Locke spoke first. He said, “Mother,” as if the word had been thoroughly practiced. Then he added, “We’ve brought meat. Several tons, dried and sweetened. We’ll give it to you, if you’ll give us the vault.”
The Waywards knew everything, it was said. And with good reason.
Instantly, without blinking, Washen told them, “The vault s empty. And pretty much useless, too.” Then she saw the other Waywards, several dozen of them, and the crude wooden sleds each of them had pulled, pack-animal fashion, each sled loaded high with bales of blackish and reddish carcasses.
Diu smiled with his mouth and his quick eyes, conceding, “We know it’s empty.”
“We.” In the past, on those rare occasions when they had spoken, Diu had always referred to the Waywards as “they” or “them.”
Washen jumped to her next rebuttal.
“It’s not my decision to give the vault to you. Or anyone else, for that matter.”
“Of course not,” he agreed. “But you’re the one who can wake up those who’ll make that decision.”
Which was what she did. The four surviving Submasters were roused out of their three beds, and with Miocene presiding, the meats were inspected and the Wayward offer was debated in whispers. There had been a shortfall of good protein lately. For all of its stampeding success, the Flowering meant machines and energy. Not new farms or fresh efficiencies in cultivation. Which the Waywards must have known, too.
Standing on the hot black round, Washen wondered when her son and Diu had started this trek. The nearest Wayward camp was at least six hundred kilometers from here, and they couldn’t have used the local roads without being noticed and intercepted. Pulling sleds over sharp ridges and through the jungles… they were obviously determined, and fantastically patient, and cocksure about how things would end…
Miocene approached Washen, and with the other Submasters, they rejoined their guests.
“Agreed,” said Miocene grudgingly.
Locke grinned for a moment. Then with an easy politeness, he said, “Thank you, madam.”
Unlike his father, Locke hadn’t shaved his scalp; his golden hair was long and simply braided. In a world without cattle or horses, Waywards used their own bodies as resources, for work and for raw materials. Her son’s belt was a tightly braided length of old hair. His breechcloth was a thin soft leather stained white by sweat salts. A knife and a flintlock pistol rode on his hips, and both handles had the whiteness of cherished bone, carefully carved from leg bones lost—she prayed—in violent accidents.
Again Locke said, “Thank you, madam.”
The Submaster let her mouth drop open, a question waiting to be asked. But then she changed her mind and closed her mouth. She had decided not to mention her own son, even in passing.
Washen knew her that well.
Centuries of living close to this woman had left her easy to read. And as always, Washen felt a mixture of pity for the mother and scorn for the power-mad leader. Or was it scorn for the mother, and pity for the poor leader?
Miocene offered to press Locke’s hand, signaling the end of negotiations. But something lay in his hand. It was disc-shaped and wrapped tight inside a folded green hammerwing.
He handed it to Miocene, then said, “As a gift. Look.”
The Submaster warily unfolded the wing and stared at the gift. A disc of pure yellow sulfur lay in her palm. Like so many light elements on Marrow, sulfur was in short supply. The sight of it was enough to make Miocene blink and look up in surprise.
“What would you give us for a ton of this?” asked Locke.
Then before she could answer, he added, “We want a laser like yours. That powerful, and with enough spare parts.”
“There isn’t another one,” she replied instantly.
“But you’re building three more.” He nodded with an unimpeachable authority, then added, “We want the first of the three. Which should be next year, if we’re not mistaken.”
Because it was poindess to lie,Washen told them, ‘You’re not mistaken.”
Miocene just stared at the sulfur cake, probably counting the industries that would be begging for the smallest taste.
Another Submaster—nervous, worried Daen—had his face screwed up in disgust, asking their guests, “But what do you need that kind of laser for?”
Diu laughed, a quick hand wiping the oily sweat from his scalp.Then he asked the obvious question:’If your little group sitting on this tiny patch of planet can find one vault, by accident… how many more do you think we might be sitting on…?”
Nineteen
The captains and their favorite children began searching for the vaults. Every local vent and fissure was watched, first by volunteers, then by automated cameras. Inside their territory, and sometimes beyond, picked teams would inspect stretches of cold iron with the latest generation of seismographs, sonic probes, and eventually, neutron beams, each device making the crust a little more transparent, and knowable, and predictable—a mostly fruitless search for vaults, but yielding a fat wealth of information about ore deposits and quake predictions.
Occasionally, one of those search teams was sent deep into the Wayward lands. The volunteers were armed, but typically in secret ways. They usually stumbled across a village filled with adults and young children who spoke a broken dialect of the ship-terran, and who claimed to have never seen Loyalists. The villages were spartan, haphazard in their layout, but basically clean. Their inhabitants were fit and happy, and as a rule, they acted utterly incurious about life in the burgeoning cities.
The Loyalists happily chattered about their latest technological marvels and all the comforts being added to their daily lives. The Waywards seemed to listen, but they rarely asked even simple questions or offered the smallest, most glancing praise.
The evictions were inevitable, though they were usually polite.
A local chief or president or priest—his exact station was nebulous—would shove aside a plate of half-eaten mite cake or a bowl of raw steel-worms. Then he, or she, would rise with a certain majesty, reminding their guests, “You are very much our guests here.”
The Loyalists would nod, push aside their harsh food, and wait.
“Our guests here.” The pattern was repeated again and again, sometimes with the same words. “ ‘Here,’ ” the chief would tell them, “means the center of the universe. Which is Marrow. ‘Our’ implies the discretion always given to rightful owners. ‘Guests’ are always temporary. Impermanent. And when the Builders wish, we will have no choice but to exclude you from the center of the universe.”
The words were always delivered with a smile.
Then, with an easy gravity, the chief would add, “When you sit with us, you make the Builders unhappy. We can hear their anger. In our dreams and behind our eyes, we hear it. And for your sake, we think that you should return to your guest quarters. Now.”
They were talking about the Loyalist cities.
If the guests refused to leave, there would be a string of petty thefts. Then expensive sensors and field generators would evaporate mysteriously, and if that didn’t change their minds, then their munitions boxes would vanish from their hiding places, each one jammed full of the newest guns and grenades.
Just once, Miocene ordered a team not to retreat. She called for volunteers, then asked, “What are the Waywards capable of?” She was talking to herself, and to them. “Let them steal everything,” she ordered. “Everything short of your lives. That’s what I want.”
The team was flown to an eruption site two thousand kilometers from the capital, and after a few coded transmissions relayed from high-altitude drones, nothing more was heard of them. Then it was six years later, and Diu led a group of Waywards into a settlement on the border. He brought the missing team with him. Standing barefoot and virtually naked on a street paved with new steel, he said, “This shouldn’t have happened. It needn’t have. Tell that bitch Miocene if she wants to play, let her play with her own important life.”