Текст книги "Anvil of Stars"

Автор книги: Грег Бир

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"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—"

Hans motioned for Martin to follow him outside. Martin walked through the door and they stayed in step down the corridor, past Jack Sand, past Andrew Jaguar and Kirsten Two Bites.

Out of the others' hearing, Hans said, "When I was a little kid, back on Earth, my folks took television and video games away from me for a week to punish me for something I did. I went nuts. I even started to read books. Well," he said, "our TV's gone now. Rosa is better than nothing." He shook his head. "But not much."

"Did you slick Paola Birdsong?" Ariel asked. Martin picked up his tray of food and walked away from her, face pinking.

"Did you?" she asked innocently, following with her own tray.

He sat, got up when she sat next to him, moved to another table, started to get up again as she kept pace with him, and finally dropped the tray a few inches to the table, slapped the tabletop once with his fist, and said, "Who the hell cares?"

Martin ate and tried to ignore her.

"I'm not trying to be nosy," Ariel said. "I want to know what it means to be devoted to someone for a long time, even after they're dead."

Martin found the situation intensely uncomfortable. "I'd like to eat in peace," he said.

"I'm sorry. I'm bothering you. I apologize." She got up, carried her tray out of the cafeteria, and left him feeling guilty, mad, and confused.

That sleep, he cried again, thinking of Theresa, but he did not remember any dreams.

Two moms appeared in the schoolroom for the next crew tenday report. There had been no announcement, no fanfare, but the crew cheered, taking it as a sign that things were improving.

Hans announced the results of the previous day's nose-to-tail races.

Hakim had five minutes to squeeze in a report on science.

Jennifer Hyacinth came up to Martin after the meeting.

"Maybe you'd like to be in on what we're doing," she said. She sounded almost conspiratorial, but he could not imagine Jennifer involved in intrigue.

"About what?" he asked.

"The noach. We're having a little conference to share results."

"Oh." He had planned to attend the next trial for the main race, but that was certainly trivial enough to ignore.

"Sure," he said.

"In the nose in ten minutes. Hakim Hadj, Giacomo Sicilia and Thorkild Lax are coming."

"I'll be there," he said.

Hakim, Giacomo, Thorkild and Jennifer had formed a Noach Studies Society some tendays before. Martin had not attended the meetings—they were reportedly dry and mathematical, the chief excitement being momerath challenges.

The reports were wrong.

Jennifer, with Giacomo's help, had put together a comprehensive description of how the noach could work, how matter could change character under the influence of noach-transmitted information, and what that meant for the ultimate shape of Benefactor society as they imagined it.

Hakim spent a few minutes projecting graphics for Martin, filling him in on the key points.

Jennifer and Giacomo held hands and contemplated momerath until the meeting was convened by Thorkild.

"We've been trying to piece together an overview of Benefactor technology," Thorkild began. "Jennifer's done most of the tough work, laying a foundation for the rest of us. Giacomo has erected the frame on that foundation…"

Giacomo smiled.

"You might say they work together intimately," Thorkild added. Hakim clapped his hand on Giacomo's shoulder as if in congratulations. Jennifer's face remained set in solid neutrality, but her eyes flashed.

"Hakim has put on the siding and I've painted," Thorkild concluded. "Mind you, none of what we've come up with has much meaning for our mission. It's all theoretical—"

"I disagree," Jennifer said.

"Which I was about to add," Thorkild said.

"I think it could have a lot of meaning for the Job," Jennifer said. "We were caught by surprise when the Killers converted our craft to anti em. We assume the moms were caught by surprise. The more we can guess about the technology and theory behind our weapons, the more we can contribute to planning."

Martin rubbed his nose. "So what's the house look like?"

Hakim projected a list. "First, the noach—instantaneous communication at a distance. This is made possible by confusing two particles—in this case, atomic nuclei—into 'believing' that they are the same. Second, actually creating a particle at a distance—deluding the matrix into believing that a particle exists at a certain position, and has a certain history attached. This could be how fake matter is created—resistance to pressure, but no resistance to acceleration; extension, but no mass."

"Noach could be the key to all of this," Jennifer said. "To send a noach message, you have to confuse a particle's bit makeup, its self-contained information about character, position and quantum state."

"What do you mean by a particle 'believing' something?" Martin asked.

"The particle's bit makeup determines its behavior," Hakim said. " 'Behavior' is a bad word, like 'belief.' We do not think particles are alive or think. But they do exhibit simple behavior, of course—a nature or character, which is the same for all similar particles, and a history in spacetime."

"Given that," Martin said, "how do we get to the rest of the abilities in this list?"

"To create fake matter," Giacomo said, "basic elements in the matrix are convinced they have some of the properties of matter. To noach messages, you tamper with the privileged channels used by particles to convince one particle at some distance to believe it is the same as, or in resonance with, another particle under our local control.

