Anvil of Stars

by Greg Bear

He called up images of Leviathan’s ruined worlds until they filled his quarters like hanging sheets. “My parents didn’t make it onto the arks. Nobody I knew made it. They were all blown to atoms. Everybody I knew!

  “The Killers had thousands of years. They sent out their clever machines, then they sat back. They built their pretty castles and made their pretty creatures, they laid their traps. They defended themselves to the max because they were afraid, they were guilty, they knew we’d come for them, and someday we’d get them. How many like us failed? We didn’t fail!”

  Beads of Hans’ spittle hung between them like tiny jewels. Hans leaned back, face blotched with red and drawn with white. He withdrew his finger. “I didn’t fail. I got the Job done. If you want to be Pan, you can have it. I resign. You lead us to the promised land.”

  “There needs to be an investigation,” Martin said.

  “I said yes. Get out of here. Let someone enjoy what we’ve accomplished.

  “We lost so much,” Hans said to his back as Martin passed through the door. “So goddamned much. What more do you want?”

  In his quarters, Martin folded himself in a net and stared at the dead worlds, then some of the pictures transmitted by Salamander.

  Hans had ripped his heart open. He did not know exactly why he persisted in asking for an investigation, but something of his father and something of his mother pushed him. He was motivated by lessons he barely remembered learning on Earth and on the Central Ark. Primal things in his life.

  In the nose, Giacomo, Eye on Sky, Anna Gray Wolf, and Thorkild Lax worked to assess the damage, tally the results, before making their final report to Hans. Unable to sleep, Martin came to them and sat in silence while they worked. They played back the war at high speed, tracking the destruction, the ineffective counter-measures, the sheer disproportion of the victory.

  Martin saw again the shadowy curled ribbon writing across Leviathan’s worlds like a finger, moving even more rapidly in the playback. Picture stacked over picture, Giacomo observing with a critical half-squint, Eye on Sky coiled with head cords attentive.

  They came to the endgame.

  “Doers and makers seeding here and here.” Giacomo pointed to a magnified image of planetary rubble blooming against darkness. Flash of that awful finger. Tiny sparks glowed in the image like fireflies in a storm cloud. “Making interceptors from the cores of Blinker and Cueball. Now—they’re not even hiding themselves. Interceptors go out on anti em plumes.” Radiant lines of white fanning out, trails fading behind them.

  The wands quickly counted interceptor traces: fifty, sixty, seventy thousand in this region alone, each no larger than a car, each seeking a Leviathan ship. No targets were visible in this image, but in another, the interceptors had found their ships, and the points of light were sharp and intense. The torch glare reflected from expanding clouds of dust and gas, like welding torches deep in a cave, on and off, winking, until they became a starfield. Enacting the Law at a distance.

  Completely different rules.

  Hundreds more images. Torches flickering, dying, starfields of destruction vanishing.

  “I we see no surviving escape vehicles,” Eye on Sky said, scenting the air with something like cinnamon and fresh-dug dirt.

  “I don’t either, but we have to expect them. The ones we took out might even be decoys. Maybe they transfer to some point outside the system by noach. You know, wholesale pattern transfer. Mind across the void.”

  “That is not a confirmed possible,” Eye on Sky said.

  Giacomo shrugged. “I’m trying to think of everything.”

  “Ship has already thought of everything,” Eye on Sky said.

  “I won’t argue that,” Giacomo said. At the heart of a planet’s dust corpse, he pointed to more sparks and red glows. “Signature of quark sex reactions, right?”

  Martin had no idea what that might be.

  They worked for an hour, ignoring Martin. When they took a break, however, Giacomo climbed along a field to hang beside Martin. Eye on Sky and the others went aft.

  “Jennifer’s back with us tomorrow,” he said. “She told me what happened on the Trojan Horse.” He clenched his jaw, lowered his voice. “Not right, Martin.”

  “You didn’t know about it?”

  Giacomo looked away, tilted his head. “I had so much new stuff to think about, having the ships’ minds really open up, go all out for us…Hans made the decision. The weapons were ready, we’d already seeded some planets with noach engineering while you were down there talking. Hans said he wouldn’t let them trap us this time, wouldn’t let them fool us.” His eyes gleamed.

