“It didn’t happen,” Diu replied. Instantly, without doubts. “No?”
“And even if it happened,” he added, “it means nothing.”
For a moment, she heard something in his voice. Then Washen blinked and looked back at the rugged face, hairless save for the thick dark eyebrows, and she found a smile waiting—a broad smile in the mouth if not in those bright steel-gray eyes.
Within each of the ancient vaults, buried inside its uranium ballast, was an elegant little device, apparently useless and mostly ignored. One day, an empty vault was being fed test data while a piece of nearby machinery, purely by coincidence, emitted a low-frequency sound. The sound triggered an echo, a powerful and instantaneous throb noticeable for kilometers in every direction. A homing signal, perhaps? If so, it would only work with an operational vault, and there was no such creature. But to be thorough, the Loyalists sent the appropriate pulses into the crust, then listened for the hypothetical “Here I am” returns.
Because their equipment was crude, the first positive returns went unnoticed. But then a soft, imprecise echo was identified, and debated, and most observers denied the data, arguing on technical grounds while emotional reasons went unmentioned.
Newer, more sensitive microphones were designed, and built, and found wanting.
But the third generation of sensors produced not only a definite return, they also confidently supplied a location.
The echo came from a point a little more than nine kilometers deep, from inside a quiet eddy of molten iron.
A small, hopefully secret project was born. Under the camouflage of a new mantle-based geothermal works, lasers began boring a series of deep holes. The local crust was a fat three kilometers thick. Beneath the crust, ceramic pipes and pumps were employed. The red-hot iron had to be lifted to the surface, and cooled, and set out of the way. Since the mande was far from rigid, their target had a nagging habit of wandering. The grandchildren likened the adventure to putting an arm into lake muck, trying to grab one of those hot black winklewarts that just had to be down there.
A full eight years were invested in the drilling.
When success was imminent, a coded message was sent to Miocene. But before she arrived, something solid was ingested, and the pumps mindlessly pulled and pulled, bringing the vault to the surface. It looked the same as the other vaults—a simple replica of the Great Ship. Yet it was nothing like the others. Everyone sensed it. Even the captain in attendance—an unimaginative, hardworking man named Koll—felt a surge of anticipation, watching as his crew and a squad of robots yanked the treasure out of that wet iron, then immersed it in a deep basin of ice water.
Blinking against the steam, Koll ordered the treasure moved indoors.
Who knew who was watching?
The pump station was a suitable hiding place. A large, rambling building without the tiniest window, it held the rarest thing on Marrow. Darkness. Koll walked beside the mechanical walker that was carrying the vault, the false rocket nozzles pointed upward. A young granddaughter was at the helm. As soon as they were inside, Koll ordered the door closed behind them, and locked. He intended to call for the lights. “A soft setting,” he would have told the main computer. But after sixteen hundred years in endless daylight, Koll had learned to cherish anything that resembled night. Standing with his eyes open and blind, he noticed that glow. Soft, and colored. Not coming from the vault, no. The light seemed to be spilling from everywhere else.
Ancient systems had been triggered.
The uranium ballast served as a kind of battery. There was just enough power remaining to make a weak, ghostly projection. And Koll, a stolid, hard-to-impress man, stared at the images, a frill minute passing before he remembered to breathe again.
“Do you see this?” he asked the woman.
“I do,” she replied weakly. “Yes.”
She was sitting on the walker, silhouetted against flashes of light, her face wearing a look of stunned awe.
After another minute, she asked Koll, “What does this mean?”
There was no point in lying. He told her simply, “I don’t know what it means.” In circumstances like this, who could know?
The woman said, “Goodness.”
She laughed nervously, then said, “You don’t suppose-?”
“Maybe it’s nothing,” the captain interrupted. Then he said, “Nothing,” once again, with a genuine hopefulness. But because he was a rigorously honest man, he added, “Yet it could be very important. Which, I suppose, makes this a very important day.”
Twenty
Stripped of its hyperfiber shell, the device seemed elegant but not particularly impressive. Various ceramics were knitted into a white buckeyball sphere, rather like an oversized child’s kick ball. The vault rode on the floor in front of Miocene, and she touched it lighdy, and with a flat, matter-of-fact voice, she reported, “I feel confident. About how things will go from here, I mean. Basically, essentially confident.”
Washen nodded, then faced forward again. With both hands on the controls, she repeated the word, “Confident.”
“I am,” the Submaster promised. “With luck and some care, this should help heal the old rifts.”
“With luck,” Washen echoed, knowing it would take a lot of that mecurial substance.
She was steering a large walker. Behind them, the latest incarnation of Happens River was dropping over the horizon. What passed for a road would soon become a starved trail, then nothing but jungle and raw mountains. They were already approaching Wayward lands, yet it would be another two hundred kilometers before the rendezvous. Nobody with an official invitation had ever moved this deep into their territory, and it had been at least three centuries since the uninvited had last passed here.
As the day progressed, Washen kept tabs on the walker’s progress. The latest AI pilots still weren’t particularly smart or adaptable, and it wouldn’t impress anyone to have their machine—the culmination of sixteen centuries of technical wizardry—trip over a piece of mountain, ending up on its back like a clumsy crap bug.
The jungle path lifted up onto a wide, newborn plateau, then vanished. A hard hot rain was falling on the open ground, collecting in little basins and pools where black algae grew in silky blankets. In another year, all of this would be a vigorous young jungle. But which species would dominate? Sixteen hundred years of research gave Washen the expertise to admit that she didn’t know how the succession would progress. Not on this ground, or any other. Chemical makeups varied from vent to vent, and even within a single flow. Rains were common but no longer reliable. Little droughts and hard floods could change initial conditions. Plus there was the pure creative randomness of the spores and seeds and eggs that would come here. A chance wind could bring a flotilla of gold balloons that might, or might not, lead to a lofty forest of pure virtue trees. Or the fickle wind would steer the balloons somewhere else. To an established jungle and their deaths, most likely, where hungry mouths waited in abundance. At least a hundred native species loved to chew on the gold foil, incorporating the metal into their own elaborate carapaces, showing the world and their prospective mates both a beauty and a gaudy strength.
Initial conditions were critical. That was essential in jungle ecologies, and in human ecologies, too.
What if Miocene were a better parent? More patient, and nurturing, and just a little more forgiving? If she and Till had been closer, resolving their differences in private, civilized ways, the history of Marrow would certainly have been much quieter. And if she had been a worse mother, she would have murdered her son. Then driven by the other captains’ outrage, Miocene would have been ousted, another Submaster named their leader. Daen, perhaps. Or more likely Twist. Which would have radically changed the evolution of their ad hoc civilization…