Anvil of Stars tfog-2

by Greg Bear

  “Killers come to we us as friends, smelling we our innocent radiation. Killers come as long friends made of jointed parts.”

  Stonemaker projected an image of a collection of shining spheres beaded together, a giant chromium caterpillar. Martin was instantly reminded of the Australian robots, shmoos they had been named; these might have been variations on the same form. “Long friends like machines for you, but living, alive within. They tell of wide places beyond, full of interest, that we we are invited to join, to learn, and then we we smell we our world is sick with weapons, it is dying. We we make power-filled ships, leave our kind to die. We we can’t travel between suns, but leave anyway, and watch we our worlds be eaten, made into millions of killer machines. Then come the ones you name Benefactors, and there is a war. We our worlds are gone, only a few alive, but we we are taken in by Benefactors, and removed from the war, to seek Killers. This is short version; long when library smells good to you.

  “We our weakness comes when we find suns and worlds infested by Killers, too late to save, hundreds of times year past. We we are caught in this tide, Journey House, and many die, Journey House is damaged. Hundreds of times year past. We we flee.” Smell of turpentine.

  Martin saw tears on the cheeks of both Wendys and Lost Boys.

  “We we hear there is another Lawship.” Smell of lilac and baking bread. “Hear we we will join and work with others not smelling of our own, singles not manyness. We we are fearful, for singleness is strange, manyness is accepted. I we am proud both can grow together, fight together. We we are all manyness, all aggregate, group brave, group strong.”

  Stonemaker, Martin thought, had the makings of a good politician.

  “We our Lawship is watched over by machines. They are long and flexible like ourselves, but I we mink they are the same as your machines. Ships’ libraries will join and we will teach each other to smell, to read, to see.

  “Our ships will be one ship, manyness made one, group strong, group brave.” Smell of cooked cabbage, not burnt. “We all selves will wait in one space while ships aggregate,” Stone-maker concluded.

  The human crew rustled uneasily. Martin heard whispers of assurance from the familiarized, and saw nudges of encouragement. Not so bad. Wait and see.

  Rosa stepped forward and raised her arms. Martin wanted to turn away, embarrassed for her, for all of them.

  “They are truly our brothers,” Rosa said. “Together, we’ll be doubly strong.”

  Hans put his arm around Rosa, smiled, and said, “We’re grouping here in the schoolroom. It’s big enough to hold us all. The Dawn Treader can make food for the Brothers. We’ll stay here, all of us, and all of the Brothers, until the ships have joined.”

  No grumbling from the crew. Martin sensed an electric anticipation that had only the slightest tinge of fear.

  Joe stood by Martin as they awaited the arrival of the full complement of Brothers. “We keep using the masculine pronoun for them,” he observed. “Is that justified?”

  “No,” Martin said. “But they are Brothers, aren’t they?”

  Joe gave him a quizzical look, one eye squeezed shut. “Martin, you’re getting a bit…” He waggled his hand. “Cynical. Am I wrong?”

  Martin zipped his lips with a finger.

  “The comment Hans made about Rosa…”

  Martin looked meaningfully at the crew a few paces away.

  Though he had spoken in an undertone, Joe sighed and said no more.

  Fifty Brothers, seventy-five Lost Boys and Wendys, for the time being separated, with a star sphere in the middle of the schoolroom, showing the ships already joined bow to stern, like mating insects:

  The air smelling of cabbage and lilacs and all manner of unidentifiables:

  The moms and the Brothers’ robots, quickly called snake mothers, two of each in the schoolroom, the moms bulbous like copper kachina dolls, the others resembling flexible bronze serpents two meters long and half a meter thick in the middle, biding their time:

  The schoolroom sealed off with an exterior sigh of equalizing pressure:

  Martin: We’ve been through this before. This is not new.

