Robert Reed: Marrow

To her lover, the woman asked, “What do you think?”

“You ate this bug for how long?” the man growled.

“Nearly five thousand years,” she confessed.

“And did it ever taste good?”

“What do you think?” she asked.

Then they were laughing, and they were hugging each other… and it was as if there weren’t crowd gathered close around them… as if it were just them, and they were perfectly alone…

“I thought you needed to see this for yourselves,” Washen told them. “Sitting in the same room for an eternity can’t help the creative process.”

The AI scribes stared down at the face of Marrow, saying nothing.

“Does it inspire? Are you finding any new ideas?”

Speaking for all, one of the scribes said, “No,” with a disgusted tone. Implied were the words, “Of course this doesn’t help!”

There was little to see, in truth. Sweeping fires and the pent-up energies of coundess volcanoes had filled the atmosphere below with clouds, black and opaque to almost every wavelength. But as awful as things looked from here, most of Marrow was neither burning nor boiling. Long-range sensors and every AI simulation gave the same sturdy answer: the old Wayward lands hadn’t been touched by the conflagration. What was happening to the world wasn’t much worse than what a million other disasters had wrought in the past. In fact, the ecosystem would probably be revitalized by the chaos, while some or most of the Waywards could hunker down, lick their wounds, and wait for the skies to clear.

The scribes continued to stare politely at the boiling black clouds.

Washen motioned. Locke walked out onto the diamond platform, knelt beside the scribes, and with a quiet reverence said, “Maybe I can offer you a new idea. Are you interested, machines?”

One after another, the rubber faces turned toward him. Polite expressions were left frozen in place, while the rapid minds behind them ignored everything but the one vast problem worthy of their considerable trouble.

Locke said, “This ship.”

He asked, “What if you don’t know its real dimensions?”

There was a momentary flicker of interest.

Locke licked his lips, then explained, “When I was a child, I had a toy. A model of the ship. It fit in my hand, it was that small. But I was a boy, too young to appreciate the ship’s real dimensions.”

Eyes widened, imagining his long-ago toy.

“My mother tried to explain the size of things. She told me about protons and kilometers and light-seconds, and light-years, and she promised me that the ship was huge. But light-years are huge, aren’t they? So when I was five or six, I believed that the ship must be that big. Millions of light-years across, 1 thought. Which was silly, of course. She teased me, I remember. Oh, I was stupid in ways that none of you have ever been, I bet.”

The eyes began to drift off again.

But then Locke asked, “What if? When they were fabricating the ship… what if the Builders didn’t stop with the hull? Marrow surrounds the Bleak, whatever that is, and what we call the Great Ship surrounds Marrow. But what if the hull isn’t the end of their work? What if their project reaches out a lot farther, and now, after all this time, it has reached as far as we can see, or imagine…?”

Without exception, the scribes leaned forward.

“You’re looking into the ship’s structures and exact proportions, hunting for some hidden message,” Locke concluded. “But what if the message isn’t written just in this stone and iron and hyperfiber? What if the Builders’ ship is the universe, too… the trillions of stars and the whirling galaxies, and every unmapped mote of dust, and everything else that we can see or suppose throughout the entire visible creation…?”

None of the AIs moved.

To the human ear, none made even the tiniest sound. Washen laid a hand on Locke’s shoulder, telling him, “They’re interested. They’re considering it now’ He said, “Good.”

Mother and son walked out onto the gangway, looking between their feet at the dim black face of Marrow. Every available engineer was waiting above them, ready to begin pouring hyperfiber into the base camp, then the access tunnel. This wouldn’t be a catastrophic collapse. They would take their time, slowly and thoroughly plugging this gaping hole in the chamber’s otherwise perfect wall. Plainly, the Builders had reasons for what they did. As far as Washen or Pamir could see, the only sensible course was to seal the prison again, making things much as they were before and doing it as permanently as possible… the only change being a few small, impossible-to-find security eyes stuck to the chamber’s slick silver wall, watching over her millions of grandchildren…

For a moment, as she stood on that gangway thinking about her grandchildren, Washen felt the sudden strange urge to throw herself at Marrow.

But she took a breath and the feeling passed, and with a practiced motion of her hand, she looked at the time. Then to Locke and the AI scribes, she announced, “We need to be leaving. Now.”

The machines stood and gathered in a neat line.

“Have you thought about what I told you?” Locke asked them.

One of the machines replied, “Naturally”

“Will you have answers soon?” he pressed.

The rubber face merely smiled, and with an appealing haughtiness, it said, “Soon. In a century or a million years. Yes. Soon.”

Washen barely heard the voice or her son’s hearty laugh.

Kneeling on the gangway, where the new hyperfiber would be poured first, she set out her mechanical clock with its silver lid opened, and she left it there. It was the hardest thing in the world. But she managed to stand and walk away, muttering to herself, “For later. I’ll leave it here for now and come back to get it later…”