Anvil of Stars

by Greg Bear

  “Jennifer,” he said, “you have work to do?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Go do it. You’re making me nervous.”

  Jennifer grinned and left the bridge.

  “So they know we’re not armed with anything lethal,” Martin said. “Why did you quit for a moment there?”

  “I am not sure.”

  Martin looked at the mom intently, then returned his attention to the projected images. “Put us into orbit around the fourth planet,” he told Hakim and Silken Parts.

  Hakim did his momerath and drew the best path and points of drive bursts; the path closely matched that suggested on the transmitted charts. “Steady deceleration of five g’s, we will be in orbit within five days, thirteen hours and twelve minutes,” Hakim said.

  Silken Parts did the same calculations using Brother math, reported the results to Eye on Sky, then turned to Martin. “We agree within a few seconds,” he said.

  “Noach our plans and the messages to Shrike and Greyhound,” Martin said.

  Martin’s cabin aboard the Trojan Horse was less than a fifth the size of his previous quarters and contained only his sleeping net. The crews had not yet finished adding homey touches to the masquerade; he scanned the walls and imagined perhaps posters of Brothers and humans frolicking on beaches beneath a blue-green sky. That isn’t too bad. He’d mention the idea to Donna Emerald Sea, who with Long Slither was in charge of ship design now.

  He twisted into the net and closed his eyes. He was instantly asleep and it seemed no time at all when his wand chimed. It was Jennifer. In long-suffering silence, he crawled from the net, assumed a lotus in mid-air to keep some sort of dignity, and told her to come in.

  “Their noach is better than ours,” she said. “Much higher level, more powerful than the moms’ noach, I mean.”

  “That’s obvious,” he said, still groggy.

  “I just had a long talk with Silken Parts. We swapped theories on Benefactor technology. Martin, we’re going to be way outmatched down there—far more than we were around Wormwood. What these folks had around Wormwood is like a steel trap and this, this is an atom bomb.”

  “What do you think they have?” Martin asked.

  “They swept us with something—no, that’s not right; sweep isn’t the right idea, not the right word. They queried our ship’s matter and particles from six billion kilometers. From what I can work out, we couldn’t manage that intense a scan at all, ever—and if we could, we couldn’t transfer that much data in less than a few weeks.”

  “Impressive, but what does it imply?”

  “If the moms are right, and these folks don’t know everything there is to know about us now—and frankly, I can’t think of a reason why they shouldn’t, except maybe bandwidth—“

  “Jennifer, I’m not thinking too clearly. You woke me up and I haven’t slept since coming out of deceleration.”

  “I haven’t either,” Jennifer said, blinking.

  “Well, you’re superhuman, we all know that.”

  “Flattery won’t get answers any faster,” she said much too brightly, her face flushed as if with fever. “Sorry. I’m a little giddy, too. What I’m getting around to saying is, they could turn us into anti-matter right now. Or just enough of us to blow our ship to pieces.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No. I’m not sure. And obviously, they haven’t. But—“

  “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know that.”

  “Can you give me any advice about what we can do?”

  “Of course, we can’t let them know we understand what noach is.”

  “That’ll be easy. I don’t understand.”

  “Or that we know it exists,” she said, knitting her brows in irritation. “Silken Parts is working over other implications, and one of them…Are you going to pull a Hans on me?” she asked suddenly.

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m going to tell you something really big, really scary. Are you going to pull a Hans and vanish into some macho shell right now?”

  “I promise, I won’t do that,” Martin said.

  “We thought maybe the twelfth planet changing character, color, maybe that was more proof that parts of this system are illusory. A projection or something. Martin, if they can do what I think they can, it doesn’t matter, there isn’t any difference. They could make a shell of fake matter around an entire planet, an entire star, just as solid as this ship is. They could redirect or manufacture images as wide as this system in any direction they desired.”

  “Do they have the energy?”

  “I’m guessing yes. They might be tapping the star. From what we can see, the system seems to be rich with volatiles. Maybe they’ve held all their resources in reserve, waiting for the main assault.”

