baffling question. But Miocene employed the oldest, easiest answer. 'Hidden reactors of some unknown type. In the chamber walls, or beneath our feet. Or perhaps in both places.'

  'And why go through these elaborate cycles, madam? I mean, if I was the chief engineer, and I needed to keep Marrow firmly in place, I don't think I'd ever allow my fancy buttresses to fall halfway asleep. Would you, madam? Would you let them fall partway asleep every ten thousand years?'

  'You don't understand the buttresses,' Miocene replied. 'You admitted it just a few breaths ago. Nobody knows how they refuel themselves, or regenerate, or whatever is happening. These mysteries have worked hard to remain mysteries, and we should give them our well-deserved respect.'

  Pepsin hugged himself, nodding as if the words carried a genuine weight. But the eyes betrayed distance, then a revelation. Suddenly they grew wide, and darker somehow, and with an embarrassed grin, he said, 'You've already had this debate with my grandmother. Haven't you?'

  'A few times,' the Submaster conceded.

  'And does Aasleen ever win?' the young man inquired.

  Miocene waited an instant, then told Pepsin, and everyone, 'She always wins. In the end, I always admit that we haven't any answers, and her questions are smart and valid and vast. And sadly, they are also quite useless to us here.

  'A waste of breath, even.'

  Then Miocene pulled a new piece of paper to the top of the pile, and dipping her head, she added, 'Get us home, darling. That's all that matters. Then I will personally give you the keys to a first-class laboratory, and you can ask all these great questions that seem to be keeping you awake nights.'

  A QUIET LITTLE party followed Pepsin's announcement. Talk centered more on new gossip than grand speculations: who was sleeping with whom, and who was pregnant, and which youngsters had slipped away to the Waywards. Washen quickly lost interest. Claiming fatigue, she escaped, walking past the security stations, and alone, walking home to the newest Hazz City.

  A rugged metropolis of eighteen thousand, the Loyalist capital lay in the bottom of a wide, flat, and well-watered rift valley. Every home was sturdy but read)' to be abandoned. Every government building was just large enough to impress, bolted to its temporary foundation of bright stainless steel. With the late hour, the streets were nearly empty. Thunderheads were piled high in the western sky, stealing heat from a dying lava flow; but the winds seemed to be shoving the storms elsewhere, making the city feel like a quiet, half-abandoned place being bypassed by the world's great events.

  Washen s house looked out over a secondary round. It was smaller than its neighbors, and in the details, was a duplicate of her last five houses. Blowing fans kept the air fresh and halfway cool. With shutters closed, a nighdike gloom took hold, and Washen allowed herself the wasteful pleasure of a small electric lamp burning above her favorite chair.

  She was in the middle of a report projecting coming demands for laboratory-grade glassware. The utterly routine work made her fatigue real. Suddenly it seemed, ridiculous to look three centuries into the future, or even three minutes, and Washen responded by yawning, closing her eyes, then dipping into a hard, dreamless sleep.

  Then she was awake again.

  Awake and confused, she reached for the mechanical clock dangling from her belt on a titanium chain. The clock was a gift from various grandchildren. They had assembled it themselves, using resurrected technologies and patient hands. The overhead lamp still burned, and the wasted energy flowed over the delicately embossed casing, its bright silver mixed with enough gunk to lend it strength. She opened the round case and stared at the numbers. At the slowly turning hands. This was the middle of the night, and she sleepily realized that what had awakened her was a slow, strong pounding against her front door.

  Washen turned off the lamp, rose and opened the door. The harsh glare of the sky flowed over her. She blinked, aware of two figures waiting for her, wearing nothing but the light. Then her eyes adapted, weakening enough for her to see two welcome faces.

  In the middle of the night, apparently unnoticed, Washen's son and his father had strolled into the heart of the city.

  DlU OFFERED A wry grin.

  He looked the same as always ... except for the breech-cloth and a leanness that ended with his strong thick legs. And his skin had the smoky tint that Marrow gave everyone. His scalp was shaved free of every hair. And after years of hard wandering, his feet had been pounded into wider, flatter versions of their old selves.

  Locke spoke first. He said, 'Mother,' as if t
he word had been thoroughly practiced. Then he added, 'We've brought meat. Several tons, dried and sweetened. We'll give it to you, if you'll give us the vault.'

  The Waywards knew everything, it was said. And with good reason.

  Instantly, without blinking, Washen told them, 'The vault s empty. And pretty much useless, too.' Then she saw the other Waywards, several dozen of them, and the crude wooden sleds each of them had pulled, pack-animal fashion, each sled loaded high with bales of blackish and reddish carcasses.

  Diu smiled with his mouth and his quick eyes, conceding, 'We know it's empty.'

  'We.' In the past, on those rare occasions when they had spoken, Diu had always referred to the Waywards as 'they' or 'them.'

  Washen jumped to her next rebuttal.

  'It's not my decision to give the vault to you. Or anyone else, for that matter.'

  'Of course not,' he agreed. 'But you're the one who can wake up those who'll make that decision.'

  Which was what she did. The four surviving Submasters were roused out of their three beds, and with Miocene presiding, the meats were inspected and the Wayward offer was debated in whispers. There had been a shortfall of good protein lately. For all of its stampeding success, the Flowering meant machines and energy. Not new farms or fresh efficiencies in cultivation. Which the Waywards must have known, too.

  Standing on the hot black round, Washen wondered when her son and Diu had started this trek. The nearest Wayward camp was at least six hundred kilometers from here, and they couldn't have used the local roads without being noticed and intercepted. Pulling sleds over sharp ridges and through the jungles . . . they were obviously determined, and fantastically patient, and cocksure about how things would end . . .

  Miocene approached Washen, and with the other Submasters, they rejoined their guests.

  'Agreed,' said Miocene grudgingly.

  Locke grinned for a moment. Then with an easy politeness, he said, 'Thank you, madam.'

  Unlike his father, Locke hadn't shaved his scalp; his golden hair was long and simply braided. In a world without cattle or horses, Waywards used their own bodies as resources, for work and for raw materials. Her son's belt was a tightly braided length of old hair. His breechcloth was a thin soft leather stained white by sweat salts. A knife and a flintlock pistol rode on his hips, and both handles had the whiteness of cherished bone, carefully carved from leg bones lost - she prayed - in violent accidents.