“The truth is that I don’t know what’s real. Madam.”
She looked up, suspicion mixed with fascination. “So you might believe. If circumstances were changed in some way, that is.”
The arrogance resurfaced. Quietly, angrily, he asked, “Wouldn’t you change your mind? If you suddenly realized that your mind was wrong, I mean.”
“As I recall, you demanded to be brought here. To this temple specifically. I can only assume that you’re eager to see the Great Ship for yourself, and to that noble end, you want to help our holy mission…”
“No, madam.”
Miocene feigned surprise, then disgust. With her own quiet anger, she asked the defector, “In what do you believe?”
“Nothing.” He sounded defiant, but like a child too full of himself, too impressed with the keen edge of his own exceptional mind. “I don’t know why Marrow is here,” he complained, “much less who built it. Or why. And I’m absolutely convinced that no one else has answers for those questions, either.”
“The artifacts-?”
“There’s another obvious explanation for them.”
But she didn’t want to hear any groundless speculations. What was important here—what was vital and even urgent—was to ascertain the real talents of this taciturn young man. A contemptuous snarl preceded her firm declaration: “I don’t have use for Wayward scientists. We’ve had a few of you defect, once a century or so, and as a rule, you’re badly educated. Unimaginative. And you trade on the names of your insane fathers.”
“I am well educated,” Virtue replied, in a sudden fever. “And I’m extremely imaginative. And I don’t use your son’s name to my advantage!”
She stared at him, the picture of skepticism.
“Don’t you appreciate the risks that I’ve taken? For your sake, and everyone’s?” He barked the words, then with a wince and grunt restrained himself. A nervous hand threw open the book, as if one of its intricate, flawed pages would lend support for his cause. Then with a soft, furious tone, Virtue explained, “I was Chief of Delving at the main research facility at the Grand Caldera. In secret, I taught myself how to fly. Alone, I stole one of our fastest pterosaurs, and I flew to within a hundred kilometers of the border. Inside a rainstorm, I jumped. I left the pterosaur to be shot down, and without armor or a parachute, I dropped through the canopy. When my shattered legs healed, I ran. I ran all the way to that shithole checkpoint of yours. That’s how badly I wanted to be here, Grandmother. Madam Miocene. Whatever the fuck you want to be called…!”
“It’s a grand epic,” Miocene offered. “All that’s missing is the motivation.”
Glowering silence.
“Chief of Delving,” she repeated. “What were you delving into at the Grand Caldera?”
“Energy.”
“Geothermal energy?”
“Hardly.” He glanced at his own hands, reporting. “There has always been a problem, and both nations know it. There’s too much energy running through this place. Energy to light the sky, and power enough to compress an entire world and hold it in one place. That’s power beyond what fission can supply. Or normal fusion. Even the great captains are at a loss to explain such a thing.”
“Hidden matter-antimatter reactors,” Miocene offered.
“Something’s hidden,” he agreed. One hand pulled a braid into his mouth, and he sucked on the wig’s dark hair for a moment. Then he spat it out again, and he told the Submaster, “I was delving into the deepest regions.”
“Of Marrow?”
A cursory nod. “Looking for your hidden reactors, I suppose.”
“Don’t you know what you were hunting?” she countered.
His hot gray eyes lifted, glaring at his accuser. “I know. You think I’m difficult, and you’re not the first to think it. Believe me.”
Miocene said nothing.
“But between us, who’s more difficult? You’ve lived on Marrow for thirty centuries, ruling a tiny piece of what you claim is a tiny world. You claim that only you and the other captains understand the beauty and enormity of the great universe, while your son and the other Waywards are idiots because they tell simple stories that halfway explain everything, making us into the reborn kings of the universe…
“We aren’t kings,” he proclaimed. “And I don’t believe that an arrogant old woman like you really understands the universe. Great and glorious and nearly boundless, it is, and what tiny fraction of it have you seen in your own little life…?”
Miocene watched the eyes, saying nothing.
“I was peering inside Marrow,” the youngster reported. “The Waywards have a larger, more sensitive array of seismic ears than yours. Since most of the world is theirs, after all. And since they believe in living with quakes, not in defusing them.”
“I know about your seismic array,” said Miocene.
“Using three thousand years of data, I built a thorough, detailed picture of the interior.” As he spoke, a rapture took hold of his gray eyes, his narrow face, then his small body. “Arrogance,” he said again, with a harsh disgust. “By your own admission, you piloted the Great Ship for a hundred millenia before you realized that Marrow was here. And now you’ve lived here for another three millenia, and hasn’t it ever occurred to you, just once, that the mysteries don’t stop? That there’s something hiding deep inside Marrow, too?”
Suddenly Miocene heard the distant singing, muted by walls and the spiraling staircase, the voices ragged and earnest and in their own way beautiful.
She heard herself ask, “What is this… this something…?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
“Is it large?”
“Fifty kilometers across. Approximately’ The young man sucked on another braid, then said, “I want to find out what it is. Give me the staff and the resources, and I’ll determine if the buttresses are being fed from down there.”
The Submaster took a breath, then another. Then she quietly, honestly, told the defector, “That can’t be our priority. Interesting as it is, the question has to wait.”
Gray eyes stared, then pulled shut.
A bilious voice reported, “That’s exactly what Till told me. Word for fucking word.”
When the eyes opened, they saw a laser cradled in the Submaster’s right hand.
“Hey, now,” he whined.
Miocene aimed for the throat, then panned downward. Then she rose and came around the table, completing the chore with delicacy and thoroughness. Only the face and the mind behind it remained unconsumed, a voiceless scream having pulled the mouth wide open. The stink of cooked flesh and a burned wig made the air close, distasteful. Working quickly, Miocene opened a satchel and dumped the head inside. Then she walked between the stacks of books, her guard waiting as ordered, out of earshot.
He took the satchel without comment.
“As always,” was all she needed to say.
With a nod, the loyal guard left, using the emergency exit. The defector’s interrogations had only just begun; and if he could prove his worth, he would be reborn into a new, infinitely more productive life.
Miocene took her time repacking the electronic file-box and adding a vial of ash to the ash pile—exactly what would be left by a man’s head. Then she picked up the book that had so bothered her grandson, and on a whim, she opened it to the reactor. Virtue had been correct, she realized. And she made a footnote to future scholars before she carefully returned the volume to its proper shelf.
The temple administrator was waiting in the stairwell.
With her hands wrapped in front of her, half-hidden by her lumpy robe, she looked up at the Submaster, winced and began to ask, “Where is he-?”