Anvil of Stars Read online

  “Show us,” Martin said. He turned to the children gathered on both sides and said, “I’ll handle this.”

  “We’d like to help,” Anna Gray Wolf said, face eager—something different attracting her, attracting all of them. She stared owlishly at Rosa.

  “It’s okay,” Martin said. “Theresa and I will take care of it.” In case they doubt the masculine touch is sufficient.

  The children dispersed, and Martin took Rosa’s elbow.

  “You don’t think I saw it?” Rosa asked as she led them along the hall to the empty C wing.

  “I don’t know what you saw,” Martin said. Then, trying for a joke, “Maybe you saw a mom without makeup.”

  Rosa looked at him resentfully, sadly, then straightened and pointed to the area of the hall where she had seen the shape. Martin ordered the hall to brighten—wondering why Rosa had not already done the same.

  He examined the walls. Never dirty, never dusty, the surfaces within the Ship of the Law cleaned themselves; it was taken for granted by the children. The walls showed no marks.

  “I saw scuffs when I came through here,” Rosa raid.

  “It was dark,” Martin said.

  Quietly, desperately, Rosa began to weep again.

  “You could have turned the lights on and seen whatever it was,” he said.

  “We don’t disbelieve you,” Theresa said, holding Rosa’s shoulder firmly, massaging it with her fingers. “But why didn’t you turn the lights on?”

  “I was afraid! I didn’t want to see it, whatever it was…I didn’t want it to see me.”

  “How big was it?” Martin asked. Dangerous, dangerous.

  “It filled this part of the hall,” Rosa said, stretching her arms to the ceiling. The hall was two meters wide, marked with blue circles where quarters might be chosen and doors made by the ship on request.

  The entire ship had completely adapted itself to deceleration. The circles that had once marked doors in the ceiling and floor had been absorbed by the ship; only circles on the “walls” remained. Perhaps Rosa had misinterpreted some function of the ship, or seen something nobody else had witnessed.

  He tried to express that diplomatically. “The ship usually cleans up or changes when we’re not watching; maybe it accidentally allowed you to see something.”

  “It wasn’t part of the ship…I don’t think it was,” Rosa said. She had lost her tone of hysteria. Her face appeared calmer now, puzzled, and she seemed willing to cooperate, to help them solve the mystery.

  “Was it metal, or something else?” Theresa asked.

  “It was like a shadow. I didn’t see any details. I don’t know what it could have been. It seemed alive to me.” Rosa folded her arms. Martin saw her as she had been when the journey started, five years ago, sixteen and not fully grown, slenderer, with a rugged attractiveness, now become a vulnerable burliness. He wondered again why the moms had chosen her. They had rejected so many others, many Martin had thought were good choices. She swallowed hard, looked, with her large black eyes, more and more lost. “Maybe it wasn’t part of the ship. Maybe it doesn’t belong here.”

  “Hold on,” Theresa said sternly. Martin was grateful to her for taking a critical tone he dared not use. “We shouldn’t jump to any conclusions.”

  “I saw it,” Rosa said, stubbornly defensive.

  “We’re not questioning that,” Theresa said, though Martin certainly thought they should, and she had. “We’ve all been under a strain lately, and…”

  Rosa was turning inward again.

  “I saw it. I think it might be important,” she said.

  “All right,” Martin said. “But for now, until we know more, or somebody else sees it, I’d like to keep this quiet.”

  “Why?” Rosa asked, eyes narrowing. Martin saw more clearly the depth of her problem. She was not going to react well to his next request, but he saw no way around it.

  “Please don’t talk about it,” he said.

  Rosa tightened her lips, jaws clenched, eyes reduced to slits, face radiating defiance, but she did not say anything more. “Can I go?” she asked, as if she were a little girl requesting dismissal from class.

  “You can go,” Martin said. Rosa walked on long, strong legs down the hall toward the central corridor, not looking back. Martin inhaled deeply, held it, watching her like a target, then exhaled when she was too far away to hear.

