Marrow

The sky is smooth as perfection and as timeless, round as perfection and supreme in every way that end of the universe should be.

A trillion faces ignore the sky. Perfection is insignificant. Is boring.

What has consequences is sick and flawed and sad and angry, everything that you eat or wishes to eat you, and everything that is a potential fuck. Only imperfection can change its nature, or yours, and the sky never changes. Never. Which is why those trillion eyes look up only to watch fir things flying or floating—everything nearer to them than that slick silvery roundness.

Time is no perfection down here.

In this place nothing can be the same for long, and nothing succeeds that cannot adapt, swiftly, without hesitation or complaint, and usithout the tiniest remorse.

The ground beneath is not to be trusted.

The next deep breath is not a certainty.

Perhaps a thinking, reasonable, and self-aware mind would desire some taste of that glorious perfection.

To ingest the eternal.

To borrow its strength and grand endurance, if only for a little moment.

But that wish is too elaborate and much too spendthrift for these minds. They are weak and small and temporary. Focus on the instant. On eating and fucking, then resting only when there is no choice. Nothing else is so firmly etched into their hot genetic, swirling in the blood and riding tucked inside pollen and sperm.

Waste a moment, and perish.

This is a desperate and furious universe. Profoundly flawed, absolutely. But inside every tiny mind is what passes for a steely pride that says:

I am here.

I am alive.

On the backside of this leaf or perched on the crest of that hot iron pebble, I rule… and to those living things beneath my feet, too small to be seen by me. I am something that looks great and powerful…

Perfect in your pathetic little eyes…!

Six

Secret wonders had been accomplished in mere decades.

Molelike drones had gnawed their way through thousands of kilometers of nickel and iron, reopening one of the ancient, collapsed tunnels. In their wake, industrial ants had slathered the walls with the highest available grade of hyperfiber. One of the fuel tank’s reserve pumping stations had been taken off-line, then integrated with the project. Fleets of cap-cars, manufactured on-site and free of identification, waited outside the excavation, ready to carry the captains to the ship’s distant center; while a brigade of construction drones had gone ahead, building a base of operations—an efficient and sterile little city of dormitories, machine shops, cozy galleys, and first-rate laboratories all tucked within a transparent blister of freshly minted diamond.

Washen was among the last to arrive at the base camp.

At the Master’s insistence, she led the cleaning detail that carefully expunged every trace of the captains from inside the leech habitat.

It was a necessary precaution in an operation demanding seamless security, and it required hard, precise work.

Some of her cohorts considered the assignment an insult.

Scrubbing latrines and tracking down flakes of wayward skin was tedious and grueling. Certain captains grumbled, “We’re not janitors, are we?”

“We aren’t,” Washen agreed. “Professionals would have finished last week.”

Diu belonged to her detail, and unlike most, the novice captain worked without complaint, plainly trying to impress his superior. A charming selfishness was at work. She would soon wear a Submaster’s epaulets, and if Diu could impress Washen with his zeal, she might become his benefactor. It was a calculation, yes. But she thought that it was a reasonable, even noble attitude. Washen believed there was nothing wrong with a captain making calculations, whether it involved the ship’s course or the trajectory of his own important career. It was a philosophy that she’d often mentioned to Pamir, and that Pamir would never, ever accept in even the most polite ways.

It took two weeks and a day to finish their janitorial assignment.

Narrow, two-passenger cars waited to make the long fall to base camp. Washen decided that Diu would ride with her, and that their car would leave last, and Diu rewarded her with the charming and very trimmed story of his life.

“Mars-born, and born wealthy,” he confessed.’I came to this ship for the usual touristy reasons. The promise of excitement. Or novelty. Adventure in safe, manageable doses. And of course, the unlikely possibility that someday, in some far and exotic part of the Milky Way, I’d actually become a better human being.”

“Passengers don’t join the crew,” Washen stated.

Diu grinned, something about the face and bright expression perpetually boyish. “Because it’s so hard,” he admitted. “Because we have to start at the bottom of the bottom. Our status, hard-won or stolen, has to be surrendered, and even if we were born wealthy, that doesn’t make us fools. We understand. Talent comes in flavors, and our particular talents don’t wear these clothes well.”

With no one here to see them, they again wore their mirrored uniforms.

Nodding, Washen touched the purple-black epaulets, asked, “So why did you do it? Are you a fool?”

“Absolutely,” he sang out. She couldn’t help but laugh.

With the tone of a confession, he explained, “I played the wealthy passenger for a few thousand years. Then 1 finally realized that despite all of my adventuring and all my of my determined smiles, I was bored and would always be bored.”

The car’s windows were blackened. The only illumination inside the little cab came from a bank of controls, green smears of light promising that every system was working well. The green of a terran forest: A comforting color for humans; an evolutionary echo, Washen thought in passing.

“But captains never looked bored,” he told her. “Pissed, yes. And harried, usually. But that’s what attracted me to you. If only because people expect it, your souls are relentlessly and momentously busy.”

Diu had taken a unique journey into the ship’s elite. He recited his postings and his steady climb through the hierarchy, first as a lowly mate, then as a low-ranking captain. But on the brink of sounding tedious, he held back. He stopped speaking, smiling until she noticed the smile. Then he quietly and respectfully asked Washen about her considerable life.

A hundred thousand years was described in eleven sentences.

“I was born inside the ship. By-the-sea was my childhood home. The Master needed captains, so I became one. I’ve done every job that captains do, plus a few others. For the last fifty millennia, I’ve welcomed and supervised our alien guests. According to my work record and my evaluations, I’m very good at my profession. I have no children.

My pets and apartment are self-sufficient. All things considered, I’m comfortable in the company of other captains. I can’t imagine living anywhere but on this wondrous, mysterious ship. Where else in Creation can a person drink in so much diversity, every day of our lives…?”

Diu’s closed his gray eyes, then opened them. And as always, the eyes smiled along with the mobile wide mouth.

“Are your parents still on board?” he asked.

“No, they sold their shares once the ship entered the Milky Way, and they emigrated.” To a colony world, she didn’t mention. A raw, wild place when they arrived, but now probably a crowded, frightfully ordinary place.

“I bet they’ll feel an enormous pride,” Diu mentioned.

“Pride for what?”

“You,” he replied.

For an instant, Washen was confused, and perhaps her confusion showed on her usually unflustered face.

“Because they’ll hear the news,” Diu continued. “When the Master announces to the galaxy what we’ve found down here, and she tells about our roles in this great adventure… when that happens, I think everyone everywhere is going to know our story…”

In truth, she hadn’t considered that very obvious prospect.

Not until this moment, that is.

“Our famous ship has something hidden inside it,” said Diu. “Imagine what people will think.”

Washen nodded, agreeing… while a sliver of herself began to feel the softest gray chill… a sudden harbinger of what could be a strange little fear…

Seven

Newcomers weren’t prepared for Marrow.

Washen hadn’t seen images of their base camp or the world itself. Images, like whispers, had their own life and a talent for spreading farther than intended. Which was why she had nothing in mind but those schematics that the Master had shown to all of her captains, leaving her feeling like an innocent.

Their tiny car turned transparent as it pulled into a small garage. Hyperfiber lay in all directions, the silvery-gray material molded into a diamond framework that created berths and storage lockers and long, long staircases.

The car claimed the first available berth.

On foot, three stairs at a time, Diu and Washen conquered the last kilometer. They were inside a newly fabricated passageway, spartan and a little cool. Then the stairs ended, and without warning, they stepped out onto a wide viewing platform, and standing together, they peered out over the edge.

The diamond blister lay between them and several hundred kilometers of airless, animated space. Force fields swirled through that apparent vacuum, creating an array of stubborn buttresses. In themselves, the buttresses were a great discovery. How were they powered? How did they succeed for so long, without a moment’s failure? Washen could actually see them: a brilliant blue-white light seemed to flow from everywhere, filling the gigantic chamber. The fight never seemed to waver. Even with the blister’s protection, the glare was intense. Relentless. Civilized eyes needed to adapt—a physiological task involving retinae and the tint of the lenses; an unconscious chore that might take an hour, at most—but even with their adaptable genetics, Washen doubted that any person, given any reasonable time, could grow comfortable with this endless day.

The chamber wall was a great sphere of silver-gray hyperfiber marred only by the tiniest of crushed tunnels left behind from the time when it was created. The chamber enclosed a volume greater than Mars, and according to sensors and best guesses, its hyperfiber was as thick as the thickest armor on the ship’s exceedingly remote hull, and judging by its purity and grade, probably stronger by a factor of two, or twenty. Or more, perhaps.

The silvery wall was the captains’ ceiling, and it fell away smoothly on all sides, its silver face vanishing behind the rounded body of Marrow.

“Marrow,” Washen whispered, spellbound.

On just one little portion of the world, down where her squinting eyes happened to look first, perhaps a dozen active volcanoes were vomiting fire and black gases, ribbons of white-hot iron flowing into an iron lake that cooled grudgingly, a filthy dark slag forming against the shoreline. In colder, closer basins, hot-water streams ran into hot-water lakes that looked only slightly more inviting: mineral-stained bodies shot full of purples and swirling crimsons and blacks and thick muddy browns. Above those lakes, water, clouds gathered into towering thunderheads that were carried by muscular winds back over the land. Where the crust wasn’t exploding, it was a scabrous shadowless black, and the blackness wasn’t because of the iron-choked soils. What Washen saw was a vigorous, soot-colored vegetation that basked in the endless day. Forests, jungles. Reeflike masses of photosynthetic life. A blessing, all. Watching from base camp, the captains could guess what was happening. The vegetation was acting like countless filters, removing toxins and yanking oxygen from the endless rust, creating an atmosphere that wasn’t clean but seemed clean enough that humans, once properly conditioned, could breathe it, and perhaps comfortably.

“I want to get down there,” Washen confessed.

“Eventually,” Diu cautioned, pointing over her shoulder. “Things that are impossible usually take time.”

The diamond blister enclosed more than a square kilometer of hyperfiber. Shops and dorms and labs hung down like stalactites, their roofs serving as foundations. On the blister’s edge, scuttlebug drones were pouring fresh hyperfiber, creating a silvery-white cylinder slowly growing toward the rough black landscape below.

That cylinder would be their bridge to the new world.

Eventually, eventually.

There was no other route down. The buttressing fields had destroyed every sort of machine sent into them. For many reasons, some barely understood, those buttresses also eroded, then killed, every sort of mind that dared touch them. Captains with engineering experience had worked on the problem. The team leader was a wizard named Aasleen, and she had designed a hyperfiber shaft, its interior shielded with quasiceramics and superfluids. Good rugged theories claimed that the danger would end where the light ended, which was at the upper edges of Marrows atmosphere. A brief, shielded exposure wouldn’t kill anyone. But before the captains made history, there would be tests. Sitting in a nearby lab, inside clean spacious cages, were several hundred immortal pigs and baboons, uniformly spoiled and completely unaware of their coming heroism.

Washen was thinking about baboons and timetables. A familiar voice broke her reverie. “What are your impressions, darlings?” Miocene stood behind them. In uniform, she was even more imposing, and more cold. Yet Washen summoned her best smile, greeting the mission leader with a crisp, “Madam,” and a little bow. “I’m surprised, madam,” she admitted. “I didn’t know that this world would be so beautiful.”

“Is it?” The knife-edged face offered a smile. Without looking down, she added, “I wouldn’t know. I don’t have a feel for aesthetics.”

For one uncomfortable moment, no one spoke.

Then Dili offered, “It’s a spartan beauty, madam. But it’s there.”

“I believe you.” The Submaster smiled off into the distance. “But tell me. If this world proves as harmless as it is beautiful, what do you think our passengers will pay? To come here and have a look. Or perhaps go below and take a walk.”

“If it’s a little dangerous,” Washen ventured, “then they’ll pay more.”

Diu nodded in agreement.

Miocene’s smile came closer, growing harder. “And if it’s more than a little dangerous?”

“We’ll leave it alone,” Washen replied. “Dangerous to the ship?”

“Then we’ll have to collapse our new tunnel,” Diu suggested.

“With us safely above,” Miocene added.

“Of course,” the captains said together, in a shared voice.

A wide grin filled Diu’s face, and for a moment, it was as if he were grinning with his entire body.

Past the fledging bridge, clinging to the chamber’s smooth face, were dozens of mirrors and arrays of complex antennae. Gesturing toward them, Diu asked, “Have we seen any intelligent life, madam? Or perhaps a few artifacts?”

“No,” said Miocene, “and no.”

It would be a strange place for sentience to evolve, thought Washen. And even if the ship’s builders had left cities behind, they would have been destroyed long ago. Or at least swallowed up. The crust beneath them was probably not even a thousand years old. Marrow was an enormous forge constantly reworking not only its black face but also the hot bones beneath.

“This world has one big distinction,” Diu pointed out. “It’s the only part of the ship that comes with its own life-forms.”

True. When humans arrived, every passageway and giant room proved sterile. As life-free as the graceful clean hands of the finest autodoc, and then some.

“But that might just be coincidence,” Washen responded. “Life usually requires an active geology to be born. The rest of the ship is cold rock and hyperfiber, and the enormous purification plants would have destroyed every ambitious organic compound, almost as it was formed.”

“Yet I can’t help dream,” Diu confessed, staring at the two women. “In my dreams, the builders are down there, waiting for us.”

“A delirious dream,” Miocene warned him.

But Washen felt much the same. Standing here, seeing this wondrous realm, she could imagine an ancient species of bipeds slathering the hyperfiber on the chambers walls, then creating Marrow from the ship’s own core. Why they would do it, she didn’t know. She wouldn’t even dare a secret guess. But imagining someone like herself, five or ten billion years removed from here… it was a compelling, frightening, and focusing insight… and something she wouldn’t share with the others…

Who knew what they would find? This was a huge place, Washen reminded herself. They couldn’t see more than a sliver of the world from this one tiny vantage point. And who could say what was beneath any of those iron-belching mountains, or beyond that rough horizon…?

As she considered these weighty matters, Diu spoke. Buoyant words kept flowing from his tireless mouth. “This is fantastic,” he exclaimed, staring down through the platform’s diamond floor. “And it’s an enormous honor. I’m just thrilled that the Master, in her wisdom, included me in this project.”

The Submaster nodded, conspicuously saying nothing.

“Now that I’m here,” Diu blubbered, “I can almost see it. The purpose of this place, and the entire ship.”

With a level glance, Washen tried to tell her companion: “Be quiet.”

But Miocene had already tilted her head, eyeing her eleventh-grade colleague. “I, for one, would love to hear all of your ideas, darling.”

Diu lifted his dark eyebrows.

An instant later, with a bleak amusement, he remarked, “My apologies. But I think not, madam.” Then he glanced at his own hands, and with a captain’s cool judgment, he added, “Once spoken, the useful thought belongs to at least one other soul.”

Eight

Even inside her quarters, with the windows blackened and every lamp put to sleep, Miocene could sense the light outside. In her mind, she could see its harsh blueness even when her eyes were firmly closed, and she could feel its radiance slipping through the tiniest cracks, then piercing her flesh, wanting nothing more than to bother her old bones.

When did she last sleep well? She couldn’t remember the night, which only made it worse. The pressure of this mission and its peculiar environment were ravaging her nerves, her confidence, and splitting her carefully crafted veneer.

Awake and knowing that she shouldn’t be, the Submaster stared up into the darkness, imagining a different ceiling, and a different self. When Miocene was little more than a baby, her parents—people of extremely modest means—presented her with an unexpected, wondrous toy. It was an aerogel-and-diamond miniature of the deep-space probe that had recently discovered the Great Ship. At the girl’s insistence, the toy was suspended over her bed. It resembled a bluish spiderweb that had somehow snared half a hundred tiny round mirrors. In its center was a fist-sized housing. Inside the housing was a simple AI holding the memories and personality of its historic predecessor. At night, while the girl lay still beneath the covers, the AI spoke with a deep, patient voice, describing the distant worlds that it had charted and how its brave trajectory had eventually carried it out of the Milky Way. The false mirrors projected images that showed thousands of worlds, then the cold black vacuum, and finally, the first dim glow of the ship. The glow brightened, swelling into the battered, ancient face, and then Miocene was past the ship, looking back at the mammoth engines that had helped throw that wonder toward her. Because the Great Ship was thrown toward her, she knew. At that age, and always.

Come morning, the toy always greeted her with envious words.

“I wish I had legs and could walk,” it claimed. “And I so wish I had your mind and your freedom, and just half of your glorious future, too.”

She loved that toy. Sometimes it seemed to be her finest friend and staunchest ally.

“You don’t need legs,” Miocene would tell it. “Wherever I go, I’ll take you.”

“People would laugh,” her friend warned.

Even as a child, Miocene hated being anyone’s joke.

“I know you,” said her toy, laughing at her foolishness. “When the time comes, you’ll leave me. And sooner than you think.”

“I wont,” she blurted. “Never.”

Naturally, she was wrong. Barely twenty years later, Miocene had an adult’s body and the beginnings of an adult’s intellect, and against brutal odds, she had won a full scholarship to the Belter Academy. Her illustrious career had begun in earnest, and of course she left her toys behind. Today her one-time friend was in storage, or lost, or most likely her parents—people not too bothered by sentimentality—had simply thrown it away.

And yet.

There were moments when she lay awake, alone or otherwise, and looking up, she would see her friend hanging over her again, and she would hear its deep heroic voice whispering just to her, telling her how it was to sail alone between the stars.

A disembodied voice said, “Miocene.”

She was awake, alert. Had never been asleep, she was certain. But the bed lifted her until she was sitting upright, and a lamp came on, and only then did she notice the passage of time. Ninety-five minutes of uninterrupted dream sleep, claimed her internal clock.

Again, she heard, “Miocene.”

The Master Captain was sitting on the far side of the room. Or rather, a simple projection of the Master sat in a hypothetical chair, looking massive even though she was composed of nothing but trained photons, that familiar voice telling her favorite and most loyal subordinate, “You look well.”

Implying the exact opposite.

The Submaster gathered up all the poise at her disposal, then with the perfect little bow, she said, “Thank you, madam. As always.”

A slight, lightspeed pause. Then, “You’re very welcome.”

The woman had a strange, quixotic sense of humor, which was why Miocene never tried to cultivate one of her own. The Master didn’t need a laughing friend, but a sober assistant full of reason and devotion.

“Your request for additional equipment—”

“Yes, madam?”

“Is denied.” The Master smiled, then shrugged. “You don’t absolutely need any more resources. And frankly, some of your colleagues are asking questions.”

“I can imagine,” Miocene replied. Then with a second, lesser bow, she added, ‘What equipment we have is adequate. We can reach our goal. But as I pointed out in my report, a second corn-line and a new field reactor would give us added flexibility”

“What resource wouldn’t help you?” the Master asked.

Then she laughed.

An eternity of practice kept Miocene from speaking or showing the simplest discomfort.

“They’re asking questions,” the Master repeated.

The Submaster knew how- to react, which was to say nothing.

“Your colleagues don’t believe our cover story, I’m afraid.” The round face smiled, absorbing the lamplight, the golden skin shining brighdy. “And I went to such trouble, too. A fully fueled taxi. Robot facsimiles of you walking on board. Then the momentous launch. But everyone knows how easy it is to lie, which makes it hard to coax anyone into believing anything…’ Again, Miocene said nothing.

Their cover was a simple fiction: a delegation of captains had left for a high-technology world. They were to meet with a species of exophobes, the humans trying to coax them into friendship, or least to trade for their profitable skills. Such missions had happened in the past, and they typically were wrapped in secrecy. Which was why those other captains—the less qualified ones left behind—should know better than to spit gossip.

“If I sent you a reactor,” the Master explained, “then someone might notice.”

Not likely, thought Miocene.

“And if we lay down a second corn-line, then we double our risk that someone will send or hear something they shouldn’t.”

A likely estimate, yes.

Quiedy, the Submaster replied, “Yes, madam. As you wish.”

“As I wish.’An amused nod. Then the Master asked the obvious question. “Are you keeping up with your timetable?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll reach the planet in six months?”

“Yes, madam.” As of yesterday, Aasleen’s bridge was halfway to Marrow. “We’ll make every deadline, if nothing unexpected happens.”

“Which is the way it should be,” the Master pointed out.

A circumspect nod. Then Miocene volunteered, “Our spirits are excellent, madam.”

“I have no doubt. They are in exceptional hands.”

Miocene felt the compliment warming her flesh, and she couldn’t help but nod and offer the tiniest of smiles before asking, “Is that all, madam?”

“For the moment,” said the ship’s leader.

“Then I shall leave you to more important duties,” Miocene offered.

“The important is finished,” she replied. “The rest of my day is nothing but routine.”

“Have a good day, madam.”

“And to you. And to yours, darling.”

The image dissolved, followed by a pulse of thoughtful light that would search the comlink for leaks and weaknesses.

Miocene rose, standing at her room’s only window. “Open,” she coaxed.

The blackness evaporated. The relentless daylight poured over her, blue and harsh. And hot. Gazing out across her abrupt little city, watching drones and captains in the midst of their important motions, Miocene allowed her thoughts to wander. Yes, she was honored to be here, and endlessly pleased to be leading this vital mission. Yet when she was honest about her ambitions, she had to be honest about her own skills, not to mention the skills of her colleagues. Why had the Master chosen her? Others were more graceful leaders, more imaginative and with better experience in the field. But she obviously was the best candidate. And when she looked hard at herself, there was only one quality in which Miocene excelled above all others.

Devotion.

Aeons ago, she and the Master had attended the Academy together. They were much alike—ambitious students who absorbed their studies together, and who socialized as friends, and who occasionally confessed their deep feelings on matters they wouldn’t admit to lovers, and sometimes wouldn’t admit to themselves.

Both young women declared, “I want to be first to that great ship.”

In the Master’s dreams, she was leading the first mission. While in Miocene’s dreams, she was merely an important organ in the mission’s body.

A critical distinction, that.

Why, wondered Miocene, hadn’t the Master herself come here?

Yes, there would have been problems. Logistical barriers and security nightmares, absolutely. But with holoprojections and robot facsimiles, she could rule the ship from anywhere. Which was why a bold, dynamic soul like hers must hate being so far removed from here. Perhaps in the end, at the last possible minute, the Master would swallow her good sense, then cram herself into one of the tiny cap-cars, coming here on the eve of their planetfall. Stealing Miocenes historic moment, in essence.

For the first time, the Submaster sensed how much she hated that prospect. A small anger began to practice inside her. It felt strangely delicious, and even better, it felt appropriate. A justified anger, and it would grow whenever it occurred to Miocene that maybe this was why she was here. The Master knew that she could take every advantage of her endless devotion. She could come here and steal the honor, and her Submaster would have no choice but to smile and nod, deflecting the credit and the fame that should have belonged to her.

Quietly, Miocene told the window to extend.

The transparent panel bowed outward, thinning like a bubble as it expanded.

Leaning forward, she looked down the side of the dormitory, through the diamond street, peering at the hot black face of that strange world… and to herself, with a quiet dry voice, she said, “Please don’t come here, madam.”

She said, “Leave me the glory. Just this once, please,”

Nine

Captains are nothing without plans and without routines.

Planetfall occurred nine days and a year after the Master’s briefing, and every historic event, small and otherwise, transpired exactly as the captains had anticipated. The touchdown site was selected for the maturity and apparent stability of its crust. The bridge was tweaked and teased into position, then lowered into the upper atmosphere, bellows taking a great breath, the stolen air subjected to every imaginable test. The bridge’s final kilometers were added in a carefully orchestrated rush. At the last instant, sensors studied the rising land, mapping details to a microscopic level. Then a tip of razor-edged hyperfiber was shoved into the iron ground, and a specially designed car raced downward, protected by elaborate fields as well as its speed. The journey through the corrosive buttresses was swift and uneventful, and the first landing party arrived with a strict minimum of fuss.

There was a rumor that the Master herself was coming to take part. But like most rumors, it proved untrue, and afterward it seemed like a faintly ridiculous story. Why, after such careful security, would the woman take the obnoxious risk now?

