Текст книги "Anvil of Stars"

Автор книги: Грег Бир

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Hakim leaned closer to the picture and said, "I can make out a familiar constellation. Familiar to the search team, at least… We have called it the Orchid. It has been with us for a year now. It looks a little different, however… The brightest star, there…"He gestured to Giacomo, who surrendered control of the image to him. Hakim brought up a crystalline starfield, live, and rotated it until he found the constellation he wanted. Then he flash-compared the blurred chart with the fresh image, adjusted for scale, and the corresponding stars jumped in and out, the brightest jumping the farthest.

"Time has passed," Hakim said, "but these are the same stars. Notice that stars in the distant background do not jump."

"I noticed," Hans said. "How long has it been?"

Hakim worked his momerath quickly. "If estimates of proper motion are correct, this image would have to be one, perhaps two thousand years old."

"They've been out here two thousand years?" Harpal asked, whistling.

The next few images showed the spacecraft itself from several angles: three spheres linked by necks.

"It's like our ship," Jennifer said.

Harpal whistled again. "It's a Ship of the Law, all right."

More pictures: cabin interiors, what might have been a social or even a mating ritual, sauropods holding up pale ovoids for examination, breaking the ovoids and appearing to consume the contents, beings in repose or dead, twenty blocks of what was probably text, then a series of ten individual portraits.

The next ten images were simple charts of a stellar system. Hakim compared these charts with the charts they had made of Leviathan. The numbers and orbits of the planets were very similar, though not exact. "Puzzling," Hakim said. "There is strong similarity, but…"

"Maybe the system has changed," Martin suggested.

"Not natural changes. Twelve planets are shown in these charts, but we have detected only ten. The largest planet is not shown in the earlier charts. Where could it have come from?"

"You're saying they didn't visit Leviathan? This is another system?" Hans asked.

Hakim frowned. "I do not know what to say. The resemblance is too close to be coincidence… these six similar planets, congruent masses, orbits, diameters…"

"Forget it for now," Hans said.

The next forty images showed planets and planetary surfaces, details too muddied to be very useful. Hints of mountains or large structures with regular, smooth surfaces; a lake or body of water; dramatic cloud formations over a flat-topped mesa, sauropods in suits exploring a broad field.

The last image was startling in its directness.

Three sauropods in suits on a planetary surface confronted a being of another kind entirely; three times more massive than they, barrel-bodied, standing on two massive legs like an elephant's, with a long, flat head topped by a row of what might have been eyes, nine of them.

They were exchanging ovoids. One sauropod appeared to be kneeling before the larger being; offering up an ovoid.

"What in the hell happened?" Hans asked, frowning, fixed on the final image. "They've picked a mighty poor choice of pictures to tell a story."

"Perhaps the sequence is incomplete," Hakim said. "What could be left after such a time?"

"Are we going to change course and find out?" Giacomo asked.

"Hell, no," Hans said immediately. "They're dead. This isn't a distress call, that's clear; they must have known they were dying."

Silence settled. Then, very distinctly, the ship's voice spoke—the first time they had heard it since a year before the Skirmish, before Martin served as Pan.

"There will be an expedition to examine this ship," it said in a rich contralto. "It would be best if members of the crew accompany the expedition."

Hans' face reddened as much with surprise as anger. "We don't have the fuel to waste!"

"There is sufficient fuel," the ship's voice said. "A vessel will be manufactured. It can carry three people, or none, depending on your decision."

"You can make another ship now?" Hakim asked in a small voice.

"Why do it at all?" Hans said. "The ship is dead—it must be! Two thousand years!"

"It is a Ship of the Law," the ship's voice answered. "The transmitted information is likely to be much less than what is stored aboard the ship itself. It is required for all Ships of the Law to rendezvous and exchange information, if such a rendezvous is possible."

Hans lifted his eyes, then his hands, giving up. "Who wants to go?" he asked.

"We can draw lots," Hakim said.

"No—we won't draw lots," Hans said. "Martin, I assume you'd like to go?"

"I don't know," Martin said.

"I'd like you to go. Take Hakim and Giacomo with you."

Jennifer's breath hitched.

"How long a voyage?" Giacomo asked.

"Your time, one month," the ship's voice said. "Time for this ship, four months. There will be super acceleration and deceleration."

"A lot of fuel," Hans said under his breath.

Giacomo touched Jennifer's hand. "Nothing like a side trip," she said. "Makes the heart grow fonder."