  “Jesus.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Theresa said. She grinned. Martin felt the walls again, as if there might be some mark remaining, some trace of Rosa’s shadow.

  “I don’t think there actually was anything,” he said, trying to be extra reasonable, extra careful, even with Theresa.

  “Of course not,” Theresa said.

  “But we shouldn’t be too certain,” he said without conviction.

  “You think she’s…let’s not use the word hysterical,” Theresa said. “That has the wrong sexual connotations. Let’s say stressed out. She’s been working up to something. That’s what you think? Don’t be a hypocrite, Martin. Not with me.”

  Martin grimaced. “If I tell it like I think it is, we might both reach the wrong conclusions. If I say Rosa is losing it, well…there’s evidence, but it’s not a sure thing. Maybe she saw a trick of the light. Something we don’t know about.”

  “Ask the War Mother,” Theresa suggested.

  That was an obvious first step. “Rosa should ask,” he said. “It’s her sighting. Let’s make her responsible for it.”

  Theresa touched index finger on one hand to little finger on the other, bent it back until it was perpendicular to the joint, a gesture she sometimes made that fascinated Martin. “Good idea. Do you think she’ll keep quiet?”

  “She doesn’t have many good friends.”

  “Poor Martin. On your watch, too.”

  “Maybe it’s just a temporary aberration, and she’ll pull out of it. Just to be safe—“

  Theresa caught his meaning before he expressed it. “I’ll have some Wendys keep watch on her.”

  Martin lowered his hands from the unmarked walls. “Right,” he said.

  “Maybe Ariel…” Theresa said. “She seems to be the only friend Rosa has.”

  “We’re all friends,” Martin said.

  “You know what I mean. Don’t be obtuse.”

  Theresa, as their time together lengthened, was becoming more and more critical, more and more judgmental, but in a gentle way, and Martin found that he liked it. He needed another voice now.

  There were things he could not directly express, even to Theresa: a growing fear. Rosa expresses it her way. I almost wish I could be so direct.

  In the central glow of the schoolroom, the War Mother contemplated Martin’s report. They were alone in the large chamber, Martin standing and the War Mother floating, both in a spot of bright light. The doors had closed. Nobody else could hear them. Rosa had refused to go to the War Mother, had seemed insulted they would ask her to. And inevitably, word about her experience had spread.

  “No such phenomenon has been noticed within the ship,” the War Mother said.

  “Rosa didn’t see anything?”

  “What she saw is not apparent to our sense,” the War Mother said.

  “Is it possible that we could see something aboard the ship, something with an objective reality, that you would not?”

  “The possibility is remote.”

  “Then it’s a psychological problem…” Martin said. And you won’t or can’t do anything about it.

  “That is for you to decide.”

  Martin nodded, less agitated by such an attitude than he might have been a few tendays before. Other than providing an interface with the ship, the moms did little now. He could issue direct instructions, request direct answers, but critical judgments from their former teachers were not forthcoming. This was independence and responsibility with a vengeance, and he had to complain, however weakly and uselessly.

  “The strain is intense. We’
re drilling day in, day out. The drills are going well, and everybody’s doing their job—no more absentees, not even Rosa. But I don’t like the way the children reacted to Rosa’s…sighting. Vision. They were fascinated by it.”

  The War Mother said nothing.

  “There hasn’t been much talk since, but it worries me.”

  The War Mother said nothing more. He looked at the black and white paint on its facelessness. He wanted to reach out, just once, and strike it, but he did not.

  The tenth drill on ship division went as smoothly as the first. In the nose, Martin projected the schematic of the Dawn Treader’s practice preparations. Paola and Hans and Joe crowded closer to see from his wand, somehow more special than viewing the same through their own.

  The picture of the changing Dawn Treader loomed large in the corridor, a vivid ghost in three dimensions. The ship had contracted, necks reduced in length, tail and nose become blunt nubbins, grooves indenting the circumference of the second homeball like the cell divisions of a blastula. The third homeball also revealed grooves, an inscribed portion of the second neck connected to an orange-slice of the second homeball.