  “Hans said nothing about our not knowing…that it was starting?”

  Giacomo shook his head, still fired by the buzz of memory. Nostrils flared. “You should have been here. It was a real circus. I mean, I had worked out some of the momeraths, and so did Jennifer and Silken Parts and a lot of the others…But the ships’ minds are working, then the moms and snake mothers bring out these plans…Makers at a distance, nothing in between. Just delude some matter into rearranging its form, ordering itself by your design. Fantastic.

  “That was what the Killers were trying to do to us. But they couldn’t find us. We were small, they were big. Our chief advantage.”

  “Did we discover these new weapons with the help of the moms, or were they already in the ships’ minds?”

  Giacomo shrugged. “I asked the moms that question twice. No real answer.” He mimicked the flat neutrality of a mom’s voice: “’You are given what you need to enact the Law.’ I’ll say this much—I had a long time to think things over, even before Jennifer and I jammed. The momeraths I did pointed to some pretty scary things.”

  “Like?”

  “All by myself, seeing the planets, trying to figure out Sleep, and Blinker, I came up with—“he circled his hands “—persuasion.

  It’s a principle, like deluding matter through hidden channels. Space is like matter—has its own book-keeping, its own channels. I don’t think the moms knew what I was thinking, I mean, I don’t think the Benefactors…the ships at least…Christ, Martin. I’m getting all tangled.”

  “They didn’t know about persuasion, whatever it is.”

  “Right…until we saw Blinker, saw their noach range out to fifty billion klicks.”

  Martin nodded. Giacomo was still drunk with the knowledge, the power.

  “Space can be persuaded to get out of the way, shrink its metric, collapse atomic diameters to create quark matter. All by myself, without the ships’ minds, I saw that quark matter makes neutronium look like a gas. By tweaking internal bits in the quarks—a whole level below particle bits—quark matter can be split into really fanatic lovers. One must have the other, or, you know, the universe will end. You put anything between the lovers…what stands between ceases to exist. The privileged bands get incredibly vicious. The books must be balanced.

  “Martin, the way it went, I don’t think the moms or the ships’ minds had to know anything. I saw it. The ships’ minds worked through a couple of hundred lifetimes of my thinking. They were way ahead of me. I talked to the moms, the ships’ minds talked to me, I talked to Jennifer, compared notes, and…There it was. Then the ship went to work making the weapons.”

  Giacomo took a deep breath and shivered some of his energy away, chuckled at his state. “Sorry. It’s not that I don’t care. But sometimes I felt as if we were forcing God to make mistakes, and there was this…this indignant power making things right again, at any cost. The Killers got in the way.”

  “Of God,” Martin said.

  Giacomo’s cheek twitched, then he grimaced. “Whatever. All this deluding and persuading. Like seduction, playing a game. We played the game better than the Killers did.”

  “Maybe they were tired,” Martin said.

  “As good an explanation as any,” Giacomo said. He shook his arms out, toes poked into the field. Jittered, hunched his shoulders, eyes dancing with energy beyond exhaustio
n.

  He’s had his religious experience.

  “I keep seeing something in the playbacks,” Martin said. “It can’t be real—it looks like a big finger.”

  Giacomo grinned, nodded. “The finger. That’s scary, isn’t it? Reaching out.” He curled his finger and poked the air. “It shows up wherever there are large masses of separated quark components. That’s what made me think maybe God was getting really angry and putting things right.”

  Martin looked unconvinced. “God again.”

  “It looks like it’s moving really fast, but that’s an illusion. It’s a chain of spatial contortions upsetting ionized hydrogen, a real barometer of quark separation. That’s one theory…or it’s a string of some sort pulled out of the universe’s sub-basement. You know, the glue that keeps us on the canvas? I haven’t even begun to think about what that implies. Maybe I don’t want to.”

  “Do you think the Killers were still at home?” Martin asked softly.

  Giacomo narrowed his eyes and licked his lips. “Not my call, Martin. Back to work. Hans wants this day after tomorrow. We’ll go after anything that looks like survivors.”

