Anvil of Stars tfog-2

by Greg Bear

  “It touches everything, and around it swirls parts of itself like bees around a flower. It…” She nodded self-affirmation and wiped her eyes.

  “Stop this now!” Hans ordered. “Enough!”

  “It loves me!” Rosa cried, hands held out, fingers clutching. “It loves me, and I do not deserve its love!”

  A few of the men walked out past Martin, shaking their heads and muttering. None of the women left, though Ariel looked as if she might spit fire. Her body shook with anger, but she said nothing.

  “It spoke to me. Its words ripped my head apart. Even when it was gentle, it overloaded me.”

  “Pray for us!” Kimberly Quartz shouted. Others yelled, “Back to the show! Get off!” Voices strained, bleating, angry.

  “Then it showed itself to me,” Rosa said in a stage whisper.

  “What did it look like?” Kirsten Two Bites asked.

  “It didn’t come as a shadow. That was my preparation, my illness. I had to become sick to see, to want to see; sick and desperate and completely lost. It came to me when I was most ready, weakest and least myself. It was not a shadow, not a presence, but a folding-around. I cannot fold myself around this; it must wrap me. I saw it was not just a whale among the stars; it covered everything known. The parts of it that I saw buzzing like bees were bigger than galaxies, dancing so slowly in endless night, trying to return to the center…”

  “They can’t! We can’t!” Kirsten Two Bites said.

  Hans got up, caught Martin’s eye, gestured for him to follow.

  Martin followed him outside the schoolroom. “What the hell am I going to do?” Hans asked, shaking his head. “Some of them are into it. I should have kept the death ship secret.”

  “How?” Martin asked.

  Hans shook his head. “If I ordered everybody out now, what would happen?”

  “It would get worse,” Martin said. He could still feel the tingle, the gooseflesh. He was confused; he feared Rosa, but part of him needed to hear what she had to say. He realized her message was crude, that she was undoubtedly crazy, but she had a message, and no one else did.

  “If we don’t do something, what’ll happen to us?” Hans asked. “We might end up like those poor bastards, drifting for thousands of years!”

  Martin lowered his head. He did not want to acknowledge what such an awkward, unattractive person had made him feel: the depth of their lostness.

  Hans stared at him and whistled. “You too, huh?”

  “No,” Martin said, shaking his head. “We should break it up now.”

  “Just you and me?”

  “I’ll get Ariel and the past Pans. You stay outside. We’ll meet here and go back in, announce…”

  “Training,” Hans said. “If we can get back to some kind of training…”

  “All right,” Martin said, unable to think of anything better.

  Martin entered the cafeteria, Rosa started to step down, and collapsed into the arms of Jeanette Snap Dragon and Kirsten Two Bites.

  The meeting broke up with a scatter of hard, fragile laughter. Jeanette and Kirsten supported Rosa out the opposite door, away from the crowd. Martin subdued an urge to follow them, to question Rosa; instead, he collected Cham and Harpal and Ariel, and told them they were meeting with Hans. Ariel was puzzled.

  “Why does Hans want to see me?” she asked.

  “Maybe he doesn’t know yet,” Martin said. “But I do.”

  “We’re two months away from rendezvous.” Hans folded his hands behind his head, leaning back on a chair that rose from the floor. Six gathered in his quarters; the past Pans, Ariel, at Martin’s insistence, and Rex Live Oak, whom Hans had invited. “We’re losing our edge. Martin sees this, and I’m sure the rest of you do, too. This is a shitty way to fight. Rosa isn’t too far wrong; we fight ghosts, we lose our friends and gain nothing really deeply satisfying—just another step in the Job. And now we have nothing to do for months.

  “We find a ship full of corpses, and the moms force us to go take a close look, stick our noses into the stink of failure. Meanwhile, we’re waiting to receive strangers—new crewmates, not even human beings. Any wonder we start listening to Rosa?”

  The six said nothing, waiting for a point to be made. Hans drew his lips together, said, “Am I right?”

  “Right,” Rex said.

  Hans raised his hand over his head, spread the fingers, contemplated them.

  Very melodramatic, Martin thought. Child-like.