It was Miocene who shouldered the privilege.

Accompanied by a swarm of cameras and security AIs, she stepped carefully onto Marrow’s surface. Watching from base camp, Washen saw that too-calm face gazing at the alien landscape, and she noticed something in the wide, unblinking eyes. An amazement, perhaps. A genuine awe. Then the look, whatever it was, evaporated, and the narrow mouth opened, and with a forced sense of importance, Miocene declared, ‘In service of the Master, we have arrived.”

The captains overhead cheered and broke into song.

The landing party took ceremonial samples of soil and foliage, then made the expected retreat back to base camp.

Dinner was late, and it was a feast. Bottomless glasses of authentic champagne washed down spiced meats and odd vegetables, and when the party was at its loudest, the distant Master sent her hearty congratulations.

In front of everyone, she called Miocene “Your brave leader.” Then the projected body did a graceful turn, gesturing at the world beneath as she proclaimed, “This is a momentous day in our ship’s momentous history.”

No it wasn’t, thought Washen.

A nagging disappointment only grew. Six teams, including Miocene’s, journeyed to Marrow that next day, and studying the data harvests and live images, Washen found exactly what she expected to find. Captains were administrators, not explorers. Every historic moment was choreographed, routine. What Miocene wanted was for every bush and bug to have a name, and every rusty piece of soil to be memorized. Not even tiny surprises were allowed to ambush those hardworking, utterly earnest first teams.

That second day was thorough, and it was stifling. But Washen didn’t mention her disappointment, or even put a name to her emotions.

Habit was habit, and she’d always been an exemplary captain. Besides, what sort of person hopes for injuries, or mistakes, or any kind of trouble? Which is what can come from the unexpected. And yet.

On the third day, when her own team was set to embark, Washen forced herself to sound like a captain. “We’ll take our walk on the iron,” she told the others, “and we’ll exceed every objective. On schedule, if not before.”

It was a swift, decidedly strange journey. Diu rode beside Washen. He made that request, just as he’d requested being part of her team. Their shielded car began by retreating back up the access tunnel, into the garage, acquiring some distance before flinging itself downward. Then it streaked through the buttresses while a trillion electric fingers reached through the superfluid shields, then through their thin skulls, momentarily playing with everyone’s sanity.

The car reached the upper atmosphere, and braked, the terrific gees bruising flesh and shattering minor bones. Emergency genes awoke, weaving protein analogs and knit-ring the most important aches in moments. The bridge was rooted in a hillside of cold rusting iron and black jungle. Despite a heavily overcast sky, the air was brilliant and furnace-hot, every breath tasting of metals and nervous sweat. The captains unloaded their supplies. As team leader, Washen gave orders that everyone already knew by heart. Their car was led from the bridge, then reconfigured. Their new vehicle was loaded and tested, and the captains were tested by their autodocs: newly implanted genes were already churning away, helping their flesh adapt to the heat and metal-rich environment. Then Miocene, sitting in a nearby encampment, gave her blessing, and Washen lifted off, steering toward their appointed study site.

The countryside was broken and twisted, split by fault fines and raw mountains and countless volcanic vents. The vents had been quiet, some for a century, some for a decade, or in some cases, for days. Yet the surrounding terrain was alive, adorned with pseudotrees reminiscent of enormous mushrooms, each pressed flush against its neighbors, their lacquered black faces feeding on the dazzling blue light.

Marrow was at least as durable as the captains flying above it. Growth rates were phenomenal, and for more reasons than the abundant light or a hyper-efficient photosynthesis. Early findings supported an early hypothesis: the jungle was also feeding through its roots, the chisellike tips forcing their way through fissures, finding hot springs fat with thermophilic bacteria.

But were the aquatic ecosystems as productive? That was Washen’s little question, and she had selected a small, metal-choked lake for study. They arrived on schedule, and after circling the lake twice, she set down on a slab of frozen black slag. The rest of the day was spent setting up their lab and quarters, and specimen traps, and as a precaution, installing a defense perimeter—three paranoid AIs chat did nothing but think the worst of every passing bug and spore.

Night was mandatory.

Despite the perpetual light, Miocene insisted that each captain sleep four full hours, then invest another hour in food and ritual chores.

On schedule, Washen’s team climbed into their six popup shelters, stripped out of their field uniforms, then lay awake, listening to the steady buzzing of the jungle, counting the seconds until it was time to rise again.

They sat in the open at breakfast, in a neat circle, and gazed up at the sky. A shifting wind had carried away the clouds, bringing hotter, drier air and even more fight. The chamber’s distant wall was silvery-white and smooth and remote. The captains’ base camp was a dark blemish visible only because of the clear air. With the distance and the glare, the bridge had vanished. If Washen was careful, she could almost believe they were the only people on the world. If she was lucky, she forgot that elaborate telescopes were watching her sitting on her aerogel chair, eating her scheduled rations, and now, with her right hand, scratching the damp back of her very damp right ear.

Diu sat on her right, and when she glanced at him, he smiled wistfully, as if reading her thoughts.

“I know what we need,’ Washen announced.

Diu asked, ‘What do we need?”

“A ceremony. Some little ritual before we can start.” She rose and walked down to the lake, not sure why until she arrived. Blackish water lapped against rusting stones. Bending at the knees, she let one of her hands dip beneath the surface, feeling its easy heat, and between the fingers, the greasy presence of mud and life. A stand of dome-headed bog plants caught her gaze, and beside it was a specimen trap. Filled, as it happened. Washen rose and wiped her hand dry against her uniform, then carefully unfastened the trap and brought it back to camp.

On Marrow, pseudoinsects filled most animal riches.

In their trap was a six-winged dragonfly, moonstone blue and longer than a forearm. With the other captains watching, Washen gently eased her victim from the netting, folding back the wings and holding the body steady with her left hand as the right wielded a laser torch. The head was cut free, and the body kicked, then died. Then she stripped the carcass of its wings and its tail, the fat thorax set inside their tiny field kitchen. The broiling took seconds. With a dull boom, the carapace split open. Then she grabbed a lump of the hot blackish meat, and with a grimace, made herself bite and chew.

Diu laughed gently.

Another captain, Saluki, was first to say, “We aren’t supposed to.”

A twelfth-grade named Broq added, “Miocene’s orders. Unless there’s an emergency, we stick to our rations.”

Washen forced herself to swallow.

Then with a wide smile, she told them, “And you won’t want to eat this again. Believe me.”

There weren’t any native viruses to catch, or toxins that their reinforced genetics couldn’t destroy or piss away. Miocene was playing the role of the cautious mother, and where was the harm?

Washen passed out the ceremonial meat.

Wanting to please her team leader, Saluki put the flesh to her tongue, then swallowed it whole.

Broq protested, then managed the same trick.

The next two, ship-born siblings named Promise and Dream, winked slyly at the sky and told Washen, “Thank you.”

Last to accept his share was Diu, and his first bite was tiny. But he didn’t grimace, and he took the rest of the carcass, his white teeth yanking out a fatrich chunk that he chewed before swallowing.

Then with an odd littie laugh, he told everyone, “It’s not too horrible.”

He said, “If my mouth just quit burning, I think I’d almost enjoy the taste.”

Ten

Weeks of relentless work made possibility look like hard fact.

Marrow had been carved from the ship’s heart. Or more properly, it was carved from the core of the young jupiter that would eventually become the Great Ship.

The world’s composition and their own common sense told the captains as much. Whoever the builders were, they must have started by wrenching the uranium and thorium and other radionuclides from the rest of the jupiter, then injecting them into the core. With buttressing fields, the world was compressed, its iron packed closer and closer before the exposed chamber wall was braced with hyperfiber. How that was accomplished, no one knew. Even Aasleen, with her engineering genius, just shook her head and said, “Damned if I know.” Yet billions of years later, without apparent help from the builders or anyone else, this vast machine was still purring along quite nicely.

But why bother with such a marvel?

The obvious, popular reason was that the ship needed to be a rigid body. Tectonics fueled by any internal heat would have melted the chambers and shattered every stone ceiling, probably within the first few thousand years. But why go to so much trouble and expense to create Marrow? If you’ve got this kind of energy at your disposal, why not just lift the uranium out into space where you could put it to good use?

Unless it was used here, of course.

Some captains suggested that Marrow was the nearly molten remnant of an enormous fission reactor.

“Except there are easier, more productive ways to make energy,” others pointed out, their voices more polite than gentle.

But what if the world was designed to store energy?

It was Aasleen*s suggestion: by tweaking the buttresses, the builders could have forced the world to rotate. With patience and power—two resources they must have had in abundance—the builders could have given it a tremendous velocity. Spinning inside a vacuum, held intact by the buttresses as well as a vanished blanket of hyperfiber, this massive iron ball would have served as a considerable flywheel.

Slowly, slowly, that energy was bled away by the empty ship.

Somewhere between the galaxies, the rotation fell to nothing, and that’s when the ship’s systems eased themselves into hibernation.

Aasleen went as far as creating an elaborate digital, as real to the eye as could be. In the early universe, heavy elements were scarce. The builders harvested the radionuclides from above and buried them here, and as Marrow grew hotter and hotter, its hyperfiber blanket began to decay. Degrade. And die.

Hyperfiber was rich in carbon and oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, every atom aligned just so and every bond strengthened with tiny predictable quantum pulses. Stressed past its limits, old hyperfiber would just fall apart, and the newly reactive elements would start dancing in celebration, giving life a reasonable chance to be born.

“It’s absolutely obvious,” Aasleen declared. “Once you see it, you can’t believe anything else. You just can’t!”

She made that dare at a weekly briefing.

Each of the team leaders was sitting in the illusion of a Master’s conference room, each perched in an black aerogel chair, sweating in Marrow’s heat. The surrounding room was sculpted from fight and shadow, and sitting at the head of the long pearlwood table, between imposing gold busts of herself, was the Master’s projection. She seemed alert but remarkably quiet. The expectation for these briefings was for crisp reports and upbeat attitudes. Grand theories were a surprise. But after Aasleen had finished, and after a contemplative pause, the Master smiled, telling her imaginative captain, “That’s an intriguing possibility. Thank you, darling. Very much.”

Then to the others, “Considerations? Any?”

Her smile brought a wave of complimentary noise.

Washen doubted they were exploring someone’s dead battery. But this wasn’t the polite moment to list the problems with flywheels and life’s origins. Besides, the bioteams were reporting next, and she had her own illuminations to share.

A tremor interrupted the compliments.

The image of one captain shook, followed by others. Knowing who sat where made it possible to guess the epicenter. When Washen felt the first jolt, then the rolling aftershocks, she realized it was a big quake, even for Marrow.

An alert silence took hold.

Washen was suddenly aware of her own sweat. A sweet oil, volatile and sweetly scented, rose up out of her nervous pores, then evaporated, leaving her flesh chilled despite the endless heat.

Then the Master, immune to the quake, lifted her wide hand, announcing in a smooth, abrupt way, “We need to discuss your timetable.”

What about the bioteams?

“You’re being missed up here. Which is what you hope to hear, I’m sure.” The woman laughed for a moment, alone. Then she added, “Our delegation fiction isn’t clever enough, or flexible enough, and the crew are getting suspicious.”

Miocene nodded knowingly.

Then the Master lowered her hand, explaining, “Before I have a panic to fend off, I need to bring you home again.” Smiles broke out.

Some of the captains were tired of the discomforts; others simply thought about the honors and promotions waiting above.

Washen cleared her throat, then asked, “Do you mean everyone, madam?”

“For the moment. Yes.”

She shouldn’t have been surprised that the cover story was leaking. Hundreds of captains couldn’t just vanish without comment. And Washen shouldn’t have felt disappointment. Even during the last busy weeks, she found herself wishing that the fiction was real. She wanted her and her colleagues off visiting some high-technology exophobes, trying to coax them into a useful trust. That would a difficult, rewarding challenge. But now, hearing that their mission was finished, she suddenly thought of hundreds of projects worth doing with her little lake—enough work to float an entire century.

As mission leader, it was Miocene’s place to ask:

“Do you want us cutting our work short, madam?”

The Master set one hand on one of the busts. For her, the room and its furnishings were genuine, and the captains were illusions.

“Mission plans can always be rewritten,” she reminded them. “What’s vital is that you finish your surveys of both hemispheres. Be sure there aren’t any big surprises. And I’d like your most critical studies wrapped up. Ten ship-days should be adequate. More than. Then you’ll come home again, leaving drones to carry on the work, and we can take our time deciding on our next important step.”

Smiles wavered, but none crumbled.

Miocene whispered, “Ten days,” with a tentative respect.

“Is there a problem?”

“Madam,” the Submaster began, “I would feel a little more at ease if we could be sure. That Marrow isn’t a threat. Madam.”

There was a pause, and not just because the Master was thousands of kilometers removed from them. It was a lengthy, unnerving silence. Then the captain’s captain looked off into the illusionary distance, asking, “Considerations? Any?”

It would be a disruption.

The other Submasters agreed with Miocene. To accomplish that work in ten days, with confidence, would require every captain’s help. That included those with the support teams. The base camp might have to be abandoned, or nearly so. Which was an acceptable risk, perhaps. But those mild, conciliatory words were obscured by clenched hands and distant, unsettled gazes.

The Master absorbed the criticisms without comment.

Then she turned to her future Submaster, saying, “Washen,” with a certain razored tone. “Do you have any considerations to add here, darling?”

Washen hesitated as long as she dared.

“Perhaps Marrow was a flywheel* she finally allowed. Ignoring every puzzled face, she nodded and said, “Madam.”

“Is this a joke?” the Master responded, her voice devoid of amusement. “Aren’t we discussing your timetable?”

“But if this was a flywheel,” Washen continued, “and if these magical buttresses ever weakened, even for an instant, Marrow would have thrown itself to pieces. A catastrophic failure. The hyperfiber blanket wouldn’t have absorbed the angular momentum, and it would have shattered, and the molten iron would have struck the chamber wall, and the shock waves would have passed up through the ship.” She offered a series of simple, coarse calculations. Then avoiding Aasleen’s glare, she added, “Maybe this was an elaborate flywheel. But it also might have made an effective self-destruct mechanism. We just don’t know, madam. We don’t know the builders’ intentions. We can’t even guess if they had enemies, real or imagined. But if there are answers, I can’t think of a better place to look.”

The Masters face was unreadable, impenetrable. Giant brown eyes closed, and finally, slowly, she shook her head, smiling in a pained fashion. “Since my first moment on board this glorious vessel,” she proclaimed, “I have nourished one guiding principle: the builders, the architects, whoever they were, would never have endangered their marvelous creation.”

Washen wished for the same confidence.

Then that apparition of light and sound rose to her feet, leaning across the golden busts and the bright pearl-wood, and she said, “You need a change of duty, Washen. You and your team will take the lead. Help us explore the far hemisphere. If it’s there, find your telltale clue. Then once your surveys are finished, everyone comes home.

“Agreed?”

“As you wish, madam,” said Washen. Said everyone.

Then Washen noticed Miocene’s surreptitious glance, something in her narrowed eyes saying, “Nice try darling.” And with that look came the faintest hint of respect.

Eleven

On three distinct occasions, flocks of pterosaur drones had intensively mapped this region. Yet as Washen retraced the machines’ path, she realized that even the most recent survey, completed eight days ago, was too old to be useful. Battered by quakes, a once-flat landscape had been heaved skyward, then split open. Torrents of molten iron ran down the new slopes. Over the hushed murmur of the engine, she could hear the iron’s voice, deep and steady, and massive, and fantastically angry. Washen flew parallel to the fierce river, and where three maps showed a great oxbow lake, the iron pooled, consuming the last of the water and the mud. Columns of filthy steam and hydrogen gas rose skyward, then twisted to the east. As an experiment, Washen flew into the steam. Samples were ingested by the car’s airscoops, then passed through filters and a hundred sensors and even a simple microscope, and peering into the scope, Diu started to giggle, saying, “Wouldn’t you know? Life.”

Riding inside the steam were spores and eggs and half-born insects, encased in tough bio ceramics and indifferent to the blistering heat. Inside the tip of one needle flask, too small to be seen with the naked eye, were enough pond weeds and finned beetles to conquer a dozen new lakes.

Catastrophe was the driving force on Marrow.

That insight struck Washen every day, every hour, and it always arrived with a larger principle in tow:

In one form or another, disaster had always ruled the universe.

The steam could disperse abruptly, giving way to the sky’s blue light, the chamber wall hanging far overhead, and beneath, stretching as far as Washen could see, lay the stark black bones of a jungle.

Fumes and fire had incinerated every tree.

Every scrambling bug.

The carnage must have been horrific. Yet the blaze had passed days ago, and new growth was already pushing up from the gnarled trunks and fresh crevices, thousands of glossy black umbrellalike leaves shining in the superheated air.

Diu said something in passing. Broq leaned over Washen s shoulder, repeating the question. “Should we stop? And have a look, maybe?”

In another fifty kilometers, they would be as far from the bridge as possible. The proverbial end of the world. Chilled champagne and some stronger pleasures waited for that symbolic moment. They would have to wait patiently, Washen decided, and through an implanted subsystem, she asked the car to find a level cool piece of ground where six captains could enjoy a little stroll.

The car hovered for a thoughtful instant, then dropped and settled.

The outside air was cool enough to breathe, if only in quick little sips. Following the mission’s protocol, everyone took samples of the burnt soil and likely rocks, and they cut away pieces of things alive and dead. But mostly this was an excuse to experience this hard landscape, once strange and now, after weeks of work, utterly familiar.

Promise and Dream were examining a broad white tree stump.

“Asbestos,” Promise observed, fingers rubbing against the powdery bark. “Pulled from the ground or out of the air, or maybe just cooked up fresh. Then laid around the roots, see? Like a blanket.”

“The trunk and branches were probably lipid rich,” her brother added. “A living candle, practically”

“Meant to burn.”

“Happy to burn.”

“Born to burn.”

“Out of love.”

Then they giggled to themselves, enjoying their little song.

Washen didn’t ask what the words meant. These ditties were ancient and impenetrable; even the siblings didn’t seem sure where they came from.

Kneeling beside Dream, she saw dozens of flat-faced shoots erupting from the ravaged trunk. On Marrow, blessed with so much energy and so little peace, vegetation didn’t store energy as sugars. Fats and oils and potent, highly compressed waxes were the norm. Some species had reinvented batteries, stockpiling electrical energies inside their intricate tissues. How much time would it take for chance and caprice to do this elaborate work? Five billion years? At the very least, she guessed. There weren’t any fossils to ask, but the genetic surveys showed a fantastic diversity, implying a truly ancient beginning. They were in a garden that could be, perhaps, ten or fifteen billions years old. With that latter estimate verging on the preposterous.

Whatever was true, leaving Marrow was wrong.

Washen couldn’t stop thinking it, in secret.

To the siblings, she said, “I’m curious. Judging by their genes, what two species are the two most dissimilar?”

Promise and Dream grew serious, unwinding their deep, efficient memories. But before either could offer a guess, there was a hard jolt followed by a string of deep shudders, and Washen found herself unceremoniously thrown back on her rear end.

She had to laugh, for a moment.

Then somewhere nearby, two great masses of iron dragged themselves against each other, and piercing squealing roars split the air, sounding like monsters in the throes of some terrific fight.

When the quake passed, Washen stood and casually adjusted her uniform.Then she announced, “Time to leave.”

But most of her team was already making for the car. Only Diu waited, looking at her and not quite smiling when he said, “Too bad.”

She knew what he meant, nodding and adding, “It is,”

their eight-day-old map was a fossil, and not a particularly useful fossil, at that.

Washen blanked her screen, flying on instinct now. In another ten minutes, maybe less, they would reach their destination. No other team would travel this far. Drawing a sturdy little satisfaction from the thought, she started to turn, ready to ask whoever was closest to check on their champagne.

Her mouth opened, but a distorted, almost inaudible voice interrupted her.

“Report… all teams…!”

“Who’s that?” asked Broq.

Miocene. But her words were strained through some kind of piercing electronic wail.

“What do… see…?” the Submaster called out.

Then, again, “Teams… report…!”

Washen tried for more than an audio link, and failed.

A dozen other team leaders were chattering in a ragged chorus.

Zale boasted, “We’re on schedule here.”

Kyzkee observed, “Odd com interference… otherwise, systems nominal…”

Then with more curiosity than worry, Aasleen inquired, “Why, madam? Do you see something wrong?”

There was a long, jangled hum.

Washen linked her nexuses to the car’s sensor array, finding Diu already there. With a tight little voice, he said, “Shit.”

“What—” Washen cried out.

Then a shrill roar swept away every voice, every thought. And the day brightened and brightened, fat ribbons of lightning flowing across the sky, then turning, moving with a liquid purpose, aiming straight for them.

From the far side of the world came a twisted voice:

“The bridge… is it… do you see it… where…?”

The car lurched as if panicking, losing thrust and lift, then altitude, every one of its AIs failing. Washen deployed the manual controls, and centuries of routine drills made her concentrate, nothing existing now but their tumbling craft, her syrupy reflexes, and a wide expanse of cracked earth and burnt forest.

The next barrage of lightning was purple-white, and brighter, nothing visible but its wild seething glare.

Washen flew blind, flew by memory.

Their car was designed to endure heroic abuse. But every system was dead and its hyperfiber must have been degraded somehow, and when it struck the iron ground, the hull was twisted until its weakest point gave way, and it shattered. Restraining fields grabbed helpless bodies. Then their perfect mechanisms failed. Nothing but padded belts and gas bags held the captains in their seats. Flesh was jerked and ripped, and shredded. Bones were shattered and wrenched from their sockets, slicing through soft pink organs, then slammed together again. Then the seats were torn free of the floor, tumbling wildly across several hectares of iron and cooked stumps.

Washen never lost consciousness.

With a numbed curiosity, she watched her own legs and arms break and break again, and a thousand bruises spread into a single purple tapestry, every rib crushed to dust and her reinforced spine splintering until she was left without pain or a shred of mobility. Lying on her back, still lashed to her twisted chair, she couldn’t move her crushed head, and her words were slow and watery, the sloppy mouth filled with teeth and dying blood.

“Abandon,” she muttered.

Then, “Ship.”

She was laughing. Feebly, desperately.

A gray sensation rippled through her body.

Emergency genes were already awake, finding their home in a shambles. They immediately protected the brain, flooding what was living with oxygen and antiinflammatories, plus a blanket of comforting narcotics. Trusted, pleasant memories bubbled into her consciousness. For a little moment, Washen was a girl again, riding on the back of her pet whale. Then doctoring genes began rebuilding organs and the spine, cannibalizing meat for raw materals and energy, the captain’s body wracked with fever, sweating perfumed oils and black dead blood.

Within minutes, Washen felt herself growing smaller.

An hour after the crash, a wrenching pain swept through her. It was a favorable, almost comforting misery. She squirmed and wailed, and wept, and with weak, rebuilt hands, she freed herself from her ruined chair. Then on sloppy, unequal legs, she forced herself into a tilted stance.

Washen was twenty centimeters shorter, and frail. But she managed to limp to the nearest body, kneeling and wiping the carnage out of his face. Diu’s face, she realized. He was injured even worse than she. He had shriveled like old fruit, and his face had been driven into a craggy fist of iron. But his features were half-healed. Mixed with his misery was a clear defiance, and he managed a mutilated grin and a wink, his surviving gray eye focusing on Washen, the battered mouth spitting teeth as he lisped, “Wonderful, you look. Madam. As always…”

Saluki was impaled on a spar of browned hyperfiber.

Broq’s legs were severed, and in a numbed anguish, he had dragged himself to the legs and pressed them against the wrong sockets.

But the siblings were the worst. Dream had slammed into an iron slipfault, and her brother then impacted against her. Flesh and bone were mixed together. Slowly, slowly, their carnage was separating itself, their healing barely begun.

