Anvil of Stars

by Greg Bear

  In the nose, Hakim slept while Li Mountain and Giacomo Sicilia tracked the corpse of Wormwood. In a few months, they would see the shroud of gas as no more than a blotch in the receding blackness.

  “Any sign of a neutron star?” Martin asked Li Mountain.

  “None,” she said. “Jennifer doesn’t think one will form. She thinks the star’s interior was deeply disturbed, that everything was flung out.”

  “It must have been quite a blast,” Giacomo Sicilia said. Almost as adept as Jennifer at momerath, he had replaced Thomas Orchard on the search team.

  There was little else for them to do but science, which Hakim enjoyed, but Martin found vaguely dissatisfying. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge was not their Job. But Hakim insisted that studying the corpse of Wormwood could teach them about Killer technology.

  They would be many months traveling to meet with the second ship; training was not an option in their present situation. Healing and reknitting the crew would be their major occupations.

  Martin recorded the figures with Giacomo, and stared back into the past, at the beautiful tendrils and shells of gas and dust.

  No sign of Killer activity around Wormwood.

  The tar baby was truly dead.

  The following months passed slow and hard in their dullness. The state of comparative luxury they had known before the Skirmish and the neutrino storm did not return; the solitary mom merely told them that the ship was damaged in ways not quickly mended. Food was nourishing but bland; access to the libraries was limited to text materials, and wand graphics were severely curtailed.

  Martin suspected the Ship of the Law had lost portions of its crucial memory, and was merely a shadow of its former self. The mom would not elaborate; it, too, seemed lost in a kind of dullness, and dullness was the order of things. In a way, Martin did not mind this difficulty; it gave them all plenty of time for thought, and he used that time.

  Hans was clearly made uneasy by it.

  The ex-Pans held colloquium every five days in his quarters.

  “I’d hate to be known as the exercise Pan,” Hans said. “We have three more months until we rendezvous with our new partners. We’ve done about all the science there is to do with Wormwood—at least, everybody has but Jennifer and Giacomo…We’re bored, there’s still only one mom, and that worries me. Am I right?”

  Hans had been asking that more and more lately: a slightly nasal Am I right? with one eyebrow lifted and a perfectly receptive expression. “We need some mental action, too. The ship isn’t going to be much help.” He looked to Cham, but Cham shrugged.

  “Martin?” Harpal asked.

  Martin made a wry face. “Without the remotes, we can’t learn much more about Leviathan.”

  “The food is dull,” Harpal offered. “Maybe we can cook it ourselves.”

  Joe Flatworm snorted. “The mom won’t let us near raw materials.”

  “Any suggestions, Joe?” Hans asked.

  “We’re stuck in a long dull rut,” Joe said softly. “We should be asleep.”

  “I’m sure if that were an option—“Martin began.

  “Yeah. The mom is concerned.” That was another phrase Hans used often now, and others in the crew had picked it up. The proper form was: stated problem or dissatisfaction; reply, Yeah, the mom is concerned.

  “I think we should—“Martin began again.

  “Slick worrying about the ship,” Hans said.

  “That wasn’t what I was—“

  “Fine,” Hans interrupted.

  “Goddammit, let me finish!” Martin shouted. Joe and Cham flinched, but Hans grinned, held up his hands, and shook his head.

  “You have the floor,” he said.

  “We can’t blame the ship for saving our lives,” Martin said, expressing not a shred of what he had meant to say, and now realized was useless to say under the present circumstances.

  “I don’t think any of us Pans have actively enjoyed our rank,” Hans said, drumming his fingers on the table between them. “Am I right? But I’m faced with problems none of you faced. Political problems. Psychological problems. We don’t have any real work to do. We have plenty of time on our hands. The only thing I can think of to keep us occupied is sports. I don’t like it, but there it is.”

  Cham raised one hand to shoulder level.

  “Yes?”

  “We should begin thinking about after,” he said.

  “After what?”

