Mallow (9 page)

Some of her cohorts considered the assignment an insult.

Scrubbing latrines and tracking down flakes of wayward skin was tedious and grueling. Certain captains grumbled, 'We're not janitors, are we?'

'We aren't,' Washen agreed. 'Professionals would have finished last week.'

Diu belonged to her detail, and unlike most, the novice captain worked without complaint, plainly trying to impress his superior. A charming selfishness was at work. She would soon wear a Submaster's epaulets, and if Diu could impress Washen with his zeal, she might become his benefactor. It was a calculation, yes. But she thought that it was a reasonable, even noble attitude. Washen believed there was nothing wrong with a captain making calculations, whether it involved the ship's course or the trajectory of his own important career. It was a philosophy that she'd often mentioned to Pamir, and that Pamir would never, ever accept in even the most polite ways.

It took two weeks and a day to finish their janitorial assignment.

Narrow, two-passenger cars waited to make the long fall to base camp. Washen decided that Diu would ride with her, and that their car would leave last, and Diu rewarded her with the charming and very trimmed story of his life.

'Mars-born, and born wealthy,' he confessed.'I came to this ship for the usual touristy reasons. The promise of excitement. Or novelty. Adventure in safe, manageable doses. And of course, the unlikely possibility that someday, in some far and exotic part of the Milky Way, I'd actually become a better human being.'

'Passengers don't join the crew,'
Washen stated.

Diu grinned, something about the face and bright expression perpetually boyish. 'Because it's so hard,' he admitted. 'Because we have to start at the bottom of the bottom. Our status, hard-won or stolen, has to be surrendered, and even if we were born wealthy, that doesn't make us fools. We understand. Talent comes in flavors, and our particular talents don't wear these clothes well.'

With no one here to see them, they again wore their mirrored uniforms.

Nodding, Washen touched the purple-black epaulets, asked, 'So why did you do it? Are you a fool?' 'Absolutely,' he sang out. She couldn't help but laugh.

With the tone of a confession, he explained, 'I played the wealthy passenger for a few thousand years. Then
1
finally realized that despite all of my adventuring and all my of my determined smiles, I was bored and would always be bored.'

The car's windows were blackened. The only illumination inside the little cab came from a bank of controls, green smears of light promising that every system was working well. The green of a terran forest: A comforting color for humans; an evolutionary echo, Washen thought in passing.

'But captains never looked bored,' he told her. 'Pissed, yes. And harried, usually. But that's what attracted me to you. If only because people expect it, your souls are relentlessly and momentously busy.'

Diu had taken a unique journey into the ship's elite. He recited his postings and his steady climb through the hierarchy, first as a lowly mate, then as a low-ranking captain. But on the brink of sounding tedious, he held back. He stopped speaking, smiling until she noticed the smile.
Then he quietly and respectfully asked Washen about her considerable life.

A hundred thousand years was described in eleven sentences.

'I was born inside the ship. By-the-sea was my childhood home.
The Master needed captains, so I became one. I've done every job that captains do, plus a few others. For the last fifty millennia, I've welcomed and supervised our alien guests. According to my work record and my evaluations, I'm very good at my profession. I have no children.

My pets and apartment are self-sufficient. All things considered, I'm comfortable in the company of other captains. I can't imagine living anywhere but on this wondrous, mysterious ship.
Where else in Creation can a person drink in so much diversity, every day of our lives . . . ?'

Diu's closed his gray eyes, then opened them. And as always, the eyes smiled along with the mobile wide mouth.

'Are your parents still on board?' he asked.

'No, they sold their shares once the ship entered the Milky Way, and they emigrated.' To a colony world, she didn't mention. A raw, wild place when they arrived, but now probably a crowded, frightfully ordinary place.

'I bet they'll feel an enormous pride,' Diu mentioned.

'Pride for what?'

'You,' he replied.

For an instant, Washen was confused, and perhaps her confusion showed on her usually unflustered face.

'Because they'll hear the news,' Diu continued. 'When the Master announces to the galaxy what we've found down here, and she tells about our roles in this great adventure . . . when that happens, I think everyone everywhere is going to know our story . . .'

In truth, she hadn't considered that very obvious prospect.

Not until this moment, that is.

'Our famous ship has something hidden inside it,' said Diu. 'Imagine what people will think.'

Washen nodded, agreeing . . . while a sliver of herself began to feel the softest gray chill
...
a sudden harbinger of what could be a strange
little
fear . . .

Seven

Newcomers weren't prepared
for Marrow.

Washen hadn't seen images of their base camp or the world itself. Images, like whispers, had their own life and a talent for spreading farther than intended. Which was why she had nothing in mind but those schematics that the Master had shown to all of her captains, leaving her feeling like an innocent.

Their tiny car turned transparent as it pulled into a small garage. Hyperfiber lay in all directions, the silvery-gray material molded into a diamond framework that created berths and storage lockers and long, long staircases.

The car claimed the first available berth.

On foot, three stairs at a time, Diu and Washen conquered the last kilometer. They were inside a newly fabricated passageway, spartan and a
little
cool. Then the stairs ended, and without warning, they stepped out onto a wide viewing platform, and standing together, they peered out over the edge.