  Hans’ mood was unreadable. Nobody else dared to speak. Martin felt some dreadful kind of grit being revealed in their Pan; tough, determined and perhaps a little perverse, even uncaring.

  “The moms say we won’t practise in simulations for a tenday, perhaps two,” Hans said. “The hell with waiting. We forget games and free-for-alls. I don’t want anybody slicking with anybody until this ship is fully prepared. I want some real tensions and angers, not these fake, shitty boredoms we have now. I’m going to have to slap this crew, hit them with work, busy work if necessary. Martin, can you figure the moms?”

  Martin showed his surprise. “Beg pardon?”

  “Any more insights into what they’re up to?”

  He fumbled for a second, shrugging, finally said, “They’re making repairs still. I don’t know what you—”

  “Repairs hell. They made your goddamned racing boat to visit the death ship. They gave up a quarter of the fuel we gathered around Wormwood—at the cost of how many lives? Are they keeping anything else important from us?”

  “I don’t think so,” Martin said. Ariel did not react. She seemed frozen, listening, waiting.

  “We train ourselves, without simulations. We drill for discipline and to keep our blood flowing. We fight each other in physical combat. All of you will be drill instructors. Martin, Rex, and I will work up a schedule of physical endurance and combat. Hand to hand. Winners get to slick. Nobody else. We’ll ask for volunteers to be rewards.”

  Only Rex returned his smile. The rest were astonished into blank expressions and silence. Ariel closed her eyes, swallowed.

  Before now, except for his outburst following the neutrino storm, Hans’ leadership instincts had always seemed acute. But Martin’s gut reaction to this pronouncement was abhorrence. To go up against crewmates in zero-sum games, physical exercises, competing for the physical affection of a few—he could think of no other words for them—prostitutes, whores, seemed as far wrong as they could go.

  But nobody objected, not Martin, not even Ariel. That horrified Martin more than anything else.

  “Then let the games begin,” Hans said.

  Martin faced Jimmy Satsuma. They bowed to each other, circled warily, clinched.

  In the schoolroom, fifteen other opponents faced off, circled, clinched. The room filled with grunts and shufflings, outrushes of air as bodies hit the resilient floor, slaps of flesh on flesh. Wendys wrestled Wendys, Lost Boys faced off against each other.

  The family groups, already reduced and weakened by the deaths, became even weaker as Cats opposed each other, Trees and Places wrestled together, Fish and Flowers grappled with Fish and Flowers.

  The ship was finding a new social order. Victors emerged; Martin came in sixth out of the top fifteen Lost Boys.

  Hans picked out the top fifteen as instructors, and the next round began with additional competitions: running, variations on football, soccer, handball.

  There was some satisfaction to Martin in seeing that most of the victors eschewed Hans’ rewards, walking from the matches with wary, embarrassed glances. Rex Live Oak eschewed nothing, taking Donna Emerald Sea to his quarters.

  Exhausted, bruised and sore, Martin spent half an hour in his quarters before sleep exploring the libraries of Dawn Treader. The libraries had re-opened in the past few days. There were gaps, but not large ones; about ninety-five percent had been saved or reconstructed from damaged domains. The libraries now integrated the remnants of the derelict’s deep time memory store.

  With
the libraries restored, he felt some of the pressure of turning inward pass away. He could venture outward again, through the ship’s information universe.

  The zero-sum competition was not nearly as divisive as Martin had feared. There were casualties; there were abstainers. Rosa Sequoia and a few of her followers did not compete, and Hans did not compel them to. Some refused after a few attempts, and Hans did not subject them to ridicule.

  Days passed.

  Nobody talked much about the upcoming rendezvous. It would be like inviting strangers to join a family already having enough troubles; the thought frightened Martin, and he realized with some elation that at least now he could genuinely feel uneasy, that the journey and Hans’ outrages had pulled him out of the gloom that had returned since the voyage to the death ship, lifted that gloom sufficiently to have emotions other than blanketing, all-too-comfortable despair. Perhaps Hans had been right again.

  Sixty-four of the crew listened to Rosa’s storytelling. Hans was not there; Ariel and Martin, at his request, attended.

