by Robert Reed
'Don't you know what you were hunting?' she countered.
His hot gray eyes lifted, glaring at his accuser. 'I know. You think I'm difficult, and you're not the first to think it. Believe me.'
Miocene said nothing.
'But between us, who's more difficult? You've lived on Marrow for thirty centuries, ruling a tiny piece of what you claim is a tiny world. You claim that only you and the other captains understand the beauty and enormity of the great universe, while your son and the other Waywards are idiots because they tell simple stories that halfway explain everything, making us into the reborn kings of the universe . . .
'We aren't kings,' he proclaimed. 'And I don't believe that an arrogant old woman like you really understands the universe. Great and glorious and nearly boundless, it is, and what tiny fraction of it have you seen in your own little life . . . ?'
Miocene watched the eyes, saying nothing.
'I was peering inside Marrow,' the youngster reported. 'The Waywards have a larger, more sensitive array of seismic ears than yours. Since most of the world is theirs, after all. And since they believe in living with quakes, not in defusing them.'
'I know about your seismic array,' said Miocene.
'Using three thousand years of data, I built a thorough, detailed picture of the interior.' As he spoke, a rapture took hold of his gray eyes, his narrow face, then his small body. 'Arrogance,' he said again, with a harsh disgust. 'By your own admission, you piloted the Great Ship for a hundred millenia before you realized that Marrow was here. And now you've lived here for another three millenia, and hasn't it ever occurred to you, just once, that the mysteries don't stop? That there's something hiding deep inside Marrow, too?'
Suddenly Miocene heard the distant singing, muted by walls and the spiraling staircase, the voices ragged and earnest and in their own way beautiful.
She heard herself ask, 'What is this . . . this something
. . . ?'
'I don't have any idea.'
'Is it large?'
'Fifty kilometers across. Approximately' The young man sucked on another braid, then said, 'I want to find out what it is. Give me the staff and the resources, and I'll determine if the buttresses are being fed from down there.'
The Submaster took a breath, then another. Then she quietly, honestly, told the defector, 'That can't be our priority. Interesting as it is, the question has to wait.'
Gray eyes stared, then pulled shut.
A bilious voice reported, 'That's exactly what Till told me. Word for fucking word.'
When the eyes opened, they saw a laser cradled in the Submaster's right hand.
'Hey, now,' he whined.
Miocene aimed for the throat, then panned downward. Then she rose and came around the table, completing the chore with delicacy and thoroughness. Only the face and the mind behind it remained unconsumed, a voiceless scream having pulled the mouth wide open. The stink of cooked flesh and a burned wig made the air close, distasteful. Working quickly, Miocene opened a satchel and dumped the head inside. Then she walked between the stacks of books, her guard waiting as ordered, out of earshot.
He took the satchel without comment.
'As always,' was all she needed to say.
With a nod, the loyal guard left, using the emergency exit. The defector's interrogations had only just begun; and if he could prove his worth, he would be reborn into a new, infinitely more productive life.
Miocene took her time repacking the electronic file-box and adding a vial of ash to the ash pile - exactly what would be left by a man's head. Then she picked up the book that had so bothered her grandson, and on a whim, she opened it to the reactor. Virtue had been correct, she realized. And she made a footnote to future scholars before she carefully returned the volume to its proper shelf.
The temple administrator was waiting in the stairwell.
With her hands wrapped in front of her, half-hidden by her lumpy robe, she looked up at the Submaster, winced and began to ask, 'Where is he—?'
Then she smelled death, or she saw it walking the stairs with Miocene.
'What . . . ?' the woman sputtered, never more nervous.
'The defector,' Miocene replied, 'was a spy. A transparent attempt to plant an agent in our midst.'
'But to kill him . . . here, in the temple . . . !'
'To my mind, there's no more appropriate location.' The Submaster pushed past her, then remarked, 'You may clean up. I would be most thankful if you would do me this favor, and that you never mention any of this to anyone.'
'Yes, madam,' a tiny voice squeaked.
