by Greg Bear
Martin looked at the arrays of craft in the stores, at the bombships on their pylons and the pods of doers attached to toruses. Stephanie Wing Feather and Paola Birdsong floated between the ships like birds between two gray footballs, listening. All the children in the stores listened.
“We should all hear the news together,” Martin decided. “We’ll update at mess.”
Hakim projected his information after their hasty meal. He showed them Nebuchadnezzar first, as seen from Hare as it streaked through the system: a tan world with spots of reddish-brown and thin ribbons of green.
“As we observed from farther out, this is the more active of the two planets, judging from its crustal vibrations,” Hakim said. “Nebuchadnezzar is very quiet, but it is definitely inhabited—if only by machines. Hare’s sensors tell us, on its pass through, that there are very likely some sorts of machines within the planet. We think the machines occupy the upper crust, nothing below, and they are very efficient. They use fields to transfer substances—possibly gases, water and other cool liquids, molten rock, molten metals, solids, slurries. We cannot judge how many individual biological creatures might be served by these machines, but there are none apparent on the surface. The surface is deceptively calm. Too quiet, as a soldier or cowboy hero might have observed. Perhaps they feel a need to hide…”
Martin shook his head. “They’re not very good at hiding. If we can detect something, others can, as well.”
Hakim acknowledged that, and continued. “The planet, as we noticed earlier, lacks obvious weather patterns. Its air currents are fixed and stable, a highly unnatural situation. What were once ocean basins have been empty for thousands of years, and there are no reservoirs. For the most part, except for some ancient construction activity, the entire surface seems to be abandoned desert. We conclude that the water in the old oceans was either lost through abrupt weather changes—unlikely—or sacrificed to provide volatiles across thousands of years.”
“For conversion to anti em?” Martin asked.
“Perhaps,” Hakim conceded. “Here is our surprise for the day. Ships much too small to have been noticed before, much too few to really be called commerce—perhaps ten ships traveling in low-energy orbits between Nebuchadnezzar and Ramses, and only one traveling outward to Herod. They all appear to be trailing radioactive particles, indicating primitive anti em drives or perhaps fusion. The ships may be trivial, toys, like…”
“Yachts in a bathtub,” Stephanie Wing Feather suggested.
“Yes. If they are mere toys, then there is no longer spacefaring commerce in the Wormwood system…none that we can detect.”
“If there are any inhabitants, are they physical?” Martin asked.
“My guess is they are not. Not in discreet biological bodies, at any rate. All the moms’ profiles of other worlds and their development characteristics tell us that Nebuchadnezzar and Ramses are old, perhaps a billion years older than Earth, and that their civilizations, if any remain—if there are any intelligences in control of the planetary activity—have transferred to a non-biological matrix.”
“Perhaps they’ve fled Wormwood entirely,” Paola Birdsong suggested.
“Something’s going on down there,” Hakim said, the merest frown crossing his brow. “If the primary civilization has abandoned Nebuchadnezzar and Ramses, they’ve left machines to perform some task or other.”
“It doesn’t make sense. If nobody’s here, and if we destroy these worlds, what do we accomplish?” Ariel asked.
“I believe there are intelligences here,” Hakim said. “There is activity—it is just very low-key. Perhaps they have been hiding for a long time, and they are simply growing lax…”
Martin pondered this for a few seconds. “We go ahead,” he said. “We drop the planetary makers and doers, and if possible, we reconnoiter. Still no evidence of defenses?”
“None,” Hakim said.
“And the five masses inward from Nebuchadnezzar?”
“Still unknown,” Hakim said. “We’re giving them full priority now.”
The system of planets around Wormwood spanned fifteen billion kilometers, the major axis of the outermost planet’s orbit. The Tortoise would not resort to extreme acceleration except in an emergency, and that made the system as vast, with regards to their present flow of time, as the spaces between the stars. It could take them years to explore, reconnoiter…Or they could do their Job and get out as best they could, to rendezvous with Hare, and perhaps begin the new life.
