Текст книги "Anvil of Stars"

Автор книги: Грег Бир

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"Was it metal, or something else?" Theresa asked.

"It was like a shadow. I didn't see any details. I don't know what it could have been. It seemed alive to me." Rosa folded her arms. Martin saw her as she had been when the journey started, five years before, sixteen and not fully grown, slenderer, with a rugged attractiveness, now become a vulnerable burliness. He wondered again why the moms had chosen her. They had rejected so many others, many Martin had thought were good choices. She swallowed hard, looked, with her large black eyes, more and more lost. "Maybe it wasn't part of the ship. Maybe it doesn't belong here."

"Hold on," Theresa said sternly. Martin was grateful to her for taking a critical tone he dared not use. "We shouldn't jump to any conclusions."

"I saw it," Rosa said, stubbornly defensive.

"We're not questioning that," Theresa said, though Martin certainly thought they should, and she had. "We've all been under a strain lately, and…"

Rosa was turning inward again.

"I saw it. I think it might be important," she said.

"All right," Martin said. "But for now, until we know more, or somebody else sees it, I'd like to keep this quiet."

"Why?" Rosa asked, eyes narrowing. Martin saw more clearly the depth of her problem. She was not going to react well to his next request, but he saw no way around it.

"Please don't talk about it," he said.

Rosa tightened her lips, jaws clenched, eyes reduced to slits, face radiating defiance, but she did not say anything more. "Can I go?" she asked, as if she were a little girl requesting dismissal from class.

"You can go," Martin said. Rosa walked on long, strong legs down the hall toward the central corridor, not looking back. Martin inhaled deeply, held it, watching her like a target, then exhaled when she was too far away to hear.

"Jesus."

"No, I don't think so," Theresa said. She grinned. Martin felt the walls again, as if there might be some mark remaining, some trace of Rosa's shadow.

"I don't think there actually was anything," he said, trying to be extra reasonable, extra careful, even with Theresa.

"Of course not," Theresa said.

"But we shouldn't be toocertain," he said without conviction.

"You think she's… let's not use the word hysterical," Theresa said. "That has the wrong sexual connotations. Let's say stressed out. She's been working up to something. That's what you think? Don't be a hypocrite, Martin. Not with me."

Martin grimaced. "If I tell it like I think it is, we might both reach the wrong conclusions. If I say Rosa is losing it, well… there's evidence, but it's not a sure thing. Maybe she saw a trick of the light. Something we don't know about."

"Ask the War Mother," Theresa suggested. >

That was an obvious first step. "Rosa should ask," he said. "It's her sighting. Let's make her responsible for it."

Theresa touched index finger on one hand to little finger on the other, bent it back until it was perpendicular to the joint, a gesture she sometimes made that fascinated Martin. "Good idea. Do you think she'll keep quiet?"

"She doesn't have many good friends."

"Poor Martin. On your watch, too."

"Maybe it's just a temporary aberration, and she'll pull out of it. Just to be safe—"

Theresa caught his meaning before he expressed it. "I'll have some Wendys keep watch on her."

Martin lowered his hands from the unmarked walls. "Right," he said.

"Maybe Ariel…" Theresa said. "She seems to be the only friend Rosa has."

"We're all friends," Martin said.

"You know what I mean. Don't be obtuse."

Theresa, as their time together lengthened, was becoming more and more critical, more and more judgmental, but in a gentle way, and Martin found that he liked it. He needed another voice now.

There were things he could not directly express, even to Theresa: a growing fear. Rosa expresses it her way. I almost wish I could be so direct.

In the central glow of the schoolroom, the War Mother contemplated Martin's report. They were alone in the large chamber, Martin standing and the War Mother floating, both in a spot of bright light. The doors had closed. Nobody else could hear them. Rosa had refused to go to the War Mother, had seemed insulted they would ask her to. And inevitably, word about her experience had spread.

"No such phenomenon has been noticed within the ship," the War Mother said.

"Rosa didn't see anything?"

"What she saw is not apparent to our sense," the War Mother said.

"Is it possible that we could see something aboard the ship, something with an objective reality, that you would not?"

"The possibility is remote."

"Then it's a psychological problem…" Martin said. And you won't or can't do anything about it.

"That is for you to decide."

