Anvil of Stars

  Jennifer’s theories had upset him on some deep level. He had dreamed about enemies they could not see, malevolent beings confusing and perverting them from a distance like puppetmasters.

  “What the hell are we doing here?” he asked. He had come to the nose to pray, but he could not conceive of anything or anyone to pray to. Nothing touched him; nothing felt for him, or knew that he was in the nose, that he was alone. Nothing knew that he was confused and needed help, that Martin son of Arthur Gordon had lost whatever path he had ever known, and that merely doing the Job seemed a highly inadequate reason for living.

  His father might have thought this view of deep space the most spectacular and beautiful thing one could wish for; Martin could not see it as anything but scattered light impinging on exhausted eyes.

  He had fought the end of his pain for many tendays now, but his grief followed its natural course like a healing wound. Finally even the itch would be gone and Theresa would truly be dead—and William—

  He groaned softly, for he owed William so much more than he could give emotionally, now or ever.

  With his grief knitting its torn edges, there would be nothing left to define himself but the dreary nothingness at his core, more blank than any black between stars, a comfortable emptiness to fall into, a gentle negation and dissolution.

  He thought he would gladly die if death were an end in itself and not something more.

  What he would pray to, then, was a weak candle of hope: that in these horrible spans of contesting civilizations, there was something, somewhere, that oversaw and judged and sympathized; that was wise in a way they could not conceive of; that might, given a chance, intervene, however mysteriously.

  Something that cradled and nurtured his dead loves in its bosom; but something that would also acknowledge his unworthiness and allow him a finality, an end.

  He thought of the powerful orgasm with Paola, stronger by many degrees than he remembered experiencing with Theresa.

  Confusion and stars. What a combination, he thought.

  He encouraged the pain to return and let depression settle over him, until his heart seemed to slow, his eyelids drooped, and he was surrounded by a comfortable blanket of despair, so much more palpable than memory or responsibility or the day-to-day dreariness of shipboard life.

  Nothing intervened.

  Nothing cared.

  In a way, that was reassuring. There could be an end to the universe’s complexity, an end to the strife and confusion of intelligence.

  In the middle of the sports and competitions, in the middle of Martin’s despair, Rosa Sequoia disappeared.

  Kimberly Quartz and Jeanette Snap Dragon found her naked and half-dead from thirst five days later. They brought her to the schoolroom. Ariel kneeled on the floor and gripped her hair, pulling her head back and forcing her to drink water. Her eyes wandered to fix on points between the people in the room. “What the hell are you doing?” Ariel asked.

  Rosa smiled up at her, water leaking from her mouth, cracked lips bleeding sluggish drops. Her face was smeared with dried blood. She had bitten her lower lip. “It came again and touched me,” she said. “I was dangerous. I might have hurt somebody.”

  Hans entered the schoolroom already in a rage and brushed Ariel aside. “Get up, damn you,” he said. Rosa stood unsteadily, smelling sour, drips of dried blood on her breasts.

  “Are you nuts?” Hans asked.

  She shook her head, her shy smile opening the bites. They bled more freely.

  Hans grabbed Rosa’s arm, looked around the room for someone to come forward of the ten crew that had gathered. Ariel stepped up again, and Hans transferred the unresisting arm to her hands, as if passing a dog’s leash. “Feed her and clean her up. She’s confined to quarters. Jeanette, guard her door and make sure she doesn’t come out.”

  “I should be telling stories later today,” Rosa said meekly. “That’s why I came back.”

  “You won’t talk to anybody,” Hans said. He brushed past them all, ridding himself of the mess with a backward wave of his hands.

  Martin followed him from the schoolroom, anger piercing his gloom. “She’s sick,” he told Hans. “She’s not responsible.”

  “I’m sick, too,” Hans said. “We’re all sick. But she’s slicking crazy. What about you?” He whirled on Martin. “Christ, you mope like a god damned snail. Harpal’s no better. What in hell is going on?”

  Martin said, “We’ve fallen into a hole.”

