Anvil of Stars

  “I don’t know,” Martin said.

  “I’d like you to go. Take Hakim and Giacomo with you.”

  Jennifer’s breath hitched.

  “How long a voyage?” Giacomo asked.

  “Your time, one month,” the ship’s voice said. “Time for this ship, four months. There will be super acceleration and deceleration.”

  “A lot of fuel,” Hans said under his breath.

  Giacomo touched Jennifer’s hand. “Nothing like a side trip,” she said. “Makes the heart grow fonder.”

  Giacomo did not look at all convinced.

  “If people go, it will use more fuel,” Martin said. He wondered if Hans wanted him out of the way.

  “That is correct,” the ship’s voice said. “But it is not a major consideration. You will learn much that cannot be learned by sending an uncrewed vessel. Your observations will be valuable.”

  “There it is,” Hans said. He wrapped his arm around Martin. “It’ll cheer you up,” he said.

  “How?” Martin asked. “Visiting a derelict…”

  “Get your God damned glum face off this barge,” Hans said.

  “Doesn’t sound like I’m being given a choice.”

  “I could send Rosa,” Hans said.

  Martin stared him down. “All right,” Martin said. Hakim tried to break the tension.

  “It will be a very unusual journey. While we are gone, the crew will have something to do. They’ll study these pictures and—“

  “Bolsh,” Hans said. “We don’t show them to anybody now. We can’t avoid letting them know there’s a ship, but everything else…zipped lips.”

  “Why?” Jennifer asked, astonished.

  “Our morale is so low the pictures might kill us,” Hans said. “Martin, Giacomo, you study them with Hakim and Jennifer. Nobody else sees them for now. I don’t even want to look at them. Report only to me.”

  “Hans, that’s deception,” Jennifer said, still astonished.

  “It’s an order, if that means anything now. Are we agreed?”

  Jennifer started to talk again, but Hans interrupted.

  “Slick it. If everybody wants to choose another Pan now, let’s go to it. I’ll be glad to go back to a relatively normal life, taking orders instead of giving them,” he said evenly. “Am I right?”

  Nobody was willing to push the issue. They agreed reluctantly. Jennifer transferred the images to their private wands.

  For the first time in their journey, one group would withhold information from another.

  Numb, his gloom deeper and more perversely comforting than ever, Martin returned to his quarters and looked through the images again, trying to fathom the seriousness of what had just happened, and whether he had gone along with Hans too quickly.

  He did not look forward to the journey. The pictures were devastating. The Benefactors apparently could not save this Ship of the Law; the sauropod beings were almost certainly thousands of years dead.

  The Benefactors could have known about Wormwood and Leviathan for millennia.

  They had sent others here before. They had surmised that much around Wormwood; now it was confirmed.

  The Dawn Treader was just another in a series.

  No ship had succeeded; none had even gone so far as to burn the tar baby, until now.

  But what awaited them around Leviathan might be even more deceptive, even more complex, playing for much higher stakes…

  The craft created within the second homeball was slightly bigger than a bombship—ten meters long, with a bulbous compartment four meters in diameter, within which Martin, Giacomo, and Hakim would spend one month—much of that time asleep or wrapped in volumetric fields.

  They said their farewells. The crew still knew next to nothing—only that there was another Ship of the Law, probably a death ship, and that the three of them would investigate.

  Hans withdrew from the interior of the new craft, looked at Martin with narrow eyes, and said, “You can back out if you want. This is no picnic.”

  Martin shook his head. He felt foolish, being manipulated so blatantly—challenged to back away, refusing to be so weak in front of Hans. Hans cocked his head to one side. “Giacomo, keep your brain running. Maybe we can learn something they don’t want us to know.”

  “Why would they have invited us to come if they wanted to keep secrets?” Hakim asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hans said. “Maybe we’re being paranoid.”

  “Maybe,” Martin said.

  “But I doubt it.”

  He shook hands with each of them. Giacomo and Jennifer had said their farewells privately.