"There could be several ways to convert a particle to an-anti-particle. A boson, approaching a particle, carries information from its source, some of which has already been conveyed by information following so-called privileged bands. The boson also conveys energy, which acts on the particle's data, changing a particular bit sequence."

"Energy is information?" Martin asked.

"Energy is a catalyst for information change. It's information in only a limited sense. To convert a particle to an anti-particle, you can change its bit makeup either by perverting the privileged band information, say by sending it a boson tailored to react falsely, which might compel it to switch a series of bits to be consistent, or by creating a resonance with outside anti-particles."

"Resonance…?"

"Imposing the data of an anti-particle on a particle in another position by making them congruent, coextensive," Hakim said. "It is similar to how the noach works."

"We think," Jennifer cautioned.

Martin could not keep up with their projected momerath, or even all of their explanations. "I'll have to take some of this on faith," he said wearily.

"Oh, please no," Hakim said. "Work it out for yourself in private. We may be wrong, and we need criticism."

"Not from me, I'm afraid."

"We are all out of our depth here, actually," Hakim said. "We must not accept this as anything more than playful theory."

Martin poked at a few expressions in the momerath that he could just begin to riddle. "Would they have to have a lot of anti em to convert something else to anti em—match a mass particle for particle?"

"We do not think so," Hakim said. "In Jennifer's momerath, a single particle could be used as template to confuse and convert many other particles. Possibly, simply knowing the structure of a particle would be enough."

"Even at a distance," Thorkild said.

"But just how it's done, we haven't a clue," Jennifer said. "The difference between theory and application."

"Oh," Martin said.

"Neat, huh?" Thorkild asked.

Martin closed his eyes and shook his head.

After, Martin sat alone in an empty quarters space, dabbling with the momerath but not able to concentrate on it, thinking instead about how much the crew had changed in just a few months. They acted like passengers enduring hard times on a down-on-its-luck cruise ship, or like students in a particularly lax high school with a principal too hip for their own good.

He longed for time to speed up, for the rendezvous to occur, for anythingto happen that was significant and not theoretical.

* * *

Rosa's storytelling improved.

The races were concluded, with Hans pitting himself against the fastest of ten trials, Rex Live Oak, and winning by two seconds, the races being run nose to tail within the ship. Hans was inordinately proud of the victory, and took two Wendys to his quarters after for a private free-for-all, the first partners he had taken since becoming Pan.

Martin did not notice who the Wendy's were; he had tired of the growing reliance on gossip for excitement. He did not care who Hans was slicking, or whether Hans had stolen Harpal's love interest, or who was going to attempt Rosa soon.

Rosa, thinner by five kilos, face austere and happy at once, was becoming, for Martin, the most interesting and at the same time the most disturbing person aboard Dawn Treader.

Martin came to the nose when it was empty and collapsed the star sphere to see the outside universe without interpretation. The stars ahead had not yet changed noticeably; bright, frozen forever against measureless black.

Jennifer's theories had upset him on some deep level. He had dreamed about enemies they could not see, malevolent beings confusing and perverting them from a distance like puppetmasters.

"What the hell are we doing here?" he asked. He had come to the nose to pray, but he could not conceive of anything or anyone to pray to. Nothing touched him; nothing felt for him, or knew that he was in the nose, that he was alone. Nothing knew that he was confused and needed help, that Martin son of Arthur Gordon had lost whatever path he had ever known, and that merely doing the Job seemed a highly inadequate reason for living.

His father might have thought this view of deep space the most spectacular and beautiful thing one could wish for; Martin could not see it as anything but scattered light impinging on exhausted eyes.

He had fought the end of his pain for many tendays now, but his grief followed its natural course like a healing wound. Finally even the itch would be gone and Theresa would truly be dead—and William—

He groaned softly, for he owed William so much more than he could give emotionally, now or ever.

With his grief knitting its torn edges, there would be nothing left to define him but the dreary nothingness at his core, more blank than any black between stars, a comfortable emptiness to fall into, a gentle negation and dissolution.

He thought he would gladly die if death were an end in itself and not something more.

What he would pray to, then, was a weak candle of hope: that in these horrible spans of contesting civilizations, there was something, somewhere, that oversaw and judged and sympathized; that was wise in a way they could not conceive of; that might, given a chance, intervene, however mysteriously.

Something that cradled and nurtured his dead loves in its bosom; but something that would also acknowledge his unworthiness and allow him a finality, an end.

He thought of the powerful orgasm with Paola, stronger by many degrees than he remembered experiencing with Theresa.

Confusion and stars. What a combination, he thought.

He encouraged the pain to return and let depression settle over him, until his heart seemed to slow, his eyelids drooped, and he was surrounded by a comfortable blanket of despair, so much more palpable than memory or responsibility or the day-to-day dreariness of shipboard life.

