by Greg Bear
“What will it feel like, the super deceleration?” Patrick Angelfish asked, standing beside Martin.
“Like what we feel in the craft, I suppose,” Martin said. “Only more. Longer.”
“I don’t like the way that feels,” Patrick said.
Martin looked at him with mock-sternness. Patrick smiled back.
“I know,” he said. “I’m a wimp.”
“Let’s hope you’re a strong-stomached wimp,” Martin said, examining and reexamining his tone to see if it was right, if it was not too sarcastic where he did not mean it to be, if he was hiding from his words the complex of worries and fears he himself felt; if he was adopting the proper tone of command mixed with reassurance and comradely banter. I am not a natural leader. A natural leader would not even worry about such things…
The children drew closer as the vibrations continued, the sounds of the new ships being made: belling and scraping, humming and faint rasping, heat in the cabin increasing for a few minutes, then cool returning. The air smelled different. Martin sniffed but did not mention it; Ariel came forward, frowning, and said, “Smells funny.”
Paola Birdsong and Stephanie Wing Feather agreed.
“Smells like rain,” Theresa said.
“’Tut tut, it looks like rain,’” Theresa quoted.
“We need a Pooh,” Andrew Jaguar said. “Who should be the ship’s Pooh?”
“Who’s most popular?” Martin asked, glancing around. “Not me,” he said.
Mei-Li groaned. “Pans are never Poohs,” she said.
“How about Ariel?” William suggested.
“Bolsh,” Ariel said quickly.
“She’s very cuddly,” Mei-Li agreed.
Ariel looked around the circle, unsure whether to be angry or to shrug this off.
“We think it’s a fine idea. You have to be Pooh,” Hakim said, smiling serenely.
Ariel made a sound of disgust. “Cut the crap.”
“We mean it,” Mei-Li said with uncharacteristic force, and Andrew Jaguar added with a tone of implied threat, “You’re chosen.”
Martin did not know whether to interfere or let the game continue. He did not know if Ariel understood that the teasing was a display of affection. Leveling the road; no bumps. “All right.” Ariel swept her arms out, stalking the children in the circle starting with Mei-Li, who giggled and backed away. “Come to momma. Come hug the Pooh.” She mugged, menaced and threatened with a grim smile. No one offered themselves to her arms until she came to William, who sighed, cast his eyes to the ceiling, and said, “Take me, I’m yours.”
“Oh, oh, Christopher Robin!” the children cried out.
Ariel embraced William, and expertly, they waltzed and flew around the cabin, swinging through the children as if they had rehearsed for months. A marvel; Martin had not known William could dance, much less Ariel. In truth, he saw they surprised themselves.
“May I butt in?” Mei-Li asked, tapping Ariel on the shoulder.
“Buzz off,” she said with a haughty shudder. “I’m Pooh.”
“Buzz off! You can fly,” Andrew Jaguar sang. “You can fly, you can fly, you can fly!”
William took Ariel around the waist and swung her legs up over the heads of several squatting children, who ducked and laughed.
“Bravo!” Theresa cried.
Martin clapped his hands in time to the loops of the dance, and the children joined in, making music, humming a waltz. Ariel assumed a pose of dignified involvement in her art, chin lifted, nose out-thrust, eyes half-closed, fingers tipping along William’s fingers, swirling, swirling.
Martin noticed the War Mother had entered the room. The dance continued until William said, “Oh Lord, enough, I’m worn out.” Ariel let him go and he echoed off the wall, grabbing a ladder field, laughing and waving one hand in time with the hummed waltz.
“Who’s next?” she called, swinging closer to the center. Her face glowed with exertion, eyes on fire, and she focused suddenly, unexpectedly, on Martin, hooded her eyes seductively, leaned back in an abbreviated S with fingers extended. “You, Pan? Dance with Pooh?”