Giacomo did not look at all convinced.

"If people go, it will use more fuel," Martin said. He wondered if Hans wanted him out of the way.

"That is correct," the ship's voice said. "But it is not a major consideration. You will learn much that cannot be learned by sending an uncrewed vessel. Your observations will be valuable."

"There it is," Hans said. He wrapped his arm around Martin. "It'll cheer you up," he said.

"How?" Martin asked. "Visiting a derelict…"

"Get your goddamned glum face off this barge," Hans said.

"Doesn't sound like I'm being given a choice."

"I could send Rosa," Hans said.

Martin stared him down. "All right," Martin said. Hakim tried to break the tension.

"It will be a very unusual journey. While we are gone, the crew will have something to do. They'll study these pictures and—"

"Bolsh," Hans said. "We don't show them to anybody now. We can't avoid letting them know there's a ship, but everything else… zipped lips."

"Why?" Jennifer asked, astonished.

"Our morale is so low the pictures might kill us," Hans said. "Martin, Giacomo, you study them with Hakim and Jennifer. Nobody else sees them for now. I don't even want to look at them. Report only to me."

"Hans, that's deception," Jennifer said, still astonished.

"It's an order, if that means anything now. Are we agreed?"

Jennifer started to talk again, but Hans interrupted.

"Slick it. If everybody wants to choose another Pan now, let's go to it. I'll be glad to go back to a relatively normal life, taking orders instead of giving them," he said evenly. "Am I right?"

Nobody was willing to push the issue. They agreed reluctantly. Jennifer transferred the images to their private wands.

For the first time in their journey, one group would withhold information from another.

Numb, his gloom deeper and more perversely comforting than ever, Martin returned to his quarters and looked through the images again, trying to fathom the seriousness of what had just happened, and whether he had gone along with Hans too quickly.

He did not look forward to the journey. The pictures were devastating. The Benefactors apparently could not save this Ship of the Law; the sauropod beings were almost certainly thousands of years dead.

The Benefactors could have known about Wormwood and Leviathan for millennia.

They had sent others here before. They had surmised that much around Wormwood; now it was confirmed.

The Dawn Treaderwas just another in a series.

No ship had succeeded; none had even gone so far as to burn the tar baby, until now.

But what awaited them around Leviathan might be even more deceptive, even more complex, playing for much higher stakes…

The craft created within the second homeball was slightly bigger than a bombship—ten meters long, with a bulbous compartment four meters in diameter, within which Martin, Giacomo, and Hakim would spend one month—much of that time asleep or wrapped in volumetric fields.

They said their farewells. The crew still knew next to nothing—only that there was another Ship of the Law, probably a death ship, and that the three of them would investigate.

Hans withdrew from the interior of the new craft, looked at Martin with narrow eyes, and said, "You can back out if you want. This is no picnic."

Martin shook his head. He felt foolish, being manipulated so blatantly—challenged to back away, refusing to be so weak in front of Hans. Hans cocked his head to one side. "Giacomo, keep your brain running. Maybe we can learn something they don't want us to know."

"Why would they have invited us to come if they wanted to keep secrets?" Hakim asked.

"I don't know," Hans said. "Maybe we're being paranoid."

"Maybe," Martin said.

"But I doubt it."

He shook hands with each of them. Giacomo and Jennifer had said their farewells privately.

"We're ready," Martin said. A journey of a trillion kilometers begins with a single step. He pulled himself into the craft, kicking free of the ladder field, into the spherical interior. Giacomo followed, then Hakim.

As they settled, Hakim said, "The Dawn Treaderis giving us one quarter of its fuel."

Martin nodded. Such profligacy seemed beside the point now.

"We will be like a fish carrying a yolk sac," Hakim continued. "Very ungainly. And this craft is sixty percent fake matter…"

"Please," Giacomo said. "I'm queasy enough."

"Big adventure," Hakim concluded with a sigh. His skin was pale and he shivered a little.

The hatch smoothed shut.

They eased out of the weapons store. Dawn Treaderreceded to no more than a pinpoint against the stars.

A mom's voice spoke. "We begin super acceleration in three minutes."

The ship was little more than an enlarged mom, Martin thought, given seven-league boots.

"You might want to see this," Hans' voice came over the noach.

They witnessed their departure from Dawn Treader'spoint of view, a tiny dart with bulbous middle surrounded by pale green fuel tanks.