  “Do you have any good news?” Martin asked.

  Jennifer grinned. “Not fond of endless David and Goliath?”

  “It’s a living,” he said dourly.

  “I can do without it myself. But I do have some wild-ass ideas that might be encouraging. I want to noach with Giacomo and do some momerath with him, and I want to hook into the ships’ minds. I’m hoping we can collaborate. This is something moms and Brothers and humans need to do together.”

  “I’ll get you some private time with Giacomo. No sweet nothings, though,” he chided.

  “Strictly business,” Jennifer said.

  Martin saw the Trojan Horse/Double Seed as an ant crawling into a kitchen, staring all unknowing at giant appliances, instruments of unknown utility, technologies beyond the capacity of its tiny brain to comprehend…

  There was so much that made no sense whatsoever.

  The twelfth planet continued to change its character every few hours, alternating between three different sets of features, all the same size, all rocky, but radically different in all other ways.

  The ninth planet had an eccentric orbit, carrying it outside the orbit of the tenth planet. It was small, perhaps a former moon, though with no surface features. It had an albedo of one, a perfectly reflective mirror at all frequencies.

  The eighth planet, a bright orange-yellow gas giant with a diameter of seventy-five thousand kilometers, possessed three large moons. Cables two to three kilometers in diameter hung from the moons to the planet’s fluid surface, leaving great whorls in their wakes, like mixers in a fantastic bakery.

  The sixth planet, eight thousand kilometers in diameter, appeared to be covered with dandelion fluff, each “seed” a thousand kilometers tall. Incoming space vessels never ventured below the crowns of the seeds. In close-up, between the seed pillars, storms churned a thick atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen and water vapor. Hakim thought this might be a giant farm of some sort, for raising unimaginable creatures or plants, but Martin thought that seemed archaic; one wondered if such powerful beings would still need to eat, much less eat formerly living things.

  “Then the creatures might have other uses,” Hakim said, eyes glittering with speculation.

  “None of which we can guess,” George Dempsey cautioned.

  “Let us have our fun,” Erin said peevishly.

  Peering deeper down Leviathan’s well, to the fifth planet, nine thousand kilometers in diameter, dull gray, and like the ninth, smoother than a billiard ball, but far from reflective.

  And perhaps the most fascinating of them all: the fourth planet, one hundred and two thousand kilometers in diameter, with six moons, three of them larger than Earth, its dark reddish-brown surface radiating heat steadily into space, covered with liquid water oceans with narrow ribbons of continent and low mountains between like stripes on a basketball.

  “Thirty-two billion square kilometers,” Ariel said in wonder. “If the land is ten percent of the surface, that’s over three billion square kilometers.” Pause for quick figuring. “Earth had about one and a third billion square kilometers of land. How many people could live here?”

  “At two g’s, not m
e,” Cham said.

  “The physics don’t make sense,” Hakim said. “Not dense enough to support a solid surface…The density below the rocky shell must be less than one and a half grams per cubic centimeter. How is this done?”

  “How is any of it done?” George Dempsey asked.

  The images and charts were noached to Greyhound and Shrike. Hans’ voice replied: “We’re almost at maximum range. Soon be out of touch for a while. How is it?”

  “I think they must be treating us like nursery school kids—if not like stray insects.”

  “We’ve been looking over the mug shots of the citizens of Leviathan,” said Hans. “The crested critter is pretty audacious. They like to repeat themselves, don’t they? Anybody prepared to make a judgment now?”

  “I think we’re close.”

  “What more do we need?”

  “The final dotted i and crossed t.”

  Hans chuckled. “I’ll settle for frontier justice and getting the hell away.”

  “We’ve come this far,” Martin said. “We’ve been invited to orbit the fourth planet, and we’ve already set our course. We’ll be down there in twenty-seven days.”

  “Godspeed,” Hans said.

  “How’s politics?” Martin asked hesitantly.

  “My worry, not yours, Martin.”

  “Just curious.”

