Robert Reed - Marrow

“Madam,” someone shouted.

After a pause, the Master said, “Yes, Diu.”

“Just tell us, please… what in hell is down there…?”

“A spherical object,” she replied. And with a slow wink, she added, “It is the size of Mars, about. But considerably more massive.”

Washen’s heart began to gallop.

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.

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…!

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.”