Anvil of Stars

by Greg Bear

  “Assuming something that small can transmit without our detecting it,” Cham said.

  “Maybe the little things can use noach, too…”

  Martin held up his hand and turned to the mom and the snake mother. “First things first. Can you tell whether we’ve been contaminated?” he asked them.

  “Possibly,” the mom said. “But an exhaustive procedure would not be easy. Miniature devices might be as small as molecules, made from one kind or another of super-dense matter. This was a risk we decided to take.”

  “Great,” Jennifer said.

  “A better plan than detection would be to change the design of the ship, and protect all spaces against unwanted transmission, in or out,” the mom suggested.

  “We can do that?” Martin asked.

  “It can be done, with a reduction in available fuel,” the mom said.

  “There’s something else,” George said. “If they wanted to kill us, they could give us a disease we pass from one to the other…these spies, miniature machines, something deadly.”

  “Killing us won’t stop the others,” Paola said.

  “Unless the disease doesn’t strike until we rejoin them,” Donna said.

  “We we do not feel contaminated,” Eye on Sky said. But the super braid uncoiled and the braids drifted apart.

  Ariel said, “Maybe those of us who went down should be in quarantine…”

  “As no fields were present when the first contact was made by their machine,” the mom said, “it seems more likely we are all contaminated.”

  “We tripped ourselves up,” George said. “Too clever for our own good. We shouldn’t have tried to fool them.”

  “No time for regrets,” Martin said. He took a deep breath, reluctant to say what he had to say. “I’m going down again, if they let me. Just me. To talk. We won’t be out of noach blackout for another day…I need to know more before I make my recommendations to Hans.”

  “Ask them,” Eye on Sky said.

  “About what?”

  “Ask them if we all we have been contaminated.”

  “Why should they tell us?” George asked, shivering, agitated.

  The second meeting was granted, to Martin’s surprise.

  He knew now with a certainty beyond intuition why they had not been killed, why the unarmed Double Seed had not been destroyed; they were the only connection their hosts had to the invisible ships now moving back in toward Leviathan, ships with unknown weapons, unknown strengths. The more that could be learned, the longer their action could be delayed, more advantage for their hosts.

  Deception piled upon deception…Their hosts could not know how much of a lie was being told, any more than humans and Brothers.

  Martin waited for the white sphere to arrive and carry him, alone, back to the surface of Sleep. He took advantage of the solitude in his cabin to scan Sleep and the other worlds in the Leviathan system, aimless observation, lips pursed, brows drawn together. Ant in kitchen: trying to understand why one planet would be set to change like a clock display, blink one moment, different the next. Why others would be spiky with massive constructs, others barren and smooth. Why Sleep existed at all—perhaps simply to house the staircase gods, all other creatures an afterthought, all other purposes secondary…

  The second journey to Sleep followed the exact pattern of the first. He boarded the shuttle and was immediately met by his skeletal suit and by Salamander. He put on the suit—or rather, it put itself on around him.

  Salamander gripped its bar behind the transparent wall.

  “We are told you are very dangerous to us,” Salamander said, hissing faintly behind the words.

  Martin did not reply.

  “The creators tell us you are an illusion, that you are much stronger than you appear, and that you will try to harm us.”

  Still, Martin kept silent.

  “They tell us you caused the star explosion.”

  “It was a trap meant to kill us,” Martin said, watching the oceans come up beneath them in the display beside Salamander’s panel.

  “Are we such a danger to you, that you would wish us gone? We have never left this system. Nor have we harmed your kind.”

  “You haven’t been told everything,” Martin said, face flushed. “Machines came to my world and destroyed it. Other machines destroyed other worlds, maybe thousands of worlds, thousands of races. Whoever made you, probably made those machines.”

  “We are aware of no such history,” Salamander said.

  Martin shook his head, irritated to be explaining any of this to what might be a puppet, a sham. Still, the instinct to communicate pushed him. If Salamander was anything like a human, the truth might not have much effect…But at least Martin would have done his best.

  “Before my world was destroyed,” he said, “the robots, the machines, created diversions to test our abilities. They made some of my people believe that a spacecraft had landed in a remote area, and an unknown…being, an individual, came out of the craft, to warn us of our destruction. It didn’t tell the entire truth. It was part of an experiment.” Anger at the memory made his throat close. He swallowed, then faced Salamander. “It looked like you. They made it look like you.”

  Salamander lifted its head, brought the knobs of its shoulders together.

  “No individuals of my kind have been to your world.”

  “I’m not making myself clear,” Martin said. “Whoever made you, destroyed my world. When I look at you, I am reminded of that crime. That’s why we’re here. To see if any of the guilty still exist.”

  “I do not believe our creators have done this thing, nor are we guilty,” Salamander said. “What will you discuss with our creators?”

  “They say they did not create you.” Martin shook his head. “Anyway, that’s between me, and them.”

  “Are they the guilty ones?”

  “I don’t know,” Martin said. “They say they aren’t.”

  “They claim to be made by others, as we are?”

  “Yes,” Martin said.