  “Then let’s climb out of it, by God!”

  “There is no god. I hope. No one listening to us.”

  Hans gave him a withering, pitying glare. “Rosa would disagree,” he said sharply. “I’ll bet she has God’s business card in her overalls right now. Wherever her overalls are.” Hans shook his head vigorously. “Of all the women on this ship, she has to shed her clothes when she feels a fit coming on.” He stopped a few meters down the corridor, shoulders hunched as if Martin were about to throw something at him.

  Martin had not moved, wrapped in a wonderfully thick and protective melancholy, feeling very little beyond the fixed anger at Hans.

  Hans turned, frowning. “You say we’re in a hole. We’re losing it, aren’t we?” he asked. “By damn, I will not let us lose it.” He tipped an almost jaunty wave to Martin, and skipped up the corridor, whistling tunelessly.

  Martin shivered as if with cold. He returned to the schoolroom. Rosa talked freely with the five who remained. Ariel had brought her a pair of overalls that did not fit. She looked ridiculous but she did not care.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I apologize for my condition. I couldn’t even think. I was wired to a big generator. I wasn’t human. My body didn’t matter.” She faced Martin, large powerful arms held out as if she might try to fly. “I felt so ugly before this. Now it just isn’t important.” The light went suddenly from her eyes and she seemed to collapse a couple of inches. “I’m really tired,” she whispered, chin dropping to her chest. “Jeanette, please take me to my room. Hans is right. Don’t let me out for a while, and don’t let anybody but you—or Ariel—in to see me.” She raised a hand and pointed at the three, including Martin. “You are my friends,” she said.

  “It’s a very weak signal,” Hakim said. He unveiled the analysis for Hans, Harpal, and Martin, all gathered in the Dawn Treader’s nose. “With our remotes out, we could have picked it up months ago…Maybe even when we were orbiting Wormwood. But we weren’t focusing in this direction…”

  “All right,” Hans said impatiently. “It’s a ship. It’s close to us. How close?”

  “Four hundred billion kilometers. If we do not alter course, we will pass within a hundred billion kilometers. It is following a course similar to our own, but traveling much more slowly. It is not accelerating. “

  Hans said. “It seems odd to find such a needle in the haystack. Why is it close to our course?”

  Hakim ventured no guesses.

  “Maybe it’s a reasonable course between the two stars,” Harpal suggested. “Give or take a few hundred billion kilometers…”

  “Bolsh,” Hans said. “They could have swung wide either way. We came up out of the poles…a reasonable course would have been to use least-energy vectors between the planes of the ecliptic. What’s our relative velocity?”

  Hakim highlighted the figure on the chart: the difference in their velocities amounted to one quarter c, about seventy-five thousand kilometers per second.

  “Even if we could change course, we wouldn’t want to shed that much speed to rendezvous…We’ll just have to pass in the night. You’re sure it’s a ship?”

  “The dimensions are appropriate. It is less than a kilometer long. We were fortunate enough to get a star occultation.”

  Hans hummed faintly and rubbed his cheeks with his palms. “Why send out a signal? Why not just hide and get your work done? Whatever the work is…“

  Nobody had an answer.

  “Can we interpret the signal?”

>   “It is not language of a spoken variety. That much we know. It may be a series of numbers, perhaps coordinates.”

  “You mean, telling rescuers where it is?”

  “I think not. If these pulses are numbers, they are repetitive…There are about a hundred such groups of numbers, assuming that a long pause—a few microseconds—means a new group. Giacomo and Jennifer are working on the possibilities now.”

  “What kind of coordinates?” Hans asked.

  “Jennifer thinks they may describe a two-dimensional image.”

  “You mean, television?”

  “Digital, not analog—not modulated.”

  “A crude picture,” Martin suggested.

  “Perhaps only a few dozen pictures in sequence,” Hakim said. “We just can’t be sure yet.”

  “Call me when you are,” Hans said.

