Robert Reed - Marrow

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.