Anvil of Stars

PART TWO

Ten years in cold, tracking each other on the rim of a shallow well: Tortoise and Hare. In defeat, caution, conserving resources. Ten years would not matter in this war of centuries.

While the crew slept, the ships came together again and made a new Dawn Treader, half its previous length, only two home-balls connected by a short neck. Some old spaces came back, though empty of pets and personal effects.

The schoolroom and cafeteria remained. No damage showed, but the fuel reserves wrapped around the neck were much reduced.

Martin awoke a month after the rejoining, to consult with the moms. Field-wrapped in a cushion of warm air, he laddered through the cold, evacuated chambers of the Ship of the Law, approving or suggesting changes. He was not sure why he had been awakened; perhaps the moms were interested in the changed psychology of a crew facing defeat and death, and sought to study one individual’s response. If so, they found Martin taciturn.

He had suffered no ill effects from the long cold sleep. He thought he much preferred sleep to years between the stars, these brief silent deaths between bright lives.

But there was a handicap to cold sleep. They would all awake with disaster fresh in their minds, their emotions raw, and immediately have to go to work. Martin was angry and frightened and twisted to such an extent he wondered if he was ill. How much psychological damage had he sustained? He could not know; there was no time for grieving and readjustment.

None of the moms carried a mark of paint. Either the marks had flaked away completely during the ten years, or the War Mother had returned to the bulk of the ship, emerging with Martin from a different kind of sleep.

Martin completed his inspection in five hours. A mom accompanied him to the chamber where the crew slept. “It is time to awaken everyone,” it said. “Final deceleration will begin before they are revived. We will approach the inner worlds within two tendays.”

“Good,” Martin said. “Let’s go.”

He listened to the winds blowing through the ship as atmosphere and warmth returned. Isolated in a small room next to the sleep chamber, he felt weight return, and stood on his feet for the first time in ten years.

The others came awake in groups of five, were tested by the moms for any health problems, cleared, and gathered slowly, quietly, in the schoolroom.

The ship’s floor felt cool to their bare feet.

Martin stayed away from the crew until they gathered in the schoolroom. His mind wandered; he thought of the children’s pets, which would not return; Dawn Treader did not have reserves to spare. Martin did not know how this would affect morale; he thought they had other and larger griefs to deal with first.

He could hardly bring himself to face the crew and tell what had happened; he did not want to feel their grief as well as his own.

But duty at least remained, if no direction or feeling, and he spoke to them, to start and to finish, to do what he knew must be done.

“We’re no longer children,” Martin told them. The schoolroom at least had changed little, with a star sphere at the center, filled with thirty-eight men and thirty-seven women. “We’ve fought and lost. We may not be mature, or very smart, but we’re no longer children.”

The crew listened in silence.

“I’ve fought and lost,” Martin said. “I missed what should have been obvious.”

“The moms missed it, too,” Hakim said, but Martin shook his head.

“A decade has passed. My term as Pan has long since expired. It’s time to choose a new Pan. We should do that now.”

Ariel sat looking at her folded hands.

“I nominate Hans,” Martin said. “Hans is my choice for Pan.”

Hans stood in a group of Hare’s crew, big arms folded, lips tightening slightly, pale skin reddening. “We usually measure time by how long we’re awake,” he said. “By that measure, you still have some months left.”

“Hans did a fine job commanding Hare,” Martin said, ignoring the comment. “His instincts are better than mine.” He looked briefly at Hans: Do not make me say it more clearly. Hans looked up at the ceiling.

Alexis Baikal seconded the nomination.

“We’ll take any other nominations,” Martin continued.

The crew looked among each other, then Kimberly Quartz said, “I nominate Rosa Sequoia.”

Rosa’s broad face flushed but she said nothing. Decline, Martin silently suggested, swallowing back an even deeper sense of dread. No sane person would nominate Rosa.

“I second the nomination,” Jeanette Snap Dragon said.

Martin surveyed the crew.

“I nominate Hakim Hadj,” Paola Birdsong said.

That was a pretty good choice, Martin thought. Hakim looked up in surprise and said, “I decline. I have my place, and it is not as Pan.”

“I renominate Martin son of Arthur Gordon,” Joe Flatworm said.

“Decline,” Martin said.

There were no further nominations.

“Vote through wands,” Martin said. The voting was quick: sixty-seven for Hans, eight for Rosa. Martin projected the results, then laddered forward to offer his hand to Hans. Hans shook it lightly and broke the grip quickly.

“Hans is the new Pan,” Martin said.

“I don’t want any ceremony,” Hans said. “There’s work to do. I appoint Harpal Timechaser as Christopher Robin.”

“Decline,” Harpal said.

“The hell you will,” Hans said. “We’ve had about enough emotional shit. Take the job or we’re all damned.”

Harpal gaped. Without waiting for his answer, Hans pushed through the crew to the edge of the schoolroom and the door, twisted around with feline grace, and said, “Martin’s right. We’re not children. We’re scum. We’ve failed and we’ve lost friends. I condemn us all to hell until we kill these goddamned worlds, all of them. We’re already dead; there isn’t enough fuel to get out of here and go any place decent. Let’s take these sons of bitches with us.”

The crew began to look at each other now, shyly at first, then with a few reckless grins.

“God damn it,” Paola Birdsong said, as if trying out the word for size. It was much too big a word for her, but the solemnity passed from her face, replaced by a grim, lively determination.

Rosa Sequoia floated as still as a statue, face as impenetrable as a mom’s.

“Let’s go see what’s up,” Hans said.

Hakim approached Martin as the crew echoed and laddered out of the schoolroom. “There have been changes,” he said conspiratorially. “I would like you to be on the search team.”

“Hans should—”

“Hans has no say, unless he wishes to disband the search team and start over. I do not think he will ask for that, Martin. I would enjoy working with you.”

“Thank you,” Martin said. “I accept.”

Hakim smiled. “My friend,” he said, touching Martin’s shoulder.

There had indeed been changes. “I do not think we wasted our time,” Hakim said as Hans, Harpal, and the search team gathered in the nose before the star sphere.

Nebuchadnezzar was no longer a brown world. Marked by streaks of bright red running longitudinally from pole to pole, dark lines like cracks covered the surface.

“It looks sick,” Thomas Orchard said.

“It is sick,” Martin said in wonder. “Some of our makers and doers got through.”

Hans regarded the star sphere image with chin in hand, frowning. “I thought everything we sent down turned to anti em and blew up.”

“Three pods got through,” Martin said. “We assumed they were destroyed some other way, but apparently they weren’t.”

Hans said nothing for a few seconds.

Hakim glanced at Martin almost shyly, as if preferring still to think of him as Pan. “Perhaps not all is lost,” Hakim said.

“Bullshit. We’re dead,” Hans said. “But we may not die in vain.”

“Perhaps that is what I mean,” Hakim said.

“All right,” Hans said. “How long would it take for seeds to come down from the outer haloes?”

“Nine or ten years,” Martin said. Harpal concurred.

“The planet’s still there. Either they haven’t come in yet, or they were deactivated. Can we signal them?”

“They should pick up the noach,” Harpal said. “If they haven’t been destroyed.”

“Let’s do it,” Hans said. Hakim made the arrangements on his wand. The results were almost instantaneous; a signal sent out, a signal returned from a seed carrier to the ship’s noach receivers. The carrier reported that eleven seeds had been delivered to Nebuchadnezzar’s interior, sufficient to cook the planet’s entire surface to a depth of fifty kilometers. Detonation of the seeds was imminent. Seeds would be delivered to Ramses within two tendays.

“I’ll be damned,” Hans said. “We’ve come to just in time for a show.”

The search team and Martin moved closer to the star sphere.

“Let’s send out remotes and take a closer look,” Hans said. “We’re how far?”

“Four hundred million kilometers from Ramses. Two hundred and fifty million from Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar must be a very sick planet,” Hakim said. “We were more successful than we ever hoped.”

“I trust in nothing,” Hans said. “Martin didn’t make any obvious big mistakes, and we still got whipped badly. I have to be that much better.” He smiled almost shyly at Martin, suggesting that they might share some secret joke, and his smile actually took a weight from Martin’s shoulders; he was not anathema, at least not to Hans. “If the planet’s sick, and if our doers have jammed its defenses, we don’t have to worry—but we haven’t dropped doers on Ramses, and anything could happen there when the seeds arrive to be inserted. Am I right?”

Harpal and Martin nodded. Hakim was busy releasing remotes to increase their baseline. “What about those orbiting dark masses?”

“They have not changed,” Hakim said, interrupting himself. “The same orbits, the same masses, the same sizes, judging by occultations.”

“And the small craft?”

“We are actually not far from one such,” Hakim said. “They are still in orbit. They have returned to status quo.”

“I’d like to see the close one,” Hans said.

“I have records from the past few tendays, recorded by the ship,” Hakim said. “I will play them back.” The star sphere sectioned and they watched a small bright point grow in size in compressed time to a long, blunt cylinder, gray in color, featureless, barely ten meters long. “It is coasting,” Hakim said. “Quiet, no drives;”

“Can we take it out?” Hans asked.

Hakim looked to Harpal and Martin.

“I suppose,” Harpal said dubiously. “Why waste the effort?”

“I want to try,” Hans said dryly. “I guess I give the order, am I right?” He lifted his wand. “We’re how close to this little slicker?”

“Two million kilometers.”

“I want two rifles to waste a little fuel, see if we can destroy it. That’ll wake the sons of bitches up if they’re still sleeping, or if they’re just logy from dealing with our doers. If they don’t react, we know something…”

“What?” Martin asked.

“That these orbiting ships aren’t important, or…” Hans shrugged. “That the planets are sitting ducks.”

“Or something else,” Harpal said.

“Keep it up,” Hans said, not unkindly. “Keep badgering me. What else?”

He’s getting into this much more quickly than I did. Good, Martin thought.

“Or they’ve got another trap set.”

“That’s what I think. But… I’m about to make the same mistake Martin did. I’m going to spring their trap and see what they can do to us. We survived the first one. Maybe we can survive the second. And if not, well…” He rubbed his palms together, as if scrubbing away dirt. “Our grief is shorter, hm?”

Martin shivered. Here was something he had never felt as Pan: fatalism. Hakim sensed it too, and looked away, swallowing. It was a reaction the others might embrace; a Wagnerian dedication to duty, a mighty blow against the enemy, valiant but useless, ending in death.

“Too strong, huh?” Hans asked, as if Martin had said something. “All right. I’ll tone it down, but I still want two rifles out there. Kill it.” He looked to Harpal. “Go to it, CR.”

Harpal left the nose. Hans concentrated on the cylinder for a moment, frowning. “I can’t imagine what purpose they serve, except… Hakim, could they work as mass detectors? Very sensitive to orbital changes caused by anything large entering the system?”

Hakim considered this. “I cannot say for sure, but I think there would be better ways to do that…”

“You could ask Jennifer,” Martin suggested.

“She gives me the shivers,” Hans said briskly. “But you’re right. What other purpose? They accelerated hours before our assault… Psychological weapons. I can’t buy that. These things don’t give a damn about our psychology. They just want us dead.”

“I have an idea,” Thomas Orchard said. The other members of the search team had been keeping a low profile, taking Hans’ measure now that he was Pan.

“Give it to me,” Hans said.

“I think they’re remote signaling stations. Something goes wrong in the trap, they survive a little while longer… They don’t attract much attention because they are small, because they seem to have primitive drives.”

“And…” Hans said, tapping his little finger again, “they accelerate just before an attack to be ready to zip out of here, if everything goes to hell…” He smiled and ran his hand through his stiff blond hair. “God damn. I like that. It makes sense.”

“But we can’t be sure,” Thomas said, proud to have Hans’ approval.

Born leader, Martin thought with a twinge.

“We can be sure of nothing in this miserable place,” Hans said. “I say we try to take one out, and if they’re vulnerable, we’ll take them all out. Meanwhile, one planet down… maybe. I’ll be interested to see how Ramses responds.” He lifted his fist and grimaced. “Slick ’em all!”

Away from the nose, going with Harpal to choose two rifle pilots for the job, Martin broke into a sweat. He lingered a few meters behind Harpal and wiped his face on his sleeve.

Ten years. Theresa and William had been dead ten years—and the others. Yet he had seen Theresa just a few days ago. She was fresh in his mind, her words were fresh.

A private and selfish bitterness came over him. He stood on the edge of a mental gulf filled with emptiness. He closed his eyes and actually saw this gulf, melodramatic imagery nonetheless real and painful. Guilt at this private bitterness could not drive it away. Others grieved; why should his grief be any the worse?

Martin told himself to catch up with Harpal, now almost one third of the neck ahead. His body refused to move.

“What are you doing?”

He turned and saw Ariel. The despair on his face must have been obvious. She backed away as if he were contagious. “What’s wrong?”

Martin shook his head.

“Tired?” she asked tentatively.

“I don’t know. Bleak.”

“Be glad you’re not Pan,” she said, not forgiving but not accusing.

“Hans will do a good job,” Martin said automatically.

“Something’s wrong,” Ariel pursued. “What is it?”

“Nothing for you to worry about.”

“You’re having a reaction, aren’t you?” she said. “You were strong and stalwart, and now you’re paying for it.”

He grimaced. “You were always so full of bullshit,” he said before he could think to keep quiet.

“That’s me, bullshit babe,” Ariel said softly. “At least I don’t get trussed up like a lamb for my own slaughter.”

“I’m okay,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“With Harpal. To pick rifle pilots.”

“Then let’s go,” Ariel said. “We have to keep moving.”

She treated his pain as something trivial. His hatred for her burned like fire. But he followed her along the neck to the aft homeball, still bleak, but at least moving, doing.

Paola Birdsong and Liam Oryx volunteered to take the rifles out. Their journey would last a day, as planned by Hans and Harpal.

Hans and Ariel accompanied the chosen pilots to the new weapons store. There were only thirty craft in the smaller space, all newly made after the destruction of William’s bombship. The designs were familiar, however. Martin and Ariel watched the two volunteers enter the slender craft, checked out their systems through the wands, stood behind ladder fields as the ships pushed through the hatch on pylons.