  Jennifer entered the nose and stood for a moment blinking at them, grinning with canines prominent: Jennifer’s wolfish expression of intellect triumphant. Giacomo came in behind her. She lifted her wand and said, “We’ve got it. Too simple to see, actually. Polar coordinates, not rectangular, spiral within a circle, a sweep point, angle theta, radius measured from the center, groups of numbers in sequence: theta, radius, gray-scale value. Theta changes every one hundred and twenty numbers. The gray-scale value gives about thirty shades. The signals translate to about a hundred graphic images before it starts to repeat. It’s clumsy but simple enough for almost anyone to decode.”

  “Want to see?” Giacomo said.

  Hans patted his arm with strained gentleness, impatient. “Show us.”

  Jennifer lifted her wand.

  The first picture was difficult to make out, a series of blurs and blocks of shadow. Harpal pointed to a mottled oval white blur and said, “That’s a face, I think. It’s very low resolution, isn’t it?”

  “We can interpolate, do some so-called Laplace enhancements,” Giacomo said. “But I thought we should see the original images first.”

  “Enhance. We’ll worry about distortions later,” Martin suggested.

  Giacomo picked out simple enhancements, stabbing with his finger expertly at a menu of selections only he could see. The picture became at once more contrasting and easier to perceive, but reduced to blacks and whites with few shades of gray. “Five faces, I think,” Harpal said, pointing them out slowly. Martin nodded; Hans simply looked with hands folded, frowning.

  “They’re not human, but they’re bilaterally symmetric,” Harpal said.

  “I think there are more faces, but they’re too blurred to make out,” Giacomo said.

  “Eyes,” Jennifer said. “A mouth perhaps.”

  “I don’t give a slick what they look like,” Hans said, scowl deepening. “What do they mean?”

  “Maybe these are the crew of the…” Jennifer said, and stopped.

  “The crew of the other Ship of the Law. Our future comrades,” Martin finished for her.

  “If they are, they’re awfully stupid, radiating a signal like this for anybody to pick up.”

  “This could be more of a last testament,” Hakim said. “A dying ship, channeling power to send out a weak but detectable signal…Someone who no longer cares about being found.”

  “The moms would tell us at least that much—whether they’re still dead, or alive. Wouldn’t they?” Harpal asked.

  “These aren’t our partners,” Hans said. “They’re just some other poor sons of bitches lost out here.”

  More faces. Dark interiors with brightly lighted figures. They began to see the overall shape of the beings: round bodies with four thick stubby legs, elongated horse-like heads on long necks, a pair of slender limbs rising from the “shoulders” and tipped with four-fingered hands. They wore harness-like outfits more useful for carrying things than as concealment.

  “Centaurs,” Jennifer said.

  “They look more like dinosaurs to me,” Giacomo said. “Sauropods.”

  “Tweak it again,” Hans ordered.

  Giacomo and Jennifer worked together to interpolate more detail. For a moment, the picture fuzzed into grayness, and then it stood out in artificial clarity, all shapes reduced to plastic simplifications. “I’ll enhance shadows, since the light source seems to be from this angle,” Giacomo said, pointing his finger in toward the picture experimentally.

  Hans’ scowl did not change. Something new and he doesn’t like it, Martin thought.

  Giacomo poked the unseen menu and keyboard and spoke short verbal commands, all interpreted by his wand.

  The image’s contrast became more dramatic, shadows more pronounced, and the scene suddenly took on depth. Five of the sauropod beings floated in an ill-defined interior, joined in a five-pointed star, heads toward the middle, linked by hand-like appendages.

  “Group portrait,” Martin said.

  “Next picture, and tweak it the same,” Hans said.

  More figures appeared, arrayed with machines as difficult to riddle as the interiors of the Dawn Treader might have been to fresh Earthbound eyes. The tenth image was a diagram: stars and larger balls against mottled dark sky. Arrays of dots and slashes that might have been labels for the image seemed to be compromised by the enhancements, but when Giacomo removed the enhancements, the symbols made no more sense than before.

