None of this had ever worked in Arrow Maker’s lifetime.
Garry Uvarov was swaddled in a leather blanket, which hid his useless limbs. His head — huge, skull-like, fringed by sky-white hair and with eyes hollowed out by corruption — lolled on a neck grown too weak to support it. If Uvarov could stand, he’d be taller than Arrow Maker by three feet. But, sprawled in his chair as he was, Uvarov looked like some grotesque doll, a crude thing constructed of rags and the skull of some animal, perhaps a monkey.
Maker studied Uvarov uneasily. The old man had never exactly been rational, but today there seemed to be an additional edge to his voice — perhaps a knife-edge of real madness, at last.
And if that was true, how was he — Arrow Maker — going to deal with it?
“Do you want anything? I’ll get you some — ”
Uvarov lifted his head. “Just tell me, damn you…” His leaf-like cheeks shook and spittle flecked his chin, signifying rage. But his voice — reconstructed by some machine generations ago — was a bland, inhuman whisper.
“I climbed the kapok — the tallest tree…” Arrow Maker, stumbling, tried to describe what he’d seen.
Uvarov listened, his head cocked back, his mouth lolling.
“The starbow,” he said at last. “Did you see the starbow?”
Arrow Maker shook his head. “I’ve never seen a starbow. Tell me what it looks like.”
Rage seemed to have enveloped Uvarov now; his chair rolled back and forth, back and forth, clattering over loose floorboards. “I knew it! No starbow… The ship’s slowing. We’ve arrived. I knew it…
“They’ve tried to exclude me. Those survivalist bastard Planners, and maybe even that wizened bitch Armonk. If she’s still alive.” He wheeled about, trying to point himself at Arrow Maker. “Don’t you see it? If there’s no starbow the ship must have arrived. The journey is over… After a thousand years, we’ve returned to Sol.”
“But you’re not making sense,” Arrow Maker protested weakly. “There’s never been a starbow. I don’t know what — ”
“The bastards… The bastards.” Uvarov continued his endless rolling. “We’ve returned, to fulfill our mission — Superet’s mission, not Louise Ye bloody Armonk’s! — and they want to shut me out. You, too, my children… My immortal children.
“Listen to me.” Uvarov wheeled about to face Maker again. “You must hear me; it’s very important. You’re the future, Arrow Maker… You, poor, ignorant as you are: you and your people are the future of the species.”
He wheeled to the lip of his flooring, now, and lifted his head to Arrow Maker. Maker could see pools of congealed blood at the pits of those empty eye sockets, and he recoiled from the heavy, fetid stink of the decaying body under its blanket. “You’ll not be betrayed by your damn AS nanobots the way I was. When the ’bots withered my limbs and chopped up my damn eyes, five centuries ago, I saw I’d been right all along…
“But now we’ve come home. The mission is over. That’s what the stars are telling you, if you only had eyes to see.
“I want you to gather the people. Get weapons — bows, blowpipes — anything you can find.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re going to go back into the Decks. For the first time in centuries. You have to reach the Interface. The wormhole Interface, Maker.”
The Decks…
Arrow Maker tried to envisage going through the Locks in the forest floor, entering the unknown darkness of the endless levels beneath his feet. Panic rose, sharp and painful in his throat.
Maker stumbled away from the little hut, and back into the familiar scents of the jungle. He raised his face to the canopy above, and the glowing sky beyond.
Could Uvarov be right? Was the thousand-year journey over — at last?
Suddenly Arrow Maker’s world seemed tiny, fragile, a mote adrift among impossible dangers. He longed to return to the canopy, to lose himself in the thick, moist air, in the scent of growing things.
“Milpitas was right,” Constancy-of-Purpose said. “Your trouble is you think too much, Morrow.” Her big voice boomed out, echoing from the bare metal walls of Deck One; Constancy-of-Purpose seemed oblivious of the huge emptiness around them — the desolate dwellings, the endless, shadowed places of this uninhabited place.
Constancy-of-Purpose opened up a Lock. The Lock was a simple cylinder which rose from the floor and merged seamlessly with the ceiling, a hundred yards above their heads. Constancy-of-Purpose had opened a door in the Lock’s side, but there was also (Morrow had noticed) a hatch inside the cylinder twenty feet above them, blocking off the cylinder’s upper section.
All the Locks were alike. But Morrow had never seen an upper hatch opened, and knew no one who had.
Today, this Lock contained a pile of pineapples, plump and ripe, and a few flagons of copafeira sap. Morrow held open a bag, and Constancy-of-Purpose started methodically to shovel the fruit out of the Lock and into the bag, her huge biceps working. “You have to accept things as they are,” she went on. “Our way of life here hasn’t changed for centuries — you have to admit that. So the Planners must be doing something right. Why not give them the benefit of the doubt?”
Constancy-of-Purpose was a big, burly woman who habitually wore sleeveless tunics, leaving the huge muscles of her arms exposed. Her face, too, was strong, broad and patient, habitually placid beneath her shaven scalp. The lower half of her body, by contrast, was wasted, spindly, giving her a strangely unbalanced look.
Morrow said to Constancy-of-Purpose, “You always talk to me as if I were still a child.” As, in Constancy-of-Purpose’s eyes, he probably always would be. Constancy-of-Purpose was twenty years older than Morrow, and she had always assumed the role of older mentor — even now, after five centuries of life, when a mere couple of decades could go by barely noticed. The fact that they’d once been married, for a few decades, had made no long-term difference to their relationship at all. “Look, Constancy-of-Purpose, so much of our little world just doesn’t make sense. And it drives me crazy to think about it.”
Constancy-of-Purpose straightened up and rested her fists on her hips; her face gleamed with sweat. “No, it doesn’t.”
“What?”
“It doesn’t drive you crazy. Nobody as old as you — or me — is capable of being driven crazy by anything. We don’t have the energy to be mad any more, Morrow.”
Morrow sighed. “All right. But it ought to drive me crazy. And you. There’s so much that is simply — unsaid.” He hoisted the half-full sack of fruit. “Look at the work we’re doing now, even. This simply isn’t logical.”
“Logical enough. Copafeira sap is a useful fuel. And we need the fruit to supplement the supply machines, which haven’t worked properly since — ”
“Yes,” Morrow said, exasperated, “but where does the fruit come from? Who brings it here, to these Locks? And — ”
“And what?”
“And what do they want with the ratchets, and knives, and figure-of-eight rings we bring them?”
Morrow picked up the sap flagons, and Constancy-of-Purpose slung the fruit bag over her shoulder. They began the hundred-yard walk to the next Lock. Constancy-of-Purpose moved with an uneven, almost waddling motion, her stick-like legs seeming almost too weak to support the massive bulk of her upper body. Some obscure nanobot failure had left her legs shriveled, spindly and — Morrow suspected, though Constancy-of-Purpose never complained — arthritic.