Washen repositioned Broq’s legs. Then with Diu’s help, she eased Saluki off the spar and set her in its shade to mend. And with Diu keeping watch over the siblings, she searched the wreckage for anything useful. There were field rations and field uniforms, but the machines wouldn’t operate. She tried to coax them awake, but none of them was well enough to declare, “I am broken.”

If there was luck, it was that the crust seemed stable for the moment. They could afford to do nothing but heal and rest, eating triple shares of their rations. Later, Saluki even managed to find two pop-up shelters and their survival packs, plus a full diamond flask of champagne. Hot as the ground, by now. But delicious.

Sitting in the shadow of a pop-up, the six captains drank the flask dry.

Pretending it was night, they huddled and discussed tomorrow, options named and weighed, and most of them discarded.

Wait, and watch; that was their collective decision.

“We’ll give Miocene three days to find us,” said Washen. Then she caught herself trying to access her implanted timepiece, out of pure habit. But every one of her implants, every minuscule nexus, had been fried by the same electric fire that had ripped them out of the sky.

In a world without night, how long was three days?

They made their best guess, then waited an extra day, in case. But there wasn’t any trace of Miocene or any other captain. Whatever had crippled their car must have left everyone else powerless. Seeing no choice in the matter, Washen looked at each of her companions, and she smiled as if embarrassed, and she admitted to them:

“If we want to get home, it looks as if we’re just going to have to walk.”

Twelve

Do something new, and do nothing else, and do that one thing relentlessly—particularly if it is painful and dangerous and utterly unplanned—and your memory begins to play one of its oldest, sneakiest tricks.

Washen couldn’t remember being anywhere else.

She would find herself standing at the base of a tall newborn mountain, or deep within some trackless black-bellied jungle, and it was as if everything she remembered about her former life was nothing but an elaborate, impossible dream, more forgotten than remembered, and those memories, at their heart, utterly ridiculous.

This hike was a deadly business. Covering any distance was slow and treacherous work, even when the captains learned little tricks and big ones to keep themselves moving in what they prayed was the right direction.

Marrow despised them. It wanted them dead, and it didn’t care how it achieved their murder. And the hatred was obvious to everyone. Washen felt its mood every waking moment, yet she refused to admit it, at least in front of the others. Except for cursing, which didn’t count. “Fucking mountain, fucking wind, fucking shit-cating fucking weeds…!’ Everyone had their favorite insults, saving the most savage words for the worst challenges. “Stupid shit iron, I hate you! Hear me? I hate you, the same as you hate me!”

Each day was a hard march punctuated with the constant search for food. What they had eaten before as a ceremony became their standard fare: they caught giant insects, ripped loose their wings, and broiled them over hot fatty fires. The strong meat held enough calories and nutrients to put the captains back to full size again, and very nearly their old health. Washen slowly learned which insects tasted the least awful. A desperate descendant of hunting apes, she taught herself the bugs’ haunts and the best ways to catch them, and after what might have been the first year—or a little less, or maybe a little more—Washen didn’t fall asleep hungry anymore. No one had to live famished. Promise and Dream sampled the lush vegetation, vomiting what was bitter beyond words, but mastering the slow careful cooking of everything else.

Where the tongue adapts, the soul follows.

Early in that second year, there was a good day. Genuinely, truly good. Simple wakefulness began it for Washen and the others. The captains’ first meal was filling. Then the six of them began to jog toward the horizon, their few possessions carried on their hips and their wide wet backs. They were retracing their flight path. Without digital maps, they had to rely on shared memories of odd volcanic peaks and twisted black gorges and the occasional mineral-stained sea. Marrow enjoyed draining its seas and detonating its mountains, and that brought confusion, doubts, and delays. Where new barriers had been heaved skyward, they had to make long detours. At the first sign of being lost, the captains had to stop and reconnoiter. Without stars or a sun, there was always the risk of becoming profoundly and embarrassingly lost. But on that very good day, they held their course throughout. Diu found a knifelike ridge where field boots found easy running, and the sky was pleasantly overcast with a thin cooling drizzle falling over them, keeping them nearly cool. Pressing until comfortably exhausted, they ran to the next landmark—a vast black escarpment that loomed over them by days end.

Camp was made in the deepest shadows of a likely valley. A rainwater stream danced down a jerky narrow bed probably not fifty years old. Rainwater was always better than springwater. True, they could taste the iron in every swallow. And there was usually a sulfurous residue. But it wasn’t the mineral-choked, bacteria-choked stew that came from underground. In fact, it was cool enough for bathing, which was a genuine luxury. Washen scrubbed herself raw, then dressed—except for her battered boots—and she stretched out beneath an enormous umbrella tree, studying her long bare feet and the busy water and noticing an unexpected emotion that was inside her. It was an emotion that seemed, against all odds, to resemble contentment. Even happiness, in a diluted fashion.

Diu appeared. One moment, Washen was utterly alone, and then Diu came from no particular direction, the top of his uniform removed, dangling behind him like the spent carapace of a growing insect. Under one arm, he carried his dinner—a beetle-like apparition, black as band iron and longer than a forearm—and he turned and smiled at Washen in a way that implied that he already knew where she was. He smiled, and his dinner moved its eight legs in a steady, complaining fashion. He ignored the legs. Stepping closer, he offered a nebulous laugh, then asked, “Would you like to share?”

For a captain, he was pretty. Diu had a pretty chest, hairless and sculpted by the last hard year. And his gray eyes had a sparkle that only grew brighter when he stepped into the shadow of the umbrella tree.

Washen said, “Fine. Thank you.”

Diu just kept smiling.

For an instant, Washen felt uncomfortable, ill at ease. But when she searched for reasons, she discovered only that here was another one of those odd moments that she couldn’t have predicted. A thousand centuries old, yet she had never imagined that she would be sitting in a place like this, under these hard circumstances, staring at a man named Diu, her mouth genuinely growing wet from the anticipation.

For a well-cooked beetle, or for something else? Washen surprised herself, admitting to both of them, “I can’t remember the last time I was this happy’ Diu giggled for a moment. “It’s been a good, good day,” she confessed. He said, “Yes,” in a certain way.

Then Washen heard herself saying, “Tie your friend down. For now, would you?” Then she threw him her best handmade rope, adding, “Only if you want. If you don’t mind. I want to see you out of those clothes, Mr Beetleman.”

The bridge was their final landmark.

In the brilliant light, looking out from high on a windy ridge, the landmark resembled a rigid thread, dark and insubstantial against the silver-white chamber wall. Sheered off in the stratosphere, it was hundreds of kilometers too short. There was no escape route for them. But it was their destination. More than three years had been invested in reaching this place, and that was enough reason to keep marching past the usual fatigue. Yet this was exceptionally rough country, even for Marrow. And worse, the captains were traveling across the grain of every local fault and stream, and the little stretches of flat ground were choked with old jungles and elaborate deadfalls.

Reaching the last high ridge, they found more ridges waiting in ambush, and the bridge was a fatter thread, but still agonizingly distant.

They collapsed under the next ridge.

It wasn’t a true camp. They were lying where they fell in a rust-cushioned bowl surrounded by raw nickel, and when a mist turned into a hard rain, they ignored it. Thousands of zigzagging kilometers and three years had made Washen and her team indifferent to this little dose of weather. They lay on their backs, breathing when they needed, and quietly, with soft exhausted voices, they made themselves mutter hopeful words.

Imagine the other captains’ surprise, they told each other.

Imagine, they said, when we come out of the jungle tomorrow…! Won’t all this be worth it, just to see the surprise on their noble faces…?

Except no one was waiting to be caught off guard. Late that next day, they arrived at the bridge and found a long-abandoned encampment, overgrown and forgotten. The solid, trusted hilltop where the bridge was rooted had been split open by quakes, and the hyperfiber was a sickly, degraded black. The structure itself was tilting precariously away from them. Dead doors were propped open with a simple iron post. A makeshift ladder reached up the dark inner shaft, but judging by the frosting of soft rust, no one had used the ladder for months. If not for several years.

Circling through the jungle, Broq found a sketchy path. They picked a random direction and followed the path until it was swallowed by the black vegetation. Then they turned and retraced their course until the path was wide enough that a person could jog, then run, relaxing because someone had been down this way. Someone was here. And suddenly Washen was in the lead, streaking ahead at a full sprint.

But the time they reached the’ river bottom, everyone was breathless.

The path bled into a wider, well-worn trail, but they had to slow again, panting as they jogged, coming around every bend with a jittery sense of anticipation.

In the end, they were the ones with surprised faces.

The six captains were trotting in the bright shadows. Some trick of the light hid the woman standing before them. The light and her mirrored uniform kept Washen from seeing her until the familiar face seemed to pop into existence. Miocene’s face, unchanged at first glance. She looked regal and well chilled. “It took you long enough,” the Submaster deadpanned. And only then was there a smile and an odd tilt to the face, and she added, “It’s good to see you. All of you. Honestly, I’d given up all hope.”

Washen swallowed her anger along with her questions.

Her companions asked the obvious question for her. Who else was here? they wondered. How were they making do? Did any machinery work? Had the Master been in contact with them? Then before any answers could be offered, Diu inquired, “What sort of relief mission is coming for us?”

“It’s a cautious mission,” Miocene replied. “So cautious that it fools you. It makes you believe that it doesn’t even exist.”

Her own anger was rich and strong, and well practiced.

The Submaster beckoned them to follow, and as they walked in the bright shade, she explained the essentials. Aasleen and others had cobbled together several telescopes, and at least one captain was always watching the base camp overhead. From what they could see, the diamond blister was intact. Every building was intact. But the drones and beacons were dead, and the reactor was off-line. A three-kilometer stub of the bridge was next to the blister, and it would make the perfect foundation for a new structure. But Miocene shook her head, quietly admitting that there wasn’t any trace of captains, or anyone else, trying to mount any sort of rescue attempt.

“Maybe they think we’re dead,” said Diu, desperate to be charitable.

“I don’t think we’re dead,” Miocene countered. “And even if we were, someone should be a little more interested in our bones, and in answers.”

Washen didn’t say one word. After three years of hard work, lousy food, and forced hopefulness, she suddenly felt sick and desperately sad.

The Submaster slowed her pace, working her way back through the questions.

“Every machine was ruined by the Event,” she explained. “That’s our little name for that very big phenomenon.The Event. From what we’ve pieced together, the buttresses merged. Those beneath us, and those above us. And when it happened, our cars and drones, sensors and AIs, were left as so much fancy trash.”

“Can’t you fix them?” asked Promise.

“We can’t even be sure how they were broken,” Miocene replied.

People nodded, and waited.

She offered a distracted smile, admitting, “We are surviving, however. Wooden shelters. Some iron tools. Pendulum clocks. Steam power when we go to the trouble. And enough homemade equipment, like the telescopes, that lets us do some toddler-type science.”

The trail made a slow turn.

The jungle’s understory had been cut down and beaten back, leaving the mature trees to give precious shade. The new encampment stretched out on all sides. Like anything built by determined captains, the community was orderly. Each house was square and strong, built from the gray trunks of the same kind of tree, iron axes squaring them up and notching them and the little gaps patched with a ruddy mortar. The paths were lined with smaller logs, and someone had given each path its own name. Center. Main. Left-behind. Rightbehind. Golden. And every captain was in uniform, and smiling, standing together in careful lines, trying to hide the weariness in their eyes and their sudden voices.

More than two hundred captains shouted, “Hello!”

In a practiced chorus, they shouted, “Welcome back!”

Washen could smell their sweet perspiration as well as an assortment of home-brewed perfumes. Then the wind gusted, bringing her the rich, very familiar odor of bug flesh broiling over a low fire.

A feast was being prepared, in their honor.

She spoke, finally. “How did you know we were coming?”

“Your bootprints were noticed,” Miocene reported. “Up by the bridge.”

“I saw them,” said Aasleen. She stepped forward, glad to take credit. “Counted them, measured them. Knew it was you, and came home to report.”

“There’s a quicker route than the one you found,” Miocene cautioned.

“Quicker than three years?* Diu joked.

Am embarrassed laughter blossomed, then fell away. Then Aasleen felt like telling them, “It’s been closer to four.”

She had a clever quick face, skin black as band iron, and among her peers, she seemed the only happy soul -this one-time engineer who had gradually become a captain, and who now had the responsibility of reinventing everything that humans had ever accomplished. Starting from scratch, with minimal resources… and she couldn’t have looked more contented…

“You didn’t have clocks,” she warned them. “You were living by how you felt, and humans, left without markers, fall into thirty- or thirty-two-hours days.”

Which wasn’t a surprise to anyone, of course.

Yet Saluki exclaimed, “Four years,” and marched into the brightest patch of light, glancing up through a gap in the canopy, perhaps trying to find the abandoned base camp. “Four long years…!”

If only a single captain had stayed behind at the base camp. One warm body could have called for help, or at least made the long climb to the fuel tank and leech habitat, then to the Master’s quarters… assuming, of course, that there was someone up there to find…

Thinking the worst, Washen recoiled. And finally, with her most careful voice, she forced herself to ask, “Who isn’t here?”

Miocene recited a dozen names.

Eleven of them had been Washen’s friends and associates. The last name was Hazz—a Submaster and a voyage-long colleague of Miocene’s. “He was the last to die,” she explained. “Two months ago, a fissure opened, and the molten iron caught him.”

A silence fell over the little village.

“I watched him die,” Miocene admitted, her eyes distant, and damp. And furious.

“I’ve got one goal now,” the Submaster warned. Speaking in a grim, hateful voice, she said, “I want the means to return to the world above. Then I will go to the Master myself and I’ll ask her why she sent us here. Was it to explore this place? Or was this just the best awful way to be rid of us…?”

Thirteen

Bitterness served the woman well.

Miocene despised her fate, and with a searing rage, she blamed those unconscionable acts that had abandoned her on this horrible, horrible world. Every disaster, and there were many of them, helped feed her emotions and fierce energies. Every death was a tragedy erasing an ocean of life and experience. And each rare success was each a minuscule step toward making right what was plainly and enormously wrong.

The Submaster rarely slept, and when her eyes dipped shut, she would descend into vivid, confused nightmares that eventually shook her awake, then lingered, left in the mind like some sophisticated neurological toxin.

Her immortal’s constitution kept her alive.

Ancestral humans would have perished here. Exhaustion or burst vessels or even madness would have been the natural outcome of so little sleep and so much undiluted anger. But no natural incarnation of humanity could have lived a single day in this environment, subsisting on harsh foods and ingesting every sort of heavy metal with each breath and sip and bite. Once it was obvious that the Master wasn’t pulling her fat carcass down the tunnel to rescue them, it also become plain that if Miocene were to escape, it would take time. Deep reaches of time. And persistence. And genius. And luck, naturally. Plus everyone else’s immortal constitution, too.

Hazz’s death had driven home every hard lesson. Two years later, she still couldn’t stop seeing him. A gregarious, Earthborn man who loved to talk about bravery, he was nothing but brave at the end. Miocene had watched helplessly as a river of slag-covered iron trapped him on a little island of old metal. Hazz had stood up tall, looking at the fierce slow current, breathing despite the charring of his lungs, putting on a grimacing sort of smile that seemed, like everything else in this awful place, utterly useless.

They tried desperately to save him.

Aasleen and her crew of engineer-minded souls had started three separate bridges, each melting before they could finish. And all that time, the iron river got deeper, and swifter, shrinking the island down to a knob on which the doomed man managed to balance, using one foot until it was too badly burned, then using the other.

He was like a heron bird, in the end.

Then the current surged, and the thin black slag burst open, a red-hot tongue of iron dissolving Hazz’s boots, then boiling away both of his feet and setting fire to his flesh. But the engines of his metabolism found ways to keep him alive. Engulfed in flames, he actually managed to stand motionless for a long moment, the grimacing smile getting brighter and sadder, and very tired. Then with every captain watching, he said something, the words too soft to be audible, and Miocene screamed, “No!,” loudly enough that Hazz must have heard her voice, because suddenly, on boding legs, he made an heroic attempt to walk himself across the slag and molten metal.

His tough, adaptable body reached its limits. Quietly and slowly, Hazz slumped forward, his mirrored uniform and his smiling face and a thick tangle of blond-white hair bursting into dirty flames. The water inside him exploded into steam and rust and hydrogen. Then there was nothing left but his shockingly white bones, and a wave of hotter, swifter iron pulled the skeleton apart and took the bones downstream, while a rising cloud of blistering fumes drove the other captains away.

Miocene wished that she could have retrieved the skull.

Bioceramics were tough, and the tough mind could have survived that heat for a little while longer. And weren’t there stories of miracles being accomplished by autodocs and patient surgeons?

But even if he was past every resurrection, Miocene wished she had Hazz’s skull now. In her dreams she saw herself setting it beside one of the Master’s golden busts, and with a deceptively calm voice, she would tell the Master who this had been and how he had died, and then with a truer, angrier voice, she would explain to the captains’ captain why she was a disgusting piece of filth, first for every awful thing that she had done, then for every good thing that she had failed to do.

Bitterness brought with it an incredible, fearless strength.

More and more, Miocene trusted that strength and her resolve, and more than at any time in her spectacularly long life, she found herself with a focus, a pure, unalloyed direction to her life.

Miocene relished her bitterness.

There were moments, and there were sleepless nights, when she wondered how she had ever succeeded in life. How could anyone accomplish anything without this rancorous and vengeful heart that would never, no matter what the abuse, stop beating inside its blazing, fierce chest?

Washen’s return had been an unexpected success. And like most successes, it was followed by disaster. The nearby crust rippled and tore apart, a barrage of quakes shattering the river bottom as well as the nearby hillside. The old remnant of the bridge pitched sideways, and with a creaking roar, its sick hyperfiber shattered, the debris field reaching across fifty kilometers of newborn mountains.

The fall of the bridge was momentous, and unseen.

The captains’ encampment had already been obliterated by a mammoth geyser of white-hot metal. The neat houses were vaporized. Two more captains died, and the survivors fled with a bare minimum of tools and provisions. Lungs were cooked during the retreat. Hands and feet were blistered. Tongues swelled and split wide, and eyes were boiled away. The strongest dragged the weakest on crude Utters, and finally, after days of stumbling, they wandered into a distant valley, into a grove of stately blue-black trees that lined a deep pool of sweet rainwater, and there, finally, the captains collapsed, too spent to curse-As if to bless them, the trees began discharging tiny balloons made from gold. The shady, halfway cool air was filled with the balloons’ glint and the dry music made when they brushed against one another.

“The virtue tree,” Diu called them, snagging one of the golden orbs with both hands, squeezing until he squeezed too hard and it split, hydrogen escaping with a soft hiss, the skin collapsing into a whiff of soft gold leaf.

Miocene set her people to work. New homes and new streets needed to be built, and this seemed an ideal location. With iron axes and their enduring flesh, they managed to hack down half a dozen of the virtue trees. The golden fat inside the wood was nourishing, and the wood itself was easily split along its grain. The beginnings of twenty fine houses were laid out before the hard ground ripped open with an anguished roar. Wearily, the captains fled again.

Again, they scrambled over ridges sharper than their axes, and the country behind them burned, then melted, consumed by a lake of iron and slag.

Nomadic blood had taken hold.

When they settled again, no one expected to linger. Miocene asked for simple houses that could be rebuilt anywhere in a ship’s day. She ordered Aasleen and her people to build lighter tools, and everyone else stockpiled food for the next migration. Only when those necessities were assured could she risk the next step: they needed to study their world, and if possible, learn to read its fickle moods.

Miocene put Washen in charge of the biological teams.

The first-grade captain picked twenty helpers, including the five from her first team, and with few tools but keen senses and their good memories, they fanned out across the nearby countryside.

Three months and a day later, every team brought home their reports.

“Breeding cycles are the key,” Washen reported. “Maybe there are other keys. But certain cycles are pretty close to infallible, it seems.”

The captains were packed into the long narrow building that served as a cafeteria and meeting hall. The central table was a block of iron dressed with gray wooden planks. Chairs and stools were crowded around the table. Bowls were filled with grilled flame ants and sugarhearts, then ignored. Cold tea was the drink of choice, and it smelled acidic and familiar, mixing with the tired oily sweat of women and men who had been in the field too long.

Miocene nodded, at Washen and at everyone. “Go on, darling. Explain.”

“Our virtue trees,” said the first-grade. “Those gold balloons are their eggs, just as we assumed. But they typically make only one or two in a day. Unless they feel the crust becoming unstable, which is when they use all of their stockpiled gold. In a rush. Since the adults are about to be torched, and the land will be remade—”

“If we see another show,” Diu interrupted, “we’re being warned. We’ve got a day, or less, to get out of here.”

In a grim fashion, the other captains laughed.

Miocene disapproved with a look and a cold silence, but nothing more. Normally, she demanded staff meetings that were disciplined and efficient. But this was a special day, and more special than anyone else had guessed.

Washen’s team spoke about the species worth watching and each warning sign of impending eruptions.

During stable times, certain winged insects transformed themselves into fat caterpillars, some longer than any arm. If they grew new wings, the stability was finished.

At the first sign of trouble, crab-sized, highly social beetles launched themselves in fantastic migrations, thousands and millions scrambling overland. Though, as Dream noted, the herds often went charging off in the very worst direction.

At least three predatory species, hammer-wings included, would suddenly arrive in areas soon to be abandoned. Perhaps it was an adaption to the good hunting that would come when locals rushed out of their burrows and nests.

In dangerous times, certain caterpillars sprouted wings and took up the predatory life.

And slight changes in water temperature and chemistry caused aquatic communities to panic or grow complacent. Just what those changes were, no one was certain. It would take delicate instruments and years more experience to read the signs as easily as the simplest black scum seemed to manage it.

Everything said was duly recorded. A low-grade captain sat at the far end of the table, taking copious notes on the huge bleached wings of copperflies.

Once finished, it was Miocene’s place to invite questions.

“How about our virtue trees?” asked Aasleen. “Are they behaving themselves?”

“As if they’ll live forever,” Washen replied. “They’re still early in their growth cycles, which means nothing. Eruptions can come anytime. But they’re putting their energies into wood and fat, not into gold balloons. And since their roots are deep and sensitive, they know what we can’t. I can guarantee that we can remain here for another two or three, or perhaps even four whole days.” Again, the grim laughter.

Washen’s confidence was contagious, and useful. Losing her would have been a small disaster. Yet years ago, the Master had sent this talented woman to the far side of Marrow, doing her accidental best to get rid of her.

Miocene nodded, then lifted a hand.

Quietly, almost too quietly to be heard, she said, “Cycles.”

The closest captains turned, watching her.

“Thank you, Washen.” The Submaster looked past her, and shivered. Without warning, she felt her own private eruption. Thoughts, fractal as any quake, made her tremble. Just for the briefest moment, she was happy.

Diu asked, “What was that, madam?”

Again, louder this time, Miocene said, “Cycles.”

Everyone blinked, and waited.

Then she turned to the leader of the geologic team, and with a barely hidden delight, she asked, “What about Marrow’s tectonics? Are they more active, or less?”

The leader was named Twist. He was a Second Chair Submaster, and if anything, he was more serious-minded than Miocene. With a circumspect nod, Twist announced, “Our local faults are more active. We have nothing but crude seismographs, of course. But the quakes are twice as busy as when we arrived on Marrow.”

“How about worldwide?”

“Really, madam… at this point, there’s no competent, comprehensive way for me to address that question…”

“What is it, madam?” asked Diu.

Honestly, she wasn’t absolutely certain.

But Miocene looked at each of the faces, wondering what it was about her face that was causing so much puzzlement and concern. Then quietly, in the tone of an apology, she said, “This may be premature. Rash. Perhaps even insane.” She swallowed and nodded, and more to herself than to them, she said, “There is another cycle at work here. A much larger, much more important cycle.”

There came the distant droning of a lone hammerwing, then silence.

“My self-appointed task,” Miocene continued, ‘is to keep watch on our former base camp. It’s a hopeless chore, frankly, and that’s why I don’t ask for anyone’s help. The camp is still empty. And until we can find the means, I think it will remain abandoned.”

