Mallow

by Robert Reed

  The Submaster sighed and stood without accepting help.

  The station's lounge was small and tidy, flexible furnishings meant for almost any traveler, its floor and arching walls decorated with beds of false limestones, buttery-yellow and white and gray, each bed impregnated with a different stew of artificial fossils that looked terran at first glance. Which was the only glance that Washen allowed herself, stepping through the last demon door and finding no one present but the resident AI.

  'The Master Captain!' Miocene barked.'Is she alive and well?'

  With a smooth cheeriness, the AI reported,'The woman is in robust good health. And she thanks you for inquiring.'

  'How long has she been healthy?' Washen pressed, in case there was a new Master.

  'For the last one hundred and twelve millenia,' the machine replied. 'Bless her, and bless ourselves. How can we do otherwise?'

  Miocene said nothing, her face red with blood, her rage thick and tireless.

  One of the fossil walls was sprinkled with com-booths. Washen stepped inside the nearest booth, saying,'Emergency status. Captains' channel. Please, we need to speak directly to the Master.'

  Miocene stepped into the booth, then sealed its thick door.

  The Master's station appeared, spun from light and sound. Three captains and the usual AIs stared at them. Three captains meant this was the nightwatch, the exact time and date floating in the air behind them. Washen opened her clock and stared at the turning hands, realizing that Marrow's clocks had been wrong by a little less than eleven minutes — a minor triumph, considering that the marooned captains had had to reinvent time.

  Three human faces stared at them, dumbfounded, while their AIs, full of poise, simply asked, 'What is your business, please?'

  'Let me see her!' Miocene thundered.

  There was a delay brought by distance, and a longer delay brought by stupidity Finally, one of the captains remarked, 'Maybe so. Who are you?'

  'You know me,' the Submaster replied. 'And I know you. Your name is Fattan. And yours is Cass. And yours, Underwood.'

  Cass whispered, 'Miocene . . . ?'

  His voice was soft, full of astonishment and doubt.

  'Submaster Miocene! First Chair to the Master Captain!' The tall woman bent over the nearest captain, shouting, 'You remember the name and rank, don't you? So act. Something's wicked here, and I need to speak to the Master!'

  'But you can't be,' said the cowering man.

  'You're dead,' said another captain. Underwood. Then she glanced at Washen, and with a strange pity, she confided, 'You're both dead. For a long time now . . .'

  'They're just holos,' the third captain announced. With an obstinate certainty, Fattan said, 'Holos. Projections. Someone's little joke.'

  But the AIs had checked their reality by a thousand lightspeed means, and following some secret, long-buried protocol, it was the machines that acted. The image swirled and stabilized again. The Master apeared, sitting up in her great bed. Dressed in a nightgown made from shaped light and airborne pearls, she looked exactly as Washen remembered, her skin golden and her hair a snowy white. But the hair was longer, and instead of being worn in a bun, it lay loose over the broad meaty shoulders. Preoccupied in ways that only a Ship's Master can be, she had to pull her attentions out of a hundred tangled nexuses, then focus on her abrupt guests. Suddenly her bright brown eyes grew huge. In reflex, she touched her own nightgown, probably wondering about their crude, almost laughable imitations of the standard ship uniform. A look of wonder and amazement swept over the broad face, and just as a smile appeared, it collapsed into an instant and piercing fury.

  'Where are you?' she snapped. 'Where have you been?' 'Where you sent us.' The Submaster refused to say,

  'Madam.' Approaching the bed, her hands pulled into fists, she said, 'We've been on that shit-world ... on Marrow . . . !'

  'Where?' the woman spat.

  'Marrow,' the Submaster repeated. Then in exasperation, 'What sort of ridiculous game are you playing with us?'

  'I didn't send you anywhere, Miocene . . . !'

  In a dim, half-born way, Washen understood.

  Miocene shook her head, asking, 'Why keep our mission secret for this long?'Then in the next breath, she answered her own question. 'You meant to imprison us. That's what this was. The best of your captains, and you wanted to push us aside!'

  Washen took Miocene by the arm.

  'Wait,' she whispered. 'No:

  'The best of my captains? You?" The giant woman gave a wild, cackling laugh.'My best captains just don't vanish without warning. They don't stay hidden for thousands of years, doing who-knows-what, in secret!' She gasped, the gold of her face brightening. 'Thousands of years,' she said, 'and without so much as a whisper. And it took all of my genius and experience, and every last power at my disposal, to explain your disappearance and steer this ship away from panic!'

  Miocene glanced at Washen, her expression astonished. Devastated. In a low, muttering voice, she said, 'But if the Master didn't—'

  'Someone else did,' Washen replied.

  'Security!' the giant woman cried out. 'Two ghosts are talking to me! Track them! Catch them! Bring them to me!'

  Washen killed the link, buying them a moment.

  The two ghosts found themselves standing inside the darkened booth, stunned and alone, trying to make sense out of the pure insanity.

  'Who could have fooled us?' Asked Washen.