The rifles began their journey of hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

“I feel guilty about keeping my room temperature above freezing now,” Ariel said. “We have so little fuel. I hope this is really worthwhile.”

Martin shrugged and left the weapons store for the schoolroom.

“Where are you going?” Ariel asked. He told her. “Can I come with you?”

Martin was surprised into a long, even a rude, silence. “You can go wherever you want,” he said. “We’re gathering to see if anything happens to Nebuchadnezzar.”

“You need company. I don’t want to see you bleak again.”

He closed one eye, squinted at her, and again, without thinking, said what was on his mind: “I can’t figure you. You were such a bitch when I was Pan. Now it’s sweetness and light. Are you crazier than I am?”

She backed away, stung, then said, “Probably. What’s it matter now?”

To that, he had no answer.

The crew gathered around the star sphere in the schoolroom, all but Hakim and Luis Estevez Saguaro, who stayed in the nose to keep working. “What we learned in training makes us think this planet’s really sick with our doers,” Thomas Orchard explained, pointing out large brown and red patches on Nebuchadnezzar. “Whatever turned our people into and em may have been failing to start with—it didn’t stop some pods from dropping doers. And it didn’t convert all our ships. Now we think the machinery, the defenses, are completely gone.”

“How long until it blows up?” David Aurora asked.

“It won’t blow up,” Harpal said. “It’s just set to cook.”

“That’s what I mean,” David said, smirking. Martin watched the crew closely, uneasy, still bleak despite Ariel’s company.

“Any minute now,” Thomas said.

“Then we got a win,” David continued, raising his fist in a victory salute.

“Fat lot of good it does us,” Ariel said. “Two more planets to go, and so little fuel we can’t escape.”

“It’s something,” Harpal said.

“I don’t think it’s much,” Erin Eire said at the rear. Martin had not even seen her since the awakening, not closely enough to pull her apart from the crowd. “I think we all know this place isn’t the real target.”

“What makes you think that?” Thomas asked.

A mom entered the schoolroom. The crew fell silent as it floated to the center, but when it said and did nothing more, they resumed.

“Wormwood’s a tar baby,” Erin said. “We got stuck. We might blow off the tar baby’s arm or leg. But it will still be sticky enough to get those who come after.”

“A seed carrier signals by noach that demolition is beginning,” the mom announced. The crew cheered, but not as lustily as they might have. “We will see the results visually within ten minutes.”

Thomas shifted from the planet view and caught the rifles on their way to the nearest orbiting cylinder. His wand sang and a message appeared for his eyes only. “That’s Hakim,” he said. “Things are happening again…”

Martin followed Thomas to the nose. Hans floated with arms wrapped around legs, watching the search team put together their information.

Hakim played the wands and the data banks like musical instruments.

“Get Jennifer Hyacinth up here,” Hans said. Thomas called Jennifer to the nose.

Martin quickly read the information projected by Hakim’s wand. The five inner orbiting masses had diffused into elongated clouds.”

Harpal had closed his eyes. The air smelled of tension. Hans seemed a still point in the swirl of motion around the star sphere. He faced the projected information with unmoving eyes, not really seeing it. Martin knew what Hans was up to: he was trying to put together a clear picture through the clutter and uncertainty.

Jennifer Hyacinth arrived in the nose a few minutes later. She squeezed in beside Hans to be in the best position to see the information.

“The masses are the next part of the trap,” she said, frowning.

“Good girl,” Hans said. “We’re in close, the planet is going, so we’re obviously dangerous and they don’t want us to escape. They don’t know how much fuel we have left, or what we’re capable of…”

“We’ve done better than previous contenders,” Martin said.

“Maybe,” Hans said. “Harpal, what—”

“The dark masses could be loose-packed neutronium bombs,” Jennifer said. “The measurements are about right.”

“Good Christ,” Harpal said. “That many bombs could wipe out every planet in the system five, ten times over. If we could gather them—”

“They’re falling into Wormwood,” Hakim said.

Fresh diagrams floating in the air showed the rearrangements of the inner masses, their drift toward the star, estimates of time of entry into the heliosphere. “They’re being pushed in,” Jennifer said. “I think—”

“Wormwood’s going to go,” Hans said. “Jennifer, work up some momerath on what that will mean for us. Martin, coordinate with the moms. Tell the rifles to come back in, fast.”

“Wormwood’s particle wind is partially channeled to the poles,” Jennifer said. “There must be powerful fields controlling its interior. When it blows, if those fields are still in place—and I don’t think they could just be switched off—it won’t expand as a sphere…”

Martin pulled back and spoke through his wand to the moms.

Hakim pulled up a picture of Nebuchadnezzar’s surface glowing from the internal plasma of their seeds, but that seemed inconsequential now; the second part of the trap was indeed about to close.

The Dawn Treader orbited less than two hundred million kilometers from Wormwood. If the star went supernova, a tremendous burst of neutrinos would blow away the star’s outer layers.

Neutrinos in normal quantities were less substantial than any ghost, capable of traveling through light year thicknesses of lead unimpeded. But if they were present in such huge numbers, their interactions with matter—with the Dawn Treader and everything else in Wormwood’s vicinity—would become deadly.

Martin had no idea what so many neutrinos would do to their chemistry, but the sheer force of the neutrino blast could tear them to pieces.

Jennifer seemed lost in an ecstasy of calculation.

A mom appeared in the nose. “If this information is correct,” it said, “there is both danger, and extraordinary opportunity.”

Jennifer’s face lit up. “There could be channeling of the blast in different areas,” she said. “Neutrinos will pour out in all directions, but most of the star’s mass may push through the poles, making two jets, like a quasar.” She linked her hands and used two thumbs up and down to show the flow.

“I concur,” the mom said.

Hans looked between Jennifer and the mom, biting his lower lip, and slowly uncurled, stretching his arms. “What do we do?”

“We use all available fuel for rapid acceleration into a new orbit to pass over the star’s south pole,” the mom said.

Jennifer laughed as if this were the funniest thing in the world. Tears came to her eyes. “Right, right!” she said.

“We can protect the ship’s contents against most of the effects of a neutrino storm,” the mom continued. “We will use neutrino pressure to propel us out of this system.”

“We’ll be like a seed in the wind,” Jennifer said. “If we hold together, we’ll be blown out into deep space.”

“The post-explosion environment will be rich with volatiles from Wormwood,” the mom continued. “We will gather volatiles even as we are propelled outward.”

“They want to destroy us, but they may save us!” Jennifer said.

“Then why are they doing this?” Harpal asked. “Why give us this gift?”

“Very likely, they will destroy us,” the mom said. “But the opportunity exists, if we are skillful, and very quick. Alert the crew to field confinement and super acceleration. We will begin in a few minutes.”

Martin watched the star sphere. Haze covered Nebuchadnezzar’s surface now, shot through with flashes of intense white light. The neutronium and anti-neutronium seeds deep within heated the body’s surface to plasma; there would not be sufficient energy released to place any of the planet’s material in orbit about itself, as had happened with Earth; indeed, Nebuchadnezzar would keep its spherical shape. But for the next few million years, the planet’s surface would consist of cooling magma.

Martin could not exult at this small victory. Assistance in a suicide was no triumph; self-immolation designed to trap arsonists was comically absurd. But to have the fire offer them a chance at life, a chance to move on and finish the Job…

He began to laugh. Jennifer joined him. Harpal grimaced and left the nose to coordinate the crew. Hans stared at them as if they were crazy, then shook his head vigorously, and whooped.

Theresa would have appreciated this, Martin thought. William would have simply loved it.

They recovered their craft and prepared for the storm.

Wormwood’s death-throes took seven hours. The star’s magnetic field—restructured to push the solar wind up through the poles—whipped about like hair blown in the wind, clearly visible as the surface layers boiled and churned and cast up dancing streamers. The star began to resemble a fiery turnip with leafy top and frantic roots.

Within, billions of neutronium weapons ate through the star’s dense inner layers and ended their unseen, unknown orbits, mated positive to negative, anti em to matter. The ambiplasma generated by these deadly copulations marched steadily outward.

The moms timed everything.

Hans ordered the crew into the schoolroom and fell silent, sitting beside the star sphere, watching with half-lidded eyes as things beyond his command and control—beyond his comprehension—began to happen.

Martin sat nearby, his body frightened but his mind too lost in sorrow to care what would happen next. He watched Rosa Sequoia, who squatted in an awkward lotus in one corner, rocking gently, eyes closed. He envied her personal treasure of spiritual solace, her ability to be lost in an inner reality that did not match the external. What had she found, that Martin would never find?

The images in the star sphere conveyed only an abstract meaning. What were the energies of a dying star if not incomprehensible? A human life—all their lives—could be snuffed with a paltry fraction of the energy about to be released.

They had climbed to the top of an enormous wave, years before, and now the wave crashed down, and any slight bubble in that foaming maelstrom would be sufficient to snuff their candles utterly and completely, forever darkness, no amens.

The peculiarity of Martin’s state of mind was that he did not so much think these things as feel them, joined to his body’s fear like an anatomical footnote.

Fear made its own opiate. Emotions cannot ride forever at high intensity; within an hour, terror declined to numbness, with clear and selfless perception. Certainty of death was replaced by light curiosity, an intensity of unattached thought impossible only a few minutes before.

Scattered parts of his overwhelmed self made ironic commentary: This is the dark night of the soul Not hardly, this is just panic carried to its extreme Look at them they do not experience this the way you do They must They must

Visceral moans filled the schoolroom as they felt the fields lock down. Martin’s body tingled and all internal motions slowed.

Waves of darkness passed as the fields subdued their eyes, all their physical senses.

Yet something remained. What could possibly be left to him? Undefined memory, perhaps an illusion; who could say where that memory began? During their sequestering, or after, as a balancing of his brain’s chemical bookkeeping…

What he later remembered was a fairy tale thread of personal continuity, all thought reduced to parable, and an extraphysical awareness of the star in its last stages. That such memory and perception were not possible did not make it less compelling.

Wormwood blossomed like a daffodil with twin streamers of intense blond hair and a sigh of neutrinos, phantom particles now in such numbers they blew millions of times stronger than hurricane winds above the tingling in his body, the battle of the neutrinos to change his chemistry, pushing denser than matter through the ship; a subtle whisper of persuasion, like a crowd of autistic children never heard, never seen, suddenly screaming in his ear at once, the silent ones of space and time gaining a voice in their liberation, that voice changing from a whisper to a propulsive scream the remade Dawn Treader having reached a point above the southern pole of the star allowed itself to be pushed, very slowly at first, its own fuel depleted, on the rush of neutrinos, its crew held in place against the persuasion of those winds, against the subnuclear argument for deadly change, accepting only the force and not the persuasion.

The fox speaks with the hurricane and says, “I need to travel far and fast. Can you take me?” The hurricane regards the puny fox with its huge, calm eye and asks, “What can you do for me?”

“Why, I will let you whisper your dreams to me.”

“But I must kill whatever I carry. You are a living thing and do not wish to die.”

“If you do not kill me, I will listen to your inmost self, and tell all the animals, that they may feel sympathy for you.”

“What do I care for sympathy? I am all-powerful.”

“Yes, but someday, your winds will die, and my kits will tell this tale even when you are gone, of the time Great-great-greatgrandfather Fox was carried by the winds and lived and learned their secrets.”

“But then they will not be afraid of me, and what good am I if I do not inspire fear?”

“Oh, no living thing could ever be so strong they would not fear you. I give you something more. I give you a voice throughout time that is more than a wordless bellow of rage.”

Dawn Treader spiraled through the plumes of gases rising south from Wormwood’s pyre, and gathered fuel. It scooped hundreds of thousands of tons of hydrogen and helium and lithium, compressing them, storing them in envelopes around its waist as a bee stores pollen.

There was a kind of joy in its flight away from the dying system; it had subverted the last-ditch attempt by the Killers. The Killers’ trap became a cornucopia.

The crew spent a silent, still year in the schoolroom, another chunk of time reassigned.

Behind them, receding into a reddened hole, Wormwood’s nebula engulfed the system’s farthest reaches. All traces of ancient crimes were obliterated; planets, orbital warning systems, clouds of depleted pre-birth material, needle ships.

The tar baby burned to cosmic ash. That alone was worth their deaths, but they did not die.

The ash of gases flowed around and ahead of them and they breathed their fill, as a drowning man draws long, grateful breaths of air.

Martin accepted a glass of water from Hakim.

Ten bodies lay in parallel around the outer perimeter of the schoolroom. Hans stood over them, chin in hand, silent, as he had stood for the last half hour. Every few minutes he would shake his head and grunt, as if in renewed astonishment. The new dead, Jorge Rabbit, David Sasquatch, Min Giao Monsoon, Thomas Orchard, Kees North Sea, Sig Butterfly, Liam Oryx, Giorgio Livorno, Rajiv Ganges, Ivan Hellas. The bodies bore no marks of violence but for faint purple blotches visible on the face and hands; they lay with eyes closed.

They had died in confinement.

Twenty-three of the survivors kneeled by the bodies, still dazed.

With a start, Martin realized they were standing in full gravity. The Dawn Treader accelerated again.

“How did this happen?” he asked, throat still dry and sore.

Hakim drank deep from his bulb of water. “Their volumetric fields must have weakened… Neutrino flux may have transmuted some of their elements. They were poisoned, or perhaps just…” He swallowed. “Burned. I have only looked at them briefly. There are no moms to talk with.”

“The moms couldn’t keep them alive?”

Hakim shook his head.

Rosa Sequoia walked among the crew, making weird and meaningless hand-gestures that most of the others ignored. Jeanette Snap Dragon and Kimberly Quartz followed her, heads bowed.

Cham approached Martin and pointed to Sig Butterfly’s body, still and gray in the lineup. “One of our own,” he said.

“They’re all our own,” Martin said.

