Anvil of Stars

by Greg Bear

  The roles they played did not stray too far from truth, but reflected a mixing of cultures, human and Brother, still prickly with potential conflict—close enough to reality. Tensions were high and human tempers flared as they critiqued each other over long hours, working to perfect their act.

  In the charged atmosphere, the Brothers tended to separate without warning, forcing braids to chase down cords, bag them, and lock them in quiet rooms until reassembly occurred.

  Silken Parts apologized to Martin for the inconvenience and confusion; Martin, as always, held his irritation in check…Knowing that humans might do something similar at any time, fight with each other, break into tears, or worse.

  But the disassembling stopped after a few days, and the humans held together remarkably well.

  Trojan Horse/Double Seed put on scars from supernova damage: radiation erosion on its outer skin, a crippled drive motor, damaged electronics within. The ship manufactured convincing guns and lasers. Martin locked them away, with only himself and Eye on Sky given the combinations necessary to unlock them.

  He could hardly keep his eyes off the growing disk of Sleep, drawing faces in the lines of mountains, disquieting patterns in the broad seas. He imagined himself drifting on a raft down rivers a hundred kilometers wide, navigating twisty cracks in the crust between sheer walls of obsidian black and rust red…

  A day before noach cut-off with Greyhound, Martin spoke with Hans in private. “We’re doing well. We know our roles. Cham and Erin have worked up a primer of human-Brother history. It’s pretty entertaining. We’ll noach it to you…”

  “Anything for a little distraction,” Hans said. “Giacomo’s had a problem. I’d call it a nervous breakdown, but he says it’s just exhaustion. He’s still trying to riddle what Jennifer sent him.”

  “She wants to talk with him some more…”

  “We’ll be in blackout…He’s really out of it, Martin.”

  “What they’re doing might be important.”

  “I’d force him if I could, but he’s like a zombie. Anything more and he’ll break.”

  “Then she’s on her own for a while,” Martin said.

  Hans made an ambiguous humph. “I’m feeding you more data from our remotes. The whole system is a circus. Don’t tell anybody I said so, but I think we’ve more than met our match. The moms say they’re not going to confuse us with guesses.”

  “I just can’t figure any of it,” Hans said. “Wouldn’t it be safer for them to destroy all intruders and visitors? Especially after the supernova—they know something’s in the neighborhood.”

  “I’m willing to make some guesses,” Martin said. “I think they could have destroyed us already, but they’re keeping up appearances. If they don’t believe our disguise, they still can’t be positive it’s a disguise. Maybe they’re extra cautious, in case we’re backed up by something even more powerful.”

  But no amount of discussion could make them feel any more certain, or any easier.

  The ships’ distances grew and blackout with Greyhound, and then with Shrike, left them completely on their own.

  Jennifer began to brood, and spent most of her off-duty time in her quarters, shared with Erin Eire. Martin worried she was on the same course as Giacomo.

  The Brothers discovered chess, and it became a release for them. One entire day, all the Brothers aboard Trojan Horse played chess without eating or sleeping. Losing a game caused a humiliating shock and momentary separation; by the end of the day, to Martin’s surprise, cords were playing cords. The cords seemed much better at the game than braids, touching the projected pieces with their claws to make them move, minimized mentalities fully focused, undistracted by organized higher intelligence. So much for cords having no intellect, he thought.

  The first complete communication, face to face, began three days before entering orbit around Sleep. Martin and Eye on Sky stood on the bridge, a flat screen monitor hissing faintly in front of them, a video camera focused on them, befitting their level of technology. Martin almost felt at home with the equipment; like Trojan Horse/ Double Seed, this was something on a human scale, something he could imagine his own people building and doing.

  The standards for transmission had been established four days before. Communication had been sporadic since; a kind of formality, perhaps an interspecies shyness, wariness, keeping the channels of communication closed most of the time, except for essential information. At this distance, there was an hour delay.

