by Robert Reed
Miocene couldn’t leave those mysterious words floating free.
With a quiet certainty, she said, “Our standard model is that the buttressing fields squeeze Marrow down, then relax. And when they relax, the world expands.”
“Until when?” asked Pepsin. “Until it fills the chamber?”
“We shall see,” the Submaster conceded.
“And what about the buttresses?” he persisted. Foolish, or brave, or simply intrigued, he had to ask the great woman, “What powers them?”
It was an old, always baffling question. But Miocene employed the oldest, easiest answer. “Hidden reactors of some unknown type. In the chamber walls, or beneath our feet. Or perhaps in both places.”
“And why go through these elaborate cycles, madam? I mean, if I was the chief engineer, and I needed to keep Marrow firmly in place, I don’t think I’d ever allow my fancy buttresses to fall halfway asleep. Would you, madam? Would you let them fall partway asleep every ten thousand years?”
“You don’t understand the buttresses,” Miocene replied. “You admitted it just a few breaths ago. Nobody knows how they refuel themselves, or regenerate, or whatever is happening. These mysteries have worked hard to remain mysteries, and we should give them our well-deserved respect.”
Pepsin hugged himself, nodding as if the words carried a genuine weight. But the eyes betrayed distance, then a revelation. Suddenly they grew wide, and darker somehow, and with an embarrassed grin, he said, “You’ve already had this debate with my grandmother. Haven’t you?”
“A few times,” the Submaster conceded.
“And does Aasleen ever win?” the young man inquired.
Miocene waited an instant, then told Pepsin, and everyone, “She always wins. In the end, I always admit that we haven’t any answers, and her questions are smart and valid and vast. And sadly, they are also quite useless to us here.
“A waste of breath, even.”
Then Miocene pulled a new piece of paper to the top of the pile, and dipping her head, she added, “Get us home, darling. That’s all that matters. Then I will personally give you the keys to a first-class laboratory, and you can ask all these great questions that seem to be keeping you awake nights.”
* * *
A QUIET LITTLE party followed Pepsin’s announcement. Talk centered more on new gossip than grand speculations: who was sleeping with whom, and who was pregnant, and which youngsters had slipped away to the Waywards. Washen quickly lost interest. Claiming fatigue, she escaped, walking past the security stations, and alone, walking home to the newest Hazz City.
A rugged metropolis of eighteen thousand, the Loyalist capital lay in the bottom of a wide, flat, and well-watered rift valley. Every home was sturdy but ready to be abandoned. Every government building was just large enough to impress, bolted to its temporary foundation of bright stainless steel. With the late hour, the streets were nearly empty. Thunderheads were piled high in the western sky, stealing heat from a dying lava flow; but the winds seemed to be shoving the storms elsewhere, making the city feel like a quiet, half-abandoned place being bypassed by the world’s great events.
Washen’s house looked out over a secondary round. It was smaller than its neighbors, and in the details, was a duplicate of her last five houses. Blowing fans kept the air fresh and halfway cool. With shutters closed, a nightlike gloom took hold, and Washen allowed herself the wasteful pleasure of a small electric lamp burning above her favorite chair.
She was in the middle of a report projecting coming demands for laboratory-grade glassware. The utterly routine work made her fatigue real. Suddenly it seemed ridiculous to look three centuries into the future, or even three minutes, and Washen responded by yawning, closing her eyes, then dipping into a hard, dreamless sleep.
Then she was awake again.
Awake and confused, she reached for the mechanical clock dangling from her belt on a titanium chain. The clock was a gift from various grandchildren. They had assembled it themselves, using resurrected technologies and patient hands. The overhead lamp still burned, and the wasted energy flowed over the delicately embossed casing, its bright silver mixed with enough gunk to lend it strength. She opened the round case and stared at the numbers. At the slowly turning hands. This was the middle of the night, and she sleepily realized that what had awakened her was a slow, strong pounding against her front door.