“That’s not what I mean.” Cham screwed up his face. “We’re losing the experience of our own leaders. We should arrange a full inquiry. We need to know what happened. Why the moms failed us again.”

“I don’t think they failed us,” Martin said. “We’re here. Most of us are alive.”

“We need to know the facts,” Cham said, getting more irritated.

“I agree,” Martin said. “But Hans is Pan, and he calls the shots now.”

“Not if he’s too stunned to move,” Cham said. “Where’s Harpal?”

They looked for the Christopher Robin, but he was not in the schoolroom. Most of the surviving crew had gone elsewhere, perhaps to recover in privacy. Martin itched to get things moving, but he resisted. “I’ll find Harpal,” he said. “Hakim, tell Hans we need to inspect the nose and the star sphere.” He pointed with his chin. “Let’s give him something concrete to think about.”

“Then I will gather the search team,” Hakim said.

The ship’s corridors smelled cooked, as if a fire had swept through the Dawn Treader while they were in confinement. The neutrino storm of dying Wormwood had done them more damage than Martin had first guessed; and that meant their escape had been something new for the moms, something experimental.

They could have lost many more.

I should be arranging for the burial of the bodies, Martin thought. The moms had always disposed of bodies before; why were they left out in the open now?

He stopped in a corridor and referred to his wand. Where were the moms? He called for one. None appeared. The wand itself acted fitfully, its projections weak and flickering.

He waited several minutes, beginning to shiver with a new fear: that the ship itself had suffered substantial damage, that its resources were diminished, that they might all die in a vessel without a ship’s mind or the moms.

He was about to continue toward Harpal’s chambers when a mom floated into view several meters ahead of him. “Thank God,” Martin said. He embraced the robot gently, as if it might shatter. The mom did not react to his relief.

“I’m looking for Harpal,” Martin said. “We have a lot of organizing to do, a lot of… psychological work.”

“A description of damage is necessary,” the mom said. “We will present an assessment before the entire crew.”

“The bodies…”

“We cannot recycle for the time being. Repair work is under way now. Some of our facilities are limited or inoperative until the work is done. The dead will be kept in fields—”

Martin shook his head and held up his hand, not wanting to hear the minute details. “We just need reassurance,” he said. “There could be a bad reaction if we don’t have a meeting soon.”

“Understood,” the mom said.

“Where is Harpal?”

“He is in the tail,” the mom said.

“I’ll go get him.”

Ariel came up behind them, sidled around the mom as if it were a wall, looked directly at Martin. “Hans is fuguing out,” she said. “He’s scaring the crew. Let’s find Harpal, and fast.”

They walked aft, not speaking until they were in the spaces of the second homeball. Here, the peculiar singed odor was even stronger.

Ariel wrinkled her nose. “Are we as bad off as it smells?” she asked.

“You heard what the mom said.”

“You know how I feel about the moms,” Ariel said.

Martin shrugged. “They saved us.”

“They put Us down there in the first place. How grateful should I be that they got us out?”

“We chose—”

“Let’s not argue,” Ariel said. “Not while Hans is sucking his thumb and Rosa is back there acting like a priestess. We have to move, or we’re going to be in more trouble than we ever imagined—our own kind of trouble. The moms aren’t going to pull us out of a fugue. They don’t know how.”

“Hans isn’t sucking his thumb,” Martin said. “He’s… putting it all together.”

“You sympathize with everyone and everything, don’t you?” Ariel said. She smiled as if in admiration, and then the smile took on a tinge of pity.

Harpal Timechaser looked at them with a frightening blankness as they approached. He had hidden in a dense tangle of pipes.

Martin’s temper had worn thin; now he was angry at Harpal, angry at everybody, not least angry at this woman who mocked him at every step and followed him for reasons he couldn’t understand.

“What is it?” Harpal asked too loudly, as if using the question as a wall or a defense.

“We have to get the crew together,” Ariel said before Martin could speak.

“Slick it,” Harpal said. “We could have died. We could have bought it while stuck in those goddamned fields.”

“Most of us survived,” Martin said.

“Jesus, I was right next to Sig,” Harpal said. “It’s never been that close for me. Whatever cooked him could have cooked me.”

“I was next to Giorgio Livorno,” Ariel said. “The moms have some explaining to do.”

“The ship is damaged,” Martin said.

“Tell them to fucking get it over with” Harpal screamed, tears streaking his cheeks. “Nobody should have died, or we all should have died!”

Martin and Ariel stood among the thick twisted pipes, the silence interrupted only by Harpal’s faint, constrained, helpless weeping. Ariel glanced at Martin, put on a resigned look, and went to Harpal. She wrapped him in her arms and rocked him gently, eyebrows arched, lips puckered as if to croon a reassuring song to a child, and she meant it.

Martin was impressed. He could not have predicted this nurturing side of Ariel.

His wand chimed. The communications at least worked now. He answered and heard Cham.

“We’ve got problems,” Cham said. Noise in the background; Hans shouting, weeping. “Hans is freaking.”

Harpal wiped his face and pulled from Ariel’s embrace. “Shit,” he said. “Time to zip it.” He crawled out of the curl of pipe. They laddered forward.

When they got to the schoolroom, Hans had left for his quarters. The ten bodies had been rearranged haphazardly on the floor, as if kicked. Five of the crew, including Jeanette Snap Dragon and Erin Eire, wore bruised faces. Half the crew had left. Martin felt sick foreboding; this was the beginning of something Theodore had talked about long ago, something Martin had refused to consider possible: the breaking strain.

Rosa Sequoia had stayed. Hans had not touched her. Now that Harpal, Hans, and Ariel had reappeared, she carefully rearranged the bodies, positioning their arms and legs, closing eyes that had opened, straightening the overalls.

Watching her pushed Martin very close to the edge, and he pulled himself back with considerable effort, swallowing, pinching his outer thigh until he bruised.

“What happened?” Harpal asked.

Cham nursed a cut cheek. “Wendys started mourning. Rosa led them. Hans told them to stop. They kept on, and a few Lost Boys joined in, started weeping, carrying on, and Hans… kicked them. David Aurora fought back and Hans really laid into him. David—”

“Where is he?” Ariel asked.

“He’s fine. Cut, bruised, but as I was saying, he got some good licks in. Hans pulled out.”

“Where is Aurora?” she asked again.

“In his quarters, I assume.”

Martin could hardly bring himself to move. He shivered suddenly, casting away the paralysis of fugue, and said to Ariel, “Get water and make some bandages and help Rosa nurse the crew. Keep her away from the bodies.”

“Right,” Ariel agreed.

“I’m not Pan,” Martin said, as if to make that clear; the crew in the schoolroom had focused on him with expectation when he spoke. “Harpal, find Hans and let’s get all the past Pans together. I want a mom there.”

“Who’s ordering what?” Harpal asked, neither grim nor accusing.

“Sorry.”

“Understood,” Harpal said. “Let’s go.”

Ariel gently coaxed Rosa away, speaking to her softly; was she trying to impress him? He could not deal with that now. He allowed himself a few seconds of closed eyes, trying to push Theresa’s remembered features into a complete portrait. The pieces would not combine.

He followed Harpal.

Hans had not locked his door. They entered his quarters, prepared for anything but what they found. He sat in the middle on a raised section of floor, sipping from a bulb of water, and greeted them with a weak smile.

“I’ve really slicked it,” he said, almost cheerfully.

“That you have,” Harpal agreed.

“Are you going to vote me out?” Hans asked.

“Why did you do it?” Martin asked.

Hans looked away. “They started keening. Women and men. I couldn’t believe it, coming out and finding bodies. It was more than I could take. I’m sorry.”

“Say it to them,” Martin said.

“I’m saying it to you.”

Cham and Joe Flatworm entered. “You bastard,” Joe said. “You slicking bastard. We should kick you out now. Give it back to Martin and stick you away like a rat.”

Hans’ face flushed and his jaw muscles tightened but he did not say anything, or move from his seat.

“We’ve all gone through hell,” Martin said, feeling how pitifully reduced the Dawn Treader’s group of leaders had become, and so quickly. “Hans agrees to apologize.”

“Apologize hell. He should resign. Martin, you take the title again.”

“No,” Martin said. “Hans, convince us. Now.”

“I don’t know if I want this mess on my head,” he said lightly, standing and stretching his arms. “I’m giving serious thought to the old Big Exit. Cut my wrists and be done with it.” He glanced at Martin. “The moms don’t seem to give a slick what we do. We’re just tools.”

“I’m not satisfied,” Joe said. He seemed on the verge of punching Hans; his arms crooked, fists clenched, chin thrust out.

“All right,” Harpal said. “Stop this shit now and talk straight. Hans, tell us what you’re going to do. And don’t flex your ego.”

Hans shrank a bit at Harpal’s tone and unyielding choice of words. “I’ll pick it up again,” he said. “I know we’re in trouble if we let it slide now. Bigger responsibilities.”

“Good for a start,” Harpal said. “What else?”

“I’ll do penance,” Hans said. “I’ll put myself in solitude for a week after we get back on our feet. I’ll tell the children—”

“Crew,” Martin said.

“I’ll tell the crew. If…”

“If what?” Joe shot back.

“I want the mourners to spend time in solitude, as well. A day. The ones who set me off.”

“That’s crap,” Joe said.

“That’s how they coped,” Harpal said.

“I have a different way of coping…” Hans began, but let it go with a shrug. “All right. Just myself. In solitude for a week. I’m still Pan, I still give the orders. I agree to that, too. Harpal, can I lean on you for help—lean hard?”

“I’ll do whatever I can,” Harpal said.

“That’s all I ask,” Hans said.

We start fresh now, Martin thought, and with that thought came a kind of relief. They had cut cleanly from the disastrous past. In a way, Hans had taken the perfect course, allowing a clean break, expiation by the leader, a new game starting from this point.

If Hans had known this from the beginning, from the time he had come out of confinement—if Hans had planned this—then he was far more canny than anybody had given him credit for.

Martin shivered. He hoped it wasn’t so.

The single mom—all the ship could produce now—told the crew what had happened to them and to the ship. They had survived the explosion of Wormwood with major damage—up to half the ship’s capabilities reduced by failure of confinement fields under extreme neutrino bombardment; ten of the crew had died, and only now were their bodies being recycled. They had sufficient fuel to move on to Leviathan—if they voted to do so. The journey would take a minimum of one year, ship’s time.

“Because of damage, you will not be able to face the anticipated defenses alone,” the mom explained. “For that reason, we suggest a combining of resources.”

Martin raised his eyes. This was the first he had heard of such a thing.

“There is another Ship of the Law about two light years distant. We can match course with this vessel and join forces. This ship has suffered damage as well, and will benefit from joining forces.”

“How do you know all this?” Hans asked. “You couldn’t have heard about it on the noach.”

“We detected the results of their skirmish, and correlated their probable path of escape. When remotes extended this ship’s sensing abilities, we used them to confirm the ship’s path.”

“Without telling us,” Hans said.

“It was not important at the time.”

Hans shrugged, looked down at the deck. “If we know, then the Killers know as well,” he said.

“The Killers do not know that we have escaped, though they may know of the survival of this second vessel. They do not know its present position, however. With both ships combined, we will have the capabilities of a fully equipped Ship of the Law.”

“On the other ship… are they human?” Erin Eire asked.

“They are not human,” the mom said.

“Do they need the same things we need?” Paola Birdsong asked. “I mean, do they breathe oxygen, and so on?”

“With slight adjustments, environments can be joined,” the mom replied.

“What do they look like?” David Aurora asked.

“More information about this ship and its inhabitants will be available before we join forces.”

“Do we take a vote?” Ariel asked.

“A vote is not forbidden. But you must understand that we cannot fulfill our mission in our present condition.”

“No shit,” someone said in the back, out of Martin’s sight; it sounded like Rex Live Oak.

“Do we really need to vote?” Hans said. “I’m still ready to fight. If this is our only chance, we should take it.”

“Vote,” Ariel insisted, and Rosa Sequoia, in a calm, deep voice, as if speaking from a cave, agreed.

“All right,” Hans said. “Martin, Harpal, take the count.”

The crew voted quickly, without energy. Of the sixty-five remaining, thirty voted no; thirty-five voted yes. Ariel voted to go; Rosa Sequoia voted against further action.

“That’s close,” Hans said, standing before them. “Now I’m here to take my licks. I screwed up today. I really fouled the nest. I apologize. I’ll go into solitary for a week. I appoint Harpal as Pan in the interim. He’ll work with Martin. I suggest we all take a rest. Let the mom finish its work. We say our farewells to everybody we lost around Wormwood, and we think things through.”

He nodded to the closest members of the crew as he passed them, heading toward the door. Harpal looked at Martin; this was hardly what they had hoped for. Martin felt sick inside; sick with his unresolved pain, and sick at the dissolution that seemed to be upon them.

“We need to talk this out,” Harpal told Martin.

Martin declined. “Rest,” he said. “We’ve been through too much, and I can’t talk sensibly now. Aliens!” He trembled suddenly, whether with excitement or exhaustion, he could not say. Harpal’s shoulders slumped and his chin dropped.

“We’ll all rest,” Martin said, touching his arm delicately. “And mourn.”

Martin’s quarters were bare and cold. Still the smell of burning lingered; the odor of neutrino-singed matter. He entered and the door slid shut behind him and for this moment at least, ignoring the smell, he might have been at the beginning of his journey, when first the Dawn Treader had been presented to the children, and they had made their new homes here.

With some relief and some sorrow, he knew that these were not the same quarters in which he and Theresa had made love. The ship had rearranged and repaired itself too extensively; the deck on which their bed had rested might now be shifted meters away, or recycled completely. What connection did he have to the past?

None.

Martin closed his eyes and curled up on the floor, laid his cheek against the smooth cool surface, flexed his fingertips against it, and waited for sleep.

He thought on the edge of that desired sleep of Jorge Rabbit’s bruised body, and what it had once held: language and laughter and sharp reliability, a favorite of the children. The crew.

