Anvil of Stars

by Greg Bear

  I’ll call him Babar, Martin thought, and held his jaws together tightly to keep from laughing. He couldn’t believe they had traveled for centuries, across so many hundreds of trillions of kilometers, to stand in this place, in this situation, meeting layer upon layer of lies with more lies. It was comic in an acutely painful way.

  William and Theresa and Theodore and so many others had died to bring them here; had been killed by these things, or by their higher authority.

  Eye on Sky said nothing, deferring to Martin. Martin wondered what the Brothers were thinking, but he could not turn back now. “That seems to be the rule,” he answered. “We appreciate your not harming us.”

  “It would not be courteous,” Salamander said. “Do you understand the intentions of your creators?”

  “If you’re asking whether we can…discuss issues with you, make decisions, the answer is yes, to a limited degree.”

  “Are your superiors in this vicinity, within our planetary system?” Frog asked.

  “No,” Martin said.

  “Are they listening through you?”

  “Not directly,” Martin said.

  “Can you provide a more direct means of communication, to allow more rapid agreement?”

  “No,” Martin said.

  “This much all seems true,” the elephantoid babar said. “Are you tiring, or do you wish to make preliminary agreements now?”

  “Let’s get something agreed to now,” Martin said.

  “We feel it is best, if you are prepared, to meet directly with our creators, that you may carry more accurate knowledge to your own.”

  Martin could not speak for a moment. Eye on Sky swiveled his broad head, cords held tightly together in a defensive posture, and said to Martin, “We we are ready.”

  “All right,” Martin said, ant in kitchen, diapered infant on a diplomatic mission. “Let’s meet them.”

  The white walls bent inward and sank out of sight.

  The five representatives moved closer to the humans and Brothers.

  “This is not dangerous,” the babar said in its high, irritating voice, “but it is difficult to fold one’s thoughts around, even if you have witnessed it before.”

  “This fourth world is a home and reservoir,” Salamander said. Martin much preferred listening to the bishop vultures. “Our creators live inside, in layers around the dense core, where there is much flow of energy.”

  “Did they always live here?” Paola asked.

  “Since we have existed,” Frog said.

  “How long is that?”

  “Two thousand years by your measure,” Salamander said.

  The killer probes may have been made long before that, Martin thought.

  The red circle appeared again, larger this time, and gracefully dropped to the floor of the tunnel. The edge of the circle rested less than two meters from Martin’s feet.

  “I reassure you, there is no danger,” Salamander said. “We will witness a part only of one of our creators.”

  The floor vibrated as if with the passage of a train. Something shimmered within the red circle. The shimmer extended into a tube rising to the top of the tunnel. The red circle vanished, Within the shimmer lifted a multi-colored brightness, dazzling in the tunnel’s obscurity.

  The brightness took a helical form, like a staircase of light. Along its length dripped brilliant colors, yellows and oranges dominant, as if the light itself congealed and condensed and evaporated again.

  The sight was intense and beautiful, but Martin was far beyond being impressed. He stifled urge upon insistent urge to laugh.

  He could see little more than the brightness. It became a staircase with dancing beetles. His vision faded in and out. He wondered how much time he had before he fainted or lost control…

  The next voice shocked him to full alertness. Richly feminine, fully human, it sounded like Theresa, but the similarity was more his making than real. He stood straight in the skeletal suit and saw the others motionless around him, all but Silken Parts, who swung to look in Martin’s direction, head cords drawn almost to a point with fright.

  “Only you and I we,” Silken Parts said. “Others…”

  Their companions were all frozen, locked into immobile fields. Ariel and Paola had become posed mannequins within the still white cages of their suits.

  The voice again, without age, smooth as ice and equally cold. Not unfriendly. Not friendly. Not caring. Not aloof.

  A voice to be described only in negatives and absences.

  “Tell me why you are here.”

  Martin could not summon enough spit to answer. Silken Parts made no effort to speak English. Martin faced the helical staircase of light and saw jeering faces ascending its twist.

  “Why are you here?”

  “We were invited,” Martin finally managed. Silken Parts’ cords had reached their limit and struggled in elemental panic, hanging from the ribs of the skeletal suit; the braid, no longer connected, would not witness or answer.

  Martin was alone now, fully accountable to whatever this was.

  “Where are your superiors, your other vessels?”

  “There are no other ships.”

  “Imagine if you will all the minds you have ever known, speaking to each other without animosity and without interruption, leaving out accumulated error. I speak to you as something of that scale. You must realize that disguises and lies are easy to penetrate.”

  “I’m not lying,” Martin said hopelessly. His fear was not enough to keep him from fading.

  “You are part of a force of ships sent to destroy this system. More correctly, you have been sent to destroy people who designed and built certain robots. You are not the first. There will be others.”

  Martin could hardly see.

  “Those who made the robots have all died. Their direct descendants long ago became part of larger forces you could not hope to understand. I am not one of the descendants; I, too, am a creation, but they have left us their history.”

  “History,” Martin said. He raised an arm with great effort, pointed to the bishop vultures, sharks, and babar. “They think you created them.”