  Then in her next breath, she knew how it could have been: someone with resources and access, and enormous ingenuity, would have sent orders in the Master's name, bringing the captains together in the leech habitat. Then the same ingenious soul deceived them with a replica of the Master, sending them rushing down into the ship's core.

  'I could have done this,' Miocene confessed, thinking along the same seductive, paranoid lines. 'Gathered the machinery and fooled all of you. If I'd wished. Assuming that I had known about Marrow, and if I had time, and some compelling reason.'

  'But you didn't, and you didn't, and you didn't,' Washen whispered.

  'Who did?' Miocene wondered aloud.

  They couldn't answer that brutally simple question.

  Washen asked the booth for the roster of Submasters and high-ranking captains. She was hunting for suspects, and maybe for a friendly name on which she could place her frail trust.

  In a bitter, low voice, Miocene said, 'My seat. Has been filled.'

  But the name that leaped out at Washen - what made her legs weak and breath quicken - was the captain occupying her former office.

  Pamir.

  'Who?' Miocene rumbled.

  But in the next instant, she remembered the name. The crime. And with a weak exasperation, the Submaster said, 'This just isn't our ship. It can't be.'

  Washen ordered the booth to contact Pamir. On an audio-only line, she warned who was calling. There was a pause, just long enough for Miocene to say, ‘Try another." But then Pamir's original face emerged from the darkness. Strong and homely, the face smiled with a wild amazement. The reborn captain was standing inside his old quarters, surrounded by a meadow of singing llano-vibra plants. 'Quiet,' he told his plants.

  Washen and Miocene were standing in the same meadow. The man facing them was bare-chested, tall and powerful through the shoulders, and he was breathing like a sprinter, gasping when he spoke.

  'You're dead,' he managed. 'A tragic mishap, they say'

  'What about you?' Washen had to ask.

  Pamir shrugged his shoulders as if embarrassed, then said, 'What with the shortfall of talent, there was a general pardon—'

  'I don't want your story,' Miocene interrupted. 'Listen. We have to explain ... we need to tell you what happened . . . !'

  But the meadow suddenly turned quiet, and the vegetation grew thin and pale, and Washen could see her own feet through the fading llano-vibra, Pamir's fine face vanishing along with the rest of the scene.

  Miocene asked, 'What's happening, booth?'

&nbs
p; Again the booth was dark; it had nothing to say.

  Washen eyed the Submaster, feeling a chill in her hard, hungry belly. The booth's door was sealed, and dead. But the mechanical safeties operated, and with their shoulders they managed to shove the door open. Then together, in a shared motion, they stepped out into the waystation's lounge.

  A familiar figure stood in plain view, calmly and efficiently melting the resident AI with a soldier's laser.

  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.

  Twenty-six

  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 w
ho believed that he was making a puzzle intended for the ship's entertainment industry . . .'

  'Everything's a lie,' said Washen.

  Diu glanced over his shoulder at the false Master. Then he looked back at them, his smile darkening as he explained, 'That elaborate holo you saw? With the Bleak fighting the Builders? It began as a dream. I was the only person on Marrow, and I saw the battle in my sleep. There's always the chance that it was a genuine vision, although, honestly, it felt like nothing but a good vivid dream. Evil pitted against Good. Why not? I thought. A simple faith could be intoxicating for the children to come . . . !'

  'But why pretend to die?'Washen asked.

  'Death offers freedom.' A boy was lurking behind the smile. 'Being a disembodied soul, I see more. Being deceased, I can disguise myself and walk wherever I want. And sleep where I wish. And I can make babies with a thousand women, including quite a few in the Loyalist camp.'

  Silence.

  Then a slight whisper, as if a breath of wind were coming.

  Miocene took a half-step, then admitted, 'We spoke to the Master.'

  'She knows everything,' Washen added. 'We told her—' 'Nothing,' Diu snapped. 'That's exactly what you told her. I know.'

  'You're certain?'Washen asked. 'Absolutely.'

  'But by now she knows we were at the waystation,' Miocene threatened, 'and she'll hunt for us. With all of her energies.'

  'She's been on that same hunt for better than four thousand years.' Diu kept smiling. He almost danced. Then with a hint of confession, he admitted, 'You did surprise me in one way, Miocene. Darling. I knew you were building that little cannonball vehicle, but I didn't think you'd try this soon. If I'd known today was the day, I would have arranged some little accident to keep you on Marrow.' Then he shrugged, adding, 'I didn't want to come chasing after you. But I did. And in a much superior version of your cannon-ball, I should add.' Silence.

  Then Washen admitted, 'The Master hasn't found us. Not yet. But this time she has a starting point. Someone will eventually come here, and who knows what they'll find . . . ?'

  'A silent, obvious point. Thank you.' He passed his weapon from hand to hand, explaining, 'Because of you, I will close the access tunnel from below. And keep it closed forever, perhaps. A series of antimatter charges will obliterate every trace of its existence. And even if the Master guesses right, which is doubtful, it would take centuries to dig to Marrow again.'