  “It isn’t over,” Martin said.

  “Justice must be complete,” Giacomo said. Swinging away, he paused, glanced over his shoulder, said, “You think the moms will let us keep what we know?”

  Martin lightly tapped his temple.

  “Right,” Giacomo said. “They’ve never asked us to forget.”

  Ariel sat in the cafeteria with Donna and Anna Gray Wolf. Twenty others off Hans’ strict watch schedule ate in clusters. Ariel looked up as Martin entered, nodded to him almost curtly and looked away. She had cut her hair very short and wore colorless overalls. Self-consciously, Martin pushed himself in their direction.

  “I’m off to help Giacomo in a few minutes,” Anna said pointedly. “You two should be alone, compare notes.”

  Ariel’s color was good, and she did not appear much thinner than he. “No hurry,” she said.

  “We’re having a wake at day’s end,” Donna said. She swallowed a last bite of something green from the air and gathered her crumbs with a small field.

  None of this seemed apropos of anything to Martin. “Do I make you uncomfortable?” he asked Ariel. This was the first time he had seen her since they had been removed from their escape craft. The awkwardness disturbed him.

  “Park here,” Ariel said. Donna moved over, and Martin drifted between them. “I’m glad you were with me,” Ariel said. “You helped me stay sane.”

  Martin nodded, the tension not yet diminished.

  “But we need to know where you stand. You know that Hans has put together a political squad.”

  “I’ve heard about it,” he said.

  “Nobody’s enthusiastic, but they’re still keeping track of us.”

  “Right.”

  “So we’re talking right here in the open,” Donna said. “We’ll call his bluff.”

  “We need to know which side you’re on,” Ariel said.

  “No sides,” Martin said.

  “You can’t be neutral,” Anna said, righteous anger in her voice. “Hans has gone way beyond his charter.”

  “He’ll call it martial law,” Donna said. “The crew went along with him during the war. But we want him to resign as Pan.”

  “Why?” Martin asked. “He got the Job done.”

  Ariel searched his face for a sign of what he actually meant, but he was stubbornly blank. “Maybe,” she said. “I doubt we’ll ever really know.”

  “I’ve told him there should be an investigation of Rosa’s death and Rex’s suicide.”

  Ariel shook her head. “I sympathize, but that’s kind of trivial now, Martin.”

  “It should be done,” Anna said.

  “Compared to what happened here, it’s damned near meaningless, a gnat in a hurricane.”

  “She was crew,” Martin said.

  “Come on,” Anna said. “It’s still necessary. Martin’s right.”

  “What will it accomplish?” Ariel said. “It’s just part of a larger crime. First, he doesn’t let us vote on this particular case. Twenty of us go down to Sleep to play ambassadors, and he knocks us out of the circuit, doesn’t even bother to keep us informed—“

  “He says that was because we could have been spied upon,” Martin said. “Or even controlled.”

  Ariel brushed that aside. “And he executes without having a proven case. Have you seen the destruction, Martin? Can you even begin to absorb it?”

  “I’ve seen it,” Martin said, “and no, I can’t.”

  David Aurora approached their group on a ladder field. “I’d keep it down, folks,” he said in a low voice. “Patrick keeps his ears open.”

  “Patrick’s replaced Rex,” Anna said. “There are others.”

  “What we want to do,” Ariel said, “is get Hans out one way or another, elect a new Pan, and try to convince the Brothers to stay with us, to combine ships. We think we’d have a better chance to find a home that way.”

  David, having issued his warning, shook his head and pulled himself to another group on the far side of the cafeteria.

  “You think Hans has really gone off the deep?” Martin asked. “You think he’s going to squash dissent?”

  “You want to investigate Rosa’s death, but you ask a question like that?” Anna asked.

  “Pardon me, but I’m very confused,” Martin said.

  “It’s pretty clear,” Ariel said. Her coldness toward him was like a slap. She’s reversed course again. Who can ever know her?

  “It’s the new order,” Donna said, thin hands rubbing her thin forearms. “He cut us loose on the Trojan Horse. He used us. I don’t care, I don’t trust him, and we need a Pan we can trust, and we need the rest of our crew. We can’t just split and go in two directions. It isn’t right. We need the Brothers, too.”

