It’s Matteo’s turn to look down. Quicksilver leans back and puts his feet up on the rain column that, if sold, could feed twenty assimilation camps for ten years.
“Quick, you can bitch and moan all you like, but you can’t hide out here forever,” I say. “If Gold puts down the Republic, do you think they won’t hunt you? Atalantia’s promised Ceres to the man or woman who brings either you or Matteo back to be her playthings. When the Republic falls, you’ll be next. There’s nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run.”
A mysterious half-smile appears on his face.
“What if there was somewhere to run, somewhere to hide, where Gold could never reach us, where the stain of their rule was erased from humanity and we could start with a blank slate…a tabula rasa…would you come and be a part of that future? Would you come with me?”
I hesitate. “What do you mean?”
“Enough toying with him. They’re our friends. Show them,” Matteo says.
“They’ll hate it,” Quicksilver says.
“We agreed you’d show Darrow. Show them both. They both deserve to know the war wasn’t all for nothing.”
“Show us what?” Sevro asks.
“My dream,” Quicksilver replies and looks heavily at Sevro. “I will remind you that violence will not work here.” With a smile of pride, he nods toward the garden window. I stand and approach the window. Obscured as it is by the fogged glass, I cannot divine anything about the garden save that it has foliage and running water. I’d assumed it was an oxygen farm, but something in Quick’s words, and in the faintly visible curve of the garden, seems off.
Then the opaque glass clears and unveils a wonder.
Time stops, and I feel that I am once again stepping out from the gravLift behind Dancer to see the surface of Mars for the first time.
It’s not just a garden that lies behind the glass: it’s an entire world. Miniature, but complete. Hundreds of varieties of trees and fruiting bushes curve along the hollowed-out interior of the asteroid, facing the small, glowing sun that floats in the center of his new world. Figures rove over the landscape in twos and threes. Children, I realize after a beat. The gravity is such that the children who run through the trees or sit in the glades taking instruction from automaton teachers all cling to the ground even as they appear upside down or sideways to me. Wherever they stand, the small sun at the center of the world is up.
“What is this place?” I ask.
“I was born too late to explore the seas, and I am too wicked to explore heaven, so the stars will have to do. This, my boy, is an interstellar generation ship. An introvert’s boyhood dream that he now gets to share with his lifelong love.” Matteo takes Quick’s hand.
The construction and technology on display would render even Virginia speechless, but that’s not what forms the lump in my throat. There is something strange about the children. I pick out the closest, a girl running from the others through a glade of young Martian godTrees. The girl is olive skinned and around six years old. Her hair and eyes are brown and her hands smooth and blank.
Without sigils.
“You see, boys. It’s not Gold that’s the problem, not entirely at least. Even if we kill them all, their work will endure. The Colors are the problem. The hierarchy itself. And those children down there, our children, they are not Gold, not Red, not Blue, nor Green. They are Homo sapiens, and they deserve to inherit more than the sins of our world.”
“Not a shipyard or a fortress,” Sevro whispers. “It is a life raft. You’re abandoning us…”
He stands and trembles with rage. “You don’t have ships. You spent all the metal on this…this.” All three of us watch and wait for Sevro to explode. The hair on my arms rises. Sevro’s must too. He turns and sees half a dozen malevolent red eyes staring back at him. I can’t see what the eyes are attached to, but I sense their mass and danger. Sevro’s lips curl. I don’t think he was going to fight, but seeing how fruitless it would have been, he grows so angry his trembling stops. He turns back to Quicksilver.
“Thirty-six days. Seventy-eight by the time we’re back.” Tears glisten in his eyes. “You saw us coming. You could have sent a message.” His voice catches. “You two ain’t fathers. Those ain’t your children. You’re cowards playing gods. Rot out there. Rot and die, Golds.”
Then he walks away. The helplessness of his rage breaks my heart. That rage was our fuel in the beginning. Our lifeblood. We learned that together long ago. It will not help us now.
Forgetting is essential to learning,
just as exhaling is essential to breathing.
I look back on the garden and breathe. This path is blocked, and no amount of pushing will help. “This place have a name?”
“We call it the Tabula Rasa.”
“Why don’t you show me your new world then, old friend?” I ask. ”Help me to understand.”
39
DARROW
Under the Golden Gaze
AS I WALK THROUGH the Tabula Rasa’s garden with Quick, an old conversation I had with Nero long ago on the Lion Steps echoes across the years. Nero told me he desired mankind to push past this stunted age to explore and colonize the stars.
A noble sentiment. Yet it is difficult not to let my wonder at the garden and Quicksilver’s ship decay into the sulky anger of a spurned lover who has been traded in for a younger model. Quick and I once held dreams in common. Even if I can see the beauty of Quicksilver’s ship, I fault him for making it, for abandoning everything we fought so hard for. At the same time, I understand his mind. All too well, I understand the frustration of feeling like the only one who is pushing at the mountain.
As the sun dimmed, the children were escorted away by their automaton teachers. Now that they no longer populate Quick’s invented world, they feel like reveries, the only evidence they existed the occasional indentation from a small foot in grass.
“It seems a somewhat impractical ship,” I say.
“Oh, this is merely the heart of the ship,” Quicksilver replies. “That’s what we call it and what it is. Spiritually at least. It is an ocean of darkness out there. Metal and halls could only do for so long. I could show you the engines, the reactors, the living quarters, the school, the water plants, but those are all the how. This is the fantastical why.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“I think so. You want to give these children the chance you never had.”
Quick considers me as I run my hand along the trunk of a godTree, wishing it was Martian soil beneath my feet, Martian air in my lungs. “Do you think Sevro would have stabbed me?” Quicksilver asks. “If he knew he could.”
“I think he saw it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t turn the metal into a navy,” I say. “But you wouldn’t have let us aboard if we were at all a threat.”
“No. I recall how you brought Lorn into that civil war. Trapped him in treason, so he had to fight.”
“Then why?” I ask.
“Why?”
“Why let me board, why be here at all? Why watch me come all this way?”
“We were performing engine tests when your wife’s agent arrived. They’re ready, but now I need an exit window. My engines may be fast, eventually, but this is a lot of mass to get moving and once it gets moving, it can’t hide.”