  The speaker mounted beside the screen crackled faintly, and then fell into silence as a many-layered digital signal was received and translated. The cool, neutral voice spoke, musical and dry like wind-blown sand. Symbols and numbers passed across the screen, to be translated into final orbital adjustments.

  “We are speaking to you from the fourth planet,” the voice announced. “All is ready now. Our first meeting will occur in orbit. You will be fitted with apparel for a journey to the surface of the fourth planet, as agreed. We are ready to transmit picture as well as sound.”

  A vivid moving image appeared on the screen. The most human-like of their hosts’ species—the crested, pale green being first encountered on Earth as the Death Valley decoy—lifted its miter-shaped head. Three amber eyes arranged in a small triangle on the snout of the miter sank into flesh, reemerged in a kind of blink. The knobby shoulders behind the crest moved slowly back and forth. Two six-fingered hands gripped a bar before it.

  The miter-head shifted to one side. “We are anticipating a physical meeting, and have made equipment to prevent biological contamination. When you enter orbit around the fourth planet, we will learn the qualities of your atmosphere and chemistry, and suit our equipment to your needs. We will tell you how to put your weapons in our safe-keeping before you enter orbit.”

  Martin froze the last image of the miter-head creature and examined it thoughtfully, goosebumps rising on his arms. This one shape so symbolized deception and betrayal, but in fact on Earth this creature had spoken a kind of truth, as part of the deadly, playful testing of humanity: it had warned American scientists of coming destruction.

  They used it on Earth, they use it still, how many thousands of years since they launched the killer probes? No wasted effort; is their creativity depleted?

  The delay still prevented practical two-way communication, but Martin thought it best to maintain an atmosphere of ceremonial observance, as befitted a truly historical occasion: the first communication between intelligent species, for humans and Brothers, since their own meetings centuries in their fictitious past.

  The red light on their camera blinked and Martin took a deep breath and delivered his reply: “We are proud to be a part of this meeting. All individuals on Double Seed are prepared to follow your instructions. Your civilization seems much more capable than our own, and we entrust ourselves to your superior reasoning and technology.” Let them digest and react to humility—or abject innocence.

  He stepped aside and let Eye on Sky deliver his message in Brother audio language. Paola stood beside Martin and translated.

  “We are most impressed by your partnerships,” Eye on Sky said as the camera light blinked. “We have learned to work in partnership ourselves, two very different kinds of life and intelligence, and we have hopes of exchanging useful knowledge.”

  Hakim turned off the camera. “It is sending,” he said. Martin looked around the bridge at Brothers and humans, at the mom and snake mother out of camera range, soon to disappear into the ship’s fabric.

  Martin could not help thinking of themselves as sacrifices, less Trojan Horse than trussed lamb waiting for the knife.

  He was prepared for that. Death would bring certainty, even an ultimate relaxation. But too many others had gone before them to make the prospect of death in defeat attractive.

  William and Theresa. The five billion dead of Earth.

  The frozen image of the miter-head creature remained on the screen. Ariel floated beside Martin, swimming against the
air with gentle hand motions to stop her axial rotation. “We were taught to hate that thing on the Ark,” she observed. “I hope our hatred doesn’t show.”

  “Two hours until our next deceleration,” Cham said. “We’ll have to be ready—it’s going to be four g’s and no fields. A big burn.”

  Eye on Sky and Silken Parts deftly removed a cord apiece and set them down to play chess while they watched. Jennifer, George Dempsey, and Donna Emerald Sea also observed, faces dreamy.

  Jennifer said very little now but her eyes were large and her cheeks had hollowed; she slept fitfully, Erin said, and never more than an hour any given time before coming wide awake with a jerk, sometimes a little shriek.

  “What did the Killers do to your people when they came?” Ariel asked Dry Skin/Norman. So far, he was the only Brother who had taken a human name, and seemed the most willing to speak about Brother history.

  “We our worlds, already in space, already commerce between worlds, all knew when our moons were taken, planets injected. Death was large and quick. We we made our own escapes. The Benefactors found us and told us the Law.” Norman weaved a little, releasing a scent of almonds and turpentine: distressed grief. This was not something any Brother enjoyed talking about.

