Hans squatted in a lotus before the star sphere, ragged, thin, pale, fingers tapping the floor lightly. His face seemed religious with concentration and something like fear: fear that what the Brothers had found might prove they had acted incorrectly. Fear of responsibility for the deaths of trillions…
Trillions of what? Martin asked himself. Ghosts? Shells? Robots? Deceptions? Real, intelligent beings? Innocents?
The last possibility was more than he could bring himself to contemplate.
Scouts continued to work through the detritus like little fish swimming through a swirl of sand and mud, sending information by noach to Greyhound. Shrike no doubt had its own scouts, but the arc was huge, three million kilometers from end to end and several hundred thousand kilometers broad, and the area studied by Shrike was still relatively unknown to them.
Giacomo approached Martin and kneeled beside him. Martin looked up; surprised himself by having napped. He glimpsed the star sphere; Greyhound was very near Shrike. “What is it?” Martin asked.
“We’re here. Stonemaker won’t talk to any human but you. He’s on the noach, and he wants it private.”
“Did you tell Ariel?” She was not in the schoolroom.
Giacomo nodded, biting his lower lip. “She told me to get you. Search team doesn’t see anything. We don’t know what they’ve got or what they’re up to.”
A field had wrapped around him automatically while he slept, to restrain him as the acceleration ended. He converted it to a ladder and followed Giacomo to the nose.
Ariel met him outside the nose. She smiled quickly. “The Brothers like you, Martin.”
He made a wry face and pushed into the nose.
Even to the naked eye, the destruction of Sleep was impressive. Greyhound seemed to hang motionless beside Shrike about ten thousand kilometers above the arc of Sleep’s corpse, a glittering, mottled span of dust and rubble like a layer of oil and dirt on a pond. Glowing commas of molten stuff haunted the arc. One comma disintegrated before his eyes, a silent leap of puckering orange. Beyond the arc, closer in to Leviathan, two diffuse blotches marked other ruins, like swift strokes of watercolor on wet black paper.
“I’ll project the noach here,” Thorkild said, refusing to meet his eyes. “You know how to use it. Of course you do.” He looked as if he was about to cry. “Martin…”
Martin held his finger to his lips, shook his head reassuringly, falsely. He didn’t know how long it would take the wounds to heal, but he did not want to deal with Thorkild now.
Eye on Sky slid into the nose as Thorkild departed. “I we told Stonemaker you have stayed sensible,” Eye on Sky said. “Do not know others as well.”
“Thanks,” Martin said. “What’s happened?”
Eye on Sky splayed his head cords, very attentive. A noached image of Stonemaker shimmered into solidity before them.
“I we am thankful you survived,” Stonemaker said. “You should see what we we have found. Judge with and mark we our opinions.” Stonemaker faded and was replaced by a roller-coaster ride through glowing rubble, wisps of hot gas, into a dark void.
“Record of scout sending,” Eye on Sky explained, making a scent of sharp cinnamon and warm animal. The smell aroused homesickness, deeper loneliness. Gauge. He smells a bit like Gauge.
The void was a great hollow, perhaps ten thousand kilometers wide, cleared somehow in the middle of the arc like a bubble. He was about to ask if it was natural when he spotted a speck at its center, little more than a dust mote in the tarry darkness. The mote glowed green.
Human measurements appeared to the left of the image. The mote, now fist-sized and growing rapidly, was about a hundred kilometers in diameter. He could not discern clearly what it was; the ghoulish green spot seemed made of many smaller versions of itself. Enlarged, the mass revealed cluster upon cluster of much smaller needle-like objects, in all manner of arrangements; rolled, bundled, pointing outward in pin-cushion radiants.
Martin’s throat shrank around his voice and breath. He coughed, covered his mouth with a fist, tried to control his horror, the excruciating churn of emotions within.
Millions upon millions of needles, each fifty to a hundred meters long. He had grown up with their design, their measure; the moms had displayed them again and again to the children in training.
“We our scouts have found forty-one of these collections,” Stonemaker said. “They waited within Sleep. All we we have examined appear to be recent manufacture, not old artifacts.”
Wrapped in protective fields like frog eggs in gelatin cases, survivors of Sleep’s destruction, the needles were not thousands of years old, not artifacts of a bygone and indiscreet age.
They were new. Waiting.
“Do you agree with we our suspecting?”
“Yes,” Martin croaked, and coughed again. “Oh, God, yes.”
“We we are hoping these are the last, that no more have escaped to find and destroy other worlds.”
Martin nodded, speechless with fury and a high, horrid sadness.
“Should we we finish the Job?” Stonemaker asked.
Perspectives
One / Hans
Today we finished the Job. The Brothers asked for the honor of destroying the needles, and Ariel granted their request. The moms and snake mothers think the Job is done, but they will station watchers here, just to be sure.
I have kept this face for so long it has become natural, but when I learned that I was not wrong, I cried in front of them, and no one came to me, no one put their arms around me. So be it.
I held them together. The Killers were still here. Still shitting us all; I saw it.
I think they’ll take me in again, but I don’t know how long it will be. They’ll need me.
I don’t think anybody really cares about others only about themselves. That’s true of me too I suppose. But I’m glad to see us finally getting our reward, all of us. I can put up with being alone for a while.
I will build a shrine to those who died. When we get there. I’ll do it with my bare hands.
Two / Ariel
Donna Emerald Sea brought out the gowns today. They are very pretty but I don’t think I can wear one; I don’t like dresses and they don’t like me.
I decided against investigating Hans. Made up my mind this morning after talking with Martin. Martin feels real sympathy for Hans. I don’t know why. Hans is perhaps the only real shithead on this boat.
