Marrow

by Robert Reed

  Running a hand across her lover’s Gordian bun, the girl confessed, “I’m going to live outside the ship.”

  “On another world?”

  She shook her head. “No. I mean on the ship’s hull.”

  “But why?”

  She wasn’t entirely serious. These were words, and fun. Yet she felt a surprising conviction in her voice, explaining, “There are people who live out there. Remoras, I think they’re called.”

  “I’ve never heard of them,” the boy admitted.

  So she explained the culture. She told how the Remoras lived inside elaborate suits, eating and drinking nothing but what their suits and bodies produced. Worlds onto themselves, they were. And wherever they were on the ship’s hull, half of the universe was overhead. Near enough to reach, beautiful beyond words.

  She was a strange girl, the boy concluded. In important little ways, he suddenly didn’t like her very much. He heard himself say, “I see,” without a shred of comprehension. Then with a forced sincerity, he promised, “I’ll come visit you there. Sometime. Okay?”

  She knew that he was lying, and somehow that was a relief.

  They stared off into the distance, in different directions, struggling with the shared problem of extracting themselves from this awkward place.

  After a few moments, the boy gave a little cough and said, “I see something.”

  “What?”

  “In the iron river. There.”

  In horror, she asked, “Is it one of us?”

  “No,” he remarked. “At least, I don’t think so.”

  The girl started to dress again, forgetting two seams as she struggled to get ready for a rescue attempt. When had she ever been a bigger fool, coming here like this? Unprepared, and doing this with this extremely ordinary boy?

  “Where is it?” she called out.

  With a marksman’s care, he pointed upstream, and she laid her head against his long arm, squinting now, peering through the clouds of rising fumes to find herself watching a round silvery lump, something that looked odd as can be, immune to the heat and calmly bobbing its way down the iron river.

  “That’s not one of us,” she said.

  “I told you it wasn’t,” he snapped.

  Then he said something else, but she didn’t hear him. She had pushed her helmet over her head and scrambled out of their hiding place, and in her heavy, ill-fitting firesuit, she was racing down the hillside, shouting and waving, begging for anyone’s attention.

  * * *

  THEY HAD JUST enough time to unwrap a pair of new safety lines, making loops at the ends and running down to where the iron river was narrowest, flinging the loops out at the strange silvery object.

  One line fell short, tangled in newborn slag and melted. But the second line fell on the silvery surface, its loop tightening around some kind of thumblike projection. Eleven grandchildren grabbed the line, and tugged, and screamed hard in one voice, and tugged. The second line was melting in that open blast furnace, but the object was close to shore, its invisible belly rubbing against half-molten ground. Three more expensive, nearly irreplaceable lines were destroyed before they could drag their prize out of the river, and if not for a favorable eddy and the river’s cutting a new channel on its north, they wouldn’t have retrieved the object at all.

  But they had it now, and that was something.

  The prize proved to be a little larger than a big person tucked into a tight ball, and it was stubbornly massive. Moving that much mass proved to be hard work, particularly while it was still radiating the iron’s heat. But later, after several kilometers of practice and the crushing of two makeshift sleds, the grandchildren learned that simply rolling their prize was easiest. Whatever the object was—and it could have been just about anything—the cold metal ground didn’t seem to dent it or even smudge its mirrored face.

  They were halfway home when they were discovered. A lone figure appeared on the main trail, jogging up into the shadow of a virtue tree, then standing motionless, watching as they worked their way closer.

  At a distance, it was obvious that this was a captain. A woman, wasn’t she? She wore a captain’s clothes and a captain’s disapproving face, but when everyone saw whose face it was, they gave a collective sigh of relief.

  “Hello, Madam Washen!” a dozen voices called out.

  With another captain, there would have been immediate miseries. But not with smart old Washen. She had a reputation for understanding what was perfectly obvious to any happy grandchild, and for knowing how to punish without killing the happiness, too.

  “Having fun?” she inquired.