  “We’re ready,” Martin said. A journey of a trillion kilometers begins with a single step. He pulled himself into the craft, kicking free of the ladder field, into the spherical interior. Giacomo followed, then Hakim.

  As they settled, Hakim said, “The Dawn Treader is giving us one quarter of its fuel.”

  Martin nodded. Such profligacy seemed beside the point now.

  “We will be like a fish carrying a yolk sac,” Hakim continued. “Very ungainly. And this craft is sixty percent fake matter…”

  “Please,” Giacomo said. “I’m queasy enough.”

  “Big adventure,” Hakim concluded with a sigh. His skin was pale and he shivered a little.

  The hatch smoothed shut.

  They eased out of the weapons store. Dawn Treader receded to no more than a pinpoint against the stars.

  A mom’s voice spoke. “We begin super acceleration in three minutes.”

  The ship was little more than an enlarged mom, Martin thought, given seven-league boots.

  “You might want to see this,” Hans’ voice came over the noach.

  They witnessed their departure from Dawn Treader’s point of view, a tiny dart with bulbous middle surrounded by pale green fuel tanks.

  Volumetric fields wrapped the three passengers in smothering safety. Martin’s eyesight suffered, as usual, but he still watched the noach transmission. A sump swallowed their flare. Little more than a rim of intense white showed, and quickly faded.

  “Bon voyage,” Hans said.

  Martin passed the acceleration in a slice of nothingness in which only a few incoherent dreams surfaced—meeting girls at dances on the Central Ark, Mother and Father, basement sweepings from his brain, exhausting in their banality. When they had reached near-c, they coasted, their fields folded, and they faced each other balefully, cramped shipmates. Outside, space twisted and stars huddled into a blurred torque. The ship restored the star fields to a normal appearance for their benefit.

  “How long until we arrive?” Giacomo asked, clearly not comfortable in the close quarters.

  “A tenday,” Hakim said.

  “You may sleep for the first six days if you wish,” the mom’s voice told them.

  “Earth’s astronauts did this for months at a time,” Hakim said.

  “Yeah, but we’re spoiled,” Giacomo said.

  “Let’s sleep,” Martin said.

  Sleep came and went, another longer slice of oblivion. Martin awoke disoriented, drank a cup of sweetened fluid, exercised in the weightlessness, observed his companions surface from their slumbers.

  He had expected the journey to add even more weight to his burden of gloom. Instead, he experienced exhilaration and freedom he had never known before.

  Hakim behaved as if the burden had shifted from Martin to him. He worked quietly but without enthusiasm. Giacomo spent much of his time contemplating the small star sphere.

  “We’re further away from our fellows than anybody’s ever been before,” he said at the end of their second day awake. The derelict was now two days away.

  “Farther,” Hakim said softly.

  “Whatever,” Giacomo said. “I don’t feel isolated. Do you?”

  “The Dawn Treader is pretty isolated,” Martin observed.

  “Yes, but they have each other…too many to keep track of. We have just three.”

  In
natural sleep, Martin saw Rosa’s dark shadow entity walk through an impossibly green field, wind knocking pieces of it away like fluff from a black dandelion. It towered over trees and hills, yet it was fragile and somehow vulnerable…

  Awake, he helped Hakim prepare for their investigation. The craft mom briefed them on designs of Ships of the Law launched over the past few thousand years, though without any indication of their origins or destinations. Martin thought this was makework; indeed, he was coming to believe their presence on this journey had more to do with ship-crew relations than practical function.

  But the crew was the entire reason for the Dawn Treader’s existence. Perhaps the ship’s mind recognized the impact of crew fears and suspicions, and was working to reduce them.

  “Let’s try something,” Hakim said when boredom had set in at the end of the second day of coasting. “Let’s float by ourselves in the middle of nothing, and see what we think about.”

  Giacomo gave Hakim a pained look. “You want us to go nuts?”

  “It will be amusing,” he said. Hakim’s gloom had lifted, but his sense of humor had taken on a strange tinge, part fatalism, part puckishness; his face stayed calm, eyes large and inoffensive, but his words sometimes aimed at targets neither of his companions could see.