  Hakim saying to him: “I am learning to interpret their astronomy. Jennifer says they have marvelous mathematics. What a wealth, Martin!” Hakim is overjoyed:

  Ariel not coming very close to him, keeping a fixed distance, watching him when he is not looking at her:

  Have I truly gotten cynical, or am I just terrified? We are such a dry forest, any spark, any change—

  Sounds throughout the ships, silence among the humans, and no smells now, the air swept clean of communications, the equivalent of Brotherly silence, and vibrations under their feet.

  Rosa stood strong and quiet near the star sphere in a theatrical attitude of prayer.

  One of the Brothers quietly broke down into cords. The cords seemed stunned and simply twitched, feelers extended, searching, claw-legs scratching the floor. Other braids quickly moved to gather the cords into small sacks carried in packs strapped around their upper halves.

  Chirps and strings of comment; smells of turpentine and bananas. The cords struggled and clicked in the sacks.

  “Fear?” Ariel asked Martin, moving closer.

  “I’ve never seen the cliche brought to life before,” Martin murmured.

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “ ‘Falling apart,’ ” he said.

  She raised the other eyebrow, shook her head. Then she chuckled. Martin could not remember having heard her chuckle before; laughing, smiling, never anything between.

  “Not a very good joke,” he said.

  “I didn’t say it was,” Ariel replied, still smiling. The smile flicked off when he didn’t return it; she looked away, smoothing her overalls. “I’m not asking for anything, Martin,” she said softly.

  “Sorry,” he said, suddenly guilty.

  “I haven’t changed,” she continued, face red. “When you were Pan, I said what I thought you needed to hear.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “The hell you do,” Ariel concluded, pushing her way to the opposite side of the group of humans.

  Another braid disintegrated. Hakim bent over a straying cord. A Brother clicked and swooped down to grab the cord, head splaying, extended clawed tail sections from two of its own cords closing on the stray. He paused with the limp cord hanging just under his head, then said, “Private.”

  “Don’t mess with them,” Hans warned Hakim. “We’ve got a lot more to learn about each other.”

  “Merging begins,” a mom said, moving to the center, near the star sphere. Martin looked at the sphere intently, watching the two ships melt into each other, impressed despite himself by the Benefactors’ capabilities.

  The snake mothers chirped, sang, and released odors. Martin’s head swam with the tension and the welter of scents; more bananas, resinous sweetness, faint odor of decay, cabbage again. Snake mother voices like a high-pitched miniature string orchestra, braids responding; stray cords mostly grabbed and bagged, the last few pulled from the air by Brothers coiling like millipedes in water.

  So damned strange, Martin thought, feeling the hysteria of creeping exhaustion. It’s too much. I want it to be over.

  But he floated in place, one hand clinging to a personal ladder field, eyes blinking, head throbbing, saying nothing. Hakim also clung to a ladder, eyes closed, as if trying to sleep. Actually, that was sensible. Martin closed his eyes.

  Giacomo patted his shoulder. Eyes flicking open, disoriented by actually having slept—for how long? seconds? minutes?—Martin turned to Giacomo and saw Jennifer behind him.

  “Completion of merger in five minutes,” the mom announced, its voice sounding far away.

  “We can’t wait to get into their math and physics,” Giacomo said, round face moist with tired excitement. Humans were adding their own smells to the schoolroom, now seeming much too small with two populations. “Jennifer’s spoken to their leader—if Stonemaker i
s their leader.”

  “Spokesnake,” Jennifer said, giggling, punchy.

  “Some fantastic things. Their math lacks integers!”

  “As far as we can tell,” Jennifer added.

  “They don’t use whole numbers at all. Only smears, they call them.”

  Martin’s interest could hardly have been less now, but he listened, too tired to evade them.

  “I think they regard integers, even rational fractions, as aberrations. They love irrationals, the perfect smears. I can’t wait to see what that means for their math.” Giacomo saw Martin’s look of patent disinterest, and sobered. “Sorry,” he said.

  “I’m very tired,” Martin said. “That’s all. Aren’t you tired?”

  “Dead tired,” Jennifer said, giggling again. “Smears! Jesus, that’s incredible. I may never make sense out of it.”