A few of the captains nodded agreeably. One or two sipped at their pungent tea.

“We have only one small telescope, and a crude tripod.” Miocene was unfolding a copperfly wing, her long hands gently trembling as she told everyone, “I leave the telescope set on the east ridge, on flat ground inside a sheltered bowl, and all I use it for is to watch the camp. Five times every day, without exception.”

Someone said, “Yes, madam.”

Patiently, but not too patiently.

Miocene rose to her feet, spreading out the reddish wings covered with numbers and small neat words. “When we lived beneath the camp, we rarely adjusted our telescopes. Usually after a tremor or a big wind. But now that we’ve moved here, fifty-three kilometers east of original position… well, I’ll tell you… in these last weeks, I’ve twice had to adjust my telescope’s alignment. I did it again just this morning. Always nudging it down toward the horizon.”

Silence.

Miocene looked up from the numbers, seeing no one.

She asked herself, “How can that be?”

With a quiet, respectful voice, Aasleen suggested, “Tremors are throwing the telescope out of alignment. As you said.”

“No,” the Submaster replied. “The ground is flat. It’s always been flat. I’ve tested for that exact error.”

It was a steadily growing error; she saw it in the careful numbers.

Quietly, Miocene read her data. When she felt absolutely sure that she understood the answer, she asked, “What does this mean?”

Someone offered, “Marrow has started to rotate again.” The flywheel hypothesis, again.

Aasleen said,’It could be the buttresses. With a fraction of their apparent energies, they could act on the iron, causing it, and us, to move a few kilometers…”

A few kilometers. Yes.

One of Miocene’s long hands lifted high, silencing the others. “Perhaps,” she said with a little smile. “But there’s still another option. Involving the buttresses, but in a rather different fashion.”

No one spoke, or blinked.

“Imagine that the Event, whatever it was… imagine it was part of some grand cycle. And after it happened, the buttresses under our feet started to weaken. To loosen their grip on Marrow, if only just a little bit.”

“The planet expands,” said someone.

Said Washen.

“Of course,” Aasleen trumpeted. “The interior iron is under fantastic pressures, and if you took off the lid, even a little bit—”

Perhaps unconsciously, half a dozen captains inflated their cheeks.

Miocene grinned, if only for a moment. This very strange idea had taken hold of her gradually, and in the excitement of the moment, she summoned up old instincts, telling everyone. “This is premature. We’ll need measurements and many different studies, and even then we won’t be certain about anything. Not for a very long while.”

Washen glanced at the ceiling, perhaps imagining the faraway base camp.

Diu, that low-grade charmer, laughed softly. Happily. And he took his lover’s hand and squeezed until she noticed and smiled back at him.

“If the buttresses below us are weakening,” Aasleen pointed out, “then maybe the ones in the sky are getting dimmer, too.”

Twist said, “We can test that. Easily.”

Nothing was easy here, Miocene nearly warned them.

But instead of discouraging anyone, she took back those copperfly wings and her precious numbers, and with the simplest trigonometry, she interpolated a rugged Little estimate. Only in the dimmest back reaches of her mind did she hear Washen and the engineers spinning new hypotheses. If the expansion was real, perhaps it would give away clues about how the buttresses worked. Clues about what powered them, and why. Aasleen suggested that a cycle of expansion and compression was the obvious means through which excess heat, from nuclear decay or other sources, was bled away from Marrow. It might even explain how the bright buttresses overhead were refueled. The whole ad hoc hypothesis sounded perfectly reasonable. And perhaps it was even a little bit true. But its truth was inconsequential. All that mattered were the dry little answers appearing beneath Miocene’s stylus.

She lifted her head.

The motion was so abrupt that the room suddenly fell silent. A flock of jade-crickets broke into song, then, as if sensing a breach in etiquette, stopped.

“Assuming some kind of expansion,” Miocene told her captains, “this world of ours has grown a little less than a kilometer since the Event. And at this rate, assuming that Marrow can maintain this modest pace for another five thousand years… in another five millenia, the world will fill this entire chamber, and we’ll be able to walk back to our base camp.”

In her own grim, determined way, Miocene laughed.

“And after that,” she whispered, “if need be… we’ll be able to walk all the way home…”

Fourteen

It was sleeptime for the children.

Washen intended to visit the nursery. But as she approached she heard the gentle murmurs of a voice, and she hesitated, then eased closer, an adult caution and her own curiosity making a game out of this routine chore.

The community nursery was built from iron blocks and iron bricks, black umbra wood making the steeply pitched roof. Next to the cafeteria, this was the largest structure in the world, and easily the most durable. Washen leaned against the wall, an ear to one of the little shuttered windows, listening carefully, realizing that it was the oldest boy who was speaking, telling everyone a story.

“We call them the Builders,” he was explaining. “That’s our name for them because they built the ship and everything within it.”

“The ship,” whispered the other children, in one voice.

“The ship is too large to measure,” he assured them, “and it is nothing but beautiful. Yet when it was new, there was no one to share it with. There were only the Builders, and they were proud, and that’s why they called out into the darkness, inviting others to come fill its vastness. To come see what they had done and sing about their lovely creation.”

Washen leaned against the wall, smelling the shutter’s sweet wood.

“Who came from the darkness?” asked that oldest boy. “The Bleak,” dozens of voices answered instantly. “Was there anyone else?”

“No one.”

“Because the universe was so young,” the boy explained. With utter confidence, he picked his own odd course through what the captains had taught him. “Everything was new, and there were only the Bleak and the Builders.”

“The Bleak,” one little girl repeated, with feeling.

“They were a cruel, selfish species,” the boy maintained. “But they always wore smiles and said careful words. They came and sang praises to our lovely ship. But what did they want? Even from the earliest moment?”

“To steal our ship,” the others answered.

“In the night, as the Builders slept unaware,” he said with a practiced foreboding, “the Bleak attacked, slaughtering most of them while they lay helpless in their beds.”

Every child whispered, “Slaughtered.”

Washen eased her way closer to the nursery door. Each child had his own little bed positioned according to some personal logic. Some of the beds were close together, in twos and threes and fives, while others preferred distance and a comparative solitude. Peering through the shuttered door, she found the storyteller. He was apart from the others, sitting up in his little bed, his face catching one of the bright slivers of light that managed to slip through the heavy ceiling. His name was Till. He looked very much like his mother, tall with a tall, thin face. Then he moved his head slightly, and he resembled no one but himself.

“Where did the surviving Builders go?” he asked.

“Here.”

“And from here, what did they do?”

“They purified the ship.”

“They purified the ship,” he repeated, with emphasis. “Everything above us had to be killed. The Builders had no choice whatsoever.”

There was a long, reflective pause.

“What happened to the Builders?” he asked.

“They were trapped here,” said the others, on cue.

“And?”

“They died here. One after another.”

“What died?”

“Their flesh.”

“But is flesh all that there is?”

“No!”

“What else is there?”

“Their spirits.”

“What isn’t flesh cannot die,” said that very peculiar boy.

Hands against the warm iron frame of the door, Washen waited, trying to recall when she had last taken a meaningful breath.

In a songful whisper, Till asked, “Do you know where the Builders’ spirits live?”

“Inside us,” the children replied with a palpable delight.

“We are the Builders now,” Tills voice assured them. “After the long, lonely wait, we have finally been reborn…!”

After, eight decades, life on Marrow had become glancingly comfortable and halfway predictable. Twist’s tectonics team had mapped the local plumes and vents and every major fault, and as a consequence, they knew where the iron crust was thickest and where to build homes that would linger. Food was abundant and was only going to be more so. Washen’s biologists were cultivating wild plants, and in the last few years, they had begun raising the most palatable bugs in cages and special huts. Various attempts at science, no matter how clumsy, were making gains. Miocene had been right: Marrow was expanding at a steady, almost stately pace as the buttressing fields grew weaker, and the sky’s brilliant light had already faded by more than a percentage point. Aasleen’s people, fueled by genius and sanguinity, had invented at least ten difficult schemes that would allow everyone to escape from Marrow.

It would only require another forty-nine centuries, give or take.

Children were inevitable, and essential. They brought new hands and new possibilities, and they would replace the losses inflicted by this awful place. Then once they had their own children, a slow-motion demographic onslaught would have begun.

Every female captain owed the world at least one healthy boy or girl; that was Miocene’s pronouncement.

But her words slammed up against modern physiologies. There wasn’t one viable egg or a motile sperm inside any captain. In modern society, complex medicines and delicate autodocs were used to tease long-lived people into fertility. They had neither. That’s why it took twenty years of determined research before Promise and Dream, working in their own laboratory, discovered that the black spit of a hammerwing, poisonous to most native life-forms, could induce a temporary fecundity in human beings.

There were dangers, however. A woman required very high, even toxic dosages, and the effects on a developing embryo were far from clear.

Miocene volunteered to be first.

It was an heroic act, and if successful, it would be a selfish act, her child destined to be the oldest. She ordered the two captains to collect sperm from every donor, and alone, the Submaster impregnated herself. As far as Washen could tell, no one but Miocene could be certain who Tills father was.

Miocene carried the boy for the full eleven-month term. The birth itself was uneventful, and for those first few months, Till seemed perfectly normal. He was happy and engaged, ready to smile up at any face that smiled at him. Later, as they tried to piece together events, it wasn’t apparent when the baby had changed. It must have happened slowly, and only later were the effects obvious. Till was a happy, giggling boy riding gracefully on his mother’s hard hip, and then it was a different day, and people began to notice that he was much more quiet, still riding that hip without complaint, but his gaze distant, and always, in some odd, undefinable fashion, distracted.

Hammerwing spit wasn’t to blame.

Maybe the boy would have grown up the same way on the ship. Or Earth. Or anywhere else, too. Children are never predictable, and they are never easy. In the following years, the encampment began to fill up with strangers. They were small and fierce, and they were endlessly entertaining. And more than anyone anticipated, the children were challenges to the captains’ seamless authority.

No, they didn’t want to eat that bug dinner.

Or poop in the neat new latrines.

And thank you, no, they wouldn’t play nice, or sleep during the arbitrary night, or listen to every important word when their parents explained what Marrow was and what the ship was and why it was so very important to eventually escape from their birthplace.

But these were little problems. Over the last decades, Washen had tried every state of mind, and optimism, far and away, was the most pleasant. She worked hard to remain positive about everything difficult and gray.

Good, sane reasons were keeping them from being rescued. The most likely explanation was the simplest: the Event was a regular phenomenon, and it had reached beyond Marrow, collapsing the access tunnel so completely that digging it out again was grueling, achingly slow work. That’s what must have happened to the original tunnels, too. Earlier Events had destroyed them. And the Master could only act with caution, balancing the good of a few captains against the unknown dangers, the well-being of billions of innocent and trusting passengers taking easy precedence.

Other captains were optimistic in public, but in private, in their lovers’ beds, they confessed to darker moods.

“What if the Masters written us off?”

Diu posed the question, then immediately offered an even worse scenario.

“Or maybe something happened to her,” he grunted. “This was an utterly secret mission. If she died unexpectedly, and if the First Chair Submasters don’t even know that we’re down here…”

“Do you believe that?” asked Washen.

Diu shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Sometimes.”

Through the heavy walls and sealed shutters came the drumming of a hammerwing. Then, silence.

For a moment, it felt as if Marrow were listening to them.

Playing Diu’s own game, Washen reminded him, “There’s another possibility.”

“There’s many. Which one?”

“The Event was bigger than we realize. And everyone else is dead.”

For a moment, Diu didn’t react.

It was the unmentionable taboo. Yet Washen kept pressing, reminding him, “Maybe we weren’t the first ones to find this derelict ship. Others came before. But the builders had left behind some kind of booby trap, primed and ready”

“Perhaps,” he allowed. Then he sat up in bed, iron springs squeaking as his smooth strong legs dropped over the edge, toes kissing the cool dark floorboards. Again, softer this time, he said, “Perhaps.”

“Maybe the ship cleanses itself every million years. The Event destroys everything foreign and organic”

A tiny grin emerged. “And we survived…?”

“Marrow survived,” she replied. “Otherwise, this would be barren iron.”

Diu pulled one of his hands across his face, then with his fingers, he combed the long coffee-colored hair. Even in the bedroom’s enforced darkness, Washen could see his face. After so many years, she knew it better than she knew her own features, and in the vastness that was her remembered life, she couldn’t think of any man to whom she had felt this close.

“I’m just talking,” she told him. “I don’t believe what I’m saying.”

“I know.”

Placing a hand on his sweaty back, she realized that Diu was watching the crib. Their infant son, Locke, was hard asleep, blissfully unaware of their grim discussion. In another three years, he would live in the nursery. He would live with Till, she kept thinking. A month had passed since Washen had overheard that story about the Builders and the Bleak. But she hadn’t told anyone. Not even Diu.

“There are more explanations than we have people,” she admitted.

Again, he wiped the sweat from his face. Then she said, “Darling,” with an important tone. “Have you ever listened to the other children?” He glanced over his shoulder. “Why?” She explained, in brief.

Since they built this house, the same sliver of light had slipped its way through the shutters. Changing the tilt of his head, the light hit his gray eye and the high strong cheek. “You know Till,” was Diu’s response. “You know how odd he can seem.”

“That’s why I didn’t mention it.”

“Have you heard him tell that story again?”

“No,” she admitted.

“But you’ve been eavesdropping, I’d guess.” She said nothing.

Her lover nodded wisely and came close to a smile. Then with a little wink, he stood up, bare feet carrying him to the crib.

But Diu wasn’t looking at their son. Instead, he was fingering the mobile hung over the crib on a thick, trustworthy cord. Painted pieces of wood bounced gently on nearly invisible wire, showing Locke all those wonders that he couldn’t see for himself. The ship was in the center, largest by a long way, and surrounding it were tinier star-ships and several generic birds as well as a Phoenix that his mother had carved for her own reasons, then hung there without explanation.

After a moment, Washen joined Diu at the crib.

Locke was a quiet baby. Patient, uncomplaining. From his parents he had acquired a stew of immortal genes and an easy strength, and from this world, his birthplace, came… well, what about him was Marrow? Not for the first time, Washen wondered if it was wrong to allow children on a world barely understood. A world that could probably kill all of them. And kill them tonight, if the urge struck it.

“I wouldn’t worry about Till,” said Diu. “I don’t,” she promised, speaking more to herself than him.

But the man still explained himself. “Children are imagination machines,” he said. “You never know what they’re going to think about anything.”

Washen was remembering the Child, that part-human, part-Gaian creature that she raised for Pamir, and with a bittersweet grin, she replied, “But that’s the fun in having them. Or so I’ve always been told…”

The boy walked alone, crossing the public round with his eyes watching his own bare feet, watching them shuffle across the hot, sky-baked iron. “Hello, Till.”

He seemed incapable of surprise. Pausing, he lifted his gaze slowly, a smile waiting to shine at the captain. “Hello, Madam Washen. You’re well, I trust.”

Under the sky’s blue glare, he was a polite, scrupulously ordinary eleven-year-old boy. He had a thin face joined to a small, narrow body, and like most of his peers, he wore as little as the adults let him wear. Modern genetics were such a tangle; Washen had given up guessing who was his father. Sometimes she wondered if Miocene even knew. She obviously wanted to be his only parent, openly grooming him to stand beside her someday. Whenever Washen looked at the half-feral boy wearing nothing but a breech-cloth, she felt a nagging resentment, petty as can be, and since it was directed at an eleven-year-old, simply foolish.

“I have a confession to make,” she said, using her own smile. “A little while back, while you were in the nursery, I overheard you talking to the other children. You were telling them a very elaborate story”

The eyes were wide and brown with darts of black inside them, and they didn’t so much as blink.

“It was an interesting story,” Washen conceded.

Till looked like any boy who didn’t know what to make of a bothersome adult. Sighing wearily, he shifted his weight from one brown foot to the other. Then he sighed again, the portrait of pure boredom.

“How did you think up that story?”

A shrug of the shoulders.

“I know we like to talk about the ship. Probably too much.” Her explanation felt sensible and practical. Her biggest fear was that she would come across as patronizing. “Everyone likes to speculate. About the ship’s past, and its builders, and the rest of it. All our chatter has to be confusing. And since we are going to be rebuilding the bridge, with your help… it does rather make you into a species of Builder, doesn’t it…?”

Till shrugged again, his eyes looking past her.

On the far side of the round, in front of their machine shop, a team of sweating captains fired up their latest turbine—a primitive wonder built from rough steel and vague memories, plus considerable trial and error. Homebrewed alcohols combined with oxygen, creating a delicious roar. While it was working, the engine was powerful enough to do any job they could offer it, at least for today. But it was dirty and noisy, and it was inefficient, and the sound of it almost obscured the boy’s strong voice.

“I’m not speculating,” he announced. “Not about anything.”

Washen said, “Excuse me?” as if she hadn’t heard him.

“I won’t tell you that. That I’m making it up.”

The turbine sputtered, then fell silent.

Washen nodded, smiling in a defeated way. Then she noticed an approaching figure. From the shop, wearing her old epaulets on a simple robe of handwoven fabric, Miocene looked weary as always, and angry in a thousand ways.

“I don’t make up anything,” the boy protested. His mother asked, “What don’t you do?” Till didn’t say.

For a moment, he and Washen exchanged looks, as if making a pact. Then he turned to Miocene, complaining, “That machine… it sounds awful.”

“It does. You’re right.”

“Is that how the ship is? Big engines screaming all the time?”

“No, we use fusion reactors. Very efficient and quiet, and extremely safe, too.” She glanced at Washen, asking, “Don’t we, darling?”

“Fusion, yes,” Washen offered, her hands trying to straighten the stiff fabric of her own handmade uniform. “The best reactors in the galaxy, I would think.”

Then like a trillion mothers, Miocene said, “I haven’t seen you for too long. Where have you been, Till?”

“Out there,” said Till. He waved in a distant, imprecise fashion, three of his fingers smaller than the rest. And paler. Regenerating after a little accident, no doubt.

“Were you exploring again?”

“But not far from here,” he told her. “Always in the valley’ He was lying, thought Washen. She heard the lie between the words.

Yet Miocene nodded with conviction, saying, “I know you were. I know.” It was a self-imposed delusion, or it was an act meant for public eyes.

There was an uncomfortable moment of silence. Then, the turbine fired up again and rattled along with a healthy vigor. The sound of it drew Miocene’s attention, leading her back toward the machine shop.

Washen smiled at the boy, then knelt beside him.

“You like to make up things,” she observed. “Don’t you?”

“No, madam.”

“Don’t be modest,” she warned.

But Till shook his head stubbornly, staring down at his toes and the black iron. “Madam Washen,” he said with a boy’s fragile patience. “What is, is. It’s the only thing that can never be made up.”

Fifteen

Locke waited in the shadows—a grown man with a boy’s guilty expression and the wide, resdess eyes of someone expecting disaster to lash out from every direction.

His first words were, “I shouldn’t be doing this.”

But a moment later, responding to the anticipated response, he said,’I know, Mother. Promises given are promises always.”

Washen hadn’t made a sound.

It was his father who offered second thoughts. “If this is going to create troubles,” Diu muttered, “maybe we should slip back home again.”

“Maybe you should,” their son allowed. Then he turned and abruptly walked off, never inviting them to follow, knowing they wouldn’t be able to help themselves.

Washen hurried up the path, feeling Diu in her footsteps. A young jungle of black umbra trees and elegant lambda bushes dissolved into a sudden landscape of bare iron: black pillars and arches created an indiscriminate, infuriating maze. Every step was a challenge, an act of conscious grace. Razored edges sliced exposed flesh, crisscrossing lingers and calves with thin pink wounds. Bottomless crevices beckoned to passersby, wind and dripping rainwater echoing out of the metal ground. Worst of all, Washen s body was accustomed to sleep at this hour. Fatigue slowed her senses and her common sense. When she saw Locke standing on the rusty lip of a cliff, waiting for them, she noticed nothing but his wide back and the long golden hair tied into an elaborate set of braids. She stared at the simple black shirt woven in the village loom, from mock cotton, the shirt that his mother had patched more than once, and always badly.

Until she stood beside him, Washen was oblivious to the deep valley spread out below them, long and rather narrow, its flat floor covered with a mature stand of black-as-night virtue trees.

“Black as night,” Washen whispered.

Her son rose to the bait. Shaking his head, he said, “Mother. There s no such thing.”

As night, he meant.

In his world, he meant.

This was lucky ground. When the world’s fiery guts began to pour out on all sides, this thick and durable slab of crust had fallen into the great fissure. The virtue jungle had burned but it hadn’t died. Its roots could be a century old, or older. As old as the human tenure on Marrow, perhaps. There was a rich, eternal feel to the ground, and perhaps that’s why the children had chosen it.

The children.

Washen knew better, but despite her careful intentions, she couldn’t think of them as anything but young, and in some profound sense, vulnerable.

“Quiet,” Locke whispered, not bothering to look back at them.

Who was talking here? she wondered. But she didn’t ask.

Then with nothing but his own deeply callused flesh between himself and the iron, Locke jumped from perch to perch, grunting softly with each impact, then pausing just long enough to glance up from below, blinking against the bright skylight as he added with an almost parental concern, “And keep close to me. Please.”

His parents’ field boots had fallen apart decades ago. They wore clumsy sandals made from mock cork and rubber, and they had to work to stay with him. On the valley floor, in the living shadows, the air turned slightly cooler and uncomfortably damp. Blankets of rotting vegetation had fallen from the canopy, leaving the ground watery-soft, a rotting organic stink still smelling utterly alien to Washen. A giant daggerwing roared past, intent on some vital business. Washen watched the animal vanish into the gloom, then reappear, tiny with the distance, its cobalt-blue carapace shining in a patch of sudden skylight.

Locke turned abruptly, silently.

A single finger lay against his lips. Just for a moment, in that light, he looked like his father. But what Washen noticed most was his expression, his gray eyes showing a pain and worry so intense that she had to try and reassure him with a touch.

Diu had wormed the secret out of their son. The children were meeting in the jungle, and these meetings had been going on for more than twenty years. At irregular intervals, Till would call them to a secluded location, and it was Till who controlled everything that was said and done.

“What’s said?” Washen had asked. “What’s done?”

Locke wouldn’t explain. First he shook his head with defiance and shame. Then with a quiet disappointment, he admitted to them, “I’m breaking my oldest promise by repeating any of this.”

“Then why tell?” she had pressed.

“Because.” Locke’s expression was complicated, his soft gray eyes changing with each blink. Finally a compassionate, halfway fearful look settled on him, and he explained, “You have every right to hear. So you can decide for yourselves.”

He cared for his parents. That’s why he broke his promise, and that’s why he had no choice but to bring them here.

Washen wouldn’t think of it any other way now.

A few more quiet steps, and she found herself staring at the largest virtue tree that she had ever seen. Age must have killed it, and rot had brought it down, splitting the canopy as it crumbled. Adult children and their little brothers and sisters had assembled in that pool of brilliant blue-white sky-light, standing in clumps and pairs, some wearing hammerwing tails shoved into their hair. Soft quick voices merged into a senseless buzz. Till was there, pacing back and forth on the wide black trunk. He looked fully adult, ageless and unexceptional, wearing a simple breechcloth and two bracelets, one of steel and the other gold. His dark braids resembled a long rope. His young, almost pretty face showed a timid, self-conscious expression that gave Wishen the strangest little moment of hope. Maybe this was nothing but the old game swollen up into some kind of social gathering. Till would perform for the children, telling his elaborate stories that no sensible mind could believe but that everyone, in one fashion or another, would take pleasure from.

Locke didn’t look back or say a word. He simply pressed ahead, through a low wall of lambdas and out into the bright busy clearing.

“Hello, Locke,” said twenty voices.

He said. “Hello,” once, loudly, then joined the oldest children in front.

Obeying their promise, his parents knelt in the jungle, ignoring the hiss and sputter of a thousand little bugs. Nothing happened.

