Robert Reed - Marrow

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…

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.