Anvil of Stars Page 6

  The injured would be well within two days…The moms’ medicine was potent. But until the casts were off, they could not participate in most of the drills.

  The ship transformed itself subtly like a living thing, usually when no one was watching. Throughout, rooms oriented to the end of weightless coasting.

  Once past their initial excitement, the children did not find the change disturbing. Psychologically, it was a return to the old patterns of the Ark, and to their year-long acceleration to near light speed away from the Sun. Not to mention their years on Earth…

  More changes would come soon—two g’s, a heavy burden—and if they decided to go for orbital insertion into the Buttercup system, the action would be spectacular.

  They had never before experienced the Ship of the Law demonstrating its full power and sophistication…

  The Dawn Treader was a single virus about to enter a highly protected and extremely powerful host, with unknown capabilities. Martin would report to the moms every day now, and a mom would be constantly available in the schoolroom; the same mom, with an identifying mark painted on it by Martin, at the suggestion of Jorge Rabbit and Stephanie Wing Feather, who thought it would boost morale.

  The marking ceremony was attended by all the children. Just before his suicide, Theodore Dawn had written of this expected time: “We’ll get dressed up in war paint and war uniforms, and we’ll swear an oath, like mythic pirates or the Three Musketeers, and it won’t be all nonsense, all childsplay. It will mean something. Just wait and see.” The search for a meaningful ceremony had come too late for Theodore, Martin thought.

  But now that moment had come for the rest of them.

  The children gathered on the tiers of an amphitheater that had risen from the floor of the schoolroom at Martin’s command. They wore black and white paint on their faces and forearms, “To eliminate the gray feelings, the neutralities, the indecisions.” Even Martin wore the paint.

  A mom floated near the middle of the schoolroom. Within the star sphere, a red circle blinked around the white point of the Buttercup star. Martin approached the mom with small pots of black and white paint in one hand, and a brush in the other.

  “To show our resolve, to show our change of state, to strengthen our minds and our courage, we appoint this mom a War Mother. The War Mother will be here to speak with any of us, at any time.

  “Now is our time.”

  Martin applied the brush thick with white paint to one side of the mom’s stubby, featureless head. The other half he carefully painted black. Then, to complete the effect—something he had thought of himself—he painted a divided circle where the “face” might have been, reversing the colors, black within white, white within black. No grays, but cautious judgment of alternatives.

  Painting completed, the War Mother decorated, Martin turned to the children on the risers. They stood quietly, no coughing, breathing hardly audible in the stillness, strong and beautiful and grim-faced with thoughts and memories. He stood before them, looking into their faces.

  “Luis Estevez Saguaro and Li Mountain of the search team have suggested names for the star systems. They think the Buttercup star should be called Wormwood, the Cornflower Leviathan, and the Firestorm, Behemoth. Any other suggestions?”

  “They’re good names,” Joe Flatworm said, scratching his sandy growth of beard.

  No one objected.

  “We’ve been training for years, but we’ve never exercised outside, in real conditions. I’m making a formal request of the moms, right now, that we begin external exercises as soon as possible, before this day is out if we can.”

  The moms had always turned that request down. Martin had not conferred with them; by asking them now, in front of the children, he was taking a real risk, operating only on a hunch.

  “You may begin three days of external drill,” the War Mother replied. “You may conduct a full-level exercise in the region around the ship.”

  Hans’ face lit up and he raised his fist in a cheer, then turned to the children behind him. All but Ariel cheered, even Erin Eire. Ariel kept her face blank.

  “We’re in it now,” Hans said to Martin as the group broke up. He smiled broadly and rubbed his hands together. “We’re really in it!”

  “What kind of drill are you planning?” Martin asked the War Mother when the room was almost empty.

  “That must be determined at the time of the exercise,” the War Mother said. Martin backed away, confused.

  “No warning?”

  “No warning,” said the mom.

  During the coasting, Martin’s primary quarters—once shared with Theodore—had been spherical, nets at one end filled with the goods manufactured by the moms to give the children a feeling of place and purpose: paper books, jewelry. Since the deceleration began, Martin had redesigned the quarters to have several flat ledges he could sit on or brace against. His sleeping net had been swapped for a bag and sling hung between two pillars.

  Theresa came to him in his primary quarters in the second homeball after a ten-hour period of self-imposed isolation. She stood at his closed hatch, inquiring discreetly through his wand whether he was available. With a groan, conflicting emotions making him ball up his fists and pound the yielding floor, he swung down from a ledge and opened the door.

  “I didn’t want to bother you…” she said, her face tight, hair in disarray, skin glistening. “We’ve been exercising. Harpal and Stephanie told me you were here…”

  He reached out for her and hugged her fiercely. “I need you. I need someone to balance me.”

  “I’m glad,” she said, burying her face in his shoulder. She wore workout cutoffs, blue shorts and loose-fitting top. “The exercises are good,” she said. “We’re really into them.”

  “I’m in the boneyard,” he said, sweeping his free arm at electronic slate and books piled into his sleep corner. What they called boneyard was everything human stored in the Dawn Treader’s libraries.

  “Tactics?” she asked.