  “You mean, we need their resources,” Martin said.

  “Actually, that’s not strictly true,” Anna said. “We’ll be able to mine enough stuff around Leviathan to take us anywhere we want to go. Even add to the ship if we want.”

  “Psychologically, we need the Brothers,” Ariel agreed. Martin was about to ask her to explain that when Patrick Angelfish came into the cafeteria, doing a bad job of looking as if he had some purpose there. Martin waved his hand to catch Patrick’s eye; Patrick looked away with too much effort. Martin spread his arms and waved them in semaphore for him to join them. Ariel’s face went pale and even colder.

  Patrick approached cautiously, not expecting the open invitation.

  “Are you spying for Hans?” Martin asked him.

  “I wouldn’t call it spying,” Patrick said. “A Pan needs to know what’s going on.”

  “Tell Hans I’m putting together a committee to investigate Rosa’s death,” Martin said. “I’m asking for volunteers now. He gave permission, and I’m acting on that permission.”

  “He hasn’t told me he gave permission,” Patrick said, clearly out of his depth.

  Martin’s sudden deep anger took him by surprise. “That’s because you’re a lackey,” he said with a grim smile. “Like Rex. Tell him if he wants to challenge me, do it in the open, himself, and not just send you to keep an eye on me.”

  Patrick left with a shake of his head and a grim, sidelong smile.

  Donna and Anna’s faces had gone pale and stiff. “You don’t understand what he’s capable of,” Anna said.

  “Maybe not,” Martin said.

  “Don’t be a martyr,” Ariel said.

  “Why not?” Martin asked.

  “Then don’t be a fool,” she added, but her chilly tone had passed.

  “I’m flying on instinct,” Martin said. “So is Hans. The question is, who has the better instincts?”

  The roll call of the new dead. The human crew in the small schoolroom. Brothers elsewhere, preparing to transfer to Shrike. The defectors attended, breaking their isolation in the Brother’s section to hono
r those who had not survived.

  Perhaps it was the last time they would be together.

  Hans came into the schoolroom with face ashen, hair unkempt, eyes large and hungry. He seemed to look in every face, ask everyone a question: Are you happy now? Is this enough, or do you want more?

  Without using his wand, Hans recited the names of the dead. Some of the crew wept. Martin closed his eyes and tried to remember Hakim’s face, the calmness and deliberation, his precise way with words. Erin Eire…intense green eyes and noble balance of defiance and sense. He wished they were here now to help him.

  Jeanette Snap Dragon lifted her arm in a clenched fist, and the defectors followed her example.

  Hans did not look at Martin after, though he passed close on his way out. Patrick glanced in his direction, face troubled.

  The delegation came to Martin’s quarters in the middle of his sleep. His wand woke him, chiming insistently. He opened the door and Patrick stepped in, Thorkild Lax behind him, then David Aurora, Carl Phoenix, and last—making Martin’s heart ache, for he knew what was happening—Harpal Timechaser. None of them met his eyes but Patrick, who said, “It’s time to put everything behind us.”

  Patrick in front, Carl on one side, David on another, Harpal slightly above him, Thorkild below; a cage of men. Martin smelled their tension.

  “Everything?” he said.

  “It’s history,” Patrick said. “Besides, you’ll get no support. Nobody wants to dig any more. We need to forget and get on with our lives.”

  “Forget what?” Martin asked mildly, but his heart pumped strong and fast. His body was very frightened, but the fear hadn’t yet reached his head.

  “Your investigation.”

  “We know who killed Rosa, and he’s dead, and Hans had nothing to do with it, at least no more than the rest of us,” Carl said.

  “She would have stopped us,” Thorkild said.

  “We did the slicking Job,” Patrick hissed, and Martin knew the quincunx of his danger. Patrick was the center who would radiate to the other four. “We did what we came here to do.”

  “Let’s just give it up, huh?” Harpal asked. “We’re tired.”

  Martin rotated in mid-air to face Harpal. Nobody would look straight into his eyes. Harpal managed to focus on Martin’s cheek. “Why are you here? Power?” he asked.