Martin nodded, less agitated by such an attitude than he might have been a few tendays before. Other than providing an interface with the ship, the moms did little now. He could issue direct instructions, request direct answers, but critical judgments from their former teachers were not forthcoming. This was independence and responsibility with a vengeance, and he had to complain, however weakly and uselessly.

"The strain is intense. We're drilling day in, day out. The drills are going well, and everybody's doing their job—no more absentees, not even Rosa. But I don't like the way the children reacted to Rosa's… sighting. Vision. They were fascinated by it."

The War Mother said nothing.

"There hasn't been much talk since, but it worries me."

The War Mother said nothing more. He looked at the black and white paint on its facelessness. He wanted to reach out, just once, and strike it, but he did not.

The tenth drill on ship division went as smoothly as the first. In the nose, Martin projected the schematic of the Dawn Treader'spractice preparations. Paola and Hans and Joe crowded closer to see from his wand, somehow more special than viewing the same through their own.

The picture of the changing Dawn Treaderloomed large in the corridor, a vivid ghost in three dimensions. The ship had contracted, necks reduced in length, tail and nose become blunt nubbins, grooves indenting the circumference of the second homeball like the cell divisions of a blastula. The third homeball also revealed grooves, an inscribed portion of the second neck connected to an orange-slice of the second homeball.

The drives would break down into two units, of sizes proportional to Tortoiseand Hare, Harebeing approximately twice the size of Tortoise. Tortoiseclaimed most of the second homeball and the shortened neck between.

Within the image, new bulkheads glowed red against the general green, spreading like wax in hot water over designated spaces, until the units were completely marked out, ready for separation.

"Show me status," Martin said. Partitions melted away, necks lengthened, homeballs became ungrooved and round. Whiskers of magnetic field vanes streamed out from the third homeball; inner traces of the scoop field glowed red around the nose.

"Looks good," Hans said. "When do you want to do final strategy?"

"The search team has more to show us. We'll listen to them, then you and I and the ex-Pans will pow-wow."

"Palaver," Paola said, smiling.

"Jaw. Chew the fat," Hans added, also smiling.

Martin was pleased that some excitement had returned.

Rosa Sequoia had performed her latest duties flawlessly, and there was little more talk about what she had seen. The incident seemed to have become an embarrassment to her, and she did not respond to inquiries from the children.

Hakim Hadj's face was less beatifically calm, his manner less polite, though hardly abrupt. He looked tired. He seemed at most mildly irritated, perhaps by a tiny itch he could not get at. The transparent nose of the Dawn Treadershowed stars now instead of abyssal darkness; the chamber was crowded with projection piled upon simulation upon chart and those piled upon neon finger-scribbles hanging wherever space allowed. Hakim and two assistants, Min Giao and Thorkild Lax, seemed to know their way through the confusion. Martin stood back and let Hakim approach him.

"We are close to knowing enough for a judgment," Hakim said, black eyes rolling. "We shall have to withdraw our remotes soon, before we enter the cloud, but I think we will have enough evidence by then. Our information about the system is immense, Martin. I have abstracted important details for you. You can look at the orbital structures between planets two and three. They are very interesting, but do not seem active—not inhabited, perhaps. We still have no clue what the five inner masses are."

"Close-in power stations?" Martin suggested.

Hakim smiled politely. "They may be reserves of converted anti em, but if so, they are very heavily shielded. They are practically invisible, much less reflective than fine carbon dust and non-radiating, and that makes little sense if they are stores of anything."

"What's your best theory?" Martin asked.

"I posit nothing," Hakim said quietly. "The unknown troubles me, especially something so prominent."

"Agreed."

Hakim continued, moving simulations of the inner planetary surfaces closer to Martin, out of the stacks of projections. He mildly chided Thorkild and Min Giao for their contributions to the clutter. They seemed to ignore him and went about their work, adding even more projections, lists, charts, simulations; blinking, flashing, moving, blessedly silent displays.

"These worlds are not very active, even for a quiet and advanced civilization. Seismic or other noise through the crust is minimal. The planet seems old. No large-scale activities below ground, natural or unnatural. Such movement would produce vibrations from crustal settling. There is no planet-altering work being done, Martin; perhaps they finished all that thousands of years ago."

"Go on," Martin said.