  He grimaced. “Call it that.”

  She hugged him again before moving away to riffle through the stack and pick up the slate. He didn’t mind her curiosity; she seemed interested in everything about him, and he was flattered. “Marshal Saxe,” she said, scrolling through the slate displays. She lifted a book. “Bourcet and Gilbert. Clausewitz, Caemerrer, Moltke, Goltz.” She lifted an eyebrow.

  “Their armies could see each other, make sorties against each other,” Martin said. “We don’t even fight with armies.”

  “These are the people T. E. Lawrence studied when he was young,” Theresa said, surprising him yet again. “You’ve been reading Liddell Hart.”

  He smiled in chagrin. “You, too.”

  “Me and about twenty others. I asked for crew access records.”

  Martin grinned ruefully. “I should have thought of that. To see what they’re…thinking, preparing for.”

  “Most are just doing your exercises. They respect you. They think you know what you’re doing. Hans is doing a lot of extra research. Erin Eire. Ariel.”

  “I’m glad they’re keeping me on my toes.”

  “We can’t afford to take chances, even with you, Martin.”

  Theresa had never spoken to him in such a tone before; was she implying lack of confidence? She smiled, but the question was raised, and she looked away, aware she had raised it.

  “I’m not criticizing you, Martin, but you—we—won’t find many answers in Earth strategy books.”

  “Right,” Martin said.

  “We can’t keep looking back.”

  “It’s all we have,” Martin said.

  “Not so.”

  Martin nodded. “I mean, it’s all we have that’s our own.”

  Theresa put the books back and returned the slate to the text he had been reading. “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn’t come here to talk about this.”

  “I’m not just looking at Earth histories and texts,” Martin said. �
�I’ve been going over everything the moms taught us. They haven’t made up a drill for the external exercise—they seem to want to surprise us. I don’t like that, but I see their point—“

  “Martin. You need a break.”

  “There’s no time!” he shouted, fists clenching again.

  “Are you thinking clearly?”

  He paused, shook his head, squeezed his palms against his temples. “Not very.”

  “I’m here.”

  He closed the entrance, reached for her, put the wand into quiet mode, kicked the books and slate aside as they moved against each other. “I don’t want to be away from you for a second, not an instant,” he said. “That’s the bad part. I want to be someplace else with you.”

  She looked at him intently, face showing none of the insinuation of her undulating body, lower lip under her teeth; hips moving with graceful need. He felt the motion of her stomach against his, the press of her curly hair, the flexing wet warmth startling, her small breasts hard against his chest; sought her neck behind her ear, knew she had closed her eyes, face still blank but for the bitten lip.

  The experience was more effort, less ethereal, with up and down re-established. It was also more familiar to his inner mind, flesh and bones; somehow more real.

  They rolled from the ledge with half-purpose, falling into a glowing ladder, and were lowered gently to tumble down a slope into a pile of Martin’s clothes.

  “I want to live with you always,” Martin said.

  “I didn’t mean to make you think I…“Tears came to her eyes. “I’m so clumsy sometimes. I trust you. It’s pretty amazing how they trust you. The past Pans—Harpal, Stephanie, Sig, Cham…Joe—They’re right behind you.” She smiled. “Hans is just doing his job, I think. I can’t read Hans all the time. He seems to hide everything important. Ariel seems either angry or sad all the time.”

  “Is that why you’re with me, because I’m trusted?” he asked quietly. That’s a stupid, stupid thing to ask.

  “Not at all,” she said. “I don’t slick for status.”

  “I know you don’t,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He stroked her face. “I wouldn’t call this slicking.”

  “Oh, it is,” she said. “The very best. Don’t be afraid of it.”

  “Of course not,” Martin whispered, edging closer, careful not to let the slight weight of his body oppress her. “I want you to live with me.”

  “Dyad?” she asked.

  “I want more than that,” he said. “I want to eat you up.”

  “Ah ha.”

  “I want you so much it hurts not to have you near me.”

  “Oh.” She looked away, pretending embarrassment even as they moved against each other.

  “I want to marry you.”

  She stopped their rolling and lay quiet beside him, breasts moving up and down, eyes flicking over his features. “We don’t marry,” she said.

  “Nothing stops us.”

  “We’re Lost Boys and Wendys. Pans don’t get married.”

  “We could get married in a new way. No priests or churches or licenses.”

  “Married is something different. It’s for Earth, or back on the Ark. People got married on the Ark.”

  “I doubt we’ll ever go back,” Martin said.

  “I know,” she said softly.

  “We’re our own Ark. We have all the information here. All the living things in memory. They’ll make every living thing we need, once we do our Job. We’ll be like war dogs.”

  “War dogs?”

  “Too vicious to be taken back. Because of what we do. We have to rely on ourselves alone. That means we can get married, whatever being married means out here.”

  “We’ve only been lovers for a few tendays.”

  “That’s enough for me,” Martin said.

  Theresa drew back to him. “Slicking is so much simpler.”

  “We make love,” Martin insisted.

  Theresa suddenly put on an innocent look. “Do you remember,” she said, pushing tongue behind her lower lip, pushing it out, gazing at him intently, “how serious this would be on Earth? How fraught with meaning, making love or slicking?”