  “I’m not so sure,” Giacomo said.

  “You’re big and strong, a strapping theoretical fellow,” Hakim said with a smile. “Catholic cannot take a dare from a Muslim?”

  Giacomo squinted. “Bolsh,” he said. “My parents didn’t even go to church.”

  “Nobody mentions my religion,” Martin said. The conversation was becoming too ragged for his taste, but he could not just stay out of it.

  “We don’t know what you are,” Hakim said.

  Martin thought for a moment. “I don’t know myself,” he said. “My grandparents were Unitarians, I think.”

  “I challenge us all to sit in the middle of a projection of the exterior, unaltered, and speak of what we experience,” Hakim said.

  Giacomo and Martin glanced at each other. “Okay,” Martin said.

  The craft mom obliged. Within a few minutes the exterior enveloped them: intense speckled darkness ahead, twisted torque of blurred stars, muddy warmth behind.

  Martin experienced immediate vertigo. The weightlessness had never bothered him until now, and he clutched the arms of his seat and felt sweat break out. They did not look at each other for several minutes, afraid of showing their discomfort.

  Strangely, it was Hakim’s voice that dispelled Martin’s sense of endless falling. “It is worse than I thought,” Hakim said. “Is everybody all right?”

  “Fine,” Giacomo said tersely. “Who’s going to clean up if I vomit?”

  “Hakim dared us,” Martin said.

  “Hand me the mop,” Hakim said. Nervous giggles almost got the better of them.

  “It’s pretty strange,” Giacomo said. “I look to my left, and…Jesus! That’s weird beyond belief. Everything twists and spins like a carousel.”

  Martin tried looking to his right. The torque shivered, an infinity of stars cowed into being social, like little knots tied in strings of dissolving paint. It all seemed oceanic, the glow of an underwater volcano behind and the queer glimmer of deep water fish ahead. Galactic fish, X-ray fish in the depth of beginning time.

  “What are you thinking?” Hakim asked after a few minutes of silence.

  “I think I want to go inside,” Martin said.

  But they remained “outside,” minutes following one on the other, and their hands crept out and grasped, their breathing came in synchrony. “Wow,” Giacomo said. “I’m not asleep, am I?”

  “No,” Martin said.

  “I keep seeing things out of the corner of my eye, where the star necklace tries to be. Things reaching out to touch me. Pretty spooky.”

  “I hear the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer,” Hakim said. “It’s very beautiful. I wish you could hear it.”

  “Are you still a Muslim, Hakim?” Martin asked.

  “We are all of us Muslims,” Hakim said. “It is our natural state. We must give ourselves to Allah at some point, become obedient. Allah is looking out for us, that I feel…And Muhammad is his prophet. But what shape Allah is, who can say? And it is no use bowing to Mecca.”

  “I think that means you’re a Muslim,” Martin said.

  “The Pope died with Earth,” Giacomo said. “Isn’t that something? The moms didn’t save the Pope. I wonder why.”

  Martin saw grass growing on the rim of a tunnel, the greenness bright and welcoming, blending toward the center.

  “Remember volunteering?” Giacomo said.

  “A difficult time for me,” Hakim said. “My mother did not want me to go. My father spoke to her sternly and she cried. I decided I had to go, and my mother…she ignored me from that day. Very sad.”

  “The tests?”

  “I didn’t take a lot of tests,” Martin said.

  “I remember a lot of tests,” Giacomo said. “Physical—“

  “Oh, those,” Martin said. He remembered being wrapped in fields that tingled while the moms floated in attendance, never telling whether the results were good or poor.

  Martin remembered his father’s face, proud and sad, on the last day. The families in the Ark gathering at the berthing bay for the new Ship of the Law, stars visible beyond the curve of the third homeball. Some of the children barely into their teens getting caught up in the excitement. Martin remembered Rex Live Oak throwing up and a hastily spread field grabbing the expelled contents of his stomach and whisking them away. He smiled. The moms did not disqualify the children for nerves or fright.

