A woman was waiting behind Locke’s door, and for a long instant, Washen didn’t know the face. She was so preoccupied that her eyes registered only its beauty. When did her son start seeing this stranger? Then the woman spoke, and Washen didn’t recognize the voice. The First Chair was looking down again, watching the little square tablet dancing with her own long hands. The voice asked, “How deep?” And then, “And how much more will fall?” And then a soft ageless hand touched her on a wrist, the voice saying, “Washen?” with a familiar tone.
Quee Lee?
“Are you all right, madam?”
Not in the slightest. But she found enough poise to straighten her back, and with a dry soft voice asked, “Where are they?”
“In the Marrow room, as always. Chattering.”
The women walked together. One respected the other’s silence, and once Washen finally closed down the majority of her nexuses, she mentioned, “We have five kilometers of boiling water sitting on the hull, in places.”
“Places?”
“Not on the trailing face, yet.” The Master Captain was calling to Washen again, demanding to know her whereabouts. She closed that nexus, too, then reported to her companion, “Imagine pouring water on one end of a wide pan. A fragile hill forms under the flow, then spreads across what is still dry.”
Quee Lee nodded soberly. With both hands, she stroked the fabric of her purple-and-cream sari, then a tight sorry voice asked again, “How much more will fall?”
“I do not know.” The only sound was the steady click of shoes on the stone floor. Too many kilometers of hyperfiber and stone lay between them and the torrents, the false silence magnified by strained nerves. “But we have projections and simulations,” Washen allowed, smelling a dampness that must have slipped out through a demon door. “And the simulations are uniformly awful, if you want my frank opinion …”
THE HALLWAY DARKENED and widened, and then vanished.
Like the genuine Marrow, this vast room was drifting into a strange deep night. The familiar trees were absent, hibernating as seeds or tough, deeply buried roots. Pseudoinsects and other tiny animals either slept in secure niches, or they exhibited entirely new morphologies and habits. A sky that was still evening-bright when Washen left the world had darkened considerably over the last two-plus centuries, coaxing obscure species into a brief dominion. And the room did its best to mirror that transformation: pale soft blisters and cylinders, puffballs and fuzzy tangles rising out of the light-starved forest, digesting wood and the last little shreds of stored fat while new roots burrowed down to where an artificial bed of iron-rich magma supported an array of chemoautotrophic bacteria, which in turn fed this new forest.
In the shadows, fungi glowed.
Beneath a canopy of dead umbra trees and young bleach-hair, the glow was bright enough to read by—a lemon yellow light emerging from the ground as well as above. Two men were sitting on separate stumps. One lay on his back, saying nothing. The other sat up while staring in a random distance, his smooth voice explaining how it had been to live as an important, well-regarded Wayward.
Unnoticed, Washen paused, using a hand to hold Quee Lee beside her.
“We were harsh, certain, strong, bright, busy people,” Locke reported. “We died, you know. Often, and not in small numbers, either. Marrow was always dangerous. The iron could boil up anywhere. For centuries, we didn’t have the medical tricks to reculture a body around its comatose mind. But we were happy. I was very happy. Risk made each day precious, and since it was Marrow, we only had that one long day.”
He laughed at the old joke.
Washen felt offended, but not because her son spoke fondly of that time. She was offended because the ship was under attack, and that wasn’t a worthy subject. She was genuinely angry because she had put these two people together for reasons—they could do important work, she had believed—yet how could Locke’s dreamy childhood recollections help that work, even in the most passing fashion—?
“Are you joining us, or not?” Perri inquired.
Then he sat up, calmly glancing at the two women, a broad easy smile filling up his face.
Quee Lee approached.
Then Washen.
Locke kept staring off into the distance. With a deep sigh, he explained, “You were right, Mother. Perri knows the ship better than anyone. But he’s never been to Marrow, and he’s curious.”
“What’s the latest?” Perri asked.
“As we thought,” his wife reported.
He nodded, the smile fading into a grim resolve. Taking Quee Lee by the hand, he pointed out, “I didn’t expect to see the First Chair just now. Shouldn’t you be pacing the bridge, madam?”
Locke continued to stare off into the gloom. His expression was distracted but focused, pained but not to the ragged point where he couldn’t function. With a faint pride, he remarked, “I think we’ve accomplished a few little things, Mother.”
“I should be on the bridge,” Washen confessed to Perri. Then she asked Locke, “What have you accomplished?”
“Well.” The small face glanced over a shoulder, not quite looking at her. “Do you know how many species officially have come on board the ship?”
From a nexus, a massive five-digit number offered itself to Washen. But she ignored it, sensing that her son was merely setting the stage.
“And how many have gone extinct? Officially, of course.”
“By the last count,” Perri volunteered, “311.”
Washen glanced at her tablet again. Again she fended off an attempt by the Master Captain to speak with her. Then with a sharp tone, she told Locke, “For the time being, we’re all living like Waywards.”
Every day was precious, in other words.
But her son barely noticed the warning. “Perri mentioned something to me. I’d never noticed it for myself. Did you know? There’s a continuum among the passengers and crew. Not a hard-and-fast continuum, and there are qualifiers. But in general, the captains and crew live up near the hull, but as you drop deeper into the ship’s body, the passengers separate along a gradient—”
“What gradient?” she prompted.
“Captains and engineers, plus the harum-scarums are among the highest souls,” he said. With a nexus, he sent her a complete list of species. “The most pragmatic species and jobs, as a rough rule. Of course the Remoras live even higher, outside the ship entirely, and they do sing a spiritual song … but the ones that I’ve actually met … well, they seem unconcerned by spiritual matters …”
“Spiritual?” Washen interrupted.