  “We know that much,” Ariel said. “But did they try to hide themselves, to…play with you?”

  Norman jabbed suddenly with his head at the projected chessboard, and the cords engaged in deep concentration jerked, clacked their claws in agitation, resumed. “No deception, no playing false,” Norman said.

  “I wonder why?” Ariel asked.

  “Why play cat and mouse with us, and not with you?” George Dempsey added.

  “Perhaps no learning in we us,” Norman said. “Perhaps they already met us our kind before, and knew enough.”

  “You were stronger and more developed than we were,” Cham said. “You actually got away from them.”

  “But we we hate this as much as you,” Norman said, “a hate to ungather a braid for multiple fury.”

  This was the first time Martin had heard a Brother speak of hatred. His face flushed and his heart raced, hearing these words; humans were not alone in their passions. “We’re partners,” Martin said. “We feel the same way.”

  “Cords have no hatred of abstractions,” Norman said. “We all we must take their example now. They play better chess, no fury, no hate. United, we we become weaker in some ways.”

  “Hatred is strength,” Cham said. “That’s what I feel. Without hating this…without hating them…” He bared his teeth like a wolf at the image on the screen. “Let’s not underestimate hating.”

  Norman weaved back and forth and made a smell like burning sugar and cut grass. “I we believe there is strength in you we we have not. I we say never these thoughts to others, but know we we worry them.”

  Paola questioned him in crude Brother audio, straining her voice to make the scrapes and tones and piped air hums.

  “Norman’s saying he thinks we might have done better in their situation. Our literature leads him to believe we’re better at getting angry. Better at killing.”

  “I we hope we can learn from you,” Norman said.

  “I we think we all our aggression suffices,” Eye on Sky said, watching his cord push a holographic bishop three squares diagonally.

  “How about names for these…creatures or beings or whatever?” Donna asked, breaking the awkward silence that followed. “I have one for it.”

  “What?” Paola asked.

  “Bishop vulture,” Donna said. “Sanctimonious diplomat, eater of carrion. Color of sick vomit.”

  “Yuck,” George Dempsey said.

  Jennifer came onto the bridge after a few hours’ absence, glanced at the chess game in progress, turned to Martin, and projected a series of charts with her wand.

  “They can project false light paths,” she said. “They can convert matter to anti-matter at billions of kilometers—maybe up to and beyond our noach limit—and they can disarm neutronium bombs. They have it all, or they want us to think they have it all.”

  “This is what you worked out with Giacomo?”

  “And with the ships’ minds.”

  “Then we can’t do anything to them.”

  The crew, human and Brother, fell silent.

  Jennifer stiffly turned her shoulders with her neck, looking at her crewmates apologetically. “Sorry,” she said. “Before the blackout, this is all we could figure, all we could deduce, given what we’re seeing.”

  “Any chance you’re wrong?” Ariel said.

  “Of course,” Jennifer said meekly. “We can always be wrong.”

  “You say the ships’ minds worked with you,” Cham said. “Do they agree?”

  “This last part I worked through on my own, after the blackout, after the moms went away, so I can’t be sure it would agree,” Jennifer said.

  “Then there’s some hope?” Paola asked plaintively. The Brothers remained silent, weaving like grass in a soft breeze.

  Jennifer bit her lip. “I’m not perfect at this sort of thing,” she said.

  “But you’re damned good,” Cham said.

  Martin reached for the last thread before the void, if only to keep the crew from something they did not need at all: complete despair. “Can the ships’ minds—on Greyhound or Shrike—learn from this…advance our technology, add to our defenses, our weapons?”

  Jennifer seemed grateful for the suggestion. “That’s what we were…I mean, we wouldn’t figure this out just to show everybody things were hopeless. We can’t do anything on Trojan Horse, but I’m hoping Giacomo and the ships’ minds, and all the others Tears broke from her eyelids and drifted in front of her face. She batted at them absently. “There just isn’t much time, and we could have figured wrong so many different ways.”

