Anvil of Stars

  She had been struck from behind, on the back of the head. The occiput was misshapen. Beneath the red hair a pool of blood had gathered, and sticky strands of blood and hair clung to the floor, breaking loose silently as she rolled face down.

  Jeanette moaned. Erin seemed fascinated now, past her nausea.

  “What should we do?” Martin asked the mom.

  “Rosa Sequoia is no longer useful,” the mom said.

  “Do you know who killed her?” Erin asked the robot.

  “We do not know who killed her.”

  Kai looked up at Hans. “Where were you?”

  “He was with me for the past couple of hours,” Martin said. “I don’t think she’s been dead more than an hour.”

  “She has been dead for fifty-two minutes,” the mom said.

  Kai’s face wrinkled in grief. “How do we know you’d tell the truth?” he asked Martin.

  “I believe Martin,” Jeanette said, wrapping her arms around herself. “Somebody else killed her.”

  “Why?” Erin asked.

  “Because she was speaking God’s truth,” Kai said. “Will you let us tell the others, or are you going to pretend this didn’t happen?”

  “Everybody will know.”

  “Even the Brothers?” Ariel asked.

  “They’re our partners,” Hans said. “We have no secrets from them.”

  Martin and Kai rolled Rosa over. Nobody’s thinking straight, Martin told himself. He looked at the pots of flowers, the pad off to one side, seeking evidence of who had been here. The room around the body was normal but for the drops of blood sprayed in one corner; empty except for Rosa’s things, and the nonessential parts of Rosa.

  “Do you wish to have a ceremony?” the mom asked.

  “Yes,” Jeanette said.

  “I’d like you to make arrangements,” Hans said to her.

  They don’t want to know who killed her, Martin realized. They aren’t looking. He alone was examining the room closely. He wished they would all leave so he could talk with the mom in private.

  “Martin, you and Jeanette clean her up,” Hans said. “Wipe her down, dress her in her best…What should she wear?” Hans asked Jeanette.

  “I don’t know,” Jeanette said. “I don’t…” She finished with a sob.

  “Gown,” Hans said. He looked at the faces one by one. “She was my lover,” he said, eyes hooded, lips downturned. “We’ll find out who did this.”

  The others left. Martin and Jeanette silently, grimly stripped Rosa and washed her with water. Martin used his wand surreptitiously to record the body’s condition, and swept the room for more details as Jeanette reverently dressed her, weeping.

  “She’s a martyr,” she said. “Rosa died for us.”

  Martin nodded. That was probably all too true.

  The moms didn’t stop this. But they had learned this very hard fact many months, many centuries before: the crew of a Ship of the Law was free.

  Free to die, and now free to kill.

  The human crew took the news much as Martin had expected. Some wept, some cried out in anger, others held on to each other; still others listened in stunned silence as Hans revealed the details.

  Only Twice Grown had been invited to join the humans as Hans spoke. Coiled, without scent, he listened to Hans and to Paola’s quiet re-Englishing.

  Hans finished by saying, “Rosa was murdered. That much is known. We know nothing about who murdered her, and we will not have time to find out before the ship splits and we move on to the next part of the Job. I wish our partners, our Brothers, to know…” He seemed to search for the right words, the diplomatic expression, but shook his head. “This was an aberration—“

  “The failure of a broken individual,” Paola said softly to Twice Grown.

  “A hideous wrong.” Hans shook his head again, lips pressed tight. “Rosa is going to be recycled by the moms in a few hours. Her family and associates will wait in her quarters to receive those who wish to grieve.”

  Martin stood before the mom alone as it entered his room. “Do you know now who killed Rosa Sequoia?” he asked after the door had closed.

  “Hans has asked me the same question,” it answered.

  “Do you?”

  “We do not track or survey individuals.”

  “You keep medical records—“

  “We monitor health of individuals when they are in public places.”