“Possessed of a mystical nature,” Perri offered. “In some ways, and it’s never a hard-and-fast condition.”
The First Chair had arrived here with one clear task in
mind, and she was being ambushed by something else entirely. “You’re claiming that the deeper you move inside the ship, the more mystical its residents tend to be?”
“It’s a little something that I first noticed long ago,” Perri said, defending himself with a shrug. “Long ago, and now and again, ever since.”
Washen didn’t dredge up any of the voluminous research. Studies and census figures and the scholarly work by armies of xenobiologists had found only the slightest tendency, probably negligible.
“Mysticism is an inadequate word,” Locke warned.
“And there’s a lot of mud in any measurements,” Perri added. “Species have to be married to habitats, but the pragmatic captains decide which volume is going to be terraformed in what way. Plus there are gravitational needs, and economic constraints. And just because one species talks endlessly about gods and visions, you can’t accept the fact that they genuinely believe their own words—”
“Or that a pragmatic, concrete species is genuinely that way,” Quee Lee offered, finishing her husband’s thought.
Perri laughed.
And then Locke looked straight at his mother, saying the word, “!eech,” with a masterly voice. The exclamation point was a clicking sound, bright and loud, and the following “eech” was over in an instant.
No species had lived deeper inside the Ship than the !eech. Their habitat was inside one of the main fuel tanks, then it was abandoned. The captains had used their old home as their base before they journeyed to Marrow. As a species, the !eech had been xenophobes and deeply odd, and for the last many thousands of years, they had occupied one of those three hundred-plus positions on the official list of extinct species.
“It’s an interesting tendency,” Locke offered. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“What exactly are you working on?” Washen snapped.
Her son seemed very much like a young boy when he
nodded, smiling shyly. “Species, present and lost. Interesting and unnoticed qualities about the ship. All those things Perri brings, and thank you, Mother. For putting us together.”
“Hyperfiber,” Perri blurted.
“What about hyperfiber?” Washen asked.
Locke nodded, focusing on some internal point that no one else could imagine. “Very possibly, the Great Ship is the largest single piece of hyperfiber in existence. Which is fascinating in its own right. But more important, I think … the hyperfiber surrounding us is billions of years older than any other example that we can envision …”
Washen felt her heart quickening. Why?
“Hyperfiber is hyperfiber because it reaches deep into hidden dimensions and shadow realities. That’s where it gains its strength, its nobility. Its perfection, and its quantum peculiarities.”
Quietly, Washen said, “I realize that.”
“But do you realize that the older it is, the greater its reach? According to certain mathematics, at least.” Locke lifted his hands, drawing nonsensical shapes in the dim yellow air. “This one great lump of hyperfiber … the majority of our hull and the supportive structures beneath, and the shell that surrounds Marrow … all of this has existed for twelve billion years, or more, each year of reality allowing its reach to expand into more shadow realms and other intellectual artifacts …”
“It isn’t any stronger because of that,” Washen pointed out.
“I’m not talking about strength,” her son replied, a hint of testiness in the voice. “I mean reach. And if the Great Ship was built when the universe was newly born … as you proposed, Mother, standing in the temple on Marrow … well, perhaps these hidden dimensions weren’t quite as well hidden back then. At the beginning of Creation, I mean. Which again makes for some interesting ideas.”
Washen knew enough to shiver but not enough to offer so much as a tiny suggestion. All she could do was stare at the yellowy glow of a bristle mold, and with a firm and pragmatic voice—a captain’s voice—she remarked, “Conjecture only gets us so far, darling. And if you don’t realize it, let me tell you: There may not be many more days before the ship isn’t ours.”
Three faces grew even more sober, sad and quiet.
It was Quee Lee who finally asked, “Why now, madam? Why are you here when so much else needs you?”
Washen lifted the tablet, piercing several deep encryptions before legible words finally began to form. “Just as the attack began,” she reported, “we received a short, repeating message. In an extinct language called Tilan, by the way. Which helps us authenticate the author. Who is Mere.”
The name was enough. No one breathed, not so much as a fingertip moved.
“It’s a brief message, and we managed to hear it repeated fifty-seven times. I don’t think she was certain that we’d hear her at all, and so …”For a moment, Washen lost her way. Then she smiled abruptly, surprising everyone, including herself. “I’m tired,” she confessed. Then after a deep sigh, she began to read the translation from the tablet. “‘once pond, only. No buds, only countless fingers.’”
Quee Lee glanced at her own soft hands. “Oh, goodness.”
“The Inkwell,” Locke muttered. “Is it a single Gaian?”
“Which makes sense,” Washen reported. “A lot of our evidence, some of which was sent home by Mere, points in that direction.”
“The slow ships moving neural matter from place to place,” Perri recalled. “They could be physical transfers of a shared mind, like electrical pulses between the cells in a brain.” He paused. “If the nebula is a single Gaian and it wants to function as so many little warm worlds, then it has to keep its bodies spread thin. Because if the pieces gather together—”
“Stars would form,” Quee Lee answered.
“Killing it,” her husband concluded.
Locke read his mother’s face. “But there is more. Am I right?”
Washen lowered the tablet.
“What else did Mere tell us, Mother?”
Stepping forward, she showed him the full text. With an appreciative expression, he studied the third, final line.
“What?” Quee Lee asked.
“It’s a tiny piece of a much larger equation,” Washen confessed. “By implication, I think Mere is telling us that this is what the polypond, the Inkwell, the one mind … this is what it believes.”