Anvil of Stars (47 page)

The image of the fifth type brought gasps from the humans. Reptilian, with a long crested head and a short trunk, and limbs that folded backward at the lower joints, the fifth was much smaller than the preceding types.

Erin reached out to take Ariel's hand. The humans stared in shock and disbelief.

"God damn them," George Dempsey said.

"They don't know where we come from," Cham said. "They've screwed up royally."

Martin nodded. Paola began to explain to Eye on Sky, but the Brother rustled and emitted a strong rosy odor of sympathy. "We we recognize," Eye on Sky said. "This is from your endtime history."

"We've found them," Martin said.

"Don't jump to conclusions," Ariel said softly.

"What other conclusions are there?" Martin asked.

"How many beings have they investigated, how many forms might they have stolen? We still can't be positive."

Martin wanted to bask in this sense of discovery, have the peculiar satisfaction of watching the Killers make a mistake, reveal a weakness. "I want to be positive," he said ambiguously.

"Then think," Ariel said, glancing nervously at the others, as if anticipating a sudden wave of emotion overriding reason. "This could be the original they stole their design from."

"Not likely," Martin said. "If the Killers knew them well enough to copy their… bodies, their designs, they'd be dead by now, almost surely…"He turned to the mom. "Do you recognize this type from any of the worlds the Benefactors saved, or any other worlds you know?"

"It does not match any in our records," the mom answered.

Martin turned back to Ariel. "Any other theories?" he asked.

Ariel raised her hands. "I still think we shouldn't jump to any conclusions."

"This is the one," Martin said. "It's the creature they used as a decoy outside the spaceship in Death Valley. I know it is."

Cham laid his hand on Martin's shoulder. "Let's say it is, for now. Doesn't change our plans any. Just another piece of evidence."

"Right," Martin said, shivering off his emotion. "Noach it to Shrike and Greyhound. Noach all the pictures."

"Let's finish looking at them ourselves, first," Cham suggested evenly, still patting Martin's shoulder.

Martin pulled himself back from his anger. "Sorry," he said.

"We all feel it, Martin," Erin said.

"All of us," Ariel said. She took a deep breath and squatted on the floor.

The next two pictures sketched an orbital path in relation to the fifteen planets, astrogational hints given by binary number measurements triangulating on the nearest stars.

"Very friendly. They're suggesting we decelerate at five g's," Cham said, tracing his finger along the projection, "and go into orbit around the fourth planet."

"Can we survive there?" Andrew asked.

"It is the inexplicable one," Hakim said. "Far too light to be solid, one hundred two thousand kilometers in diameter, there is a cool, solid surface and a thin atmosphere, ten percent oxygen, seventy percent nitrogen, fifteen percent argon and other inerts, five percent carbon dioxide, about six tenths of ship's pressure. Not good to breathe. The surface temperature is fine, a range of ten to twenty degrees centigrade. The gravitational pull is high, however, about two g's."

"The mom can't wrap us in fields," Andrew Jaguar said. "We're not supposed to have that kind of technology."

"We we might disassemble," Eye on Sky warned. "With such weight, there is often no braid control over cords."

Martin held up his hand to cut the discussion. His head hurt abominably. "I don't think that's going to be a problem, one way or another. If they treat us like guests, they'll probably have ways to make us comfortable. If not—" He looked around the cabin. "Why worry?"

"We don't know we'll be invited to the surface," Paola said.

"Not very neighborly if we aren't," Erin said.

"Or they might just kill us," Andrew Jaguar said. "These worlds look like a lot of very sweet candy for curious flies."

"Andrew," Jennifer said testily.

"Nobody can tell me they don't look… just very interesting! Gingerbread house and witch!"

Paola tried to explain this to the Brothers, but Eye on Sky showed with a flourish of head cords that explanation was either not needed or not wanted. No more of our violent fairy tales , Martin thought.

He turned to Eye on Sky. "Do we go in?"

"What is your opinion?" Eye on Sky rejoined. Some of the Brothers smelled of cloves.

Martin nodded. "Sure," he said. "That's why we're here. Jennifer, is this diagram clear?"