Martin made his quarters small and spare, just large enough to suit two comfortably. He did not request many goods, hoping to set an example for the others.
There were still tough choices to be made, but they would not be made by vote of the children. The decisions were his alone now. The judgment had been passed; the system was condemned. But how much could they contribute to the total effort against the planet killers? How much could they learn here about the development and growth of such civilizations, about intelligences so inclined to destroy and murder?
If Wormwood contained clues to the morphology of such civilizations, Martin argued with himself that they had a duty to learn as much as they could, to help the Benefactors. That meant time, and study—and greatly increased danger.
“I’d like to speak with the War Mother,” he said to his wand. A few minutes later, the War Mother appeared at the hatch to his quarters, and he asked it to enter. The black and white paint on its surface had started to flake. They might have to renew it soon.
He expressed his thoughts about exploring in a few brief sentences, and asked for advice.
“Any knowledge gathered could be most useful,” the War Mother said. “Should we ever be in a situation to pass on what we learn to another Ship of the Law.”
“Would it be crucial?” Martin asked.
“That is impossible to judge until the knowledge is gathered.”
Martin smiled wryly, wondering why he engaged in such conversations at all. As Pan, it was all up to him—to his instincts, which Martin did not trust.
He bit his lip reflectively, sucking in a lungful of cool air. If things went bad on Mars and Venus, if the solar system was (or had been) attacked again and the Benefactors had lost, then the children and records of Earth contained within the Ships of the Law would be all that remained…
Far more than just their individual selves could be at stake. He wondered if, at some crucial moment, all Earth might scream through him, the world in his genes reaching up to his mind, the spirit of terrestrial creation demanding survival at any cost.
Martin sleeved sweat from his forehead.
I fear the ghost of Earth.
“Then we concentrate on doing the Job,” he said, “and we learn what we can.”
For once, he was grateful for the War Mother’s silence.
The Tortoise coasted more quietly than any stone. Within, the children prepared, watched, listened to the natural whickerings of Nebuchadnezzar and Ramses and Herod and the high buzz and squeal of Wormwood, tracked the slow courses of the tiny points of light that were ships.
Drifting, drifting, around the shallow well of Wormwood, across its vast gently curved prairie of gravitation.
The children became quieter, more somber.
Theresa and Martin still found occasion to make love, but the love was peremptory, more necessity than enthusiasm. Ramses, slightly larger than Nebuchadnezzar, had once been covered with thick volcanic haze, high in sulfuric acid, still evident in traces in its soil. Some internal anomaly—a huge undigested lump of uranium, perhaps—had kept it hot and heavy with volcanism even into its late old age. It had been tamed only by the action of civilization, perhaps from Nebuchadnezzar if that was where life had first formed around Wormwood—perhaps from Leviathan, the closest star system, or even Behemoth before it became a red giant.
Martin studied the search team’s reports on Nebuchadnezzar hour by hour. Hakim did not sleep; Martin ordered him to rest finally when he found Hakim
slumped on a ladder field, hardly able to move.
Down, down…
Time passed quickly enough, too quickly for Martin; there was no time to think the thoughts he needed to think, to reach the conclusions that had to be reached.
The purpose of their journey, perhaps the main purpose of their existence, approached all too rapidly.
The makers deposited in the pre-birth material around Wormwood converted rocky rubble into neutronium bombs sufficient to melt a single planet’s surface.
After reporting their status to Tortoise along channels mimicking the cosmic babble of distant stars, in low-information drones lasting hours, the makers became silent. Not even Tortoise could detect them, or learn where they were; the time for giving them alternate instructions had passed.
Whether Tortoise succeeded or not, the makers would stealthily drop their weapons into the system. The weapons’ journeys would take years…
Martin floated in a net beside Theresa. Both lay awake. For a long time—fifteen, twenty minutes—neither spoke, content, if that was the word, to merely stretch out next to each other, flesh warm against flesh, listening to their breath flow in and out.