Jorge Rabbit and the others might soon be in the air they breathed, the food and water they took in. But not William or Theresa.

Martin reached out for Theresa’s hand. He could almost feel it, his fingers brushing the air where it would be, faintest rasp of sensation. Then, deliberately, he withdrew his hand and folded it under his chest. “Goodbye,” he whispered, and slept.

Behind the Dawn Treader, the corpse of Wormwood expanded as a many-colored vapor, like milk swirling in water and illuminated by many lights.

“Hakim watched the stellar corpse with cold curiosity, arms folded. Beside the image in the star sphere scrolled and flashed figures, charts, condensed images, conveying the qualities of the corpse in an interstellar autopsy of incredible depth and complexity.

“If I were back on Earth now,” he told Martin, “I would be an astronomer, but never in my life would I see something like this. Where would I rather be, do you think? Here, now, seeing this, or…?”

“You’d rather be on Earth,” Martin said. They were alone in the nose; the rest of the crew awaited the end of Hans’ self-imposed week of isolation, going through their own isolations, their own regroupings, reassessments.

Hakim agreed. His face had changed since the Skirmish, as Erin Eire called their costly victory. His expression had hardened, eyes shining brighter, perpetual smile tighter, lines more deeply grooved around his lips and eyes.

“It was a fair exchange, perhaps,” Hakim said. “How many Ships of the Law were trapped by Wormwood and destroyed?”

“We were lucky,” Martin said. “The trap was getting rusty.”

“You know as well as I, war is a matter of luck as much as strategy. We should not deny ourselves satisfaction because we came upon a weakened enemy.”

“We don’t know the enemy is weak,” Martin said. “They might still be strong.”

“Then why do they hide behind traps?”

“To avoid trouble. Maybe this was no more significant to them than the loss of a bug zapper in a front yard.”

Hakim’s smile curled wickedly. “I like this metaphor,” he said. “We are mosquitoes, but we bring yellow fever… And now the bug zapper is down, we fly freely toward the house…”

“About to join with a group of moths,” Martin suggested.

“I would prefer wasps.” Hakim chuckled, and then suddenly his voice caught and he turned away. “Excuse me,” he said, clearing his throat.

“Someone you loved,” Martin said after a moment. He had never followed Hakim’s romantic affairs, partly out of respect, partly because Hakim and his partners had always been extremely circumspect.

“It was hard for me to call it love,” Hakim said. “Min Giao Monsoon. She was my equal, and I couldn’t… I didn’t know how to digest that. But she was very important to me. We were not very open.” For an instant, Hakim showed simple and enormous pain.

Martin watched the beautiful display, greens and reds dominating, cinders of planets visible only in the graphs and enhancements at this distance. Spirals of plasma from the poles had quickly spread and whipped in arcs to encompass a vast sphere; the artificial fields that controlled Wormwood giving way and rearranging in the violence. Wormwood’s corpse had finally assumed an aspect of natural star death. Perhaps that had been planned by the Killers, as well…

No need to light any brighter a beacon in the forest than absolutely necessary.

“However you loved, you loved,” Martin said.

Hakim agreed to that with a measured nod. “I have high hopes that our new Pan will grow into his position.” He spoke quietly, as if Hans might be listening.

“It’s not easy.”

“There are many challenges even before we get to our destination. I wonder how I will react to new and inhuman colleagues… perhaps better to say nonhuman.”

“The ship and the mom don’t know an awful lot about them,” Martin said. “Otherwise they’d tell us more.”

“I agree,” Hakim said. “I have never believed the moms hold things back from us.”

“Oh…” Martin said, “I wouldn’t go that far. They always tell us what we need to know, but…”

“Pardon my saying so, but you sound like Ariel.”

Martin scowled. “Please,” he said.

“Not to offend,” Hakim added with a touch of his old impish-ness.

Rosa Sequoia sat in the cafeteria among a group of twenty-two of the crew, conducting a ceremony for the dead, following— as far as Martin could tell—her own rules and her own rituals. He could not object; ritual was healthy at this point.

She had made up hymns or borrowed from old songs and projected lyrics for the crew to sing. Martin watched from the outside, near the door, and did not sing, but felt his heart tug at the swell of voices.

Rosa looked up, and her eyes met his, and she smiled—broadly, without resentment; beautifully.

In our grief and pain, she finds herself, he thought. But perhaps that was too unkind.

Hans came out of his isolation after six days, somber and unshaven, blond beard bristling and face wreathed in a dreary scowl that gave nobody confidence, least of all Martin. He asked for a private session with Hakim and the remains of the search team. After, he emerged from the nose to brush past Martin and Erin Eire in the corridor, saying nothing.

“He hasn’t taken a lover since he became Pan,” Erin said.

Martin looked at her. “So?”

Erin blinked. “So it’s unusual. He’s not exactly been chaste, Martin. A lot of Wendys go for bulk over brains.”

“He’s not stupid,” Martin said.

“He’s still acting like a jerk,” Erin said.

“Maybe he’s waiting for the right girl to come along,” Martin said, aware how silly that sounded.

Erin hooted. “Oh, sure. Somebody he’s never met before.”

“We’ll have visitors soon,” Martin said, face straight.

“Spare me,” Erin said, grimacing over her shoulder as she departed.

Ariel laid her meal tray on the table across from Martin in the cafeteria. New watch schedules posted by Hans had placed her in an opposite sleep cycle; he was having dinner, she breakfast, but the food appeared much the same.

The ship was not yet up to the broad variety of meals it had once offered; what they were served now was bland but filling, a brownish bread-like pudding varied occasionally by soups.

They exchanged minimal greetings. Ariel made him uncomfortable by focusing on him when he wasn’t looking.

“What do you think of Hans now?” she asked when their eyes met.

“He’s doing fine,” Martin said.

“Better than you?” she asked.

“In some ways,” Martin said.

“How? I’m curious. I don’t mean to embarrass you.”

“I’m not embarrassed. He’s probably more canny than I am, more sensitive to the crew’s swings of mood.”

She tipped her head in a way that implied neither agreement nor disagreement.

“And you?” he asked.

“Reserving judgment. He is more canny than some Pans we’ve had. Rosa approves of him. She talks about the duty to our leader in her sermons.”

“Sermons?”

“I haven’t been to one, but I hear about them.”

“She’s preaching?”

“Not yet,” Ariel said, “but close. She’s counseling. Helping some of the crew face up to the Skirmish and what it means.”

“Blaming the moms?”

“Not implicitly.”

“Blaming them at all?”

“She doesn’t even mention them, from what I’ve been told. She talks about responsibility and free will and our place in the broad scheme. Maybe we should go and listen.”

“Maybe I will,” Martin said.

“Maybe Hans should go, too.”

“Do you want me to spy on her for Hans?”

Ariel shook her head. “I just think it’s significant, what’s happening.”

“It’s inevitable, maybe,” Martin said under his breath, and got up to go to his quarters.

Theodore Dawn visited his dreams, and was full of talk, some of which Martin remembered on waking.

They sat in a garden, under an arbor in full flower, Theodore in a short white tunic, his legs tanned from long exposure to the summer sun now at zenith over their heads. They were eating grapes; they might have been Romans. Theodore had been fond of reading about Romans.

“Something terrible is about to happen to Rosa,” Theodore said. “You know what it is?”

“I think so,” Martin answered, letting a grape leaf fall to the pebble gravel at their feet.

“The worst thing that can happen to a prophet is not to be ignored and forgotten; it’s to have her cause taken up and chewed by the masses. Whatever she says, if it doesn’t fit, will be chewed some more; some opportunist will come along and forge a contradiction, polish a rough edge of meaning, and then it will fit. People believe in everything but the original words.”

“Rosa isn’t a prophet.”

“You said you knew what’s happening.”

“She isn’t a prophet. Just look at her.”

“She’s had the vision. This is a special time for you.”

“Nonsense!” Martin said, angry now. He got up from the marble bench and adjusted his robe clumsily, not used to its folds. “By the way, is Theresa here with you?”

Theodore shook his head sadly. “She’s dead. You have to be alive to die.”

Paola Birdsong and Martin found themselves alone in the tail of the ship, having completed a wand transmission test for the mom, and with no further instructions, they sat and talked, glad to be away from the glum business of the crew.

Their talk trailed off. She looked away, olive skin darkening, lips pressed together. Martin reached out to stroke her cheek, make her relax, and she leaned into the stroke, and then tears came to her face. “I don’t know what to do or how to feel,” she said.

She had been loosely bonded with Sig Butterfly. Martin did not want to inquire for fear of opening wounds, so he kept silent and let her talk.

“We weren’t deep with each other,” she said. “I’ve never really been deep with any lover. But he was a friend and he listened to me.”

Martin nodded.

“Would he want me to feel badly for him?” she asked.

Martin was about to shake his head, but then smiled and said, “A little, maybe.”

“I’ll remember him.” She shuddered at the word “remember,” as if it were a realization or betrayal or both, remembrance being so different from seeing directly, remembrance being an acknowledgment of death.

It was natural for him to fold her in his arms. He had never been strongly attracted to Paola Birdsong, and perhaps that was why holding her seemed less a violation to his memory of Theresa. Paola must have felt the same about Martin. The embrace became more awkwardly direct, and they lay side by side in the curls of pipes, the burned smell almost too faint to notice now.

Where they lay was dry and quiet and isolated. Martin felt a little like a mouse in a giant house, having found a place away from so many cats; and Paola was herself small, mouselike, undemanding, touching him in a way that did not discourage, did not invite. The momentum of the situation was carried by instinct. He did not undress her completely, nor himself, but rolled over on top of her, and with a direct motion they joined, and she closed her eyes.

Neither of them cried.

Martin made love to her slowly, without urgency. She had no orgasm to match his, which was surprisingly powerful, and he did not press her for one; it seemed this was what she wished, only a little betrayal of memory at a time, a little return to whole life. After, with no word of what they had just done, they rearranged their overalls.

“What have your dreams been like lately?” he asked.

“Nothing unusual,” she said, drawing her knees up in her arms and resting her chin on them.

“I’ve been having pretty vivid dreams. For a long time now. Pretty specific dreams, almost instructive.”

“Like what?”

Martin found himself much more reluctant to describe the dreams than to characterize them. “Memories with real people in them. People from the ship, I mean, saying things to me. Giving advice as if they were alive.”

Paola bumped her chin on her knees as she nodded. “I’ve had dreams like that,” she said. “I think it means we’re in a special time.”

Martin jerked at that phrase.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“It just seems right. We’re so far away from our people. We’re losing more and more connections. Something’s bound to change.”

“What will change?” Martin asked.

She uncurled, pulled up a bare foot to inspect a toenail. “Our psychologies,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m just talking. A special time is when we learn who we are all over again.”

“Shrugging off the past,” Martin suggested.

“Maybe. Or seeing it differently.”

“Does Sig come to you in your dreams?” he asked.

“No,” she said, dark eyes watching him.

He thought it unlikely they would make love again.

After, in his quarters to prepare for a watch in the nose, he felt melancholy, but that was an improvement. It had been only weeks in his personal, conscious time, but the clouds thinned, and he could think clearly for moments at a stretch without the shadow of Theresa or William.

In the nose, Hakim slept while Li Mountain and Giacomo Sicilia tracked the corpse of Wormwood. In a few months, they would see the shroud of gas as no more than a blotch in the receding blackness.

“Any sign of a neutron star?” Martin asked Li Mountain.

“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 anything to 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, she has 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’s nose. “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 Treader might 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.

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 Treader was 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 Treader is 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 Treader receded 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’s point 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 Treader is 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’s existence. 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 Treader rose 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 tink and 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 Treader is. 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 Treader frame 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.”

“But they weren’t Benefactors themselves?” Hakim asked.

“No. You might call them junior partners.”

Hans chuckled. “Higher rank than us.”

“A different arrangement, under different circumstances. The Red Tree Runners traveled over one hundred light years, a journey lasting thirty Earth years by their reference frame.”

“And?” Hans said.

“They arrived at Leviathan nineteen hundred years ago. Leviathan has changed considerably since then.”

“We noticed,” Giacomo said.

“Reasons for the changes are not clear. But they were convinced Leviathan was not their target, obtained fuel from the inhabitants of one of the worlds, and departed.”

Martin shook his head. “That’s all?”

“The memory store has undergone considerable decay. The Red Tree Runners may have discovered how to deactivate the ship’s mind, or interfere with its operations. Over ninety percent of the records are too deteriorated for retrieval. One third of the shipboard recordings have survived, but all biological, historical, and library records of their civilization have decayed.”

“Of course,” Hans said dryly.

“They fell apart,” Jennifer said. “They lost it and they killed themselves. Or decided to die.”

Martin recalled the mummified corpses, the last of the crew, saw them lying down to accept the end.

“By God, that won’t happen to us,” Hans said.

“Will this information be made available to all crew members?” the mom asked.

Hans seemed startled by the question. He mused for a moment, squinted one eye, looked at Martin as if about to dress him down for some unspecified offense. “Yeah,” he said. “Open to everybody. Why not. Warning to us all.”

“It’ll be our albatross,” Harpal said. “I don’t know what the others are going to think…”

“It’s a goddamned bloody sign from heaven,” Hans said. “Rosa’s going to have a ball.”

Wild Night was not, as the awkward name suggested, a free-for-all; boredom with lust had settled in. The occasion was treated as both a welcome home for the three travelers and a chance for the crew to let off steam after absorbing news of the death ship; to get back at authority—at the moms, and more implicitly, at Hans, with his planning and approval.

In the cafeteria, the crew enjoyed the first dinner they had had since the Skirmish that tasted like anything.

Martin had not participated in the Wild Night planning, and so was as surprised as anybody by the depth of vituperation Hans endured. Rex Live Oak cut his hair to resemble Hans’, and performed a skit with three Wendys about Hans’ sexual escapades. The jokes were explicit and not very funny, but brought hoots and cackles from the crew. Hans smiled grimly and tilted his head back in mock chagrin.