Washen turned off the lamp, rose and opened the door. The harsh glare of the sky flowed over her. She blinked, aware of two figures waiting for her, wearing nothing but the light. Then her eyes adapted, weakening enough for her to see two welcome faces.
In the middle of the night, apparently unnoticed, Washen’s son and his father had strolled into the heart of the city.
* * *
DIU OFFERED A wry grin.
He looked the same as always … except for the breechcloth and a leanness that ended with his strong thick legs. And his skin had the smoky tint that Marrow gave everyone. His scalp was shaved free of every hair. And after years of hard wandering, his feet had been pounded into wider, flatter versions of their old selves.
Locke spoke first. He said, “Mother,” as if the word had been thoroughly practiced. Then he added, “We’ve brought meat. Several tons, dried and sweetened. We’ll give it to you, if you’ll give us the vault.”
The Waywards knew everything, it was said. And with good reason.
Instantly, without blinking, Washen told them, “The vault’s empty. And pretty much useless, too.” Then she saw the other Waywards, several dozen of them, and the crude wooden sleds each of them had pulled, pack-animal fashion, each sled loaded high with bales of blackish and reddish carcasses.
Diu smiled with his mouth and his quick eyes, conceding, “We know it’s empty.”
“We.” In the past, on those rare occasions when they had spoken, Diu had always referred to the Waywards as “they” or “them.”
Washen jumped to her next rebuttal.
“It’s not my decision to give the vault to you. Or anyone else, for that matter.”
“Of course not,” he agreed. “But you’re the one who can wake up those who’ll make that decision.”
Which was what she did. The four surviving Submasters were roused out of their three beds, and with Miocene presiding, the meats were inspected and the Wayward offer was debated in whispers. There had been a shortfall of good protein lately. For all of its stampeding successes, the Flowering meant machines and energy. Not new farms or fresh efficiencies in cultivation. Which the Waywards must have known, too.
Standing on the hot black round, Washen wondered when her son and Diu had started this trek. The nearest Wayward camp was at least six hundred kilometers from here, and they couldn’t have used the local roads without being noticed and intercepted. Pulling sleds over sharp ridges and through the jungles … they were obviously determined, and fantatically patient, and cocksure about how things would end …
Miocene approached Washen, and with the other Submasters, they rejoined their guests.
“Agreed,” said Miocene grudgingly.
Locke grinned for a moment. Then with an easy politeness, he said, “Thank you, madam.”
Unlike his father, Locke hadn’t shaved his scalp; his golden hair was long and simply braided. In a world without cattle or horses, Waywards used their own bodies as resources, for work and for raw materials. Her son’s belt was a tightly braided length of old hair. His breechcloth was a thin soft leather stained white by sweat salts. A knife and a flintlock pistol rode on his hips, and both handles had the whiteness of cherished bone, carefully carved from leg bones lost—she prayed—in violent accidents.
Again Locke said, “Thank you, madam.”
The Submaster let her mouth drop open, a question waiting to be asked. But then she changed her mind and closed her mouth. She had decided not to mention her own son, even in passing.
Washen knew her that well.
Centuries of living close to this woman had left h
er easy to read. And as always, Washen felt a mixture of pity for the mother and scorn for the power-mad leader. Or was it scorn for the mother, and pity for the poor leader?
Miocene offered to press Locke’s hand, signaling the end of negotiations. But something lay in his hand. It was disc-shaped and wrapped tight inside a folded green hammerwing.
He handed it to Miocene, then said, “As a gift. Look.”
The Submaster warily unfolded the wing and stared at the gift. A disc of pure yellow sulfur lay in her palm. Like so many light elements on Marrow, sulfur was in short supply. The sight of it was enough to make Miocene blink and look up in surprise.
“What would you give us for a ton of this?” asked Locke.
Then before she could answer, he added, “We want a laser like yours. That powerful, and with enough spare parts.”
“There isn’t another one,” she replied instantly.
