It would only require another forty-nine centuries, give or take.
Children were inevitable, and essential. They brought new hands and new possibilities, and they would replace the losses inflicted by this awful place. Then once they had their own children, a slow-motion demographic onslaught would have begun.
Every female captain owed the world at least one healthy boy or girl; that was Miocene’s pronouncement.
But her words slammed up against modern physiologies. There wasn’t one viable egg or a motile sperm inside any captain. In modern society, complex medicines and delicate autodocs were used to tease long-lived people into fertility. They had neither. That’s why it took twenty years of determined research before Promise and Dream, working in their own laboratory, discovered that the black spit of a hammerwing, poisonous to most native life-forms, could induce a temporary fecundity in human beings.
There were dangers, however. A woman required very high, even toxic dosages, and the effects on a developing embryo were far from clear.
Miocene volunteered to be first.
It was an heroic act, and if successful, it would be a selfish act, her child destined to be the oldest. She ordered the two captains to collect sperm from every donor, and alone, the Submaster impregnated herself. As far as Washen could tell, no one but Miocene could be certain who Tills father was.
Miocene carried the boy for the full eleven-month term. The birth itself was uneventful, and for those first few months, Till seemed perfectly normal. He was happy and engaged, ready to smile up at any face that smiled at him. Later, as they tried to piece together events, it wasn’t apparent when the baby had changed. It must have happened slowly, and only later were the effects obvious. Till was a happy, giggling boy riding gracefully on his mother’s hard hip, and then it was a different day, and people began to notice that he was much more quiet, still riding that hip without complaint, but his gaze distant, and always, in some odd, undefinable fashion, distracted.
Hammerwing spit wasn’t to blame.
Maybe the boy would have grown up the same way on the ship. Or Earth. Or anywhere else, too. Children are never predictable, and they are never easy. In the following years, the encampment began to fill up with strangers. They were small and fierce, and they were endlessly entertaining. And more than anyone anticipated, the children were challenges to the captains’ seamless authority.
No, they didn’t want to eat that bug dinner.
Or poop in the neat new latrines.
And thank you, no, they wouldn’t play nice, or sleep during the arbitrary night, or listen to every important word when their parents explained what Marrow was and what the ship was and why it was so very important to eventually escape from their birthplace.
But these were little problems. Over the last decades, Washen had tried every state of mind, and optimism, far and away, was the most pleasant. She worked hard to remain positive about everything difficult and gray.
Good, sane reasons were keeping them from being rescued. The most likely explanation was the simplest: the Event was a regular phenomenon, and it had reached beyond Marrow, collapsing the access tunnel so completely that digging it out again was grueling, achingly slow work. That’s what must have happened to the original tunnels, too. Earlier Events had destroyed them. And the Master could only act with caution, balancing the good of a few captains against the unknown dangers, the well-being of billions of innocent and trusting passengers taking easy precedence.
Other captains were optimistic in public, but in private, in their lovers’ beds, they confessed to darker moods.
“What if the Masters written us off?”
Diu posed the question, then immediately offered an even worse scenario.
“Or maybe something happened to her,” he grunted. “This was an utterly secret mission. If she died unexpectedly, and if the First Chair Submasters don’t even know that we’re down here…”
“Do you believe that?” asked Washen.
Diu shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Sometimes.”
Through the heavy walls and sealed shutters came the drumming of a hammerwing. Then, silence.
For a moment, it felt as if Marrow were listening to them.
Playing Diu’s own game, Washen reminded him, “There’s another possibility.”
“There’s many. Which one?”
“The Event was bigger than we realize. And everyone else is dead.”
For a moment, Diu didn’t react.
It was the unmentionable taboo. Yet Washen kept pressing, reminding him, “Maybe we weren’t the first ones to find this derelict ship. Others came before. But the builders had left behind some kind of booby trap, primed and ready”
“Perhaps,” he allowed. Then he sat up in bed, iron springs squeaking as his smooth strong legs dropped over the edge, toes kissing the cool dark floorboards. Again, softer this time, he said, “Perhaps.”
“Maybe the ship cleanses itself every million years. The Event destroys everything foreign and organic”
A tiny grin emerged. “And we survived…?”
“Marrow survived,” she replied. “Otherwise, this would be barren iron.”
Diu pulled one of his hands across his face, then with his fingers, he combed the long coffee-colored hair. Even in the bedroom’s enforced darkness, Washen could see his face. After so many years, she knew it better than she knew her own features, and in the vastness that was her remembered life, she couldn’t think of any man to whom she had felt this close.
“I’m just talking,” she told him. “I don’t believe what I’m saying.”
“I know.”
Placing a hand on his sweaty back, she realized that Diu was watching the crib. Their infant son, Locke, was hard asleep, blissfully unaware of their grim discussion. In another three years, he would live in the nursery. He would live with Till, she kept thinking. A month had passed since Washen had overheard that story about the Builders and the Bleak. But she hadn’t told anyone. Not even Diu.
“There are more explanations than we have people,” she admitted.
Again, he wiped the sweat from his face. Then she said, “Darling,” with an important tone. “Have you ever listened to the other children?” He glanced over his shoulder. “Why?” She explained, in brief.
Since they built this house, the same sliver of light had slipped its way through the shutters. Changing the tilt of his head, the light hit his gray eye and the high strong cheek. “You know Till,” was Diu’s response. “You know how odd he can seem.”
“That’s why I didn’t mention it.”
“Have you heard him tell that story again?”
“No,” she admitted.
“But you’ve been eavesdropping, I’d guess.” She said nothing.
Her lover nodded wisely and came close to a smile. Then with a little wink, he stood up, bare feet carrying him to the crib.
But Diu wasn’t looking at their son. Instead, he was fingering the mobile hung over the crib on a thick, trustworthy cord. Painted pieces of wood bounced gently on nearly invisible wire, showing Locke all those wonders that he couldn’t see for himself. The ship was in the center, largest by a long way, and surrounding it were tinier star-ships and several generic birds as well as a Phoenix that his mother had carved for her own reasons, then hung there without explanation.