Martin wanted to leave before the third skit, but saw clearly that that would not have been appreciated. Group action was the call of the night, cooperation and coordination: laugh together, poke fun together, rise from the pit together. The entire atmosphere only deepened Martin’s gloom; on Earth, he had never seen a social gathering turn sour, but this must have been what it was like: forced hilarity, insults and insincerity passing for humor, bitterness and sadness masking as camaraderie. Hans presided over it all with dogged equanimity, sitting slightly apart from the others at a table.

The unexpected came, of course, from Rosa Sequoia. She had been quiet for the months when Martin, Giacomo, and Hakim had been away, “Biding her time,” as Hans said. Now, as the skit’s players took a break, she climbed on top of the center table and began to speak.

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

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

Nobody said a word. Uncomfortable shufflings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’ve been dreaming about people who died, haven’t you?” Rosa continued, still smiling, still disarming.

“What about you?” Rex barked.

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

“Sit down, Rosa,” Hans said.

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

“I’ve been dreaming about people who died on Earth,” Jeanette said. “They tell me things.”

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

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

“What do your parents tell you?”

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

“What do they tell you, Kirsten?”

“My brother on the Ark,” Patrick Angelfish said.

“What does he tell you, Patrick?” Rosa’s face reddened with enthusiasm.

Martin’s skin prickled. Theodore.

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

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

He cut himself short, glanced at Martin, grimaced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Monsters in the halls?” Rex Live Oak called out.

“Let her talk,” Jeanette Snap Dragon demanded, angry.

Hans started to rise.

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

“The God of our mothers and fathers!” Jeanette sobbed.

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

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

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

“It touches everything, and around it swirls parts of itself like bees around a flower. It…” She nodded self-affirmation and wiped her eyes.

“Stop this now!” Hans ordered. “Enough!”

“It loves me!” Rosa cried, hands held out, fingers clutching. “It loves me, and I do not deserve its love!”

A few of the men walked out past Martin, shaking their heads and muttering. None of the women left, though Ariel looked as if she might spit fire. Her body shook with anger, but she said nothing.

“It spoke to me. Its words ripped my head apart. Even when it was gentle, it overloaded me.”

“Pray for us!” Kimberly Quartz shouted. Others yelled, “Back to the show! Get off!” Voices strained, bleating, angry.

“Then it showed itself to me,” Rosa said in a stage whisper.

“What did it look like?” Kirsten Two Bites asked.

“It didn’t come as a shadow. That was my preparation, my illness. I had to become sick to see, to want to see; sick and desperate and completely lost. It came to me when I was most ready, weakest and least myself. It was not a shadow, not a presence, but a folding-around. I cannot fold myself around this; it must wrap me. I saw it was not just a whale among the stars; it covered everything known. The parts of it that I saw buzzing like bees were bigger than galaxies, dancing so slowly in endless night, trying to return to the center…”

“They can’t! We can’t!” Kirsten Two Bites said.

Hans got up, caught Martin’s eye, gestured for him to follow.

Martin followed him outside the schoolroom. “What the hell am I going to do?” Hans asked, shaking his head. “Some of them are into it. I should have kept the death ship secret.”

“How?” Martin asked.

Hans shook his head. “If I ordered everybody out now, what would happen?”

“It would get worse,” Martin said. He could still feel the tingle, the gooseflesh. He was confused; he feared Rosa, but part of him needed to hear what she had to say. He realized her message was crude, that she was undoubtedly crazy, but she had a message, and no one else did.

“If we don’t do something, what’ll happen to us?” Hans asked. “We might end up like those poor bastards, drifting for thousands of years!”

Martin lowered his head. He did not want to acknowledge what such an awkward, unattractive person had made him feel: the depth of their lostness.

Hans stared at him and whistled. “You too, huh?”

“No,” Martin said, shaking his head. “We should break it up now.”

“Just you and me?”

“I’ll get Ariel and the past Pans. You stay outside. We’ll meet here and go back in, announce…”

“Training,” Hans said. “If we can get back to some kind of training…”

“All right,” Martin said, unable to think of anything better.

Martin entered the cafeteria, Rosa started to step down, and collapsed into the arms of Jeanette Snap Dragon and Kirsten Two Bites.

The meeting broke up with a scatter of hard, fragile laughter. Jeanette and Kirsten supported Rosa out the opposite door, away from the crowd. Martin subdued an urge to follow them, to question Rosa; instead, he collected Cham and Harpal and Ariel, and told them they were meeting with Hans. Ariel was puzzled.

“Why does Hans want to see me?” she asked.

“Maybe he doesn’t know yet,” Martin said. “But I do.”

“We’re two months away from rendezvous.” Hans folded his hands behind his head, leaning back on a chair that rose from the floor. Six gathered in his quarters; the past Pans, Ariel, at Martin’s insistence, and Rex Live Oak, whom Hans had invited. “We’re losing our edge. Martin sees this, and I’m sure the rest of you do, too. This is a shitty way to fight. Rosa isn’t too far wrong; we fight ghosts, we lose our friends and gain nothing really deeply satisfying—just another step in the Job. And now we have nothing to do for months.

“We find a ship full of corpses, and the moms force us to go take a close look, stick our noses into the stink of failure. Meanwhile, we’re waiting to receive strangers—new crewmates, not even human beings. Any wonder we start listening to Rosa?”

The six said nothing, waiting for a point to be made. Hans drew his lips together, said, “Am I right?”

“Right,” Rex said.

Hans raised his hand over his head, spread the fingers, contemplated them.

Very melodramatic, Martin thought. Child-like.

Hans’ mood was unreadable. Nobody else dared to speak. Martin felt some dreadful kind of grit being revealed in their Pan; tough, determined and perhaps a little perverse, even uncaring.

“The moms say we won’t practise in simulations for a tenday, perhaps two,” Hans said. “The hell with waiting. We forget games and free-for-alls. I don’t want anybody slicking with anybody until this ship is fully prepared. I want some real tensions and angers, not these fake, shitty boredoms we have now. I’m going to have to slap this crew, hit them with work, busy work if necessary. Martin, can you figure the moms?”

Martin showed his surprise. “Beg pardon?”

“Any more insights into what they’re up to?”

He fumbled for a second, shrugging, finally said, “They’re making repairs still. I don’t know what you—”

“Repairs hell. They made your goddamned racing boat to visit the death ship. They gave up a quarter of the fuel we gathered around Wormwood—at the cost of how many lives? Are they keeping anything else important from us?”

“I don’t think so,” Martin said. Ariel did not react. She seemed frozen, listening, waiting.

“We train ourselves, without simulations. We drill for discipline and to keep our blood flowing. We fight each other in physical combat. All of you will be drill instructors. Martin, Rex, and I will work up a schedule of physical endurance and combat. Hand to hand. Winners get to slick. Nobody else. We’ll ask for volunteers to be rewards.”

Only Rex returned his smile. The rest were astonished into blank expressions and silence. Ariel closed her eyes, swallowed.

Before now, except for his outburst following the neutrino storm, Hans’ leadership instincts had always seemed acute. But Martin’s gut reaction to this pronouncement was abhorrence. To go up against crewmates in zero-sum games, physical exercises, competing for the physical affection of a few—he could think of no other words for them—prostitutes, whores, seemed as far wrong as they could go.

But nobody objected, not Martin, not even Ariel. That horrified Martin more than anything else.

“Then let the games begin,” Hans said.

Martin faced Jimmy Satsuma. They bowed to each other, circled warily, clinched.

In the schoolroom, fifteen other opponents faced off, circled, clinched. The room filled with grunts and shufflings, outrushes of air as bodies hit the resilient floor, slaps of flesh on flesh. Wendys wrestled Wendys, Lost Boys faced off against each other.

The family groups, already reduced and weakened by the deaths, became even weaker as Cats opposed each other, Trees and Places wrestled together, Fish and Flowers grappled with Fish and Flowers.

The ship was finding a new social order. Victors emerged; Martin came in sixth out of the top fifteen Lost Boys.

Hans picked out the top fifteen as instructors, and the next round began with additional competitions: running, variations on football, soccer, handball.

There was some satisfaction to Martin in seeing that most of the victors eschewed Hans’ rewards, walking from the matches with wary, embarrassed glances. Rex Live Oak eschewed nothing, taking Donna Emerald Sea to his quarters.

Exhausted, bruised and sore, Martin spent half an hour in his quarters before sleep exploring the libraries of Dawn Treader. The libraries had re-opened in the past few days. There were gaps, but not large ones; about ninety-five percent had been saved or reconstructed from damaged domains. The libraries now integrated the remnants of the derelict’s deep time memory store.

With the libraries restored, he felt some of the pressure of turning inward pass away. He could venture outward again, through the ship’s information universe.

The zero-sum competition was not nearly as divisive as Martin had feared. There were casualties; there were abstainers. Rosa Sequoia and a few of her followers did not compete, and Hans did not compel them to. Some refused after a few attempts, and Hans did not subject them to ridicule.

Days passed.

Nobody talked much about the upcoming rendezvous. It would be like inviting strangers to join a family already having enough troubles; the thought frightened Martin, and he realized with some elation that at least now he could genuinely feel uneasy, that the journey and Hans’ outrages had pulled him out of the gloom that had returned since the voyage to the death ship, lifted that gloom sufficiently to have emotions other than blanketing, all-too-comfortable despair. Perhaps Hans had been right again.

Sixty-four of the crew listened to Rosa’s storytelling. Hans was not there; Ariel and Martin, at his request, attended.

Ariel had accepted Hans and Martin’s attempt to bring her into the fold of authority with surprising composure. Martin thought of two explanations for her placidity: proximity to the center of things gave access to crucial information, and Ariel was no fool; and she would be closer to Martin.

Ariel sat beside Martin in the cafeteria. Martin was reasonably sure she had been making her moves on him, in her peculiar way, since the Skirmish.

He had been celibate since Paola Birdsong. The lure of the flesh was nothing compared to the other conflicts he had to resolve.

The crew came to the cafeteria singly and in triples; few entered in pairs. The dyad structure had broken down in Hans’ exercises and rewards; those who had lost partners in the Skirmish had not yet made new matches, and only one or two new dyads were apparent.

Rosa began her session with a parable.

“Once, back when Earth was young, three children came upon a sick wolf in the woods. The first child was a girl, and her name was Penelope, and she was sweet and younger than the others, and spoke with a lisp. The second was Kim, her brother, who did not know where to go in life, and who always worried about fighting and winning. The third was Jacob, a cousin, the oldest, frightened of his shadow.

“They circled the wolf and Penelope asked the wolf what was wrong with it.

“ ‘I am in a trap,’ the wolf said, and Penelope saw that this was so; the wolf’s paw was caught in a steel jaw chained to the ground. ‘Please release me.’

“ ‘Wait a minute,’ Kim said. ‘What if the trapper sees us? We’ll get in trouble…’

“ ‘The trapper only comes once a week,’ the wolf said.

“ ‘If you know that, then you must know where the trappersets his traps. How did you fall into a trap if you knew where they were?’ Kim asked.

“ ‘You are a very smart boy, so I will tell you something,’ the wolf said. ‘Something very important. But first you must release me.’

“ ‘Are you a magic wolf?’ Penelope asked. She had heard of such things.

“ ‘I am a sorcerer, pretending to be a wolf. I can change my shape at will, unless I am caught by iron—and this is iron.’

“ ‘I think we should release him,’ Jacob said. ‘I don’t like to see live things in pain.’

“ ‘Wait,’ Kim said. ‘Maybe this is the wolf that’s been killing our sheep. Maybe the trapper is doing us a favor.’

“ ‘That was the cougar, not me,’ the wolf said. ‘Have you no trust?’

“ ‘I trust nothing, and care for nothing, because I have been hurt when I trusted before,’ Kim said.

“ ‘I trust you,’ Penelope said.

“ ‘I don’t know whether to trust him or not, but he’s in pain,’ Jacob said.

“ ‘What will you give us if we set you free?’ Kim asked.

“ ‘I can grant no wish while I am trapped by iron,’ the wolf answered.

“ ‘So you can’t prove you’re a sorcerer. I say let’s leave him here for the trapper,’ Kim said.

“But Penelope reached down to open the trap anyway. Kim saw her and tried to stop her, but Jacob fought with him, and she opened the trap, and the wolf crawled free, lay in the grass with its tongue out, and said, ‘I am very ill. I will die now, because I have been in the trap so long, but I will come in your dreams and give you each what you have given to me.’

“And the wolf died. Penelope mourned, and buried its body in the woods where the trapper would not find it. Kim stalked away, angry at Jacob. And Jacob felt sad that they had not saved the wolf, and that he had lost Kim’s friendship in the bargain.

“That night, the wolf came to Penelope in her dreams, but it was a slender old man wearing a wolf-fur robe, with sharp gray eyes and a wise smile. The old man said, To you I give long life and children, and in your old age, when your time comes to die, you will be content with the men you have loved, the children you have borne, the life you have lived… This I give to you.’

“To Jacob the sorcerer came as a wolf, and said, ‘You will live a long life, and it will be rich and complex, with sadness and joy mixed so that often you cannot distinguish between them. Life will make you a wise soul, because it will be hard, and when you die, you will sit on God’s favored side, to render advice on the affairs of men. All this you will have; but this you will lose. You will never know what is truth, and never know certainty. All things will be ambiguous, for this is the curse of wisdom.’

“To Kim, the wolf came as a wolf, and growled at him in his dreams, until the dreams became dark as nightmare. And the wolf told him, ‘All your life the world will turn its hand against you. You will scheme and scheme, but gain no advantage, and learn nothing from your failures. You will not live to a ripe old age, but instead, you will die young, bitter and cheated, loved by no one. This I give to you.’

“ ‘And what do you give to yourself?’ Kim cried out in his dream. ‘You who have so much power, and can cause so much pain?’

“ ‘For my foolishness in being trapped, I can have nothing but oblivion. For to gain this power, long ago I sold my soul. I now have nothing. And when my ghost fades from your dream, I will be less than the echo of wind.’ ”

Rosa lowered her head. The crew seemed to appreciate the story, but did not applaud. They stood to leave, and Jeanette Snap Dragon said in a stage voice, “Rosa was visited again last night. Something came to her.”