Volumetric fields wrapped the three passengers in smothering safety. Martin's eyesight suffered, as usual, but he still watched the noach transmission. A sump swallowed their flare. Little more than a rim of intense white showed, and quickly faded.

"Bon voyage," Hans said.

Martin passed the acceleration in a slice of nothingness in which only a few incoherent dreams surfaced—meeting girls at dances on the Central Ark, Mother and Father, basement sweepings from his brain, exhausting in their banality. When they had reached near-c, they coasted, their fields folded, and they faced each other balefully, cramped shipmates. Outside, space twisted and stars huddled into a blurred torque. The ship restored the star fields to a normal appearance for their benefit.

"How long until we arrive?" Giacomo asked, clearly not comfortable in the close quarters.

"A tenday," Hakim said.

"You may sleep for the first six days if you wish," the mom's voice told them.

"Earth's astronauts did this for months at a time," Hakim said.

"Yeah, but we're spoiled," Giacomo said.

"Let's sleep," Martin said.

Sleep came and went, another longer slice of oblivion. Martin awoke disoriented, drank a cup of sweetened fluid, exercised in the weightlessness, observed his companions surface from their slumbers.

He had expected the journey to add even more weight to his burden of gloom. Instead, he experienced exhilaration and freedom he had never known before.

Hakim behaved as if the burden had shifted from Martin to him. He worked quietly but without enthusiasm. Giacomo spent much of his time contemplating the small star sphere.

"We're further away from our fellows than anybody's ever been before," he said at the end of their second day awake. The derelict was now two days away.

"Farther," Hakim said softly.

"Whatever," Giacomo said. "I don't feel isolated. Do you?"

"The Dawn Treaderis pretty isolated," Martin observed.

"Yes, but they have each other… too many to keep track of. We have just three."

In natural sleep, Martin saw Rosa's dark shadow entity walk through an impossibly green field, wind knocking pieces of it away like fluff from a black dandelion. It towered over trees and hills, yet it was fragile and somehow vulnerable…

Awake, he helped Hakim prepare for their investigation. The craft mom briefed them on designs of Ships of the Law launched over the past few thousand years, though without any indication of their origins or destinations. Martin thought this was make-work; indeed, he was coming to believe their presence on this journey had more to do with ship-crew relations than practical function.

But the crew was the entire reason for the Dawn Treader'sexistence. Perhaps the ship's mind recognized the impact of crew fears and suspicions, and was working to reduce them.

"Let's try something," Hakim said when boredom had set in at the end of the second day of coasting. "Let's float by ourselves in the middle of nothing, and see what we think about."

Giacomo gave Hakim a pained look. "You want us to go nuts?"

"It will be amusing," he said. Hakim's gloom had lifted, but his sense of humor had taken on a strange tinge, part fatalism, part puckishness; his face stayed calm, eyes large and inoffensive, but his words sometimes aimed at targets neither of his companions could see.

"I'm not so sure," Giacomo said.

"You're big and strong, a strapping theoretical fellow," Hakim said with a smile. "Catholic cannot take a dare from a Muslim?"

Giacomo squinted. "Bolsh," he said. "My parents didn't even go to church."

"Nobody mentions my religion," Martin said. The conversation was becoming too ragged for his taste, but he could not just stay out of it.

"We don't know what you are," Hakim said.

Martin thought for a moment. "I don't know myself," he said. "My grandparents were Unitarians, I think."

"I challenge us all to sit in the middle of a projection of the exterior, unaltered, and speak of what we experience," Hakim said.

Giacomo and Martin glanced at each other. "Okay," Martin said.

The craft mom obliged. Within a few minutes the exterior enveloped them: intense speckled darkness ahead, twisted torque of blurred stars, muddy warmth behind.

Martin experienced immediate vertigo. The weightlessness had never bothered him until now, and he clutched the arms of his seat and felt sweat break out. They did not look at each other for several minutes, afraid of showing their discomfort.

Strangely, it was Hakim's voice that dispelled Martin's sense of endless falling. "It is worse than I thought," Hakim said. "Is everybody all right?"

"Fine," Giacomo said tersely. "Who's going to clean up if I vomit?"

"Hakim dared us," Martin said.

"Hand me the mop," Hakim said. Nervous giggles almost got the better of them.

"It's pretty strange," Giacomo said. "I look to my left, and… Jesus! That's weird beyond belief. Everything twists and spins like a carousel."