Martin blushed, laughed, and extended his hand. Ariel touched it with an expression of anything but addle-headed Pooh-bear affection, and was about to swing him off when the cabin lurched violently. The children instinctively dropped to the floor, fingers clutching uselessly. Martin felt their weight increase: a tenth of a g, half, three quarters…He glanced at Ariel, sprawled across from him, eyes wide, scared, then rolled over to find Theresa on his other side; the couches had collapsed into the floor, leaving an unobstructed, cushioned environment.
The War Mother grounded against the floor, fastening itself. Ladder fields sprang up and the air vibrated with milky rainbow colors.
Martin tuned his wand to show Tortoise’s, exterior. Like a wooden stake shivered by the tap of an axe, the Dawn Treader had split from the third homeball forward. The last tissue of connection—Martin noticed the flexibility of that connection, so unlike metal—parted, and Hare leaped with new freedom.
“Separation?” Theresa asked, though the answer was obvious. Belief did not necessarily follow seeing.
“The Ship of the Law is now two ships,” the War Mother said. They had already moved a dozen kilometers from Hare, and the distance quickly increased.
“We made it,” Martin said.
“Shit,” said Ariel, crossing her legs on the soft floor.
The children squatted and clasped their hands in front of them like so many Buddhas. Martin reached for Theresa’s hand, gripped it tightly. She smiled at him.
All so very brave. No choice.
“Let’s do it,” Martin said.
“Super deceleration will begin in one minute,” the War Mother said.
“Count!” Andrew Jaguar shouted, and they counted as the numbers from Martin’s wand gleamed in the air above them.
Five, four, three, two
Martin took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Like a soft electric hand probing his body, the volumetric fields diffused through him. He heard a tiny distant whining noise in his ears, felt the blood stop in his veins, all the protoplasm in his cells pause, then the blood start again, pause, start: the vibrating jerkiness of fields controlling the path of each molecule, adjusting to allow normal vectors, to cancel the effects of the deceleration, temporarily paused thought, jammed his mind with half-aware impulses, threw him into blankness.
He could not see. His eyes hurt but he could not be fully aware of the pain. They would be in this state for days, but fortunately, the fields would soon give them a semblance of normality. They could see, move, talk, eat, however slowly and carefully.
If all goes well. No machine works perfectly. Every machine can fail.
The wands would not work under super deceleration. The War Mother would be inactive. They would have only themselves, in this small space, for days as they dropped from the top of the universe to the bottom, as they drained their momentum into massive sumps…as they let themselves be guided like pigeons in the head of a bomb, pigeons ready to peck their final destination, coo their final judgments, hoping to put out the eyes of those who had eaten their eggs, their young, their very coop.
Theodore came into the room where Martin sat alone with just the drip of thoughts to occupy him.
“Is it sadness then that makes you think of our enemy so?”
“Ah, Christ, Theodore. I miss you. Why did you kill yourself?”
“Because we’re just pigeons, that’s all.”
“You never said so.”
“I was never omniscient, Martin. You have original thoughts, you know, some better than mine ever were. Death just makes me larger, and that’s silly. I’m actually very small now, being dead; a dust mote in your mind.”
“I’d like to have you back in more than just dreams…”
“Hardly a dream. You’re awake.”
Martin sighed, shook his head. “I think we’ve gone through the worst part, and this is me,
sleeping and dreaming, waiting for the whole thing to end. Boredom can do this to us. I think we’re all sleeping now, tired of each other, bored with being in a tiny room.”
“You’ve been thinking of Ariel, haven’t you?”
“I suppose…What can you tell me about her?”
“Nothing you don’t already know. The disadvantage of being dead. I can only be the image of your thoughts.”
“So what do I know about her that I can’t recognize?”
“She’s tough, she keeps her mind about her, she believes in very little, and she has a capacity for great”
love
Theresa lay next to him, snoring lightly. Martin stroked her hip, feeling the tingle of field adjustment in his hands, the constant bind of constraints as the fields decided (if such was the right word) what motion was permitted, and what might be the beginning of a disastrous tumble into one-thousand-g deceleration.
love
for individual, for family, for group, for companions, for ship, for world, for Earth.