The crew stopped, stared at Rosa, who raised her head, eyes distant.

“We don’t talk about it, but we think of the death ship a lot now,” Rosa said. “We wonder why they all died, and there are no answers. I give no comfort this evening. Our greatest trial comes. Soon another kind of intelligence will join with us. We will be visited by innocents, and we will teach them pain.”

Silent, without argument, the crew left the cafeteria.

Ariel followed Martin to Hans’ quarters. “Well?” Rex Live Oak asked, beckoning them in as the door opened.

“She was… innocuous,” Martin said.

“What kind of word is that?” Hans asked. “Nothing Rosa does can ever be innocuous. What did you think?” He stared at Ariel.

“She’s getting better. Much stronger,” Ariel said. “Jeanette and Kirsten are with her all the time now. She doesn’t ask for me very often. She knows I talk to Martin and you. She’s putting together disciples. I think she’s building up to something.”

Ariel gave Martin a fleeting smile, as if asking for approval but realizing he would not give it.

“Is that right?” Hans asked Martin.

“Whatever she’s building up to, she isn’t there yet,” Martin said. “She spins a good story, but so far, it’s just entertainment. Fairytales.”

Hans pondered for a moment. “She’s not going to stick to telling stories. She’s bound to have another revelation. I’m not sure we can afford to let her go off on her own. We’re still close to the edge, and having visitors isn’t going to make things any easier.” He mused, squeezing his palms together, making small sucking sounds. “What Rosa needs is a good slicking. Any volunteers?”

The crudity stunned Martin and made Ariel’s neck muscles stand out, but they did not answer.

“Not me,” Rex Live Oak said casually.

“Just as I thought. I’ll have to bell and feed the cat. Part of the old burden, am I right?”

“The libraries are open, the food’s getting better, and the moms tell us we can use remotes to expand our baseline,” Rex Live Oak said, looking around the cafeteria. “I think we’re ready to meet our new comrades. Any comments, before I let the search team report?”

The crew moved restlessly for a few seconds, as if reluctant to push forward a questioner. Paola Birdsong raised her hand.

“The Pan is supposed to give us the report,” she said. “Why isn’t Hans here?”

“Hans is doing research now,” Rex said.

“Then why not Harpal?” Erin Eire asked.

“I don’t know,” Rex answered flippantly. “Harpal?”

Harpal shrugged, refusing to be stung. “Rank hath its privileges. Hans can pick anybody he wants as a speaker.”

“We don’t need a speaker. We need the Pan himself,” Erin persisted.

“I’ll take your questions directly to Hans,” Rex said.

Martin looked around the room. There were two conspicuous absences: Hans, of course, and Rosa Sequoia.

“Think he’s giving Rosa her medicine?” Ariel whispered in Martin’s ear. Martin didn’t answer; if Hans was with Rosa, he must know their absence together would be noticed. If Rosa was giving in to Hans’ “medicine,” she was at risk of losing her unusual status, and perhaps that was Hans’ intent.

Hakim cleared his throat and came forward as Rex cleared the way magnanimously with a sweep of his arm. “We are at least a half a trillion kilometers from the other ship,” Hakim said. “We’ll drop our camouflage in a few days. The moms think it’s very doubtful anyone can detect us out here. We should be able to establish noach a few hours before rendezvous.”

“Are we looking at the Cornflower?” Alexis Baikal asked.

Hakim affirmed that the Leviathan system was being studied.

“Anything new?” Bonita Imperial Valley asked.

“There are ten planets around Leviathan,” Hakim said. “We have few details on the planets other than their mass and size: five rocky worlds less than twenty thousand kilometers in diameter. The sixth through the tenth planets are gas giants. They emit very little or nothing in radio frequencies. There has been no reaction to the destruction of Wormwood; no armoring, nothing. That is about all we can say for now.”

“Are there other orbiting structures?” Erin Eire asked.

“Not that we can detect.”

“Any explanation why they’ve changed since the death ship was there?” Rex asked.

Hakim shook his head. “Perhaps there has been massive engineering, as there was around Wormwood. That would be my guess. Two planets might have been broken down for raw materials.”

“Are the planets inhabited?” Paola asked.

“No signs of habitation, but that is expected. We presume they are,” Hakim said, averting his eyes. “For now, there is not really much more to say.”

“All right,” Rex said, standing again, arms folded. “Comments? Anything for me to take to Hans?”

“We’re tired of wrestling,” Jack Sand said.

“I’ll let him know,” Rex said, smiling broadly.

Harpal came to Martin’s quarters an hour after the meeting, Ariel following. “I’m going to resign as Christopher Robin,” he said, stalking through the door, arms swinging loosely, fists clenched.

“I suppose I don’t need to ask why,” Martin said. Ariel sat with hands between her knees, lost in thought.

“I hope not. You’re too smart,” Harpal said. “He picks me, then he lights on Rex, and Rex does everything I should be doing… and I do nothing. Does that make sense?”

“He’s feeling his way,” Ariel said. Harpal turned on her.

“And where do you stand, Mademoiselle Critical?”

Ariel lifted her hands.

“Jesus,” Harpal said. “When Martin was Pan, you were so full of bolsh we could grow mushrooms in your mouth!”

“Harpal,” Martin said.

“I mean it! What’s with the sudden quiet?”

“I trusted Martin,” Ariel said. “He wouldn’t hold things against me. Not enough to hurt me. I’m not an idiot.”

This stopped Harpal cold. He simply stared at her, then at Martin, and threw his hands up in the air. “None of this makes sense.”

Martin gestured with his fingers to her: Come on, let it out.

“Martin was sincere. He didn’t calculate for effect.”

“Thank you very much,” Martin said with some bite.

“I mean it. You didn’t measure everybody for his coffin. Hans hasn’t changed… he’s just grown into the job. Everything is weighed according to political advantage.”

“Even when he blew up after the neutrino storm?” Harpal asked.

“That was genuine,” she admitted, “but it put people in their place. Where he wanted them to be—a little afraid of him. He’s big. He hits when he’s angry. He’s not exactly predictable. So people are more wary and they don’t speak up. Big, smart bully. Or didn’t you notice?” She looked at Harpal accusingly.

“I don’t see how he could plan such outbursts,” Martin said.

“You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed his skills,” she said, eyes glittering. Martin saw the former Ariel again, saw she was keeping her anger and dismay tightly wrapped, and felt a fresh surge of concern.

“He’s a better Pan than I was.”

“Maybe better at manipulating. He knows what he wants.”

“He pulled us out of a pit,” Martin said, realizing his Devil’s advocacy. He wanted to see how much Ariel’s views coincided with his—all unvoiced, even unconfirmed in his own mind.

“He put us there in the first place,” she countered.

Harpal sat and crossed his legs. Martin and Ariel both looked to him for comment. “Good Pan, bad Pan,” he said softly, in wonder.

“The crew puts a lot of faith in the Pan. Martin was good—if a little gullible—because everybody knew they could talk to him, and he wouldn’t hurt them, wouldn’t even think of it,” Ariel said. “I spoke up because I thought I could argue him into seeing certain important things…”

“You went at it pretty forcefully,” Martin said.

“I’ve never claimed to be subtle. When will you resign?”

Harpal squinted. “When the time’s right,” he said. “Can anybody tell me why he’s courting Rosa?”

“He’s doing more than courting her,” Ariel said. “Rosa’s still in his room. You know she hasn’t had a real friend for years?”

Martin nodded. “He thinks she’s on to something.”

“What?” Harpal asked.

“Something we need,” Martin said, and Ariel nodded.

“What?” Harpal asked again, genuinely puzzled.

“Faith,” Martin said.

Harpal drew back as if bitten. “You’re kidding.”

“Not at all,” Martin said. “She’s getting closer and closer to the mark. I’ve felt it myself.” He tapped his chest.

“I’m completely lost now,” Harpal said. “I don’t deserve to be second. I’m out of touch.”

“Things are going to get a lot more complicated very soon,” Martin said. “Let’s see how he handles the situation.”

Ariel surprised him by agreeing completely. “He’s made mistakes… But he’s still in charge, and we’re still ready to do the Job.”

Harpal stood in the door. “If he accepts my resignation, that’s fine by me,” he said. “But why did he pick Rex? Rex is not the smartest person on the ship. He knows nothing about leadership.”

Martin held back the most obvious and the darkest answer he could think of: Rex won’t say no.

Hans kept to the back of the cafeteria, smiling benignly. Rosa stood on a table; sixty-three of the crew listened intently.

“In two days,” she said, “we’ll meet our new colleagues… What will they be like? What will they think and believe? How can we accommodate them? Interact with them? What are we, to them!”

The crew did not answer. Martin sat a few meters from Hans, beside Harpal and Ariel. Hans winked at Martin.

Rosa looked radiant; the beauty of intense compassion, of selflessness. Awkward Rosa had melted finally, giving way to a new woman; had the defining moment occurred in Hans’ arms? Hans revealed nothing.

“In the scale of things, we are the very smallest of intelligences, the very dimmest of lights. Yet like plankton in Earth’s seas, we lay the foundations for all the complex glory above us. We are the food and eggs and seed of all intelligence, up to and including that radiant center beyond all understanding. A disturbance in the sea of little thinking creatures can move up the spiritual food column with disastrous consequences, though it may take an age; and so the highest regards the lowest with more than just disinterested love, for we are ultimately them, part of their flesh, if they have flesh, part of their histories, and their futures…

“The colleagues joining us have undoubtedly suffered as we have. They have lost their home world, have wandered for centuries in foreign shells, and have fought and lost loved ones, all to vanquish the poison, the death of the planet killers. We join with them now, and the little intelligences merge… And it is noticed by those high above us, those in attendance on the Most High, the galaxies of bright spirituality that rotate around the unimaginably vast center… And that notice is not just a kind of love, it is love, compared to which the love we feel for the parts of our own body, for our own flesh, is a cheap imitation.

“Our success or failure has a larger meaning. When we die, we are not just lost; I have felt the cradle of the Most High coming for our dead, to embrace their memories, their essence, and draw them to the center, where there is eternal motion and eternal rest, peace and the center of all action.”

“She hasn’t read her Aquinas,” Ariel whispered to Martin.

But what Rosa said sounded good to him. Martin needed to know that Theresa and William were happy, that they had found rest; that sardonic and razor-sharp Theodore and all the others were appreciated somewhere, that perhaps they floated in a sea of painless interaction, showing their highest qualities to something that might finally appreciate them…

“When our ships join, we join purposes as well. All our goals must mesh. We are here not to satisfy the moms, but to clean the seas of a poison that could reach to the center itself. Call it evil, call it senseless greed, call it maladaptation… It is separate from the Most High, and the Most High does not cherish it.

“The cup-bearers of planetary death are not among the lights in attendance to the Most High; they are caught in a vicious cycle of pain and fear. We have felt their fear. It killed our home planet and it has killed our friends; the time has come for us to apply the burning iron to that fear, and to send the Killers back to where they can again become part of the column, rise in usefulness again to the Most High.

“But we will not receive divine aid. Though there are things repugnant to the highest intelligences, the greatest spirits, they do not give us their powers and insights when we fight the repugnant things. That would be a kind of interference even more evil than senseless murder; a confusion of scales, the Most High stifling the potential of the low, where all creativity, all creation begins. We are on our own, but our struggle is not senseless.”

“What do the moms think of this?” Harpal asked Martin in a low voice.

Martin shook his head.

“The story I tell this evening is of war. Nothing gentle, nothing soothing, it reminds us of what we face still, and may face for centuries more, before we can lay down our weapons and take up the duties of living for ourselves.”

“Why can’t I feel the touch and see what you’ve seen?” Nguyen Mountain Lily asked.

Rosa looked puzzled for an instant, then smiled again and raised her hands, sweeping all around. “The Most High is never not touching us. But it does not tell us what to do, and it does not speak to us in words; its presence is the conviction we all feel, that there must be a loving observer to whom we are very important, and who loves us.

“The love the Most High feels is not the love of sexuality and reproduction—it is the love of one of us for our own bodies, our own cells, a constant love made of care and nourishment. But we do not interfere with our own cells.”

Martin could poke holes in this like ripping a finger through rotten cloth, but he did not want to; he found himself explaining away the inconsistencies, the poor metaphors, as weaknesses in Rosa’s perceptions, not in her message.

“I don’t think anything watches me, or cares about me,” Thorkild Lax said. “I watch out for myself and for my crew-mates.”

“I felt that way. I felt lost,” Rosa said. “I thought no one cared—not my crewmates, certainly. I was slovenly, out of touch. I didn’t really belong. No one was more lost than I was. But there was this final loving in me, this urge to reach out.” She folded her hands in front of her, then swept them out and up like two parting doves, fingers spread. “I reached out in the middle of my pain—”

“Enough of this shit,” a masculine voice called out. “Tell the story.”

The crowd turned and Martin saw George Dempsey, blushing at the accumulated stares. He got up, started to leave, but Alexis Baikal reached up and held on to his hand, pulled him gently down, and he sat.

Martin felt a warmth, and then a tremor of unease. The group spirit, the bonding again—the wish for strong answers, for transcending love. The special time.

He thought of his father and mother, and the touch his father could give, and the warmth of his mother, large and all-encompassing, the way she wore full dresses to cover her ample figure, the sweetness of her round face wrapped in dark silken hair, the complex and giving love of both; and he thought of that love writ large, the beginning place for that sort of love.

“How do I reach up and out?” Terry Loblolly asked, voice small in the cafeteria.

“When you need to, you will do it as a hungry flower blooms beneath the sun,” Rosa said. “If you do not need enough, you will not; your time is not yet.”

“If we don’t love, does the Most High blame us? Does he hate us?”

“The Most High is neither male nor female. It does not blame, it does not judge. It loves, and it gathers.” She curled her arms as if to gather unseen children to her breast and hug them.

