“Except it’s brighter,” another boy offered.
“And bumpy,” another girl offered.
With the salty taste of blood in her mouth, the Remora girl observed, “It’s sort of like a tiny, tiny version of the Great Ship. Those knobs are the rocket nozzles, see? Except they aren’t really big enough. Not like the nozzles in the paintings.”
“But there is a resemblance,” Washen conceded. Then she stood and wiped her hand on the leg of her uniform, and looking off toward the doomed High Spines, she said, “Honestly.” Her voice was gentle. “I don’t know what this is.”
Eighteen
For the next one hundred and eight years, the artifact lay in storage, wrapped within a clean purple woolbark blanket and tucked inside a steel vault designed to hold nothing else. Aasleen and her engineers had been given the fun of divining its secrets. But at least one Submaster had to be present whenever studies were undertaken, and if the artifact was to be moved, as it was during two eruption cycles, a Submaster as well as a platoon of picked and utterly trustworthy guards accompanied the relic, weapons politely kept out of sight but a palpable air of suspicion obvious to all.
For many reasons, that century was dubbed The Flowering.
There were finally enough grandchildren, mature and educated and inspired, that something resembling an industrialized nation was possible. A lacework of good smooth roads was built between the cities and largest villages, then rebuilt after each eruption. More important were the crude smear-signal transmitters, hung high on mountain peaks and steel poles, that network allowing anyone to speak with anyone within a thousand-kilometer zone. Clumsy carbide drills gnawed through the crust, reaching the molten iron, then simple-as-can-be geothermal plants were erected, supplying what seemed to be a wealth of power to the labs and factories and increasingly luxurious homes. Life on Marrow remained a hard, crude business. But that wasn’t what the captains said in public. In front of the grandchildren, they mustered up every imaginable praise for the new biogas toilets and the cultured bug-based meats and the frail, fixed-wing aircraft that could, if blessed with good weather, crawl all up into the cold upper reaches of the atmosphere. They weren’t trying to mislead so much as encourage. And really, they were the ones who needed most of the encouragement. Life here might not match the serene pleasures found inside the ship, but to a youngster barely five centuries old, it was obvious that his world had grown more comfortable in his lifetime, and more predictable, and if he could have known about the captains’ real disappointments, he would have felt nothing but a pitying, even fearful puzzlement.
The Flowering culminated with a clumsy but muscular laser, designed from Aasleen’s recollections and adapted to local resources, then helped along with her staff’s countless inspirations and other making-dos.
Hundreds attended the first full-strength firing of the laser.
The artifact was its target. The hyperfiber shell was presumably ancient, but it had to be a premium grade. To slice a hair-wide hole through the shell meant an enforced blackout, the power from some fifty-odd geothermal plants fed directly into Aasleen’s newest laboratory, into a long cramped room built for this precise moment, a series of microsecond pulses delivered in what sounded like a monster’s roar, lending drama to the moment as well as jarring quite a few nerves.
Miocene sat in the control room, hands tied together in a tense lump.
“Stop!’ she heard Aasleen bark. Finally.
The laser was put to bed. Then an optical cable was inserted into the fresh hole, and the engineer peered inside, saying nothing, forgetting about her audience until Miocene asked, “Is there anything?”
“Vault,” Aasleen reported.
Did she want the artifact set back into its vault?
But before anyone could ask, she added, “It looks a lot like a memory vault. Not human-made, but not all that strange, either.”
With an impatient nod, Miocene said, “What else?”
“A standard bioceramic matrix, with some kind of holo-projector. And a dense ballast at the center.” Aasleen looked in the general direction of her audience, blind to everything but her own quick thoughts. “No power cells, from what I can tell. But what good would they be after a few billion years? Even the Builders couldn’t make a battery that would ignore this kind of long-term heat…”
“But does this vault still work?” Miocene growled.
“Too soon to tell,” Aasleen replied. “I’ve got to peel back the shell and feed power to the systems… which will mean… hey, what’s the date…?”
Twenty voices told her. Counting from the first day of the mission, up in the leech habitat, the date was 619.23.
“Working at night, making one cut at a time… and of course I’ll have to refurbish the laser once every week or so… so maybe by 621 or 621.5. Maybe…?”
The Submasters were openly disappointed.
Miocene spoke for them, asking, “Is there any way to speed up this process?”
“Absolutely,” Aasleen responded. “Take me back upstairs, and I can do everything in three minutes. At the most.”
“Upstairs’ was the latest term for the ship. Informal, and by implication, a place that was relatively close by.
Miocene was disgusted, and happy to show her feelings. She shook her head and rose to her feet. Half a hundred of the captains’ children and grandchildren were in attendance. After all, this was their mystery, too. Facing them, she asked the engineer, “What are the odds that this memory vault remembers anything at all?”
“After being immersed in liquid iron for several billion years…?”
“Yes.”
Aasleen chewed on her lower lip for a thoughtful moment, then said, “Next to none. Madam.”
Disappointment hung in the air, thick and bitter.
“But that’s assuming that the bioceramics are the same as the grades seen before, of course. Which might be unlikely, since the Builders always seemed to know just how good their machines needed to be.”
Disappointment wrestled with a sudden hope.
“Whoever they were,” Aasleen reported, “the Builders were great engineers.”
“Undoubtedly,” Miocene purred.
“Begging to differ,” someone muttered. Who? Washen? Miocene gave her a quick glance and a crisp, “And why not, darling?”
“I’ve never known an engineer, great or lousy, who didn’t leave behind at least one plaque with her name on it.”
When Aasleen laughed, almost everyone began to laugh with her.
Giggling, nodding her happy face, the engineer admitted, “That’s the truth. That’s exactly how we are!”
Maybe the Builders were clever and rich with foresight, but the artifact—the ancient memory vault—was found empty of anything other than a few shredded, incoherent images. Shades of gray laid over a wealth of blackness.
The sorry news was delivered by one of Aasleen s genuine grandsons.
It was five days before the year 621 began. The speaker, named Pepsin, was a stocky, vivacious man with an easy smile and blue-black skin and a habit of talking too quickly to be understood. As evidence mounted that nothing of consequence waited in the vault, Pepsin had inherited the project from his famous grandmother. And like the good descendant of any good captain, he had taken this dead-end project and made it his own, carefully and thoroughly wringing from it everything that was important.
A small group of disappointed captains and Submasters were in attendance. No one else. Miocene herself sat in the back, reviewing administrative papers, barely noticing when that fast, fast voice announced, “But information comes in many delicate flavors.” What was that?
Pepsin grinned and said, “The hyperfiber shell degraded over time. Which gives us clues about its entombment.”