How does one come to love a world? Born into it, suffused with it, the world is part of everything and not differentiable. The Dawn Treader was a world, as large in its way as any human lifetime; plenty of places to live, plenty of dreams to dream, even allowing them fragments of Earth. Scientific, curious Theodore Dawn, always observing, making notes, bent over his lenses and clear tanks of pond water in the quarters he shared with Martin, his personal equivalent of the cats and parrots other children kept as mutual pets and mascots. The lenses—the moms’ equivalent of microscopes—hovering in the air before Theodore’s face like tiny white jewels, light-refracting fields of optical strength and clarity far better than fluorite. Caught in a small spherical field that allowed in oxygen, but kept water from escaping, several chaoborus specimens, the larvae of phantom midges that Theodore favored so highly. The specimens were kept from escaping by gentle fields…fields within fields, allowing Theodore access to these living creatures that would have been impossible on old Earth.
“Quite lovely,” Theodore said. “And even better—harmless. Aren’t you glad I’m not raising mosquitoes? You’d sneak in at night and destroy my tanks.”
“We’d put up with it,” Martin said.
“No you wouldn’t,” Theodore said. “You’re much too judgmental…” Chaoborus, zooplankters, phytoplankters, varieties of beautiful algae, and above the pond, flying about the room, adult phantom midges buzzing, almost invisible, preening themselves on the walls; ignorant that they were no longer on Earth.
“Do you think we understand where we are?” Martin asked.
“You think we don’t and can’t, not where it counts. Not in our guts and cells. We always carry Earth with us. When a parent dies, the genes remain, and the memories, which are only lesser and weaker threads.”
“My parents are alive, probably, but I can’t feel them.”
“We’re on opposite sides of a gulf of physics difficult for us midges to understand, in our guts,” Theodore said. Musing over his spherical field-bound pond, stirring it with a glass rod, watching the algae twine on the rod, making history among the micro-organisms, the paramecia and rotifers, the euglenoids and diatoms, the desmids, amphipods, ostracods, wreaking havoc among the daphnia.
The comparatively large chaoborus larvae thin as ghosts with vicious curved beaks and black-eyed heads, pairs of beautifully patterned buoyancy organs fore and aft, whisking themselves away with a wriggle to avoid the currents.
Martin rolled over and opened his eyes and felt the tingle in his lids. Sometimes he made moves that were resisted: sudden moves, alarming the fields perhaps, though dropping his substance only a few ten thousandths into the forbidden chasm of one thousand g’s.
It was best not to move at all, and so most of the children did not.
Theresa and Ariel sat talking quietly about Hans the Eternal and others; as they talked, Martin saw Hans and Theodore together, though they had not been close friends, had rarely spoken to each other. Hans asked Theodore what he thought of Martin, whether Martin had what it took to be Pan.
“He doesn’t think so,” Theodore said, winking over his shoulder at Martin. “He thinks he cares too much.”
“Do you think I have what it takes?”
“Nobody who wants to be Pan should be,” Theodore said.
“I don’t want to be…“But there was something like hope on Hans’ face.
Theresa and Ariel discussed the gowns the Wendys would wear when all was done, and they married another world.
Theresa wore this gown as she marched down a vast cathedral aisle. The gown draped white, like a weave of quartz crystals and diamonds, supernaturally supple and beautiful, and in her hair threaded rubies, emeralds, opals, beryls, flowers of sulfur, selenite, celestite, amethyst, garnets, agates, sapphires, and on her hands she wore constellations of Iceland spar, white aragonite, green azurite, blue lapis, representing the dowry of her Mother, and Theodore gave her away, dressed in a suit woven entirely of shimmering midges and butterflies and moths, and Martin waited at the altar. Behind him opened the arms of another world, even more beautiful than Earth, and that meant a guilt of unfaithfulness.
Now the women were talking about having children someday, and Ariel shaking her head stubbornly, saying she would not be a good mother, she was too tough on others, no sympathy, but Theresa said instincts will kick in and they will be tender.
Three days, top to bottom, in this small room, sleeping and talking, eating only a few times, for food did not digest well under the tyranny of volumetric fields grumpy about adding new molecules to the body’s equation.
