Anvil of Stars

by Greg Bear

  “Good question, but I can only guess, the same as you. The star is well over six billion years old. The volatiles could have been lost during birth, with the cold outer worlds getting correspondingly thinner envelopes of atmosphere. But this would be unusual for a yellow dwarf in this neighborhood.”

  “Even in a multiple group?”

  Hakim nodded. “Even so. The volatiles might have fueled early interstellar travel within the group. The pre-birth cloud is also very low on volatiles, remember. Or…“

  Martin looked up.

  “Most of it could have been converted to anti em for making killer probes.”

  “That’s a lot of probes,” Martin said.

  Hakim agreed. “Billions, fueled and sent out across the stellar neighborhood. Depleting the outer cloud, the comets, the ice moons, the gas giant, everything…If I may say so, a massive and vicious campaign with great risks, at great expense. To be followed logically by a wave of stellar exploration and colonization.”

  “But we don’t see any settled systems beyond the group…It wouldn’t make sense to launch such a campaign, and not follow through.”

  “Ah.” Hakim raised his finger. “Centuries must pass while they wait for the probes to do their work. What if the civilization changes in that time?”

  “Seems certain they’d change some,” Martin agreed.

  “A change of heart, perhaps, or sudden fear of the wrath of other civilizations. Cowardice. Many possibilities.”

  “What percentage of converted volatiles could be stored in the five masses?”

  “A minuscule amount of the total estimated gases lost from the system,” Hakim said. “We’re not yet certain of the size, but each of the masses appears to be several thousand kilometers in diameter, which would rule out neutronium, if their densities were uniform.”

  Thorkild Lax said, “I’m finishing work on the outer cloud, and Min Giao is redoing our work on the inner dust and debris.”

  “Dust and debris…how long would it take to push most of it away from the system?”

  “Wouldn’t happen,” Thorkild said. “Most of the dust grains and larger rubble are too big to be cleaned out by radiation. Remember, the stellar wind has been channeled up and out through the poles.”

  “A good point,” Hakim said.

  “How much more time do you need?”

  “A day?” Hakim asked his colleagues.

  “I’ll need a break,” Min Giao said. “My momerath is fading now.”

  “A day and a half,” Hakim said.

  “Fine,” Martin said.

  They would enter the outer pre-birth material in three days. They would make their decision. Martin had no doubt how the children would decide. The Dawn Treader would split just beyond the diffuse inner boundaries of the cloud. Tortoise would begin super deceleration immediately after splitting.

  They could disperse their weapons, carry out the Law, and at the very least, Hare would be outside the system before any defense could touch it.

  The second stage of deceleration ended. Martin felt his stronger body jump free, like a highly charged battery. Some of the children felt mildly ill for a few hours, but the illness passed.

  Jennifer Hyacinth was a slim, chatty, energetic woman who had not impressed Martin upon their first meeting; triangular of face, neither pretty nor unpleasant to look at, with narrow eyes and a habit of wincing when spoken to, as if she were being insulted; thin of arm and large-chested, breasts sitting on her ribcage as if an afterthought. Jennifer had gradually acquired Martin’s respect by the wry and sharp observations she made about life on ship, by her willingness to volunteer for jobs others found unpleasant, and most of all, by her extraordinary command of momerath.

  Like Ariel, Jennifer Hyacinth did not trust the moms any more than she had to by working with them or living in an environment made by them. But she had concentrated this distrust into a kind of mental guerrilla action, using her head to gain insight into those things the moms did not tell the children.

  Martin put her request to see him into a short queue of appointments for the first half of the next day, and met with her in his early morning, while Theresa organized torus transfer drills for the bombship pilots.

  Jennifer laddered into his quarters in the first homeball, face taut, clearly uncomfortable.

  “What’s up?” Martin asked casually, hoping to relax her. She widened her eyes, shrugged, narrowed them again, as if she really had nothing to say, and was embarrassed by having called the meeting in the first place.

  “Jennifer—“he said, exasperated.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she blurted defensively, as if he were to blame for her discomfiture. “Doing momerath and just thinking. I’ve reached some conclusions—not really conclusions, actually, but they’re interesting, and I thought you’d like to hear them…I hoped you would.”

  “I’d like to,” Martin said.

  “They’re not final but they’re pretty compelling. I think you can follow most of it…“

  “I’ll try.”

  “The moms aren’t telling us everything.”

  “That seems to be the popular wisdom,” Martin said.

  She blinked. “It’s true. They haven’t told us how they do certain things—convert matter to anti em, for example. Or how they compress ordinary matter into neutronium. Or how they transmit on the noach without possibility of interception.”

  “They don’t seem to think we need to know.”

  “Well, curiosity is reason enough.”

  “Right,” Martin said.

  “I think I know how they do some things. Not how they actually do it, but the theory behind it.” Her eyes widened, defying him to think her efforts were trivial. “It’s good momerath. It’s self-consistent, I mean. I’ve even translated some of it into formal maths.”

  “I’m listening,” Martin said.

