by Greg Bear
Hans ordered the crew into the schoolroom and fell silent, sitting beside the star sphere, watching with half-lidded eyes as things beyond his command and control—beyond his comprehension—began to happen.
Martin sat nearby, his body frightened but his mind too lost in sorrow to care what would happen next. He watched Rosa Sequoia, who squatted in an awkward lotus in one corner, rocking gently, eyes closed. He envied her personal treasure of spiritual solace, her ability to be lost in an inner reality that did not match the external. What had she found, that Martin would never find?
The images in the star sphere conveyed only an abstract meaning. What were the energies of a dying star if not incomprehensible? A human life—all their lives—could be snuffed with a paltry fraction of the energy about to be released.
They had climbed to the top of an enormous wave, years before, and now the wave crashed down, and any slight bubble in that foaming maelstrom would be sufficient to snuff their candles utterly and completely, forever darkness, no amens.
The peculiarity of Martin’s state of mind was that he did not so much think these things as feel them, joined to his body’s fear like an anatomical footnote.
Fear made its own opiate. Emotions cannot ride forever at high intensity; within an hour, terror declined to numbness, with clear and selfless perception. Certainty of death was replaced by light curiosity, an intensity of unattached thought impossible only a few minutes before.
Scattered parts of his overwhelmed self made ironic commentary: This is the dark night of the soul Not hardly, this is just panic carried to its extreme Look at them they do not experience this the way you do They must They must
Visceral moans filled the schoolroom as they felt the fields lock down. Martin’s body tingled and all internal motions slowed.
Waves of darkness passed as the fields subdued their eyes, all their physical senses.
Yet something remained. What could possibly be left to him? Undefined memory, perhaps an illusion; who could say where that memory began? During their sequestering, or after, as a balancing of his brain’s chemical bookkeeping…
What he later remembered was a fairy tale thread of personal continuity, all thought reduced to parable, and an extraphysical awareness of the star in its last stages. That such memory and perception were not possible did not make it less compelling.
Wormwood blossomed like a daffodil with twin streamers of intense blond hair and a sigh of neutrinos, phantom particles now in such numbers they blew millions of times stronger than hurricane winds above the tingling in his body, the battle of the neutrinos to change his chemistry, pushing denser than matter through the ship; a subtle whisper of persuasion, like a crowd of autistic children never heard, never seen, suddenly screaming in his ear at once, the silent ones of space and time gaining a voice in their liberation, that voice changing from a whisper to a propulsive scream the remade Dawn Treader having reached a point above the southern pole of the star allowed itself to be pushed, very slowly at first, its own fuel depleted, on the rush of neutrinos, its crew held in place against the persuasion of those winds, against the subnuclear argument for deadly change, accepting only the force and not the persuasion
The fox speaks with the hurricane and says, “I need to travel far and fast. Can you take me?” The hurricane regards the puny fox with its huge, calm eye and asks, “What can you do for me?” “Why, I will let you whisper your dreams to me.” “But I must kill whatever I carry. You are a living thing and do not wish to die.” “If you do not kill me, I will listen to your inmost self, and tell all the animals, that they may feel sympathy for you.” “What do I care for sympathy? I am all-powerful.” “Yes, but someday, your winds will die, and my kits will tell this tale even when you are gone, of the time great-great-great-grandfather fox was carried by the winds and lived and learned their secrets.” “But then they will not be afraid of me, and what good am I if I do not inspire fear?” “Oh, no living thing could ever be so strong they would not fear you. I give you something more. I give you a voice throughout time that is more than a wordless bellow of rage.”
Dawn Treader spiraled through the plumes of gases rising south from Wormwood’s pyre, and gathered fuel. It scooped hundreds of thousands of tons of hydrogen and helium and lithium, compressing them, storing them in envelopes around its waist as a bee stores pollen.
There was a kind of joy in its flight away from the dying system; it had subverted the last-ditch attempt by the Killers. The Killers’ trap became a cornucopia.
The crew spent a silent, still year in the schoolroom, another chunk of time reassigned.
