Robert Reed - Marrow

Just which captains were used as a model was a secret. But persistent rumors claimed it was Miocene—a possibility that perhaps accounted for the popularity of the foods, among both captains as well as certain grandchildren.

With an extra hour in her day, Washen took her time. She ate slowly. She read both competing news services; neither offered anything of real interest. Then she stepped from her house out into her very long yard, strolling on a path of native iron blocks rusted into a pleasant shade of drab red, little tufts of grayhair and sadscent growing in the gaps.

Gardening was a recent hobby. Her one-time lover, long-time friend Pamir used to be an accomplished gardener. What were his flowers of choice? The Ilano-vibra, yes. Maybe he was gardening today, if he was alive. And if he was, wouldn’t that old criminal be astonished, seeing Washen’s ambitious soul bending at the knees, plucking at the blackish weeds with her bare ringers?

As the buttresses weakened, as the skylight fell away into a twilightlike glow, the Marrow ecosystem continued to transform itself. Obscure species that lived only in caves and the deepest jungles weren’t simply abundant, they were huge. Like the elfliearts in the middle of her garden. A species that was mature when it was hip-high inside the deepest shade had transformed itself into stout trees with trunks nearly a meter thick and a richly scented purple-black foliage, giant leaves and flowers mixed into a single elaborate structure that was fertilized by the lusciousflies, then curled into a black ball that matured into a fatty fruit, only a little toxic and with a lovely, if somewhat strong taste.

Washen kept the trees for their scent and her flies, and for their almost-terran limbs.

She kept them because some decades ago, a boyish lover had allowed himself to be taken in this orchard, and taken again.

Past the orchard were wide iron steps leading down to Idle Lake. No body of water on the world was older. Born fifteen hundred years ago, this patch of crust could lay claim to being the most ancient slab of iron ever to exist on Marrow: a testament to the captains’ ingenuity and persistence. Or was it their obsessive need for order?

The old lake was still and stained red with rust and ruddy planktons. Above, stretching like some great steel ceiling, the chamber’s wall looked near enough to touch. This was a pure illusion, of course. Marrow’s atmosphere ended fifty kilometers short of the wall. The radiant buttresses still ruled above the swelling world. They remained dangerously strong, if considerably thinner. And for the next three hundred-plus years, they would continue to thin, and Marrow would expand, and according to every forecast and every carefully plotted graph, the buttresses would reach their minimum when Marrow’s atmosphere began to lick against the chamber wall.

Finally, the captains would be able to climb to the base camp, and the access tunnel, and if the tunnel hadn’t crumbled, they could move up into the vastness of the ship itself. Which was a derelict now, probably. Assuredly. Millennia of debate hadn’t produced any other reasonable explanation for their long, perfect solitude, and three more centuries probably wouldn’t change that grim assessment.

Washen opened the silver lid of her old, much-cherished timepiece, deciding that in this great march of centuries, she still had a few moments to waste.

Old, light-starved virtue trees had made the planks that were fixed to the stainless steel pontoons that held up Washen’s dock. She strolled out to the end, listening to the pleasant sound of her dress boots striking wood. A tiny school of hammerwing larvae swam away, then turned and came back again, perhaps wanting handouts. Fins sloshed. Big many-faceted eyes saw a human figure against the hyperfiber sky. Then Washen closed the lid of her little clock, and the sudden click caused the school to dive deep in a single smooth panic, only swirls of red water betraying their presence.

Idle was an ancient lake, and by Marrow standards, it was impoverished, senile. An ecosystem built on frequent, radical change didn’t appreciate stability and a thousand years of eutrophication.

Washen slipped the clock and its titanium chain into a trusted pocket, and her dream suddenly came back to her. Without warning, she remembered being somewhere else. Somewhere high, wasn’t it? Perhaps on top of the bridge, which was only reasonable; she worked here every day. Only somehow that possibility didn’t feel right, either.

Someone else was in her dream.

Whom, she couldn’t say. But she had heard a voice, clear and strong, telling her with such sadness, “This is not the way it is supposed to be.”

“What’s wrong?” she had asked.

“Everything,” the voice declared. “Everything.”

Then she looked down at Marrow. It seemed even larger than it was today, bright with fire and with molten, white-hot lakes of iron. Or was that iron? It occurred to Washen that the glow looked wrong… although she couldn’t seem to piece together an answer from the sparse, ill-remembered clues…

“What is ‘everything’?” She had asked the voice.

“Don’t you see?” the voice replied.

“What should I see?”

But no answer was offered, and Washen turned, trying to look at her companion. She turned and saw… what?

Nothing came to mind, save for the odd and thrilling sensation of falling from a very great height.

Her puttercar needed surgery.

Time and the hard steel roads had dismantled is suspension, and the simple turbine engine had developed an odd, nagging whine. But Washen hadn’t gotten around to seeing it fixed. The vehicle still ran, and there was the salient fact that every machine shop in the capital had priorities. Personal transportation held a low priority. On Miocene’s orders, every device that directly served the growing bridge held sway over personal concerns. And while Washen could have claimed privilege—wasn’t she a vital part of this heroic effort?—she felt uncomfortable demanding favors.

For six hundred years, with rare exceptions, she had driven this route into the metropolis. Her local road merged with a highway that took her straight through older, more densely settled neighborhoods. Fifty-story apartment buildings stood in the mandatory parks, the black foliage mixed with playground equipment and the scrambling, energetic bodies of screaming children. Single houses and row houses and houses perched on aging, enfeebled virtue trees testified to the wild diversity of people left to their own logic. No two structures were the same, including the tallest buildings. And no two neighborhood temples could be confused for one another, sharing nothing but the dome-hearted architecture and a certain comfortable majesty.

Washen’s feelings about this faith were complex, and fickle. There were moments and years when she believed Miocene was a cynical leader, and this religion was as contrived as almost every other faith that Washen had met, and much less beautiful, too. But there were also unexpected, if fleeting moments when the hymns and the pageantry and everything else about it made sudden and perfect sense.

There was an ethereal charm to this bizarre mishmash.

The ship was real, she reminded herself. The object of their devotion was a miraculous, amazing machine, and empty or otherwise, it was plying its way through a wondrous universe. And even after her long isolation, the captain inside her felt a powerful duty toward that ball of hyperfiber and cold rock.

The puttercar highway grew wide, then evaporated into the central district.

Three hundred-story skyscrapers rose from the trustworthy ground. Steel skeletons were cloaked in acrylic windows and set on frictionless, sway-resistant foundations. A different logic had created the administrative headquarters. Fashioned from titanium and tough ceramics, it resembled a giant puffball—no windows showing to the outside wodd, its base reinforced in a hundred ways, walls armored and bristling with hidden weapons. The enemy was never mentioned, but it wasn’t much of a secret. A Wayward assault was Miocene’s most paranoid fear, offered without the slightest evidence. Yet it was a fear that Washen shared, if only on certain days. No, she didn’t look at those impregnable walls with pride, exactly. But they didn’t make her bristle, either.