  Of course they were. Didn’t it look as if they were having fun?

  “Not entirely,” the ancient woman admitted. She looked at each of their faces, saying, “I count twelve,” with an ominous tone. Then she sighed and shook her head, asking, “Where’s Blessing Gable? Was she with you?”

  “No,” they said together, with a mixture of surprise and relief. Then one of the boys explained, “She’s way too old to float with us.”

  The girl who liked Remoras realized what had happened. “Blessing has gone missing, hasn’t she?”

  The captain nodded.

  “To the Waywards, maybe?” Blessing was a quiet girl, and if she was too old for them, she was the perfect age for that nonsense.

  “Maybe she’s left us,” Washen admitted with a sad, resigned tone. Then without another word, she stepped past the grandchildren.

  Their prize sat in the middle of the trail, bright despite the tree’s shadows.

  Someone asked, “See what we found?”

  “No,” said Washen. As a joke. Then her long fingers played across the still-warm surface, the dark old eyes staring at her own distorted reflection.

  “Do you know what it is?” asked the boy who wanted to live by the sea.

  Washen fingered the knobs, and instead of answering, she asked, “What do you think it is?”

  “A piece of the old bridge. The one you came down on.” The boy had given the matter some thought, and he was proud of his careful reasoning. “After it tumbled down, the iron swallowed this piece and kept it until now. I think.”

  Several others voiced their agreement. Wasn’t it obvious?

  The captain didn’t seem to think so. She looked at the Remora girl, then with her calm and smooth and happy voice asked, “Any other guesses?”

  Someone asked, “Is it hyperfiber?”

  “I don’t know what else it would be,” Washen admitted.

  “But the bridge was ruined by the Event,” the Remora girl offered. “In our history books, it says it was made brown and weak, somehow, and all its little bonds kept breaking apart. Somehow.”

  Washen winked, making the girl feel important, and smart.

  “And it isn’t just hyperfiber,” the girl added, talking too quickly now. “Because it’s so heavy, and hyperfiber isn’t. Is it?”

  Washen shrugged, then said, “Tell me how you found it. And where.”

  The girl tried. And she meant to be perfectly honest, though she never mentioned sex, and the story came charging out of her mouth as if she were taking credit for everything.

  Her one-time lover protested. “I saw the stupid thing first,” he complained. “Not you.”

  “Good eyes,” Washen offered. “Whoever was using them.”

  The girl bit her own stupid, careless tongue.

  “What does this look like?” asked Washen.

  “A piece of the sky,” said the boy. “Sort of, it does.”

  “Except it’s brighter,” another boy offered.

  “And bumpy,” another girl offered.

  With the salty taste of blood in her mouth, the Remora girl observed, “It’s sort of like a tiny, tiny version of the Great Ship. Those knobs are the rocket nozzles, see? Except they aren’t really big enough. Not like the nozzles in the paintings.”

  “But there is a resemblance,” Washen conceded. Then she stood and wiped her hand o
n the leg of her uniform, and looking off toward the doomed High Spines, she said, “Honestly.” Her voice was gentle. “I don’t know what this is.”

  Eighteen

  FOR THE NEXT one hundred and eight years, the artifact lay in storage, wrapped within a clean purple woolbark blanket and tucked inside a steel vault designed to hold nothing else. Aasleen and her engineers had been given the fun of divining its secrets. But at least one Submaster had to be present whenever studies were undertaken, and if the artifact was to be moved, as it was during two eruption cycles, a Submaster as well as a platoon of picked and utterly trustworthy guards accompanied the relic, weapons politely kept out of sight but a palpable air of suspicion obvious to all.

  For many reasons, that century was dubbed The Flowering.