  “We’re prepared for whatever you ask of us. Count on it.”

  “Any idea who killed Rosa?” Martin asked.

  “Time enough after the Job’s done.”

  “Jennifer wants some extended time with Giacomo. She thinks she may have something interesting to present to the ships’ minds.”

  “I can’t wait,” Hans said. “Not more super-physics doom and gloom, I hope. We’re getting enough of that here, every time we look at those damned planets.”

  “She says it might be good news.”

  “Put her on, then. Giacomo’s in the nose with me.”

  Jennifer came forward and said she wanted the bridge empty while she talked with Giacomo. Humans and Brothers left, all but Silken Parts, who was collaborating on the problems using Brother math.

  “Hans doesn’t sound good,” Erin told Martin in the hall outside the bridge.

  Ariel concurred. “I hope he’s keeping it together.”

  “Maybe he’s depressed because of the show,” Erin suggested. “It’s gotten to me.”

  “Maybe,” Martin said. He was empty of either optimism or gloom. The sheer weight of superiority of Leviathan’s worlds made it hard for him to breathe, much less think.

  Jennifer and Silken Parts left the noach chamber after three hours. Jennifer could hardly talk. She hung on to a net in the crew quarters and thirstily gulped a bulb of juice. When Martin approached, she held up her hand and shook her head.

  “Please,” she said. “My head hurts. Giacomo’s found ways to—“

  “You don’t have to talk now if you don’t want to,” Martin said. She ignored that.

  “He’s found ways to use Brother math to describe Leviathan’s noach physics. Silken Parts and the ships’ minds are collaborating.

  “It’s just too fast, much too fast. We see something, maybe the way number twelve changes or the number eight has big suspended cables, and Silken Parts comes up with a hypothesis…Giacomo runs it through…I look it over. Ah, God. I’m dead tired.”

  Jennifer waved her hand again weakly, closed her eyes, and instantly fell asleep.

  “I think we’ve broken through,” Hakim said. “I give them all the credit. They’re sending us basic math now, which means they understand the symbols…the human symbols.”

  “Is there any of interest in the math?” Silken Parts asked.

  “All very innocuous, child’s stuff,” Hakim said. “More like human math than Brother math.”

  Silken Parts made a noise like leaves on pavement.

  Eye on Sky examined the projected records of the transmissions from the fourth planet. Still shaky after four hours’ sleep, Jennifer peered around the Brother at the records. “They’re echoing most of what we send, but making changes, some…improvements? The notation is altered a little…here and here.” She pointed to equations describing n-dimensional geometries. Martin couldn’t begin to interpret what she was seeing.

  “They learn fast and soon,” Eye on Sky said. “We can seed the beach now, I we think.”

  “Time to test them on language,” Martin said. “Transmit a Brother and an English dictionary, and a full audio record of speech sounds for both languages.”

  “Like opening our book to them,” Ariel said.

  “Baiting the hook,” Martin said. He turned to the mom and snake mother. “Can you arrange for the Trojan Horse to have some supernova damage?”

  “Yes,” the mom replied.

  “Cham, you and Erin design our damage and report to Eye on Sky and me when it’s done.”

  “Got it,” Cham said, and they left the bridge.

  “It looks dark and heavy,” Ariel said, staring at the projection of the fourth planet. “I’ve got a name for it, if anybody cares,” she said.

  “What?” Martin asked.

  “Sleep. The other planets…the bristling world, looks to me like Puffball. The flipping world…”

  “Masque,” Martin suggested.

  “Blinker is better,” Erin said. Within ten minutes, they had named each of the planets, according to their characteristics, working outward from Leviathan itself:

  Frisbee, orbiting barely half a million kilometers above the surface of Leviathan, a rapidly rotating white disk seventy-two hundred kilometers in diameter, its circumference fringed with tangled, outward-streaming “hair” of unknown purpose and composition.

  Big City, surrounded by red acid haze, covered with architecture to a depth of four hundred kilometers.