  The drives would break down into two units, of sizes proportional to Tortoise and Hare, Hare being approximately twice the size of Tortoise. Tortoise claimed most of the second homeball and the shortened neck between.

  Within the image, new bulkheads glowed red against the general green, spreading like wax in hot water over designated spaces, until the units were completely marked out, ready for separation.

  “Show me status,” Martin said. Partitions melted away, necks lengthened, homeballs became ungrooved and round. Whiskers of magnetic field vanes streamed out from the third homeball; inner traces of the scoop field glowed red around the nose.

  “Looks good,” Hans said. “When do you want to do final strategy?”

  “The search team has more to show us. We’ll listen to them, then you and I and the ex-Pans will pow-wow.”

  “Palaver,” Paola said, smiling.

  “Jaw. Chew the fat,” Hans added, also smiling.

  Martin was pleased that some excitement had returned.

  Rosa Sequoia had performed her latest duties flawlessly, and there was little more talk about what she had seen. The incident seemed to have become an embarrassment to her, and she did not respond to inquiries from the children.

  Hakim Hadj’s face was less beatifically calm, his manner less polite, though hardly abrupt. He looked tired. He seemed at most mildly irritated, perhaps by a tiny itch he could not get at. The transparent nose of the Dawn Treader showed stars now instead of abyssal darkness; the chamber was crowded with projection piled upon simulation upon chart and those piled upon neon finger-scribbles hanging wherever space allowed. Hakim and two assistants, Min Giao and Thorkild Lax, seemed to know their way through the confusion. Martin stood back and let Hakim approach him.

  “We are close to knowing enough for a judgment,” Hakim said, black eyes rolling. “We shall have to withdraw our remotes soon, before we enter the cloud, but I think we will have enough evidence by then. Our information about the system is immense, Martin. I have abstracted important details for you. You can look at the orbital structures between planets two and three. They are very interesting, but do not seem active—not inhabited, perhaps. We still have no clue what the five inner masses are.”

  “Close-in power stations?” Martin suggested.

  Hakim smiled politely. “They may be reserves of converted anti em, but if so, they are very heavily shielded. They are practically invisible, much less reflective than fine carbon dust and non-radiating, and that makes little sense if they are stores of anything.”

  “What’s your best theory?” Martin asked.

  “I posit nothing,” Hakim said quietly. “The unknown troubles me, especially something so prominent.”

  “Agreed.”

  Hakim continued, moving simulations of the inner planetary surfaces closer to Martin, out of the stacks of projections. He mildly chided Thorkild and Min Giao for their contributions to the clutter. They seemed to ignore him and went about their work, adding even more projections, lists, charts, simulations; blinking, flashing, moving, blessedly silent displays.

  “These worlds are not very active, even for a quiet and advanced civilization. Seismic or other noise through the crust is minimal. The planet seems old. No large-scale activities below ground, natural or unnatural. Such movement would produce vibrations from crustal settling. There is no planet-altering work being done, Martin; perhaps they finished all that thousands of years ago.”

  “Go on,” Martin said.

  “Radiation flux from the planets does not exceed expected natural levels. Both rocky inner worlds are either dead, or quiescent, pointing perhaps to a solid-state civilization, that is, all activity confined to information transfer through quiet links, or using noach, as we do.”

  “No physical bodies? Nothing organic?” Martin asked.

  “None visible. If there are organics below the surface, they produce no traces on the surface itself, and that is odd. At this distance we might miss extremely light organic activity, but judging from the telescope images…Here.” He pulled up a projection. Smiled at Martin as the image wavered. “My wand works overtime. Thorkild, clear some capacity, please, or shunt it to the moms’ systems!”

  Thorkild looked up, lost in momerath and graphics. A few of the stacks dimmed or winked out.