A few more children filtered into view, and there was quiet conversation, and Till, oblivious to it all, continued to pace. Maybe this was all that would happen. It was certainly easy to hope so.

Till stopped.

In an instant, the worshipers fell silent.

With a quiet voice, Till asked, “What do we want?”

“What is best for the ship,” the children answered, each with his own quiet voice. Then together, in one voice, they said, “Always.”

“How long is always?”

“Longer than we can count.”

“How far is always?”

“To the endless ends.”

“Yet we live—”

“For a moment!’ they cried. “If that long!”

The words were absurd, and chilling. What should have sounded ludicrous to Washen wasn’t, the prayer acquiring a muscular credibility when hundreds were speaking in a smooth chorus, every syllable endowed with a practiced surety.

“What is best for the ship,” Till repeated.

But the words were a question. His narrow and very appealing face was filled with a curiosity, a genuine longing.

Quietly, he asked his audience, “Do you know the answer?”

In a muddled shout, the children said, “No.”

“Do I know the answer?”

Quiedy, respectfully, they told him, “No.”

“True, and true,” their leader professed. “But when I’m awake, I am searching for what is best. Best for our great ship, and for always. And when I sleep, my dream self does the same.”

“And so do we,” his followers chanted.

Then Washen thought, No, it wasn’t a chant. It was too disheveled and honest-sounding, each one of them making the solemn vow to himself.

There was a brief, unnerving pause.

Then Till asked, “Do we have business today?”

“We have newcomers!’ someone cried out.

For a slippery instant, Washen thought they meant her and Diu. She glanced over her shoulder, looking at Diu for the first time: he appeared calm in that electric, perpetually busy way of his, and he seemed thankful for the look. One hand took her by the arm as Till’s voice shouted, “Bring them up here.”

The newcomers were genuine children. Seven-year-old twins, as it happened. Brother and sister climbed the rotting trunk slowly, as if terrified, trembling hands clinging to the fluted velvet-black bark. But Till offered his hands, and with a crisp surety, he suggested deep breaths. “We’re your brothers and sisters,” he reminded them, more than once. Then when they finally smiled, he asked, “Do you know about the ship?”

The little boy glanced at the sky, saying, “It’s very old.”

“Nothing is older,” Till confided.

“And it’s huge.”

“Nothing can be larger. Yes.”

His sister fingered her navel, waiting to feel brave. When Till looked at her, she lifted her gaze and told everyone, “It’s where we came from. The ship is.”

The audience laughed at her.

Till lifted a hand, bringing silence.

Her brother corrected her. Quietly and fiercely, he said, “The captains came from there. Not us.”

Till nodded, waiting.

“But we’re going to help them,” the boy added, infinitely pleased with that destiny. “We’ll help them get back up to the ship. Soon.”

There was a prolonged and very cold silence.

Till allowed himself a patient smile, patting both of their heads. Then he looked out at his followers, asking, “Is he right?”

“No,” they roared.

The siblings winced and tried to vanish.

Till knelt between them, and with a steady, untroubled voice said, “The captains are just the captains. But you and I and all of us here… we are built from the stuff of this world, from its flesh and water and air… and from the old souls of the Builders, too…”

Washen hadn’t heard that nonsense in a quarter of a century, and hearing it now, she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or explode.

“We are the Builders reborn,” Till assured everyone. Then he stood, and with his hands fondly draped over the children’s slumping shoulders, he hinted at the true scope of this rebellion. “Whatever our purpose is, it is not to help the captains. That is the one truth about which I am certain.”

Staring off into the shadowy jungle, he exclaimed, “The captains only think they have a tight hold on the ship. But friends, if you will… think of all the wonders that can happen in a single day…!”

Miocene refused to believe any of it.

“First of all,” she told Washen, and herself, “I know my own son. What you’ve described is ridiculous. Ludicrous. And frankly, stupid. Second of all, according to your count, this rally involved more than half of our children—”

Diu interrupted. “Most of them are adults. With their own homes.” Then he added, “Madam,” and framed the word with quick nods.

An angry silence descended.

Then Washen admitted, “I checked. Several dozen children slipped out of the nurseries last night—”

“And I’m not claiming they didn’t. And I’m very sure they slipped off somewhere.” Then with a haughty expression, Miocene asked, “Will the two of you listen to me? Will you give me that much consideration, please?”

“Of course, madam,” said Diu.

“I know what’s possible. I know exactly how my child was raised, and I know his character, and unless you can offer me some credible motivation for this fable… this shit… then I think we’ll just pretend that nothing has been said here…”

“What about my motivation?” asked Washen. “Why would I tell such a story?”

With a chill delight, Miocene said, “Greed.”

“Toward who?”

“Believe me, I understand.” The sullen eyes narrowed, silver glints in their corners. “If Till is insane, your son stands to gain. Status among his peers, at the very least. And eventually, genuine power.”

Washen glanced at Diu.

They hadn’t mentioned Locke’s role as informant, and they’d keep it secret as long as possible—for a tangle of reasons, most of them selfish.

They were inside the Submaster’s one-room house. The place felt small and crowded, its nervous air nearly too hot to breathe. There was a shabbiness here, despite the fact that Miocene kept every surface as clean as possible. A shabbiness, and a deep weariness, and in the darkest corners, there was a cold, living fear. Washen could almost see the fear staring out at her with its dim red eyes.

She couldn’t help herself. “Ask Till about the Builders,” she insisted. “Ask what he believes.”

“I won’t.”

“Why not?”

The woman took a moment, vainly picking at the barbed spores and winged seeds that were trying to root in her sweat-dampened uniform. Then with a cutting logic, she said, “If your story is a lie, he will say it’s a lie. And if it’s true and he lies, then he’ll just say that I shouldn’t believe you.”

“But what if he admits to it?”

“Then Till wants me to know’ She stared at Washen as if she were the worst kind of fool. Her hands had stopped picking at the seeds, and her voice was angry and sturdy and perfectly cold. “If he confesses, then he wants me to find out, Washen. Darling. And you’re just serving as his messenger.”

Washen took a breath and held it tight.

Then Miocene looked through her open door, out into the public round, adding, “And that isn’t a revelation that I want delivered at his convenience.”

There had been warnings.

A rising chorus of tremors were noted. Little spore storms reminded the captains of blizzards on cold worlds.

The discharge from half a dozen hot springs changed color, a vivid and toxic blueness spreading into the local streams. And a single Hazz tree had wilted, pulling its well-earned fat and water deep underground.

But as warnings went, they were small, and the highest-ranking captains were too distracted to pay attention.

Three ship-days later, while the encampment slept, a great hand lifted the land several meters, then grew bored and flung it down again. Captains and children stumbled into the public rounds. Within moments, the sky was choked with golden balloons and billions of flying insects. Experience said that in another twelve hours, perhaps less, the land would blister and explode, and die. Moving like a drunken woman, Washen began running through the aftershocks, moving from one round to its neighbor, finally reaching a certain tidy home and shouting, “Locke,” into its empty rooms.

Where was he?

She moved along the edge of the round, finding nothing but empty houses. A tall figure stepped from Tills tiny house and asked, “Have you seen mine?”

Washen shook her head. “Mine?”

Miocene said, “No,” and sighed. Then she strode past Washen, shouting, “Do you know where he is?”

Diu was standing in the center of the round.

“Help me,” the Submaster promised, “and you’ll help your son, too.”

With a nod and quick bow, Diu agreed.

A dozen captains rushed off into the jungle. Left behind, Washen forced herself to pack their household’s essentials and help other worried parents. New quakes came in threes and fours. Hours passed in a well-rehearsed chaos. The crust beneath them had been shattered, fissures breaking up the rounds and a worrisome heat percolating to the surface. The gold balloons had vanished, replaced with clouds of iron dust and the fat-blackened stink of burning jungle. The captains and youngest children stood in the main round, waiting nervously. Sleds and balloon carts had been loaded, but the ranking Submaster, giddy old Daen, wouldn’t give the order to leave. “Another minute,” he kept telling them. Then he would carefully hide his crude clock inside his largest pocket, fighting the urge to watch the relentless turning of its tiny mechanical hands.

When Till stepped into the open, he was grinning.

Washen felt a giddy, incoherent relief.

Relief collapsed into shock, and terror. The young man’s chest cavity had been wrenched open with a knife, the first wound healing but a second wound deeper, lying perpendicular to the first. Ripped, desiccated flesh fought to knit itself. Shockingly white ribs lay in plain view. Till wasn’t in mortal danger, but he wore his agony well. With an artful moan, he stumbled, then managed to right himself for an instant before collapsing, slamming against the bare iron just as his mother emerged from the black jungle.

Miocene was unhurt, and she was thoroughly, hopelessly trapped.

Numbed and sickened, Washen watched as the Submaster knelt beside her boy, gripping his thick brown hair with one hand while the other hand carefully slipped her blood-drenched knife back into its steel hilt.

What had Till said to her in the jungle?

How had he steered his mother into this murderous rage?

Because that’s what he must have done. As each event happened in turn, Washen realized this was no accident. There was an elaborate plan reaching back to the instant when Locke told her about the secret meetings. Her son had promised to take her and Diu to one of the meetings.

But whom had he promised? Till, obviously. Till had conscripted Locke into joining this game, ensuring that Miocene would eventually learn of the meetings, her authority suddenly in question. And it was Till who lay in his mother’s arms, knowing exactly what would happen next.

Miocene stared at her son, searching for some trace of apology, some faltering of courage. Or perhaps she was simply giving him a moment to contemplate her own gaze, relentless and cold.

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.

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 category 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 themselves 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:

“Five hundred years.”

Magnified and projected from cumbersome speakers, her voice seemed to boom across the city and the world.

There was a great cheer, sloppy and full throated, and honest.

“Five centuries,” she repeated, her voice louder than the crowd’s. Then Miocene asked the nation, “Where are we now?”

A few jokes were muttered.

“Where we always are!’ someone called out.

A thin trickle of laughter diminished into a respectful, impatient silence.

“We are climbing,” the Submaster declared. “Constantly, endlessly climbing. At this moment, we are being lifted skyward at the graceful, glorious rate of a quarter of a meter to the year. We are building new machines and new citizens, and despite the hardships that the world throws at us daily, we are prospering. But what is more important, by a thousandfold, is that you remember what we are climbing toward. This world of ours is only a small place. It is like a hammerwing larva nestled inside its large and infinitely more impressive cocoon.

“We are in the center of a starship. A great vessel, complex and vast. This starship is racing through a universe that you have never seen. About which you know next to nothing. A universe of such scope and beauty that when you see it, I promise, all of you won’t be able to hold back your tears.”

She paused, just for an instant.

“I promise. All of you will see this great universe.

“For the willing and the loyal, your rewards will be vast and glorious, and you will have no fear or want for the rest of your endless lives.”

A small cheer rose, then collapsed on itself.

“I know how hard it can be,” she told them. “To believe in places and wonders that none of you have witnessed for yourselves. It takes a certain type of thinking. A grand, dreaming mind. It takes courage and trust, and I am so pleased with each and every one of you. For your work. Your patience. And your boundless love.”

A larger, self-congratulatory cheer blossomed, hands clapping each other and flat wet bellies before the crowd slowly let itself grow quiet again.

“We old captains thank you. Thank you!”

That was a prearranged signal. The surviving captains were sitting behind Miocene according to rank. As a body, they rose to their feet, their silvered uniforms catching the light, and after a communal bow, they sat again, staring purposefully at the back of her head.

“Your lives here have only become richer with time,” she remarked. “We old captains brought knowledge with us, a small taste of what is possible. You see the impact of that knowledge every day, everywhere. We can now predict eruptions months in advance, and we farm the local jungles with great efficiency, and who is our equal at building new and fantastic machines? But those aren’t our greatest gifts to you, our children. Our grandchildren. All of our beautiful, loving descendants.

“Our greatest gifts are charity and honor.

“Charity,” she repeated, “and honor.”

Miocene’s voice ran off into the distance, bouncing off the High Spines and returning again. Softer now, and kinder.

She smiled grandly, then said, “This is what charity is. On my authority, today and for the next complete year, there is a full pardon in effect. A full pardon intended for any person belonging to the Wayward camps. We want to include you in our dream. Yes, the Waywards! If you are listening to me now, come forward. Come out of the wild forests! Come join us, and help us build for this great day coming!”

Again, the echoes bounced off the nearby mountains.

Surely the Waywards were hiding on those slopes, watching the great celebration. Or closer, perhaps. Rumor had it that spies crept in and out of the Loyalist cities every day. But even when she heard the thunder of her own voice, Miocene didn’t believe that any Wayward would ever willingly accept her charity.

Yet only one year later, typing into the bulky and very stupid machine that passed for an AI, the Submaster could write, “Three souls have returned to us.”

Two were Loyal-born, desperately unhappy with the hard Wayward existence. While the third convert was one of Tills grandchildren, which meant that she was one of Miocene’s great-grandchildren.

Of course the Submaster had welcomed each of them. But she also made certain that the three newcomers were shadowed by special friends, and their conversations were recorded and transcribed, and nothing of technical merit, no matter how trivial, was put in easy reach.

Every night, just before her sleepless sleep, Miocene typed into the machine’s simple magnetic mind, “I hate this world.

“But,” she added with a grim satisfaction, “I will have it by its heart, and I’ll squeeze that heart until it can never beat again.”

Seventeen

A decade later, the High Spines were about to die.

Seismic evidence showed an ocean of liquid metal rising beneath them, and the local virtue trees were equally convinced. A string of hard, sharp tremors caused a panic in the jungles and up on the raw black iron, and inside Hazz City people were knocking their most cherished buildings off their foundations, preparing to carry them away, abandoning the region according to precise, exacting plans.

What the grandchildren were doing was wrong. They knew it was foolish and dangerous, and they expected to pay a stiff penalty. Yet the promise of wildfires and utter devastation—more carnage than they had ever witnessed in their little lives—was too much temptation to resist.

A dozen youngsters, the absolute best of friends, borrowed asbestos suits and boots and bright blue-painted titanium oxygen tanks, carrying those treasures to the foothills in a series of secret sleeptime marches. Then as their home city was being wrestled to safer ground, they assembled near the main round, and in order to swear eternal secrecy for what they were about to do, each cut off one of his or her little toes, the twelve bloody pieces buried in a tiny, unmarked grave.

They weren’t true grandchildren. Not to the captains, at least. But they were called “grandchildren” because that was the tradition. Girls and boys anywhere from tenth- to twentieth-generation Loyalists marched together toward the High Spines, in a neat double row, and pushing through the first traces of smoke and caustic vapor, they told some of the traditional jokes about the ancient ones.

“How many captains does it take to get off Marrow?” one boy asked.

“None,” his girlfriend chimed. “We do all the work for them!”

“How big is this ship we ride inside?”

“It gets bigger every day,” another girl offered. “At least in the captains’ minds!”

Everyone had a good little laugh.

Then another boy asked, “What is happier than our leader?”

“A daggerwing on a dinner spit!’ several of his friends shouted, on cue.

“Why is that?” he inquired.

“Because the bug is going to die soon, while our leader just keeps turning on her spit, feeling the flames!”

Miocene’s dark moods were famous. Indeed, they were a source of great fondness among the average grandchild. Looking at that very tall woman, you actually saw the gloom in those dark ageless eyes, and it was easy to believe her desperate need to leave Marrow, returning to that wondrous and most peculiar place called “the ship.”

On Marrow, a cheery, optimistic leader would never inspire. No one else could deserve the kind of support and ceaseless work that the Loyalists gave freely and almost without question.

At least in this little group, that was everyone’s definite opinion.

As their march continued, the laughter grew louder and more nervous. These were city children, after all. They knew the jungle well enough, but this district had been tectonically quiet for most of their lives. The snapping fires and swirling black ash were new to them. In secret, each girl and boy realized that they’d never imagined such a persistent, withering heat. Sometimes they’d burn a hand intentionally, taking what comfort they could from the quick healing of their wounds. Passing too near a little fumarole, half of them scorched the insides of their mouths and cooked their lungs, and coughing hard, they had to huddle beneath a massive baybay tree, slashing its bark to let the cool sap seep out and soothe their aches.

In secret, it occurred to each of them that they would die today. But none could find the simple courage to admit what they were thinking, and each heard herself or himself coaxing the others to hurry, squinting into the black clouds, lying when they claimed, “I can see the mountains.”

Saying, “It isn’t far now, I think.”

I hope.

Using a homing beacon, they found their firesuits and air tanks. Without that simple precaution, they would have stumbled past the cache, the landscape already transformed by the wildfires.

Everyone dressed, not one of the suits fitting properly.

But who cared if there were gaps in the seams, and the brutal heat was leaking inside too quickly? They were brave, and they were hopelessly together in this undertaking, and as if Marrow were trying to entertain them, a sudden vent opened up nearby, letting a deep plume of molten red-hot metal slip a finger out into the open air, under pressure, hot enough to make unshielded eyes blink, running like a river down the floor of the doomed valley.

“Closer,” the children screamed at each other. “Get closer.”

They didn’t bother with safety lines or lifeguards. What mattered was to get near the shoreline, watching the blazing iron push downhill, feeling its enormous, irresistible weight through your sweating toes.

Like a living monster, it was.

And like all good monsters, it possessed a surprising, intriguing beauty.

With a massive grace, the river melted the ground beneath it. Ancient tree trunks evaporated in its presence. Chunks of cold iron were tossed into the river, sinking where it was deep. Larger knobs and boulders of iron resisted the flow for an instant or two, then were shoved downstream with a plaintive screeching scream.

One boy crept up behind a spellbound girl—the subject of a little crush—and with both hands, he gave her a hard little shove.

Then he grabbed her.

She howled and jabbed him with both elbows, then tried to turn around. But she was clumsy in that heavy misfitting suit, one boot slipping and her body yanked free of the fond grip, tumbling back toward the molten metal until she grabbed the boy’s belt, yanking him hard toward her.

For an instant, they hung in the incandescent air. Then they fell slowly and clumsily onto the cooler ground, laughing in each other’s arms, the simple raw danger of the moment leaving them in love.

While the other children played by the river, they slipped away.

On a burnt hillside, wearing nothing but the thick-soled boots, they made love. He was behind her, holding her against him by her hips, then her hard little breasts. They didn’t dare sit; the ground was far too hot. There were moments when the fumes rose and found them, and they would suck at the bottled air, or they would hold their breath, feeling a quick dizzyness that became a warm electric buzz as their physiologies coped with the lack of oxygen.

Eventually, the game lost its intoxicating charm.

The urgency had left them. Little regrets started to nag. To obscure their feelings, they talked about the grandest imaginable things. The girl pulled up her insulated trousers, asking, “Where are you going to live afterward?”

When we reach the ship, she meant.

“By that big sea,” the boy replied. “The one where the captains first lived.”

It was a common response. Everyone knew about the great bodies of water, the illusion of an endless blue sky suspended overhead. The most artistic captains had done paintings, and without exception, the grandchildren were in awe of the idea that there could be so much water, and it would be so clean, and that living inside it would be great creatures like those mythical whales and squid and tuna.

Running a hand across her lover’s Gordian bun, the girl confessed, “I’m going to live outside the ship.”

“On another world?”

She shook her head. “No. I mean on the ship’s hull.”

“But why?”

She wasn’t entirely serious. These were words, and fun. Yet she felt a surprising conviction in her voice, explaining, “There are people who live out there. Remoras, I think they’re called.”

“I’ve never heard of them,” the boy admitted.

So she explained the culture. She told how the Remoras lived inside elaborate suits, eating and drinking nothing but what their suits and bodies produced. Worlds unto themselves, they were. And wherever they were on the ship’s hull, half of the universe was overhead. Near enough to reach, beautiful beyond words.

She was a strange girl, the boy concluded. In important little ways, he suddenly didn’t like her very much. He heard himself say, “I see,” without a shred of comprehension. Then with a forced sincerity, he promised, “I’ll come visit you there. Sometime. Okay?”

She knew that he was lying, and somehow that was a relief.

They stared off into the distance, in different directions, struggling with the shared problem of extracting themselves from this awkward place.

After a few moments, the boy gave a little cough and said, “I see something.”

“What?”

“In the iron river. There.”

In horror, she asked, “Is it one of us?”

“No,” he remarked. “At least, I don’t think so.”

The girl started to dress again, forgetting two seams as she struggled to get ready for a rescue attempt. When had she ever been a bigger fool, coming here like this? Unprepared, and doing this with this extremely ordinary boy?

“Where is it?” she called out.

With a marksman’s care, he pointed upstream, and she laid her head against his long arm, squinting now, peering through the clouds of rising fumes to find herself watching a round silvery lump, something that looked odd as can be, immune to the heat and calmly bobbing its way down the iron river.

“That’s not one of us,” she said.

“I told you it wasn’t,” he snapped.

Then he said something else, but she didn’t hear him. She had pushed her helmet over her head and scrambled out of their hiding place, and in her heavy, ill-fitting fire-suit, she was racing down the hillside, shouting and waving, begging for anyone’s attention.

They had just enough time to unwrap a pair of new safety lines, making loops at the ends and running down to where the iron river was narrowest, flinging the loops out at the strange silvery object.

One line fell short, tangled in newborn slag and melted. But the second line fell on the silvery surface, its loop tightening around some kind of thumb-like projection. Eleven grandchildren grabbed the line, and tugged, and screamed hard in one voice, and tugged. The second line was melting in that open blast furnace, but the object was close to shore, its invisible belly rubbing against half-molten ground. Three more expensive, nearly irreplaceable lines were destroyed before they could drag their prize out of the river, and if not for a favorable eddy and the river’s cutting a new channel on its north, they wouldn’t have retrieved the object at all.

But they had it now, and that was something.

The prize proved to be a little larger than a big person tucked into a tight ball, and it was stubbornly massive. Moving that much mass proved to be hard work, particularly while it was still radiating the iron’s heat. But later, after several kilometers of practice and the crushing of two makeshift sleds, the grandchildren learned that simply rolling their prize was easiest. Whatever the object was—and it could have been just about anything—the cold metal ground didn’t seem to dent it or even smudge its mirrored face.

They were halfway home when they were discovered. A lone figure appeared on the main trail, jogging up into the shadow of a virtue tree, then standing motionless, watching as they worked their way closer.

At a distance, it was obvious that this was a captain. A woman, wasn’t she? She wore a captain’s clothes and a captain’s disapproving face, but when everyone saw whose face it was, they gave a collective sigh of relief.

“Hello, Madam Washen!’ a dozen voices called out.

With another captain, there would have been immediate miseries. But not with smart old Washen. She had a reputation for understanding what was perfectly obvious to any happy grandchild, and for knowing how to punish without killing the happiness, too.

“Having fun?” she inquired.

Of course they were. Didn’t it look as if they were having fun?

“Not entirely,” the ancient woman admitted. She looked at each of their faces, saying, “I count twelve,” with an ominous tone.Then she sighed and shook her head, asking, “Where’s Blessing Gable? Was she with you?”

“No,” they said together, with a mixture of surprise and relief. Then one of the boys explained, “She’s way too old to float with us.”

The girl who liked Remoras realized what had happened. “Blessing has gone missing, hasn’t she?”

The captain nodded.

“To the Waywards, maybe?” Blessing was a quiet girl, and if she was too old for them, she was the perfect age for that nonsense.

“Maybe she’s left us,” Washen admitted with a sad, resigned tone. Then without another word, she stepped past the grandchildren.

Their prize sat in the middle of the trail, bright despite the tree’s shadows.

Someone asked, “See what we found?”

“No,” said Washen. As a joke. Then her long fingers played across the still-warm surface, the dark old eyes staring at her own distorted reflection.

“Do you know what it is?” asked the boy who wanted to live by the sea.

Washen fingered the knobs, and instead of answering, she asked. “What do you think it is?”

“A piece of the old bridge. The one you came down on.” The boy had given the matter some thought, and he was proud of his careful reasoning. “After it tumbled down, the iron swallowed this piece and kept it until now. I think.”

Several others voiced their agreement. Wasn’t it obvious?

