by Robert Reed
After a moment, Washen joined Diu at the crib.
Locke was a quiet baby. Patient, uncomplaining. From his parents he had acquired a stew of immortal genes and an easy strength, and from this world, his birthplace, came … well, what about him was Marrow? Not for the first time, Washen wondered if it was wrong to allow children on a world barely understood. A world that could probably kill all of them. And kill them tonight, if the urge struck it.
“I wouldn’t worry about Till,” said Diu.
“I don’t,” she promised, speaking more to herself than him.
But the man still explained himself. “Children are imagination machines,” he said. “You never know what they’re going to think about anything.”
Washen was remembering the Child, that part-human, part-Gaian creature that she raised for Pamir, and with a bittersweet grin, she replied, “But that’s the fun in having them. Or so I’ve always been told…”
* * *
THE BOY WALKED alone, crossing the public round with his eyes watching his own bare feet, watching them shuffle across the hot, sky-baked iron.
“Hello, Till.”
He seemed incapable of surprise. Pausing, he lifted his gaze slowly, a smile waiting to shine at the captain. “Hello, Madam Washen. You’re well, I trust.”
Under the sky’s blue glare, he was a polite, scrupulously ordinary eleven-year-old boy. He had a thin face joined to a small, narrow body, and like most of his peers, he wore as little as the adults let him wear. Modern genetics were such a tangle; Washen had given up guessing who was his father. Sometimes she wondered if Miocene even knew. She obviously wanted to be his only parent, openly grooming him to stand beside her someday. Whenever Washen looked at the half-feral boy wearing nothing but a breech-cloth, she felt a nagging resentment, petty as can be, and since it was directed at an eleven-year-old, simply foolish.
“I have a confession to make,” she said, using her own smile. “A little while back, while you were in the nursery, I overheard you talking to the other children. You were telling them a very elaborate story.”
The eyes were wide and brown with darts of black inside them, and they didn’t so much as blink.
“It was an interesting story,” Washen conceded.
Till looked like any boy who didn’t know what to make of a bothersome adult. Sighing wearily, he shifted his weight from one brown foot to the other. Then he sighed again, the portrait of pure boredom.
“How did you think up that story?”
A shrug of the shoulders.
“I know we like to talk about the ship. Probably too much.” Her explanation felt sensible and practical. Her biggest fear was that she would come across as patronizing. “Everyone likes to speculate. About the ship’s past, and its builders, and the rest of it. All our chatter has to be confusing. And since we are going to be rebuilding the bridge, with your help … it does rather make you into a species of Builder, doesn’t it…?”
Till shrugged again, his eyes looking past her.
On the far side of the round, in front of their machine shop, a team of sweating captains fired up their latest turbine—a primitive wonder built from rough steel and vague memories, plus considerable trial and error. Home-brewed alcohols combined with oxygen, creating a delicious roar. While it was working, the engine was powerful enough to do any job they could offer it, at least for today. But it was dirty and noisy, and it was inefficient, and the sound of it almost obscured the boy’s strong voice.
“I’m not speculating,” he announced. “Not about anything.”
Washen said, “Excuse me?” as if she hadn’t heard him.
“I won’t tell you that. That I’m making it up.”
The turbine sputtered, then fell silent.
Washen nodded, smiling in a defeated way. Then she noticed an approaching figure. From the shop, wearing her old epaulets on a simple robe of handwoven fabric, Miocene looked weary as always, and angry in a thousand ways.
“I don’t make up anything,” the boy protested.
His mother asked, “What don’t you do?”
Till didn’t say.
For a moment, he and Washen exchanged looks, as if making a pact. Then he turned to Miocene, complaining, “That machine … it sounds awful.”
“It does. You’re right.”
“Is that how the ship is? Big engines screaming all the time?”
“No, we use fusion reactors. Very efficient and quiet, and extremely safe, too.” She glanced at Washen, asking, “Don’t we, darling?”
“Fusion, yes,” Washen offered, her hands trying to straighten the stiff fabric of her own handmade uniform. “The best reactors in the galaxy, I would think.”
Then like a trillion mothers, Miocene said, “I haven’t seen you for too long. Where have you been, Till?”
“Out there,” said Till. He waved in a distant, imprecise fashion, three of his fingers smaller than the rest. And paler. Regenerating after a little accident, no doubt.
“Were you exploring again?”
“But not far from here,” he told her. “Always in the valley.”
He was lying, thought Washen. She heard the lie between the words.
Yet Miocene nodded with conviction, saying, “I know you were. I know.” It was a self-imposed delusion, or it was an act meant for public eyes.
There was an uncomfortable moment of silence. Then, the turbine fired up again and rattled along with a healthy vigor. The sound of it drew Miocene’s attention, leading her back toward the machine shop.
Washen smiled at the boy, then knelt beside him.
“You like to make up things,” she observed. “Don’t you?”
“No, madam.”
“Don’t be modest,” she warned.
But Till shook his head stubbornly, staring down at his toes and the black iron. “Madam Washen,” he said with a boy’s fragile patience. “What is, is. It’s the only thing that can never be made up.”