  The second planet rotated once every three hundred and two hours, surface temperature of one hundred and seventy degrees Celsius, albedo of point seven, light gray and tan, no oceans of course, thin atmosphere mostly carbon dioxide and nitrogen, no oxygen, no geological activity, mountain chains old and worn with no young replacements, no visible structures over a hundred meters in size. Or no structures with a height of more than ten meters…

  “All right,” Martin said, deliberately quelling his enthusiasm. “Both inner planets are quiet.”

  “In keeping with the Biblical turn of phrase,” Hakim said, “I suggest we call the inner planet Nebuchadnezzar, the second Ramses, and the third, Herod.”

  Martin made a face. “Might be a bit prejudicial, don’t you think?”

  “Mere suggestion,” Hakim said. His face brightened. “Ah, yes, I see what you are getting at. Herod destroying the first born…Ramses overseeing the captivity of the Jews. Nebuchadnezzar having destroyed the first temple in Jerusalem…I see.”

  “The names are fine,” Martin said.

  “Good.” Hakim seemed pleased. “Ramses…the next rocky planet, second planet out, is like this…” He drew forth another chart, put it through its paces. “Similar to the first, but cooler—minus four degrees Celsius average temperature, albedo of point seven, atmosphere again contains no oxygen or water vapor. No seismic activity, old mountains—old worlds.”

  “They might be deserted.”

  “We do not think so. The strongest evidence of continuing artifice lies in their temperatures versus their distances from Wormwood, and their atmospheric compositions. They are actively controlled environments, but for what sort of organisms or mechanisms—if any—I cannot say.”

  “Very small machines,” Martin mused.

  Hakim nodded. “That is difficult to confirm, of course. If they exist, their work is isolated from the surface.”

  “But the worlds are active.”

  “Active, yes, but they do not have large numbers of physical inhabitants—living creatures. The moms teach us that many civilizations reduce their presence to information matrices, abandoning their physical forms, and living as pure mentality.”

  “About half of all advanced civilizations…” Martin remembered, stroking his cheek with one hand.

  “Yes. That could be the case here.”

  Maybe they’ve become ghosts. Martin shuddered at the thought of abandoning physical form; like spending forever in neural simulation. What would they gain? A low profile, a kind of immortality—but no need to phys
ically colonize the systems they “sterilized” for future use. “You said we could almost make a judgment.”

  Hakim’s face brightened. “I have been teasing, Martin. Withholding the best until last. This is very good. But you judge.”

  He ordered a series of charts on debris scattered throughout the ecliptic between fifty million kilometers and seven hundred million kilometers from Wormwood. “Dust and larger particles heated by the star, chemical reactions excited by the little stellar wind that does get through…Very interesting.”

  The dust and debris pointed to intense spaceborn industrial activity in the system’s past. Much of the debris consisted of simple waste—rocky materials, lacking all metals and volatiles, heavy on silicates.

  Manufacturing dust from shaping and processing: trace elements inevitably mixed into the dust, reflecting even more precisely than in the spectrum of Wormwood itself the proportions of trace elements in the killer machines.

  “It’s more than a close match,” Martin said.

  Hakim revealed his excitement in a mild lift of eyebrow.

  “It’s exact,” Martin said.

  “Very nearly,” Hakim said.

  “They made the killer machines around Wormwood.”

  “Perhaps around Leviathan, as well. We are not close enough to judge.”

  “But certainly here.”

  “The evidence is compelling.”

  Martin’s skin warmed and his eyes grew moist, a response he had seldom felt before, and could not ascribe to any particular emotion. Perhaps it came from a complex of emotions so deeply buried he did not experience them consciously.

  “No defenses?”

  “None,” Hakim said. “No evidence of defenses on the surface of the inner worlds. The depleted gas giant shows even less activity, a large lump of cold wastes and rocky debris, with a thin atmosphere of helium, carbon dioxide solids, bromine, and sparse hydrocarbons. Here is a list.”

  “Where did the volatiles go?” Martin asked. The list was devoid of hydrogen, methane, and ammonia. The thin haze of helium was so diffuse as to be useless. No swooping down to scoop up fuel, like Robin Hood swinging out of a tree to snatch a purse.