"Radiation flux from the planets does not exceed expected natural levels. Both rocky inner worlds are either dead, or quiescent, pointing perhaps to a solid-state civilization, that is, all activity confined to information transfer through quiet links, or using noach, as we do."

"No physical bodies? Nothing organic?" Martin asked.

"None visible. If there are organics below the surface, they produce no traces on the surface itself, and that is odd. At this distance we might miss extremely light organic activity, but judging from the telescope images… Here." He pulled up a projection. Smiled at Martin as the image wavered. "My wand works overtime. Thorkild, clear some capacity, please, or shunt it to the moms' systems!"

Thorkild looked up, lost in momerath and graphics. A few of the stacks dimmed or winked out.

The second planet rotated once every three hundred and two hours, surface temperature of one hundred and seventy degrees Celsius, albedo of point seven, light gray and tan, no oceans of course, thin atmosphere mostly carbon dioxide and nitrogen, no oxygen, no geological activity, mountain chains old and worn with no young replacements, no visible structures over a hundred meters in size. Or no structures with a height of more than ten meters…

"All right," Martin said, deliberately quelling his enthusiasm. "Both inner planets are quiet."

"In keeping with the biblical turn of phrase," Hakim said, "I suggest we call the inner planet Nebuchadnezzar, the second Ramses, and the third, Herod."

Martin made a face. "Might be a bit prejudicial, don't you think?"

"Mere suggestion," Hakim said. His face brightened. "Ah, yes, I see what you are getting at. Herod destroying the first born… Ramses overseeing the captivity of the Jews. Nebuchadnezzar having destroyed the first temple in Jerusalem… I see."

"The names are fine," Martin said.

"Good." Hakim seemed pleased. "Ramses… the next rocky planet, second planet out, is like this…" He drew forth another chart, put it through its paces. "Similar to the first, but cooler—minus four degrees Celsius average temperature, albedo of point seven, atmosphere again contains no oxygen or water vapor. No seismic activity, old mountains—old worlds."

"They might be deserted."

"We do not think so. The strongest evidence of continuing artifice lies in their temperatures versus their distances from Wormwood, and their atmospheric compositions. They are actively controlled environments, but for what sort of organisms or mechanisms—if any—I cannot say."

"Very small machines," Martin mused.

Hakim nodded. "That is difficult to confirm, of course. If they exist, their work is isolated from the surface."

"But the worlds areactive."

"Active, yes, but they do not have large numbers of physical inhabitants—living creatures. The moms teach us that many civilizations reduce their presence to information matrices, abandoning their physical forms, and living as pure mentality."

"About half of all advanced civilizations…" Martin remembered, stroking his cheek with one hand.

"Yes. That could be the case here."

Maybe they've become ghosts. Martin shuddered at the thought of abandoning physical form; like spending forever in neural simulation. What would they gain? A low profile, a kind of immortality—but no need to physically colonize the systems they "sterilized" for future use. "You said we could almost make a judgment."

Hakim's face brightened. "I have been teasing, Martin. Withholding the best until last. This is very good. But you judge."

He ordered a series of charts on debris scattered throughout the ecliptic between fifty million kilometers and seven hundred million kilometers from Wormwood. "Dust and larger particles heated by the star, chemical reactions excited by the little stellar wind that does get through… Very interesting."

The dust and debris pointed to intense spaceborne industrial activity in the system's past. Much of the debris consisted of simple waste—rocky materials, lacking all metals and volatiles, heavy on silicates.

Manufacturing dust from shaping and processing: trace elements inevitably mixed into the dust, reflecting even more precisely than in the spectrum of Wormwood itself the proportions of trace elements in the killer machines.

"It's more than a close match," Martin said.

Hakim revealed his excitement in a mild lift of eyebrow.

"It's exact," Martin said.

"Very nearly," Hakim said.

"They made the killer machines around Wormwood."

"Perhaps around Leviathan, as well. We are not close enough to judge."

"But certainly here."

"The evidence is compelling."

Martin's skin warmed and his eyes grew moist, a response he had seldom felt before, and could not ascribe to any particular emotion. Perhaps it came from a complex of emotions so deeply buried he did not experience them consciously.

"No defenses?"