Behind them, receding into a reddened hole, Wormwood’s nebula engulfed the system’s farthest reaches. All traces of ancient crimes were obliterated; planets, orbital warning systems, clouds of depleted pre-birth material, needle ships.
The tar baby burned to cosmic ash. That alone was worth their deaths, but they did not die.
The ash of gases flowed around and ahead of them and they breathed their fill, as a drowning man draws long, grateful breaths of air.
Martin accepted a glass of water from Hakim.
Ten bodies lay in parallel around the outer perimeter of the schoolroom. Hans stood over them, chin in hand, silent, as he had stood for the last half-hour. Every few minutes he would shake his head and grunt, as if in renewed astonishment. The new dead, Jorge Rabbit, David Sasquatch, Min Giao Monsoon, Thomas Orchard, Kees North Sea, Sig Butterfly, Liam Oryx, Giorgio Livorno, Rajiv Ganges, Ivan Hellas. The bodies bore no marks of violence but for faint purple blotches visible on the face and hands; they lay with eyes closed.
They had died in confinement.
Twenty-three of the survivors kneeled by the bodies, still dazed.
With a start, Martin realized they were standing in full gravity. The Dawn Treader accelerated again.
“How did this happen?” he asked, throat still dry and sore.
Hakim drank deep from his bulb of water. “Their volumetric fields must have weakened…Neutrino flux may have transmuted some of their elements. They were poisoned, or perhaps just…” He swallowed. “Burned. I have only looked at them briefly. There are no moms to talk with.”
“The moms couldn’t keep them alive?”
Hakim shook his head.
Rosa Sequoia walked among the crew, making weird and meaningless hand-gestures that most of the others ignored. Jeanette Snap Dragon and Kimberly Quartz followed her, heads bowed.
Cham approached Martin and pointed to Sig Butterfly’s body, still and gray in the lineup. “One of our own,” he said.
“They’re all our own,” Martin said.
“That’s not what I mean.” Cham screwed up his face. “We’re losing the experience of our own leaders. We should arrange a full enquiry. We need to know what happened. Why the moms failed us again.”
“I don’t think they failed us,” Martin said. “We’re here. Most of us are alive.”
“We need to know the facts,” Cham said, getting more irritated.
“I agree,” Martin said. “But Hans is Pan, and he calls the shots now.”
“Not if he’s too stunned to move,” Cham said. “Where’s Harpal?”
They looked for the Christopher Robin, but he was not in the schoolroom. Most of the surviving crew had gone elsewhere, perhaps to recover in privacy. Martin itched to get things moving, but he resisted. “I’ll find Harpal,” he said. “Hakim, tell Hans we need to inspect the nose and the star sphere.” He pointed with his chin. “Let’s give him something concrete to think about.”
“Then I will gather the search team,” Hakim said.
The ship’s corridors smelled cooked, as if a fire had swept through the Dawn Treader while they were in confinement. The neutrino storm of dying Wormwood had done them more damage than Martin had first guessed; and that meant their escape had been something new for the moms, something experimental.
They could have lost many more.
I should be arranging for
the burial of the bodies, Martin thought. The moms had always disposed of bodies before; why were they left out in the open now?
He stopped in a corridor and referred to his wand. Where were the moms? He called for one. None appeared. The wand itself acted fitfully, its projections weak and flickering.
He waited several minutes, beginning to shiver with a new fear: that the ship itself had suffered substantial damage, that its resources were diminished, that they might all die in a vessel without a ship’s mind or the moms.
He was about to continue toward Harpal’s chambers when a mom floated into view several meters ahead of him. “Thank God,” Martin said. He embraced the robot gently, as if it might shatter. The mom did not react to his relief.
“I’m looking for Harpal,” Martin said. “We have a lot of organizing to do, a lot of…psychological work.”
“A description of damage is necessary,” the mom said. “We will present an assessment before the entire crew.”
