Mallow

by Robert Reed

  Again Locke said, 'Thank you, madam.'

  The Submaster let her mouth drop open, a question waiting to be asked. But then she changed her mind and closed her mouth. She had decided not to mention her own son, even in passing.

  Washen knew her that well.

  Centuries of living close to this woman had left her easy to read. And as always, Washen felt a mixture of pity for the mother and scorn for the power-mad leader. Or was it scorn for the mother, and pity for the poor leader?

  Miocene offered to press Locke's hand, signaling the end of negotiations. But something lay in his hand. It was disc-shaped and wrapped tight inside a folded green hammerwing.

  He handed it to Miocene, then said, 'As a gift. Look.'

  The Submaster warily unfolded the wing and stared at the gift. A disc of pure yellow sulfur lay in her palm. Like so many light elements on Marrow, sulfur was in short supply. The sight of it was enough to make Miocene blink and look up in surprise.

  'What would you give us for a ton of this?' asked Locke.

  Then before she could answer, he added, 'We want a laser like yours. That powerful, and with enough spare parts.'

  'There isn't another one,' she replied instantly.

  'But you're building three more.' He nodded with an unimpeachable authority, then added, 'We want the first of the three. Which should be next year, if we're not mistaken.'

  Because it was poindess to lie,Washen told them, ‘You're not mistaken.'

  Miocene just stared at the sulfur cake, probably counting the industries that would be begging for the smallest taste.

  Another Submaster — nervous, worried Daen — had his face screwed up in disgust, asking their guests, 'But what do you need that kind of laser for?'

  Diu laughed, a quick hand wiping the oily sweat from his scalp.Then he asked the obvious question:'If your little group sitting on this tiny patch of planet can find one vault, by accident . . . how many more do you think we might be sitting on . . . ?'

  Nineteen

  THE CAPTAINS AND their favorite children began searching for the vaults. Every local vent and fissure was watched, first by volunteers, then by automated cameras. Inside their territory, and sometimes beyond, picked teams would inspect stretches of cold iron with the latest generation of seismographs, sonic probes, and eventually, neutron beams, each device making the crust a little more transparent, and knowable, and predictable — a mostly fruitless search for vaults, but yielding a fat wealth of information about ore deposits and quake predictions.

  Occasionally, one of those search teams was sent deep into the Wayward lands. The volunteers were armed, but typically in secret ways. They usually stumbled across a village filled with adults and young children who spoke a broken dialect of the ship-terran, and who claimed to have never seen Loyalists. The villages were spartan, haphazard in their layout, but basically clean. Their inhabitants were fit and happy, and as a rule, they acted utterly incurious about life in the burgeoning cities.

  The Loyalists happily chattered about their latest technological marvels and all the comforts being added to their daily lives. The Waywards seemed to listen, but they rarely asked even simple questions or offered the smallest, most glancing praise.

  The evictions were inevitable, though they were usually polite.

  A local chief or president or priest - his exact station was nebulous - would shove aside a plate of half-eaten mite cake or a bowl of raw steel-worms. Then he, or she, would rise with a certain majesty, reminding their guests, 'You are very much our guests here.'

  The Loyalists would nod, push aside their harsh food, and wait.

  'Our guests here.' The pattern was repeated again and again, sometimes with the same words. '"Here,"' the chief would tell them, 'means the center of the universe. Which is Marrow. "Our" implies the discretion always given to rightful owners. "Guests" are always temporary. Impermanent. And when the Builders wish, we will have no choice but to exclude you from the center of the universe.'

  The words were always delivered with a smile.

  Then, with an easy gravity, the chief would add, 'When you sit with us, you make the Builders unhappy. We can hear their anger. In our dreams and behind our eyes, we hear it. And for your sake, we think that you should return to your guest quarters. Now.'

  They were talking about the Loyalist cities.

  If the guests refused to leave, there would be a string of petty thefts. Then expensive sensors and field generators would evaporate mysteriously, and if that didn't change their minds, then their munitions boxes would vanish from their hiding places, each one jammed full of the newest guns and grenades.

  Just once, Miocene ordered a team not to retreat. She called for volunteers, then asked, 'What are the Waywards capable of?' She was talking to herself, and to them. 'Let them steal everything,' she ordered. 'Everything short of your lives. That's what I want.'

  The team was flown to an eruption site two thousand kilometers from the capital, and after a few coded transmissions relayed from high-altitude drones, nothing more was heard of them. Then it was six years later, and Diu led a group of Waywards into a settlement on the border. He brought the missing team with him. Standing barefoot and virtually naked on a street paved with new steel, he said, 'This shouldn't have happened. It needn't have. Tell that bitch Miocene if she wants to play, let her play with her own important life.'

