Then she smelled death, or she saw it walking the stairs with Miocene.
“What…?” the woman sputtered, never more nervous.
“The defector,” Miocene replied, “was a spy. A transparent attempt to plant an agent in our midst.”
“But to kill him… here, in the temple…!”
“To my mind, there’s no more appropriate location.” The Submaster pushed past her, then remarked, “You may clean up. I would be most thankful if you would do me this favor, and that you never mention any of this to anyone.”
“Yes, madam,” a tiny voice squeaked.
Then Miocene was in the open hallway again, the rattling, ill-disciplined voices singing about the bridge soon to be built and the rewards to be won, and for no precise reason, it seemed important for her to step out into the expansive chamber, facing the ranks of devoted worshipers.
It was chilling and enchanting to realize how easily, almost effortlessly, children embraced the words and dreams of another. Miocene looked at the startled, smiling faces, seeing nothing but the purest belief.Yet these people knew nothing about the worlds beyond their own. None had walked t he ship’s smallest hallway, much less witnessed the beauty and majesty of the Milky Way. They sang of this great quest to return to the world above, ready to make any sacrifice to move past their simple silver sky. A sky unblemished, save for that lone patch of darkness directly above—the base camp, still and always abandoned.
Abandoned like the ship itself?
Billions might have died, and Miocene didn’t care. Perhaps she once hated the idea that her people, following her reasonable instructions, had triggered an elaborate, ancient booby trap, causing every organism above them to be murdered. But what had horrified once was now history, past and murky as only history can be, and how could Miocene accept any blame for what was surely unavoidable?
The ship might be dead, but she most definitely was alive.
To the pleasure of several thousand parishioners, this living embodiment of everything great about themselves joined in with their singing, Miocene’s voice strong and and relentless and untroubled by its melodic failures.
How easily they believe, she thought with a fond contempt.
Then as she sang about the sweet light of G-class stars, Miocene asked herself, in her most secret voice, “But what if it’s the same for the great souls?”
She wondered:
“What do I believe too willingly and too well…?”
Twenty-two
The cold iron would occasionally shift on its own, giving no warning. The old faults never moved quickly or particularly far, and they rarely caused damage of consequence. The tremor-abatement facilities absorbed the event’s energies, and where feasible, what was harvested was piped into the main power grid. In that sense, quakes were a blessing. But the unscheduled events had a nagging habit of interrupting a certain captain’s deepest sleep, causing her to awaken suddenly, her dreams swirling out of reach in those delicious few moments before she found herself lucid again.
That morning’s quake lingered. Awake in her bed, lying on her right side, Washen felt the shudder falling away slowly, turning into the quiet, steady, and purposeful drumming of her own heart.
The calendar on the wall displayed the date.
4611.277.
Sheer curtains cut to resemble the unfolded wings of a lusciousfly let in the anemic skylight, illuminating the bedroom in which she had slept for the last six centuries. Steel walls covered with polished umbra wood gave the structure a palpable, reassuring strength. The high steel ceiling bristled with hooks and potted plants and little wooden houses, drab as dirt, where domesticated lusciousflies roosted and made love. A rare species in the bright, hot days after the Event, the lovely creatures had been growing more abundant as the overhead buttresses diminished—a cycle presumably aeons old. At Promise-and-Dream’s Generic Works, the siblings had tinkered with their colors and size, producing giant butterfly-like organisms with elaborate, every-colored wings. Every Loyalist seemed to have his own flock. And since there were twenty million homes in the nation, the sibling captains had made themselves a tidy, even enviable profit.
As Washen sat up in bed, her lusciousflies came out to greet her. With the softness of shadows, they perched on her bare shoulders and in her hair, licking at the salt of her skin and leaving their subtle perfumes as payment.
She shooed them away with a gentle hand.
Her old clock lay open on the tabletop. According to the slow metal hands, she could sleep for another hour. But her body said otherwise. While the mirrored uniform dressed her, Washen remembered dreaming, and the tremor. For a few wasted moments, she tried to resurrect her last dream. But it had slipped away already, leaving nothing but a vague, ill-fed disquiet.
Not for the first time, it occurred to Washen that she could build a universe from her lost dreams.
“Maybe that’s their real purpose,” she whispered to her pets. “When my universe is finished, so am I.”
Laughing quietly, she set her mirrored cap on her head.
There.
Breakfast was peppered bacon over a toasted sweetcake, everything washed down with hot tea and more hot tea. The Genetics Works were responsible for the bacon, too. A few centuries ago, responding to the captains’ complaints, Promise and Dream had cultured several familiar foods in lab vats; respectable steaks and cured meats were the result. But it was a minor project, finished quickly and cheaply. Instead of trying to resurrect the genetics of cattle and boars, from memory, the siblings used the only available meat-bearer—humans—tweaking the genetics enough to make a fleshy product that wasn’t human. Not in texture, or in flavor. Or hopefully, in spirit.
Just which captains were used as a model was a secret. But persistent rumors claimed it was Miocene—a possibility that perhaps accounted for the popularity of the foods, among both captains as well as certain grandchildren.
With an extra hour in her day, Washen took her time. She ate slowly. She read both competing news services; neither offered anything of real interest. Then she stepped from her house out into her very long yard, strolling on a path of native iron blocks rusted into a pleasant shade of drab red, little tufts of grayhair and sadscent growing in the gaps.
Gardening was a recent hobby. Her one-time lover, long-time friend Pamir used to be an accomplished gardener. What were his flowers of choice? The Ilano-vibra, yes. Maybe he was gardening today, if he was alive. And if he was, wouldn’t that old criminal be astonished, seeing Washen’s ambitious soul bending at the knees, plucking at the blackish weeds with her bare ringers?
As the buttresses weakened, as the skylight fell away into a twilightlike glow, the Marrow ecosystem continued to transform itself. Obscure species that lived only in caves and the deepest jungles weren’t simply abundant, they were huge. Like the elfliearts in the middle of her garden. A species that was mature when it was hip-high inside the deepest shade had transformed itself into stout trees with trunks nearly a meter thick and a richly scented purple-black foliage, giant leaves and flowers mixed into a single elaborate structure that was fertilized by the lusciousflies, then curled into a black ball that matured into a fatty fruit, only a little toxic and with a lovely, if somewhat strong taste.
Washen kept the trees for their scent and her flies, and for their almost-terran limbs.
She kept them because some decades ago, a boyish lover had allowed himself to be taken in this orchard, and taken again.
Past the orchard were wide iron steps leading down to Idle Lake. No body of water on the world was older. Born fifteen hundred years ago, this patch of crust could lay claim to being the most ancient slab of iron ever to exist on Marrow: a testament to the captains’ ingenuity and persistence. Or was it their obsessive need for order?