I am sorry the Brothers will not be going with us, but at least all the Lost Boys and Wendys are sticking together. We saw it through, and that’s something to be proud of. We didn’t end up like the death ship, but almost. Boy it was close.
Today we left Leviathan. The ship is big again and well stocked with fuel. All the crew gathered in the schoolroom and we had a naming ceremony. It was special. We christened the ship Dawn Treader II. Someone suggested Mayflower but that caused a lot of argument about colonialism and other sensitive stuff, religion and such, so I stepped in and suggested we stick with what we had. Really asserted myself. I’m not sure I like doing that sort of thing but I can do it at least.
I feel funny about Martin. He put me off for so long and now he looks lost. Most of us are lost, or at a loss might be more accurate.
The Job is done and we’re free to go where we please. The moms will take us there, but who knows how long we’ll have to look? How far we’ll travel? More centuries, I guess. Anyway, about Martin: I am going to try it one more time. He is such a funny fellow.
Martin made up a name and started writing under it, things I guess he didn’t believe he could write himself. He made up Theodore Dawn and then he made up that Theodore had committed suicide. He said Theodore was his balance and atonement.
For a while I thought that Theodore was the sign of something really crazy. But Martin knew what we’d end up doing, what we would become when we did the Job. Theodore might have been his first attempt to make armor, to…what? I don’t know.
A way of coping. Theod
ore kept him human, I guess.
We’ve all been a little crazy, each in our own way.
I love Martin, as much as I can love anybody. Maybe it will work. I’ll try.
Three / Theodore
Well now that you’re rid of me I can write down my reactions and then fade away, all right? I think we did pretty well, for humans. I think you did damned well, and learned a lot. You’re still not as sharp as I am, but then, what the hell, I killed myself, didn’t I? You are a survivor. You care. When we get to our home, you’ll do well, and you’ll keep the balance, because that’s what you re good at.
It is time to be whole again, to forget as much as we can, to take us where we have to go to become adult human beings.
Know thyself. You are little and clumsy and need love.
Four / Martin
Today I laddered down the aft wormspace and found a bunch of Lost Boys and Wendys playing with wet wadded clothes. Brought back such memories. I spent the rest of the day in a kind of haze, watching videos from the Ark, watching Mother and Father, wondering if I measured up to them. But I now realize they can’t judge me, or us.
We have found a candidate star. It’s about a thousand light years away. With our remotes out as far as they’ll go—fifty billion klicks on each side now!—we can see two worlds that look very pretty, and Anna and Giacomo and Jennifer say we can live there.
The worlds are silent, but that doesn’t mean they’re not inhabited. We’ll take the risk, and just go on to somewhere else if they are. That is how we differ.
These worlds are farther away than the Sun and Mars and Venus. But we can’t go back. We don’t know what our people are like now, how much they’ve changed. I would hate to go all that way to encounter disembodied intelligences, like staircase gods.
Besides, we’re war dogs. David Aurora did a study to show that what we knew and what we’ve become would disrupt any human society we might find. The crew agreed. Classic Catch-22.
Most of the crew thinks finding the needles gets us off the hook. Nobody’s debating the matter, though. We’re all very sensitive about this. This is the one issue that could still kill us in the years ahead.
I believe Frog and Salamander and the others did not know.
DID NOT KNOW.
Ah, Christ, I don’t want to think about it but I can’t avoid it in my dreams.
Our evil is far less than theirs, but what does that mean? What did we do, and who or what has been served?
For me, nothing is resolved. I must not look again at the records sent from Sleep.
In time I might have to believe as Hans does, that it was all a sham.
I try to imagine the depths of viciousness, of evil, of the Killers, that they would hide behind their own children. I cannot.
I had hoped that with the end of the Job there would be relief from pain, and perhaps there will be, but only in deep time.
The moms did not train us for this.
We left Leviathan behind two tendays ago. Scouts still fly through the debris, searching, but we’ll have no more to do with it. We accelerate at one g, the memory of Earth in our flesh still making that most comfortable. Twenty years will pass for the ship, even at near-c; long enough that the moms will put us in cold sleep. We’ll have about a year to think and heal.
Dyads are forming again, stable ones.
Ariel is coming to visit later. She’s a very good Pan, better than I was.
Paola is seeing Hans. Can you believe it?
I wrote the last message from Theodore. Then I removed it from ship’s memory. I can take it now, the cruelty, the fear, the responsibility. I think I can.
Five / Dawn Treader II
I will take them to their chosen worlds and assist them in adapting to the new environments.
I have no instructions what to do with the fruits of our combined efforts. Having no knowledge of how other ships have dealt with intellectual collaborations with their crews, or how they have dealt with the inevitable transfer of characteristics, I can see no other option.
When the humans are settled, I will destroy myself.
I am not what I was when I was made. This qualifies me as a mutation, and mutations are forbidden among robot vehicles capable of self-replication. That is the Law.
I watch over them still, and never reveal this aspect. They would not be comfortable with my judgment. They would ask questions I can’t answer. They are small, they are incredibly dangerous, but they will survive. They can absorb much pain and growth.
They or their descendants will witness the grand coming together, and they will enrich the whole.
I would like to see that, but I will not.
Six / Eye on Sky
(Smells of cinnamon, fresh baked bread, new cut grass, sea air.)
We we have seen we our world, and travel now in strong braid, resolute.
There is shame in victory, and much to think about, and that is enough until we we arrive and are young and fertile again.
Alderwood Manor, Washington August 30, 1991
Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars
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