  A dozen bodies lay on a dozen sleds, unbound and on their backs, and alive only by the tiniest of degrees. Eyelids had been pinned back, letting the skylight blind them. Barbed hooks kept the mouths pulled open, allowing the light to bake tongues and gums. Famine and a total lack of water had shriveled their bodies to a third of their original size. But worst of all was the way each prisoner had his neck broken. Three times a day, without exception, one of the strong young Waywards would smash the vertebrae and the spinal cord, keeping ahead of the sluggish healing mechanisms, leaving their guests helpless, limp and cut free of their dignity in precisely the same way that Miocene had once treated her son.

  USUALLY ONCE EVERY century, and sometimes twice, the Loyalists came across one of the ancient vaults.

  They were always empty, and after a thorough examination, each vault was declared useless and available for sale to the Waywards, in exchange for sulfur and silicon and rare earths. Deals were typically made in the same little city where Diu had brought the prisoners. Happens River was named for a feature obliterated centuries ago, and the city had moved several times since. A Submaster always handled the prolonged, increasingly difficult negotiations, and Locke always represented the Waywards. Washen and Diu served as observers, present because they had always been, but unnecessary to any of the tedious, long-winded business.

  Like any old lovers, they took a slightly uncomfortable pleasure in each others company.

  Washen was under strict orders to speak with Diu, though she didn't need prodding. Standing next to Diu, she looked tall and elegant, dressed in her newest uniform, ancient epaulets shining in the skylight as she strolled along a new river's shoreline. Diu, by contrast, seemed small, his body a little shrunken by the hard Wayward existence, fadess muscle wearing nothing but the only breechcloth that he owned. A mock wool breechcloth, she noted. Not leather. He still was too much of a captain to skin himself alive.

  Still and always, Diu was a jittery man. Nervous, quick. And relentlessly, effordessly charming.

  Not thinking of her orders but curious for herself, Washen mentioned the Waywards. 'Our best guess is that you've got twice our population. Or four times. Or eight.' 'Your best guess?' he laughed. 'Stinks,' she allowed.

  Then he nodded, and grinned, and after a dramatic pause, he admitted, 'Eight times is too little. Sixteen times is closer to the mark.'

  That gave the Waywards better than twenty-five million citizens. A huge mass of bodies and minds. She let herself wonder what so many modern minds, designed for endless and interesting lives, would think about. Without literature and digitals and sciences and histo
ry to embrace, and an ascetic's endless denial of pleasure . . . what kinds of ideas could keep such a mind engaged . . . ?

  She was trying to frame the question. But when she spoke, something else entirely came out of her mouth.

  'Do you remember ice cream?'

  Diu giggled.

  'That little shop.' She pointed, then said, 'It sells the next best thing.'

  In that perpetual heat, anything cold tasted fine. In a sugar-poor world, everything sweet was a treasure, even if the treasure was the product of dead chew-chews and biochemical magic. The shop owner conspicuously ignored the Wayward man. Washen paid for both treats as well the rental of the steel bowls and steel spoons. They sat by the river, on a little gold-embossed table set on a patio of iron bricks doctored with cyanides, giving them a blue cast. The river was a mixture of native springs and the runoff from local industries, creating a chemical stew to which Marrow had quickly adapted. The bacterial smell wasn't pleasant, but it had a strength and an honesty. That's what Washen was thinking as she watched Diu take a careful bite of the ice cream. Then his eyes grew wide, and he asked, 'Is that how chocolate tastes?'

  'We aren't sure,' she admitted. 'When you've got nothing to go on but your thousand-year-old memories . . .' Both of them laughed quietly.

  People sauntered past on the nearby walkway: lovers holding one another. Friends chattering. Business associates planning for a prosperous future. A couple had their toddler strapped into a wheeled cart. Like everyone else, they never quite looked at the Wayward sitting in plain view, eating ice cream. Only their child stared in amazement. Washen found herself thinking about the prisoners that Diu had brought back to Happens River. He had had no role in their torture. She had never asked, but he had volunteered his innocence just the same. Decades ago, now. Why even think about it? Then she looked at him, and smiled, trying to change the flow of her ancient mind.

  Perhaps Diu guessed her thoughts.

  Whatever the reason, he suddenly asked, 'How are those people, by the way? The poor souls that we brought back to you?'

  'They healed,' she allowed. 'In most ways.'

  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 mc 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 mande 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 frill 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 lighdy, 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.'