"None," Hakim said. "No evidence of defenses on the surface of the inner worlds. The depleted gas giant shows even less activity, a large lump of cold wastes and rocky debris, with a thin atmosphere of helium, carbon dioxide solids, bromine, and sparse hydrocarbons. Here is a list."

"Where did the volatiles go?" Martin asked. The list was devoid of hydrogen, methane, and ammonia. The thin haze of helium was so diffuse as to be useless. No swooping down to scoop up fuel, like Robin Hood swinging out of a tree to snatch a purse.

"Good question, but I can only guess, the same as you. The star is well over six billion years old. The volatiles could have been lost during birth, with the cold outer worlds getting correspondingly thinner envelopes of atmosphere. But this would be unusual for a yellow dwarf in this neighborhood."

"Even in a multiple group?"

Hakim nodded. "Even so. The volatiles might have fueled early interstellar travel within the group. The pre-birth cloud is also very low on volatiles, remember. Or…"

Martin looked up.

"Most of it could have been converted to anti em for making killer probes."

"That's a lot of probes," Martin said.

Hakim agreed. "Billions, fueled and sent out across the stellar neighborhood. Depleting the outer cloud, the comets, the ice moons, the gas giant, everything… If I may say so, a massive and vicious campaign with great risks, at great expense. To be followed logically by a wave of stellar exploration and colonization."

"But we don't see any settled systems beyond the group… It wouldn't make sense to launch such a campaign, and not follow through."

"Ah." Hakim raised his finger. "Centuries must pass while they wait for the probes to do their work. What if the civilization changes in that time?"

"Seems certain they'd change some," Martin agreed.

"A change of heart, perhaps, or sudden fear of the wrath of other civilizations. Cowardice. Many possibilities."

"What percentage of converted volatiles could be stored in the five masses?"

"A minuscule amount of the total estimated gases lost from the system," Hakim said. "We're not yet certain of the size, but each of the masses appears to be several thousand kilometers in diameter, which would rule out neutronium, if their densities were uniform."

Thorkild Lax said, "I'm finishing work on the outer cloud, and Min Giao is redoing our work on the inner dust and debris."

"Dust and debris… how long would it take to push most of it away from the system?"

"Wouldn't happen," Thorkild said. "Most of the dust grains and larger rubble are too big to be cleaned out by radiation. Remember, the stellar wind has been channeled up and out through the poles."

"A good point," Hakim said.

"How much more time do you need?"

"A day?" Hakim asked his colleagues.

"I'll need a break," Min Giao said. "My momerath is fading now."

"A day and a half," Hakim said.

"Fine," Martin said.

They would enter the outer pre-birth material in three days. They would make their decision. Martin had no doubt how the children would decide. The Dawn Treaderwould split just beyond the diffuse inner boundaries of the cloud. Tortoisewould begin super deceleration immediately after splitting.

They could disperse their weapons, carry out the Law, and at the very least, Harewould be outside the system before any defense could touch it.

The second stage of deceleration ended. Martin felt his stronger body jump free, like a highly charged battery. Some of the children felt mildly ill for a few hours, but the illness passed. Jennifer Hyacinth was a slim, chatty, energetic woman who had not impressed Martin upon their first meeting; triangular of face, neither pretty nor unpleasant to look at, with narrow eyes and a habit of wincing when spoken to, as if she were being insulted; thin of arm and large-chested, breasts sitting on her ribcage as if an afterthought. Jennifer had gradually acquired Martin's respect by the wry and sharp observations she made about life on ship, by her willingness to volunteer for jobs others found unpleasant, and most of all, by her extraordinary command of momerath.

Like Ariel, Jennifer Hyacinth did not trust the moms any more than she had to by working with them or living in an environment made by them. But she had concentrated this distrust into a kind of mental guerrilla action, using her head to gain insight into those things the moms did not tell the children.

Martin put her request to see him into a short queue of appointments for the first half of the next day, and met with her in his early morning, while Theresa organized torus transfer drills for the bombship pilots.

Jennifer laddered into his quarters in the first homeball, face taut, clearly uncomfortable.

"What's up?" Martin asked casually, hoping to relax her. She widened her eyes, shrugged, narrowed them again, as if she really had nothing to say, and was embarrassed by having called the meeting in the first place.

"Jennifer—" he said, exasperated.