Fifteen
LOCKE WAITED IN the shadows—a grown man with a boy’s guilty expression and the wide, restless eyes of someone expecting disaster to lash out from every direction.
His first words were, “I shouldn’t be doing this.”
But a moment later, responding to the anticipated response, he said, “I know, Mother. Promises given are promises always.”
Washen hadn’t made a sound.
It was his father who offered second thoughts. “If this is going to create troubles,” Diu muttered, “maybe we should slip back home again.”
“Maybe you should,” their son allowed. Then he turned and abruptly walked off, never inviting them to follow, knowing they wouldn’t be able to help themselves.
Washen hurried up the path, feeling Diu in her footsteps. A young jungle of black umbra trees and elegant lambda bushes dissolved into a sudden landscape of bare iron: black pillars and arches created an indiscriminate, infuriating maze. Every step was a challenge, an act of conscious grace. Razored edges sliced exposed flesh, crisscrossing fingers and calves with thin pink wounds. Bottomless crevices beckoned to passersby, wind and dripping rainwater echoing out of the metal ground. Worst of all, Washen’s body was accustomed to sleep at this hour. Fatigue slowed her senses and her common sense. When she saw Locke standing on the rusty lip of a cliff, waiting for them, she noticed nothing but his wide back and the long golden hair tied into an elaborate set of braids. She stared at the simple black shirt woven in the village loom, from mock cotton, the shirt that his mother had patched more than once, and always badly.
Until she stood beside him, Washen was oblivious to the deep valley spread out below them, long and rather narrow, its flat floor covered with a mature stand of black-as-night virtue trees.
“Black as night,” Washen whispered.
Her son rose to the bait. Shaking his head, he said, “Mother. There’s no such thing.”
As night, he meant.
In his world, he meant.
This was lucky ground. When the w
orld’s fiery guts began to pour out on all sides, this thick and durable slab of crust had fallen into the great fissure. The virtue jungle had burned but it hadn’t died. Its roots could be a century old, or older. As old as the human tenure on Marrow, perhaps. There was a rich, eternal feel to the ground, and perhaps that’s why the children had chosen it.
The children.
Washen knew better, but despite her careful intentions, she couldn’t think of them as anything but young, and in some profound sense, vulnerable.
“Quiet,” Locke whispered, not bothering to look back at them.
Who was talking here? she wondered. But she didn’t ask.
Then with nothing but his own deeply callused flesh between himself and the iron, Locke jumped from perch to perch, grunting softly with each impact, then pausing just long enough to glance up from below, blinking against the bright skylight as he added with an almost parental concern, “And keep close to me. Please.”
His parents’ field boots had fallen apart decades ago. They wore clumsy sandals made from mock cork and rubber, and they had to work to stay with him. On the valley floor, in the living shadows, the air turned slightly cooler and uncomfortably damp. Blankets of rotting vegetation had fallen from the canopy, leaving the ground watery-soft, a rotting organic stink still smelling utterly alien to Washen. A giant daggerwing roared past, intent on some vital business. Washen watched the animal vanish into the gloom, then reappear, tiny with the distance, its cobalt-blue carapace shining in a patch of sudden skylight.
Locke turned abruptly, silently.
A single finger lay against his lips. Just for a moment, in that light, he looked like his father. But what Washen noticed most was his expression, his gray eyes showing a pain and worry so intense that she had to try and reassure him with a touch.
Diu had wormed the secret out of their son. The children were meeting in the jungle, and these meetings had been going on for more than twenty years. At irregular intervals, Till would call them to a secluded location, and it was Till who controlled everything that was said and done.
“What’s said?” Washen had asked. “What’s done?”
Locke wouldn’t explain. First he shook his head with defiance and shame. Then with a quiet disappointment, he admitted to them, “I’m breaking my oldest promise by repeating any of this.”
“Then why tell?” she had pressed.
“Because.” Locke’s expression was complicated, his soft gray eyes changing with each blink. Finally a compassionate, halfway fearful look settled on him, and he explained, “You have every right to hear. So you can decide for yourselves.”
He cared for his parents. That’s why he broke his promise, and that’s why he had no choice but to bring them here.
Washen wouldn’t think of it any other way now.
A few more quiet steps, and she found herself staring at the largest virtue tree that she had ever seen. Age must have killed it, and rot had brought it down, splitting the canopy as it crumbled. Adult children and their little brothers and sisters had assembled in that pool of brilliant blue-white skylight, standing in clumps and pairs, some some wearing hammerwing tails shoved into their hair. Soft quick voices merged into a senseless buzz. Till was there, pacing back and forth on the wide black trunk. He looked fully adult, ageless and unexceptional, wearing a simple breechcloth and two bracelets, one of steel and the other gold. His dark braids resembled a long rope. His young, almost pretty face showed a timid, self-conscious expression that gave Washen the strangest little moment of hope. Maybe this was nothing but the old game swollen up into some kind of social gathering. Till would perform for the children, telling his elaborate stories that no sensible mind could believe but that everyone, in one fashion or another, would take pleasure from.