  Martin smelled lilacs; dreamed of his grandmother’s face powder, drifting through the air in her small bathroom like snow, spotting her throw rug beneath the sink. In the dream, he lay down on the rug, curled up, and closed his eyes.

  When he awoke, the schoolroom was quiet but for a few whispered conversations. Hakim slept nearby; Giacomo and Jennifer lay curled together an arm’s reach in front of Martin. Joe Flatworm slept in a lotus, anchored to a ladder field. The moms and snake mothers floated inactive.

  The Brothers had all disintegrated. Cords hung from ladder fields like socks on a neon clothes net.

  Cham was awake. Martin asked him, “Is that how they sleep?”

  “Beats me,” Cham said.

  “Where’s Hans?”

  “Other side of the schoolroom,” Cham said. “Asleep with Rosa holding his head.”

  Martin turned to the star sphere and saw for the first time their new ship, the merger largely completed. He judged it to be perhaps as big as the original Dawn Treader, with three home-balls again; but this time the aft homeball was larger than the others. There were no obvious tanks of reserve fuel; Martin assumed the fuel must now be stored in the aft homeball. That might reflect a design improvement; the more he saw, the more he was convinced that the Brothers’ Ship of the Law was a later model, with major differences in equipment, tactics, perhaps even general strategy.

  “I wonder if they dream?” Cham asked.

  “They’re all asleep?” Martin stretched out, peering between the fields and sleeping bodies. He could see no intact braids, only cords.

  “Wonder if they ever get confused and end up with parts of each other? It’s scary, how much we’re going to have to learn.”

  Deceleration began. Up and down returned to the Ship of the Law; humans and Brothers explored the new order of things. The quarters were divided into human and Brother sectors in the first two homeballs. A buffer of empty quarters and shared hallways gave cords spaces in which to hide and conduct their private, instinctive affairs. Provisions were made for human capture of straying cords; boxes mounted in well-traveled halls were filled with specially scented bags (tea and cabbage odors) with which to sedate and carry any cords they might find in human quarters.

  Some practise sessions were arranged; Martin learned where to pick up a cord, before and after it had been covered with a scented bag. The best place to hold a cord was along the smooth, leathery body forward of the claw legs and behind the feelers. The cord mouth parts opened ventrally just to the rear of the feelers. The only danger—as yet untested—was that a cord, away from its fellows, might defend itself if the pick-up and bagging ritual was not properly observed. It might then nip or chew on a human, and certain alkaloids in its saliva might cause a toxic reaction, perhaps no more severe than a rash, perhaps worse, so why take chances?

  What the humans learned soon enough was that the Brothers’ diet was simple. They ate a cultivated broth of small green and purple organisms, resembling aquatic worms, neither plants nor animals. These organisms—Stonemaker suggested they might be called noodles—grew under bright lights; they could move freely within their liquid-filled containers, but derived most of their nutrients from simple chemicals. At one stage in their growth, they ate each other, and the remains of their feasts contributed substantially to the broth.

  Brothers always ate disassembled, the cords gathering around the vats like snakes around bowls of milk. While the cords dined, two or more braids watched over the diners.

  The snake mothers had nothing to do with preparing the broth. Growing food was a particularly important ritual for the Brothers, and it was apparently an honor to be placed in charge of the broth vats.

  This much the human crew was allowed to observe. Other aspects of Brotherly life were more circumspect. Because cords could die as individuals—it was normal, like shedding skin—reproduction continued after a fashion. Breeding cords were sequestered and their activities were hidden from the humans.

  Three braids seemed to act as intellectual reserves for the entire group. These braids appeared slow, not particularly personable; they spoke no English, communicated not at all with humans, but occasionally disassembled, and some of their parts would be used for a time by other braids. Erin Eire called them Wisdom, Honor, and Charity; the names stuck, at least among the humans.

  Stonemaker became familiar to all the humans; Shipmaker and Eye on Sky also mixed freely. Others came forward more gradually to interact with the humans. Within two days, twenty-three Brothers mingled regularly. Their English improved rapidly.