"I've been thinking," she blurted defensively, as if he were to blame for her discomfiture. "Doing momerath and just thinking. I've reached some conclusions—not really conclusions, actually, but they're interesting, and I thought you'd like to hear them… I hoped you would."

"I'd like to," Martin said.

"They're not final but they're pretty compelling. I think you can follow most of it…"

"I'll try."

"The moms aren't telling us everything."

"That seems to be the popular wisdom," Martin said.

She blinked. "It's true. They haven't told us how they do certain things—convert matter to anti em, for example. Or how they compress ordinary matter into neutronium. Or how they transmit on the noach without possibility of interception."

"They don't seem to think we need to know."

"Well, curiosity is reason enough."

"Right," Martin said.

"I think I know how they do some things. Not how they actually doit, but the theory behind it." Her eyes widened, defying him to think her efforts were trivial. "It's good momer-ath. It's self-consistent, I mean. I've even translated some of it into formal maths."

"I'm listening," Martin said.

Martin knew his momerath ability was dwarfed by Jennifer's. She was probably the fastest and most innovative mathematician on the ship, followed only by Giacomo Sicilia.

"I've been putting some things together by looking at the moms'—I mean, the Benefactors' technologies. What they did on Earth and on the Ark. On Mars. They have ways of altering matter on a fundamental level—that's obvious, of course, since they can make matter into anti em. I don'tthink they have spacewarps or can rotate mass points through higher dimensions—that would imply faster-than-light travel, which they don't seemto have."

"Okay," Martin said.

"The way momerath is constructed—the formal side I mean, not the psychological—there are branches of the discipline that suggest human information theory. There's an argument that physics can be reduced to the laws governing transfer of information; but I haven't been working on that."

"What I havebeen doing is looking at how the moms treat basic physics in their drill instructions. We have to know certainthings, such as repair of maker delivery systems using remotes, in case they're severely damaged in a fight. It's funny, but the Dawn Treadercan repair itself, and the bombships can't… not without remotes, at any rate. I guess they don't want bombships going off on their own, mutating—"

"Yes," Martin said, in a tone that urged her to come back to the main subject.

"About the anti em conversion process. I think they've worked out ways to access a particle's bit structure, its self-information. To do that, they'd have to tamper with the so-called privileged channels. Channelsisn't the right word, of course. I'd call them bands—but—"

Martin looked at her blankly.

"Some more radical theorists on Earth thought spacetime might be a giant computational matrix, with information transferred along privileged bands or channels instantaneously, and bosons—photons, and so on—conveying other types of information at no more than the speed of light. Baryons don't expand when the universe expands. They're loosely tied to spacetime. But bosons—photons, and so on—are in some respects strongly tied to spacetime. Their wavelengths expand as the universe expands. The privileged bands are not tied to spacetime at all, and they convey certain kinds of special information between particles. Kind of cosmic bookkeeping. The Benefactors seem to know how to access these bands, and to control the information they carry."

"I'm still not following you."

Jennifer sighed, squatted in the air beside Martin, and lifted her hands to add gestures to her explanation. "Particles need to knowcertain things, if I can use that word in its most basic sense. They need to know what they are—charge, mass, spin, strangeness, and so on—and wherethey are. They have to react to information conveyed by other particles, information about their own character and position. Particles are the most basic processors of information. Bosons and the privileged bands are the fundamental carriers of information."

"All right," Martin said, although the full implications of this were far from clear, and he was far from agreeing with the theory.

"I think the Benefactors—and probably the planet killers—have found ways to control the privileged bands. Now that's remarkable by itself, because privileged bands aren't supposed to be accessed by anythingbut the particles and bosons they work for. They might as well be called forbiddenbands. They carry information about a particle's state that helps keep things running on a quantum level—bookkeeping and housecleaning, so to speak. They have to carry information instantly because… well, in some experiments, that kind of bookkeeping seems to happen instantly, across great distances. Most information can't travel faster than light. Well, that sort can, but it's very special, the exception to the rule.

"Bosons travel at the speed of light. They carry information about changes in position, mass, and so on, like I said. If you can change their states and information content, you can make them lie.If you control all the information carried by bosons and along the privileged bands, you can lieto other particles. If you tinker with a particle's internal information, you can changethat particle. I think that's what they do to make anti em."

"They just tell an atom it's anti em?"

