Anvil of Stars tfog-2

by Greg Bear

  Martin sat with his back against the wall. Ariel approached him, examining his face cautiously. “May I?” she asked.

  He gestured for her to sit beside him.

  “Hans didn’t pick Rex,” she said quietly.

  In the middle of the schoolroom, several men and women showed the Brothers where they had been bruised, and suggested more gentle methods of handling. The Brothers, in broken English and with smells of onion and fresh bread, lodged more courteous, but no less pointed, complaints.

  “My luck,” Martin said. “Getting ready to jump all over me again?”

  “You’re a prick, a real prick,” Ariel said. A child-like tone of pique took some of the sting out of her words. “You don’t deserve my anger.” She squatted, lay her back against the wall, straightened her legs one at a time, and slumped beside him.

  Rosa had stayed apart from the exercises; Hans had privately instructed Cham not to include her. She seemed dreamy, unfocused; Martin saw her leave the room. “How’s Rosa?” he asked.

  “Like a volcano,” Ariel answered. “Hans isn’t helping her any. He may think he is, but she knows what he’s doing.”

  “What do you think he’s doing?”

  “Typical masculine shit. ‘What she needs is a good slicking.’ ”

  “What do you suggest we should do?”

  “About Rosa?” She lifted her shoulders, inhaled. “She has a mission. She doesn’t pay attention to me now—I’m not in her circle, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “I noticed.”

  “She doesn’t pay attention to anybody, really, except Hans—she’s like a tape-recorder with Hans.”

  “You said she knows what he’s up to.”

  “She’s using him as much as he’s using her. He’s given her official status, Martin. She’s strengthening her position. If Hans thinks he’s smarter than Rosa… But you’re co-opted now, aren’t you? You can’t talk about Hans or what he’s thinking.”

  “I didn’t ask to be second.”

  “Right,” Ariel said, nodding emphatically. “Do you disapprove of Hans?”

  Martin didn’t answer.

  “Right,” she said again, and stood. “Everything’s working out with the Brothers. But there are some of us besides Rosa who are on the edge, and being with the Brothers isn’t helping. You know the ones I mean. They’re traveling without any compass, Martin.”

  “Thank you for believing I have some intelligence.”

  “You’re welcome.” She rubbed her hands on her pants and looked at him with an expression between concern and irritation. “I know you won’t swallow the bait,” she said. “Spit it back. Rosa isn’t the most dangerous person on this ship.” Martin pretended to ignore her.

  Rex lost it first.

  Martin was laddering between the first and second homeballs when he heard shouts echoing from below. He clambered down to the neck join and saw a radiance of cords streaming from a pile that had just seconds before been a braid.

  Rex stood to one side with a metal baseball bat, face pale and moist. He stooped and swung the bat lightly from one hand. With the other hand he fanned a sharp odor of turpentine and burned sugar.

  He turned and lifted his eyes to Martin’s face. “Help me,” he said, voice flat. “This slicker attacked me.”

  The braid had completely dissolved. The cords tried to climb the walls and fell back with sad thumps. Three cords lay writhing in the middle of the join, smearing brown fluid on the floor—the first time Martin had seen cords bleeding. “What the hell happened?” he asked.

  “I just told you,” Rex said, pointing the bat at Martin. “It grabbed me. I had to fight it off.”

  “Who was it?” Joe Flatworm asked, dropping from a ladder field behind Martin. “Which Brother?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t give a damn,” Rex said, lowering the bat and standing straight. “It was a big one.”

  Two of the three injured cords had stopped moving. Two more Brothers wriggled through cylindrical fields from the level below. They immediately set about bagging the uninjured cords.

  Ten more humans and three more Brothers gathered in the dome. Paola Birdsong stooped beside the still cords. Twice Grown slid forward and gently picked up one of the two, not bothering to bag it.

  “Is it dead?” she asked.

  “It is dead,” Twice Grown said.

  “Who did it belong to?”

  “A cord of Sand Filer,” Twice Grown said.

  “What is this, a goddamned funeral?” Rex shouted.

  Martin approached Rex carefully, holding out a hand and wriggling his fingers. “Give me that,” he said.

