Mallow (60 page)

She said, 'Yes.'

After a contemplative moment, she said, 'Fine.'

After a long, painful wait, she said, 'Of course you want to be my First Chair. Isn't that right, Pamir?'

'Me? No.' He laughed for a long moment. A deep, honest laugh.
Then he told her,
'But I know someone more qualified. By a long ways.'

The Master might be battered and disoriented. But she was sharp enough to make a good guess, asking, 'Where's Washen? May I speak with her?'

'Eventually,' Pamir allowed.

Then he rose to his feet and set the mirrored cap on his head, at the customary angle, and he mentioned, 'Your First Chair is setting things right around the ship. Believe me, you wouldn't trust anyone else with this assignment.'

Quietly, almost submissively, the Master said, 'Thank you again, Pamir.'

'Yeah. You're welcome.'

Then with a whispering laugh, she added,
'I knew you'd bring sweet luck someday. Didn't I tell you that I had a feeling? Didn't I?'

But the Master was alone now. Pamir had slipped away without begging for permission, and nobody was there to hear the raspy voice from the little box saying, 'Thank you, thank you.'
With a giddy joy, she cried out,
'To everyone who helped save me and the ship
...
a trillion sweet thanks . . . !'

A
t first glance
, they looked like lovers and nothing more.

The woman was human, tall for her species and quite lovely, and the human male sharing her table was just as tall and not nearly so pretty.
The woman smiled and spoke quietl
y, and the man grinned and laughed, then with a word or two, he caused the woman to laugh hard and long. Then they held hands like lovers. It was a simple, natural gesture that their fingers and palms managed with a practiced perfection. Passerby barely gave them a glance. Why should they? Lovers were common along this particular avenue, and these passengers were far too busy with their own important lives to notice two humans who happened to be out of uniform, wearing faces that changed their appearance just enough to lend them a well-earned anonymity.

These were exciting times. Perhaps even wondrous rimes. After aeons of utter, unruffled sameness, everything on board the Great Ship was changed. There had been a mutiny and a war, and even with that finished now, there were new changes bearing down on everyone. A new course for the ship! Talk of new captains being hired from among the passengers, and new opportunities for every species! And at the center of this great old vessel were mysteries too incredible to describe, much less comprehend in a matter of days and weeks!

Everyone wanted to see this Marrow place, if only from a safe distance. And since they couldn't actually see the world, they talked about it in loud, excited voices, or in chemical shouts, or with complicated touches that asked obvious questions for which nobody seemed to have answers.

What was locked at the center of Marrow? What, really, was this thing they kept calling the Bleak . . . ?

And what about the Great Ship? It was on a course to leave the galaxy, which was more than a
little
complication for most passengers. There were only so many taxis and so many living worlds between here and the inter-galactic beyond . . . and it seemed unlikely that even a fraction of those who wanted to embark would be able to do so . . .

Which left the passengers where?

Trapped, in one sense. Or in a different sense, infinitely blessed. How many souls had ever taken a voyag
e of this scope? Hundreds of mill
ions of years from now, with luck, the Great Ship would slice its way through the Virgo cluster . . . and beyond those wild ports was more emptiness, and black reaches of time, and marvels that undoubtedly would astonish all of those who could endure that long, long wait . . .

And what about the Waywards? the voices asked each other, with fear and with grave respect.

Rumor stated that billions of Waywards still lived on Marrow, keeping close to the ancient Bleak. While other wise, apparently knowing voices claimed that Waywards were still running at large among the ship s well-lit, apparently peaceful avenues.
They had vanished during the chaos, and now they were hiding in the most remote, empty places, gathering themselves for their next awful assault.

Unless, of course, they were nearer than that.

A few voices suggested that maybe the Waywards were among them now. Perhaps there was a chosen, well-
trained
cadre of priests who only pretended to be wealthy human passengers. But how would you recognize them? In what subtle, accidental way would they betray their identity, letting a simple passenger have the danger and the honor of capturin
g them in the middle of a brightl
y lit avenue?

Those two lovers were Waywards. It was their meal that gave them away. Someone noticed that the tall, pretty woman had ordered a platter filled with some monstrous thing called a hammerwing, and when it arrived at her table, she cut it open with a casual expertise, dishing out a portion to her man, then kissing the back of his hand before she let him have the first
little
bite.

Someone shouted, 'Waywards! There!'

Individuals from various species heard the warning translated, then responded by pushing up to the little table, leveling arms and jointed legs at the diners, and with scared voices and farts, they repeated their accusation.

'Look there! Waywards!'

'Stop them!'

'Someone, arrest them!'

The lovers couldn't have been more calm. Unhurried, they set down their eating utensils and reached across the table one last time, fingers knotted together in that same comfortable fashion . . . and after a moment of blistering suspense, they decided to let their disguises fall away, and they stood up tall, and their touristy clothes changed back into the brilliant and lovely uniforms that captains were always supposed to wear.