Martin tried looking to his right. The torque shivered, an infinity of stars cowed into being social, like little knots tied in strings of dissolving paint. It all seemed oceanic, the glow of an underwater volcano behind and the queer glimmer of deep water fish ahead. Galactic fish, X-ray fish in the depth of beginning time.

"What are you thinking?" Hakim asked after a few minutes of silence.

"I think I want to go inside," Martin said.

But they remained "outside," minutes following one on the other, and their hands crept out and grasped, their breathing came in synchrony. "Wow," Giacomo said. "I'm not asleep, am I?"

"No," Martin said.

"I keep seeing things out of the corner of my eye, where the star necklace tries to be. Things reaching out to touch me. Pretty spooky."

"I hear the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer," Hakim said. "It's very beautiful. I wish you could hear it."

"Are you still a Muslim, Hakim?" Martin asked.

"We are all of us Muslims," Hakim said. "It is our natural state. We must give ourselves to Allah at some point, become obedient. Allah is looking out for us, that I feel… And Muhammad is his prophet. But what shape Allah is, who can say? And it is no use bowing to Mecca."

"I think that means you're a Muslim," Martin said.

"The Pope died with Earth," Giacomo said. "Isn't that something? The moms didn't save the Pope. I wonder why."

Martin saw grass growing on the rim of a tunnel, the greenness bright and welcoming, blending toward the center.

"Remember volunteering?" Giacomo said.

"A difficult time for me," Hakim said. "My mother did not want me to go. My father spoke to her sternly and she cried. I decided I had to go, and my mother… she ignored me from that day. Very sad."

"The tests?"

"I didn't take a lot of tests," Martin said.

"I remember a lot of tests," Giacomo said. "Physical—"

"Oh, those," Martin said. He remembered being wrapped in fields that tingled while the moms floated in attendance, never telling whether the results were good or poor.

Martin remembered his father's face, proud and sad, on the last day. The families in the Ark gathering at the berthing bay for the new Ship of the Law, stars visible beyond the curve of the third homeball. Some of the children barely into their teens getting caught up in the excitement. Martin remembered Rex Live Oak throwing up and a hastily spread field grabbing the expelled contents of his stomach and whisking them away. He smiled. The moms did not disqualify the children for nerves or fright.

Sleepless nights as the Dawn Treaderrose into darkness, climbing for almost a year on a torch dipped into a sump. The classes, momerath refreshers, Martin's first tryst with Felicity Tigertail, awkward and delicious, a little scary to him, how much he fixed on her. With a little more innate physical wisdom, she did not fix on him, gently repulsed his further advances, introduced him without embarrassment to her other boyfriends…

Strange that he did not feel attracted to Theresa much sooner. Eighty-five young crew, given subtle guidance or no guidance by moms intent on letting their charges come to wisdom the human way, not the Benefactors' way, whatever that might be…

"Martin," Giacomo said. "Do you remember first meeting Jennifer?"

"Yes," Martin said.

"Was it on the Ark?"

"No," Martin said. "On the ship."

"What was she like then? I just don't remember much about her…"·

They talked into the weirdness for hours, and gradually their talk fell silent, and they simply stared, or slept fitfully. The universe seemed to quiver with Martin's heart, flinching, star necklace alive, a thinly spread tissue of life. His own scale increased to match; Martin became galactic and with his new size came a nervous euphoria.

How long they sat, Martin couldn't tell at first. But Giacomo broke the vigil and said, "That's enough for me."

Hakim made a little grunt. "Why?" he said.

"Because I just had a wet dream, damn it," Giacomo said.

They agreed to stop, and the projection folded into a small star sphere, returning them to the narrow and much more comfortable confines of the craft.

* * *

Their deceleration was brief, merely two hours, to match course and speed with the derelict. As volumetric fields faded, they waited eagerly for a first glimpse of the ship from a few kilometers.

What first appeared was almost impossible to comprehend. The ship resembled a twisted, crisped piece of paper in a fire, covered with holes, the edges of the holes burning orange and red; homeballs skeletal, debris drifting in a cloud.

"Dear God," Giacomo said.

"What happened?" Hakim asked.

The mom took them around the derelict in a slow loop. "This ship is very old," it said. "Central control of its shape has failed. Fake matter is decaying. Within a few hundred years, there will be only the shells of real matter."

"There are no survivors?" Hakim asked.

"We guessed that much already," Martin said.

"Not with certainty," Hakim persisted.

"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 tinkand 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 Treaderis. 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 Treaderframe 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."