Then Miocene was in the open hallway again, the rattling, ill-disciplined voices singing about the bridge soon to be built and the rewards to be won, and for no precise reason, it seemed important for her to step out into the expansive chamber, facing the ranks of devoted worshipers.
It was chilling and enchanting to realize how easily, almost effortlessly, children embraced the words and dreams of another. Miocene looked at the startled, smiling faces, seeing nothing but the purest belief.Yet these people knew nothing about the worlds beyond their own. None had walked t he ship's smallest hallway, much less witnessed the beauty and majesty of the Milky Way. They sang of this great quest to return to the world above, ready to make any sacrifice to move past their simple silver sky. A sky unblemished, save for that lone patch of darkness directly above — the base camp, still and always abandoned.
Abandoned like the ship itself?
Billions might have died, and Miocene didn't care. Perhaps she once hated the idea that her people, following her reasonable instructions, had triggered an elaborate, ancient booby trap, causing every organism above them to be murdered. But what had horrified once was now history, past and murky as only history can be, and how could Miocene accept any blame for what was surely unavoidable?
The ship might be dead, but she most definitely was alive.
To the pleasure of several thousand parishioners, this living embodiment of everything great about themselves joined in with their singing, Miocene's voice strong and and relentless and untroubled by its melodic failures.
How easily they believe, she thought with a fond contempt.
Then as she sang about the sweet light of G-class stars, Miocene asked herself, in her most secret voice, 'But what if it's the same for the great souls?'
She wondered:
'What do I believe too willingly and too well . . . ?'
Twenty-two
THE COLD IRON would occasionally shift on its own, giving no warning. The old faults never moved quickly or particularly far, and they rarely caused damage of consequence. The tremor-abatement facilities absorbed the event's energies, and where feasible, what was harvested was piped into the main power grid. In that sense, quakes were a blessing. But the unscheduled events had a nagging habit of interrupting a certain captain's deepest sleep, causing her to awaken suddenly, her dreams swirling out of reach in those delicious few moments before she found herself lucid again.
That morning's quake lingered. Awake in her bed, lying on her right side, Washen felt the shudder falling away slowly, turning into the quiet, steady, and purposeful drumming of her own heart.
The calendar on the wall displayed the date.
4611.277.
Sheer curtains cut to resemble the unfolded wings of a lusciousfly let in the anemic skylight, illuminating the bedroom in which she had slept for the last six centuries. Steel walls covered with polished umbra wood gave the structure a palpable, reassuring strength. The high steel ceiling bristled with hooks and potted plants and little wooden houses, drab as dirt, where domesticated lusciousflies roosted and made love. A rare species in the bright, hot days after the Event, the lovely creatures had been growing more abundant as the overhead buttresses diminished - a cycle presumably aeons old. At Promise-and-Dream's Generic Works, the siblings had tinkered with their colors and size, producing giant butterfly-like organisms with elaborate, every-colored wings. Every Loyalist s
eemed to have his own flock. And since there were twenty million homes in the nation, the sibling captains had made themselves a tidy, even enviable profit.
As Washen sat up in bed, her lusciousflies came out to greet her. With the softness of shadows, they perched on her bare shoulders and in her hair, licking at the salt of her skin and leaving their subtle perfumes as payment.
She shooed them away with a gentle hand.
Her old clock lay open on the tabletop. According to the slow metal hands, she could sleep for another hour. But her body said otherwise. While the mirrored uniform dressed her, Washen remembered dreaming, and the tremor. For a few wasted moments, she tried to resurrect her last dream. But it had slipped away already, leaving nothing but a vague, ill-fed disquiet.
Not for the first time, it occurred to Washen that she could build a universe from her lost dreams.
'Maybe that's their real purpose,' she whispered to her pets. 'When my universe is finished, so am I.'
Laughing quietly, she set her mirrored cap on her head.
There.
Breakfast was peppered bacon over a toasted sweetcake, everything washed down with hot tea and more hot tea. The Genetics Works were responsible for the bacon, too. A few centuries ago, responding to the captains' complaints, Promise and Dream had cultured several familiar foods in lab vats; respectable steaks and cured meats were the result. But it was a minor project, finished quickly and cheaply. Instead of trying to resurrect the genetics of cattle and boars, from memory, the siblings used the only available meat-bearer - humans - tweaking the genetics enough to make a fleshy product that wasn't human. Not in texture, or in flavor. Or hopefully, in spirit.