  “We did not create them. That is their chosen delusion, their faith.” Pause. “You are in physical distress.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Rest. Time to think. Sleep. Water.”

  That was all he could manage, and he felt shame at saying so much, at being so weak before his enemy.

  “I will adjust your surround to make you lighter. Is that better?”

  Martin seemed to float. Blood began to flow again, and he could see again, but his body still ached.

  A fountain of water rose before him, and his suit leaned forward, dashing his face into it. Despite his apprehensions, he drank deeply. Strength seemed to radiate from his tongue and cheeks, from his throat.

  “Better,” he said.

  “Can you listen now?”

  “Yes.”

  “These representatives know a little, but for their sake, they do not know all. Are you a hunter?”

  “Yes,” Martin said, eyes fixing on the helix.

  “You hunt to avenge the death of others?”

  “My world.”

  “It was destroyed by robots?”

  “Yes.”

  “We sympathize. Those who made us are distant descendants of those who made the machines that probably destroyed your world. But they are gone, enlarged. They have packed their minds into massless forms that will last beyond the end of the universe.

  “They have left us here, greater than you, but still limited, because creating us pleased them. My kind live within this world, surviving in deep energy flows. I do not think there is time to explain our existence to you. We number in the tens of trillions.

  “We did not make the machines that destroyed your world.”

  “The makers aren’t here?” Martin asked.

  “No. There are many more trillions of created
intelligences in this system, none of them responsible for the destruction of your world.”

  Martin watched images of species upon species flash before him, stacking like cards, filling the tunnel; more forms than he could have ever imagined.

  “Kill them, and you kill innocents. I am one.”

  The helix of light descended through the glimmer. The glimmer sank into the red circle. The red circle faded.

  The others began to move again. Silken Parts’ cords squirmed, grasped by his suit; only a few had fallen to the floor, where they curled like threatened millipedes. The bishop vultures swiveled their miters, eyes sinking and rising within their fleshy noses.

  “You have been visited,” Salamander said. “Who was chosen?”

  The twenty gathered on the bridge of Double Seed, where Martin floated with eyes closed, still exhausted. Ariel and Paola squatted in mid-air nearby, sucking juice from squeeze bulbs.

  The journey back had followed the same tortuous procedures, leaving Martin more confused, and finally angry at everything, a thick, clogging anger that seemed to reach back to the Ark and before, to Earth, to his childhood.

  He had finished explaining what he had seen less than an hour before, and the twenty surrounded him in silence, as if in mourning.

  Erin broke the hush. “You were the only one who saw…and heard.”

  “I we am embarrassed I did not maintain,” Silken Parts said. “But I we saw the first appearance of the master.”

  “It wasn’t the master,” Martin said. “Or so it claims. Its kind may control the fourth planet…May control everything in this system. But it denies it is responsible for the killer probes.”

  “Did it say it would defend itself?” Cham asked.

  Martin looked at him with a squint. “Against what?”

  Cham rubbed his chin with his thumb. “If we carry out the Law.”

  “We didn’t talk about it,” Martin said.

  Eye on Sky curled along a pipe like a snake around a tree limb. “The Law is not for taking lives of the uninvolved.”

  “You’d think they’d make the facts known to all of us,” Cham said, looking at his thumb as if he may have rubbed away some dirt. “Why choose just two?”

  “Serious disinterest, I’d say,” Erin commented.

  “Aloof,” Donna added.

  “Maybe we can’t destroy them—the ones inside Sleep,” George Dempsey said.

  Eye on Sky spread his face cords and arched the upper part of his body to face Martin. “You as one are sure of what you gathered?”

  “Are you positive you saw and heard correctly?” Paola interpreted.

  Martin nodded. “No sham,” he said. “It was as real as anything else we saw. It was real.”

  “But you were exhausted…” Cham said. “The others saw nothing.”

  “It felt like super deceleration,” Ariel said. She put her hand on Martin’s shoulder, gripping it to keep from giving him a slight spin, and locked her foot under a brace. “I think Martin saw and heard what he’s described.”

  Jennifer had kept silent since their return. Upside down to him, feet locked in ceiling grips, she folded her arms.

  “Do we vote on it?” George Dempsey asked.

  “No,” Martin said. “When we can noach again, we tell our story to Hans and Stonemaker.”

  “We should go down again,” Paola said, and bit her lower lip, looking around the group like a frightened deer. “We should try to talk again with…Martin’s staircase gods, whatever they’re called, inside Sleep. It’s our duty.”

  “What are you going to recommend?” Ariel asked.

  “I don’t know,” Martin said. “I need to sleep, or I’m going to be sick.”

  In his cabin, Martin slumbered in total darkness without dream or memory, a deathly bite of nothing. He awakened abruptly once, knew precisely where he was and what had happened, remembering all too easily—and closed his eyes again to return to nothing. He was not so exhausted now, however, and as he rotated within his net, pulling his arms in, he knew there was somebody else in the room with him.

  For a moment he assumed it was that old companion of his sleeping existence, Theodore, but it was not. He smelled a living person, a woman.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” Ariel said.