"Clear enough," she said. "Silken Parts and I can tell the ship where to go."

Martin turned to the mom. "I assume you'll vanish into the woodwork, so to speak, when the time comes."

"When the time comes," it said, "my presence will not be obvious."

Without warning, the mom made a peculiar noise like a trumpet blat and gently toppled to one side, rebounding against the floor. The crew stared in surprise; before anyone could react, it made a similar noise and rose again, stabilized. "This vessel has been searched for high-density weapons. Examination may have been conducted by noach. My functioning was temporarily interfered with."

"How do they search by noach?" Jennifer asked, voice squeaky.

"They may query selected atoms and particles within our vessel for their state and position."

Jennifer looked as if she had just opened a wonderful Christmas present, and she turned to Martin, gleeful, clearly believing that her work and theory had been confirmed.

Martin was struck by how much they acted and sounded like eager, frightened children, himself included.

"Will they know the ship has a fake matter core?" he asked the mom. "Could they know you're here?"

"Unless I am mistaken, which is possible but not likely, such a noach examination can only reveal extremes of mass density."

Jennifer slapped her right hand against her thigh; it was obvious she wanted to do more momerath and plug in these new clues.

"Jennifer," he said, "you have work to do?"

"Pardon?"

"Go do it. You're making me nervous."

Jennifer grinned and left the bridge.

"So they know we're not armed with anything lethal," Martin said. "Why did you quit for a moment there?"

"I am not sure."

Martin looked at the mom intently, then returned his attention to the projected images. "Put us into orbit around the fourth planet," he told Hakim and Silken Parts.

Hakim did his momerath and drew the best path and points of drive bursts; the path closely matched that suggested on the transmitted charts. "Steady deceleration of five g's, we will be in orbit within five days, thirteen hours and twelve minutes," Hakim said.

Silken Parts did the same calculations using Brother math, reported the results to Eye on Sky, then turned to Martin. "We agree within a few seconds," he said.

"Noach our plans and the messages to Shrike and Greyhound," Martin said.

Martin's cabin aboard the Trojan Horse was less than a fifth the size of his previous quarters and contained only his sleeping net. The crews had not yet finished adding homey touches to the masquerade; he scanned the walls and imagined perhaps posters of Brothers and humans frolicking on beaches beneath a blue-green sky. That isn't too bad. He'd mention the idea to Donna Emerald Sea, who with Long Slither was in charge of ship design now.

He twisted into the net and closed his eyes. He was instantly asleep and in no time at all, it seemed, his wand chimed. It was Jennifer. In long-suffering silence, he crawled from the net, assumed a lotus in mid-air to keep some sort of dignity, and told her to come in.

"Their noach is better than ours," she said. "Much higher level, more powerful than the moms' noach, I mean."

"That's obvious," he said, still groggy.

"I just had a long talk with Silken Parts. We swapped theories on Benefactor technology. Martin, we're going to be way outmatched down there—far more than we were around Wormwood. What these folks had around Wormwood is like a steel trap, and this, this is an atom bomb."

"What do you think they have?" Martin asked.

"They swept us with something—no, that's not right; sweep isn't the right idea, not the right word. They queried our ship's matter and particles from six billion kilometers. From what I can work out, we couldn't manage that intense a scan at all, ever—and if we could, we couldn't transfer that much data in less than a few weeks."

"Impressive, but what does it imply?"

"If the moms are right, and these folks don't know everything there is to know about us now—and frankly, I can't think of a reason why they shouldn't, except maybe bandwidth—"

"Jennifer, I'm not thinking too clearly. You woke me up and I haven't slept since coming out of deceleration."

"I haven't either," Jennifer said, blinking.

"Well, you're superhuman, we all know that."

"Flattery won't get answers any faster," she said much too brightly, her face flushed as if with fever. "Sorry. I'm a little giddy, too. What I'm getting around to saying is, they could turn us into anti-matter right now. Or just enough of us to blow our ship to pieces."

"Are you sure?"

"No. I'm not sure. And obviously, they haven't. But—"

"There's nothing we can do about it."