Just which captains were used as a model was a secret. But persistent rumors claimed it was Miocene — a possibility that perhaps accounted for the popularity of the foods, among both captains as well as certain grandchildren.
With an extra hour in her day, Washen took her time. She ate slowly. She read both competing news services; neither offered anything of real interest. Then she stepped from her house out into her very long yard, strolling on a path of native iron blocks rusted into a pleasant shade of drab red, little tufts of grayhair and sadscent growing in the gaps.
Gardening was a recent hobby. Her one-time lover, long-time friend Pamir used to be an accomplished gardener. What were his flowers of choice? The Ilano-vibra, yes. Maybe he was gardening today, if he was alive. And if he was, wouldn't that old criminal be astonished, seeing Washen's ambitious soul bending at the knees, plucking at the blackish weeds with her bare ringers?
As the buttresses weakened, as the skylight fell away into a twilightlike glow, the Marrow ecosystem continued to transform itself. Obscure species that lived only in caves and the deepest jungles weren't simply abundant, they were huge. Like the elfliearts in the middle of her garden. A species that was mature when it was hip-high inside the deepest shade had transformed itself into stout trees with trunks nearly a meter thick and a richly scented purple-black foliage, giant leaves and flowers mixed into a single elaborate structure that was fertilized by the lusciousflies, then curled into a black ball that matured into a fatty fruit, only a little toxic and with a lovely, if somewhat strong taste.
Washen kept the trees for their scent and her flies, and for their almost-terran limbs.
She kept them because some decades ago, a boyish lover had allowed himself to be taken in this orchard, and taken again.
Past the orchard were wide iron steps leading down to Idle Lake. No body of water on the world was older. Born fifteen hundred years ago, this patch of crust could lay claim to being the most ancient slab of iron ever to exist on Marrow: a testament to the captains' ingenuity and persistence. Or was it their obsessive need for order?
The old lake was still and stained red with rust and ruddy planktons. Above, stretching like some great steel ceiling, the chamber's wall looked near enough to touch. This was a pure illusion, of course. Marrow's atmosphere ended fifty kilometers short of the wall. The radiant buttresses still ruled above the swelling world. They remained dangerously strong, if considerably thinner. And for the next three hundred-plus years, they would continue to thin, and Marrow would expand, and according to every forecast and every carefully plotted graph, the buttresses would reach their minimum when Marrow's atmosphere began to lick against the chamber wall.
Finally, the captains would be able to climb to the base camp, and the access tunnel, and if the tunnel hadn't crumbled, they could move up into the vastness of the ship itself. Which was a derelict now, probably. Assuredly. Millennia of debate hadn't produced any other reasonable explanation for their long, perfect solitude, and three more centuries probably wouldn't change that grim assessment.
Washen opened the silver lid of her old, much-cherished timepiece, deciding that in this great march of centuries, she still had a few moments to waste.
Old, light-starved virtue trees had made the planks that were fixed to the stainless steel pontoons that held up Washen's dock. She strolled out to the end, listening to the pleasant sound of her dress boots striking wood. A tiny school of hammerwing larvae swam away, then turned and came back again, perhaps wanting handouts. Fins sloshed. Big many-faceted eyes saw a human figure against the hyperfiber sky. Then Washen closed the lid of her little clock, and the sudden click caused the school to dive deep in a single smooth panic, only swirls of red water betraying their presence.
Idle was an ancient lake, and by Marrow standards, it was impoverished, senile. An ecosystem built on frequent, radical change didn't appreciate stability and a thousand years of eutrophication.
Washen slipped the clock and its titanium chain into a trusted pocket, and her dream suddenly came back to her. Without warning, she remembered being somewhere else. Somewhere high, wasn't it? Perhaps on top of the bridge, which was only reasonable; she worked here every day. Only somehow that possibility didn't feel right, either.