Locke didn’t look back or say a word. He simply pressed ahead, through a low wall of lambdas and out into the bright busy clearing.
“Hello, Locke,” said twenty voices.
He said, “Hello,” once, loudly, then joined the oldest children in front.
Obeying their promise, his parents knelt in the jungle, ignoring the hiss and sputter of a thousand little bugs.
Nothing happened.
A few more children filtered into view, and there was quiet conversation, and Till, oblivious to it all, continued to pace. Maybe this was all that would happen. It was certainly easy to hope so.
Till stopped.
In an instant, the worshipers fell silent.
With a quiet voice, Till asked, “What do we want?”
“What is best for the ship,” the children answered, each with his own quiet voice. Then together, in one voice, they said, “Always.”
“How long is always?”
“Longer than we can count.”
“How far is always?”
“To the endless ends.”
“Yet we live—”
“For a moment!” they cried. “If that long!”
The words were absurd, and chilling. What should have sounded ludicrous to Washen wasn’t, the prayer acquiring a muscular credibility when hundreds were speaking in a smooth chorus, every syllable endowed with a practiced surety.
“What is best for the ship,” Till repeated.
But the words were a question. His narrow and very appealing face was filled with a curiosity, a genuine longing.
Quietly, he asked his audience, “Do you know the answer?”
In a muddled shout, the children said, “No.”
“Do I know the answer?”
Quietly, respectfully, they told him, “No.”
“True, and true,” their leader professed. “But when I’m awake, I am searching for what is best. Best for our great ship, and for always. And when I sleep, my dream self does the same.”
“And so do we,” his followers chanted.
Then Washen thought, No, it wasn’t a chant. It was too disheveled and honest-sounding, each one of them making the solemn vow to himself.
There was a brief, unnerving pause.
Then Till asked, “Do we have business today?”
“We have newcomers!” someone cried out.
For a slippery instant, Washen thought they meant her and Diu. She glanced over her shoulder, looking at Diu for the first time: he appeared calm in that electric, perpetually busy way of his, and he seemed thankful for the look. One hand took her by the arm as Till’s voice shouted, “Bring them up here.”
The newcomers were genuine children. Seven-year-old twins, as it happened. Brother and sister climbed the rotting trunk slowly, as if terrified, trembling hands clinging to the fluted velvet-black bark. But Till offered his hands, and with a crisp surety, he suggested deep breaths. “We’re your brothers and sisters,” he reminded them, more than once. Then when they finally smiled, he asked, “Do you know about the ship?”
The little boy glanced at the sky, saying, “It’s very old.”
“Nothing is older,” Till confided.
“And it’s huge.”
“Nothing can be larger. Yes.”
His sister fingered her navel, waiting to feel brave. When Till looked at her, she lifted her gaze and told everyone, “It’s where we came from. The ship is.”
The audience laughed at her.
Till lifted a hand, bringing silence.
Her brother corrected her. Quietly and fiercely, he said, “The captains came from there. Not us.”
Till nodded, waiting.
“But we’re going to help them,” the boy added, infinitely pleased with that destiny. “We’ll help them get back up to the ship. Soon.”
There was a prolonged and very cold silence.
Till allowed himself a patient smile, patting both of their heads. Then he looked out at his followers, asking, “Is he right?”
“No,” they roared.
The siblings winced and tried to vanish.
Till knelt between them, and with a steady, untroubled voice said, “The captains are just the captains. But you and I and all of
us here … we are built from the stuff of this world, from its flesh and water and air … and from the old souls of the Builders, too…”
Washen hadn’t heard that nonsense in a quarter of a century, and hearing it now, she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or explode.
“We are the Builders reborn,” Till assured everyone. Then he stood, and with his hands fondly draped over the children’s slumping shoulders, he hinted at the true scope of this rebellion. “Whatever our purpose is, it is not to help the captains. That is the one truth about which I am certain.”
Staring off into the shadowy jungle, he exclaimed, “The captains only think they have a tight hold on the ship. But friends, if you will … think of all the wonders that can happen in a single day…!”
* * *
MIOCENE REFUSED TO believe any of it.
“First of all,” she told Washen, and herself, “I know my own son. What you’ve described is ridiculous. Ludicrous. And frankly, stupid. Second of all, according to your count, this rally involved more than half of our children—”
Diu interrupted. “Most of them are adults. With their own homes.” Then he added, “Madam,” and framed the word with quick nods.
An angry silence descended.
Then Washen admitted, “I checked. Several dozen children slipped out of the nurseries last night—”
“And I’m not claiming they didn’t. And I’m very sure they slipped off somewhere.” Then with a haughty expression, Miocene asked, “Will the two of you listen to me? Will you give me that much consideration, please?”
“Of course, madam,” said Diu.
“I know what’s possible. I know exactly how my child was raised, and I know his character, and unless you can offer me some credible motivation for this fable … this shit … then I think we’ll just pretend that nothing has been said here…”