  Martin knew that, but he would not let his questions go. One by one, he would ask them, and that would be his peculiar grief; for he had in a sense been relieved by Rosa’s death, and he was sure Hans had been relieved as well, and a kind of guilt drove him now.

  “Could you detect who had been in her room?”

  “It is possible to identify numbers of presences in a room, after the fact, but we lack the means to identify individuals.”

  “How many people were in her room before she died, before she was found?”

  “One person was in her room with her,” the mom said.

  “Male or female?”

  “Male.”

  “What else can you tell me?”

  “There had been sexual activity,” the mom said.

  Martin had noticed dried fluid around Rosa’s vulva and spots still damp on her pad. “Was she raped?”

  “No.”

  He took a shuddering breath, stomach twisting and his neck hard as rock, head aching intensely. “But you don’t know who was with her.”

  “We are aware of sixty people who were not with her,” the mom said. “Four others were in private quarters, not their own, including the one with Rosa, and were not tracked.”

  “Can you list their names?”

  “Their names are in your wand now.”

  “Thank you,” Martin said.

  The mom departed and Martin examined the list. One or more of the four could have killed her, and Martin noted that Rex was among them. Giacomo, Rex, Ariel, Carl Phoenix; he could not help returning to Rex Live Oak’s glowing name.

  Hans insisted Martin attend the service. Jeanette Snap Dragon delivered a brief and surprisingly cool talk, and there was no mention of Rosa’s supernatural interactions, no mention as well of Rosa’s disciples.

  Jeanette spoke instead of Rosa the story-teller, of the early awkward Rosa who had blossomed into her own kind of maturity late in the voyage.

  Before Jeanette was finished, Martin’s eyes filled with tears. We’ve lost our final illusions.

  After the service, Jeanette and Rex Live Oak were the last to leave. Rex glanced at Martin in the corridor outside Rosa’s quarters, his eyes red and swollen, his mouth a broken curve.

  Rex had never been a very good actor. He was not acting now. “Too much,” he said, edging past Martin in the corridor. “Too slicking much.”

  Rosa’s room was sealed, her body still inside. Out of sight, the ship did its work silently and quickly, and the last of Rosa vanished.

  Jeanette approached Hans and Martin when the others had dispersed. “We’re still agreed,” she told him. “None of Rosa’s people will fight. We’re standing down.”

  “I understand,” Hans said.

  “We won’t vote on judgment, we won’t go on the Trojan Horse, we won’t engage in support services.”

  “That’s all been planned for,” Hans said. Jeanette looked between them, her unlined features appearing much older than before. She turned slowly, eyes lingering on Hans, and walked inboard.

  “It’s over,” Hans murmured to Martin, hair in spikes from constant pushes of his hand, eyes dark and puffy. “Let it go.”

  There wasn’t much else Martin could do.

  Separation was less than six hours away.

  Martin walked beside Hans into the schoolroom. Hans carried the list of the names of the ten humans who would accompany ten Brothers aboard the Trojan Horse as it dipped into Leviathan’s system. The crew assembled in the center before the star sphere, all but Rosa’s party, who stood to one side in ranks of five. r />
  Hakim and Giacomo had arranged for the most recent results of the search team to be projected within the sphere: the best images of the worlds, like God’s marbles dropped carelessly on velvet, beautiful and alive.

  Hans called out the names without referring to the list.

  Those chosen smiled and shook fists high in the air. Others looked disappointed until Jimmy Satsuma said, “Into the valley of death rode the ten…The rest of us will just have to wait outside to kick ass.”

  The crew cheered. Martin thought, Remarkable how little the rhetoric of war changes, as if it’s built into our genes.

  “Twenty,” Hans said. “Don’t forget the Brothers.” But word of possible doubts among the Brothers had circulated with unfortunate speed, and Hans had done nothing to cool their anger.

  “Yeah,” Satsuma said, without enthusiasm.

  “The ship will split in one hour,” Hans said. “I will ride Greyhound. Martin will ride the Trojan Horse. For the time being, all is in the hands of the moms. But we’ll get our chance soon enough.”

