But like every man ever born, they couldn’t just leave the storm.

Lingering in the open, they stood exposed while a single polypond struck the far end of this dish field, the brilliant flash of light washing over them, followed by the faint first traces of a wind, and with the wind, the soft, almost inaudible scream of a titanic explosion.

And still, they lingered.

Within minutes, the wind had a push about it. A genuine muscle. Dishes built for a hard vacuum began to quiver and sing, a multitude of tiny flexes giving the moment another unexpected, utterly eerie beauty. Bubbling out of the maimed polypond were gases as well as steam. Nitrogen. Oxygen. The noble gases, and carbon dioxide. Not for the first time but surely for the last, Pamir wondered if this was nothing important. Could it be? Were the polyponds following in the tradition of millions of other sentient souls, wanting nothing but the simple privilege of riding on the Great Ship, at least for a little while?

Perhaps, he thought.

On the horizon toward the bow, then to Ports Alpha and Beta, a hundred polyponds hit in rapid succession.

A sound like thunder rippled first through the hull, then the air.

When the three men finally stepped into the open door, that alien air had to be pumped out and discarded with a clinical care. Then their suits were cleaned a thousand ways, and they were ushered below, the shaft that they had used rapidly plugged by a team of fefs.

And still, Pamir could hear the rain falling above—a comforting rumbling that he had enjoyed since he was a boy—and with the faint beginnings of a smile, he realized that he was too old and far too set in his nature to think much differently now.

Twenty-seven

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—”