The captain didn’t seem to think so. She looked at the Remora girl, then with her calm and smooth and happy voice asked, “Any other guesses?”

Someone asked, “Is it hyperfiber?”

“I don’t know what else it would be,” Washen admitted.

“But the bridge was ruined by the Event,” the Remora girl offered. “In our history books, it says it was made brown and weak, somehow, and all its little bonds kept breaking apart. Somehow”

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 made 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.

Diu 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 the 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.

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 history 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.”

“With luck,” Washen echoed, knowing it would take a lot of that mecurial substance.

She was steering a large walker. Behind them, the latest incarnation of Happens River was dropping over the horizon. What passed for a road would soon become a starved trail, then nothing but jungle and raw mountains. They were already approaching Wayward lands, yet it would be another two hundred kilometers before the rendezvous. Nobody with an official invitation had ever moved this deep into their territory, and it had been at least three centuries since the uninvited had last passed here.

As the day progressed, Washen kept tabs on the walker’s progress. The latest AI pilots still weren’t particularly smart or adaptable, and it wouldn’t impress anyone to have their machine—the culmination of sixteen centuries of technical wizardry—trip over a piece of mountain, ending up on its back like a clumsy crap bug.

The jungle path lifted up onto a wide, newborn plateau, then vanished. A hard hot rain was falling on the open ground, collecting in little basins and pools where black algae grew in silky blankets. In another year, all of this would be a vigorous young jungle. But which species would dominate? Sixteen hundred years of research gave Washen the expertise to admit that she didn’t know how the succession would progress. Not on this ground, or any other. Chemical makeups varied from vent to vent, and even within a single flow. Rains were common but no longer reliable. Little droughts and hard floods could change initial conditions. Plus there was the pure creative randomness of the spores and seeds and eggs that would come here. A chance wind could bring a flotilla of gold balloons that might, or might not, lead to a lofty forest of pure virtue trees. Or the fickle wind would steer the balloons somewhere else. To an established jungle and their deaths, most likely, where hungry mouths waited in abundance. At least a hundred native species loved to chew on the gold foil, incorporating the metal into their own elaborate carapaces, showing the world and their prospective mates both a beauty and a gaudy strength.

Initial conditions were critical. That was essential in jungle ecologies, and in human ecologies, too.

What if Miocene were a better parent? More patient, and nurturing, and just a little more forgiving? If she and Till had been closer, resolving their differences in private, civilized ways, the history of Marrow would certainly have been much quieter. And if she had been a worse mother, she would have murdered her son. Then driven by the other captains’ outrage, Miocene would have been ousted, another Submaster named their leader. Daen, perhaps. Or more likely Twist. Which would have radically changed the evolution of their ad hoc civilization…

The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.

The young plateau gave way to a younger volcanic cone, now sleeping. Dirty iron and nickel had frozen into a rough-faced slag. As the machine scrambled up the naked slope, the rains slackened, and the clouds were shoved far ahead, allowing Washen to glance over her shoulder, looking back across the swollen face of the world.

The sky was dimmer than ever.

As the buttresses weakened, the ambient light fell away proportionally. Still brilliant, but not the same cutting-to-the-bone brilliance. Temperatures were following the same smooth curve downward. Gravity weakened as the world expanded, subtly changing the architecture of plants and mountains and the largest, most important buildings. The atmosphere was growing cooler and quieter but not deeper, since it was spreading across more and more surface area. Likewise, there was only a finite amount of water. The metallic lavas were parched, bringing up nothing but rare earths and heavy metals. Less rain was falling and rivers were smaller, and if these various trends continued apace, there was the promise of long, hard droughts.

Near the horizon, far too small to be seen by the naked eye, was the sky’s only flaw. The original base camp still clung to the silvery hyperfiber, its modern buildings and diamond walkways still empty and alone. And in another thirty-four centuries, the camp would remain just as empty, but it would gaze down on a radically different world. The buttresses’ light would have fallen away to nothing, revealing a lovely starlike sparkle marking cities and well-lighted lanes.

That was the instant when a person could escape. And thinking that, Washen glanced at the vault again, feeling a cold, unnerving pain.

“We don’t know if it’s true,” she muttered to herself.

Miocene glanced at her, nearly asking, “What did you say?”

But the Submaster thought better of it, placing both hands on that ball of smooth gray-white ceramics, the gesture protective, hands and her tilting body conveying a strange fondness for the terrible artifact.

An unmapped river of iron meant a prolonged detour.

They were an hour behind schedule when they arrived at the appointed clearing. Three in the morning, ship time, according to Washen’s silver clock.

The clearing began as a lava plain, but when its molten heart retreated underground, the flat countryside collapsed into a natural amphitheatre. A great flat slab was the stage, and the black iron rose up on all sides, in oversized stairsteps. The shadowless play of the light and the angle of the slopes made everything appear closer than it was. As instructed, Washen parked in the middle of the stage, both captains climbing into plain view, and with two of its jointed limbs, the walker carefully lowered the vault to the iron. Then the first Waywards appeared, mere dots against the blackness. Even trotting at a respectable pace, it took them forever to work their way down the long slope. Besides breechcloths, each wore an ornamental mask made from soft leather stretched over a framework of carved bone. Leather made from their flesh; bone torn from their own enduring bodies. Every mask was painted with blood and with urine. Each showed the same wild, almost fluid face. Like electricity with eyes but no mouth. A Builder’s face, Washen recalled. How they had arrived at that imagery, she didn’t know. Diu claimed that Till was preyed upon by visions. The Wayward’s leader was convinced that the Builders were visiting him, and in some ways, they were his only true friends.

As the first Waywards approached, they slowed to a dignified walk and lifted their masks back up on top of their heads.

Nearly fifteen centuries had passed since Washen last saw Till. Yet she knew him immediately. She knew him from the drawings and from a captain’s crisp memories. But she also recognized his mother in his face and in his measured, imperious stride.

He was a smaller, prettier version of Miocene.

The rest of the party—the finest priests and diplomats and cabinet members—followed at a respectful distance. They were staring at the prize. Washen had plugged an umbilical into the vault, and the walker’s generator was feeding it. A smooth living hum came from within, infusing the air with a palpable hint of possibilities.

Only Till wasn’t staring at the prize. He watched Miocene. Wariness was mixed with other, less legible emotions. For an instant, his mouth opened. Then he took a quick breath and turned to Wishen, asking, “May I examine the device?”

“Please,” she told him; she told all of them.

Locke was standing closest to Till. It was a sign of rank, perhaps, and as always, that brought Washen an unexpected pride.

“How have you been, Mother?” he inquired. Always polite; never warm.

“Well enough,” she allowed. “And how are you?”

His answer was an odd wincing smile, and silence.

Where was Diu? More of the Waywards were climbing up on the stage, and she looked at each man as he lifted his mask, watching their faces, assuming that Diu was somewhere close, hidden by the growing crush of bodies.

Till was kneeling, caressing the vault’s slick surface.

Miocene studied him, but her eyes seemed empty. Blind.

A few thousand honored Waywards had gathered around the stage. All were nursing women, each with at least one infant sucking on their swollen breasts. A thick, oddly pleasant scent lay on the breeze. Tens of thousands more streamed out of the jungle, from every direction, moving purposefully and quietly, footfalls and breathing making a sound, soft and vast, like the beating of a distant surf that grew closer. Something about the sound was irresistible, and beautiful, and at the heart of things, frightening.

Among them were Locke’s children and grandchildren.

In principle, Washen could have a hundred thousand descendants among these people. Which wasn’t a small accomplishment for one old woman who could claim only one child of her own.

The vault’s hum grew louder, increased in pitch, then stopped altogether. It was Locke who lifted an arm, shouting, “Now,” to the multitude.

Everyone else repeated the gesture, the word. A great shared voice rippled its way to the top of the amphitheatre, and then a sudden smear of gold appeared along one edge, expanding rapidly, bright in the skylight as hundreds of strong bodies dragged it forward. Countless golden balloons helped hold the fabric aloft. It was a foil of gold, hectares in size and pounded thin and strengthened… how…? Whatever the trick, it was strong enough and light enough to be pulled across the entire amphitheatre, enclosing everyone, creating a temporary, impermeable roof.

The sky fell dark.

Sensing the perfect darkness, the vault opened itself, revealing a new sky and a younger world. Marrow was suddenly barren and smooth, and it was covered with a worldwide ocean of bubbling, irradiated iron.

The audience found itself standing on that ocean, unwarmed, watching an ancient drama play itself out. The Builders’ enemies appeared.

Without warning, the hated Bleak squirmed their way through the chamber’s walls, emerging from the countless access tunnels—insectlike cyborgs, each one enormous and cold and frighteningly swift. Like angry jackwasps, they dove at Marrow, spitting out gobs of antimatter that slammed into the molten surface. Scorching white-hot explosions rose up and up. Liquid iron swirled and lifted, then collapsed again. In the harsh shifting light, Washen glanced at her son, trying to measure his face, his mood. Locke was spellbound, eyes wide and his mouth ajar, his muscular body drenched with a glossy, almost radiant perspiration. Almost every face and body was the same. Even Miocene was enthralled. But she was staring at Till, not at the spectacle overhead, and if anything, her rapture was worse than the others’. While her son, in stark contrast, seemed oddly unmoved by these glorious, holy images.

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 ghosdy 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 pagen-try 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 carde 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 ported 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 quasi-religion 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 hall.”

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.”

“Which song?” the woman sputtered.

“Oh, that’s their choice,” Miocene replied. “It’s always theirs.”

The defector was an emotional alloy: two parts arrogance, one part fear.

It was a useful combination.

Sitting at the table with Miocene, Virtue seemed to recall that smiles were a helpful gesture. But he wasn’t particularly skilled with the expression, his smile looking more like a pained wince, his light gray eyes growing larger by the moment.

“I told them that I absolutely had to see you,” he reported. “Only you, and as soon as possible.”

“Madam Miocene.”

His genius wavered. A stupid voice said, “Pardon?”

“I am your single hope,” she replied, leaning back in the tall chair as if disgusted by the creature before her. “You live out the day if I let you. Otherwise, you die. And I think that I’m entitled to hear my name used in the proper fashion, at the proper times.”

He looked at his own hands.

Then, quietly, “Madam Miocene.”

“Thank you.” She showed him a narrow grin, then with a slow, almost indifferent set of motions, she opened the bright chromium case of her electronic file box, pretending to read what she already knew by heart. “To my associates, you claimed that you had something to tell me. News fit only for my ears.”

“Yes… Madam Miocene…’ He swallowed hard, then said, “It has to do with this world of ours—”

“This isn’t my world,” she interrupted.

Virtue nodded, and waited. His eyes couldn’t have been larger.

Miocene pretended to concentrate on the screen. “It says here… that you’re a second-generation descendant of Diu—”

“He was my grandfather, yes. Madam.”

“And your father…?”

“Is Till.”

She looked up, staring as if she had never noticed the familial resemblance. After a lengthy pause, she mentioned, “Many Waywards are Till’s children. As I understand these things.”

“Yes, Madam.”

“No real honor to it, since there’s so awfully many of you.”

“Well, I don’t know if I would…’ He hesitated, then said, “No, madam, I suppose there isn’t a specific honor, no.”

She touched a key, then another, scrolling through the transcripts and the written accounts of each interrogator. Every entry gave clues to this man’s character, or lack of it. And none could be trusted as the final word on anything concerning him.

“So our texts are inaccurate. You’re claiming.”

Virtue blinked, and he held his breath.

Souls were a fluid alloy. The arrogance hid deep inside him, replaced on the surface by a growing, strengthening sense of fear.

“Are they inaccurate, or aren’t they?”

“In places, I think so. Yes.”

“Have you built a fusion reactor like the one in those diagrams?”

“No, madam.”

“Are there any reactors like it in the Wayward nation?”

“No.”

“You’re certain?”

“I can’t be absolutely certain,” he admitted.

“And we haven’t built them, either,” she confessed. “Our geothermal plants are quite sufficient for our very modest demands.”

The defector nodded, then attempted a compliment. “This is an amazing city, madam. They let me see pieces of it on my way here.”

“That was their mistake,” she replied.

He hunkered, a little bit.

Then she gave him a smile, inquiring, “Do you Waywards have cities this large? With almost a million people in one place?”

“No. No, madam.”

“We’ve mastered some marvelous tricks,” she continued. “The crust beneath us is thick and solid, and we keep it that way. Quakes are diffused or bled away. The fluid iron is steered into managed zones. Artificial vents, in essence.”

Sensing her wishes, he allowed, “The Waywards don’t have that technology.”

“You’re still nomads, aren’t you? Basically”

He started to answer, then hesitated. “I’m not a Wayward anymore,” he finally offered. Then with a tight little voice, he added, “Madam.”

“But you could tell me much about them. I would imagine.”

A cursory nod.

“You know about their lives,” she continued. “About their technologies. Perhaps even their ultimate goals.”

“Yes,” he said. “And yes. And no, madam.”

“Oh? You don’t know what Till wants?”

“Not in any clear way, no.” He swallowed as if in pain. “My father… well, Till doesn’t exactly confide in me…”

Again, Miocene touched the keys. “Maybe that’s why you lost the Wayward faith. Is that a possibility?”

“I’m not sure that I ever believed.”

“All that noise about Builders and Bleaks and ancient souls entombed inside those hyperfiber coffins…?”

“The truth is that I don’t know what’s real. Madam.”

She looked up, suspicion mixed with fascination. “So you might believe. If circumstances were changed in some way, that is.”

The arrogance resurfaced. Quietly, angrily, he asked, “Wouldn’t you change your mind? If you suddenly realized that your mind was wrong, I mean.”

“As I recall, you demanded to be brought here. To this temple specifically. I can only assume that you’re eager to see the Great Ship for yourself, and to that noble end, you want to help our holy mission…”

“No, madam.”

Miocene feigned surprise, then disgust. With her own quiet anger, she asked the defector, “In what do you believe?”

“Nothing.” He sounded defiant, but like a child too full of himself, too impressed with the keen edge of his own exceptional mind. “I don’t know why Marrow is here,” he complained, “much less who built it. Or why. And I’m absolutely convinced that no one else has answers for those questions, either.”

“The artifacts-?”

“There’s another obvious explanation for them.”

But she didn’t want to hear any groundless speculations. What was important here—what was vital and even urgent—was to ascertain the real talents of this taciturn young man. A contemptuous snarl preceded her firm declaration: “I don’t have use for Wayward scientists. We’ve had a few of you defect, once a century or so, and as a rule, you’re badly educated. Unimaginative. And you trade on the names of your insane fathers.”

“I am well educated,” Virtue replied, in a sudden fever. “And I’m extremely imaginative. And I don’t use your son’s name to my advantage!”

She stared at him, the picture of skepticism.

“Don’t you appreciate the risks that I’ve taken? For your sake, and everyone’s?” He barked the words, then with a wince and grunt restrained himself. A nervous hand threw open the book, as if one of its intricate, flawed pages would lend support for his cause. Then with a soft, furious tone, Virtue explained, “I was Chief of Delving at the main research facility at the Grand Caldera. In secret, I taught myself how to fly. Alone, I stole one of our fastest pterosaurs, and I flew to within a hundred kilometers of the border. Inside a rainstorm, I jumped. I left the pterosaur to be shot down, and without armor or a parachute, I dropped through the canopy. When my shattered legs healed, I ran. I ran all the way to that shithole checkpoint of yours. That’s how badly I wanted to be here, Grandmother. Madam Miocene. Whatever the fuck you want to be called…!”

“It’s a grand epic,” Miocene offered. “All that’s missing is the motivation.”

Glowering silence.

“Chief of Delving,” she repeated. “What were you delving into at the Grand Caldera?”

“Energy.”

“Geothermal energy?”

“Hardly.” He glanced at his own hands, reporting. “There has always been a problem, and both nations know it. There’s too much energy running through this place. Energy to light the sky, and power enough to compress an entire world and hold it in one place. That’s power beyond what fission can supply. Or normal fusion. Even the great captains are at a loss to explain such a thing.”

“Hidden matter-antimatter reactors,” Miocene offered.

“Something’s hidden,” he agreed. One hand pulled a braid into his mouth, and he sucked on the wig’s dark hair for a moment. Then he spat it out again, and he told the Submaster, “I was delving into the deepest regions.”

“Of Marrow?”

A cursory nod. “Looking for your hidden reactors, I suppose.”

“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 seemed 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 neighborhood 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.

“I know that I’m asking too much,” Miocene had admitted on many occasions. “A slower pace would be fast enough, and there wouldn’t be as many hardships on our grandchildren. But these are only hardships. Not lives. And I want our people to see their energies going toward something genuine. Something they can touch, and climb -with our permission—and something that is visibly progressing.”

What the eye found unimpressive at first glance was quite tall, and even to an old woman who had seen plenty of marvels, the bridge had a magnificence that always made her blink and shiver. It was far taller than any neighboring skyscraper. Taller than all of them set on top of each other, in fact. It reached up into the cold stratosphere. If they didn’t add another centimeter, Marrow’s own expansion could lift it up until it nearly kissed the surviving nub of the old bridge, and their escape would be complete.

But that led to a problem.

Washen had always doubted Miocene’s rationale. Maybe their people needed something tangible. Although hadn’t they always been wonderfully motivated by the abstract charms of the mythlike ship? And maybe this was a project that should be completed as quickly as possible, regardless of costs and deprivations. But the fledging bridge stood on an island of iron, and the iron was drifting on a slow, ancient ocean. Plumes of white-hot metal were rising beneath them, each plume wrestling with its neighbors. Heat and momentum played a slow, relentless game. True, the abatement teams had managed to steer the plumes, forcing them to cancel each other’s effects. Drifting ten meters north or sixty east were workable issues. But they still had three centuries of tectonic tampering ahead of them, and what was difficult today would only become more so. With the crust acting as a blanket, the trapped heat could only grow, the molten iron would rise faster and faster, and like any liquid that needs to move, the iron would show persistence and a low cunning.

“This is too soon,” she had told the Submaster. The ancient woman had become a recluse over these last centuries. She had her own elaborate compound between the factories and the bridge. She ruled by dispatches and digitals. Walls of scrap hyperfiber hid whatever passed for a life, and sometimes an entire year would pass without the two women meeting face-to-face. Miocene only emerged for the annual Submaster feast, which was where Washen asked her bluntly, “What if Marrow pushes the bridge completely out of alignment?”

But Miocene possessed her own form of persistence. “First of all,” she replied, “that will not happen. Hasn’t the situation been well in hand for the last thousand years?”

With the buried heat escalating all the time, yes.

“And second of all, is any of this your responsibility? No, it is not. In fact, you have no role in any key decision.” Miocene seemed cold and troubled, shaking her head as she explained,’I gave you a role in the bridge’s construction, Washen, because you motivate the grandchildren better than most. And because you’re willing to make your own decisions without troubling the Submasters every day”

Miocene didn’t like to be troubled anymore.

There were whispers about her hermitage. Sad rumors, typically. Some claimed that Miocene wasn’t at all alone. She kept a secret cadre of young grandchildren whose only function was to entertain her, sexually and otherwise. It was a ludicrous story, but centuries old just the same. And what was that old warning? If you tell a lie often and if you tell it well, then the truth has no choice but to change Her face…

With a hard thump of tires, Washen pulled into the main garage.

The Great Temple was always open to the public. From the basement garage to the old library, she was surrounded by crowds of worshipers from across the city and from every end of the Loyalist nation. Happens River had sent a dozen grinning pilgrims bearing a special gift—a giant, hugely massive nickel bust of Miocene—and the temple administrator wore a pained, confused expression, telling them thank you in the same breath that she warned them that all gifts needed to be registered beforehand. “Do you see my point? And thank you so much, again. But how else can I keep this place from being a cluttered mess? With so much devotion, don’t we need a system?”

There were many ways into the bridge.

Most of the routes were subterranean, and armored, and typically locked. Washen preferred to enter through a small door at the back of the library. The important security measures were thorough but subtle. But to convince visitors of the facility’s impregnability, armed guards stood in plain view, eyeing everyone; even high-ranking captains deserved a look of cold suspicion.

Twice in twenty meters, Washen was scanned and registered.

Reaching a secondary elevator, she signed her name into the register, then allowed an autodoc to take a snip of tissue, a sip of blood.

With confidence, the nearest guard said, “Good morning, Madam Washen.”

“Hello, Golden,” she replied.

For the last twenty years, without fail, the man had sat at his station, never complaining, observing the comings and goings of thousands of talented, determined workers. Besides a square face and a name, he seemed to have no identity of his own. If Washen asked about his life, he deflected the question. It was their game. At least it was her game. But she didn’t feel like playing it today. Watching her hand scrawl her name on the thinking plastic, she found herself recalling her dream again, wondering why it was bothering her so much.

“Have a good day, madam.”

“You, too, Golden. You, too.”

Alone, Washen sat in the car and rode to the top of the bridge. Another square-faced guard welcomed her by name, saluted briefly, then reported the most important news of the day. “Rain is coming, madam.”

“Good.”

The only windows on the bridge were here. A series of tall diamond panes looked out on the near vacuum of the stratosphere. The sky was hyperfiber and a tired blue glow came from nowhere, from everywhere. And fifty kilometers below was the city and its surrounding ring of farms, dormant volcanoes, and aging red lakes reaching out to a horizon that looked as if it were about to press up against the chamber’s wall.

Only from here did Marrow resemble a faraway place.

This was a view that any captain could appreciate.

As promised, a line of thunderstorms were drifting toward the city. The tallest clouds were intricate and clean and white, beautifully shaped and constantly twisted by winds into even more beautiful shapes. But the clouds were little more than bumps above the remote terrain. As the buttresses weakened, storms grew less frequent, and less angry. Without light and an abundance of water to feed them, they tended to fade and fall apart as swiftly as they formed.

Another three-plus centuries, and Marrow would be immersed in darkness.

And for how long?

Maybe a ship-day. Or maybe twenty years. Either was a viable estimate, and nobody knew enough to feel certain. But each of the native species had a reservoir of unexpressed genes, and in laboratory conditions, bathed in night, the genes awakened, allowing the vegetation and blind insects to fall into a durable hibernation.

The buttresses would vanish, it was assumed. Or at least fade to negligible levels. And the Loyalists would climb up this wondrous makeshift bridge, reaching the base camp, then the ship beyond.

In polite company, nobody even discussed the possibilities that lay beyond that point. After forty-six centuries, the same theories ruled. And every other bizarre explanation had been offered, then debated in depth, and finally, mercifully, buried in a very deep, unmarked grave.

Whatever was, was.

That’s what Washen told herself as she entered her small, spartan office, taking her seat before a bank of controls and monitors and simple-minded AIs.

“Whatever is, is.”

Then like every other morning, she let herself gaze out the diamond window. Maybe the bridge was too much and too soon. But even still, it was a marvel of engineering and ad hoc inventiveness, and sometimes, in a secret part of herself, Washen wished there was some way to carry it along with the grandchildren.

To show the universe both treasures in which she felt such pride.

“Madam Washen?” She blinked, turned.

Her newest assistant stood in the office doorway. An intense, self-assured man of no particular age, he was obviously puzzled—a rare expression for him—and with a mixture of curiosity and confusion, he announced, “Our shift is over.”

“In another fifty minutes,” she replied, pushing aside her daily report. Washen knew the rime, but the habit of her hands was to open her silver watch, eyes glancing at the slow hands. “Forty-nine minutes, and a few seconds.”

“No, madam.” Nervous fingers tugged at the dangling Gordian braids, then attempted to smooth the crisp blue fabric of his uniform. “I was just told, madam. Everyone is to leave the bridge immediately, using every tube but the Primary.”

Washen looked at her displays. “I don’t see orders.”

“I know—”

“Is this a drill?” Drills happened from time to time. If the crust beneath them subsided, they might have only moments to evacuate. “Because if it’s an exercise, we need a better system than having you wandering about, tapping people on their shoulders.”

“No, madam. It’s not that.”