  Rex dropped the bat and stepped away. “Self-defense,” he said. Martin picked up the bat and handed it to Joe.

  “He was part of your training team,” Martin said. “Are you sure he attacked you?”

  “It put its claws on me and it pinched like it was going to break my arm,” Rex said, backing away from Martin, who kept edging closer.

  “Was he trying to do more exercises with you?” Martin asked, working to contain his anger.

  “How the fuck should I know?” Rex said. “Stop pressing me, Martin, or I’ll—”

  “You going to knock his brains out, you slicking baboon?” Hans pushed through the humans and sidled around Martin, then grabbed Rex’s sleeves and shook him once, twice. “You—are—a—piece—of—SHIT!” Hans shouted, then dropped Rex and turned back to the middle of the room. “Twice Grown, is Stonemaker coming here?”

  Twice Grown consulted his wand. “I we have requested such,” he said.

  “I hope this one’s not badly injured.”

  “Two cords still, one hurt,” Twice Grown said. “Will not be complete Sand Filer.”

  “We’re very sorry,” Hans said. “Martin, Joe, take Rex to his quarters. Joe, watch and make sure he doesn’t leave.”

  “What?” Rex cried indignantly. “I said it was self-defense, damn it!”

  “Do it,” Hans repeated coldly.

  Rex did not fight them. Rosa watched, hanging from a field in the neck as they passed. “What happened?” she asked.

  “Fuck you,” Rex said.

  Joe grabbed Rex’s shoulder with his free hand. “You’re swimming in sewage, buddy,” he said firmly. “Don’t stop paddling or you’ll sink.”

  Rex wiped his eyes and forehead and shook Joe’s hand off. He walked between them in silence.

  The inquest was held a day later, Stonemaker, Eye on Sky, Hans, Cham, Joe, and Martin presiding. Rex stood between Cham and Joe, considerably subdued. Hans had interviewed him for an hour after the incident.

  Stonemaker made the first remarks. “I we have asked the individual Sand Filer for a telling, but memory is degraded. Sand Filer does not see what happened. We we must rely on your individual for testimony.”

  Hans sat on a rise in the schoolroom floor and folded his arms. “Tell us, Rex.”

  Rex looked at the humans in the room, all but Hans. “It’s a misunderstanding,” he said.

  “Tell us,” Hans said, tone neutral, eyes downcast.

  “We met in the neck join. I was going my way—”

  “Carrying a bat?” Hans asked.

  “The moms made it for our games. We were going to play baseball in the gym.”

  “We?” Hans asked.

  “We were going to choose teams,” Rex said.

  “Who?”

  “Four or five of us. We wanted to see how baseball was played. Do some normal, Earth-type games.”

  “You met Sand Filer in the join,” Hans prompted.

  “Yes. I didn’t recognize it—”

  “ ‘Him,’ ” Martin said softly, “That’s the accepted pronoun. ‘Him.’ ”

  Rex swallowed hard but was not about to argue. Martin saw the apprehension in him, and something else—a blunt kind of defiance, no admission to himself that he had done anything wrong.

  “I didn’t recognize him,” Rex said. “I didn’t know who it… he was. He w
as big, though. We passed and he reached out to grab me. It hurt. He hurt me.”

  “Did he give you any warning?”

  “He said something, but I couldn’t understand. I can’t understand any of them.”

  “Do you understand I we?” Stonemaker asked.

  “Mostly, but you speak the best English,” Rex said. “It was an accident. He frightened me.”

  “Did you figure out later what he might have been trying to say?” Martin asked.

  “Gentlemen, we have procedures here,” Hans interrupted with a heavy sigh. “I’ll ask my questions, and Stonemaker will ask his questions.”

  Martin agreed to that.

  “It’s a good question, though,” Hans said. “What was he trying to say?”

  “I don’t know,” Rex said.

  “Something about being on your team in the exercises, the grab races?”

  “Maybe,” Rex said. “I just didn’t hear him clearly.”

  “Then what?”

  “He got me with those claws… Grabbed me around the chest. It hurt like hell. I thought he was attacking me.”

  “And?” Hans pursued.

  “I defended myself.”