  Ariel had accepted Hans and Martin’s attempt to bring her into the fold of authority with surprising composure. Martin thought of two explanations for her placidity: proximity to the center of things gave access to crucial information, and Ariel was no fool; and she would be closer to Martin.

  Ariel sat beside Martin in the cafeteria. Martin was reasonably sure she had been making her moves on him, in her peculiar way, since the Skirmish.

  He had been celibate since Paola Birdsong. The lure of the flesh was nothing compared to the other conflicts he had to resolve.

  The crew came to the cafeteria singly and in triples; few entered in pairs. The dyad structure had broken down in Hans’ exercises and rewards; those who had lost partners in the Skirmish had not yet made new matches, and only one or two new dyads were apparent.

  Rosa began her session with a parable.

  “Once, back when Earth was young, three children came upon a sick wolf in the woods. The first child was a girl, and her name was Penelope, and she was sweet and younger than the others, and spoke with a lisp. The second was Kim, her brother, who did not know where to go in life, and who always worried about fighting and winning. The third was Jacob, a cousin, the oldest, frightened of his shadow.

  “They circled the wolf and Penelope asked the wolf what was wrong with it.

  “ ‘I am in a trap,’ the wolf said, and Penelope saw that this was so; the wolf’s paw was caught in a steel jaw chained to the ground. ‘Please release me.’

  “ ‘Wait a minute,’ Kim said. ‘What if the trapper sees us? We’ll get in trouble…’

  “ ‘The trapper only comes once a week,’ the wolf said.

  “ ‘If you know that, then you must know where the trappersets his traps. How did you fall into a trap if you knew where they were?’ Kim asked.

  “ ‘You are a very smart boy, so I will tell you something,’ the wolf said. ‘Something very important. But first you must release me.’

  “ ‘Are you a magic wolf?’ Penelope asked. She had heard of such things.

  “ ‘I am a sorcerer, pretending to be a wolf. I can change my shape at will, unless I am caught by iron—and this is iron.’

  “ ‘I think we should release him,’ Jacob said. ‘I don’t like to see live things in pain.’

  “ ‘Wait,’ Kim said. ‘Maybe this is the wolf that’s been killing our sheep. Maybe the trapper is doing us a favor.’

  “ ‘That was the cougar, not me,’ the wolf said. ‘Have you no trust?’

  “ ‘I trust nothing, and care for nothing, because I have been hurt when I trusted before,’ Kim said.

  “ ‘I trust you,’ Penelope said.

  “ ‘I don’t know whether to trust him or not, but he’s in pain,’ Jacob said.

  “ ‘What will you give us if we set you free?’ Kim asked.

  “ ‘I can grant no wish while I am trapped by iron,’ the wolf answered.

  “ ‘So you can’t prove you’re a sorcerer. I say let’s leave him here for the trapper,’ Kim said.

  “But Penelope reached down to open the trap anyway. Kim saw her and tried to stop her, but Jacob fought with him, and she opened the trap, and the wolf crawled free, lay in the grass with its tongue out, and said, ‘I am very ill. I will die now, because I have been in the trap so long, but I will come in your dreams and give you each what you have given to me.’

  “And the wolf died. Penelope mourned, and buried its body in the woods where the trapper would not find it. Kim stalked away, angry at Jacob. And Jacob felt sad that they had not saved the wolf, and that he had lost Kim’s friendship in the bargain.

  “That night, the wolf came to Penelope in her dreams, but it was a slender old man wearing a wolf-fur robe, with sharp gray eyes and a wise smile. The old man said, To you I give long life and children, and in your old age, when your time comes to die, you will be content with the men you have loved, the children you have borne, the life you have lived… This I give to you.’

  “To Jacob the sorcerer came as a wolf, and said, ‘You will live a long life, and it will be rich and complex, with sadness and joy mixed so that often you cannot distinguish between them. Life will make you a wise soul, because it will be hard, and when you die, you will sit on God’s favored side, to render advice on the affairs of men. All this you will have; but this you will lose. You will never know what is truth, and never know certainty. All things will be ambiguous, for this is the curse of wisdom.’