The diamond blister lay between them and several hundred kilometers of airless, animated space. Force fields swirled through that apparent vacuum, creating an array of stubborn buttresses. In themselves, the buttresses were a great discovery. How were they powered? How did they succeed for so long, without a moment's failure? Washen could actually see them: a brilliant blue-white light seemed to flow from everywhere, filling the gigantic chamber. The fight never seemed to waver. Even with the blister's protection, the glare was intense. Relentless. Civilized eyes needed to adapt - a physiological task involving retinae and the tint of the lenses; an unconscious chore that might take an hour, at most — but even with their adaptable genetics,

Washen doubted that any person, given any reasonable time, could grow comfortable with this endless day

The chamber wall was a great sphere of silver-gray hyperfiber marred only by the tiniest of crushed tunnels left behind from the time when it was created.
The chamber enclosed a volume greater than Mars, and according to sensors and best guesses, its hyperfiber was as thick as the thickest armor on the ship's exceedingly remote hull, and judging by its purity and grade, probably stronger by a factor of two, or twenty. Or more, perhaps.

The silvery wall was the captains' ceiling, and it fell away smoothly on all sides, its silver face vanishing behind the rounded body of Marrow.

'Marrow,' Washen whispered, spellbound.

On just one li
ttle portion of the world, down where her squinting eyes happened to look first, perhaps a dozen active volcanoes were vomiting fire and black gases, ribbons of white-hot iron flowing into an iron lake that cooled grudgingly, a filthy dark slag forming against the shoreline. In colder, closer basins, hot-water streams ran into hot-water lakes that looked only slightly more inviting: mineral-stained bodies shot full of purples and swirling crimsons and blacks and thick muddy browns. Above those lakes, water, clouds gathered into towering thunderheads that were carried by muscular winds back over the land. Where the crust wasn't exploding, it was a scabrous shadowless black, and the blackness wasn't because of the iron-choked soils. What Washen saw was a vigorous, soot-colored vegetation that basked in the endless day. Forests, jungles. Reeflike masses of photosynthetic life. A blessing, all.
Watching from base camp, the captains could guess what was happening. The
vegetation was acting like countl
ess filters, removing toxins and yanking oxygen from the endless rust, creating an atmosphere that wasn't clean but seemed clean enough that humans, once properly conditioned, could breathe it, and perhaps comfortably.

'I want to get down there,'
Washen confessed.

'Eventually,' Diu cautioned, pointing over her shoulder. 'Things that are impossible usually take time.'

The diamond blister enclosed more than a square kilometer of hyperfiber. Shops and dorms and labs hung down like stalactites, their roofs serving as foundations. On the
blister's edge, scuttl
ebug drones were pouring fresh hyperfiber, creating a silvery-white cylinder slowly growing toward the rough black landscape below.

That cylinder would be their bridge to the new world.

Eventually, eventually.

There was no other route down. The buttressing fields had destroyed every sort of machine sent into them. For many reasons, some barely understood, those buttresses also eroded, then killed, every sort of mind that dared touch them. Captains with engineering experience had worked on the problem. The team leader was a wizard named Aasleen, and she had designed a hyperfiber shaft, its interior shielded with quasiceramics and superfluids. Good rugged theories claimed that the danger would end where the light ended, which was at the upper edges of Marrows atmosphere. A brief, shielded exposure wouldn't kill anyone. But before the captains made history, there would be tests. Sitting in a nearby lab, inside clean spacious cages, were several hundred immortal pigs and baboons, uniformly spoiled and completely unaware of their coming heroism.

Washen was thinking about baboons and timetables. A familiar voice broke her reverie. 'What are your impressions, darlings?' Miocene stood behind them. In uniform, she was even more imposing, and more cold. Yet Washen summoned her

best smile, greeting the mission leader with a crisp,
'Madam,' and a
little
bow. 'I'm surprised, madam,' she admitted. 'I didn't know that this world would be so beautiful.'

'Is it?' The knife-edged face offered a smile. Without looking down, she added, 'I wouldn't know. I don't have a feel for aesthetics.'

For one uncomfortable moment, no one spoke.

Then Dili offered,
'It's a spartan beauty, madam. But it's there.'

'I believe you.' The Submaster smiled off into the distance. 'But tell me. If this world proves as harmless as it is beautiful, what do you think our passengers will pay? To come here and have a look. Or perhaps go below and take a walk.'

'If it's a littl
e dangerous,' Washen ventured, 'then they'll pay more.'

Diu nodded in agreement.

Miocene's smile came closer, growing harder. 'And if it's more than a little dangerous?'

'We'll leave it alone,'
Washen replied. 'Dangerous to the ship?'

'Then we'll have to collapse our new tunnel,' Diu suggested.

'With us safely above,' Miocene added.

'Of course,' the captains said together, in a shared voice.

A wide grin filled Diu's face, and for a moment, it was as if he were grinning with his entire body.

Past the fledging bridge, clinging to the chamber's smooth face, were dozens of mirrors and arrays of complex antennae. Gesturing toward them, Diu asked, 'Have we seen any intelligent life, madam? Or perhaps a few artifacts?'

'No,' said Miocene, 'and no.'

It would be a strange place for sentience to evolve, thought Washen. And even if the ship's builders had left cities behind, they would have been destroyed long ago. Or at least swallowed up. The crust beneath them was probably not even a thousand years old. Marrow was an enormous forge constantly reworking not only its black face but also the hot bones beneath.

'This world has one big distinction,' Diu pointed out. 'It's the only part of the ship that comes with its own life-forms.'

True.
When humans arrived, every passageway and giant room proved sterile. As life-free as the graceful clean hands of the finest autodoc, and then some.

'But that might just be coincidence,'
Washen responded. 'Life usually requires an active geology to be born. The rest of the ship is cold rock and hyperfiber, and the enormous purification plants would have destroyed every ambitious organic compound, almost as it was formed.'

'Yet I can't help dream,' Diu confessed, staring at the two women. 'In my dreams, the builders are down there, waiting for us.'