Robert Reed: Marrow

A majestic song roared out of him.

The box fixed on his muscled chest efficiently reduced all that majesty and passion to simple words.

“The Great Nothingness conspired to make me,” he informed her. “He intended me to five for a day. As He intends for each of us. I am a selfish, loud, arrogant, manly man, yes. But if I stay alive for two days, I am stealing another’s life. Someone meant to be born but left without room. If I live for three days, I steal two lives. And if I lived as long as you wish… for a million days… how many nations would remain unborn…?”

There was more to the speech, but she heard none of it.

She wasn’t Snowfeather anymore; she was a young human again. Finding herself standing, she interrupted the translator’s blather with a raucous laugh. Then scorn took hold, making her cry out, telling the Supreme-example-of-manhood, “You know what you are? You’re a stupid, self-absorbed turkey!”

His box hesitated, fighting for a translation.

Before it could speak, and without a backward glance, Washen leaped off the bladder, spreading the mechanical wings and plunging fast, her chest perilously close to the forest’s blue-black face before a rising wind claimed her, helping carry her to the observation deck.

On her feet again, Washen unstrapped the almost-new wings and shoved them over the railing. Then she quietly returned home. That day, or sometime during those next few months, she approached her parents, asking what they would think of her if she applied to the captains’ academy.

“That would be wonderful,” her father purred.

“Whatever you want,” said her mother, her feelings coming with a relieved smile.

No one mentioned the Phoenixes. What her parents knew, Washen never learned. But after her acceptance to the academy, and under the influence of a few celebratory drinks, Father gave her a squidlike hug, and with wisdom and a drunk’s easy conviction, he told her, “There are different ways to fly, darling.

“Different wings.

“And I think… I know… you’re choosing the very best kind…!”

Washen had always lived in the same apartment nestled deep inside one of the popular captains’ districts. But that wasn’t to say that her home hadn’t changed during this great march of a life. Furniture. Artwork. Cultivated plants, and domesticated animals. With several hectares of climate-controlled, earth-gravity terrain to play with, and the resources of the ship at her full disposal, the danger was that she would make too many changes, inspiration ruling, never allowing herself enough time to appreciate each of her accomplishments.

While returning home from Port Beta, Washen composed her daily report, then studied the next passengers scheduled to board the ship: a race of machines, super-chilled and tiny, eager to build a new nation inside a volume smaller than most drawers.

Whenever she grew bored, Washen found herself dreaming up new ways to redecorate the rooms and gardens inside her home.

She would do the work soon, she told herself.

In a year, or ten.

The cap-car delivered her to her private door. Stepping out of the car, she decided that things had gone well today. A thousand centuries of steady practice had made her an expert in alien psychologies and the theatre that went into handling them, and like any good captain, Washen allowed herself to feel pride, knowing that what she did she did better than almost anyone else on board.

If there was anyone better, of course.

She wasn’t consciously thinking about her long-dead lover, or the Phoenixes, or that fateful day that helped make her into a captain. But everything that she was now had been born then. The young Washen had no genuine feel for any alien species, much less for Manly. She never suspected what the Phoenixes were planning. Events had come as a complete surprise, and a revelation, and it was only luck and Washen’s popularity that kept her from being tainted by the whole ugly business.

Several youngsters besides Washen had taken lovers. Or the Phoenixes had allowed themselves to be taken. Either way, emotional bonds were built on top of political hopes, and slowly, over the course of the next years, the humans helped their lovers in ways that were at first questionable, then illegal, and finally, treasonous.

Along a thousand conduits, forbidden machines entered the prison.

Under the watchful gaze of AI paranoids and suspicious captains, weapons were designed and built, then stored inside the floating bladders—invisible because the captains’ sensors were sabotaged by the sympathizers.

When it came, the rebellion gave no warning. Five captains were murdered, along with nine hundred-plus mates and engineers and young humans, including many of Washen’s one-time friends. Their bodies and bioceramic brains were obliterated by laser light, not a memory left to save. The Great Nothingness had reclaimed a few of its weakest children—an accomplishment that must have made Manly intensely proud—and for a moment in time, the ship itself seemed to be in peril.

Then the Master Captain took charge of the fight, and within minutes, the rebellion was finished. The war was won. Unrepentent prisoners were forced back into their chamber, and its ancient machinery was awakened for the first time in at least five billion years.The temperature inside the great cylinder dropped. Frost turned to hard ice, and numbed by the cold, the Phoenixes descended to the prison floor, huddling together for heat, cursing the Master with their beautiful songs, then with their next labored breath, their flesh turned into a rigid glassy solid, undead, and with an accidental vengeance, they were left glancingly immortal.

Millennia later, as the Great Ship passed near Phoenix space, those frozen warriors were loaded into a taxi like cargo, then delivered home.

Washen herself had overseen the transfer of the bodies. It wasn’t an assignment that she had requested, but the Master, who surely possessed a record of the young woman’s indiscretions, thought it would be a telling moment.

Maybe it had been.

The memory came like a rebellion. Stepping through her apartment door, she suddenly remembered that long-ago chore, and in particular, the look of a certain male Phoenix caught in mid-breath, his gills pulled wide and the blackness of the blood still apparent after thousands of years of dreamless sleep. Still lovely, Manly was. All of them were lovely. And just once, for an instant, Washen had touched the frozen feathers and the defiant beak with the sensitive glove of her lifesuit.

Washen tried to remember what she was thinking as she touched her lost love.There had to be some leftover sadness and an older person’s acceptance of things that would never change, and there had to be a captain’s genuine relief that she had survived the assault. The ship was a machine and a mystery, and it was filled with living souls who looked on her to keep them safe… And at that instant, stepping into the familiar back hallway of her apartment, her thoughts were interrupted by the apartment’s voice.

“Message,” she heard.

The entranceway was footworn silk-marble, its walls currently wearing tapestries woven by a communal intelligence of antlike organisms. Before Washen could take a second step, she heard, “A priority message. Coded. And urgent.”

She blinked, her attentions shifting.

“Black level,” she heard. “Alpha protocols.”

This was a drill. Those protocols were intended only for the worst disasters and the gravest secrets. Washen nodded, engaging one of her internal nexus links. Then after several minutes of proving that she was herself, the message was decoded and delivered.

She read it in full, twice. Then she sent away for the essential confirmation, knowing this was an exercise, and the Masters office would thank her for her timely and efficient response. But the unthinkable occurred. After the briefest pause, the word ‘Proceed’ was delivered to her.