Mallow (28 page)

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?

The old lake was still and stained red with rust and ruddy planktons. Above, stretching like some great steel ceiling, the chamber's wall looked near enough to touch. This was a pure illusion, of course. Marrow's atmosphere ended fifty kilometers short of the wall. The radiant buttresses still ruled above the swelling world. They remained dangerously strong, if considerably thinner. And for the next three hundred-plus years, they would continue to thin, and Marrow would expand, and according to every forecast and every carefully plotted graph, the buttresses would reach their minimum when Marrow's atmosphere began to lick against the chamber wall.

Finally, the captains would be able to climb to the base camp, and the access tunnel, and if the tunnel hadn't crumbled, they could move up into the vastness of the ship itself. Which was a derelict now, probably. Assuredly. Millennia of debate hadn't produced any other reasonable explanation for their long, perfect solitude, and three more centuries probably wouldn't change that grim assessment.

Washen opened the silver lid of her old, much-cherished timepiece, deciding that in this great march of centuries, she still had a few moments to waste.

Old, light-starved virtue trees had made the planks that were fixed to the stainless steel pontoons that held up Washen's dock. She strolled out to the end, listening to the pleasant sound of her dress boots striking wood. A tiny school of hammerwing larvae swam away, then turned and came back again, perhaps wanting handouts. Fins sloshed. Big many-faceted eyes saw a human figure against the hyperfiber sky. Then Washen closed the lid of her little clock, and the sudden click caused the school to dive deep in a single smooth panic, only swirls of red water betraying their presence.

Idle was an ancient lake, and by Marrow standards, it was impoverished, senile. An ecosystem built on frequent, radical change didn't appreciate stability and a thousand years of eutrophication.

Washen slipped the clock and its titanium chain into a trusted pocket, and her dream suddenly came back to her. Without warning, she remembered being somewhere else. Somewhere high, wasn't it? Perhaps on top of the bridge, which was only reasonable; she worked here every day. Only somehow that possibility didn't feel right, either.

Someone else was in her dream.

Whom, she couldn't say. But she had heard a voice, clear and strong, telling her with such sadness, 'This is not the way it is supposed to be.'

'What's wrong?' she had asked.

'Everything,' the voice declared. 'Everything.'

Then she looked down at Marrow. It seemed even larger than it was today, bright with fire and with molten, white-hot lakes of iron. Or was that iron? It occurred to Washen that the glow looked wrong . . . although she couldn't seem to piece together an answer from the sparse, ill-remembered clues . . .

'What is "everything"?' She .had asked the voice.

'Don't you see?' the voice replied.

'What should I see?'

But no answer was offered, and Washen turned, trying to look at her companion. She turned and saw . . . what
?

Nothing came to mind, save for the odd and thrilling sensation of falling from a very great height.

Her puttercar needed
surgery.

Time and the hard steel roads had dismantled is suspension, and the simple turbine engine had developed an odd, nagging whine. But Washen hadn't gotten around to seeing it fixed. The vehicle still ran, and there was the salient fact that every machine shop in the capital had priorities. Personal transportation held a low priority. On Miocene's
orders, every device that directl
y served the growing bridge held sway over personal concerns. And while Washen could have claimed privilege - wasn't she a vital part of this heroic effort? — she felt uncomfortable demanding favors.

For six hundred years, with rare exceptions, she had driven this route into the metropolis. Her local road merged with a highway that took her straight
through older, more densely settl
ed neighborhoods. Fifty-story apartment buildings stood in the mandatory parks, the black foliage mixed with playground equipment and the scrambling, energetic bodies of screaming children. Single houses and row houses and houses perched on aging, enfeebled virtue trees testified to the wild diversity of people left to their own logic. No two structures were the same, including the tallest buildings. And no two neighborhood temples could be confused for one another, sharing nothing but the dome-hearted architecture and a certain comfortable majesty.

Washen's feelings about this faith were complex, and fickle. There were moments and years when she believed Miocene was a cynical leader, and this religion was as contrived as almost every other faith that Washen had met, and much less beautiful, too. But there were also unexpected, if fleeting moments when the hymns and the pageantry and everything else about it made sudden and perfect sense.

There was an ethereal charm to this bizarre mishmash.

The ship was real, she reminded herself. The object of their devotion was a miraculous, amazing machine, and empty or otherwise, it was plying its way through a wondrous universe. And even after her long isolation, the captain inside her felt a powerful duty toward that ball of hyperfiber and cold rock.

The puttercar highway grew wide, then evaporated into the central district.

Three hundred-story skyscrapers rose from the trustworthy ground. Steel skeletons were cloaked in acrylic windows and set on frictionless, sway-resistant foundations. A different logic had created the administrative headquarters. Fashioned from titanium and tough ceramics, it resembled a giant puffball - no windows showing to the outside wodd, its base reinforced in a hundred ways, walls armored and bristling with hidden weapons. The enemy was never mentioned, but it wasn't much of a secret. A Wayward assault was Miocene's most paranoid fear, offered without the slightest evidence. Yet it was a fear that Washen shared, if only on certain days. No, she didn't look at those imp
regnable walls with pride, exactl
y
. But they didn't make her bristl
e, either.

Past the puffball were the six domes of the Great Temple. And standing at its center, directly beneath the abandoned base camp, was the only object that truly mattered to the Loyalist nation.

The bridge.