Someone else was in her dream.
Whom, she couldn't say. But she had heard a voice, clear and strong, telling her with such sadness, 'This is not the way it is supposed to be.'
'What's wrong?' she had asked.
'Everything,' the voice declared. 'Everything.'
Then she looked down at Marrow. It seemed even larger than it was today, bright with fire and with molten, white-hot lakes of iron. Or was that iron? It occurred to Washen that the glow looked wrong . . . although she couldn't seem to piece together an answer from the sparse, ill-remembered clues . . .
'What is "everything"?' She .had asked the voice.
'Don't you see?' the voice replied.
'What should I see?'
But no answer was offered, and Washen turned, trying to look at her companion. She turned and saw . . . what?
Nothing came to mind, save for the odd and thrilling sensation of falling from a very great height.
HER PUTTERCAR NEEDED surgery.
Time and the hard steel roads had dismantled is suspension, and the simple turbine engine had developed an odd, nagging whine. But Washen hadn't gotten around to seeing it fixed. The vehicle still ran, and there was the salient fact that every machine shop in the capital had priorities. Personal transportation held a low priority. On Miocene's orders, every device that directly served the growing bridge held sway over personal concerns. And while Washen could have claimed privilege - wasn't she a vital part of this heroic effort? — she felt uncomfortable demanding favors.
For six hundred years, with rare exceptions, she had driven this route into the metropolis. Her local road merged with a highway that took her straight through older, more densely settled neighborhoods. Fifty-story apartment buildings stood in the mandatory parks, the black foliage mixed with playground equipment and the scrambling, energetic bodies of screaming children. Single houses and row houses and houses perched on aging, enfeebled virtue trees testified to the wild diversity of people left to their own logic. No two structures were the same, including the tallest buildings. And no two ne
ighborhood temples could be confused for one another, sharing nothing but the dome-hearted architecture and a certain comfortable majesty.
Washen's feelings about this faith were complex, and fickle. There were moments and years when she believed Miocene was a cynical leader, and this religion was as contrived as almost every other faith that Washen had met, and much less beautiful, too. But there were also unexpected, if fleeting moments when the hymns and the pageantry and everything else about it made sudden and perfect sense.
There was an ethereal charm to this bizarre mishmash.
The ship was real, she reminded herself. The object of their devotion was a miraculous, amazing machine, and empty or otherwise, it was plying its way through a wondrous universe. And even after her long isolation, the captain inside her felt a powerful duty toward that ball of hyperfiber and cold rock.
The puttercar highway grew wide, then evaporated into the central district.
Three hundred-story skyscrapers rose from the trustworthy ground. Steel skeletons were cloaked in acrylic windows and set on frictionless, sway-resistant foundations. A different logic had created the administrative headquarters. Fashioned from titanium and tough ceramics, it resembled a giant puffball - no windows showing to the outside wodd, its base reinforced in a hundred ways, walls armored and bristling with hidden weapons. The enemy was never mentioned, but it wasn't much of a secret. A Wayward assault was Miocene's most paranoid fear, offered without the slightest evidence. Yet it was a fear that Washen shared, if only on certain days. No, she didn't look at those impregnable walls with pride, exactly. But they didn't make her bristle, either.
Past the puffball were the six domes of the Great Temple. And standing at its center, directly beneath the abandoned base camp, was the only object that truly mattered to the Loyalist nation.
The bridge.
No wider than a large skyscraper and pale gray against the silver sky, the structure seemed lost at first glance. By ship standards, its hyperfiber shell was of a poor grade. But each gram of the stuff had come at great cost, grown inside sprawling, muscular factories built for no other purpose. True, most of the hyperfiber was thrown away, inadequate even for simple structural duties. But just to reach this modest point was a marvel. Aasleen and her teams had done miracles. Despite shortages of key elements, tons of hyperfiber had been created, one little droplet at a time, and then teams under Washen's gaze had slowly and carefully poured those gray droplets into molds that pushed the bridge higher every day. On the very best days, the bridge rose a full fat meter.