  He paused, looking at the floor. “I have an intuition.” The crew kept a tense silence. “I think we’ll find what we came for. We’ll find it here. We share this with the Brothers, whatever our physical differences: we share the need to see justice done.

  “I am not as good with words as other Pans have been. I don’t know if a pep-talk from me will do you any good. We have our own tragedies to face, our own…evil to deal with. But all that has to be put aside for now. It can’t knock us off the road.

  “This is the anniversary of the day we left the solar system. The road takes us to meet Earth’s Killers. I know what I have to do. You all know what you have to do.”

  Enough was enough. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Humans and Brothers, the crew of the Trojan Horse entered the cafeteria. Martin sat against the wall. Hakim sat beside him. “I am not frightened,” Hakim said, eyes glittering, face flushed as if with fever.

  “I am,” Martin said.

  “It would be more polite for me to be frightened with you,” Hakim said, shaking his head. “But I am not. I feel as if I have lived a very long time. If I must face Shaitan, now is the time to do it. Allah will have pity on us all, and we will…” He swallowed. “This talk of God does not disturb you?”

  “No,” Martin said, gripping Hakim’s shoulder.

  “Rosa did not take Allah away from us.”

  “Of course not.”

  “We will grow in Allah’s sight, after this,” Hakim said. “Allah loved Earth, and loves his frail children.”

  Martin nodded. He watched Ariel sitting at a table, getting up as table and benches sank into the floors. He smiled at her. She looked around, held up her arms, Where am I going to sit?

  Martin patted the floor beside him.

  She sat. “I think we should take another vote…on who should be Pan. After the Job.”

  Martin nodded absently.

  “Poor Rosa,” she said, drawing up her knees.

  Martin closed his eyes. Hakim murmured suras from the Qur’an. The ten Brothers coiled near the middle. Eye on Sky approached Martin.

  “We we are sorry for the tragedy of the death,” he said. “We we are hoping this does not make you less efficient.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” Martin said.

  Paola put an arm around Eye on Sky. “We’ll do our work well.”

  Martin looked up into its “face,” like the frayed end of a rope with eyes and a bouquet of claws. “Times past, an observation was made by one of yours,” Eye on Sky said. “In we our hearing. That humans might know more about death and killing than Brothers. This is not so. Brothers have fought with each other, though not for many thousands of years.”

  Paola hovered nervously, looking between them.

  “We we and you will share the guilt for this vengeance,” Eye on Sky said. “It is agreed, as the Brothers agreed when we ourselves set this mission along, this Job.”

  He smelled of tea and woodsmoke, a combination Martin had not experienced before.

  “I’m glad to have you with us,” Martin said.

  “Until we our world was destroyed,” Eye on Sky continued, “Brothers thought the stars to be peaceful, places of unity and being sure-footed. We we have learned, those of other stars are only like we ourselves.”

  “We’re a team,” Martin said, rising and extending his arms. Eye on Sky leaned forward, and Martin hugged the sinewy braid as well, feeling the leathery dryness of its cords ripple beneath his fingers.

  The ship began its sounds of dividing, familiar to them all. The door to the cafeteria admitted a mom and a snake mother, and then smoothed shut, its outlines vanishing into the wall. Fields appeared automatically around each of them, vibrating faint pastel colors. Martin watched Eye on Sky return to the center, followed by his field. The humans stayed on the periphery.

  “End of deceleration in twenty seconds,” the mom said.

  Their weight passed from them until they floated. Martin automatically did the exercises that controlled his inner ear and his stomach.

  “Separation will begin in fifteen seconds,” the mom said. The snake mother made low string sounds and percussive clicks for the Brothers.

  The ladder fields grew brighter. Muffled sounds of matter being rearranged, fake matter growing; Martin’s hair stood on end. He thought of the decaying death ship lost in endless cold void, its fake matter fizzling away after ages, mummies of the crew surrounded by eternal haloes of cold dust, undisturbed in the interstellar medium until their arrival.