  Hakim leaned closer to the picture and said, “I can make out a familiar constellation. Familiar to the search team, at least…We have called it the Orchid. It has been with us for a year now. It looks a little different, however…The brightest star, there…” He gestured to Giacomo, who surrendered control of the image to him. Hakim brought up a crystalline starfield, live, and rotated it until he found the constellation he wanted. Then he flash-compared the blurred chart with the fresh image, adjusted for scale, and the corresponding stars jumped in and out, the brightest jumping the farthest.

  “Time has passed,” Hakim said, “but these are the same stars. Notice that stars in the distant background do not jump.”

  “I noticed,” Hans said. “How long has it been?”

  Hakim worked his momerath quickly. “If estimates of proper motion are correct, this image would have to be one, perhaps two thousand years old.”

  “They’ve been out here two thousand years?” Harpal asked, whistling.

  The next few images showed the spacecraft itself from several angles: three spheres linked by necks.

  “It’s like our ship,” Jennifer said.

  Harpal whistled again. “It’s a Ship of the Law, all right.”

  More pictures: cabin interiors, what might have been a social or even a mating ritual, sauropods holding up pale ovoids for examination, breaking the ovoids and appearing to consume the contents, beings in repose or dead, twenty blocks of what was probably text, then a series of ten individual portraits.

  The next ten images were simple charts of a stellar system. Hakim compared these charts with the charts they had made of Leviathan. The numbers and orbits of the planets were very similar, though not exact. “Puzzling,” Hakim said. “There is strong similarity, but…“

  “Maybe the system has changed,” Martin suggested.

  “Not natural changes. Twelve planets are shown in these charts, but we have detected only ten. The largest planet is not shown in the earlier charts. Where could it have come from?”

  “You’re saying they didn’t visit Leviathan? This is another system?” Hans asked.

  Hakim frowned. “I do not know what to say. The resemblance is too close to be coincidence…these six similar planets, congruent masses, orbits, diameters…”

  “Forget it for now,” Hans said.

  The next forty images showed planets and planetary surfaces, details too muddied to be very useful. Hints of mountains or large structures with regular, smooth surfaces; a lake or body of water; dramatic cloud formations over a flat-topped mesa, sauropods in suits exploring a broad field.

  The last image was startling in its directness.

  Three sauropods in suit
s on a planetary surface confronted a being of another kind entirely; three times more massive than they, barrel-bodied, standing on two massive legs like an elephant’s, with a long, flat head topped by a row of what might have been eyes, nine of them.

  They were exchanging ovoids. One sauropod appeared to be kneeling before the larger being; offering up an ovoid.

  “What in the hell happened?” Hans asked, frowning, fixed on the final image. “They’ve picked a mighty poor choice of pictures to tell a story.”

  “Perhaps the sequence is incomplete,” Hakim said. “What could be left after such a time?”

  “Are we going to change course and find out?” Giacomo asked.

  “Hell, no,” Hans said immediately. “They’re dead. This isn’t a distress call, that’s clear; they must have known they were dying.”

  Silence settled. Then, very distinctly, the ship’s voice spoke—the first time they had heard it since a year before the Skirmish, before Martin served as Pan.

  “There will be an expedition to examine this ship,” it said in a rich contralto. “It would be best if members of the crew accompany the expedition.”

  Hans’ face reddened as much with surprise as anger. “We don’t have the fuel to waste!”

  “There is sufficient fuel,” the ship’s voice said. “A vessel will be manufactured. It can carry three people, or none, depending on your decision.”

  “You can make another ship now?” Hakim asked in a small voice.

  “Why do it at all?” Hans said. “The ship is dead—it must be! Two thousand years!”

  “It is a Ship of the Law,” the ship’s voice answered. “The transmitted information is likely to be much less than what is stored aboard the ship itself. It is required for all Ships of the Law to rendezvous and exchange information, if such a rendezvous is possible.”

  Hans lifted his eyes, then his hands, giving up. “Who wants to go?” he asked.

  “We can draw lots,” Hakim said.

  “No—we won’t draw lots,” Hans said. “Martin, I assume you’d like to go?”