“I need that touch badly,” Drusilla Norway said. “But I don’t feel it. Is that my fault?”

“You have no faults except in your own eyes. All fault is human judgment.”

“Then who will punish us for our sins?” Alexis Baikal asked, voice distorted with sorrow.

“Only ourselves. Punishment is our way of training ourselves for this level of life. The Most High does not acknowledge a court of law, a court of judgment. We are forgiven before we die, every moment of every day, whether we seek forgiveness or not.”

Martin thought of Theresa waiting at the end of this long journey to explain these things to him, part of the all-enveloping warmth; he put Theresa’s face over Rosa’s, and wanted to sleep in the comfort of this thought, hoped it would not go away.

“Is Jesus Christ the son of the Most High?” Michael Vineyard asked.

“Yes,” Rosa said, her smile broadening. “We are all its children. Christ must have felt the warmth like a fusion fire, even more strongly than I do. It glows from his words and deeds. The Buddha also felt the warmth, as did Muhammad…”

Hakim seemed displeased to hear the Prophet’s name in Rosa’s mouth.

“… And the many prophets and sages of Earth. They were mirrors to the sun.”

“All of them?” Michael persisted.

“All knew part of the truth.”

“Do you know only part?” Michael asked.

“A small part. You must explain the rest to me,” Rosa said. “Tell me what you find in yourselves.”

In murmurs, in challenges and questions, in Rosa’s parables and explanations, give and take, for the next two hours the crew spoke and confessed. A current went through the room as something palpable, as if she were a tree, and the wind of feeling passed around her, through her. When others in the crew cried, Martin found tears in his own eyes; when others laughed with a revelation of joy, he laughed also.

“I am not a prophet,” Rosa said. “I am simply a voice, no better than yours.”

“How can we hate our enemies, when they are just like us?” someone asked.

“We do not hate them; but they are not just like us, they are desperately wrong and we fight them with all our strength, for that is how we correct the imbalances. We must never be cruel, and we must never hate, for that damages us; but we must never forget our duties.”

Martin felt the Job fall into place in his thoughts; nothing holy about death and destruction, but a necessary part of their existence, their duty. A natural act, action to reaction.

Nothing they did was sanctioned; nothing they did was judged except by themselves, and by the standards that flooded them from the light of the Most High. The passion of revenge had no place here; it was an abomination. But the duty of correcting the balance, that was as essential as the breath in his lungs and the blood in his veins.

Groups pushed in close around Rosa, hands linked. Together they sang hymns, the wordless Hum, Christmas carols, ballads, whatever they remembered, while others searched the libraries for more songs. All their musical instruments had been absorbed in the emergency, but their voices remained.

The singing lasted an hour. Some were hoarse and weary, and some fell asleep on the floor, but still Rosa ministered to them. Jeanette Snap Dragon brought her a chair and she sat in it atop the table, her red hair standing out in radiant frizz around her head. Jeanette and others sat around her, on the table, at her feet. Jeanette placed her head on Rosa’s knees and seemed to sleep.

Others came, until almost all the crew filled the cafeteria. Some looked bewildered, feeling the current, but not letting it pass through them yet; hopeful but confused, resistant but needy.

The special time. Ariel came close to him and he hugged her as a sister. She looked up at him, head against his shoulder, and he smiled, loving all his fellows.

At Rosa’s request, the floor softened. The crew lay together on the floor, around the table, as the other tables and chairs lowered and were absorbed. Jeanette’s wand projected light behind Rosa and the room fell dark.

“Sleep,” Rosa said, her hair an indistinct shadow in the rosy glow. “Soon we begin our duties again. Sleep in peace, for there is work to do. Sleep, and reach into your dreams to find the truth. When you sleep you are most open to the wishes of your friends, and to the love of the Most High. Sleep.”

Martin closed his eyes.

Someone tapped his shoulder. Hans kneeled beside him. He shook Martin, whispered into his ear, “Cut it out. Come with me.”

Martin rose, a shock like electricity tingling through him. He seemed stuck between two worlds, shame and exaltation. Hans’ grim expression and tense marching posture seemed a reproof. Ariel followed, and at first it seemed Hans might send her back, but he said, “All right. Both of you.”

Rex Live Oak stood in the corridor, smiling wolfishly.

“Fantastic,” Hans said, shaking his head. “She’s so good. She’s got them all now.”

Martin’s head cleared as if with a dash of ice water.

“She just needed a little help and encouragement,” Hans said. Rex chuckled. “I damn near felt it myself. Didn’t you? I think we have this situation under control now.”

Ariel touched Martin’s shoulder but he shrugged away the touch.

“All she needed was a little reason to live, something just for herself,” Hans said.

“Don’t slick her too much,” Rex said. “Keep her lean and hungry.”

Hans shook his head ruefully. “Got to ration my blessings,” he said. “I only have so much to be generous with.”

Rex and Hans walked along the corridor. Ariel watched Martin for a moment and saw the anger on his face. “You didn’t know?” she asked, astonished. “He coached her, Martin. He’s been whispering in her ear for days.”

His eyes filled and he wiped them. He turned to stamp into another corridor, away from the cafeteria.

Ariel followed. “I’m sorry!” she said. “I assumed you knew! It was so obvious…”

“What was obvious?” Martin asked, still fleeing.

“He was turning Rosa, directing her to shore up the Job. Otherwise she could tear us apart. He thinks—”

“Thinks what?” Martin asked, stopping at the join to the neck. A ladder field appeared and he gripped it with his hand, preparing to descend.

Ariel caught up with him, still astonished by his naïveté. She dropped her voice, murmuring as if embarrassed. “Hans is very smart. He sees that this vision can help him control the crew. He told us so. Remember?”

“Yeah?” The word came out loud and harsh.

“She’s warm and cozy in his arms. He says something, you know, about the Job, and our relation to God, something like that. She’s happy, she’s flattered. She’s never been an ascetic by choice. She listens. She goes his way.” Ariel spread her arms, eyes narrow, puzzled. “So for him, everything’s great.”

Martin felt like hitting out, and he went so far as to clench his fist. “Why are you following me?” he shouted. “Why don’t you just stay the hell away from me?”

“Hans is dangerous,” Ariel said in a conspiratorial, husky voice. “He’s hollow inside, and the more he settles in, the hollower he gets. He thinks the Wendys are cattle. He thinks we’re all cattle.”

“Crap,” Martin said.

Ariel’s face reddened and her eyes narrowed even more, to angry slits. She spat out, “What are you, celibate! Do you plan on being solitary for the rest of the journey? Is that why you hate me?”

Martin grimaced and laddered into the neck, leaving Ariel behind.

“God damn you!” she cried out after him.

Giacomo and Jennifer hung beside the star sphere in the schoolroom. The ship had stopped accelerating twelve hours before, and all drifted free now. Ladder fields crossed the periphery of the schoolroom and shimmered along what had once been floor and ceiling.

Hakim, Li Mountain and Luis Estevez Saguaro quietly arranged for echoes of the sphere to appear around the schoolroom.

Martin entered alone, stared at the central sphere, and took a deep breath.

They were nine billion kilometers from their future companions, about two days from a merger. The two ships had matched courses and now edged slowly closer.

Harpal came in behind Martin. “Why so many?” he asked, sweeping his arm at the five spheres.

“Hans aims for effect,” Martin said.

Hakim climbed along a ladder field, hooked his foot, and hung beside them. He did not smile. “Races over?” he asked.

Hans was making sure the crew was exhausted before bringing them into the schoolroom.

“Almost,” Martin said. “Ten, fifteen minutes.”

“It seems silly to me, all this exercise,” Hakim said. “We could be doing science, anything but rolling like squirrels in a cage.”

“Hans has his plans,” Harpal said.

“Who’s winning?” Jennifer called from across the schoolroom.

“Rex,” Martin said carelessly. He climbed in closer to the main sphere. The image of the other Ship of the Law appeared distinct, about two hand-breadths wide, three eggs swallowed by a snake. “They don’t look damaged,” he said.

“The ship is smaller than Dawn Treader used to be,” Giacomo said. “About half the size. It must have taken some pretty substantial hits. I wonder where they fought? What they did?”

“I don’t see any fuel cells,” Harpal said.

A mom entered the schoolroom. They had seen so little of the moms in recent tendays that Martin was startled by it. “Hans has not made a tenday report,” it said to Martin and Harpal, matter-of-factly, no judgment implied. “Is there something wrong?”

Martin swallowed; for Hans to ignore the tenday was… What? What did they expect? Hans had restructured the society of the Dawn Treader, just as the ship itself had been rebuilt. Why should anything surprise Martin?

Hakim looked to Martin, no sign of natural cheer or even excitement; eyes wary. Betray nothing.

“I don’t think so,” Martin said. He no longer wanted to play the advocate for the office of Pan, to defend Hans, to judge the situation in the best light. He could not ignore the knot in his stomach whenever he saw Hans’ confident, strong features, or Rosa’s intoxicated beatitude.

“There is information to be presented to the crew,” the mom said. “I am here to report. Is a meeting scheduled?”

“Yes,” Martin said.

“Hans shouldn’t shirk the reports,” Harpal muttered.

“There are problems?” the mom asked. Martin’s embarrassment turned to anger in a flash and he crossed his arms, shook his head.

“No problems,” he said. Nothing I can pin down in words. Hans does nothing overt; the worst he does is change things without consulting us… and why should he? The crew follows him almost without question. He doesn’t act like a tyrant; he just glowers, and that’s enough.

We’re back to being children again. Hans is Daddy; Rosa is Mommy. So what will we call the moms now? Auntie?

We’re one big happy family.

“When will the crew convene?” the mom asked.

“In a few minutes,” Hakim said.

“I will wait.”

The Wendys and Lost Boys started filing in a half hour later, sweating and flushed. Hans had insisted on trying new sports in the weightless conditions. Three or four had arms in makeshift slings. They gathered in loose groups, no longer according to family or namesake; Hans had dissolved those connections.

Hans and Rex came in last.

All eyes turned to the spheres, weary, interested but shielding responses.

Hakim began his description: the second ship’s length, mass, the approximate amount of fuel it carried. He glanced nervously at the mom, wondering if it would merely repeat what he was saying. He seemed to fear becoming redundant; Hans seldom conferred with the search team.

“I think the mom has something to tell us,” Hans said when Hakim stammered into silence. Hakim nodded and backed away.

“We will now prepare you for the meeting with your new partners,” the mom said. “Noach communications have been established with this Ship of the Law, which is called Journey House by its crew. We have many more details. May I take control” of the displays?”

“Of course,” Hans said.

The first image in the spheres puzzled the crew: a long black cable. Martin had to concentrate to understand what he was seeing. The first guess would have been a tentacle, or perhaps a snake, but close inspection showed that this was more than an individual being. The image moved, and the crew reacted with shock.

The cable disassembled into a squirming pile of serpents, and then quickly reassembled. Martin wondered whether this was a simulation or the image of a real creature.

“These are colonial intelligences,” the mom said. “Such a configuration is not unusual. Many worlds support bionts that combine to form larger bionts, even in more advanced evolutionary phases. Your new partners are of this type. Between ten and twenty components come together to form an intelligent individual. The components”—A single blunt-ended tube with grasping hooks at one end and millipede-like feet at the other—“are seventy to eighty centimeters long, and are not in themselves intelligent, though they perform many social and practical roles. The components are responsible for gathering food, though not for agriculture or preparing food. They are responsible for reproduction and nurture, their offspring. When the offspring are mature, they are instructed in the basics of forming combinations, and these combinations are then raised and educated by fully mature aggregates.”

More images: aggregates ranging in size (a human silhouette for comparison) from two meters long, comprising ten intertwined components, to five meters, and fifty centimeters to a meter thick.

“They are oxygen breathers. An atmosphere conducive to both species, human and aggregates, will be maintained in all common areas of the ship, though separate quarters will also be available.”

Martin glanced at Hans. Not a hint of shrewd speculation, not a trace of anything but shock. Here was strangeness that exceeded Hans’ expectations.

“Their foodstuffs are not edible for humans, nor is your food sufficient for their needs. Contact is not dangerous, provided certain rules are followed. Components must not be molested or impeded in their duties; they can’t respond socially beyond a limited-—”

“Like my wanger,” Rex Live Oak cracked. Some of the crew laughed nervously.

“A limited range of interactions with their kind, guided largely by instinct. Components can be dangerous if they are molested. They can inflict a painful bite. We do not yet know how toxins for this species might affect humans—”

“Christ, they’re poisonous?” Rex asked, astonished.

“That is a possibility. But they will not attack unless severely molested. Aggregates are highly intelligent, capable of complex social interactions. We are confident they can mimic human speech better than humans can learn their methods of communication, which are chemical and auditory. To your senses, their variety of smells should be pleasant.”

The promise of pleasant smell wasn’t cutting much ice. The crew looked on the images with open mouthed amazement and half-controlled revulsion.

“What do we call them?” Ariel asked.

“Good question,” Erin Eire commented. “I don’t think calling them snakes is a good idea.”

“Or worms,” Jeanette Snap Dragon added.

“What in hell are they?” someone else asked.

“They are aggregate intelligences,” the mom said, not making the mystery any shallower.

“But what the hell is that?” Rex asked. “How do they think? How do they fight?”

“The proper question,” Hans said, “is how—and if—we’re going to cooperate with them.”

Martin stepped forward. “Of course we’re going to cooperate,” he said, as if challenging Hans directly. Hans took the challenge without hesitation.

“Martin’s right. We’re going to get along, whatever they’re called. Which takes us back to an earlier question. What do we call them?”

”What will they call us?” Erin Eire interrupted.

Hans ignored her. “Suggestions? The moms seem to be leaving this up to us. I assume they don’t use any name we could smell, much less pronounce…”

“Do they have sexes?” Rosa asked, voice sweet and clear over the murmuring.

“The components can be male or female or both, depending on environmental conditions. They give live birth to between one and four young every two years. Aggregates do not engage in any sexual activity; sex occurs only among separated components.”