To her lover, the woman asked, 'What do you think?'

'You ate this bug for how long?' the man growled.

'Nearly five thousand years,' she confessed.

'And did it ever taste good?'

'What do you think?' she asked.

Then they were laughing, and they were hugging each other . . . and it was as if there weren't crowd gathered close around them
...
as if it were just them, and they were perfectly alone . . .

'I
THOUGHT YOU
needed to see this for yourselves,'
Washen told them. 'Sitting in the same room for an eternity can't help the creative process.'

The AI scribes stared down at the face of Marrow, saying nothing.

'Does it inspire? Are you finding any new ideas?'

Speaking for all, one of the scribes said, 'No,' with a disgusted tone. Implied were the words, 'Of course this doesn't help!'

There was little to see, in truth. Sweeping fires and the pent-up energies of coundess volcanoes had filled the atmosphere below with clouds, black and opaque to almost every wavelength. But as awful as things looked from here, most of Marrow was neither burning nor boiling. Long-range sensors and every AI simulation gave the same sturdy answer: the old Wayward lands hadn't been touched by the conflagration. What was happening to the world wasn't much worse than what a million other disasters had wrought in the past. In fact, the ecosystem would probably be revitalized by the chaos, while some or most of the Waywards could hunker down, lick their wounds, and wait for the skies to clear.

The scribes continued to stare politely at the boiling black clouds.

Washen motioned. Locke walked out onto the diamond platform, knelt beside the scribes, and with a quiet reverence said, 'Maybe I can offer you a new idea. Are you interested, machines?'

One after another, the rubber faces turned toward him. Polite expressions were left frozen in place, while the rapid minds behind them ignored everything but the one vast problem worthy of their considerable trouble.

Locke said, 'This ship.'

He asked, 'What if you don't know its real dimensions?'

There was a momentary flicker of interest.

Locke licked his lips, then explained, 'When I was a child, I had a toy. A model of the ship. It fit in my hand, it was that small. But I was a boy, too young to appreciate the ship's real dimensions.'

Eyes widened, imagining his long-ago toy.

'My mother tried to explain the size of things. She told me about protons and kilometers and light-seconds, and light-years, and she promised me that the ship was huge. But light-years are huge, aren't they? So when I was five or six, I believed that the ship must be that big. Millions of light-years across,
1
thought. Which was silly, of course. She teased me, I remember. Oh, I was stupid in ways that none of you have ever been, I bet.'

The eyes began to drift off again.

But then Locke asked, 'What if? When they were fabricating the ship . . . what if the Builders didn't stop with the hull? Marrow surrounds the Bleak, whatever that is, an
d what we call the Great Ship s
urrounds Marrow. But what if the hull isn't the end of their work? What if their project reaches out a lot farther, and now, after all this time, it has reached as far as we can see, or imagine . . . ?'

Without exception, the scribes leaned forward.

'You're looking into the ship's structures and exact proportions, hunting for some hidden message,' Locke concluded. 'But what if the message isn't written just in this stone and iron and hyperfiber? What if the Builders' ship is the universe, too . . . the trillions of stars and the whirling galaxies, and every unmapped mote of dust, and everything else that we can see or suppose throughout the entire visible creation . . . ?'

None of the AIs moved.

To
the human ear, none made even the tiniest sound. Washen laid a hand on Locke's shoulder, telling him, 'They're interested. They're considering it now' He said, 'Good.'

Mother and son walked out onto the gangway, looking between their feet at the dim black face of Marrow. Every available engineer was waiting above them, ready to begin pouring hyperfiber into the base camp, then the access tunnel. This wouldn't be a catastrophic collapse. They would take their time, slowly and thoroughly plugging this gaping hole in the chamber's otherwise perfect wall. Plainly, the Builders had reasons for what they did. As far as Washen or Pamir could see, the only sensible course was to seal the prison again, making things much as they were before and doing it as permanently as possible . . . the only change being a few small, impossible-to-find security eyes stuck to the chamber's slick silver wall, watching over her millions of grandchildren . . .

For a moment, as she stood on that gangway thinking about her grandchildren, Washen felt the sudden strange urge to throw herself at Marrow.

But she took a breath and the feeling passed, and with a practiced motion of her hand, she looked at the time. Then to Locke and the AI scribes, she announced, 'We need to be leaving. Now.'

The machines stood and gathered in a neat line.

'Have you thought about what I told you?' Locke asked them.

One of the machines replied, 'Naturally'

'Will you have answers soon?' he pressed.

The rubber face merely smiled, and with an appealing

haughtiness, it said, 'Soon. In a century or a million years.

Yes. Soon.'

Washen barely heard the voice or her son's hearty laugh.

Kneeling on the gangway, where the new hyperfiber would be poured first, she set out her mechanical clock with its silver lid opened, and she left it there. It was the hardest thing in the world. But she managed to stand and walk away, muttering to herself, 'For later. I'll leave it here for now and come back to get it later . . .'