  “Would you kill us, knowing we did not harm your world?”

  Martin swallowed again, feeling his weight grow as the ship entered Sleep’s atmosphere, descending slowly, deliberately and with vast power. “I don’t know.”

  “You do not know anything about us.”

  “I’m here to learn.”

  “We are independent. We have a rich existence. Whoever made us, did not give us the need to destroy.”

  Martin stared at Salamander behind the barrier, empathizing for the first time.

  “We are not illusions,” Salamander continued. “We have separate existence.”

  Repeating itself made it even more sympathetic. Martin tried to strengthen his resolve, but in Salamander’s words there was also sorrow, as well as frustration and perhaps confusion.

  “Do you have the power to destroy us?”

  Martin said they did, lying.

  Salamander’s shoulder knobs touched, jerked back, and its six-fingered hands grew tight on the steel bar.

  “What will I tell my kind, that we face extinction when we have extended a hand of information and giving?”

  “Ask your superiors,” Martin said.

  “We seldom confer with our creators. We assume they made us. Some have thought perhaps they didn’t make us. You say they didn’t.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you any more,” Martin said.

  Salamander’s wall darkened.

  The dark sky, thick blue sea, walls of jagged rock; the white disk on its journey around the sharp headland; the triple tunnel mouths, the dock and gray stone floor, into the darkness. Martin carried his water in a plastic bottle, and felt more prepared this time to withstand the heaviness, the weariness in his blood and behind his eyes.

  An hour from leaving the ship, he stood within his skeletal suit deep in the tunnel, before the red circle.

  The helix of light within its glimmering cylinder rose from the floor.

 
“Have you contacted your leaders?” the staircase god asked.

  “I have more questions,” Martin said.

  “Why should your questions be answered?”

  “If we’re going to go to war against each other, we should know more, shouldn’t we?”

  “That implies an exchange. What do you offer?”

  “I’m giving you another chance to convince me you aren’t the enemy we’ve been hunting for.”

  The staircase god produced its display of cascading lights and colors, but no voice came from the pillar for long seconds. Martin thought of the Bible in his father’s library, and reflected that this was a particularly biblical moment. But he did not feel like a prophet facing the burning bush.

  What he did feel was not awe, but fear, and not fear for his life. He feared screwing up. He could just begin to see the scale of the blunders they might make here.

  “Why should we make the effort?” the staircase god asked bluntly. Language was a true handicap here; nuances and subtleties could not be expected, and bluntness could not be interpreted as…anything.

  “Do you believe we can hurt you?” Martin asked.

  “It is possible you can destroy us, despite precautions we might take.”

  “Then accept my offer. Tell me about your past. I’m here to learn.”

  “In absorbing the information you have given us, I have tried to understand both those you call humans and those you call Brothers. You did not come from the same star systems; your chemistries differ in reliance on certain trace elements. This told us that your story was not true, and we had no difficulty putting facts together. But it did occur to some of us that your gesture of making a lie, of sending a disguised ship, was magnanimous. Your kinds seem to believe in deliberation before reckless action.

  “But surely anything we tell you cannot be convincing. What compelling evidence can we provide? We could rearrange your brains, change you so that the beings on your ship would all believe we are innocent. How would you know the difference between compulsion and compelling evidence?”

  “I hope to be able to tell the difference,” Martin said.

  “Your innocence, your ignorance, reminds me of many of our smaller neighbors that live on planet surfaces. There is an attractiveness, you might say a beauty, to their limited lives and thoughts, but unfortunately, faster and more capable minds can’t share such illusions.”

  “Why did you tell Salamander and his people, all the hundreds of others, that you made them?”

  “We did not. They concluded that we are their makers. We have chosen not to contradict their beliefs.”

  Martin was getting nowhere. Still, he would keep asking questions, keep probing. He could not, for justice’s sake, do otherwise.

  “Do you remember your makers?”

  “No.”

  “They never met with you after making you?”

  “They made us as growing potentials within this world. By the time of our maturity, they had changed, and they have not returned or looked at us, so far as we can sense.”

  “Why did they make you?”

  “We do not know.”

  Martin looked up again. “Can you understand how frustrated I am, not being able to judge? Not having enough evidence?”

  “No.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “Choose different masters, different guides,” the staircase god replied. “It is obvious to me, and to many of our smaller surface species, that you have been poorly informed and poorly led. Those who seek revenge for wrongs committed in ages past are not thinking correctly.”

  “It’s part of a system of justice,” Martin said. “If you make machines that kill living planets, you know that you or your descendants will be punished.”

  “Has this prevented the creation of such machines, and the destruction of worlds like yours?”

  “No,” Martin admitted.

  “Then such a law is useless. Ask yourself if there is only one law, or if others have made other laws; ask yourself why we feel that if there are many joined civilizations of the kind you describe, they must to us seem immature, not capable of judging.

  “It seems likely now that you cannot harm our worlds, that you are weaker than we. You are not a threat. Any further discussion is wasted effort.”

  The vision faded, helix of light and glimmer dropping to the red circle.