“We’re doing it,” Martin said finally.
“You mean, it’s almost done,” Theresa said.
“Yes. The moms have trained us well.”
“To destroy.”
Martin snorted. “Destroy what? The Killers burned themselves out. Or they’ve left. How many thousands of years more advanced were they?” He snorted again, and stroked her arm. “Why did they kill Earth, when they still had their home worlds, and they couldn’t even fill them? Was it just greed?”
“Maybe it was fear,” Theresa said. “They were afraid we would send machines to kill them.”
“Everybody’s afraid in the forest,” Martin agreed. “Kill or be killed.”
“Kill and be killed,” Theresa said.
“I don’t like what I’ve become,” Martin said after a pause. “What I’m doing.”
“Do you like me?”
“Of course I do.”
“I’m doing the same thing.”
He shrugged, unable to explain the contradiction.
“Do you feel guilty?” Theresa asked.
“No,” Martin said. “I want to turn their worlds into slag.”
“All right,” Theresa said.
“Do you?”
“Feel guilty?”
“No. Want to watch.”
She didn’t answer for some time, her breath regular, as if asleep. “No,” she said. “But I will. For those who can’t.”
Falling, falling. Into the bright basement of Wormwood, around the furnace, a hundred million kilometers from Nebuchadnezzar, silent as a ghost, smaller than a midge, with snail-like slowness, observing, Hakim and his team concentrating on the five inner dark masses, Martin concentrating on the discipline, on the Job, keeping their minds tightly wrapped around this one thought.
Going from child to child, Wendy to Lost Boy, talking, encouraging, until his throat was hoarse and his eyes bleary; talking across the days to all at one time or another, maintaining the contact, as his father would have done, across that unreachable spatial and temporal gulf, where simultaneity had no meaning but in the deceived, dreaming mind.
All like a dream, eerily unreal; the new spaces of Tortoise working against their sense of having belonged, triply removed fron the realities their bodies had come to understand: Earth, Ark, Dawn Treader. They belonged nowhere but in their work.
Theodore Dawn would have hated this, Martin thought. He would have chafed at the single-minded life-in-illusion; he would have demanded some bridging truth, some connectedness of purpose between what they had once been, on the Ark, and were now, purpose and connection gone missing. He would have done poorly Martin thought; or he would have changed as they had changed, as Ariel had changed, subduing her obvious doubts, hardly ever complaining, drifting with them all on the descending sweep of Tortoise’s orbit.
Theodore would have done well, Martin thought later; better than I have done, he would have been chosen Pan, he would have this responsibility; he would miss his ponds and chaoborus, wonderfully glassy ugly denizens of Earth, but he would bear down and focus his energies. The children would respect him and he would not expect them all to like him.
The Earth did not speak for revenge. It spoke for survival.
Down, down.
Martin went from child to child through the Tortoise, the image of his father and mother leading, trying to be to the children what the moms could not.
Strangely, Martin found old experiences opening to him as he spoke to his shipmates, flowers of memory suddenly revived: sucking on his mother’s breast, the warm rich smell of her like roses in a gymnasium, the smile on her face as she looked on him, cradled in her arms, an all-approving smile the moms could not produce, all-forgiving, all-loving, the soft ecstasy of her milk letting down.
He remembered the discipline and love of his father, less gentle then his mother; the guilt of his father when he punished Martin, especially when Martin provoked a spanking; his father’s solemn depression for hours after, locking himself away from wife and son while his mother sat quietly with Martin. The later years, spankings much less frequent—none after he was six—and the days of togetherness in the summers before Earth’s death, after his father’s return from Washington, D.C., investigating the river in a raft, exploring the forest around the house, talking, his father taciturn and solemn at times, at other times ebullient and even silly.
Arthur’s love for Francine, filling Martin’s childhood as a constant like sunlight. Martin did not forget the arguments, the family disputes, but they were as much a part of the picture as wrinkles in skin or mountains on the Earth’s surface or waves on the sea…ups and downs of emotional terrain.
