After a moment, Washen joined Diu at the crib.
Locke was a quiet baby. Patient, uncomplaining. From his parents he had acquired a stew of immortal genes and an easy strength, and from this world, his birthplace, came… well, what about him was Marrow? Not for the first time, Washen wondered if it was wrong to allow children on a world barely understood. A world that could probably kill all of them. And kill them tonight, if the urge struck it.
“I wouldn’t worry about Till,” said Diu. “I don’t,” she promised, speaking more to herself than him.
But the man still explained himself. “Children are imagination machines,” he said. “You never know what they’re going to think about anything.”
Washen was remembering the Child, that part-human, part-Gaian creature that she raised for Pamir, and with a bittersweet grin, she replied, “But that’s the fun in having them. Or so I’ve always been told…”
The boy walked alone, crossing the public round with his eyes watching his own bare feet, watching them shuffle across the hot, sky-baked iron. “Hello, Till.”
He seemed incapable of surprise. Pausing, he lifted his gaze slowly, a smile waiting to shine at the captain. “Hello, Madam Washen. You’re well, I trust.”
Under the sky’s blue glare, he was a polite, scrupulously ordinary eleven-year-old boy. He had a thin face joined to a small, narrow body, and like most of his peers, he wore as little as the adults let him wear. Modern genetics were such a tangle; Washen had given up guessing who was his father. Sometimes she wondered if Miocene even knew. She obviously wanted to be his only parent, openly grooming him to stand beside her someday. Whenever Washen looked at the half-feral boy wearing nothing but a breech-cloth, she felt a nagging resentment, petty as can be, and since it was directed at an eleven-year-old, simply foolish.
“I have a confession to make,” she said, using her own smile. “A little while back, while you were in the nursery, I overheard you talking to the other children. You were telling them a very elaborate story”
The eyes were wide and brown with darts of black inside them, and they didn’t so much as blink.
“It was an interesting story,” Washen conceded.
Till looked like any boy who didn’t know what to make of a bothersome adult. Sighing wearily, he shifted his weight from one brown foot to the other. Then he sighed again, the portrait of pure boredom.
“How did you think up that story?”
A shrug of the shoulders.
“I know we like to talk about the ship. Probably too much.” Her explanation felt sensible and practical. Her biggest fear was that she would come across as patronizing. “Everyone likes to speculate. About the ship’s past, and its builders, and the rest of it. All our chatter has to be confusing. And since we are going to be rebuilding the bridge, with your help… it does rather make you into a species of Builder, doesn’t it…?”
Till shrugged again, his eyes looking past her.
On the far side of the round, in front of their machine shop, a team of sweating captains fired up their latest turbine—a primitive wonder built from rough steel and vague memories, plus considerable trial and error. Homebrewed alcohols combined with oxygen, creating a delicious roar. While it was working, the engine was powerful enough to do any job they could offer it, at least for today. But it was dirty and noisy, and it was inefficient, and the sound of it almost obscured the boy’s strong voice.
“I’m not speculating,” he announced. “Not about anything.”
Washen said, “Excuse me?” as if she hadn’t heard him.
“I won’t tell you that. That I’m making it up.”
The turbine sputtered, then fell silent.
Washen nodded, smiling in a defeated way. Then she noticed an approaching figure. From the shop, wearing her old epaulets on a simple robe of handwoven fabric, Miocene looked weary as always, and angry in a thousand ways.
“I don’t make up anything,” the boy protested. His mother asked, “What don’t you do?” Till didn’t say.
For a moment, he and Washen exchanged looks, as if making a pact. Then he turned to Miocene, complaining, “That machine… it sounds awful.”
“It does. You’re right.”
“Is that how the ship is? Big engines screaming all the time?”
“No, we use fusion reactors. Very efficient and quiet, and extremely safe, too.” She glanced at Washen, asking, “Don’t we, darling?”
“Fusion, yes,” Washen offered, her hands trying to straighten the stiff fabric of her own handmade uniform. “The best reactors in the galaxy, I would think.”
Then like a trillion mothers, Miocene said, “I haven’t seen you for too long. Where have you been, Till?”
“Out there,” said Till. He waved in a distant, imprecise fashion, three of his fingers smaller than the rest. And paler. Regenerating after a little accident, no doubt.
“Were you exploring again?”
“But not far from here,” he told her. “Always in the valley’ He was lying, thought Washen. She heard the lie between the words.
Yet Miocene nodded with conviction, saying, “I know you were. I know.” It was a self-imposed delusion, or it was an act meant for public eyes.
There was an uncomfortable moment of silence. Then, the turbine fired up again and rattled along with a healthy vigor. The sound of it drew Miocene’s attention, leading her back toward the machine shop.
Washen smiled at the boy, then knelt beside him.
“You like to make up things,” she observed. “Don’t you?”
“No, madam.”
“Don’t be modest,” she warned.
But Till shook his head stubbornly, staring down at his toes and the black iron. “Madam Washen,” he said with a boy’s fragile patience. “What is, is. It’s the only thing that can never be made up.”
Fifteen
Locke waited in the shadows—a grown man with a boy’s guilty expression and the wide, resdess eyes of someone expecting disaster to lash out from every direction.
His first words were, “I shouldn’t be doing this.”
But a moment later, responding to the anticipated response, he said,’I know, Mother. Promises given are promises always.”
Washen hadn’t made a sound.
It was his father who offered second thoughts. “If this is going to create troubles,” Diu muttered, “maybe we should slip back home again.”
“Maybe you should,” their son allowed. Then he turned and abruptly walked off, never inviting them to follow, knowing they wouldn’t be able to help themselves.
Washen hurried up the path, feeling Diu in her footsteps. A young jungle of black umbra trees and elegant lambda bushes dissolved into a sudden landscape of bare iron: black pillars and arches created an indiscriminate, infuriating maze. Every step was a challenge, an act of conscious grace. Razored edges sliced exposed flesh, crisscrossing lingers and calves with thin pink wounds. Bottomless crevices beckoned to passersby, wind and dripping rainwater echoing out of the metal ground. Worst of all, Washen s body was accustomed to sleep at this hour. Fatigue slowed her senses and her common sense. When she saw Locke standing on the rusty lip of a cliff, waiting for them, she noticed nothing but his wide back and the long golden hair tied into an elaborate set of braids. She stared at the simple black shirt woven in the village loom, from mock cotton, the shirt that his mother had patched more than once, and always badly.