“Then what-?”

“Miocene,” he blurted. “She contacted me personally. On a secure line. Following her instructions, I’ve dismissed our construction crews, and I’ve placed our robots into their sleep mode.”

Washen said nothing, thinking hard.

With a barely restrained frustration, he added, “This is very mysterious. Everyone agrees. But the Submaster is fond of her secrets, so I’m assuming—”

“Why didn’t she talk to me?” asked Washen.

The assistant gave a big lost shrug.

“Is she coming here?” she asked. “Is she using the Primary?”

A quick nod.

“Who’s with her?”

“I don’t know if there’s anyone else, madam.”

The Primary tube was the largest. Fifty captains could ascend inside one of its cars, never brushing elbows with each other.

“I already looked,” he confessed. “It’s not a normal car.”

Washen found the rising car on her monitors, then tried to wake a platoon of cameras. But none of them would respond to her commands.

“The Submaster asked me to take the cameras off-line, madam. But I happened to get a glimpse of the car first, by accident.” The assistant grimaced as he made his confession.’It’s a massive object, judging by the energy demands. With an extra-thick hull, I would surmise. And there are some embellishments that I can’t quite decipher.”

“Embellishments?”

He glanced at his own clock, pretending that he was anxious to leave. But he was also proud of his courage, smiling when he explained, “The car is dressed up inside pipelike devices. They make it look like someone’s ball of rope.”

“Rope?”

With a dose of humility, he admitted, “I don’t quite understand that apparatus.”

In plain words, “Please explain it to me, madam.”

But Washen explained nothing. Looking at her assistant—one of the most loyal of the captains’ loyal oflsping; a man who had proved himself on every occasion—she shrugged her shoulders, took a secret breath, then lied.

She said, “I don’t understand it, either.”

Then, as an afterthought, she inquired, “Was my name mentioned, by any chance? While you and Miocene were chatting, I mean.”

“Yes, madam. She wanted me to tell you to stay here, and wait.”

Washen took a little breath, saying nothing.

“I’m supposed to leave you here,” he whined.

“Well, then, do what our Submaster wants,” was Washen’s advice. “Leave right now. If she finds you here, I guarantee she’ll throw you down the shaft herself.”

Twenty-three

For centuries, virtue had proved himself with his genius and his passion for the work. On all occasions, contrived or genuine, he had acted with as much loyalty as anyone born into the Loyalist nation. Yet even now—particularly now—Miocene couldn’t make herself completely trust the little man.

“It might not work,” he warned her, again.

She said, “It will,” and looked past him, watching the sealed and simple mechanical door, imagining it opening and her stepping that much closer to the end. Another barrier crossed, if only a small one. Then she reminded Virtue, “In your simulations, success is a ninety percent event. And we both appreciate how difficult you make your simulations.”

The Wayward scalp had grown hair. A Gordian bun and implanted gemstones made him look like any Loyalist, while the busy gray eyes had acquired a fondness for the Submaster, deeply felt and surprising to both of them.

Quietly, angrily, Virtue told her, “This is too soon.”

She said nothing.

“Another two years, and I can improve the odds—”

“One or two percent,” she quoted. Then staring at the fond eyes, Miocene wondered why she didn’t trust him. Was she that suspicious, or that girted? Either way, she would feel better if she could find a fair reason to send him home again. “Miocene.”

He said her name tenderly, hopefully. Fondness dissolved into a stew of deeper emotions, and where the voice stopped, a small tidy hand reached out, reached up, grabbing hold of her right breast.

After so long, a Wayward gesture.

She said, “No,” to him, or to herself.

Again, he said, “Miocene.”

The Submaster removed his hand with one of hers, bending back two of his fingers until his face filled with a pained surprise.

“That little quake helped the alignment,” she reminded him. “ ‘By nearly half a meter,’ you said. ‘But the next quake or two could steal our advantage.’ ”

“I said it,” he agreed. “I remember.”

“Besides,” she whispered. “If we wait, we’ll likely lose the gift of surprise.”

“But we’ve kept our work secret for this long.” When determined. Virtue could look like his father. Like Till. The narrow face was full of emotions, and you were never sure which emotion would bubble out next. “What would it injure? Give me another full day, and I’ll recheck every system and recalibrate the guidance system, plus both backups—”

“But,” Miocene interrupted, “this is the day. This is.”

He had no choice but to sigh and shake his empty hands, and surrender. And just like that, he suddenly looked nothing at all like Till.

“Don’t you believe in destinies?” she asked. “You’re a Wayward, after all.”

“Not now,” he grumbled, hurt by the insult. “If I ever was.”

“Destinies,” she repeated. “I woke this morning knowing that this was the morning. I understood that fully, and I have no idea why.” She felt herself smiling, looking through him as she explained, “I’m not superstitious.You know that much about my character. And that’s why I know that this is the right, perfect moment. Intuition is instructing me. Every day that I make ready is another opportunity to be found out, and why would I want that? My Loyalists. Your Way wards. Let’s allow both our peoples as much ignorance as they can possibly cherish. Isn’t that what we agreed?”

Virtue nodded helplessly.

As a lover, he reached for the comforting curve of her breast, and Miocene intercepted the hand, lowering it and holding tight to the fingers, gazing into the warm and caring steel-gray eyes.

From the charred remains of his mind, she had resurrected him—never letting him forget on whose charity his existence was perched. But even with that intimacy, and after living for centuries in her private compound, surrounded by luxuries and every research toy that Marrow could provide—not to mention her own compliant body—the little man insisted on surprising her. That’s why she could only trust him to a point. She didn’t know him perfectly, and now, at this point, she never would.

Tenderly, he said, “Darling.”

He confessed, “I don’t want to lose you, darling.”

Quietly and fiercely, Miocene promised, “If you don’t do this one thing for me, you’ll most assuredly lose me. I won’t see you to shit on you. And you know I mean it.”

He shrank.

He started to say, “Darling,” once again.

But the car was deaccelerating, and the massive door was preparing to unseal itself. To her lover and to herself, Miocene said, “This is the moment.” At long last.

As ordered, Washen was waiting.

As the door opened outward, the first-grade peered into the tiny cabin, eyes the color of band iron staring at the stranger—at Virtue—even as her steady, mocking voice asked, “Madam, are you insane? Do you really think this can work?”

Then she answered her own questions.

“No, you aren’t insane,” she said. “And yes, you’ve got to think it can.”

“Washen,” Miocene replied. “I’d recognize your wit anywhere, darling.”

She stepped out of the car. The Submaster had never visited the control room, but it was exactly like its holo-plans, complete to the banks of glowing instruments and the absence of human bodies. Most of its systems had barely been tested. Why bother when it would be another three centuries before they were meant to be used?

“You’ll need me to oversee,” Washen assumed. Then she stared at Virtue, remarking, “I don’t know you.”

“She doesn’t need you, and you don’t know me,” the man replied. Bristling now.

Miocene faced her captain, and exactly as she had imagined the moment, she said, “No, my associate will oversee the launch. He’s fully versed in this equipment.”

Washen nearly blinked.

Then to her credit, she focused on the larger issue. “You’ve got to have accuracy to do this. Because what we’re talking about here is shooting a fat cannonball between two cannons. Am I right?”

A nod. “Always, darling.”

“And if you can hit the old bridge true, you’ll still have enough time and distance to brake your momentum. True?”

“A rough, abrupt stop. It has to be.”

“But even as thin and weak as the buttresses are… this ugly little ship has got to do an impressive job of protecting you.”

“It will,” Miocene replied.

Virtue took a deep, skeptical breath.

Washen examined the car in person, touching the outside of the hatch, fondling the odd, ugly pipes.” Aasleen suggested something along these lines,” she allowed. “I can’t remember when, it was that long ago. But after she was done explaining herself, you said no. You said it would be too clumsy and too limited, not to mention the technical hurdles, and you ordered us to put our efforts into richer ground.”

“I said those things. Yes.”

For lack of anything better, Washen smiled, and she said. “Well, then. The best of luck to you.”

Miocene let herself show a grin. “Good luck to both of us, you mean. The interior, as you see, seats two.”

The woman was brave, but she wasn’t fearless or a fool. She had to flinch and think hard about her next breath, eyeing the Submaster for a long moment before asking, “Why? Me?”

“Because I respect you,” Miocene replied, honestly and without qualms.

The dark eyes grew larger.

“And because if I order you to accompany me, you will. Now.”

Washen took a careful breath, and another. Then she admitted, “I suppose all of that’s true.”

“And truthfully, I need you.” That declaration seemed to embarrass everyone. To kill the silence, Miocene turned to Virtue, telling him, “Start the procedures.” She paused. Then quietly, she added, “As soon as we’re on board.” The man looked ready to cry.

She didn’t leave him the opportunity. With a crisp wave and a defiant stride, Miocene re-entered the car. Not for the first time, she thought how it resembled the Great Ship—a thick body with a hidden hollow sphere at its center.

To Washen, she said, “Now, darling.”

The first-grade was obviously considering her next step, and everything else, too. Long, strong hands wiped themselves dry against her uniform, and with a mixture of stiffness and grace, she bent over and climbed through the hatchway, then examined the twin seats, padded and set on greased titanium rails. The seats would always keep their backs to the accelerations. As if to appreciate the technology, she touched the simple control panel, then the inner wall. The hand pulled away abruptly, and she said, “Cold,” with a quiet little voice.

“Crude, chilly superconductors,” Miocene admitted.

Then the Submaster touched the panel, and as the hatch pulled itself shut, she said, “Virtue.” She looked out at him and said, “I trust you.”

The man was crying. Nothing but.

The hatch closed and sealed itself, and as the two women sat together, back to back, Washen said, “You trust him, and you respect me, too.” She was securing her protective straps, and laughing. “Trust and respect. From you, on the same day”

Miocene refused to look over her shoulder. She busied herself making last-instant checks, saying to the controls, “You’re more gifted than I am when it comes to other people. You can speak to the grandchildren, and the other captains… and that’s a sweet skill that could prove an enormous advantage…”

Washen had to ask, “Why is that an advantage?”

“I could explore the ship alone,” Miocene allowed. “But if the worst has happened—if everything above us is dead and empty—then you, I think, Washen… you are the better person to bring home that terrible news…”

Twenty-four

Here was the culmination of more than four thousand years of single-minded labor—two captains ready to throw themselves off Marrow. Washen found herself strapped into the primitive crash chair, part of her demanding some task, some worthwhile duty, even when she knew full well that there was nothing to do now but sit and wait and wish for the best.

With a crisp, dry voice, Miocene worked her way down a precise checklist.

Her mysterious companion might resemble Till, or Diu, but his voice was far too slow and uncertain to belong to either man. He spoke across an intercom, alternating, “Good,” and “Yes,” and, “Nominal,” with little pained silences.

The captains sat back to back. Unable to see the Submaster’s face, Washen found herself thinking about little else. It was the same cold, confident face that it had always been, and it wasn’t. Washen always marveled at how Marrow had changed that rigid woman. A metamorphosis showed in the wasted, haunted eyes, in the taut corners of the pained mouth. And when she spoke, as she did now, even a simple word felt infinitely sad, and a little profound.

“Initiate,” that sad voice commanded.

There was a pause.

Then the little man said softly, with resignation, “Yes, madam.”

They were falling, accelerating down a dark, airless shaft. This wasn’t a bridge, and it was never supposed to be. It was a vast piece of munitions, and everything depended on its accuracy. Descending to the starting point, to the electromagnetic breech, Miocene whispered technical details. Terminal velocity. Exposure to the buttresses. The transit time. “Eighteen point three seconds.” Which was nearly as long as they spent inside the buttresses on their way down. But without the same levels of protection, or backup systems, or even a single field test beyond the laboratory.

The ugly cannonball stopped abruptly, then its thick walls began to hum. To crackle, and sputter, and seemingly ripple as the protective fields were woven tighdy around them.

Again, Miocene said, “Initiate.”

There was no response this time. Would the man obey? But as she thought those words, Washen was slammed back into her seat, bone pressed against dense padding, gee forces mounting, tearing flesh and bursting blood vessels.

Then came the sensation of drifting.

A pleasant, teasing peace.

After leaving the shaft, there was perhaps a half second of streaking up through the last breaths of the atmosphere, a cluster of little rockets firing on the hull, correcting for the very thin winds. In her mind’s eye, Washen saw everything: Marrow’s storm clouds and cities and tired volcanoes falling behind while the slick sliver of the chamber wall descended on them. Then they struck the buttresses, and her eyes filled with random colors and senseless shapes, while a thousand incoherent, terrified voices screamed inside her dying mind.

Madness.

Eighteen point three seconds of nothing else.

Time dragged. That’s what she promised herself when she managed to concentrate, carving a sensible thought out of that screaming chaos. It was a symptom of the buttresses, this compression of the seconds. Because if more than eighteen seconds had passed, they had simply missed their target, falling short, and now they were tumbling in a close, fatal orbit around Marrow.

No, we can’t be, Washen whimpered.

The frightened voices lent her their fear, and a ragged wild panic took her by the throat, by the colon. Nausea came in one savage thrust. Washen bent forward as far as the padded straps allowed, and with her left hand she managed to yank the silver clock from its pocket, then open it, that sequence of practiced motions requiring what seemed to be hours of relentless work.

She stared at the fastest hand.

A solid click meant that a full second had passed.

Then, another.

Then her seat, and Miocene’s, unlocked and slipped on the titanium rails, meeting at the opposite end of the little cabin, locking again with a crisp determination.

Washen looked up.

Swallowing a burning mouthful of bile and vomit, she stared up at where she had just been, and she saw herself restrained in an identical chair, her own face twisted in misery, gazing down, hair hanging loose and long, unlike Washen’s bunned hair, and the mouth opening as if this hallucination were ready to offer a few tortured words.

Washen watched herself, and in rapt attention, listened.

But then they had pierced the buttresses, and a string of angry rockets fired beneath Washen, braking the vehicle as it plunged, she hoped, into the battered remains of the original bridge.

Impact.

Washen felt the car scrape hard against hyperfiber. There was a sloppy shrieking on her right as pipes and boiling superconductors were stripped away. Then an instant of silence, followed by a second, deeper roar from her left, their car bouncing down the shaft.

Rockets barked again, killing momentum at all costs.

The final impact was abrupt and crushing, and it was over before her mind registered the barest pain.

The chair fell back into its original position.

A voice said, “There.”

Miocene’s voice. Then the Submaster fought her way out of her belts and made herself stand, holding her long sides as she sipped each breath, acting as if her ribs had been shattered.

Washen’s ribs were on fire. She eased herself out of her chair, feeling the delicious warmth as the curved bones knitted themselves. Emergency genes synthesized machinery that turned masticated flesh into new bone and blood, giving her strength enough to stand. She sipped one breath, then another. The hatch began to open itself, creaking with each slow millimeter. If it jammed, they were trapped. Doomed. But that would be a ridiculous finish. Ludicrous. Which was why she dismissed the possibility, refusing to worry.

The hatch gave a squeal and jammed.

Then after a prolonged silence, it freed itself with a white-hot screech.

Darkness fell on them. Miocene stepped out into the silence, into the darkness. Her exhausted black eyes were huge. She was staring at the empty berths as Washen climbed and joined her, the two women standing close enough to touch each other, but avoiding that gesture, busily scouring their memories for the way out of the unlit assembly station.

At the same moment they pointed in the same direction, saying, “That way”

Base camp had been without power for forty-six centuries. The Event had crippled every machine. Reactors, drones, all of it. The magnetic latches on every sealed door had failed. Pushing the last door aside, they stepped out into the soft, muted light of the dying buttresses.

“Wander,” Miocene ordered. “For half an hour. Then meet at the observation station, and we’ll go on from there.”

“Yes, madam.”

Washen started for the dormitories, then thought better of it. Instead she crept into the biolabs, opening curtains for light and dislodging dust that fell softly over dust. Ever)’ system was ruined. Cages with tough mechanical locks remained sealed—an ancient precaution—and inside each cage lay mounds of colorless dust. Washen found keys left hanging above a captain’s empty desk. Eventually she found the key that would fit and turn, and quietly, she crept into one of the cages, stepping over a child’s doll, then kneeling to reach into the largest dust pile.

Without food or water, the abandoned lab animals had dropped into comas, and as their immortal flesh lost energy and moisture, they had quietly and thoroughly mummified themselves.

Washen picked up one of the mandrill baboons—an enormous male weighing little more than a breath—and she held it against her own body, looking into the desiccated eyes, feeling its leathery heart beat, just once, just to say, “I waited for you.”

She set him down carefully, and left.

Miocene was standing on the viewing platform, impatient and concerned, gazing expectantly at the horizon. Even at this altitude, they could only see the captains’ realm. The nearest Waywards were hundreds of kilometers removed from them. Which might as well have been hundreds of light-years, as much as the cultures interacted anymore.

“What are you looking for?” Washen asked.

The Submaster said nothing.

“They’ll find out what what we’ve done,” Washen had to tell her. “If Till doesn’t know already, I’d be surprised.”

Miocene nodded absently, taking a deep, deep breath.

Then she turned, and never mentioning the Waywards, she said, “We’ve wasted enough time. Lets find out what’s upstairs.”

Tiny cap-cars remained in their berths, untouched by any hand and shielded by kilometers of hyperfiber. Their engines remained charged, but every system was locked into a diagnostic mode. The com-links refused to work. The ship was dead, said the silence. But then Washen remembered that the com-link was singular and tightly guarded, and after a century’s wait, the security systems would have ripped out the only tongue, as a reasonable precaution.

Miocene offered a code that brought one car to life.

Occasionally Washen would glance at the Submaster. measuring the woman’s stern profile, and her silence, wondering which of them was more terrified. The long access tunnel led straight upward, not a trace of damage or disruptions showing anywhere along the narrow shaft. Then the tunnel ended with a slab of hyperfiber. Touch codes caused the slab to detach and fall inward, revealing an abandoned fuel line—a vertical shaft better than five kilometers across.

Against that vastness, the doorway closed again, vanishing.

The car skimmed along the surface of the fuel line, always climbing, gradually turning onto its back as they slipped closer to the vast fuel tank. If the great ship’s engines were firing, not so much as a shiver reached them. But those engines rarely ignited, Washen reminded herself. The stillness meant nothing. Nothing.

Between the women, a pact had formed. Neither mentioned where they were going. After such an enormous wait, neither dared make the tiniest speculation. Possibilities had been exhausted. What was, was. Each said it with her eyes, her silence. It was implicit in the way their long hands lay in their laps, peacefully wresding with one another.

The vast tunnel passed sleeping pumps larger than some moons.

Quietly, Washen asked, “Where?”

The Submaster opened her mouth, then hesitated.

Finally, strangely, she asked, “What do you think is best?”

“The leech habitat,” Washen allowed. “Maybe someone lives there now. And if not, we could still borrow its com-lines.”

“Do that,” Miocene replied.

They entered through the fuel tank, flying high above the dark hydrogen sea. The leech habitat was exactly as Washen remembered it. Empty. Clean. Forgotten. A scan showed nothing alive and warm. She slipped into its docking berth, then they climbed into the gray hub. With a breath and a slack, numbed expression, Miocene touched the aliens’ only com-panel, and nothing happened. In frustration, she said, “Shit,” and stepped back, telling Washen, “Do it for me. Please.”

But there wasn’t anything to do.

“It’s malfunctioned, or there’s no com-system anymore.” Washen said the words, then felt her belly knot up and ache.

Miocene glared at the dead machinery.

After a long moment, they turned away, saying nothing as they climbed back into the waiting cap-car.

A narrow service tunnel angled upward, passing through a series of demon doors, an atmosphere building with each crisp crackle. And in a soft, whispering voice, Miocene asked, “How many were on board? Do you remember?”

“One hundred billion.”

The Submaster closed her eyes and held them closed.

“Plus the machine intelligences. Another one hundred billion, at least.”

Miocene said, “Dead. They all are.”

Washen couldn’t see through her tears. With the back of a hand, she wiped her face, and she muttered, “We don’t know,” with a contrived hopefulness.

But Miocene said, “Dead,” again. She was defiant about her pronouncement. Then she straightened the clumsy fabric of her uniform, staring at her hands and the reflections that seemed to float inside her chest, and she sighed and looked up, staring straight ahead and sighing once again before announcing, “There is a higher purpose. To all of this. Since we’re still alive, there must be.”

Washen didn’t respond.

“A higher purpose,” the woman repeated. Smiling now. That wide strange smile said as much as her words.

The service tunnel ended inside one of the deepest passenger districts. Suddenly they were skimming along the obsidian floor of a broad, flattened tunnel—a minor passageway barely half a kilometer across—and it was plainly, horribly empty. No traffic. No important, busy lights. And to herself, in misery, Washen said, “Maybe the crew and passengers… maybe we were able to evacuate everyone…”

“Doubtful,” was Miocene’s response.

She turned to stare at Washen, ready to say something else honest, and harsh. But her expression changed abruptly. The eyes went distant, and wide, and Washen looked back over her shoulder in time to see a vast machine appear behind them, bearing down on them until a collision was imminent, then skipping sideways with a crisp, AI precision. And the machine passed them. A car, it was. A light-filled diamond hull held a lake of warm saltwater, and floating in the center of the lake was the sole passenger—a whalelike entity with a forest of strong-handed symbionts rooted on its long back—and as it passed them at a blurring, impolite speed, the entity winked. Three of its black eyes winked just as humans would wink, offering them nothing but a friendly, casual greeting.

It was a Yawkleen.

More than four millenia removed from her post, yet Washen immediately remembered the species’ name. With a flat, disbelieving voice, Miocene said, “No.” But it was true.

Suddenly another dozen cars caught up with them, then slipped past. Washen saw four harum-scarums, and what could have been a pair of humans, and then an insectish creature that reminded her, with its intricate jaws and long black back, of the crap-sculptor beetle from the Marrow jungles.

From back home, Washen was thinking.

Where, if the truth were told, she’d almost prefer to be.

Twenty-five

A small, obscure waystation lay on the tubeway s floor.

With a pained voice, Miocene ordered Washen to stop. Their car passed through a series of demon doors, an atmosphere spun around them.Then they did nothing.The Submaster sat erect, hands trembling and her face iron-taut and her mouth opened just enough to pull in a series of quick deep breaths, that private little wind whistling across her angry lips, a wild fury spreading from her eyes into her face, her body, then filling the car until Washen couldn’t help but feel her own heart hammering against her new ribs.

Finally, with a soft choked voice, Miocene said, “Go into the station.”

Washen climbed from the car. “Do it,” Miocene commanded.

She was shouting at herself, staring at her folded legs and her trembling hands, then at the single hand that Washen offered, along with a quiet voice that reminded her, “Whatever is, is. Madam.”

The Submaster sighed and stood without accepting help.

The station’s lounge was small and tidy, flexible furnishings meant for almost any traveler, its floor and arching walls decorated with beds of false limestones, buttery-yellow and white and gray, each bed impregnated with a different stew of artificial fossils that looked terran at first glance. Which was the only glance that Washen allowed herself, stepping through the last demon door and finding no one present but the resident AI.

“The Master Captain!’ Miocene barked.’Is she alive and well?”

With a smooth cheeriness, the AI reported, “The woman is in robust good health. And she thanks you for inquiring.”

“How long has she been healthy?” Washen pressed, in case there was a new Master.

“For the last one hundred and twelve millenia,” the machine replied. “Bless her, and bless ourselves. How can we do otherwise?”

Miocene said nothing, her face red with blood, her rage thick and tireless.

One of the fossil walls was sprinkled with com-booths. Washen stepped inside the nearest booth, saying, “Emergency status. Captains’ channel. Please, we need to speak directly to the Master.”

Miocene stepped into the booth, then sealed its thick door.

The Master’s station appeared, spun from light and sound. Three captains and the usual AIs stared at them. Three captains meant this was the nightwatch, the exact time and date floating in the air behind them. Washen opened her clock and stared at the turning hands, realizing that Marrow’s clocks had been wrong by a little less than eleven minutes—a minor triumph, considering that the marooned captains had had to reinvent time.