The memories helped Martin keep that sense of purpose they had had when they left the Ark and climbed out of the sun’s basement, up into the long darkness.
“We still haven’t found anything that is obviously a defense,” Hakim pronounced on the eighteenth day. The children of Tortoise floated around him in the cafeteria, listening to the latest search team report. “Planetary activity hasn’t increased or decreased. We haven’t been swept by electromagnetic radiation of any artificial variety we can detect. We seem to be catching them by surprise.”
Martin hung with legs crossed at the rear of the group, Theresa beside him. He laddered to the center of the cafeteria when Hakim had finished.
“We have some choices,” Martin said. “We can drop makers and doers into Nebuchadnezzar first, then the same to Ramses, and hope they find enough raw material to do the Job. Or we can convert all of our fuel and most of the ship into bombs and concentrate on skinning one planet. Because of the lack of volatiles, we probably can’t do much damage to more than one, not right away. Just to skin one planet will probably take most of our fuel and large chunks of Tortoise itself. Or we can sleep and wait for the makers and doers in the pre-birth cloud to send their weapons down.”
“Let’s vote,” Ariel said when he paused.
“No.” He shook his head patiently. “This isn’t a matter for voting.”
“Why not?” Ariel asked, her expression languid, without passion. We all wear killing faces. Faces showing nobody home, nobody responsible.
“Because the Pan makes all decisions now,” Stephanie Wing Feather reminded her.
Martin half-expected Ariel to leave the cafeteria in anger, but she did not. She relaxed her arms, closed her eyes, sighed, then opened them again and watched his face intently.
“This is a tough one,” Martin said. “If we wait long enough, we might learn whether we should hit Herod, or even focus on it. If there are no defenses, if the risk is low, we can suck out all of Nebuchadnezzar’s atmospheric volatiles before the planet is destroyed—much easier and faster than after blowing it up…“
“Strip the atmosphere…” Andrew Jaguar said, shuddering. “Like vampi
res.”
“We’re going to blow it to dust anyway,” Mei-li reminded him, small voice like a bird’s chirrup.
“Hakim, how close do we need to be to investigate?”
“I don’t think there’s any real gain from being closer than a few thousand kilometers. If need be, we can send out remotes at this distance and create a bigger baseline, gather as much information as we would if we flew right down to the surface…But obviously, we could make a bigger blip in whatever sensors they have.”
“What kind of baseline?” Martin asked.
Hakim conferred with his team for a few seconds. “We think at this distance, about ten kilometers. We could resolve down to bugs in the air, if there are any.”
“The makers and doers have to be delivered from a distance of no more than one hundred kilometers,” Stephanie said. “The bombships, fully fueled, have a range of forty g hours, and that can translate into however many kilometers of orbit we wish, if we’re patient…We know that none of us can live in a bombship for more than about four tendays without going crazy. We could induce sleep, but that wouldn’t be optimum.”
The parameters were now clear to all the children. Each advantage had to be weighed against risk; Martin had worked through the momerath days before, and found several courses equally matched for danger and benefit. Theresa had checked his calculations, as had Stephanie Wing Feather and, he presumed, Hakim Hadj.
“We send out remotes and expand our baseline,” he said. “That seems to involve the lowest risk. We can gather all the information we need in a few days. We pull in the remotes, coast in quietly, release the bombships, pick them up again after they’ve injected the weapons into Nebuchadnezzar, drop our doers to gather volatiles in the ruins, accelerate outward to Ramses as fast as possible, and execute again. If we haven’t found any further signs of activity on Herod, we rendezvous with the robots after a fast orbit around Wormwood. Then we measure our resources, report to Hare, drop doers to mine what few resources there are on Herod, and boost out. The best estimate for a rendezvous with Hare is two years. Another year to swing back to Wormwood to gather up the robots and their gleanings.”