  “After the Job is done. We should work on a constitution. Laws, and so on. Get ready for when we look for another world…”

  Hans considered with a thoughtfulness that somehow did not convince Martin. “Right,” he said. “Joe, get on it. Cham, for your sins, organize some games and competitions. Start with races from nose to tail, like we used to do. Think up rewards. Shake them up, get their blood moving. Martin, perhaps you should work on intellectual games…More your speed, no? Get together with Hakim. Jennifer. Whoever. Competition. If we’re cast on our own resources, we have to be resourceful.”

  Am I right? Martin predicted. Hans smiled and said nothing.

  Rosa Sequoia sat comfortably in the middle of thirty-two of the crew—a broad selection, including Erin Eire and Paola Birdsong. Martin stood to one side of the schoolroom, listening, observing.

  With all of her words, she made gentle, sweeping hand gestures, drawing in but not demanding or assertive. Her voice soothed, low and soft, yet authoritative. Something had come together for her, Martin saw; and her newfound grace and ease of expression worried him. A special time.

  Hans entered behind him, leaned against the wall next to Martin, nodded in greeting, folded his arms, and listened.

  “…To have lost the home we all cherished, we all grew up with, is like the farmer who lost his farm, when the wind came and blew it away. One day he awoke and walked out his door to see barren dirt, the crops smashed flat, dead and brown, and he told himself, ‘I have worked this land all my life, why didn’t the wind take me as well? This farm is like an arm or a leg to me—why wasn’t 1 snatched away with it?’”

  Martin listened intently, waiting to see if Rosa’s fairy tale or parable or whatever it was came close to those he had experienced in the volumetric fields.

  Rosa looked down, lowered her arms as if resting. “The farmer became bitter. He thought he would fight the wind. He built walls against the wind, higher and higher, making them out of the dust and straw and the mud that ran in rivers across the dead fields. But the wind knocked the walls down, and still the farmer was alive. The wind took his family one by one, and still the farmer lived, and cursed the wind, and finally he began to curse the Maker of Winds—“

  “He became a wind breaker!” Rex Live Oak called out.

  Rosa smiled, unperturbed. “He tried magic when the walls wouldn’t work. He chanted against the wind, and sang songs, and all the while, he grew to hate the land, the wind, the water. He cursed them all and he became more and more bitter, until it seemed bad water ran in his veins, and his mind was poisoned with hate and fear and change. He no longer missed his family; he no longer missed the farm. It seemed nothing meant anything to him but revenge against the wind—“

  “Sounds subversive to me,” Hans whispered to Martin.

  “And he grew thinner and thinner each day, more and more wrinkled, until he looked like a dead stalk of corn—“

  “I don’t remember what corn looked like, growing on a stalk,” Bonita Imperial Valley said. “I grew up in a farm town, and I just don’t remember”

  “He couldn’t remember, either,” Rosa continued smoothly. “He couldn’t remember what the crops looked like, or what had been important to him. He fought the wind with the only weapon he had left, useless empty words, and the wind howled and howled. Finally, the farmer became so bitter and dry and dead inside, the wind sucked him up through the air like a leaf. He lived inside the wind, empty as a husk, and the wind filled his dry lungs, and reached into his dry stomach, and then into his dry, rattlin
g head.”

  “So what’s the point?” Jack Sand asked, looking around the assembled group with a puzzled expression.

  “It’s a story,” Kimberly Quartz said. “Just listen.”

  “I don’t listen to stories unless they have a point. It’s a waste of time,” Jack said. He got up and left, glancing at Hans and Martin and shaking his head.

  “In the wind,” Rosa continued, hardly missing a beat, “the farmer knew what he was up against, and that he had no power. He stopped cursing and he started listening. He stopped resisting—I mean, how can you resist something so powerful?—and he began to live in the wind, as part of the howl and the whirl and the swirling. He saw other people in the wind—“

  Hans motioned for Martin to follow him outside. Martin walked through the door and they stayed in step down the corridor, past Jack Sand, past Andrew Jaguar and Kirsten Two Bites.