Nothing intervened.

Nothing cared.

In a way, that was reassuring. There could be an end to the universe's complexity, an end to the strife and confusion of intelligence.

In the middle of the sports and competitions, in the middle of Martin's despair, Rosa Sequoia disappeared.

Kimberly Quartz and Jeanette Snap Dragon found her naked and half-dead from thirst five days later. They brought her to the schoolroom. Ariel kneeled on the floor and gripped her hair, pulling her head back and forcing her to drink water. Her eyes wandered to fix on points between the people in the room. "What the hell are you doing?" Ariel asked.

Rosa smiled up at her, water leaking from her mouth, cracked lips bleeding sluggish drops. Her face was smeared with dried blood. She had bitten her lower lip. "It came again and touched me," she said. "I was dangerous. I might have hurt somebody."

Hans entered the schoolroom already in a rage and brushed Ariel aside. "Get up, damn you," he said. Rosa stood unsteadily, smelling sour, drips of dried blood on her breasts.

"Are you nuts?" Hans asked.

She shook her head, her shy smile opening the bites. They bled more freely.

Hans grabbed Rosa's arm, looked around the room for someone to come forward of the ten crew that had gathered. Ariel stepped up again, and Hans transferred the unresisting arm to her hands, as if passing a dog's leash. "Feed her and clean her up. She's confined to quarters. Jeanette, guard her door and make sure she doesn't come out."

"I should be telling stories later today," Rosa said meekly. "That's why I came back."

"You won't talk to anybody," Hans said. He brushed past them all, ridding himself of the mess with a backward wave of his hands.

Martin followed him from the schoolroom, anger piercing his gloom. "She's sick," he told Hans. "She's not responsible."

"I'm sick, too," Hans said. "We're all sick. But she's slicking crazy. What about you?" He whirled on Martin. "Christ, you mope like a goddamned snail. Harpal's no better. What in hell is going on?"

Martin said, "We've fallen into a hole."

"Then let's climb out of it, by God!"

"There is no god. I hope. No one listening to us."

Hans gave him a withering, pitying glare. "Rosa would disagree," he said sharply. "I'll bet she has God's business card in her overalls right now. Wherever her overalls are. " Hans shook his head vigorously. "Of all the women on this ship, shehas to shed her clothes when she feels a fit coming on." He stopped a few meters down the corridor, shoulders hunched as if Martin were about to throw something at him.

Martin had not moved, wrapped in a wonderfully thick and protective melancholy, feeling very little beyond the fixed anger at Hans.

Hans turned, frowning. "You say we're in a hole. We're losing it, aren't we?" he asked. "By damn, I will not let us lose it." He tipped an almost jaunty wave to Martin, and skipped up the corridor, whistling tunelessly.

Martin shivered as if with cold. He returned to the schoolroom. Rosa talked freely with the five who remained. Ariel had brought her a pair of overalls that did not fit. She looked ridiculous but she did not care.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I apologize for my condition. I couldn't even think. I was wired to a big generator. I wasn't human. My body didn't matter." She faced Martin, large powerful arms held out as if she might try to fly. "I felt so ugly before this. Now it just isn't important." The light went suddenly from her eyes and she seemed to collapse a couple of inches. "I'm really tired," she whispered, chin dropping to her chest. "Jeanette, please take me to my room. Hans is right. Don't let me out for a while, and don't let anybody but you—or Ariel—in to see me." She raised a hand and pointed at the three, including Martin. "You are my friends," she said.

"It's a very weak signal," Hakim said. He unveiled the analysis for Hans, Harpal, and Martin, all gathered in the Dawn Treader'snose. "With our remotes out, we could have picked it up months ago… Maybe even when we were orbiting Wormwood. But we weren't focusing in this direction…"

"All right," Hans said impatiently. "It's a ship. It's close to us. How close?"

"Four hundred billion kilometers. If we do not alter course, we will pass within a hundred billion kilometers. It is following a course similar to our own, but traveling much more slowly. It is not accelerating."

Hans said. "It seems odd to find such a needle in the haystack. Why is it close to our course?"

Hakim ventured no guesses.

"Maybe it's a reasonable course between the two stars," Harpal suggested. "Give or take a few hundred billion kilometers…"

"Bolsh," Hans said. "They could have swung wide either way. We came up out of the poles… a reasonable course would have been to use least-energy vectors between the planes of the ecliptic. What's our relative velocity?"

Hakim highlighted the figure on the chart: the difference in their velocities amounted to one quarter c, about seventy-five thousand kilometers per second.

"Even if we could change course, we wouldn't want to shed that much speed to rendezvous… We'll just have to pass in the night. You're sure it's a ship?"

