Anvil of Stars (27 page)

"She doesn't even mention them, from what I've been told. She talks about responsibility and free will and our place in the broad scheme. Maybe we should go and listen."

"Maybe I will," Martin said.

"Maybe Hans should go, too."

"Do you want me to spy on her for Hans?"

Ariel shook her head. "I just think it's significant, what's happening."

"It's inevitable, maybe," Martin said under his breath, and got up to go to his quarters.

Theodore Dawn visited his dreams, and was full of talk, some of which Martin remembered on waking.

They sat in a garden, under an arbor in full flower, Theodore in a short white tunic, his legs tanned from long exposure to the summer sun now at zenith over their heads. They were eating grapes; they might have been Romans. Theodore had been fond of reading about Romans.

"Something terrible is about to happen to Rosa," Theodore said. "You know what it is?"

"I think so," Martin answered, letting a grape leaf fall to the pebble gravel at their feet.

"The worst thing that can happen to a prophet is not to be ignored and forgotten; it's to have her cause taken up and chewed by the masses. Whatever she says, if it doesn't fit, will be chewed some more; some opportunist will come along and forge a contradiction, polish a rough edge of meaning, and then it will fit. People believe in everything but the original words."

"Rosa isn't a prophet."

"You said you knew what's happening."

"She isn't a prophet. Just look at her."

"She's had the vision. This is a special time for you."

"Nonsense!" Martin said, angry now. He got up from the marble bench and adjusted his robe clumsily, not used to its folds. "By the way, is Theresa here with you?"

Theodore shook his head sadly. "She's dead. You have to be alive to die."

Paola Birdsong and Martin found themselves alone in the tail of the ship, having completed a wand transmission test for the mom, and with no further instructions, they sat and talked, glad to be away from the glum business of the crew.

Their talk trailed off. She looked away, olive skin darkening, lips pressed together. Martin reached out to stroke her cheek, make her relax, and she leaned into the stroke, and then tears came to her face. "I don't know what to do or how to feel," she said.

She had been loosely bonded with Sig Butterfly. Martin did not want to inquire for fear of opening wounds, so he kept silent and let her talk.

"We weren't deep with each other," she said. "I've never really been deep with any lover. But he was a friend and he listened to me."

Martin nodded.

"Would he want me to feel badly for him?" she asked.

Martin was about to shake his head, but then smiled and said, "A little, maybe."

"I'll remember him." She shuddered at the word "remember," as if it were a realization or betrayal or both, remembrance being so different from seeing directly, remembrance being an acknowledgment of death.

It was natural for him to fold her in his arms. He had never been strongly attracted to Paola Birdsong, and perhaps that was why holding her seemed less a violation to his memory of Theresa. Paola must have felt the same about Martin. The embrace became more awkwardly direct, and they lay side by side in the curls of pipes, the burned smell almost too faint to notice now.

Where they lay was dry and quiet and isolated. Martin felt a little like a mouse in a giant house, having found a place away from so many cats; and Paola was herself small, mouselike, undemanding, touching him in a way that did not discourage, did not invite. The momentum of the situation was carried by instinct. He did not undress her completely, nor himself, but rolled over on top of her, and with a direct motion they joined, and she closed her eyes.

Neither of them cried.

Martin made love to her slowly, without urgency. She had no orgasm to match his, which was surprisingly powerful, and he did not press her for one; it seemed this was what she wished, only a little betrayal of memory at a time, a little return to whole life. After, with no word of what they had just done, they rearranged their overalls.

"What have your dreams been like lately?" he asked.

"Nothing unusual," she said, drawing her knees up in her arms and resting her chin on them.

"I've been having pretty vivid dreams. For a long time now. Pretty specific dreams, almost instructive."

"Like what?"

Martin found himself much more reluctant to describe the dreams than to characterize them. "Memories with real people in them. People from the ship, I mean, saying things to me. Giving advice as if they were alive."

Paola bumped her chin on her knees as she nodded. "I've had dreams like that," she said. "I think it means we're in a special time."

Martin jerked at that phrase.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"It just seems right. We're so far away from our people. We're losing more and more connections. Something's bound to change."