"I know," she said. "I know that."

"Can you give me any advice about what we can do?"

"Of course, we can't let them know we understand what noach is."

"That'll be easy. I don't understand."

"Or that we know it exists," she said, knitting her brows in irritation. "Silken Parts is working over other implications, and one of them… Are you going to pull a Hans on me?" she asked suddenly.

"Pardon?"

"I'm going to tell you something really big, really scary. Are you going to pull a Hans and vanish into some macho shell right now?"

"I promise, I won't do that," Martin said.

"We thought maybe the twelfth planet changing character, color, maybe that was more proof that parts of this system are illusory. A projection or something. Martin, if they can do what I think they can, it doesn't matter, there isn't any difference. They could make a shell of fake matter around an entire planet, an entire star, just as solid as this ship is. They could redirect or manufacture images as wide as this system in any direction they desired."

"Do they have the energy?"

"I'm guessing yes. They might be tapping the star. From what we can see, the system seems to be rich with volatiles.

Maybe they've held all their resources in reserve, waiting for the main assault."

"Do you have any good news?" Martin asked.

Jennifer grinned. "Not fond of endless David and Goliath?"

"It's a living," he said dourly.

"I can do without it myself. But I do have some wild-ass ideas that might be encouraging. I want to noach with Giacomo and do some momerath with him, and I want to hook into the ships' minds. I'm hoping we can collaborate. This is something moms and Brothers and humans need to do together."

"I'll get you some private time with Giacomo. No sweet nothings, though," he chided.

"Strictly business," Jennifer said.

Martin saw the Trojan Horse/Double Seed as an ant crawling into a kitchen, staring all unknowing at giant appliances, instruments of unknown utility, technologies beyond the capacity of its tiny brain to comprehend…

There was so much that made no sense whatsoever.

The twelfth planet continued to change its character every few hours, alternating between three different sets of features, all the same size, all rocky, but radically different in all other ways.

The ninth planet had an eccentric orbit, carrying it outside the orbit of the tenth planet. It was small, perhaps a former moon, though with no surface features. It had an albedo of one, a perfectly reflective mirror at all frequencies.

The eighth planet, a bright orange-yellow gas giant with a diameter of seventy-five thousand kilometers, possessed three large moons. Cables two to three kilometers in diameter hung from the moons to the planet's fluid surface, leaving great whorls in their wakes, like mixers in a fantastic bakery.

The sixth planet, eight thousand kilometers in diameter, appeared to be covered with dandelion fluff, each "seed" a thousand kilometers tall. Incoming space vessels never ventured below the crowns of the seeds. In close-up, between the seed pillars, storms churned a thick atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen and water vapor. Hakim thought this might be a giant farm of some sort, for raising unimaginable creatures or plants, but Martin thought that seemed archaic; one wondered if such powerful beings would still need to eat, much less eat formerly living things.

"Then the creatures might have other uses," Hakim said, eyes glittering with speculation.

"None of which we can guess," George Dempsey cautioned.

"Let us have our fun," Erin said peevishly.

Peering deeper down Leviathan's well, to the fifth planet, nine thousand kilometers in diameter, dull gray, and like the ninth, smoother than a billiard ball, but far from reflective.

And perhaps the most fascinating of them all: the fourth planet, one hundred and two thousand kilometers in diameter, with six moons, three of them larger than Earth, its dark reddish-brown surface radiating heat steadily into space, covered with liquid water oceans with narrow ribbons of continent and low mountains between like stripes on a basketball.

"Thirty-two billion square kilometers," Ariel said in wonder. "If the land is ten percent of the surface, that's over three billion square kilometers." Pause for quick figuring. "Earth had about one and a third billion square kilometers of land. How many people could live here?"

"At two g's, not me," Cham said.

"The physics don't make sense," Hakim said. "Not dense enough to support a solid surface… The density below the rocky shell must be less than one and a half grams per cubic centimeter. How is this done?"

"How is any of it done?" George Dempsey asked.

The images and charts were noached to Greyhound and Shrike. Hans' voice replied: "We're almost at maximum range. Soon be out of touch for a while. How is it?"