  There were finally enough grandchildren, mature and educated and inspired, that something resembling an industrialized nation was possible. A lacework of good smooth roads was built between the cities and largest villages, then rebuilt after each eruption. More important were the crude smear-signal transmitters, hung high on mountain peaks and steel poles, that network allowing anyone to speak with anyone within a thousand-kilometer zone. Clumsy carbide drills gnawed through the crust, reaching the molten iron, then simple-as-can-be geothermal plants were erected, supplying what seemed to be a wealth of power to the labs and factories and increasingly luxurious homes. Life on Marrow remained a hard, crude business. But that wasn’t what the captains said in public. In front of the grandchildren, they mustered up every imaginable praise for the new biogas toilets and the cultured bug-based meats and the frail, fixed-wing aircraft that could, if blessed with good weather, crawl all up into the cold upper reaches of the atmosphere. They weren’t trying to mislead so much as encourage. And really, they were the ones who needed most of the encouragement. Life here might not match the serene pleasures found inside the ship, but to a youngster barely five centuries old, it was obvious that his world had grown more comfortable in his lifetime, and more predictable, and if he could have known about the captains’ real disappointments, he would have felt nothing but a pitying, even fearful puzzlement.

  The Flowering culminated with a clumsy but muscular laser, designed from Aasleen’s recollections and adapted to local resources, then helped along with her staff’s countless inspirations and other making-dos.

  Hundreds attended the first full-strength firing of the laser.

  The artifact was its target. The hyperfiber shell was presumably ancient, but it had to be a premium grade. To slice a hair-wide hole through the shell meant an enfored blackout, the power from some fifty-odd geothermal plants fed directly into Aasleen’s newest laboratory, into a long cramped room built for this precise moment, a series of microsecond pulses delivered in what sounded like a monster’s roar, lending drama to the moment as well as jarring quite a few nerves.

  Miocene sat in the control room, hands tied together in a tense lump.

  “Stop!” she heard Aasleen bark. Finally.

  The laser was put to bed. Then an optical cable was inserted into the fresh hole, and the engineer peered inside, saying nothing, forgetting about her audience until Miocene asked, “Is there anything?”

  “Vault,” Aasleen reported.

  Did she want the artifact set back into its vault?

  But before anyone could ask, she added, “It looks a lot like a memory vault. Not human-made, but not all that strange, either.”

  With an impatient nod, Miocene said, “What else?”

  “A standard bioceramic matrix, with some kind of holoprojector. And a dense ballast at the center.” Aasleen looked in the general direction of her audience, blind to everything but her own quick thoughts. “No power cells, from what I can tell. But what good would they be after a few billion years? Even the Builders couldn’t make a battery that would ignore this kind of long-term heat…”

  “But does this vault still work?” Miocene growled.

  “Too soon to tell,” Aasleen replied. “I’ve got to peel back the shell and feed power to the systems … which will mean … hey, what’s the date…?”

  Twenty voices told her. Counting from the first day of the mission, up in the !eech habitat, the date was 619.23.

  “Working at night, making one cut at a time … and of course I’ll have to refurbish the laser once every week or so … so maybe by 621 or 621.5. Maybe…?”

  The Submasters were openly disappointed.

  Miocene spoke for them, asking, “Is there any way to speed up this process?”

  “Absolutely,” Aasleen responded. “Take me back upstairs, and I can do everything in three minutes. At the most.”

  “Upstairs” was the latest term for the ship. Informal, and by implication, a place that was relatively close by.

  Miocene was disgusted, and happy to show her feelings. She shook her head and rose to her feet. Half a hundred of the captains’ children and grandchildren were in attendance. After all, this was their mystery, too. Facing them, she asked the engineer, “What are the odds that this memory vault remembers anything at all?”

  “After being immersed in liquid iron for several billion years…?”

  “Yes.”

  Aasleen chewed on her lower lip for a thoughtful moment, then said, “Next to none. Madam.”

  Disappointment hung in the air, thick and bitter.

  “But that’s assuming that the bioceramics are the same as the grades seen before, of course. Which might be unlikely, since the Builders always seemed to know just how good their machines needed to be.”