“But you’re building three more.” He nodded with an unimpeachable authority, then added, “We want the first of the three. Which should be next year, if we’re not mistaken.”
Because it was pointless to lie, Washen told them, “You’re not mistaken.”
Miocene just stared at the sulfur cake, probably counting the industries that would be begging for the smallest taste.
Another Submaster—nervous, worried Daen—had his face screwed up in disgust, asking their guests, “But what do you need that kind of laser for?”
Diu laughed, a quick hand wiping the oily sweat from his scalp. Then he asked the obvious question: “If your little group sitting on this tiny patch of planet can find one vault, by accident … how many more do you think we might be sitting on…?”
Nineteen
THE CAPTAINS AND their favorite children began searching for the vaults. Every local vent and fissure was watched, first by volunteers, then by automated cameras. Inside their territory, and sometimes beyond, picked teams would inspect stretches of cold iron with the latest generation of seismographs, sonic probes, and eventually, neutron beams, each device making the crust a little more transparent, and knowable, and predictable—a mostly fruitless search for vaults, but yielding a fat wealth of information about ore deposits and quake predictions.
Occasionally, one of those search teams was sent deep into the Wayward lands. The volunteers were armed, but typically in secret ways. They usually stumbled across a village filled with adults and young children who spoke a broken dialect of the ship-terran, and who claimed to have never seen Loyalists. The villages were spartan, haphazard in their layout, but basically clean. Their inhabitants were fit and happy, and as a rule, they acted utterly incurious about life in the burgeoning cities.
The Loyalists happily chattered about their latest technological marvels and all the comforts being added to their daily lives. The Waywards seemed to listen, but they rarely asked even simple questions or offered the smallest, most glancing praise.
The evictions were inevitable, though they were usually polite.
A local chief or president or priest—his exact station was nebulous—would shove aside a plate of half-eaten mite cake or a bowl of raw steelworms. Then he, or she, would rise with a certain majesty, reminding their guests, “You are very much our guests here.”
The Loyalists would nod, push aside their harsh food, and wait.
“Our guests here.” The pattern was repeated again and again, sometimes with the same words. “‘Here,’” the chief would tell them, “means the center of the universe. Which is Marrow. ‘Our’ implies the discretion always given to rightful owners. ‘Guests’ are always temporary. Impermanent. And when the Builders wish, we will have no choice but to exclude you from the center of the universe.”
The words were always delivered with a smile.
Then, with an easy gravity, the chief would add, “When you sit with us, you make the Builders unhappy. We can hear their anger. In our dreams and behind our eyes, we hear it. And for your sake, we think that you should return to your guest quarters. Now.”
They were talking about the Loyalist cities.
If the guests refused to leave, there would be a string of petty thefts. Then expensive sensors and field generators would evaporate mysteriously, and if that didn’t change their minds, then their munitions boxes would vanish from their hiding places, each one jammed full of the newest guns and grenades.
Just once, Miocene ordered a team not to retreat. She called for volunteers, then asked, “What are the Waywards capable of?” She was talking to herself, and to them. “Let them steal everything,” she ordered. “Everything short of your lives. That’s what I want.”
The team was flown to an eruption site two thousand kilometers from the capital, and after a few coded transmissions relayed from high-altitude drones, nothing more was heard of them. Then it was six years later, and Diu led a group of Waywards into a settlement on the border. He brought the missing team with him. Standing barefoot and virtually naked on a street paved with new steel, he said, “This shouldn’t have happened. It needn’t have. Tell that bitch Miocene if she wants to play, let her play with her own important life.”
A dozen bodies lay on a dozen sleds, unbound and on their backs, and alive only by the tiniest of degrees. Eyelids had been pinned back, letting the skylight blind them. Barbed hooks kept the mouths pulled open, allowing the light to bake tongues and gums. Famine and a total lack of water had shriveled their bodies to a third of their original size. But worst of all was the way each prisoner had his neck broken. Three times a day, without exception, one of the strong young Waywards would smash the vertebrae and the spinal cord, keeping ahead of the sluggish healing mechanisms, leaving their guests helpless, limp and cut free of their dignity in precisely the same way that Miocene had once treated her son.
