Anvil of Stars (31 page)

"There are no survivors," the mom said. "The ship's mind is inoperative. We will search for deep time memory stores."

A hole opened in the side of their craft. Martin pushed himself through first, wrapped in a spherical field with a green balloon of life support.

"It's like being in a soap bubble," he said. They had not practised with these fields before. Martin pulled down an ephemeral control panel and touched arrows to indicate the direction he wanted to move. The bubble thrust away from the craft with a barely audible tink and a tiny flash of light—individually matched atoms of anti em and matter, their explosions cupped against a mirror-reflective field the size of his hand.

Giacomo emerged next, then Hakim. Except for their few words and the sounds of breathing, again they were enveloped by the universe, although in the form of an undistorted field of stars. Martin saw the constellation of the Orchid. In that direction, visually aligned within a degree of the star known to humans as Betelgeuse, lay the Dawn Treader, two hundred billion kilometers away.

He rotated his bubble toward the constellation Hakim had named Philosopher. The derelict crossed the sweep of the Philosopher's hand.

"What was its name?" Giacomo asked.

The craft mom's voice answered, "I do not know."

They pushed slowly across the two kilometers. Martin trailed Giacomo's balloon, watching the staccato, firecracker punctuations of dying atoms.

"I feel like an angel. This is incredible," Hakim said, following Martin.

Martin's attention focused on the disintegrating hulk looming before them. He could make out the three homeballs, reduced to psychedelic leaf-skeletons, all edges glowing red and orange and white.

"I knew it took energy to maintain fake matter… I didn't know it would just fizzle out," Giacomo said. Martin spun around and urged his bubble toward the third homeball, leaving Giacomo and Hakim near the middle. He had spotted a hole big enough to squeeze his bubble through, and with the craft mom's approval, he was going to attempt entry.

Beside him followed a half-sized copper-bronze mom; he had not seen the craft produce the little robot, but no explanations were necessary. The diminutive mom advanced on its own firecracker bursts.

"What do I look for?" he asked the little mom.

"Ship's mind will have left a marker that will interact with close fields. The deep time memory store will probably reside within the third homeball, in the densest concentrations of real matter."

His bubble passed through what must have once been the hatch to the weapons store. "This ship wasn't attacked, was it?"

"No," the little mom said. "It ceased performing its mission."

"Why?"

"We have insufficient information to answer," the little mom said. Martin watched an extrusion of glowing scrap push against his bubble. He slowed and moved deeper, through layer after glimmering layer; walls, distorted cubicles, warped structural members. Sheets of disengaged matter—real matter, not subject to deterioration—hung undisturbed, brushed against his bubble, bounced aside silently, rippling like cloth. He could see now how little real matter actually coated the fake matter within a Ship of the Law; no thicker than paint.

"I'm inside the second homeball," Giacomo said.

"I'm entering the first neck," Hakim said. "It's really thinning out here—not much holding it together. I'll go forward."

Within a dark cavity, wrapped by sheets of pitted matter, Martin saw an intriguing shadow, something that did not appear to be part of the ship. He extruded a green field to push aside the sheets. A shriveled cold face stared at him, eyes sunk within their orbits, long neck desiccated to knots of dried skin and muscle around sharply defined bone.

"I've found one of the crew," he said.

"Freeze dried?" Giacomo asked.

"Not exactly. Looks like it died and mummified, then was exposed to space, maybe centuries later."

"One of our sauropods?"

Martin transmitted an image to satisfy their curiosity. A flapping sail of matter tapped the corpse and knocked lines of powder free.

He maneuvered around the corpse and pushed deeper.

His bubble pulsed suddenly, glowed pale green, returned to normal.

"That is the beacon," the little mom said. "We are near a deep time memory store."

"I've found more bodies," Giacomo said. "Dozens of them. They look like they fell asleep, or died quietly—like they're lying down."

"The ship must have been accelerating when they died," Hakim said. "Unless we are seeing peculiar patterns of rigor."

Martin wiped his eyes with a sleeve. "Really awful," he murmured.