  Martin’s audience was over.

  Salamander, frozen throughout the dialog, lifted its crest and advanced a step toward Martin.

  “You have talked? Have you what you need?” it asked.

  Martin relaxed his clenched fists. An involuntary spasm clenched them again. He sucked in breath, shuddering with frustration and rage.

  “Have you what you need?” Salamander repeated. Martin looked at the creature sharply, trying to see behind the barriers of physical form, language, his prejudice. He could not help but conclude that Salamander was not an illusion.

  The creature in the Death Valley space ship had been a kind of prototype of the bishop vultures, designed by the Killers, who also created all these beings now experienced…Creators of whom Salamander knew nothing.

  To Salamander, Martin represented a monster as frightening as the neutronium bombs that had whizzed through the Earth had been to his father…

  Martin was Death, Destroyer of Worlds.

  “I should go back,” Martin said.

  Salamander advanced again, fingers held up. “You have not enough,” it said. “You still think we are guilty.”

  “No,” Martin said. What could he say? Nothing to reassure it; nothing to mislead.

  “What can we do to defend ourselves?” Salamander asked, with sufficient ambiguity of meaning to confuse Martin.

  “I need evidence that those who built the machines are no longer here,” Martin said. “Your superiors either can’t or won’t supply me with the evidence.”

  “We know nothing of them,” Salamander said. “There will be meetings. We must meet with you again.”

  “Please take me back,” Martin said. In Salamander he recognized a type not so inhuman after all; diplomat, organizer, representative of many interests and individuals. He could not hate Salamander, or by extension, any of the others he had seen.

  “You must recognize what is to be lost,” Salamander said, waddling closer, fingers curling as if in threat.

  “I know,” Martin said.

  “You are not capable of knowing, you are too small and limited,” Salamander said. “I must teach you now, immediately, what can be lost. There is no time. What must I do?”

  Martin did not want to confront Salamander. “We’ll try to arrange another meeting.”

  “You have met with the superiors twice, and that has never happened in our history.”

  “Maybe there can be a third meeting.”

  “They have told you what you need. They will not speak to you again,” Salamander said.

  “How do you speak to them?”

  “We send signals into this planet, and they respond, or do not respond.”

  Like calling monsters from the deep with songs. Leviathan, indeed; the staircase gods were great energy leviathans basking on the deep energy slopes of paradise, thinking unknown thoughts, disdaining surface creatures.

  Noach blackout would end within hours. Martin had to speak with the other ships as soon as possible.

  Salamander drew back its arms, dropped them to the floor, backed away, miter head bowed as if in supplication.

  “I have been ordered to let you return,” it said. It walked on all fours toward the opening of the tunnel. Martin followed, the timeless wash of the vast blue ocean growing louder.

  With Martin’s return and explanation of what had happened, Double Seed altered radically in design and ability. The crews stayed on the bridge as the ship drew in its extensions, armored itself against possible direct assault, and shielded itself against transmissions into or out of the ship’s interior. Martin knew the ship’s t
ransformation could be taken as a sign of aggression, but they had to take the risk.

  While they waited, Hakim and Silken Parts selected and displayed some of the huge volume of information sent to the Double Seed in the past two hours from the surface of Sleep.

  Images of planet-spanning cities on the inner worlds, scenes of daily life whose meaning they could hardly guess without reference to hundreds of thousands of pages of text, expertly Englished; the varieties of races, sounds of over twenty spoken languages, biographies and portraits of highly accomplished individuals, including long sequences on Salamander and Frog, more than just diplomats or representatives, but creative artists famous throughout the Leviathan system, experts in planetary architecture, responsible for Puffball’s construction over the past few hundred years, as well as designers of philosophical systems regarded as complex games…

  They’re trying to personalize themselves, be more to us than unfamiliar creatures and opponents. It’s a tactic almost human…and it implies some understanding of or congruence with our psychology.

  “They have opened their archives,” Eye on Sky said, and curled to face Martin. “They are very afraid of we us.”

  Martin nodded.

  “He knows that,” Paola said.

  “They couldn’t give me proof that the Killers have gone,” Martin said.

  “Is that kind of proof possible?” Ariel asked. “They could only prove the Killers are still here, if the Killers themselves talked to us—admitted they were here. Right?”

  “Right,” Martin said. “I’m thinking of the decision Stonemaker and Hans have to make. We’ve tracked the Killers, we’ve found conclusive evidence they once lived here…”

  Talented Salamander and Frog, betrayed by their physique; leftovers from centuries, millennia of frantic creativity—and to what end? To make up for the Killers’ sins, creation to atone for destruction?

  Hans would not see it that way. Martin could not predict Stonemaker’s reaction, but Eye on Sky was clearly sympathetic to the pleas of innocence, the urgent appeal for multitudes of intelligent beings, far more than just the leftovers of Killer habitation.

  Hakim touched Martin on the shoulder. “We will be able to noach in two minutes,” he said. “We will communicate with Greyhound directly. Through them, of course, Shrike as well, but Shrike is still out of direct range.”