“The bodies…”
“We cannot recycle for the time being. Repair work is under way now. Some of our facilities are limited or inoperative until the work is done. The dead will be kept in fields—“
Martin shook his head and held up his hand, not wanting—perhaps incapable—of hearing the minute details. “We just need reassurance,” he said. “There could be a bad reaction if we don’t have a meeting soon.”
“Understood,” the mom said.
“Where is Harpal?”
“He is in the tail,” the mom said.
“I’ll go get him.”
Ariel came up behind them, sidled around the mom as if it were a wall, looked directly at Martin. “Hans is fuguing out,” she said. “He’s scaring the crew. Let’s find Harpal, and fast.”
They walked aft, not speaking until they were in the spaces of the second homeball. Here, the peculiar singed odor was even stronger. Ariel wrinkled her nose. “Are we as bad off as it smells?” she asked.
“You heard what the mom said.”
“You know how I feel about the moms,” Ariel said.
Martin shrugged. “They saved us.”
“They put us down there in the first place. How grateful should I be that they got us out?”
“We chose—“
“Let’s not argue,” Ariel said. “Not while Hans is sucking his thumb and Rosa is back there acting like a priestess. We have to move, or we’re going to be in more trouble than we ever imagined—our own kind of trouble. The moms aren’t going to pull us out of a fugue. They don’t know how.”
“Hans isn’t sucking his thumb,” Martin said. “He’s…putting it all together.”
“You sympathize with everyone and everything, don’t you?” Ariel said. She smiled as if in admiration, and then the smile took on a tinge of pity.
Harpal Timechaser looked at them with a frightening blankness as they approached. He had hidden in a dense tangle of pipes.
Martin’s temper had worn thin; now he was angry at Harpal, angry at everybody, not least angry at this woman who mocked him at every step and followed him for reasons he couldn’t understand.
“What is it?” Harpal asked too loudly, as if using the question as a wall or a defense.
“We have to get the crew together,” Ariel said before Martin could speak.
“Slick it,” Harpal said. “We could have died. We could have bought it while stuck in those god damned fields.”
“Most of us survived,” Martin said.
“Jesus, I was right next to Sig,” Harpal said. “It’s never been that close for me. Whatever cooked him could have cooked me.”
“I was next to Giorgio Livorno,” Ariel said. “The moms have some explaining to do.”
“The ship is damaged,” Martin said.
“Tell them to fucking get it over with!” Harpal screamed, tears streaking his cheeks. “Nobody should have died, or we all should have died!”
Martin and Ariel stood among the thick twisted pipes, the silence interrupted only by Harpal’s faint, constrained, helpless weeping. Ariel glanced at Martin, put on a resigned look, and went to Harpal. She wrapped him in her arms and rocked him gently, eyebrows arched, lips puckered as if to croon a reassuring song to a child, and she meant it.
Martin was impressed. He could not have predicted this nurturing side of Ariel.
His wand chimed. The communications at least worked now. He answered and heard Cham.
“We’ve got problems,” Cham said. Noise in the background; Hans shouting, weeping. “Hans is freaking.”
Harpal wiped his face and pulled from Ariel’s embrace. “Shit,” he said. “Time to zip it.” He crawled out of the curl of pipe. They laddered forward.
When they got to the schoolroom, Hans had left for his quarters. The ten bodies had been rearranged haphazardly on the floor, as if kicked. Five of the crew, including Jeanette Snap Dragon and Erin Eire, wore bruised faces. Half the crew had left. Martin felt sick foreboding; this was the beginning of something Theodore had talked about long ago, something Martin had refused to consider possible: the breaking strain.
Rosa Sequoia had stayed. Hans had not touched her. Now that Harpal, Hans, and Ariel reappeared, she carefully rearranged the bodies, positioning their arms and legs, closing eyes that had opened, straightening the overalls.
Watching her pushed Martin very close to the edge, and he pulled himself back with considerable effort, swallowing, pinching his outer thigh until he bruised.
“What happened?” Harpal asked.
Cham nursed a cut cheek. “Wendys started mourning. Rosa led them. Hans told them to stop. They kept on, and a few Lost Boys joined in, started weeping, carrying on, and Hans…kicked them. David Aurora fought back and Hans really laid into him. David—“
“Where is he?” Ariel asked.