  “It isn’t serious here?”

  She put fingers to her lips, holding something: a cigarette, he remembered. Lowered her lashes, looked at him seductively, deep sensual meaning, smiling, drew back, flung back her hair. “I could be a temptress,” she said.

  “Harlot,” he said.

  “We would spend ever so much time worrying, once we were married, on Earth, about whether we were doing it right, whether we were in style.”

  “We have styles here,” Martin said.

  She made a bitter face, tossed the ghost cigarette away. “I read about it. In some places, we could have been arrested for…“She touched his limp tip with a finger, brought a drop of wheyish moisture to her mouth. “We could have been arrested for…” She reached into his mouth with the finger, and he obligingly tongued it. She moved the finger up her thigh, touched herself, moved without effort into a melodramatic vamping posture. “How can we be married without thousands knowing and approving or disapproving? Looking at us in our little home, approving or disapproving.” She whispered the words again, but there was a strain in her face. “All those people. But it’s okay.” She looked at him directly, struggling to hold back more tears. “And we know we can make children. That’s serious.”

  Martin smiled. His eyes focused not on her now, but on far dead Earth. He had never thought or imagined such adult concerns on Earth. He had been a child when Earth died. So had she.

  “Knowing you can make children if you want. That’s really making love,” she concluded, words catching in her throat. She closed her eyes and like a dark-headed bird lay her cheek and palm on his chest.

  “We make love,” he persisted. “The moms will let us have children after we’ve done the Job.”

  She wept in shaking silence in his arms.

  If the children decided Wormwood was a source of killer probes, the Ship of the Law would break in two. Stephanie Wing Feather suggested the separate ships should be called Hare and Tortoise.

  The two ships would decelerate at different rates. Tortoise, the smaller, would begin super deceleration—one thousand g’s—days before reaching the system, and would enter at maneuvering speed. The larger, Hare, would shoot through the system at three quarters c, conduct reconnaissance while passing between the two inner rocky planets, relay the information to Tortoise, then escape the system and wait for results. It would decelerate more gradually, reaching maneuvering speed some hundreds of billions of kilometers on the other side of Wormwood.

  If Tortoise was severely damaged or destroyed, Hare could continue, hunting for fuel around the other stars in the group.

  Before then, the Ship of the Law would pass through a section of Wormwood’s outlying haloes of pre-birth material: what around the Sun had been called the Oort and Kuiper clouds. It was possible that Wormwood’s inhabitants had mined even these outer reaches of the pre-birth material, probably in the youth of their civilization, when comets were used by “hitch-hikers” to ride far beyond the orbits of the outer planets. It was also possible that the clouds had never been rich with volatiles; even the rocky pickings were slim by comparison to the sun’s cloud.

  The Dawn Treader would release makers and doers into these diffuse haloes to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. If the judgment was guilty, the makers and doers would push these weapons inward toward the planets. The weapons would take time to accomplish their back-up mission of destruction, should Hare and Tortoise fail, and at a net energy loss.

  The energy required to make and move the weapons would come from conversion of carbon and silicon to anti-matter—what the children called “anti em.” Elements heavier than silicon did not convert with any energy gain. Elements between lithium and silicon converted with a marginal energy gain.

  To make up for the clouds’ paucity, they would have to give the maker
s and doers substantial portions of the Dawn Treader’s fuel.

  They desperately needed to find more fuel within the system.

  They would enter as black as the Benefactors’ technologies allowed. Entry would be an extremely dangerous time; dangerous even should the children decide Earth’s Killers did not live here. How would the defenders of these stars know they had been judged innocent or guilty, or whether the Dawn Treader was itself a killer, a wolf between the stars?

  The children filed into the weapons store, apprehensive. Martin led the way, and the children went to their craft in a welter of voices, calling names, moving on ladders to their vessels in the up and downness.

  Paola Birdsong lost her grasp and almost fell; Harpal Timechaser caught her halfway to the fore side of the hemisphere. Seeing her safe, the children hooted at her lack of attention. Paola crawled red-faced to her ovoid bombship and hooked both elbows in the ladder’s softly glowing field.

  Martin stood beside his ship, watching his brothers and sisters find theirs, watching Theresa climb to her rifle, watching William join with Umberto Umbra in their cylinder cluster, called an Oscar Meyer by some, and a cigar box by others.

  Fifty children stood apart. They would remain in the Ship of the Law. Hans would stay with them.

  Martin moved forward along his ladder and hung next to his assigned craft, a rifle.

  “The moms have promised a target and we’ll match ourselves against it. I don’t know what the target is, or how we’ll fight it.”

  “We don’t have a set drill?” Erin Eire asked. Hans looked at Martin; they had discussed this already, and Hans had expressed real reservations. Going outside without a plan the first time did not seem wise to either of them; going outside with no known adversaries, no expressed situations, seemed foolhardy at best.

  “The War Mother won’t tell us what it is,” Martin said.

  “That’s stupid,” Erin Eire said. The children shook their heads.

  “What are they trying to do to us?” Rex Live Oak asked.