  Within a tenday of the merger, rudimentary jokes could be exchanged. Brother humor was simple enough: sickly-sweet flower-smells marked a kind of laughter, brought on by simple stories whose punchline always involved involuntary disassembly. The Brothers particularly enjoyed stories or mimicry of humans passing gas or fainting.

  With Hans’ approval, Paola Birdsong appointed herself a special student of Brotherly language and behavior.

  Giacomo and Jennifer volunteered to help coordinate human and Brother libraries, working with Eye on Sky and Shipmaker. Hans suggested they first translate and integrate what the libraries had to say about galactic history and battle strategy and tactics. Jennifer was disappointed by these practical priorities; she desperately wanted to explore Brother mathematics.

  Martin observed, in his library visits, that the ship’s mind was itself translating and correlating information.

  Rosa Sequoia stayed in the background, watching everything intently, weighing and measuring the new situation.

  The remnants of Martin’s funk had passed like fog. For hours at a time he did not think of Theresa or William.

  Hakim, Harpal, and Luis Estevez Saguaro joined forces with a Brother named Silken Parts, a large (five meters long) and dapper-looking braid whose cords were, indeed, somewhat silkier in texture than those of other Brothers. Together, they organized a combined search team in the nose.

  Giacomo and Jennifer acted as search team advisors, but were now absorbed in their library work and theoretical activities.

  Remotes were sent out and Leviathan came under close scrutiny.

  After four days immersed in studying Leviathan, Hakim asked to speak with Martin, alone and in Martin’s quarters.

  They squatted beside each other and sipped strong sweet hot tea, Hakim’s favorite.

  Hakim was agitated. “I will speak of this with Hans soon,” Hakim began, eyes downturned. “This is awkward, I know, but I do not know how he will react. I myself do not know how to react. I hope you can advise me.”

  “About what?” Martin asked.

  “Silken Parts has gone to the Brothers now, and I understand they face similar difficulties. The information from the remotes is disturbing.”

  “How?” Martin asked.

  “I am most embarrassed.”

  “Christ, Hakim—”

  Hakim glanced at him sharply, disliking religious blasphemies of any sort.

  “I’m sorry. Tell me.”

  “Our early information about Leviathan seems to have been completely in error. I don’t know how it could have happened, bu
t we have major discrepancies. Our new findings are different.”

  “How different?”

  “Leviathan has fifteen planets, not ten, or even twelve.”

  “Fifteen?”

  Hakim winced and shook his head. “The star itself has much the same characteristics—some not unexpected refinements in spectral measurements. Almost everything else seems to have changed.”

  “How wrong could we have been?”

  “Not this wrong,” Hakim said. “I am upset to think the ship’s instruments could have misled us; even more upset to think we could have misinterpreted the facts so.”

  “Fifteen planets sounds awfully crowded.”

  “It is. I have referred the momerath to Jennifer and Giacomo. The orbital patterns as we see them are astonishing. We believe the system must be artificial, and artificially maintained—which would require great expenditures of energy.”

  “What else?”

  “The system is rich with raw materials. Two of the planets, not four, are large gas giants, and they are not depleted. The fourth planet is a true enigma—about one hundred thousand kilometers in diameter, with a distinct and apparently solid surface, not a gas giant… but with a density comparable to the gas giants’.”

  “Hakim, I know you’ve checked this a dozen times—”

  “We’ve made measurements more often than I can count, separately and together. The current information seems correct, Martin. I am mortified to possibly have been so in error before.”

  “The Red Tree Runners were inside the system. They saw ten planets. Their charts didn’t match with our views from a distance… and they certainly don’t conform now…”

  “We could be in different universes, the differences are so great.”

  “Right…” Martin screwed up his face in thought. “Hakim—”

  “We were not wrong!” Hakim shouted, pounding the mat. He glanced at Martin expectantly.

  “I don’t think you were, either. The Brothers took Leviathan’s measure. Have you compared results?”