Jennifer smiled brightly. "Nothing so simple, but that's the gist, I think. They mess with privileged bands, they tinker with the memory stores of huge numbers of particles within atoms, all at once, and they create anti em. I've got the momerath…"

"How long would it take me to absorb it?"

She pursed her lips. "You, maybe three tendays."

"I don't have time, Jennifer. But I'd like to have the record anyway…" Her theory seemed less than important to him now. "Sounds impossible, though."

Jennifer grinned. "It does, doesn't it? That's what's so neat. Given certain assumptions, and running them through the momerath, the impossibilities go away. It becomes a coherent system, and it has huge implications, most of which I haven't worked out. Like, what sort of coordinate system would a particle use? Relative, absolute? Cartesian? How many axes? I'm not really serious about it being Cartesian—it couldn't be—and remember, the coordinates or whatever you want to call them have to be self-sensing. The particle has to be what it knows it is, and to be whereit knows it is. Unless we start calling in observer-induced phenomena, which I do in my momerath… though that isn't finished, yet."

"How much information does a particle have to carry?" Martin asked.

"To differentiate itself from every other particle—a unique particle signature—and to know its state, its position, its motion, and so on… about two hundred bits."

Martin looked to one side for a moment, frowning, getting interested despite his weariness. "If the universe is a computer, what's the hardware like?"

"The momerath explicitly forbids positing a matrix for this system. None can be described. Only the rules exist, and the interactions."

"There's no programmer?"

"The momerath says nothing about that. Just, no hardware, no explicitly real matrix. The matrix is, but is not separate from what takes place. You areinterested, aren't you? "

He was, but there seemed so little time to think even the thoughts he needed to think, and make the necessary plans. "I'll look the work over when I can. You know I'm bogged."

"Yes, but this could be important. If we see something that fits, something around Wormwood maybe, something high tech that doesn't make sense unless I'm right, then we can apply whole new ideas."

"Obviously," Martin said. "Thanks."

Jennifer smiled brightly, then leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. "You're sweet, but I thought you'd ask about something…"

"What?"

"About the noach—how we communicate with nearby craft and the remotes."

"Along the privileged bands?"

She shook her head. "Not exactly. There wouldn't be any distance limitations if the moms used the privileged bands to chat. Remember, we can't chat beyond ten billion kilometers. "

"All right, how, then?"

"By setting up a resonance. You could change the bit or bits that distinguish one particle from another. The particles seem to resonate, to be somewhere else for a very short time. Signals could be sent that way. But there's a limit how far. I don't know why, yet, but I'm working on it."

"Let me know what you come up with," Martin said.

"Can I talk about it with the others? Get others to work on it?"

"If they have time," Martin said.

She smiled again, bowed ceremonially in mid-air like a diver, and laddered through the door.

* * *

There was little time for anything but work, drill, sleep. Theresa slept with him, but they were too tired to make love more than once before sleep, down from their coasting average of two or three times per day.

Martin curled up against her in the warm darkness of his quarters, in the net. His limp penis nested between her thighs, just below her buttocks, slight stickiness adhering his prepuce to her skin. His hand on her hip, finger caressing lightly; she was already asleep, breathing shallow and even. Her hair in disarray tickled his nose. He moved his head back a few centimeters, opened his eyes, saw a dim memory of the momerath that had absorbed him in most of his time outside drilling and attending to the active teams. The personal momerath; what all the children were doing now, trying to think their way through to an individual judgment, to the most important decision of their lives.

There was much more than just analyzing the data Hakim provided. There was the intuition beyond rational thought; the unknown process of personal conviction, of human faculties at work, that made their judgments different from what the moms might have decided by themselves.

They probably had the power to destroy whatever life existed around Wormwood. The system did not look strongly defended; and in strategy, appearances could count for everything. An appearance of strength could be important… To appear weaker than one actually was could inviteassault, never useful.

Going over it again and again. Gradually sleep came.

The universe is made of plateaus and valleys, stars nestled in valleys, the long spaces between the stars creating broad, almost flat plateaus along which orbital courses approach but never reach straightness. Martin floated in the nose of the Dawn Treader, the sleeping search team scattered in nets and in bags behind him. Through the transparent nose, peering into the valley around Wormwood, Martin contemplated their target, now the brightest star in their field of view.