The bottom of the universe, perversely, was bright, and the top was dark. The Dawn Treader had fallen out of the darkness, away from the muddy twisted ring of stars, but there was still this vast cliff to descend, from three quarters of the speed of light to less than one hundredth of one percent c, a profligate excretion of momentum that must later be regained from fuel in the very system they would try to kill.
They tumbled toward the central furnace, their almost straight-line course gradually curving like an expertly drawn wire. They slowed to one half c, one quarter, one tenth, one hundredth, and now, one thousandth, one ten thousandth.
Breaking and entering. Intent to murder.
The enormous burden of momentum passed away, and the children were no longer fast gods, but pigeons in the head of a very quiet, dark bomb, stealing through the house, the solar system of Wormwood.
Martin opened his eyes and spread his arms, his fingers, savoring the freedom of no tingle, no tyranny.
Theresa leaned over him, already awake. “It’s over,” she said. “We’re here.”
In the first few hours of freedom from the cramped super deceleration space, the children reacquainted themselves with the ship. Martin led them stem to stern, following the map projected by his wand.
Tortoise had taken the shape of a squat dumbbell, the third homeball having split into two hemispheres, absorbing and redistributing the second neck to become a connecting bar between them. The nose was a mere blister on the blunt face of the fore hemisphere, and there was no tail.
Hakim set up the search shop in the nose of Tortoise to see what there was to see. The new star sphere quickly filled with information, and Hakim immediately reexamined their target worlds one by one as Martin observed: rocky Nebuchadnezzar, innermost, Ramses next, and far beyond, on the opposite side of Wormwood, Herod, the massive depleted gas giant. There were still no major surprises at this distance, half a billion kilometers from Nebuchadnezzar, but the images in the star sphere were gratifyingly crisp and clean.
“It’s very good,” Hakim told Martin. “What would we like to know?”
“The makers in the outer cloud should be ready in a few tendays,” Martin said. “We need to confirm our first target, or inform the makers by tight-beam whether we’ve chosen another.” The makers were beyond noach range; a tight-beam message would take days to reach them. “We nee
d to know which is the most active world, and whether there are any defenses.”
Tortoise was one sixth the size of Dawn Treader, but still large enough for the children to rattle around in. The unfamiliar corridors smelled new, like fresh clothes made by the moms. Martin took in as much of the new design as he could, judging its suitability for their needs, finding it adequate, but with an intense, childish kind of disappointment, missing the huge spaces of the Dawn Treader. He put that disappointment aside.
Martin leading, the thirty-five children in the Tortoise crew echoed and laddered down a smaller, shorter neck to the redesigned, rearranged weapons store, where the pods containing the makers and doers that would infiltrate the inner rocky worlds of Wormwood had been moved to prominent position.
Paola Birdsong and Stephanie Wing Feather moved the first pod groupings into six bombships, part of the ritual demanded by the moms—that as much as possible, the children should take responsibility for their weapons, for their assigned tasks, to complete the Job. Martin confirmed the loading, and the War Mother inspected the results. Training was paying off; the work had been done perfectly.
With the first part of the Job done, Martin gave them permission to establish new quarters and manufacture those things they needed. No personal goods or pets had been transferred to Tortoise.
The first group meal would begin in an hour.
Within three days, as Tortoise slid farther down the well of the Wormwood’s gravitation, all their familiarization, establishment of quarters, manufacturing of goods, might go for nothing; the ship might have to change again, to deal quickly with whatever defenses the planet killers could muster…
But until that time, Martin wanted to establish a sense of normality, to keep his children as stable and contented as he could.
Still, they all knew that their home had fled. The chances of Dawn Treader being reassembled as it had been were nil. The chances of all of them surviving…of Wormwood having no defenses, no sensors able to detect their presence…were also nil.
Hakim came to Martin in the weapons stores as he finished his inspection, waited patiently, approached the Pan with face alight with enthusiasm. “There’s news,” he said. “More information, and very interesting, too.”