  Disappointment wrestled with a sudden hope.

  “Whoever they were,” Aasleen reported, “the Builders were great engineers.”

  “Undoubtedly,” Miocene purred.

  “Begging to differ,” someone muttered. Who? Washen?

  Miocene gave her a quick glance and a crisp, “And why not, darling?”

  “I’ve never known an engineer, great or lousy, who didn’t leave behind at least one plaque with her name on it.”

  When Aasleen laughed, almost everyone began to laugh with her.

  Giggling, nodding her happy face, the engineer admitted, “That’s the truth. That’s exactly how we are!”

  * * *

  MAYBE THE BUILDERS were clever and rich with foresight, but the artifact—the ancient memory vault—was found empty of anything other than a few shredded, incoherent images. Shades of gray laid over a wealth of blackness.

  The sorry news was delivered by one of Aasleen’s genuine grandsons.

  It was five days before the year 621 began. The speaker, named Pepsin, was a stocky, vivacious man with an easy smile and blue-black skin and a habit of talking too quickly to be understood. As evidence mounted that nothing of consequence waited in the vault, Pepsin had inherited the project from his famous grandmother. And like the good descendant of any good captain, he had taken this dead-end project and made it his own, carefully and thoroughly wringing from it everything that was important.

  A small group of disappointed captains and Submasters were in attendance. No one else. Miocene herself sat in the back, reviewing administrative papers, barely noticing when that fast, fast voice announced, “But information comes in many delicate flavors.”

  What was that?

  Pepsin grinned and said, “The hyperfiber shell degraded over time. Which gives us clues about its entombment.”

  Washen was sitting in the front. She noticed that Miocene wasn’t paying attention, which was why she took it upon herself to ask, “What do you mean?”

  “Madam,” he replied, “I mean what I say.”

  Sarcasm caused the Submaster to lift her head. “But I didn’t hear you,” she growled. “And this time, darling, talk slowly and look only at me.”

  The young engineer blinked and licked his lips, then explained. “Even the best hyperfiber ages, if stressed. As I’m sure you know, madam. By examining cross sections of the vault’s shell, at the microscopic level, we can read a crude history no
t only of the vault, but of the world that embraced it, too.”

  “Marrow,” the old woman growled.

  Again, he blinked. Then with a graceless cleverness, added, “Presumably, madam. Presumably.”

  With her quietest voice, Miocene advised, “Maybe you should proceed.”

  Pepsin nodded, obeyed.

  “The hyperfiber has spent the last several billion years bobbing inside liquid iron. As expected. But if there were no breaks in that routine, the degradation should be worse than observed. Fifty to ninety percent worse, according to my honorable grandmother.” A glance at Aasleen; no more. “Hyperfiber has a great capacity to heal itself. But the bonds don’t knit themselves quite as effectively at several thousand degrees Kelvin. No, what’s best is chilly weather under a thousand degrees. Deep space is the very best. Otherwise, the hyperfiber scars, and it scars in distinct patterns. And what I see in the microscope, and what everyone else here sees … measuring the scars, we have evidence of approximately five to fifteen hundred thousand distinct periods of high heat. Presumably, each of those periods marks time spent in Marrow’s deep interior—”

  “Five to fifteen billion years,” Miocene interrupted. “Is that your estimate?”

  “Basically. Yes, madam.” He licked his lips, and blinked, and conjured up a wide contented smile. “Of course we can’t assume that the vault was always thrown to the surface, and there surely have been periods when it was submerged several times during a single cycle.” Again, the lips needed moisture. “In different words, this is a lousy clock. But being a clock whose hands have moved, it points to what we have always assumed. For my entire little life, and this last brief chapter in your great lives…”

  “Just say it,” Aasleen snarled at her grandson.

  “Marrow expands and contracts. Again, we have evidence.” He grinned at everyone, at no one. Then he added, “Why this should be, I don’t know. And how it does this trick is difficult for me to conceive.”