* * *
USUALLY ONCE EVERY century, and sometimes twice, the Loyalists came across one of the ancient vaults.
They were always empty, and after a thorough examination, each vault was declared useless and available for sale to the Waywards, in exchange for sulfur and silicon and rare earths. Deals were typically made in the same little city where Diu had brought the prisoners. Happens River was named for a feature obliterated centuries ago, and the city had moved several times since. A Submaster always handled the prolonged, increasingly difficult negotiations, and Locke always represented the Waywards. Washen and Diu served as observers, present because they had always been, but unnecessary to any of the tedious, long-winded business.
Like any old lovers, they took a slightly uncomfortable pleasure in each other’s company.
Washen was under strict orders to speak with Diu, though she didn’t need prodding. Standing next to Diu, she looked tall and elegant, dressed in her newest uniform, ancient epaulets shining in the skylight as she strolled along a new river’s shoreline. Diu, by contrast, seemed small, his body a little shrunken by the hard Wayward existence, fatless muscle wearing nothing but the only breechcloth that he owned. A mock wool breechcloth, she noted. Not leather. He still was too much of a captain to skin himself alive.
Still and always, Diu was a jittery man. Nervous, quick. And relentlessly, effortlessly charming.
Not thinking of her orders but curious for herself, Washen mentioned the Waywards. “Our best guess is that you’ve got twice our population. Or four times. Or eight.”
“Your best guess?” he laughed.
“Stinks,” she allowed.
Then he nodded, and grinned, and after a dramatic pause, he admitted, “Eight times is too little. Sixteen times is closer to the mark.”
That gave the Waywards better than twenty-five million citizens. A huge mass of bodies and minds. She let herself wonder what so many modern minds, designed for endless and interesting lives, would think about. Without literature and digitals and sciences and history to embrace, and an ascetic’s endless denial of pleasure … what kinds of ideas could keep such a mind engaged…?
She was trying to frame the question. But when she spoke
, something else entirely came out of her mouth.
“Do you remember ice cream?”
Diu giggled.
“That little shop.” She pointed, then said, “It sells the next best thing.”
In that perpetual heat, anything cold tasted fine. In a sugar-poor world, everything sweet was a treasure, even if the treasure was the product of dead chew-chews and biochemical magic. The shop owner conspicuously ignored the Wayward man. Washen paid for both treats as well the rental of the steel bowls and steel spoons. They sat by the river, on a little gold-embossed table set on a patio of iron bricks doctored with cyanides, giving them a blue cast. The river was a mixture of native springs and the runoff from local industries, creating a chemical stew to which Marrow had quickly adapted. The bacterial smell wasn’t pleasant, but it had a strength and an honesty. That’s what Washen was thinking as she watched Diu take a careful bite of the ice cream. Then his eyes grew wide, and he asked, “Is that how chocolate tastes?”
“We aren’t sure,” she admitted. “When you’ve got nothing to go on but your thousand-year-old memories…”
Both of them laughed quietly.
People sauntered past on the nearby walkway: lovers holding one another. Friends chattering. Business associates planning for a prosperous future. A couple had their toddler strapped into a wheeled cart. Like everyone else, they never quite looked at the Wayward sitting in plain view, eating ice cream. Only their child stared in amazement. Washen found herself thinking about the prisoners that Diu had brought back to Happens River. He had had no role in their torture. She had never asked, but he had volunteered his innocence just the same. Decades ago, now. Why even think about it? Then she looked at him, and smiled, trying to change the flow of her ancient mind.
Perhaps Diu guessed her thoughts.
Whatever the reason, he suddenly asked, “How are those people, by the way? The poor souls that we brought back to you?”
“They healed,” she allowed. “In most ways.”