  Out of the others’ hearing, Hans said, “When I was a little kid, back on Earth, my folks took television and video games away from me for a week to punish me for something I did. I went nuts. I even started to read books. Well,” he said, “our TV’s gone now. Rosa is better than nothing.” He shook his head. “But not much.”

  “Did you slick Paola Birdsong?” Ariel asked. Martin picked up his tray of food and walked away from her, face pinking.

  “Did you?” she asked innocently, following with her own tray. He sat, got up when she sat next to him, moved to another table, started to get up again as she kept pace with him, and finally dropped the tray a few inches to the table, slapped the tabletop once with his fist, and said, “Who the hell cares?”

  Martin ate and tried to ignore her.

  “I’m not trying to be nosy,” Ariel said. “I want to know what it means to be devoted to someone for a long time, even after they’re dead.”

  Martin found the situation intensely uncomfortable. “I’d like to eat in peace,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I’m bothering you. I apologize.” She got up, carried her tray out of the cafeteria, and left him feeling guilty, mad, and confused.

  That sleep, he cried again, thinking of Theresa, but he did not remember any dreams.

  Two moms appeared in the schoolroom for the next crew tenday report. There had been no announcement, no fanfare, but the crew cheered, taking it as a sign that things were improving. Hans announced the results of the previous day’s nose-to-tail races. Hakim had five minutes to squeeze in a report on science.

  Jennifer Hyacinth came up to Martin after the meeting.

  “Maybe you’d like to be in on what we’re doing,” she said. She sounded almost conspiratorial, but he could not imagine Jennifer involved in intrigue.

  “About what?” he asked.

  “The noach. We’re having a little conference to share results.”

  “Oh.” He had planned to attend the next trial for the main race, but that was certainly trivial enough to ignore. “Sure,” he said.

  “In the nose in ten minutes. Hakim Hadj, Giacomo Sicilia and Thorkild Lax are coming.”

  “I’ll be there,” he said.

  Hakim, Giacomo, Thorkild and Jennifer had formed a Noach Studies Society some tendays before. Martin had not attended the meetings—they were reportedly dry and mathematical, the chief excitement being momerath challenges.

  The reports were wrong.

  Jennifer, with Giacomo’s help, had put together a comprehensive description of how the noach could work, how matter could change character under the influence of noach-transmitted information, and what that meant for the ultimate shape of Benefactor society as they imagined it.

  Hakim spent a few minutes projecting graphics for Martin, filling him in on the key points.

  Jennifer and Giacomo held hands and contemplated momerath until the meeting was convened by Thorkild.

  “We’ve been trying to piece together an overview of Benefactor technology,” Thorkild began. “Jennifer’s done most of the tough work, laying a foundation for the rest of us. Giacomo has erected the frame on that foundation…”

  Giacomo smiled.

  “You might say they work together intimately,” Thorkild added. Hakim clapped his hand on Giacomo’s shoulder as if in congratulations. Jennifer’s face remained set in solid neutrality, but her eyes flashed.

  “Hakim has put on the siding and I’ve painted,” Thorkild concluded. “Mind you, none of what we’ve come up with has much meaning for our mission. It’s all theoretical—“

  “I disagree,” Jennifer said.

  “Which I was about to add,” Thorkild said.

  “I think it could have a lot of meaning for the Job,” Jennifer said. “We were caught by surprise when the Killers converted our craft to anti em. We assume the moms were caught by surprise. The more we can guess about the technology and theory behind our weapons, the more we can contribute to planning.”

  Martin rubbed his nose. “So what’s the house look like?”

  Hakim projected a list. “First, the noach—instantaneous communication at a distance. This is made possible by confusing two particles—in this case, atomic nuclei—into ‘believing’ that they are the same. Second, actually creating a particle at a distance—deluding the matrix into believing that a particle exists at a certain position, and has a certain history attached. This could be how fake matter is created—resistance to pressure, but no resistance to acceleration; extension, but no mass.”