“He’s fine. Cut, bruised, but as I was saying, he got some good licks in. Hans pulled out.”
“Where is Aurora?” she asked again.
“In his quarters, I assume.”
Martin could hardly bring himself to move. He shivered suddenly, casting away the paralysis of fugue, and said to Ariel, “Get water and make some bandages and help Rosa nurse the crew. Keep her away from the bodies.”
“Right,” Ariel agreed.
“I’m not Pan,” Martin said, as if to make that clear; the crew in the schoolroom had focused on him with expectation when he spoke. “Harpal, find Hans and let’s get all the past Pans together. I want a mom there.”
“Who’s ordering what?” Harpal asked, neither grim nor accusing.
“Sorry.”
“Understood,” Harpal said. “Let’s go.”
Ariel gently coaxed Rosa away, speaking to her softly; was she trying to impress him? He could not deal with that now. He allowed himself a few seconds of closed eyes, trying to push Theresa’s remembered features into a complete portrait. The pieces would not combine.
He followed Harpal.
Hans had not locked his door. They entered his quarters, prepared for anything but what they found. He sat in the middle on a raised section of floor, sipping from a bulb of water, and greeted them with a weak smile.
“I’ve really slicked it,” he said, almost cheerfully.
“That you have,” Harpal agreed.
“Are you going to vote me out?” Hans asked.
“Why did you do it?” Martin asked.
Hans looked away. “They started keening. Women and men. I couldn’t believe it, coming out and finding bodies. It was more than I could take. I’m sorry.”
“Say it to them,” Martin said.
“I’m saying it to you.”
Cham and Joe Flatworm entered. “You bastard,” Joe said. “You slicking bastard. We should kick you out now. Give it back to Martin and stick you away like a rat.”
Hans’ face flushed and his jaw muscles tightened but he did not say anything, or move from his seat.
“We’ve all gone through hell,” Martin said, feeling how pitifully reduced the
Dawn Treader’s group of leaders had become, and so quickly. “Hans agrees to apologize.”
“Apologize hell. He should resign. Martin, you take the title again.”
“No,” Martin said. “Hans, convince us. Now.”
“I don’t know if I want this mess on my head,” he said lightly, standing and stretching his arms. “I’m giving serious thought to the old Big Exit. Cut my wrists and be done with it.” He glanced at Martin. “The moms don’t seem to give a slick what we do. We’re just tools.”
“I’m not satisfied,” Joe said. He seemed on the verge of punching Hans; his arms crooked, fists clenched, chin thrust out.
“All right,” Harpal said. “Stop this shit now and talk straight. Hans, tell us what you’re going to do. And don’t flex your ego.”
Hans shrunk a bit at Harpal’s tone and unyielding choice of words. “I’ll pick it up again,” he said. “I know we’re in trouble if we let it slide now. Bigger responsibilities.”
“Good for a start,” Harpal said. “What else?”
“I’ll do penance,” Hans said. “I’ll put myself in solitude for a week after we get back on our feet. I’ll tell the children—“
“Crew,” Martin said.
“I’ll tell the crew. If…“
“If what?” Joe shot back.
“I want the mourners to spend time in solitude, as well. A day. The ones who set me off.”
“That’s crap,” Joe said.
“That’s how they coped,” Harpal said.
“I have a different way of coping…” Hans began, but let it go with a shrug. “All right. Just myself. In solitude for a week. I’m still Pan, I still give the orders. I agree to that, too. Harpal, can I lean on you for help—lean hard?”
“I’ll do whatever I can,” Harpal said.
“That’s all I ask,” Hans said.
We start fresh now, Martin thought, and with that thought came a kind of relief. They had cut cleanly from the disastrous past. In a way, Hans had taken the perfect course, allowing a clean break, expiation by the leader, a new game starting from this point.
If Hans had known this from the beginning, from the time he had come out of confinement—if Hans had planned this—then he was far more canny than anybody had given him credit for.