  Sleepless nights as the Dawn Treader rose into darkness, climbing for almost a year on a torch dipped into a sump. The classes, momerath refreshers, Martin’s first tryst with Felicity Tigertail, awkward and delicious, a little scary to him, how much he fixed on her. With a little more innate physical wisdom, she did not fix on him, gently repulsed his further advances, introduced him without embarrassment to her other boyfriends…

  Strange that he did not feel attracted to Theresa much sooner. Eighty-seven young crew, given subtle guidance or no guidance by moms intent on letting their charges come to wisdom the human way, not the Benefactors’ way, whatever that might be…

  “Martin,” Giacomo said. “Do you remember first meeting Jennifer?”

  “Yes,” Martin said.

  “Was it on the Ark?”

  “No,” Martin said. “On the ship.”

  “What was she like then? I just don’t remember much about her…“

  They talked into the weirdness for hours, and gradually their talk fell silent, and they simply stared, or slept fitfully. The universe seemed to quiver with Martin’s heart, flinching, star necklace alive, a thinly spread tissue of life. His own scale increased to match; Martin became galactic and with his new size came a nervous euphoria.

  How long they sat, Martin couldn’t tell at first. But Giacomo broke the vigil and said, “That’s enough for me.”

  Hakim made a little grunt. “Why?” he said.

  “Because I just had a wet dream, damn it,” Giacomo said.

  They agreed to stop, and the projection folded into a small star sphere, returning them to the narrow and much more comfortable confines of the craft.

  Their deceleration was brief, merely two hours, to match course and speed with the derelict. As volumetric fields faded, they waited eagerly for a first glimpse of the ship from a few kilometers.

  What first appeared was almost impossible to comprehend. The ship resembled a twisted, crisped piece of paper in a fire, covered with holes, the edges of the holes burning orange and red; homeballs skeletal, debris drifting in a cloud.

  “Dear God,” Giacomo said.

  “What happened?” Hakim asked.

  The mom took them around the derelict in a slow loop. “This ship is very old,” it said. “Central control of its shape has failed. Fake matter i
s decaying. Within a few hundred years, there will be only the shells of real matter.”

  “There are no survivors?” Hakim asked.

  “We guessed that much already,” Martin said.

  “Not with certainty,” Hakim persisted.

  “There are no survivors,” the mom said. “The ship’s mind is inoperative. We will search for deep time memory stores.”

  A hole opened in the side of their craft. Martin pushed himself through first, wrapped in a spherical field with a green balloon of life support.

  “It’s like being in a soap bubble,” he said. They had not practised with these fields before. Martin pulled down an ephemeral control panel and touched arrows to indicate the direction he wanted to move. The bubble thrust away from the craft with a barely audible tink and a tiny flash of light—individually matched atoms of anti em and matter, their explosions cupped against a mirror-reflective field the size of his hand.

  Giacomo emerged next, then Hakim. Except for their few words and the sounds of breathing, again they were enveloped by the universe, although in the form of an undistorted field of stars. Martin saw the constellation of the Orchid. In that direction, visually aligned within a degree of the star known to humans as Betelgeuse, lay the Dawn Treader, two hundred billion kilometers away.

  He rotated his bubble toward the constellation Hakim had named Philosopher. The derelict crossed the sweep of the Philosopher’s hand.

  “What was its name?” Giacomo asked.

  The craft mom’s voice answered, “I do not know.”

  They pushed slowly across the two kilometers. Martin trailed Giacomo’s balloon, watching the staccato, firecracker punctuations of dying atoms.

  “I feel like an angel. This is incredible,” Hakim said, following Martin.

  Martin’s attention focused on the disintegrating hulk looming before them. He could make out the three homeballs, reduced to psychedelic leaf-skeletons, all edges glowing red and orange and white.

  “I knew it took energy to maintain fake matter…I didn’t know it would just fizzle out,” Giacomo said. Martin spun around and urged his bubble toward the third homeball, leaving Giacomo and Hakim near the middle. He had spotted a hole big enough to squeeze his bubble through, and with the craft mom’s approval, he was going to attempt entry.