"What will change?" Martin asked.

She uncurled, pulled up a bare foot to inspect a toenail. "Our psychologies," she said. "I don't know. I'm just talking. A special time is when we learn who we are all over again."

"Shrugging off the past," Martin suggested.

"Maybe. Or seeing it differently."

"Does Sig come to you in your dreams?" he asked.

"No," she said, dark eyes watching him.

He thought it unlikely they would make love again.

After, in his quarters to prepare for a watch in the nose, he felt melancholy, but that was an improvement. It had been only weeks in his personal, conscious time, but the clouds thinned, and he could think clearly for moments at a stretch without the shadow of Theresa or William.

In the nose, Hakim slept while Li Mountain and Giacomo Sicilia tracked the corpse of Wormwood. In a few months, they would see the shroud of gas as no more than a blotch in the receding blackness.

"Any sign of a neutron star?" Martin asked Li Mountain.

"None," she said. "Jennifer doesn't think one will form. She thinks the star's interior was deeply disturbed, that everything was flung out."

"It must have been quite a blast," Giacomo Sicilia said. Almost as adept as Jennifer at momerath, he had replaced Thomas Orchard on the search team.

There was little else for them to do but science, which Hakim enjoyed, but Martin found vaguely dissatisfying. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge was not their Job. But Hakim insisted that studying the corpse of Wormwood could teach them about Killer technology.

They would be many months traveling to meet with the second ship; training was not an option in their present situation. Healing and reknitting the crew would be their major occupations.

Martin recorded the figures with Giacomo, and stared back into the past, at the beautiful tendrils and shells of gas and dust.

No sign of Killer activity around Wormwood.

The tar baby was truly dead.

The following months passed slow and hard in their dullness. The state of comparative luxury they had known before the Skirmish and the neutrino storm did not return; the solitary mom merely told them that the ship was damaged in ways not quickly mended. Food was nourishing but bland; access to the libraries was limited to text materials, and wand graphics were severely curtailed.

Martin suspected the Ship of the Law had lost portions of its crucial memory, and was merely a shadow of its former self. The mom would not elaborate; it, too, seemed lost in a kind of dullness, and dullness was the order of things. In a way, Martin did not mind this difficulty; it gave them all plenty of time for thought, and he used that time.

Hans was clearly made uneasy by it.

The ex-Pans held colloquium every five days in his quarters.

"I'd hate to be known as the exercise Pan," Hans said. "We have three more months until we rendezvous with our new partners. We've done about all the science there is to do with Wormwood—at least, everybody has but Jennifer and Giacomo… We're bored, there's still only one mom, and that worries me. Am I right?"

Hans had been asking that more and more lately: a slightly nasal "Am I right?" with one eyebrow lifted and a perfectly receptive expression. "We need some mental action, too. The ship isn't going to be much help." He looked to Cham, but Cham shrugged.

"Martin?" Harpal asked.

Martin made a wry face. "Without the remotes, we can't learn much more about Leviathan."

"The food is dull," Harpal offered. "Maybe we can cook it ourselves."

Joe Flatworm snorted. "The mom won't let us near raw materials."

"Any suggestions, Joe?" Hans asked.

"We're stuck in a long dull rut," Joe said softly. "We should be asleep."

"I'm sure if that were an option—" Martin began.

"Yeah. The mom is concerned." That was another phrase Hans used often now, and others in the crew had picked it up. The proper form was: stated problem or dissatisfaction; reply, "Yeah, the mom is concerned."

"I think we should—" Martin began again.

"Slick worrying about the ship," Hans said.

"That wasn't what I was—"

"Fine," Hans interrupted.

"Goddammit, let me finish!" Martin shouted. Joe and Cham flinched, but Hans grinned, held up his hands, and shook his head.

"You have the floor," he said.

"We can't blame the ship for saving our lives," Martin said, expressing not a shred of what he had meant to say, and now realized was useless to say under the present circumstances.