"The dimensions are appropriate. It is less than a kilometer long. We were fortunate enough to get a star occultation."

Hans hummed faintly and rubbed his cheeks with his palms. "Why send out a signal? Why not just hide and get your work done? Whatever the work is…"

Nobody had an answer.

"Can we interpret the signal?"

"It is not language of a spoken variety. That much we know. It may be a series of numbers, perhaps coordinates."

"You mean, telling rescuers where it is?"

"I think not. If these pulses are numbers, they are repetitive… There are about a hundred such groups of numbers, assuming that a long pause—a few microseconds—means a new group. Giacomo and Jennifer are working on the possibilities now."

"What kind of coordinates?" Hans asked.

"Jennifer thinks they may describe a two-dimensional image."

"You mean, television?"

"Digital, not analog—not modulated."

"A crude picture," Martin suggested.

"Perhaps only a few dozen pictures in sequence," Hakim said. "We just can't be sure yet."

"Call me when you are," Hans said.

Jennifer entered the nose and stood for a moment, blinking at them, grinning with canines prominent: Jennifer's wolfish expression of intellect triumphant. Giacomo came in behind her. She lifted her wand and said, "We've got it. Too simple to see, actually. Polar coordinates, not rectangular, spiral within a circle, a sweep point, angle theta, radius measured from the center, groups of numbers in sequence: theta, radius, gray-scale value. Theta changes every one hundred and twenty numbers. The gray-scale value gives about thirty shades. The signals translate to about a hundred graphic images before it starts to repeat. It's clumsy but simple enough for almost anyone to decode."

"Want to see?" Giacomo said.

Hans patted his arm with strained gentleness, impatient. "Show us."

Jennifer lifted her wand.

The first picture was difficult to make out, a series of blurs and blocks of shadow. Harpal pointed to a mottled oval white blur and said, "That's a face, I think. It's very low resolution, isn't it?"

"We can interpolate, do some so-called Laplace enhancements," Giacomo said. "But I thought we should see the original images first."

"Enhance. We'll worry about distortions later," Martin suggested.

Giacomo picked out simple enhancements, stabbing with his finger expertly at a menu of selections only he could see. The picture became at once more contrasting and easier to perceive, but reduced to blacks and whites with few shades of gray. "Five faces, I think," Harpal said, pointing them out slowly. Martin nodded; Hans simply looked with hands folded, frowning.

"They're not human, but they're bilaterally symmetric," Harpal said.

"I think there are more faces, but they're too blurred to make out," Giacomo said.

"Eyes," Jennifer said. "A mouth perhaps."

"I don't give a slick what they look like," Hans said, scowl deepening. "What do they mean!"

"Maybe these are the crew of the…" Jennifer said, and stopped.

"The crew of the other Ship of the Law. Our future comrades," Martin finished for her.

"If they are, they're awfully stupid, radiating a signal like this for anybody to pick up."

"This could be more of a last testament," Hakim said. "A dying ship, channeling power to send out a weak but detectable signal… Someone who no longer cares about being found."

"The moms would tell us at least that much—whether they're still dead, or alive. Wouldn't they?" Harpal asked.

"These aren't our partners," Hans said. "They're just some other poor sons of bitches lost out here."

More faces. Dark interiors with brightly lighted figures. They began to see the overall shape of the beings: round bodies with four thick stubby legs, elongated horse-like heads on long necks, a pair of slender limbs rising from the "shoulders" and tipped with four-fingered hands. They wore harness-like outfits more useful for carrying things than as concealment.

"Centaurs," Jennifer said.

"They look more like dinosaurs to me," Giacomo said. "Sauropods."

"Tweak it again," Hans ordered.

Giacomo and Jennifer worked together to interpolate more detail. For a moment, the picture fuzzed into grayness, and then it stood out in artificial clarity, all shapes reduced to plastic simplifications. "I'll enhance shadows, since the light source seems to be from this angle," Giacomo said, pointing his finger in toward the picture experimentally.

Hans' scowl did not change. Something new and he doesn't like it, Martin thought.

Giacomo poked the unseen menu and keyboard and spoke short verbal commands, all interpreted by his wand.

The image's contrast became more dramatic, shadows more pronounced, and the scene suddenly took on depth. Five of the sauropod beings floated in an ill-defined interior, joined in a five-pointed star, heads toward the middle, linked by hand-like appendages.

"Group portrait," Martin said.

"Next picture, and tweak it the same," Hans said.

More figures appeared, arrayed with machines as difficult to riddle as the interiors of the Dawn Treadermight have been to fresh Earthbound eyes. The tenth image was a diagram: stars and larger balls against mottled dark sky. Arrays of dots and slashes that might have been labels for the image seemed to be compromised by the enhancements, but when Giacomo removed the enhancements, the symbols made no more sense than before.