"Do you think they just gave up, or did they run out of fuel?" Giacomo asked. Nobody could answer. "What happened to them?"

Martin's bubble advanced through curving pipes and conduits, the ship's drive, real matter, not fake. He had come to the very bowels of the ship.

The bubble pulsed again. The deep time memory store was a white dodecahedron surrounded by an intact cage of real matter, near the center of the third homeball. "Found what we're looking for," he said. "I think."

The half-sized robot pushed closer, used fields like hands and fingers to disengage the dodecahedron, pulled it from its cage. "I will store it in the craft. You may explore more if you wish. "

Martin's horror and pity had diminished enough to bring curiosity to the fore. He moved forward through the neck to the second homeball, saw Giacomo prying his way into what must have once been a large room—a kind of schoolroom—to get at what lay within. More bodies, some hidden by membranes of surface matter, all shrunken, limbs curled in death's rigor, necks pulled back as if they were in despair or agony—rigor also, he hoped—arranged against what might have been a floor. The floor rippled under the impact of dislodged particles. The bodies drifted centimeters from their resting places, illuminated by the spooky fireside glow of fake matter coming apart.

Giacomo kept muttering under his breath.

"Speak up," Martin said, irritated.

"It's so much more… obvious, how they do it," Giacomo said.

"Who does what?"

"How the Benefactors make Ships of the Law. There must be a kind of noach transmitter, and it makes a shape… fools the privileged bands into informing other particles that matter is there, but doesn't finish the job. Leaves out mass. Something paints real matter over the fake, and voila! A big fake matter balloon. That's all Dawn Treader is. Our ship could look like this in a few thousand years."

"I think there must have been fifty or sixty crew members," Hakim said. "I count thirteen where I am, near the nose. They all seem to have slept before they died."

"They sure as hell didn't die in combat" Giacomo said.

"Our mission is accomplished," the little mom said. "It is time to return."

Back in the craft, they sampled portions of the deep time memory store, what little was comprehensible to them. Martin confirmed what he had already suspected; the Benefactors' representatives, the moms, even on this Ship of the Law, interfered very little with their charges, and did not keep day-to-day records of activities. But they did store records kept by the crew, and that was what occupied Martin, Giacomo and Hakim in their free moments on the return voyage.

They decelerated, saw the two homeballs of Dawn Treader, and were welcomed back to the ship by a crowd of fit-looking crew.

Martin did not look forward to briefing Hans. Hans immediately took them to his quarters, with no time to recover. Harpal and Jennifer came as well, but no others.

"The moms let you see what you recovered?" Hans asked.

"They did, as much as we could understand," Martin answered.

"Most of the memory is ship's mind data," Hakim said. "We do not know what that contained."

Martin produced his wand. "We've tried to translate and edit. You can look over the crew records in detail… For purposes of a briefing, I thought this might cover the important points."

They watched in silence as picture and sound unfolded. The unfamiliar visual language of the recordings made viewing difficult; different color values, different notions of perspective and "editing," attempts at three-dimensional images which did not match human eyes, all added to their problems.

But the salient points were clear.

They watched hour after hour of sauropod crew history, rituals, ceremonies; and as the other Ship of the Law moved farther and farther from Leviathan and their encounters with the civilization there, the sauropod social structure became less and less firm.

Martin pointed out what must have been acts of murder. The sauropods needed a kind of reproductive analog without full reproduction; non-fertile eggs provided essential nutrients, apparently. But egg production dropped off, and the egg-producing sex—not precisely females, as three sexes were involved—underwent chastisement, isolation, and then death for their failures.

All of this was recorded with a solemn and unwinking attention to detail, a little slice of hell from human perspective, but day-to-day existence for the sauropods.

"Don't they see what they're doing?" Jennifer asked, aghast; they saw the ritualized execution of the last egg-producer, multiple hammer-blows by a group of dominants, all of one sex.

Hans grunted, turned away from the flickering images.

"It'll take us a long time to riddle some of this," Giacomo said, clutching Jennifer's hand.