"I don't think any of us Pans have actively enjoyed our rank," Hans said, drumming his fingers on the table between them. "Am I right? But I'm faced with problems none of you faced. Political problems. Psychological problems. We don't have any real work to do. We have plenty of time on our hands. The only thing I can think of to keep us occupied is sports. I don't like it, but there it is."

Cham raised one hand to shoulder level.

"Yes?"

"We should begin thinking about after," he said.

"After what?"

"After the Job is done. We should work on a constitution. Laws, and so on. Get ready for when we look for another world…"

Hans considered with a thoughtfulness that somehow did not convince Martin. "Right," he said. "Joe, get on it. Cham, for your sins, organize some games and competitions. Start with races from nose to tail, like we used to do. Think up rewards.

Shake them up, get their blood moving. Martin, perhaps you should work on intellectual games… More your speed, no? Get together with Hakim. Jennifer. Whoever. Competition. If we're cast on our own resources, we have to be resourceful." Am I right? Martin predicted. Hans smiled and said nothing.

Rosa Sequoia sat comfortably in the middle of thirty-two of the crew—a broad selection, including Erin Eire and Paola Bird-song. Martin stood to one side of the schoolroom, listening, observing.

With all of her words, she made gentle, sweeping hand gestures, drawing in but not demanding or assertive. Her voice soothed, low and soft, yet authoritative. Something had come together for her, Martin saw; and her newfound grace and ease of expression worried him. A special time.

Hans entered behind him, leaned against the wall next to Martin, nodded in greeting, folded his arms, and listened.

"… To have lost the home we all cherished, we all grew up with, is like the farmer who lost his farm, when the wind came and blew it away. One day he awoke and walked out his door to see barren dirt, the crops smashed flat, dead and brown, and he told himself, 'I have worked this land all my life, why didn't the wind take me as well? This farm is like an arm or a leg to me—why wasn't I snatched away with it?' "

Martin listened intently, waiting to see if Rosa's fairy tale or parable or whatever it was came close to those he had experienced in the volumetric fields.

Rosa looked down, lowered her arms as if resting. "The farmer became bitter. He thought he would fight the wind. He built walls against the wind, higher and higher, making them out of the dust and straw and the mud that ran in rivers across the dead fields. But the wind knocked the walls down, and still the farmer was alive. The wind took his family one by one, and still the farmer lived, and cursed the wind, and finally he began to curse the Maker of Winds—"

"He became a wind breaker!" Rex Live Oak called out.

Rosa smiled, unperturbed. "He tried magic when the walls wouldn't work. He chanted against the wind, and sang songs, and all the while, he grew to hate the land, the wind, the water.

He cursed them all and he became more and more bitter, until it seemed bad water ran in his veins, and his mind was poisoned with hate and fear and change. He no longer missed his family; he no longer missed the farm. It seemed nothing meant anything to him but revenge against the wind—"

"Sounds subversive to me," Hans whispered to Martin.

"And he grew thinner and thinner each day, more and more wrinkled, until he looked like a dead stalk of corn—"

"I don't remember what corn looked like, growing on a stalk," Bonita Imperial Valley said. "I grew up in a farm town, and I just don't remember."

"He couldn't remember, either," Rosa continued smoothly. "He couldn't remember what the crops looked like, or what had been important to him. He fought the wind with the only weapon he had left, useless empty words, and the wind howled and howled. Finally, the farmer became so bitter and dry and dead inside, the wind sucked him up through the air like a leaf. He lived inside the wind, empty as a husk, and the wind filled his dry lungs, and reached into his dry stomach, and then into his dry, rattling head."

"So what's the point?" Jack Sand asked, looking around the assembled group with a puzzled expression.

"It's a story," Kimberly Quartz said. "Just listen."

"I don't listen to stories unless they have a point. It's a waste of time," Jack said. He got up and left, glancing at Hans and Martin and shaking his head.

"In the wind," Rosa continued, hardly missing a beat, "the farmer knew what he was up against, and that he had no power. He stopped cursing and he started listening. He stopped resisting—I mean, how can you resist something so powerful?—and he began to live in the wind, as part of the howl and the whirl and the swirling. He saw other people in the wind—"