  “I don’t think you did.”

  “I was too tired to sleep. I came here. I’ve been listening to you breathing. It’s like…When you breathe, it’s like…”

  He heard her neck bones quietly pop in the dark. She was shaking her head.

  “Soothing,” she finished. “Can I be in your net with you?”

  “I’m still tired.”

  “I need to sleep, too,” she said.

  “All right.” He opened the net and she pushed in beside him, an elbow in his ribs, her buttocks against his knees, and then they were parallel in the net and he could smell her more strongly. The sweet musty scent of her hair. He had never thought of Ariel as physically pleasant, but he found her so now. She did not move or speak. Finally her breathing smoothed and he listened to her sleeping. It was soothing, simple and basic and human, what someone might have experienced lying in bed next to a woman thousands of years ago, or nearly so: the hug of Earth subtracted.

  She wore shorts and top of loose terry. He wore nothing. She had not come into his room to make love, but he knew she would not stop him if he chose to begin making love. The inevitability intrigued him.

  He thought of the spiral of plasma and dancing lights, Silken Parts breaking down under the experience of meeting the staircase god.

  Bishop vultures, babar, sharks, staircase god.

  He lightly touched the stretch of her shorts, withdrew his finger. She still slept.

  Reaching down, he touched the flesh between her thighs, centimeters below her pubis, not sexually aroused, simply touching, familiarizing. He did not even think about her consent. He was far from convention and the courtesy of human courtship; he had spoken with a staircase god, and drunk water from the fountain of Sleep.

  If there had been something in that water, and if he was now a haven for microscopic listeners and watchers, they could not judge his indiscretion, touching while she slept this woman he had once disliked intensely. No staircase god or bishop vulture, no babar would understand.

  Martin could not begin to recall all the races he had been shown, the immense fecundity of the Killers’ creation.

  “What are you doing?” Ariel asked. He pulled his hand away and pretended to be asleep.

  He still pretended to sleep.

  She shivered slightly. “You’re not asleep,” she said.

  “No.”

  “May I touch you?”

  “Yes.”

  She rotated beside him and faced him, then wrapped both arms around him without pressure and touched his back with fingertips, small of back, ribs, where ribs meet spine from each side, fingers gently prodding. “It’s okay,” she said, voice sleepy. “We feel good.”

  “Your legs feel nice,” he said.

  “Not asleep,” she chided.

  “You have pretty legs,” he said.

  “They’re not fat,” she said.

  “They’re strong,” he said.

  “It’s okay for you to think I’m not pretty.”

  “I don’t think you’re not pretty.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You smell good.”

  She hugged him tighter. It was not cold, but both began to shiver, exhaustion compounding excitement. He felt her removing her shorts and then she was on him.

  “Ah God,” he said. Simple.

  She had wrapped her toes in the net left and right of him, and he held himself with fingers and one set of toes above and below her.

  She moved strongly and put pressure on him and the result was quick and not particularly intense. She held him then and moved back and forth but did not find herself as Theresa might have. He sensed her weary frustration and even a little anger, angry Ariel, resentful of hi
s ease and her difficulty. But he did not want to put his mouth to her, still reserving that for the memories of Theresa and William.

  He put his hand between her legs and she held his wrist and moved his hand and herself, and it was not his doing really when she shuddered in quiet but for a small squeak.

  Nothing in the way of finesse, there hadn’t even been the voluptuousness of impersonally slicking Paola. But it was enough.

  He felt her relax into floating sleep, and willed blanket nothing over himself again. If we all die now and nothing is accomplished, I can at least say

  I have met staircase god and babar

  Pretense seemed useless now. The mom and snake mother emerged from the fabric of Trojan Horse, and now all gathered on the bridge to decide what could be done next.

  “If they know, they know,” Martin said. “We can’t convince them otherwise.”

  Cham looked around the cabin with a stern, wild face. “Why haven’t they blown us to quarks?”

  The Brothers curled together in a ten-strand super-braid that filled one side of the room, an imposing knot of knots. Eye on Sky’s head swung closest to the sphere of humans, but so far the Brothers had said nothing.

  “They could go a lot finer than quarks,” Jennifer said. “They could grind us to metrons.”

  “Whatever those are,” Ariel said.

  “I just made them up,” Jennifer said.

  Martin could sense the fraying fabric and he extended straight as a board and stretched his arms, in this way imposing on the whole group, most of whom had lotused or curled in the cabin.

  “They haven’t destroyed us because they don’t know where our other ships are. And we won’t tell them. We won’t even talk about it.”

  “The possibility of invisible spies,” Cham said.

  “Right.”

  “You drank water…” Donna accused.

  “We all breathed the air,” Ariel said with a touch of scorn. “We knew that would be a problem…”

  “So what can we talk about?” George Dempsey asked.

  “That’s what we’re going to establish,” Martin said. “When we’re in the noach chamber, nothing can transmit out…”

  “But the…little spies, whatever, could store up a message and send it after we’re out of the chamber,” Jennifer said.