  “Noach could be the key to all of this,” Jennifer said. “To send a noach message, you have to confuse a particle’s bit makeup, its self-contained information about character, position and quantum state.”

  “What do you mean by a particle ‘believing’ something?” Martin asked.

  “The particle’s bit makeup determines its behavior,” Hakim said. “’Behavior’ is a bad word, like belief. We do not think particles are alive or think. But they do exhibit simple behavior, of course—a nature or character, which is the same for all similar particles, and a history in spacetime.”

  “Given that,” Martin said, “how do we get to the rest of the abilities in this list?”

  “To create fake matter,” Giacomo said, “basic elements in the matrix are convinced they have some of the properties of matter. To noach messages, you tamper with the privileged channels used by particles to convince one particle at some distance to believe it is the same, or in resonance with, another particle under our local control.

  “There could be several ways to convert a particle to an anti-particle. A boson, approaching a particle, carries information from its source, some of which has already been conveyed by information following so-called privileged bands. The boson also conveys energy, which acts on the particle’s data, changing a particular bit sequence.”

  “Energy is information?” Martin asked.

  “Energy is a catalyst for information change. It’s information in only a limited sense. To convert a particle to an anti-particle, you can change its bit makeup either by perverting the privileged band information, say by sending it a boson tailored to react falsely, which might compel it to switch a series of bits to be consistent, or by creating a resonance with outside anti-particles.”

  “Resonance…?”

  “Imposing the data of an anti-particle on a particle in another position by making them congruent, coextensive,” Hakim said. “It is similar to how the noach works.”

  “We think,” Jennifer cautioned.

  Martin could not keep up with their projected momerath, or even all of their explanations. “I’ll have to take some of this on faith,” he said wearily.

  “Oh, please no,” Hakim said. “Work it out for yourself, in private. We may be wrong, and we need criticism.”

  “Not from me, I’m afraid.”

  “We are all out of our depth here, actually,” Hakim said. “We must not accept this as anything more than playful theory.”

  Martin poked at a few expressions in the momerath that he could just begin to riddle. “Would they have to have a l
ot of anti em to convert something else to anti em—match a mass particle for particle?”

  “We do not think so,” Hakim said. “In Jennifer’s momerath, a single particle could be used as template to confuse and convert many other particles. Possibly, simply knowing the structure of a particle would be enough.”

  “Even at a distance,” Thorkild said.

  “But just how it’s done, we haven’t a clue,” Jennifer said. “The difference between theory and application.”

  “Oh,” Martin said.

  “Neat, huh?” Thorkild asked.

  Martin closed his eyes and shook his head.

  After, Martin sat alone in an empty quarters space, dabbling with the momerath but not able to concentrate on it, thinking instead about how much the crew had changed in just a few months. They acted like passengers enduring hard times on a down-on-its-luck cruise ship, or like students in a particularly lax high school with a principal too hip for their own good.

  He longed for time to speed up, for the rendezvous to occur, for anything to happen that was significant and not theoretical.

  Rosa’s story-telling improved.

  The races were concluded, with Hans pitting himself against the fastest of ten trials, Rex Live Oak, and winning by two seconds, the races being run nose to tail within the ship. Hans was inordinately proud of the victory, and took two Wendys to his quarters after for a private freeforall, the first partners he had taken since becoming Pan.

  Martin did not notice who the Wendys were; he had tired of the growing reliance on gossip for excitement. He did not care who Hans was slicking, or whether Hans had stolen Harpal’s love interest, or who was going to attempt Rosa soon.

  Rosa, thinner by five kilos, face austere and happy at once, was becoming, for Martin, the most interesting and at the same time the most disturbing person aboard Dawn Treader.

  Martin came to the nose when it was empty and collapsed the star sphere to see the outside universe without interpretation. The stars ahead had not yet changed noticeably; bright, frozen forever against measureless black.