No wider than a large skyscraper and pale gray against the silver sky, the structure seemed lost at first glance. By ship standards, its hyperfiber shell was of a poor grade. But each gram of the stuff had come at great cost, grown inside sprawling, muscular factories built for no other purpose. True, most of the hyperfiber was thrown away, inadequate even for simple structural duties. But just to reach this modest point was a marvel. Aasleen and her teams had done miracles. Despite shortages of key elements, tons of hyperfiber had been created, one little droplet at a time, and then teams under Washen's gaze had slowly and carefully poured those gray droplets into molds that pushed the bridge higher every day. On the very best days, the bridge rose a full fat meter.

'I know that I'm asking too much,' Miocene had admitted on many occasions. 'A slower pace would be fast enough, and there wouldn't be as many hardships on our grandchildren. But these are only hardships. Not lives. And I want our people to see their energies going toward something genuine. Something they can touch, and climb -with our permission - and something that is visibly progressing.'

What the eye found unimpressive at first glance was quite tall, and even to an old woman who had seen plenty of marvels, the bridge had a magnificence that always made her blink and shiver. It was far taller than any neighboring skyscraper. Taller than all of them set on top of each other, in fact. It reached up into the cold stratosphere. If they didn't add another centimeter, Marrow's own expansion could lift it up until it nearly kissed the surviving nub of the old bridge, and their escape would be complete.

But that led to a problem.

Washen had always doubted Miocene's rationale. Maybe their people needed something tangible. Although hadn't they always been wonderfully motivated by the abstract charms of the mythlike ship? And maybe this was a project that should be completed as quickly as possible, regardless of costs and deprivations. But the fledging bridge stood on an island of iron, and the iron was drifting on a slow, ancient ocean. Plumes of white-hot metal were risin
g beneath them, each plume wrestl
ing with its neighbors. Heat an
d momentum played a slow, relentl
ess game. True, the abatement teams had managed to steer the plumes, forcing them to cancel each other's effects. Drifting ten meters north or sixty east were workable issues. But they still had three centuries of tectonic tampering ahead of them, and what was difficult today would only become more so. With the crust acting as a blanket, the trapped heat could only grow, the molten iron would rise faster and faster, and like any liquid that needs to move, the iron would show persistence and a low cunning.

'This is too soon,' she had told the Submaster. The ancient woman had become a recluse over these last centuries. She had her own elaborate compound between the factories and the bridge. She ruled by dispatches and digitals. Walls of scrap hyperfiber hid whatever passed for a life, and sometimes an entire year would pass without the two women meeting face-to-face. Miocene only emerged for the annual Submaster feast, which was where Washen asked her blu
ntly
, 'What if Marrow pushes the bridge completely out of alignment?'

But Miocene possessed her own form of persistence. 'First of all,' she replied, 'that will not happen. Hasn't the situation been well in hand for the last thousand years?'

With the buried heat escalating all the time, yes.

'And second of all, is any of this your responsibility? No, it is not. In fact, you have no role in any key decision.' Miocene seemed cold and troubled, shaking her head as she explained,'I gave you a role in the bridge's construction, Washen, because you motivate the grandchildren better than most. And because you're willing to make your own decisions without troubling the Submasters every day'

Miocene didn't like to be troubled anymore.

There were whispers about her hermitage. Sad rumors, typically. Some claimed that Miocene wasn't at all alone. She kept a secret cadre of young grandchildren whose only function was to entertain her, sexually and otherwise. It was a ludicrous story, but centuries old just the same. And what was that old warning? If you tell a lie often and if you tell it well, then the truth has no choice but to change Her face . . .

With a hard thump of tires, Washen pulled into the main garage.

The Great Temple was always open to the public. From the basement garage to the old library, she was surrounded by crowds of worshipers from across the city and from every end of the Loyalist nation. Happens River had sent a dozen grinning pilgrims bearing a special gift - a giant, hugely massive nickel bust of Miocene - and the temple administrator wore a pained, confused expression, telling them thank you in the same breath that she warned them that all gifts needed to be registered beforehand. 'Do you see my point? And thank you so much, again. But how else can I keep this place from being a cluttered mess? With so much devotion, don't we need a system?'

There were many ways into the bridge.

Most of the routes were subterranean, and armored, and typically locked. Washen preferred to enter through a small door at the back of the library. The important security measures wer
e thorough but subtl
e. But to convince visitors of the facility's impregnability, armed guards stood in plain view, eyeing everyone; even high-ranking captains deserved a look of cold suspicion.

Twice in twenty meters, Washen was scanned and registered.

Reaching a secondary elevator, she signed her name into the register, then allowed an autodoc to take a snip of tissue, a sip of blood.

With confidence, the nearest guard said, 'Good morning, Madam Washen.'

'Hello, Golden,' she replied.

For the last twenty years, without fail, the man had sat at his station, never complaining, observing the comings and goings of thousands of talented, determined workers. Besides a square face and a name, he seemed to have no identity of his own. If Washen asked about his life, he deflected the question. It was their game. At least it was her game. But she didn't feel like playing it today. Watching her hand scrawl her name on the thinking plastic, she found herself recalling her dream again, wondering why it was bothering her so much.

'Have a good day, madam.'

'You, too, Golden. You, too.'

Alone, Washen sat in the car and rode to the top of the bridge. Another square-faced guard welcomed her by name, saluted briefly, then reported the most important news of the day. 'Rain is coming, madam.'