  Martin knew his momerath ability was dwarfed by Jennifer’s. She was probably the fastest and most innovative mathematician on the ship, followed only by Giacomo Sicilia.

  “I’ve been putting some things together by looking at the moms’—I mean, the Benefactors’ technologies. What they did on Earth and on the Ark. On Mars. They have ways of altering matter on a fundamental level—that’s obvious, of course, since they can make matter into anti em. I don’t think they have spacewarps or can rotate mass points through higher dimensions—that would imply faster-than light travel, which they don’t seem to have.”

  “Okay,” Martin said.

  “The way momerath is constructed—the formal side I mean, not the psychological—there are branches of the discipline that suggest human information theory. There’s an argument that physics can be reduced to the laws governing transfer of information; but I haven’t been working on that.

  “What I have been doing is looking at how the moms treat basic physics in their drill instructions. We have to know certain things, such as repair of maker delivery systems using remotes, in case they’re severely damaged in a fight. It’s funny, but the Dawn Treader can repair itself, and the bombships can’t…not without remotes, at any rate. I guess they don’t want bombships going off on their own, mutating—“

  “Yes,” Martin said, in a tone that urged her to come back to the main subject.

  “About the anti em conversion process. I think they’ve worked out ways to access a particle’s bit structure, its self-information. To do that, they’d have to tamper with the so-called privileged channels. Channels isn’t the right word, of course—I’d call them bands—but—“

  Martin looked at her blankly.

  “Some more radical theorists on Earth thought spacetime might be a giant computational matrix, with information transferred along privileged bands or channels instantaneously, and bosons—photons, and so on, conveying other types of information at no more than the speed of light. Baryons don’t expand when the universe expands. They’re loosely tied to spacetime. But bosons—photons, and so on—are in some respects strongly t
ied to spacetime. Their wavelengths expand as the universe expands. The privileged bands are not tied to spacetime at all, and they convey certain kinds of special information between particles. Kind of cosmic book-keeping. The Benefactors seem to know how to access these bands, and to control the information they carry.”

  “I’m still not following you.”

  Jennifer sighed, squatted in the air beside Martin, and lifted her hands to add gestures to her explanation. “Particles need to know certain things, if I can use that word in its most basic sense. They need to know what they are—charge, mass, spin, strangeness, and so on—and where they are. They have to react to information conveyed by other particles, information about their own character and position. Particles are the most basic processors of information. Bosons and the privileged bands are the fundamental carriers of information.”

  “All right,” Martin said, although the full implications of this were far from clear, and he was far from agreeing with the theory.

  “I think the Benefactors—and probably the planet-killers—have found ways to control the privileged bands. Now that’s remarkable by itself, because privileged bands aren’t supposed to be accessed by anything but the particles and bosons they work for. They might as well be called forbidden bands. They carry information about a particle’s state that help keep things running on a quantum level—book-keeping and housecleaning, so to speak. They have to carry information instantly because…well, in some experiments, that kind of bookkeeping seems to happen instantly, across great distances. Most information can’t travel faster than light. Well, that sort can, but it’s very special, the exception to the rule.

  “Bosons travel at the speed of light. They carry information about changes in position, mass, and so on, like I said. If you can change their states and information content, you can make them lie. If you control all the information carried by bosons and along the privileged bands, you can lie to other particles. If you tinker with a particle’s internal information, you can change that particle. I think that’s what they do to make anti em.”

  “They just tell an atom it’s anti em?”

  Jennifer smiled brightly. “Nothing so simple, but that’s the gist, I think. They mess with privileged bands, they tinker with the memory stores of huge numbers of particles within atoms, all at once, and they create anti em. I’ve got the momerath…”

  “How long would it take me to absorb it?”

  She pursed her lips. “You, maybe three tendays.”

  “I don’t have time, Jennifer. But I’d like to have the record anyway…” Her theory seemed less than important to him now. “Sounds impossible, though.”

  Jennifer grinned. “It does, doesn’t it? That’s what’s so neat. Given certain assumptions, and running them through the momerath, the impossibilities go away. It becomes a coherent system, and it has huge implications, most of which I haven’t worked out. Like, what sort of coordinate system would a particle use? Relative, absolute? Cartesian? How many axes? I’m not really serious about it being Cartesian—it couldn’t be—and remember, the coordinates or whatever you want to call them have to be self-sensing. The particle has to be what it knows it is, and to be where it knows it is. Unless we start calling in observer-induced phenomena, which I do in my momerath…though that isn’t finished, yet.”

  “How much information does a particle have to carry?” Martin asked.

  “To differentiate itself from every other particle—a unique particle signature—and to know its state, its position, its motion, and so on…about two hundred bits.”

  Martin looked to one side for a moment, frowning, getting interested despite his weariness. “If the universe is a computer, what’s the hardware like?”

  “The momerath explicitly forbids positing a matrix for this system. None can be described. Only the rules exist, and the interactions.”

  “There’s no programmer?”

  “The momerath says nothing about that. Just, no hardware, no explicitly real matrix. The matrix is, but is not separate from what takes place. You are interested, aren’t you?”

