Robert Reed - Marrow

It was a machine, Washen realized. The machine was wearing a drab bone-white robe and nothing else. But if it were clothed in a mirrored uniform, with the proper epaulets on its shoulders and the proper voice and vocabulary and manners, then that mechanical device would have been indistinguishable from the Master Captain.

The AI’s mind lay in a puddle on the floor, boiling and dead, while an acrid steam rose up and made Washen cough.

Miocene coughed.

Then a third person cleared his throat in a quiet, amused fashion. The captains turned in the same motion and saw a dead man staring at them. He was wearing a tourist’s clothes and a simple disguise, and Washen hadn’t seen the man for centuries. But the way he stood there with his flesh quivering on his bones, and the way his gray eyes smiled straight at her heart… there was absolutely no doubt about his name.

“Diu,” Washen whispered.

Her lover and the father of her child lifted a small kinetic stunner.

Too late and much too slowly, Washen ran.

Then she was somewhere else, and her neck had been broken, and Diu’s face was hovering against the gray sky; eyes and the smiling mouth all laughing as he spoke, every word utterly incomprehensible.

Washen closed her eyes, and her hearing returned. Another voice descended. “How did you find Marrow?” Miocene’s voice.

“Remember your mission briefing,” Diu replied. “But the telltale impact occurred in the early stages of the galactic voyage. Some curious data were gathered. But there were easier explanations, and your dear Master dismissed the idea of a hollow core. The data waited for me to find it. As you recall, I began as a wealthy passenger. With means and the time, I could afford to chase the unlikely and the insane.”

“How long ago was this?”

“When I found Marrow? Not too long after the voyage began, actually”

“You opened the access tunnel?” asked Miocene.

“Not personally. But I had drones manufactured, and they dug on my behalf, and replicated themselves, and eventually their descendants reached the chamber. Which was when I followed them down.”

A soft laugh, a reflective pause.

“I named Marrow,” Diu announced. “It was my world to study, and I watched it from above for twenty millennia. When I understood the world’s cycles, I commissioned a ship that could cross the buttresses when they were thin and weak. And I touched down first and stepped out onto the iron. Long before you ever did, Madam Miocene.”

Washen opened her eyes again, fighting to make them focus.

“Madam,” Diu sang out, “I’ve lived on that wondrous planet more than twice as long as you. And unlike you, I had all the skills and AI helpers that a wealthy man can afford to bring on his adventures.”

What looked like a gray sky became a low gray ceiling, bland and endless. Slowly, very slowly, Washen realized that she was back inside the leech habitat—inside its two-dimensional vastness; who knew where?—and looking the length of her body, she found Diu’s face and body framed by the diffuse gray light, his kinetic weapon held in his strong right hand.

“Unlike you,” he reminded, “I didn’t have to reinvent civilization.”

Miocene was standing beside Washen, her face taut and tired but the eyes opened wide, missing nothing.

She glanced down, asking, “How are you?”

“Awful,” Washen managed. But her voice was dry and clear, and the shattered vertebrae and spinal cord were healing. She was well enough that her hands and toes were waiting for her to notice them, and her body was strong enough that she managed a breath, then lifted herself, sitting upright.

One deep gulp of stale air let her ask, “How long have we been here?”

“Moments,” Diu replied.

“Did you carry me?”

“My associate did that chore.”

The false Master stood nearby, its white hair brushing against the low ceiling as it turned and turned, watching everything, a dead expression centered on glassy eyes, the stubby emerald-and-teakwood laser bolted to one of its thick forearms.

For as far as Washen could see, twin planes of perfect gray reached into infinity—an assuring endlessness, if you were a leech.

She turned her healing neck. The habitat’s wall and a long window were behind her, and aging pillows were strewn about the gray floor. Knowing the answer, she asked Diu, “Why here?”

“I want to explain myself,” he replied. “And we have privacy here, as well as a certain symbolism.”

An old memory surfaced. Washen saw herself standing before a leech window, looking at the captains’ reflections while Miocene spoke fondly about ambition and its sweet, intoxicating stink.

In an angry low voice, Miocene asked, “Who knows that you’re alive?”

“Except for you, nobody”

Washen stared at the man, trying to recall why she ever loved him.

“The Waywards saw you die,” said the Submaster.

“They watched my body being consumed by the molten iron. Or at least seemed to be.” He shook his head, boasting, “When I first came to Marrow, I brought huge stockpiles of raw materials and machinery. I stowed everything in hyperfiber vaults that float inside the liquid iron. When I need them, they surface. When I need to vanish, I can live inside the vaults. Underground.”

Miocene seemed to stare at him. But while Washen glanced at her—just for a slippery instant—the walnut eyes focused on the infinite, their gaze intense and unreadable, a subtle hope lurking somewhere inside them.

Washen said, “Ambition.”

“Pardon?” asked Diu.

“That’s what all of this is about,” she offered. “Am I right?”

He regarded them with an easy contempt. Then he shook his head, remarking, “Captains don’t understand ambition. I mean real ambition. Rank and tiny honors are nothing compared to what is possible.”

“What is possible?” Miocene barked.

“The ship,” said Washen. Quiedy, with certainty.

Diu said nothing.

On clumsy legs, Washen tried to stand, pausing with her knees still bent and breathing with deep gasps. Then Miocene offered her hand, yanking her upright, and the two women embraced like clumsy dancers fighting to keep their balance.

“Diu wants the ship,” Washen muttered. “He gathered up the most talented captains, then made certain that we were trapped on Marrow when the Event came. He knew we would be marooned. He guessed that we’d have to build a civilization in order to escape. And everything since has been orchestrated by him…

“The Waywards,” Miocene barked. “Did you create them, Diu?”

“Naturally,” he replied with a wide, smug grin.

“A nation of fanatics being readied for a holy war.” Washen looked at the Submaster, adding, “With your son as their nominal leader.”

Miocene stiffened, releasing her grip on Washen’s arm.

“You fed him those ridiculous visions,” she remarked, eyes peering at the infinite. “It’s always been you, hasn’t it?”

“But really’ the grinning man replied. “If you honestly think about it, aren’t you mostly to blame for driving him away?”

A cold, suffocating silence descended.

Washen found the strength to take a step, and with both hands, she massaged the new bone and flesh inside her neck.

Miocene said nothing. “The Builders,” said Washen. Diu winked and asked, “What about them?”

“Were they real? And did they fight the Bleak?” Diu drank in the suspense, smiling at both of them before admitting, “How the fuck should I know?”

“The artifacts—” Miocene began.

“Six thousand years old,” Diu boasted. “Designed and constructed by one of our alien passengers… a creative soul who believed that he was making a puzzle intended for the ship’s entertainment industry…”