Robert Reed - Marrow

Past the puffball were the six domes of the Great Temple. And standing at its center, directly beneath the abandoned base camp, was the only object that truly mattered to the Loyalist nation.

The bridge.

No wider than a large skyscraper and pale gray against the silver sky, the structure seemed lost at first glance. By ship standards, its hyperfiber shell was of a poor grade. But each gram of the stuff had come at great cost, grown inside sprawling, muscular factories built for no other purpose. True, most of the hyperfiber was thrown away, inadequate even for simple structural duties. But just to reach this modest point was a marvel. Aasleen and her teams had done miracles. Despite shortages of key elements, tons of hyperfiber had been created, one little droplet at a time, and then teams under Washen’s gaze had slowly and carefully poured those gray droplets into molds that pushed the bridge higher every day. On the very best days, the bridge rose a full fat meter.

“I know that I’m asking too much,” Miocene had admitted on many occasions. “A slower pace would be fast enough, and there wouldn’t be as many hardships on our grandchildren. But these are only hardships. Not lives. And I want our people to see their energies going toward something genuine. Something they can touch, and climb -with our permission—and something that is visibly progressing.”

What the eye found unimpressive at first glance was quite tall, and even to an old woman who had seen plenty of marvels, the bridge had a magnificence that always made her blink and shiver. It was far taller than any neighboring skyscraper. Taller than all of them set on top of each other, in fact. It reached up into the cold stratosphere. If they didn’t add another centimeter, Marrow’s own expansion could lift it up until it nearly kissed the surviving nub of the old bridge, and their escape would be complete.

But that led to a problem.

Washen had always doubted Miocene’s rationale. Maybe their people needed something tangible. Although hadn’t they always been wonderfully motivated by the abstract charms of the mythlike ship? And maybe this was a project that should be completed as quickly as possible, regardless of costs and deprivations. But the fledging bridge stood on an island of iron, and the iron was drifting on a slow, ancient ocean. Plumes of white-hot metal were rising beneath them, each plume wrestling with its neighbors. Heat and momentum played a slow, relentless game. True, the abatement teams had managed to steer the plumes, forcing them to cancel each other’s effects. Drifting ten meters north or sixty east were workable issues. But they still had three centuries of tectonic tampering ahead of them, and what was difficult today would only become more so. With the crust acting as a blanket, the trapped heat could only grow, the molten iron would rise faster and faster, and like any liquid that needs to move, the iron would show persistence and a low cunning.

“This is too soon,” she had told the Submaster. The ancient woman had become a recluse over these last centuries. She had her own elaborate compound between the factories and the bridge. She ruled by dispatches and digitals. Walls of scrap hyperfiber hid whatever passed for a life, and sometimes an entire year would pass without the two women meeting face-to-face. Miocene only emerged for the annual Submaster feast, which was where Washen asked her bluntly, “What if Marrow pushes the bridge completely out of alignment?”

But Miocene possessed her own form of persistence. “First of all,” she replied, “that will not happen. Hasn’t the situation been well in hand for the last thousand years?”

With the buried heat escalating all the time, yes.

“And second of all, is any of this your responsibility? No, it is not. In fact, you have no role in any key decision.” Miocene seemed cold and troubled, shaking her head as she explained,’I gave you a role in the bridge’s construction, Washen, because you motivate the grandchildren better than most. And because you’re willing to make your own decisions without troubling the Submasters every day”

Miocene didn’t like to be troubled anymore.

There were whispers about her hermitage. Sad rumors, typically. Some claimed that Miocene wasn’t at all alone. She kept a secret cadre of young grandchildren whose only function was to entertain her, sexually and otherwise. It was a ludicrous story, but centuries old just the same. And what was that old warning? If you tell a lie often and if you tell it well, then the truth has no choice but to change Her face…

With a hard thump of tires, Washen pulled into the main garage.

The Great Temple was always open to the public. From the basement garage to the old library, she was surrounded by crowds of worshipers from across the city and from every end of the Loyalist nation. Happens River had sent a dozen grinning pilgrims bearing a special gift—a giant, hugely massive nickel bust of Miocene—and the temple administrator wore a pained, confused expression, telling them thank you in the same breath that she warned them that all gifts needed to be registered beforehand. “Do you see my point? And thank you so much, again. But how else can I keep this place from being a cluttered mess? With so much devotion, don’t we need a system?”

There were many ways into the bridge.

Most of the routes were subterranean, and armored, and typically locked. Washen preferred to enter through a small door at the back of the library. The important security measures were thorough but subtle. But to convince visitors of the facility’s impregnability, armed guards stood in plain view, eyeing everyone; even high-ranking captains deserved a look of cold suspicion.

Twice in twenty meters, Washen was scanned and registered.

Reaching a secondary elevator, she signed her name into the register, then allowed an autodoc to take a snip of tissue, a sip of blood.

With confidence, the nearest guard said, “Good morning, Madam Washen.”

“Hello, Golden,” she replied.

For the last twenty years, without fail, the man had sat at his station, never complaining, observing the comings and goings of thousands of talented, determined workers. Besides a square face and a name, he seemed to have no identity of his own. If Washen asked about his life, he deflected the question. It was their game. At least it was her game. But she didn’t feel like playing it today. Watching her hand scrawl her name on the thinking plastic, she found herself recalling her dream again, wondering why it was bothering her so much.

“Have a good day, madam.”

“You, too, Golden. You, too.”

Alone, Washen sat in the car and rode to the top of the bridge. Another square-faced guard welcomed her by name, saluted briefly, then reported the most important news of the day. “Rain is coming, madam.”

“Good.”

The only windows on the bridge were here. A series of tall diamond panes looked out on the near vacuum of the stratosphere. The sky was hyperfiber and a tired blue glow came from nowhere, from everywhere. And fifty kilometers below was the city and its surrounding ring of farms, dormant volcanoes, and aging red lakes reaching out to a horizon that looked as if it were about to press up against the chamber’s wall.

Only from here did Marrow resemble a faraway place.

This was a view that any captain could appreciate.

As promised, a line of thunderstorms were drifting toward the city. The tallest clouds were intricate and clean and white, beautifully shaped and constantly twisted by winds into even more beautiful shapes. But the clouds were little more than bumps above the remote terrain. As the buttresses weakened, storms grew less frequent, and less angry. Without light and an abundance of water to feed them, they tended to fade and fall apart as swiftly as they formed.