  He was, but there seemed so little time to think even the thoughts he needed to think, and make the necessary plans. “I’ll look the work over when I can. You know I’m bogged.”

  “Yes, but this could be important. If we see something that fits, something around Wormwood maybe, something high tech that doesn’t make sense unless I’m right, then we can apply whole new ideas.”

  “Obviously,” Martin said. “Thanks.”

  Jennifer smiled brightly, then leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re sweet, but I thought you’d ask about something…”

  “What?”

  “About the noach—how we communicate with nearby craft and the remotes.”

  “Along the privileged bands?”

  She shook her head. “Not exactly. There wouldn’t be any distance limitations if the moms used the privileged bands to chat. Remember, we can’t chat beyond ten billion kilometers.”

  “All right, how, then?”

  “By setting up a resonance. You could change the bit or bits that distinguish one particle from another. The particles seem to resonate, to be somewhere else for a very short time. Signals could be sent that way. But there’s a limit how far. I don’t know why, yet, but I’m working on it.”

  “Let me know what you come up with,” Martin said.

  “Can I talk about it with the others? Get others to work on it?”

  “If they have time,” Martin said.

  She smiled again, bowed ceremonially in mid-air like a diver, and laddered through the door.

  There was little time for anything but work, drill, sleep. Theresa slept with him, but they were too tired to make love more than once before sleep, down from their coasting average of two or three times per day.

  Martin curled up against her in the warm darkness of his quarters, in the net. His limp penis nested between her thighs, just below her buttocks, slight stickiness adhering his prepuce to her skin. His hand on her hip, finger caressing lightly; she was already asleep, breathing shallow and even. Her hair in disarray tickled his nose. He moved his head back a few centimeters, opened his eyes, saw a dim memory of the momerath that had absorbed him in most of his time outside drilling and attending to the active teams. The personal momerath; what all the children were doing now, trying to think their way through to an individual judgment, to the most important decision of their lives.

  There was much more than just analyzing the data Hakim provided. There was the intuition beyond rational thought; the unknown process of personal conviction, of human faculties at work, that made their judgments different from what the moms might have decided by themselves.

  They probably had the power to destroy whatever life existed around Wormwood. The system did not look strongly defended; and in strategy, appearances could count for everything. An appearance of strength could be important…To appear weaker than one actually was could invite assault, never useful.

  Going over it again and again. Gradually sleep came.

  The universe is made of plateaus and valleys, stars nestled in valleys, the long spaces between the stars creating broad, almost flat plateaus along which orbital courses approach but never reach straightness. Martin floated in the nose of the Dawn Treader, the sleeping search team scattered in nets and in bags behind him. Through the transparent nose, peering into the valley around Wormwood, Martin contemplated their target, now the brightest star in their field of view.

  Within twenty hours, they would begin separation into Tortoise and Hare. Martin would be in charge of Tortoise, Hans in command of Hare. Thirty-five children would accompany Martin, including Theresa and William and Ariel; Hakim and the search team would go with Hans. Hare would plunge through Wormwood’s system ahead of them, collecting information to be relayed back to Tortoise.

  Martin felt someone behind him and turned to see Ariel. She looked angry or frightened, he could not tell which, and she
was out of breath.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Rosa’s seen the dark shape again. In the second homeball. Alexis Baikal saw it before she did, in the third homeball, close to the neck and the stores.”

  “Shit,” Martin said.

  “Both think it’s real. They’re talking to others…I was the first to get here.”

  “Why in Christ’s name now?”

  “Maybe it is real,” Ariel said. “Maybe it knows when to disrupt us.”

  “Where are they? Did they see it do anything or go anywhere?”

  “I don’t know. I came up here as fast as I could.”

  “Why not use the wand?”

  “The moms…” She seemed slightly abashed, but still defiant. “Nobody wants them to know.”

  “Why in hell not?” Martin said.

  She shook her head briskly. “I’ll take you to where they are. They think maybe the moms have been…taken over. That we’re being forced to suicide.”

  Martin took his wand and called for Hans and the five ex-Pans. “That’s so slicking stupid,” he said under his breath, following Ariel down the long nose to the central corridor passing through the first homeball. He noted the fissures already formed, stretching in thin grooves along the walls of the necks and around key pipes and protrusions, as the ship carved itself ahead of time for the likely partition. “If people are going to be this paranoid, they should at least use their heads…”

  “I know,” Ariel said, echoing ahead, then using ladder fields to propel herself quickly up the long corridor. “Most of what they’re saying doesn’t make sense. Martin, I don’t agree with much of it. But some…it’s frightening. They saw something.”

  Martin laddered grimly behind her.

  She preceded him to the corridor leading to Rosa’s quarters on the outer perimeter of the second homeball. Hans joined them, glancing at Martin inquisitively. Martin shrugged and said, “Shadows again.” Hans pulled a disgusted face.

  Stephanie Wing Feather and Harpal Timechaser waited outside the closed door to Rosa’s quarters. Martin took up his wand and tried to communicate with Rosa.