"Seems pretty clear to me," Hans said. "They went to Leviathan, they were given the runaround, they gave up and left. Play back the meetings."

In much clearer detail, they saw selected images and motion sequences of Leviathan's worlds, conferences with multiple-eyed, bipedal creatures that seemed to represent the civilization; these segments were particularly muddy, almost useless in terms of linear history.

A mom entered Hans' cabin. "The ship has translated all Benefactor and ship language records," the mom said. "We may call these beings Red Tree Runners."

"Why would we want to?" Hans asked.

"That is a close translation of their name for themselves. Their home system was invaded four thousand three hundred and fifty years ago, Dawn Treader frame of reference. They had already established a pact with representatives of the Benefactors. The killer probes were defeated and their worlds were not substantially damaged. Perhaps half of their original population survived, and they were able to rebuild. They were outfitted with ships and weapons suitable to seek out the Killers. They became part of the Benefactor alliance."

"But they weren't Benefactors themselves?" Hakim asked.

"No. You might call them junior partners."

Hans chuckled. "Higher rank than us."

"A different arrangement, under different circumstances. The Red Tree Runners traveled over one hundred light years, a journey lasting thirty Earth years by their reference frame."

"And?" Hans said.

"They arrived at Leviathan nineteen hundred years ago. Leviathan has changed considerably since then."

"We noticed," Giacomo said.

"Reasons for the changes are not clear. But they were convinced Leviathan was not their target, obtained fuel from the inhabitants of one of the worlds, and departed."

Martin shook his head. "That's all?"

"The memory store has undergone considerable decay. The Red Tree Runners may have discovered how to deactivate the ship's mind, or interfere with its operations. Over ninety percent of the records are too deteriorated for retrieval. One third of the shipboard recordings have survived, but all biological, historical, and library records of their civilization have decayed."

"Of course," Hans said dryly.

"They fell apart," Jennifer said. "They lost it and they killed themselves. Or decided to die."

Martin recalled the mummified corpses, the last of the crew, saw them lying down to accept the end.

"By God, that won't happen to us," Hans said.

"Will this information be made available to all crew members?" the mom asked.

Hans seemed startled by the question. He mused for a moment, squinted one eye, looked at Martin as if about to dress him down for some unspecified offense. "Yeah," he said. "Open to everybody. Why not. Warning to us all."

"It'll be our albatross," Harpal said. "I don't know what the others are going to think…"

"It's a goddamned bloody sign from heaven," Hans said. "Rosa's going to have a ball."

Wild Night was not, as the awkward name suggested, a free-for-all; boredom with lust had settled in. The occasion was treated as both a welcome home for the three travelers and a chance for the crew to let off steam after absorbing news of the death ship; to get back at authority—at the moms, and more implicitly, at Hans, with his planning and approval.

In the cafeteria, the crew enjoyed the first dinner they had had since the Skirmish that tasted like anything.

Martin had not participated in the Wild Night planning, and so was as surprised as anybody by the depth of vituperation Hans endured. Rex Live Oak cut his hair to resemble Hans', and performed a skit with three Wendys about Hans' sexual escapades. The jokes were explicit and not very funny, but brought hoots and cackles from the crew. Hans smiled grimly and tilted his head back in mock chagrin.

Martin wanted to leave before the third skit, but saw clearly that that would not have been appreciated. Group action was the call of the night, cooperation and coordination: laugh together, poke fun together, rise from the pit together. The entire atmosphere only deepened Martin's gloom; on Earth, he had never seen a social gathering turn sour, but this must have been what it was like: forced hilarity, insults and insincerity passing for humor, bitterness and sadness masking as camaraderie. Hans presided over it all with dogged equanimity, sitting slightly apart from the others at a table.

The unexpected came, of course, from Rosa Sequoia. She had been quiet for the months when Martin, Giacomo, and Hakim had been away, "Biding her time," as Hans said. Now, as the skit's players took a break, she climbed on top of the center table and began to speak.