Anvil of Stars (32 page)

The show's presenters could not intervene without breaking the fragile, false mood of all for one and one for all; they had started something, and Rosa took advantage of it.

"You know me," she said. "I'm the crazy one. I see things and tell stories. You think Hans is funny. You think you are funny. What about me?"

Nobody said a word. Uncomfortable shufflings.

"What about us?" Rosa's loose robe did not hide the fact that her bulk had turned to muscle, that while neither thin nor graceful, she had grown much stronger in the past four months, much more self-assured.

Her face radiated simple pleasure at being in front of them; of all the people in the crew, now only Rosa could manage a genuinely pleasant smile.

"We're flesh and blood, but we allow ourselves to be dragged across hundreds of trillions of kilometers, to fight with ghosts… to take revenge on people who aren't there. That's funny."

Hans' expression solidified, dangerous, head drawn back as if he might snap at a passing bug with his teeth.

But there was something about Rosa's tone that kept them in their seats. She was not going to harangue them for being foolish; nor play the doom-saying prophet, holding up the example of the corpse of a Ship of the Law to chasten them; she was up to something else.

"How many of you have had strange dreams?" she asked. That hit the mark; nobody answered or raised their hands, but a stiffening of bodies, a turning away of eyes, showed that most had. Martin looked over his crewmates, neckhair rising.

"You've been dreaming about people who died, haven't you?" Rosa continued, still smiling, still disarming.

"What about you?" Rex barked.

"Oh, yes, I've been dreaming; if you could call it dreaming, the crazy things that happen to me. I've got it bad. I don't just talk to dead people; I talk to dead ideas. I visit places none of us have thought about since we were little children. Now that's crazy!"

"Sit down, Rosa," Hans said.

Rosa did not flinch, did not shift her smile or narrow her eyes; she was oblivious to him.

"I've been dreaming about people who died on Earth," Jeanette said. "They tell me things."

"What do they tell you?" Rosa asked. Target acquired, audience responding, some at least warming to this change, welcoming relief from the previous cruel absurdity.

Kai Khosrau jumped in before Jeanette could answer. "My parents," he said.

"What do your parents tell you?"

"My friends when I was a little girl," Kirsten Two Bites called out. "They must be dead; they weren't on the Ark."

"What do they tell you, Kirsten?"

"My brother on the Ark," Patrick Angelfish said.

"What does he tell you, Patrick?" Rosa's face reddened with enthusiasm.

Martin's skin prickled. Theodore.

"They all tell us we're in a maze and we've forgotten what's important," Rosa answered herself, triumphant. "We're in a maze of pain and we can't find a way out. We don't know what we're doing or why we're here any more. We used to know. Who knows why we're here?"

"We all know," Hans said, eyes squinted, looking from face to face around him, shrewd, assessing. "We're doing the Job. We've already done more than all the others before us—"

He cut himself short, glanced at Martin, grimaced.

"We know up here," Rosa said, tapping her head. She placed her hand over her breast. "We do not know here."

"Oh, Jesus," Hans groaned. No one else said a word.

"We play and we try to laugh. We laugh at Hans, but he doesn't deserve our laughter. He's Pan. His job is tough. We should be laughing at ourselves. At our sadness."

Paola Birdsong cried out, "You're sick, Rosa. Some of us are still grieving. We don't know what to think… Stop this crap now!"

"We're all grieving. All our lives is grief," Rosa said. "Grief and vengeance. Hate and death. No birth, no redemption. We are like mindless knives and guns, bombs, pigeons in rockets."

" Make your point and get off," Hans said, sensing that taking her off by force would meet with strong disapproval.

"Something else speaks to me," Rosa said, chin dipping, shoulders rising.

"Monsters in the halls?" Rex Live Oak called out.

"Let her talk," Jeanette Snap Dragon demanded, angry.

Hans started to rise.

Rosa lifted her arms. "The things we fight against, we might have called gods once, but we would have been wrong. They are not gods. They aren't even close. I saw something last tenday that nearly burned me alive."

"The God of our mothers and fathers!" Jeanette sobbed.

Martin slipped from his chair and started to leave. He did not want to be here, did not want to face this.

"No!" Rosa cried. "It has a voice like chimes, like flutes, like birds, but it crosses this span of stars like a whale in the sea."

Martin froze, eyes welling up. Yes. So huge and yet it cares.

"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.