Three human faces stared at them, dumbfounded, while their AIs, full of poise, simply asked, “What is your business, please?”

“Let me see her!’ Miocene thundered.

There was a delay brought by distance, and a longer delay brought by stupidity Finally, one of the captains remarked, “Maybe so. Who are you?”

“You know me,” the Submaster replied. “And I know you. Your name is Fattan. And yours is Cass. And yours, Underwood.”

Cass whispered, “Miocene…?”

His voice was soft, full of astonishment and doubt.

“Submaster Miocene! First Chair to the Master Captain!’ The tall woman bent over the nearest captain, shouting, “You remember the name and rank, don’t you? So act. Something’s wicked here, and I need to speak to the Master!”

“But you can’t be,” said the cowering man.

“You’re dead,” said another captain. Underwood. Then she glanced at Washen, and with a strange pity, she confided, “You’re both dead. For a long time now…”

“They’re just holos,” the third captain announced. With an obstinate certainty, Fattan said, “Holos. Projections. Someone’s little joke.”

But the AIs had checked their reality by a thousand lightspeed means, and following some secret, long-buried protocol, it was the machines that acted. The image swirled and stabilized again. The Master apeared, sitting up in her great bed. Dressed in a nightgown made from shaped light and airborne pearls, she looked exactly as Washen remembered, her skin golden and her hair a snowy white. But the hair was longer, and instead of being worn in a bun, it lay loose over the broad meaty shoulders. Preoccupied in ways that only a Ship’s Master can be, she had to pull her attentions out of a hundred tangled nexuses, then focus on her abrupt guests. Suddenly her bright brown eyes grew huge. In reflex, she touched her own nightgown, probably wondering about their crude, almost laughable imitations of the standard ship uniform. A look of wonder and amazement swept over the broad face, and just as a smile appeared, it collapsed into an instant and piercing fury.

“Where are you?” she snapped. “Where have you been?”

“Where you sent us.” The Submaster refused to say, “Madam.” Approaching the bed, her hands pulled into fists, she said, “We’ve been on that shit-world… on Marrow…!”

“Where?” the woman spat.

“Marrow,” the Submaster repeated. Then in exasperation, “What sort of ridiculous game are you playing with us?”

“I didn’t send you anywhere, Miocene…!”

In a dim, half-born way, Washen understood.

Miocene shook her head, asking, “Why keep our mission secret for this long?” Then in the next breath, she answered her own question. “You meant to imprison us. That’s what this was. The best of your captains, and you wanted to push us aside!”

Washen took Miocene by the arm.

“Wait,” she whispered. “No:

“The best of my captains? You?’ The giant woman gave a wild, cackling laugh.’My best captains just don’t vanish without warning. They don’t stay hidden for thousands of years, doing who-knows-what, in secret!’ She gasped, the gold of her face brightening. “Thousands of years,” she said, “and without so much as a whisper. And it took all of my genius and experience, and every last power at my disposal, to explain your disappearance and steer this ship away from panic!”

Miocene glanced at Washen, her expression astonished. Devastated. In a low, muttering voice, she said, “But if the Master didn’t—”

“Someone else did,” Washen replied.

“Security!’ the giant woman cried out. “Two ghosts are talking to me! Track them! Catch them! Bring them to me!”

Washen killed the link, buying them a moment.

The two ghosts found themselves standing inside the darkened booth, stunned and alone, trying to make sense out of the pure insanity.

“Who could have fooled us?” Asked Washen.

Then in her next breath, she knew how it could have been: someone with resources and access, and enormous ingenuity, would have sent orders in the Master’s name, bringing the captains together in the leech habitat. Then the same ingenious soul deceived them with a replica of the Master, sending them rushing down into the ship’s core.

“I could have done this,” Miocene confessed, thinking along the same seductive, paranoid lines. “Gathered the machinery and fooled all of you. If I’d wished. Assuming that I had known about Marrow, and if I had time, and some compelling reason.”

“But you didn’t, and you didn’t, and you didn’t,” Washen whispered.

“Who did?” Miocene wondered aloud.

They couldn’t answer that brutally simple question.

Washen asked the booth for the roster of Submasters and high-ranking captains. She was hunting for suspects, and maybe for a friendly name on which she could place her frail trust.

In a bitter, low voice, Miocene said, “My seat. Has been filled.”

But the name that leaped out at Washen—what made her legs weak and breath quicken—was the captain occupying her former office.

Pamir.

“Who?” Miocene rumbled.

But in the next instant, she remembered the name. The crime. And with a weak exasperation, the Submaster said, “This just isn’t our ship. It can’t be.”

Washen ordered the booth to contact Pamir. On an audio-only line, she warned who was calling. There was a pause, just long enough for Miocene to say, ‘Try another.’ But then Pamir’s original face emerged from the darkness. Strong and homely, the face smiled with a wild amazement. The reborn captain was standing inside his old quarters, surrounded by a meadow of singing llano-vibra plants. “Quiet,” he told his plants.

Washen and Miocene were standing in the same meadow. The man facing them was bare-chested, tall and powerful through the shoulders, and he was breathing like a sprinter, gasping when he spoke.

“You’re dead,” he managed. “A tragic mishap, they say”

“What about you?” Washen had to ask.

Pamir shrugged his shoulders as if embarrassed, then said, “What with the shortfall of talent, there was a general pardon—”

“I don’t want your story,” Miocene interrupted. “Listen. We have to explain… we need to tell you what happened…!”

But the meadow suddenly turned quiet, and the vegetation grew thin and pale, and Washen could see her own feet through the fading llano-vibra, Pamir’s fine face vanishing along with the rest of the scene.

Miocene asked, “What’s happening, booth?”

Again the booth was dark; it had nothing to say.

Washen eyed the Submaster, feeling a chill in her hard, hungry belly. The booth’s door was sealed, and dead. But the mechanical safeties operated, and with their shoulders they managed to shove the door open. Then together, in a shared motion, they stepped out into the waystation’s lounge.

A familiar figure stood in plain view, calmly and efficiently melting the resident AI with a soldier’s laser.

It was a machine, Washen realized. The machine was wearing a drab bone-white robe and nothing else. But if it were clothed in a mirrored uniform, with the proper epaulets on its shoulders and the proper voice and vocabulary and manners, then that mechanical device would have been indistinguishable from the Master Captain.

The AI’s mind lay in a puddle on the floor, boiling and dead, while an acrid steam rose up and made Washen cough.

Miocene coughed.

Then a third person cleared his throat in a quiet, amused fashion. The captains turned in the same motion and saw a dead man staring at them. He was wearing a tourist’s clothes and a simple disguise, and Washen hadn’t seen the man for centuries. But the way he stood there with his flesh quivering on his bones, and the way his gray eyes smiled straight at her heart… there was absolutely no doubt about his name.

“Diu,” Washen whispered.

Her lover and the father of her child lifted a small kinetic stunner.

Too late and much too slowly, Washen ran.

Then she was somewhere else, and her neck had been broken, and Diu’s face was hovering against the gray sky; eyes and the smiling mouth all laughing as he spoke, every word utterly incomprehensible.

Twenty-six

Washen closed her eyes, and her hearing returned. Another voice descended. “How did you find Marrow?” Miocene’s voice.

“Remember your mission briefing,” Diu replied. “But the telltale impact occurred in the early stages of the galactic voyage. Some curious data were gathered. But there were easier explanations, and your dear Master dismissed the idea of a hollow core. The data waited for me to find it. As you recall, I began as a wealthy passenger. With means and the time, I could afford to chase the unlikely and the insane.”

“How long ago was this?”

“When I found Marrow? Not too long after the voyage began, actually”

“You opened the access tunnel?” asked Miocene.

“Not personally. But I had drones manufactured, and they dug on my behalf, and replicated themselves, and eventually their descendants reached the chamber. Which was when I followed them down.”

A soft laugh, a reflective pause.

“I named Marrow,” Diu announced. “It was my world to study, and I watched it from above for twenty millennia. When I understood the world’s cycles, I commissioned a ship that could cross the buttresses when they were thin and weak. And I touched down first and stepped out onto the iron. Long before you ever did, Madam Miocene.”

Washen opened her eyes again, fighting to make them focus.

“Madam,” Diu sang out, “I’ve lived on that wondrous planet more than twice as long as you. And unlike you, I had all the skills and AI helpers that a wealthy man can afford to bring on his adventures.”

What looked like a gray sky became a low gray ceiling, bland and endless. Slowly, very slowly, Washen realized that she was back inside the leech habitat—inside its two-dimensional vastness; who knew where?—and looking the length of her body, she found Diu’s face and body framed by the diffuse gray light, his kinetic weapon held in his strong right hand.

“Unlike you,” he reminded, “I didn’t have to reinvent civilization.”

Miocene was standing beside Washen, her face taut and tired but the eyes opened wide, missing nothing.

She glanced down, asking, “How are you?”

“Awful,” Washen managed. But her voice was dry and clear, and the shattered vertebrae and spinal cord were healing. She was well enough that her hands and toes were waiting for her to notice them, and her body was strong enough that she managed a breath, then lifted herself, sitting upright.

One deep gulp of stale air let her ask, “How long have we been here?”

“Moments,” Diu replied.

“Did you carry me?”

“My associate did that chore.”

The false Master stood nearby, its white hair brushing against the low ceiling as it turned and turned, watching everything, a dead expression centered on glassy eyes, the stubby emerald-and-teakwood laser bolted to one of its thick forearms.

For as far as Washen could see, twin planes of perfect gray reached into infinity—an assuring endlessness, if you were a leech.

She turned her healing neck. The habitat’s wall and a long window were behind her, and aging pillows were strewn about the gray floor. Knowing the answer, she asked Diu, “Why here?”

“I want to explain myself,” he replied. “And we have privacy here, as well as a certain symbolism.”

An old memory surfaced. Washen saw herself standing before a leech window, looking at the captains’ reflections while Miocene spoke fondly about ambition and its sweet, intoxicating stink.

In an angry low voice, Miocene asked, “Who knows that you’re alive?”

“Except for you, nobody”

Washen stared at the man, trying to recall why she ever loved him.

“The Waywards saw you die,” said the Submaster.

“They watched my body being consumed by the molten iron. Or at least seemed to be.” He shook his head, boasting, “When I first came to Marrow, I brought huge stockpiles of raw materials and machinery. I stowed everything in hyperfiber vaults that float inside the liquid iron. When I need them, they surface. When I need to vanish, I can live inside the vaults. Underground.”

Miocene seemed to stare at him. But while Washen glanced at her—just for a slippery instant—the walnut eyes focused on the infinite, their gaze intense and unreadable, a subtle hope lurking somewhere inside them.

Washen said, “Ambition.”

“Pardon?” asked Diu.

“That’s what all of this is about,” she offered. “Am I right?”

He regarded them with an easy contempt. Then he shook his head, remarking, “Captains don’t understand ambition. I mean real ambition. Rank and tiny honors are nothing compared to what is possible.”

“What is possible?” Miocene barked.

“The ship,” said Washen. Quiedy, with certainty.

Diu said nothing.

On clumsy legs, Washen tried to stand, pausing with her knees still bent and breathing with deep gasps. Then Miocene offered her hand, yanking her upright, and the two women embraced like clumsy dancers fighting to keep their balance.

“Diu wants the ship,” Washen muttered. “He gathered up the most talented captains, then made certain that we were trapped on Marrow when the Event came. He knew we would be marooned. He guessed that we’d have to build a civilization in order to escape. And everything since has been orchestrated by him…

“The Waywards,” Miocene barked. “Did you create them, Diu?”

“Naturally,” he replied with a wide, smug grin.

“A nation of fanatics being readied for a holy war.” Washen looked at the Submaster, adding, “With your son as their nominal leader.”

Miocene stiffened, releasing her grip on Washen’s arm.

“You fed him those ridiculous visions,” she remarked, eyes peering at the infinite. “It’s always been you, hasn’t it?”

“But really’ the grinning man replied. “If you honestly think about it, aren’t you mostly to blame for driving him away?”

A cold, suffocating silence descended.

Washen found the strength to take a step, and with both hands, she massaged the new bone and flesh inside her neck.

Miocene said nothing. “The Builders,” said Washen. Diu winked and asked, “What about them?”

“Were they real? And did they fight the Bleak?” Diu drank in the suspense, smiling at both of them before admitting, “How the fuck should I know?”

“The artifacts—” Miocene began.

“Six thousand years old,” Diu boasted. “Designed and constructed by one of our alien passengers… a creative soul who believed that he was making a puzzle intended for the ship’s entertainment industry…”

“Everything’s a lie,” said Washen.

Diu glanced over his shoulder at the false Master. Then he looked back at them, his smile darkening as he explained, “That elaborate holo you saw? With the Bleak fighting the Builders? It began as a dream. I was the only person on Marrow, and I saw the battle in my sleep. There’s always the chance that it was a genuine vision, although, honestly, it felt like nothing but a good vivid dream. Evil pitted against Good. Why not? I thought. A simple faith could be intoxicating for the children to come…!”

“But why pretend to die?” Washen asked.

“Death offers freedom.” A boy was lurking behind the smile. “Being a disembodied soul, I see more. Being deceased, I can disguise myself and walk wherever I want. And sleep where I wish. And I can make babies with a thousand women, including quite a few in the Loyalist camp.”

Silence.

Then a slight whisper, as if a breath of wind were coming.

Miocene took a half-step, then admitted, “We spoke to the Master.”

“She knows everything,” Washen added. “We told her—”

“Nothing,” Diu snapped. “That’s exactly what you told her. I know.”

“You’re certain?” Washen asked. “Absolutely.”

“But by now she knows we were at the waystation,” Miocene threatened, “and she’ll hunt for us. With all of her energies.”

“She’s been on that same hunt for better than four thousand years.” Diu kept smiling. He almost danced. Then with a hint of confession, he admitted, “You did surprise me in one way, Miocene. Darling. I knew you were building that little cannonball vehicle, but I didn’t think you’d try this soon. If I’d known today was the day, I would have arranged some little accident to keep you on Marrow.” Then he shrugged, adding, “I didn’t want to come chasing after you. But I did. And in a much superior version of your cannon-ball, I should add.” Silence.

Then Washen admitted, “The Master hasn’t found us. Not yet. But this time she has a starting point. Someone will eventually come here, and who knows what they’ll find…?”

“A silent, obvious point. Thank you.” He passed his weapon from hand to hand, explaining, “Because of you, I will close the access tunnel from below. And keep it closed forever, perhaps. A series of antimatter charges will obliterate every trace of its existence. And even if the Master guesses right, which is doubtful, it would take centuries to dig to Marrow again.”

“With you trapped down there,” Washen offered.

Diu shrugged again. “How does that old story play? It’s better to rule in one realm than serve in another-?”

There was an abrupt, soft squeal.

The false Master had stopping moving, eyes staring back toward the center of the habitat, something seen and the machine repeating the squeal again. Louder this time, and more focused.

If there was an echo, Washen couldn’t hear it.

Irritated, Diu asked, “What is it?”

Then he turned and stepped toward the robot, asking, “Is something wrong?”

With the Master’s voice, it said, “Motion.”

“From the entranceway?”

“Along the line, yes.”

“What about now?”

“Nothing.”

“Watch,” was Diu’s advice. Then he faced his prisoners, and with an odd little smile, focused on Miocene. “You’ve done something else surprising,” he decided. “Am I right? You’ve fooled me in another way. Haven’t you, darling?”

“I didn’t build one escape pod,” Miocene confessed. “There are two pods. Both serviceable.”

The man took a breath, then held it. Then he said, “So,” with a low, contemptuous voice. “Two more captains have followed you up here. So what?”

He turned to the false Master.

“Shoot—” he began to order.

“No,” Miocene interrupted, taking a step and lifting both hands. “I didn’t invite any captains. And believe me, you don’t want to open fire on them.”

The false Master was aiming at a target too distant for human eyes.

Diu growled, “Wait.”

He turned back to the women, his expression merely surprised. He seemed to be just a little angry. Then he lifted his kinetic weapon, fingers to the trigger as he said, “Who, then? Tell me.”

“My son,” said Miocene.

The false Master was still as a statue, waiting for the correct word.

“Till,” Miocene whispered. “I hoped he’d be curious enough. Through his spies, I sent a message. Virtue was under orders to launch Till to the bridge. I gave him the codes to awaken a second cap-car. I just wanted him to have this chance to see the Great Ship for himself.”

“Well,” Diu said softly, defiantly. Then he looked off into the distance, contemplating that narrow infinity, and after a few moments of hard thought, he told his machine, “Kill them. I don’t care who they are. Kill them.”

The laser gave a sharp, sudden crack.

Miocene ran, screaming now, hands reaching as Diu turned and calmly shot her in the chest, a fat explosive charge burrowing through bone and the wildly beating heart, then detonating with a wet pop.

She collapsed into a shockingly red pool of blood.

Following protocols, the robot turned, ready to defend its master. For that simple instant, Washen knew she was doomed. She ducked down, by instinct, and watched the lasers barrel swing for her, charged again and ready to turn her water and flesh into an amorphous, lifeless gas. But when the next crack shattered the silence, the beam missed. She felt the heat pass overhead and watched in amazement as the false Master panned up and up, aiming at nothing, the golden face turning bright as it absorbed blistering, unrelenting energies.

Quietly, with an eerie grace, the face collapsed into a molten goo.

The barrel of the laser dropped and pulled sideways, then fired again, punching a hole in the wall behind Washen, holding steady until that vast body and its weapon turned to a duck liquid, the robes burning as a Marrow-like pond melted its way into the gray floor.

Diu was screaming and backing up as he fired twice.

Washen tackled him from behind.

They wrestled, and she threw a forearm into his exposed throat, and for a delicious moment she thought she could win. But her body wasn’t perfectly healed. A thousand weaknesses found her, and Diu bent her back, hard, then gave her a smooth strong shove, and when she tumbled, he aimed his weapon at her heaving chest.

“Till heard you,” she sputtered. “With these leech acoustics—”

“So,” he replied.

She said, “He knows everything-!”

Diu hit her with one explosive round, pushing her back against the window.

“What’s changed? Nothing’s changed!’ he roared. Then he shot again, and again. As if from a great distance, Washen heard him shout, “I have a million sons!,” and the next round punched through one of the gaping holes in her body, cutting deep into the insulated window before detonating with a dull, almost inaudible thud.

Quietly, with the blood filling her mouth, Washen said, “Shit.”

Diu was aiming again. Aiming at her head.

Washen blinked and fell to the floor, watching with a thin interest and a genuine impatience, thinking this wasn’t how it was meant to be.

This was wrong.

Behind Diu, a running figure appeared. Legs and arms and a familiar, welcome face came sprinting out of the grayness, a laser drill clasped in one hand.

He wasn’t whom she expected. Instead of Till, she saw her son.

Locke called out, “Father.”

Startled, Diu turned to face him.

And Locke shot him with the drill, emptying its energies into that jittery body, that old metaphor of the flesh ready to boil coming true.

In a moment, Diu evaporated.

Vanished.

Then Locke stepped toward Washen, his face torn with compassion and a wild fear. He dropped the drill and blurted, “Mother.” But she couldn’t hear his voice. Something louder, and nearer, interrupted him. Then came the sensation of motion, sudden and irresistible, and Washen felt herself being sucked through a small hole, her ravaged body spinning and freezing, and falling, the blackness everywhere, and a tiny voice inside her whispering:

“Not like this.

Not now.

No.”

Twenty-seven

There was a screaming wind and the harsher, nearer wailing of a lone man.

Miocene pried open her eyes and found herself miraculously sitting upright, her chest ripped open and her uniform splattered with dying blood and bone and the shredded and blackened muscle of her dead heart. Diu and the false Master had vanished. But the newcomer was running straight for her, sprinting with the roaring wind… a Wayward man, half-naked and barefoot, shorn of his hair and every dignity, his miserable voice screaming, “Mother, no…!”

Was this her child?

Miocene couldn’t place his face. But just the same, she tried to grab him, aiming for one of his legs and losing her balance as a consequence, dropping to her side and the man leaping over her helpless body, again screaming, “No…!,” with a voice as pitiful and lost as she was feeling now.

For a moment, or a year, the ancient woman shut her eyes.

The wind fell away to a whistling murmur. The leech habitat was repairing its damage, and she realized that her miserable carcass was trapped here. The screaming man was near the wall, sobbing now. Slobbering. “I should have… done it faster… fired at him sooner…!’ he was complaining to someone. Then with a massive disgust, he confessed, “But he’s my father, and my hand froze-!”

“But Locke,” a second voice remarked, “don’t you realize? He was probably my father, too.”

Miocene recognized that voice.

Plainly stunned, Locke asked, “Was he? How do you know?”

The Submaster inhaled, and again she forced her eyes to open. Her son was kneeling before her, eyes focused on her eyes, that charming, pretty face breaking into a knowing smile. “Am I right, Mother? Was Diu my father?”

One of her most cherished secrets. All those vials of semen, and she selected a donor with gifts but minimal status. A father who wouldn’t be in any position to contest her role as the child’s sole parent…

Miocene nodded.

The whistling had stopped now. With blood on her tongue, she softly asked, “How long… have you known…?”

Till laughed for a moment. Then he said, “Always.”

Locke stumbled into view, at least as shocked as Miocene. “We’re brothers, and you always knew it,” he muttered, wrestling with the possibilities. Then he quietly and fearfully asked, “What else did you know?”

Miocene spat out the blood, then said, “It was always Diu. Always.”

Her son had deep cold eyes.

Locke stepped nearer, whispering, “But you knew that, too.” He was staring at Till, saying, “I saw you. While Diu was confessing, I saw it in your face. You already knew all about his deceptions!”

Till winked fondly at his mother.

Then he looked at his half brother, and with a smooth, untroubled voice, said, “Our father was an agent. A means. A great tool of the Builders. But Diu’s work was finished, and you did exactly what was necessary, and nothing has changed. Do you hear me, Locke? You had to kill that man, or he would have murdered someone in whom the Builders have all their great, glorious hopes…”

Locke glanced at new gray wall, his face slick with tears.

Till looked down and said, “Mother,” with a firm, low voice.

“I’ve been wrong,” said the shattered woman. “Wrong, and stupid.”

“You have been,” he allowed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t know how sorry.”

Till said nothing.

Then she whimpered, “Forgive me. Can you, please?”

His expression gave his answer. He smiled warmly, if only for an instant. Then he stood and remarked to Locke, “We need to hide our presence. As best as we can, then better. Then we’ll use Diu’s fancy machine to return to Marrow, and we’ll shut the tunnel as our father planned.”

Carefully, Locke asked, “What about my mother?”

Till sighed and said, “Let her sleep. For now, that’s all that we can do.”

Locke wiped at his tears, but he moved like a man who knew his duty, who understood what was expected of him.

Waywards could make wonderful followers, thought Miocene. Then she coughed, and with a stronger voice, she suggested, “You could go above… and look at the ship for yourself. Just once.”

Till regarded her with pity and with amusement. “What did you find up there, Mother?”

Miocene’s old anger fused with a new rage. Emotion helped her sit up again, her trembling hand grasping a piece of dead heart muscle, crushing it as she said, “The Master’s an idiot, unfit for her office… obviously, obviously…”

Till nodded knowingly.

“For my forgiveness,” he asked, “what are you willing to give?”

“Anything,” Miocene muttered. “Tell me what you want…!”

But her son merely shook his head, and with a sad, sturdy voice, he said to Locke, “Your laser.” Then with the weapon in both hands, he said to his mother, “You’re wrong. Don’t you see? I have never wanted you to follow me.”

“No?” she squeaked.

“That’s not my destiny,” he promised. “Or yours.”

Then she understood—suddenly; perfectly—and her eyes grew wide.

Till aimed the laser at her broken body, and with a flash of blue-white light, he destroyed everything but her tough old mind, plus enough skull and unburnt hair to serve as a trustworthy handle.