  “Was there any reason he would want to attack you?”

  “How should I know?” Rex said.

  Here it is, Martin thought. Plain as can be.

  “You mean, the Brothers are unpredictable,” Hans said, face clouding.

  “I don’t know them,” Rex said, smiling as if on firmer ground.

  Hans turned to Stonemaker. “Rex Live Oak has been to Brother orientations. He participated in the grab races. He’s carried Brothers, and been carried by them.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Rex said. “It—he tried to crush me.”

  “You have bruises?”

  Rex dropped his shoulder straps and showed livid bruises around his ribs and abdomen.

  Stonemaker rustled, rearranged his coils. Hans put his chin in one hand and bent to examine the bruises. “Did you do anything to frighten him?”

  “Nothing. I swear.”

  “No reason for him to attack you.”

  “Hey,” Rex said, his smile broad now, shoulders lifted.

  “Stop smiling, you asshole,” Hans said. “Stonemaker, can you tell me how Rex might have frightened Sand Filer?”

  “We we have not experienced aggression from our partners before,” Stonemaker said. “We we do not understand capacity for being frightened, for giving fright.”

  “I don’t think that’s clear,” Hans said.

  “We we do not expect aggression from you,” Eye on Sky said. “There is no reason for we us to be afraid, whatever you do, unless we we are injured. Then we we lose trust and may be afraid.”

  “Makes sense,” Hans said. “It’s a pity Sand Filer doesn’t remember. I’m open to suggestions from our partners.”

  The Brothers said nothing, weaving and scenting the air with baking bread, new-mown grass.

  “I don’t have any guidelines myself,” Hans said. “I’m very angry at Rex. Personally, I’d throw his ass outside, if the moms would let us. Would they, Martin?”

  Martin shook his head.

  “You don’t know?” Hans pursued, as if shifting his anger to Martin now, Rex being such a pitiful target.

  “I don’t think they would let us,” Martin clarified.

  “Damned lucky for Rex. Stonemaker, I don’t know how to make up for this breach, however it happened. I think we should be blunt and say that some of our people are still frightened by your people. Rex seems a simple-minded sort, and anything can happen with idiots.” He fairly jammed the name down Rex’s throat, standing with face pressed a few centimeters from Rex’s nose. Surprise or emotion made Rex’s eyes water and he stumbled back a step.

  “It wasn’t anything I planned,” he said. “It just happened.”

  “Will Sand Filer recover?” Hans asked Stonemaker.

  “Damage to Sand Filer will not mean breakdown and adoption by others. He will be an individual, and useful to his friends.”

  “That’s… very good,” Hans said, taking two sharp and broken breaths, as if he were about to hiccough. He seemed infinitely weary as he returned his attention to Rex. “We take care of our own. Brothers judge Brothers, and humans judge humans. You’re banned from the Job. I suppose later you might try something really impressive and heroic, and get back your duty. But I wouldn’t waste my time thinking about it.”

  Rex closed his eyes. “Hans—” he said.

  “Please go,” Hans said.

  “I was defending myself, for Christ’s sake!”

  “You’re a liar,” Hans said. “I can’t prove it, but you’ve lost my confidence, and while I’m Pan, you have no work to do. You’re a free man, Rex. Leave before I decide to beat the shit out of you.”

  Rex left the room, shaking his head, fists clenched. He slammed a wall just before stepping through the hatch.

  Hans bowed very low to Stonemaker and Eye on Sky. “I beg forgiveness for my people,” he said. “We must work together. We have no choice.”

  “We we shall work together, and this shall be lost in we our minds,” Stonemaker said.

  “If we judge again, if we take a vote to enact the Law,” Hans said, standing in the middle of a wealth of planetary images, “the Brothers will probably vote to investigate. Am I right?”

  Martin, Hakim, Joe, and Cham sat circled before Hans in the nose of the ship. Joe and Cham nodded. Hakim kept still and quiet.

  “Martin? Will they vote to go in and learn more?”

  Martin said he thought they would.

  “Because the more we learn, the more ambiguous this all is,” Hans said softly. “I don’t think it’s going to get any better.”