  “To Kim, the wolf came as a wolf, and growled at him in his dreams, until the dreams became dark as nightmare. And the wolf told him, ‘All your life the world will turn its hand against you. You will scheme and scheme, but gain no advantage, and learn nothing from your failures. You will not live to a ripe old age, but instead, you will die young, bitter and cheated, loved by no one. This I give to you.’

  “ ‘And what do you give to yourself?’ Kim cried out in his dream. ‘You who have so much power, and can cause so much pain?’

  “ ‘For my foolishness in being trapped, I can have nothing but oblivion. For to gain this power, long ago I sold my soul. I now have nothing. And when my ghost fades from your dream, I will be less than the echo of wind.’ ”

  Rosa lowered her head. The crew seemed to appreciate the story, but did not applaud. They stood to leave, and Jeanette Snap Dragon said in a stage voice, “Rosa was visited again last night. Something came to her.”

  The crew stopped, stared at Rosa, who raised her head, eyes distant.

  “We don’t talk about it, but we think of the death ship a lot now,” Rosa said. “We wonder why they all died, and there are no answers. I give no comfort this evening. Our greatest trial comes. Soon another kind of intelligence will join with us. We will be visited by innocents, and we will teach them pain.”

  Silent, without argument, the crew left the cafeteria.

  Ariel followed Martin to Hans’ quarters. “Well?” Rex Live Oak asked, beckoning them in as the door opened.

  “She was… innocuous,” Martin said.

  “What kind of word is that?” Hans asked. “Nothing Rosa does can ever be innocuous. What did you think?” He stared at Ariel.

  “She’s getting better. Much stronger,” Ariel said. “Jeanette and Kirsten are with her all the time now. She doesn’t ask for me very often. She knows I talk to Martin and you. She’s putting together disciples. I think she’s building up to something.”

  Ariel gave Martin a fleeting smile, as if asking for approval but realizing he would not give it.

  “Is that right?” Hans asked Martin.

  “Whatever she’s building up to, she isn’t there yet,” Martin said. “She spins a good story, but so far, it’s just entertainment. Fairytales.”

  Hans pondered for a moment. “She’s not going to stick to telling stories. She’s bound to have another revelation. I’m not sure we can afford to let her go off on her own. We’re still close to the edge, and having visitors isn’t going to make th
ings any easier.” He mused, squeezing his palms together, making small sucking sounds. “What Rosa needs is a good slicking. Any volunteers?”

  The crudity stunned Martin and made Ariel’s neck muscles stand out, but they did not answer.

  “Not me,” Rex Live Oak said casually.

  “Just as I thought. I’ll have to bell and feed the cat. Part of the old burden, am I right?”

  “The libraries are open, the food’s getting better, and the moms tell us we can use remotes to expand our baseline,” Rex Live Oak said, looking around the cafeteria. “I think we’re ready to meet our new comrades. Any comments, before I let the search team report?”

  The crew moved restlessly for a few seconds, as if reluctant to push forward a questioner. Paola Birdsong raised her hand.

  “The Pan is supposed to give us the report,” she said. “Why isn’t Hans here?”

  “Hans is doing research now,” Rex said.

  “Then why not Harpal?” Erin Eire asked.

  “I don’t know,” Rex answered flippantly. “Harpal?”

  Harpal shrugged, refusing to be stung. “Rank hath its privileges. Hans can pick anybody he wants as a speaker.”

  “We don’t need a speaker. We need the Pan himself,” Erin persisted.

  “I’ll take your questions directly to Hans,” Rex said.

  Martin looked around the room. There were two conspicuous absences: Hans, of course, and Rosa Sequoia.

  “Think he’s giving Rosa her medicine?” Ariel whispered in Martin’s ear. Martin didn’t answer; if Hans was with Rosa, he must know their absence together would be noticed. If Rosa was giving in to Hans’ “medicine,” she was at risk of losing her unusual status, and perhaps that was Hans’ intent.

  Hakim cleared his throat and came forward as Rex cleared the way magnanimously with a sweep of his arm. “We are at least a half a trillion kilometers from the other ship,” Hakim said. “We’ll drop our camouflage in a few days. The moms think it’s very doubtful anyone can detect us out here. We should be able to establish noach a few hours before rendezvous.”

  “Are we looking at the Cornflower?” Alexis Baikal asked.