It was a steadily growing error; she saw it in the careful numbers.
Quietly, Miocene read her data. When she felt absolutely sure that she understood the answer, she asked, “What does this mean?”
Someone offered, “Marrow has started to rotate again.” The flywheel hypothesis, again.
Aasleen said,’It could be the buttresses. With a fraction of their apparent energies, they could act on the iron, causing it, and us, to move a few kilometers…”
A few kilometers. Yes.
One of Miocene’s long hands lifted high, silencing the others. “Perhaps,” she said with a little smile. “But there’s still another option. Involving the buttresses, but in a rather different fashion.”
No one spoke, or blinked.
“Imagine that the Event, whatever it was… imagine it was part of some grand cycle. And after it happened, the buttresses under our feet started to weaken. To loosen their grip on Marrow, if only just a little bit.”
“The planet expands,” said someone.
Said Washen.
“Of course,” Aasleen trumpeted. “The interior iron is under fantastic pressures, and if you took off the lid, even a little bit—”
Perhaps unconsciously, half a dozen captains inflated their cheeks.
Miocene grinned, if only for a moment. This very strange idea had taken hold of her gradually, and in the excitement of the moment, she summoned up old instincts, telling everyone. “This is premature. We’ll need measurements and many different studies, and even then we won’t be certain about anything. Not for a very long while.”
Washen glanced at the ceiling, perhaps imagining the faraway base camp.
Diu, that low-grade charmer, laughed softly. Happily. And he took his lover’s hand and squeezed until she noticed and smiled back at him.
“If the buttresses below us are weakening,” Aasleen pointed out, “then maybe the ones in the sky are getting dimmer, too.”
Twist said, “We can test that. Easily.”
Nothing was easy here, Miocene nearly warned them.
But instead of discouraging anyone, she took back those copperfly wings and her precious numbers, and with the simplest trigonometry, she interpolated a rugged Little estimate. Only in the dimmest back reaches of her mind did she hear Washen and the engineers spinning new hypotheses. If the expansion was real, perhaps it would give away clues about how the buttresses worked. Clues about what powered them, and why. Aasleen suggested that a cycle of expansion and compression was the obvious means through which excess heat, from nuclear decay or other sources, was bled away from Marrow. It might even explain how the bright buttresses overhead were refueled. The whole ad hoc hypothesis sounded perfectly reasonable. And perhaps it was even a little bit true. But its truth was inconsequential. All that mattered were the dry little answers appearing beneath Miocene’s stylus.
She lifted her head.
The motion was so abrupt that the room suddenly fell silent. A flock of jade-crickets broke into song, then, as if sensing a breach in etiquette, stopped.
“Assuming some kind of expansion,” Miocene told her captains, “this world of ours has grown a little less than a kilometer since the Event. And at this rate, assuming that Marrow can maintain this modest pace for another five thousand years… in another five millenia, the world will fill this entire chamber, and we’ll be able to walk back to our base camp.”
In her own grim, determined way, Miocene laughed.
“And after that,” she whispered, “if need be… we’ll be able to walk all the way home…”
Fourteen
It was sleeptime for the children.
Washen intended to visit the nursery. But as she approached she heard the gentle murmurs of a voice, and she hesitated, then eased closer, an adult caution and her own curiosity making a game out of this routine chore.
The community nursery was built from iron blocks and iron bricks, black umbra wood making the steeply pitched roof. Next to the cafeteria, this was the largest structure in the world, and easily the most durable. Washen leaned against the wall, an ear to one of the little shuttered windows, listening carefully, realizing that it was the oldest boy who was speaking, telling everyone a story.
“We call them the Builders,” he was explaining. “That’s our name for them because they built the ship and everything within it.”
“The ship,” whispered the other children, in one voice.
“The ship is too large to measure,” he assured them, “and it is nothing but beautiful. Yet when it was new, there was no one to share it with. There were only the Builders, and they were proud, and that’s why they called out into the darkness, inviting others to come fill its vastness. To come see what they had done and sing about their lovely creation.”
Washen leaned against the wall, smelling the shutter’s sweet wood.
“Who came from the darkness?” asked that oldest boy. “The Bleak,” dozens of voices answered instantly. “Was there anyone else?”
“No one.”
“Because the universe was so young,” the boy explained. With utter confidence, he picked his own odd course through what the captains had taught him. “Everything was new, and there were only the Bleak and the Builders.”
“The Bleak,” one little girl repeated, with feeling.
“They were a cruel, selfish species,” the boy maintained. “But they always wore smiles and said careful words. They came and sang praises to our lovely ship. But what did they want? Even from the earliest moment?”
“To steal our ship,” the others answered.
“In the night, as the Builders slept unaware,” he said with a practiced foreboding, “the Bleak attacked, slaughtering most of them while they lay helpless in their beds.”
Every child whispered, “Slaughtered.”
Washen eased her way closer to the nursery door. Each child had his own little bed positioned according to some personal logic. Some of the beds were close together, in twos and threes and fives, while others preferred distance and a comparative solitude. Peering through the shuttered door, she found the storyteller. He was apart from the others, sitting up in his little bed, his face catching one of the bright slivers of light that managed to slip through the heavy ceiling. His name was Till. He looked very much like his mother, tall with a tall, thin face. Then he moved his head slightly, and he resembled no one but himself.
“Where did the surviving Builders go?” he asked.
“Here.”
“And from here, what did they do?”
“They purified the ship.”
“They purified the ship,” he repeated, with emphasis. “Everything above us had to be killed. The Builders had no choice whatsoever.”
There was a long, reflective pause.
“What happened to the Builders?” he asked.
“They were trapped here,” said the others, on cue.
“And?”
“They died here. One after another.”
“What died?”
“Their flesh.”
“But is flesh all that there is?”
“No!”
“What else is there?”
“Their spirits.”
“What isn’t flesh cannot die,” said that very peculiar boy.
Hands against the warm iron frame of the door, Washen waited, trying to recall when she had last taken a meaningful breath.
In a songful whisper, Till asked, “Do you know where the Builders’ spirits live?”
“Inside us,” the children replied with a palpable delight.
“We are the Builders now,” Tills voice assured them. “After the long, lonely wait, we have finally been reborn…!”
After, eight decades, life on Marrow had become glancingly comfortable and halfway predictable. Twist’s tectonics team had mapped the local plumes and vents and every major fault, and as a consequence, they knew where the iron crust was thickest and where to build homes that would linger. Food was abundant and was only going to be more so. Washen’s biologists were cultivating wild plants, and in the last few years, they had begun raising the most palatable bugs in cages and special huts. Various attempts at science, no matter how clumsy, were making gains. Miocene had been right: Marrow was expanding at a steady, almost stately pace as the buttressing fields grew weaker, and the sky’s brilliant light had already faded by more than a percentage point. Aasleen’s people, fueled by genius and sanguinity, had invented at least ten difficult schemes that would allow everyone to escape from Marrow.