  “But there’s hope,” Paola persevered. “Real hope.”

  Jennifer looked at Martin, saw the beseeching in his eyes, and said, “I think so. I haven’t given up.”

  They endured the four-g deceleration for a day. They had created liquid-filled couches for these times; Martin and all the humans kept to their couches and tried to sleep through it. The Brothers’ cords clutched their rings.

  Orbital insertion was now assured without any further action.

  The craft that came alongside a day before they entered orbit gleamed white as snow, a sand-blasted, spherical purity of forty or fifty meters.

  The dry voice and image of bishop vulture instructed them, and they pushed their made-up weapons through the mechanical airlock.

  The sphere opened a black mouth and swallowed the weapons like a big fish after a school of sprat. Its brightness dulled to charcoal gray; almost lost against the stars, visible only as shadow, it slipped away.

  “Nothing lost,” Eye on Sky said. “They were not good weapons. They gave no comfort.”

  Actually, to Martin, holding a laser rifle had afforded a kind of comfort. He hadn’t held an actual gun since target shooting with his father when he was seven; the smooth gunmetal blue and gray lines of the laser rifle, though cinematic, had at least given him the sensation, however illusory, of doing something for immediate defense.

  None of the weapons had ever been fired. Compared to the ability to control mass at billions of kilometers, a high-powered laser beam and chemical kinetic bullets seemed less than a stone axe against an atomic bomb.

  One of the cords died playing chess. It belonged to Sharp Seeing. A brief ceremony was held before the Brothers, alone in their quarters, ate it, separating into their own cords to do so. After, with only twelve hours to go before orbiting Sleep, Sharp Seeing explained that the cord had died of frustration, facing potential checkmate and unable to find an escape. “I we begin to think perhaps this game is bad,” Sharp Seeing said. The cord he had lost was not, so he claimed, an essential part.

  Paola was the only human allowed to attend the ceremony, after which she emerged both deeply moved, and very proud.

>   Sleep filled the screen in hypnotic detail. Hakim and Sharp Seeing busily gathered information, expressing each in his way the excitement of witnessing and recording such an extraordinary object.

  The fourth planet’s supply of internal heat was sufficient to keep its surface at a constant twenty degrees centigrade, except where molten material and hot gases leaked through, chiefly along the mountain ridges, which seemed to show where massive rocky plates ground against each other.

  The physics, as Hakim had already said, was incomprehensible, pointing to massive technological adaptations. Possibly the entire planet was artificial, but the crudity and violence of its design said otherwise…and there was no way to unravel the contradiction, given what they knew and what they could see.

  Sleep’s crudity lay in the uncertainty of its surface. With an area of thirty-two billion square kilometers, nine tenths of it under water, hundreds of millions of square kilometers of land churned in apparently useless turmoil. Angry black clouds rose where molten material flowed into the broad seas, rolling from the wall-like mountain ridges.

  The air was moist and high in carbon dioxide, low in oxygen. Martin thought it might be an atmosphere adapted for plants. Hakim and Sharp Seeing used the Double Seed’s primitive instruments to capture images of ocean-going forests of dark green, rising from the water like drifting continents, the largest of them wallowing for ten thousand kilometers across a smooth sea.

  Low, rounded quartz-like mountains punctuated the dark basaltic crust, topped by thick crests of pink and orange.

  “The colors are probably phosphates, volcanic sulfur compounds, and hydrocarbons,” Hakim said. “Wonderful sights, wonderful knowledge, but our instruments are so limited!”

  “Time for an open meeting, all of us, now,” Martin said.

  All twenty of the Double Seed’screw gathered in the cafeteria, humans and Brothers mingling easily.

  Eye on Sky and Martin floated at the center. Eye on Sky spoke first in a rich sequence of odors and sounds, head cords stretching wide, claws clicking for the third, almost musical component. Paola might have been able to understand some of this; to Martin, who knew only a few of the less sibilant sounds, the speech was interesting, but empty of meaning. Then Eye on Sky switched to English.