  “Terribly ambiguous,” Cham said. He pulled down a more detailed image of Leviathan’s third planet. Smooth, lovely green continents and blue oceans, no visible cloud cover, surface temperature about twenty Celsius, land masses checked with immense tan squares. Surrounding it like a fringe: huge puff-ball seeds, perhaps a thousand kilometers long, touching ocean and continent. The seeds did not limit themselves to the equator; a few even rose from the poles.

  Fourth planet, huge and dark, surrounded by seas butting against dark continents spotted with glowing lava-filled rifts. The fifth planet: volatile-rich gas giant, surface temperature of eighty five kelvins, two point two g’s, hints of wide green patches and black ribbons, rotating storms. Again enormous structures studded the upper atmosphere, these shaped like giant nested funnels. The sixth: a smaller gas giant, about the size of Neptune, artificial constructs floating in orbit like braided hair, brilliantly reflective. Thick streamers of gas rose from the giant’s surface along the equator, drawn up by the constructs.

  “Looks like paradise for the fuel-hungry,” Cham said.

  “A very masterpiece of bullshit,” Hans said. “Designed to do just what it’s doing to us.”

  “Or—” Joe said.

  Hans raised an eyebrow.

  “I can think of two or three ways what we’re seeing could actually be what’s there.”

  “Camouflaged with real races and cultures,” Hakim said, taking Joe’s hint.

  “Explain, please.”

  “Well, Hakim seems on my wavelength,” Joe said.

  “I think I see it, too,” Cham said.

  “Somebody should explain it to the poor old boss-man,” Hans said.

  “The Killers have given up sending out probes,” Hakim said. “They have aligned with other cultures, made alliances, and now hide among them.”

  Hans cocked his head to one side, squinting one eye dubiously.

  “Or they’ve died out,” Joe said, “and other spacefaring races have taken over the system.”

  “If we don’t accept that these planets are all projections or something as crazy as that,” Hans said. He slumped his shoulders and closed his eyes. “Has anybody asked the moms what they think?”

  “I’ve asked for a for
mal meeting with a mom and a snake mother,” Martin said. “I’ve asked that Stonemaker and whoever he wants to bring should be there, too.”

  “Shouldn’t I be there?” Hans asked, opening one eye.

  “Of course,” Martin said.

  Hans pinned Martin with a fishy gaze, then smiled. “Good. We’ve been exercising for a tenday now. Everything’s smooth.”

  “There are still problems with some of our crew,” Martin said.

  “But they’re doing the work,” Hans said.

  Martin hesitated, then agreed.

  “Let me deal with just a few hundred things at a time.” Hans stood and stretched. He had put on weight around the stomach and his face seemed puffy. “Rex is staying out of sight. I hope his example keeps the others in check. I need a plan. What are we going to do if the decision is to investigate, get right in close before we drop weapons?”

  “Split the ship,” Joe said.

  Cham agreed. “Maybe into two or three ships, dispersed to swing back at different times, from different angles. All black, all silent.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Hans said. “Martin?”

  “The ship that goes in first… it’s a fantasy to think it will stay hidden for long, if at all.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe it should go in openly. Maybe it should be disguised. A Trojan horse.”

  Hans leaned his head back, looking at Martin over his short nose and open mouth. “Uh, Jesus is simple, Satan is complex. We come in openly, we’re traveling merchants, we’re not hunting killer probes. We’ve just come to show our wares—”

  Cham cackled and slapped his legs. Hakim looked around, still bewildered. “Don’t you see?” Cham asked him.

  “I am not—”

  “Slick them at their own game,” Joe said. Hakim caught on but suddenly frowned.

  “They know we were at Wormwood,” he said. “They know—”

  “They may not know anything,” Martin said, energized by his own idea, and Hans’ elaboration. “They could easily assume Wormwood killed us in the trap. They’re more vulnerable, but for that reason, they can’t afford to throw off their disguise—if it is a disguise—”

  “Because traveling merchants might tattle on them, or be expected somewhere else, and missed if they don’t show,” Hans said. “And they have a reputation in the neighborhood to maintain. They let the Red Tree Runners go… Martin, my faith in you has paid off. Anything after this is bonus.”