  The cafeteria closed in. Fields jostled them within the smaller, rearranged space. They now occupied the sleeping quarters of the Trojan Horse.

  “I told them about the Iliad” Paola whispered to Martin and Ariel. “They were very impressed. And we chose another name for the ship, when we’re in disguise, so we don’t have to explain Trojan Horse: Double Seed.”

  More sounds, sliding and scraping, something vibrating like a broken pitch pipe. Trojan Horse/Double Seed broke free of Greyhound and Shrike.

  All three ships spread apart, each on a different course and schedule, each with a different mission, fifty billion kilometers from Leviathan, still racing at close to light-speed.

  “Super deceleration in ten seconds,” the mom said.

  They had been through this many times before, enough to be used to it, but Martin felt a deep sense of dread: dread of the poised dream-state, his every move second-guessed by the volumetric fields. He felt them creep around his molecules, taking inventory of his body. And dread as well for what they all would have to face if they succeeded, when the ships came back together: the lies and deceit he knew had been perpetrated on the crews.

  “Good luck,” Ariel said.

  He tried to think of a pleasant scene on Earth, to lock this into his thoughts and avoid visions of the dead.

  Instead, he saw as if through a grim documentary that the entire crew had been fed fake matter food, that they were now made of massless coerced points in space; that when the Job was done they would simply dissolve like the Red Tree Runners’ Ship of the Law.

  The Law would be done at the cost of their being; in fact, they were nothing right at this moment, merely illusions on a ghost ship falling again into brightness to bring death.

  His unvoiced moan seemed to echo behind his closed eyes. If he opened his eyes, he would see the others, trying to do little tasks, conversing or just sitting, waiting out the constrained hours. He preferred to be alone with this nightmare.

  Twenty-two hours passed.

  An hour before super deceleration ended, as planned, Hakim broadcast their first message to the beings around Leviathan. He had created a simple binary signal repeating pi and the first ten prime numbers, without the Brothers’ help; the moms had indicated Brother mathematics was most unusual, and not likely to be easily understood.

  The signal was adjusted to disguise their velocity. It would reach Leviathan’s world
s in twenty-three hours; Trojan Horse/Double Seed would be twenty-two billion kilometers from the system by then, easily visible to Leviathan’s masters.

  The mom informed them that Greyhound and Shrike were doing well, that all was going as planned.

  Martin listened to the mom’s voice, acknowledged with a nod that he had heard the news and understood it, closed his eyes again, waited, still not convinced of his reality, his solidity.

  Ariel touched his arm. “You don’t look happy,” she said.

  “Nightmare,” he said, shaking his head.

  “You’re not asleep,” she said.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Want to talk?”

  “About what?”

  “About after.”

  He smiled. “After we get the Job done? Or after we’ve decelerated?”

  “After anything,” she said.

  Martin opened his eyes completely and wiped them to clear his mottled vision. What he saw was still not sharp; Ariel leaned on her elbow a meter away, face blurred, eyes indistinct, mouth moving. He made an effort to listen.

  “The Wendys will make their gowns. We’ll marry a planet. Do you ever think about that?”

  He shook his head.

  “I do. I’d like to let it all down, relax, sit in a thick, fresh atmosphere with the sun in the sky…just not worry about anything. Do you think people on Earth ever did that?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I wonder if I’d make a good mother. Having babies, I mean.”

  “Probably,” he said.

  “I’ve just started thinking about being a mother. My thoughts…I’ve been young for so long, it’s hard to imagine actually being grown-up.”

  “Ariel, I’m not thinking too clearly right now. We should talk later.”

  “If you want. I don’t mind if you don’t answer. Do you mind listening?”

  “I don’t know if I mind anything right now.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll wait. But we’re going to be so busy.”

  “That will be good,” Martin said. “Not having time to think.”

  “Do you have a voice…” She trailed off. “It sounds so silly, like something Rosa might say. Do you have a voice that tells you what’s going to happen?”