  Lawn, a blanket of blue-green vegetation divided by artificial rivers, Earth-like but for the fact that the average surface temperature was three hundred degrees Celsius, the rivers ran deep with liquid fake matter (so Giacomo and Eye on Sky speculated), and the atmosphere consisted largely of carbon dioxide and steam.

  Sleep, a dark funeral bouquet of wilted roses packed into a ball one hundred and two thousand kilometers in diameter…

  Cueball, featureless gray.

  Puffball with its thousand-kilometer-high seeds.

  Pebble One, barely a thousand kilometers wide, empty gray rock and water ice au naturel.

  Mixer, cables hanging from three moons stirring its gaseous surface into a beautiful abstraction of swirls and eddies.

  Mirror, perfect and apparently pointless.

  Gopher, like a huge lava bomb from a volcano, riddled with holes impossibly deep and wide, green lights winking in the holes like baleful eyes.

  Pebble Two, very much like Pebble One: in fact, exactly alike in every detail.

  Blinker still flipping like the display on a cosmic clock, changing its character between three different worlds.

  Pebble Three, duplicate of Pebbles One and Two.

  Gas Pump, blue green, a slushball of methane and ammonia and hydrogen and helium, its glowing wells tossing billions of tons of volatiles into orbit every hour.

  And at the farthest extremes of the system, Magic Lantern, covered with oceans of perfectly smooth water ice, interspersed with polished iron and crystal land masses, the land and solid seas studded with black domes hundreds of kilometers across.

  Naming Leviathan’s fifteen planets did not bring any cheer or sense of control.

  Martin hung in his net, watching with half-closed eyes the image of Sleep fill his cabin. Savages canoeing up the Hudson River, walking into New York City. Look up: the skyline. Pad on moccasins down the asphalt streets. Threaten to destroy the city with bows and arrows. Laughing, the mayor invites them into his office.

  On the bridge, Jennifer, Hakim, Cham and Ariel floated at different angles, heads turning toward Martin as he entered. They all wore the same half-terrified expectant look M
artin had become familiar with in the past few days.

  “Play it back,” Cham said. “This is new,” Hakim said. “Ten minutes ago.” The transmitted voice sounded flat, sexually neutral, a little harsh, diction precise and almost chilly. “Hello,” it began. “You have entered cooperative areas and are welcome to the gathering of partners.”

  “Not perfect,” Jennifer commented. “But good enough.” “Many different kinds of intelligence work and play in union. Your kind may join, or may visit. There are no requirements except peaceful intentions. As you no doubt are aware, the local star group is a dangerous territory, populated by machines and intelligences not of good will. Weapons are not allowed in our neighborhood. If you have any weapons, even defensive weapons of low power, you must notify us and dispose of them under our direction, instructions to follow. Further informative discussions will follow. Is this understood?”

  Eye on Sky listened intently to the same message delivered in Brother audio. “It is hollow and smells like space,” he said. “But it is understandable.”

  “They’ll be suspicious if we’re completely unarmed,” Cham said.

  Martin nodded. “I think we should make some weapons and hand them over. Nothing impressive. Defensive projectile weapons, chemical…”

  “The ship should have something, too,” Erin said.

  Martin looked at Ariel. “Lasers,” he said.

  “Right,” she said.

  “You direct the mom and snake mother,” he said. “We’ll need something convincing to hand over or jettison soon. It’s time we put on our costumes and start getting used to our roles. In a tenday or so, I think we’re going to be in their control…”

  Martin asked Eye on Sky, “How do we answer them?”

  “Enthusiasm and charm,” Eye on Sky said. “We all we must be eager to learn. We all we are young, loving to splash the shore, and they will teach.”

  Martin smiled. “Who’s deceiving the other more?”

  Eye on Sky rotated his head in a figure-eight with a particularly equine motion. “We all ourselves, let it be hoped.”

  There was no time to think. Exhausted, pushing himself and the others hours past their sleeps, Martin prepared the human crew as best he could, doing what Erin called “hearsing and rehearsing.”