Mallow Page 7

The audience let out a low, wounded groan.

  'Show them,' the Master said to her AI. 'Show them what we found.'

  Again, the image changed. Nestled inside the great ship was another world, black as iron and distinctly smaller than the surrounding chamber. The simple possibility of such an enormous, unlikely discovery didn't strike Washen as one revelation, but as many, coming in waves, making her gasp and shake her head as she looked at her colleagues' faces, barely seeing any of them.

  'This world — and it is a genuine world — has an atmosphere.' The Master was laughing quietly, and her quiet voice kept offering impossibilities.'Despite the abundance of iron, the atmosphere has free oxygen. And there's enough water for small rivers and lakes. All of those delicious symptoms that come with living worlds are present here—'

  'How do you know?'Washen called out. Then, in reflex, 'No disrespect intended, madam!'

  'I haven't visited the world, if that's your question.' She giggled like a child, telling everyone, 'Yet fifty years of hard, secret work have paid dividends. Using self-replica ting drones, I've been able to reopen one of those collapsed tunnels. And I've sent curious probes to the chamber for a first look. That's why I can stand here, assuring you that not only does this world exist, but that each of you are going to see it for yourselves.'

  Washen glanced at Diu, wondering if her face was wearing the same wide smile.

  'By the way, I named this world.' The Master winked and said, 'Marrow.' Then again, she said, 'Marrow.' Then by way of explanation, she said,'It's a very old word. It means "where the blood is born.'"

  Washen felt her own blood coursing through her trembling body.

  'Marrow is reserved for you,' the Master Captain promised.

  The floor seemed to pitch and roll beneath Washen's legs, and she couldn't remember when she last took a meaningful breath.

  'For you,' the giant woman proclaimed. 'My most talented, trustworthy friends , , . !'

  Washen whispered, 'Thank you.'

  Everyone said the words, in a ragged chorus.

  Then Miocene called out, 'Applause for the Master! Applause!'

  But Washen heard nothing, and said nothing, staring hard at the strange black face of that most unexpected world.

  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 to
ld 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 . . .