The crew mulled this over in silence; stranger and stranger, perhaps more and more alarming.

“We could call the components cords,” Paola suggested. “The aggregates could be braids.”

“Good,” Hans said. “Anything better?”

“We’ll call them Brothers,” Rosa said, as if it were final. “A new part of our family.”

Hans raised one eyebrow and said, “Sounds fine to me.”

The names stuck. Cords, braids: Brothers. A new addition to the family of Wendys, Lost Boys, and moms.

Dawn Treader and Journey House would merge to make a single vessel nearly as large as Dawn Treader had originally been.

Communication between Dawn Treader and Journey House passed along the noach at a furious rate; hour by hour, the libraries expanded.

Martin, just before sleep, toured the libraries’ new extensions and found himself in territories that had not existed before, filled with streaming bands of projected colors, tending to the reds and greens; sounds like aspirated music—haunting, sweet, and disturbing at once; and images of enormous complexity, swimming and flowing as if projected on dense fog. Some images were expressed in rotated and skewed multiples, as if they might be viewed by many eyes, each having a slightly different function.

He checked to see how many of the crew were exploring these fresh territories. The wand reported fifteen so engaged, including himself; the rest, it seemed, were waiting to be pushed.

The size of the libraries had trebled in just a day. If the libraries had been reduced by a tenth during the neutrino storm, then the Brothers’ libraries had held just over twice as much information as theirs. Martin was eager to have that translated, if translation was possible; perhaps they would have to learn how to see and understand differently.

Before shutting off the wand, he requested a kind of judgment from the libraries: how the Brothers compared to other beings of whom the Benefactors were aware.

“In a range of deviance from your norm, the Brothers are perhaps halfway along an arbitrary scale of biological differences,” the library voice responded.

Martin sensed something new in this answer; something fresh and perhaps useful. They might be dealing with the merged intelligences of both ships’ minds; and he thought it more than a little possible that, for whatever reason, the new combination would be more informed, and more willing to inform the crews.

Before falling off into muddled dreams, Martin realized what this could mean, if true.

They’re more confident. We’re closing in; there aren’t many surprises left.

Another voice—it might have been Theodore’s—seemed to laugh ironically. How wrong do you want to be? Keep working at it… You might break a record…

Hans gathered the remaining ex-Pans—and Rex Live Oak. They met in the nose, with the search team absent, and looked across a few infinitesimal kilometers to Journey House.

“The ships join tomorrow at fifteen hundred. We’ll all wait in the cafeteria,” Hans said. His face looked drawn, older. Circles shadowed his eyes. “But we’re going to meet a few of the Brothers first. They’re coming over in one of their craft in two hours. Three of them, three of us. The moms say they can’t predict how we’ll interact. For once, I think they’re being absolutely square with us. I’d like Martin and Cham to join me. We’ll meet them together. Before then, the moms are going to give us background on the individuals.” He looked around the group with one eyebrow raised, as if expecting a challenge. Quietly, he asked, “Any suggestions?”

Harpal said, “As Pan’s second, I’d like to go.”

“Cham is better suited to meeting live ropes,” Hans said. It wasn’t clear to the others whether that was a joke or not.

“Then I’d like to resign as Christopher Robin,” Harpal said.

“Fine.”

Harpal waited for someone to object, to rise to his defense. No one did. He nodded, jaw clenched, and backed away.

“Not that you haven’t done a good job;” Hans said. “I’m not appointing anyone in your place. Anything you’d like me to ask our new friends?” He made the inquiry with unctuous solicitation, rubbing the moment in.

“Ask them what they regard as a mortal insult,” Harpal said. “I don’t want to get on their bad side if they’re poisonous.”

“We’ll get all this culture stuff straightened out. Right now—and I think that’s a good question, Harpal, but it can wait—right now, I’d like to see just how much personality the braids actually have. How we connect, what sort of fellows they are.”

“I think a woman should go with us,” Martin said. “A different point of view.”

Hans cocked his head to one side, considered for a moment, and replied, “Bad idea. I’ve watched the Wendys closely, and I think they’re going to take longer to adjust than the Lost Boys. Maybe it’s a snake or phallic thing. Just look at their faces when the Brothers move. Stephanie maybe, but she’s not with us any more.”

“They scare me, too,” Rex said.

“Here’s what I think we should do,” Hans said, and he told them.

Martin, Hans, and Cham waited in the weapons store. The air in the hemisphere had cooled to just above freezing and smelled faintly of metals and salt. Hans straightened his overalls and cleared his throat. “We’ll meet them casual,” he said. “No hands out, nothing. Let them make the first gesture.”

“What if we all just stand here?” Cham said.

“I’m patient,” Hans said.

A mom entered the store and floated next to Hans. “The craft approaches now,” it said.

“Christ, I’m nervous,” Hans said.

A field glowed around the pylon, which pushed through a darkness in the bulkhead. Faint clunks and hums resonated throughout the chamber. The pylon returned, bringing at its tip like a fly on a frog’s tongue a round craft about three meters wide with a conical protrusion, much like a squat pear. The pylon set the craft gently in a field, and the field wrapped it in purple, lowering it to the floor of the chamber.

“Our gravity will be slightly heavy for them,” the mom said. “But they are very adaptable.”

“Good,” Hans said. His throat bobbed.

Maybe he’s got a snake thing, too, Martin thought.

The pear-shaped craft opened a hatch. Within, like rope in a ship’s locker, coiled three of the Brothers: red and black, cords gleaming like rich leather. They did not move at first. Then, with uncanny grace, a braid uncoiled from the mass and slid to the floor, the forward end rising and making a faint chirping noise, like summer crickets.

The second and third braids followed, and stood before the three humans separated by only a few meters of floor. Martin smelled fruity sweetness, like cheap perfume. He did not feel repugnance, or even fear; only child-like fascination, as if these were wonderful new puzzles. I like them.

The central braid coiled its rear and lifted its front end two meters above the floor. Then, in birdlike, chirping English, it said, “We we are very pleased to be With you.”

Hans swallowed again, eyes wide, and said, “Welcome to the Dawn Treader. To our ship.”

“Yes,” said the central braid. “We we must all be curious to know. I we do not see any of females. Odd must be very odd to have two sexes when you together are thinking.”

Cham grinned. Hans swallowed again. “Not so odd,” he said.

“Let get closer, and touch,” the Brother continued. “It is perhaps best to know what we we are.”

Cham and Martin stepped forward as the central braid swayed and the other two lowered themselves to lie at full length on the floor.

“You may touch any of we us,” the Brother said. “I we am speaking because this individual is most skilled this time at your language. I we will pass this along to other individuals by teaching and by giving parts of myself.”

Martin bent down next to the leftmost braid and put out his hand. The cords glistened, their smooth skins finely wrinkled. Hans stood behind Martin, not stooping.

Cham touched the rightmost braid, stroked it with his palm. “It’s warm,” he said. “Almost hot.”

Martin could feel the heat even before contact was made, like a dampered stove.

The braid shifted beneath his touch, and a cord slowly uncurled four legs, touching, scraping Martin’s hand. Now he shivered; the touch was like pointed fingernails.

The smell became tangy and sweet, like wine.

“You are not touching,” the central Brother said to Hans. “Touch.”

Hans closed his eyes and gathered his courage. He reached out, and in a move that surprised Martin completely, wrapped his arms around the Brother and squeezed gently. The Brother wriggled beneath the pressure.

The air smelled like fresh soil.

“How do we look to you?” Hans asked, glancing up at the front end. Cords made a kind of knot there, small black eyes—four per cord—rising as the knot undid itself and the cords splayed to inspect Hans’ face.

“In your visible light, you are quite interesting,” the Brother said. “Like nothing familiar to we us.”

“We have creatures called snakes or worms,” Hans said huskily. Sweat beaded his cheeks and forehead. “You remind us of them…”

“You do not like snakes or worms? They mean harm or negatives to you?”

“I’ll get over it,” Hans said, looking down at Martin. “Not too bad, huh?”

“You’re doing fine,” Martin said.

“Thanks,” Hans said, stepping back. “You fellows would be great on a cold night.”

“He means,” Cham said, “that to us you feel quite warm, pleasant.”

“You are pleasing cool,” the Brother said. “Now companions will speak. Pardon language. Lacking tongues, we we make sounds with air expelled between parts of components, and with friction on legs interior we our fore part.”

“Like horns and violins,” Martin said.

“I’ll be damned,” Hans said.

“It is true that you always are,” the rightmost braid said, the tone sharp and scraping, vowels mere lapses between tones.

Martin, Cham, and Hans looked at each other, puzzled. Martin pondered if the aggregate was echoing Hans’ proclamation of damnation; Cham figured out that the statement was actually a question. “I think he’s asking, are we always the same person. Do our arms and legs run away when we aren’t looking.”

Hans grimaced. “We’re always the same,” he said. The central braid issued a series of cricket chirps and the air smelled of something rich and perhaps not entirely fresh. “Our bodies stay together:”

“We our guide tells us so,” the middle aggregate said. “It is difficult for we us to think about.”

“I understand,” Hans said. “Your lifestyle… your life is difficult for us to imagine, too.”

“But we we can friendly,” the rightmost aggregate chirped and sang.

“Friendly we are,” Hans said, smiling giddily at Martin and Cham.

“You do have no like we us?” the rightmost asked.

“Nothing like we us,” the middle clarified.

“Where we… come, came from,” Martin began, “colonial, aggregate creatures—beings…” He paused and took a deep breath. The three aggregates made a breathy noise as well. “Creatures made of parts existed only in simple animals and plants.”

“Insects,” Cham said.

“What?” Martin asked.

“Insects came together to make flowers,” Cham said.

“Different,” Martin said.

“Stuff it,” Hans said under his breath.

“May we we see records of these colonials?” the middle asked.

“Certainly,” Hans said.

“Do you regard them with disliking?” the middle asked.

“I’ve never met any of them, actually,” Hans said. Martin admired the insouciance of the answer and hoped it wasn’t lost on or misinterpreted by their new partners.

“Think in reality you are colonials, only individual is big social, society,” the rightmost said.

“I think he means we’re part of a social group, and that’s the real individual,” Cham said. “Interesting idea. Maybe we can discuss it when we know each other better.”

“Do you fight each other?” the middle asked.

None of the humans answered for long seconds. Then Martin said, “Not usually, no. Do you?”

“Constituent parts may fight outside we our control,” the middle aggregate said. “Do not interfere. It is normal.”

Hans controlled a shiver. Martin said, “We play games, competition, to keep ourselves fit. They are a kind of fighting, but generally, nobody gets hurt.”

“Components may be violent,” the middle said. “No interference. It is normal. They have no minds alone.”

“Make a note,” Hans said to Martin facetiously. “Don’t step on them.”

“We we are interested how we our components react to you,” the middle said.

“So are we,” Hans said.

The rightmost braid touched “heads” with the middle braid and smoothly disassembled. The air smelled of vinegar and fruit. The components, fourteen of them, lay in an interwoven pile, like centipedes or snakes taught macramé. Slowly, the cords crawled apart, spreading out on the floor until they encountered the humans.

Hans’ face dripped and he smelled rank. Martin felt no better.

“Shit shit shit,” Cham said, but kept his place.

The cords gently nudged their feet and calves. Several cords used this opportunity to lock lengthwise and roll back and forth.

“Mating?” Hans asked.

“Dominance on their level,” the middle braid responded. “It is not fighting to kill. You might call it rough play.”

“Your English is wonderful,” Martin said, trying to hide his fear.

“I have fine components, and am blessed with interior harmony,” the middle replied.

“Congratulations,” Hans said.

The two aggregates chirped and whistled-to each other. The air smelled of baking bread and sulfur.

One component advanced up Cham’s pantsleg, front feelers spread wide. Martin had noticed that the feelers fit into rear invaginations when the cords locked together.

Cham could barely control his trembling.

“Our companion is not comfortable,” Martin said.

“I’m fine,” Cham said.

“We we anticipate distress,” the middle braid said. “Must you get accustomed.”

“We must,” Hans said, more to Cham than in answer.

“Right,” Cham said. The cord crawled up his leg to his side.

“It is not behaving violently,” the middle braid reassured.

“By the way,” Cham said, his voice high-pitched and shaky.

“We use names to address each other.” The cord advanced around his chest, slipped, grabbed hold of the overalls material.

“You may touch it,” the middle braid said.

“How do we… what names can we use for you?”

“We we have discussed,” the middle said. “As each of we our aggregates learn language, they will pick names. You may call I me mine Stonemaker. Disassembled braid, when together again may be Shipmaker. Other may be Eye on Sky.”

“Enjoy stars,” the leftmost braid said.

“Like Hakim,” Martin said.

“Your names,” the middle braid requested.

“Our names are sounds, sometimes without meaning,” Martin said. “I am Martin. This is Hans. And this is Cham.”

“Bread and jam food,” the leftmost said.

“Cham, not jam,” Cham corrected.

“Martin animal,” Stonemaker observed. “From word lists.”

“Hands for picking up with,” said Eye on Sky.

Hans smiled stiffly.

“Do you like component, Jam?” the middle braid asked Cham.

“It hurts when it grabs,” Cham said. “Can you speak to them?” The cord’s feelers explored his face. Cham bent his neck back as far as he could.

“No,” Stonemaker said. “But we we make them assemble. Looks it enjoys humans.”

“Wonderful,” Cham said.

“No biting,” Stonemaker observed.

“Yes, we’ve had some concerns… about that,” Hans said. “Can they hurt us?”

“That would be distressing,” Stonemaker said.

“End of aggregate whose part did wrong,” Eye on Sky added.

“Wouldn’t want that, would we?” Cham said. He put his hands up to stroke the cord, which had crawled lower. It had wrapped around his chest, tail under right arm, head and feelers under left, and stopped moving.

“It likes the way you smell,” Martin said to reassure his crewmate.

“Very true,” Stonemaker said. “To me self my you smell friendly.”

They don’t know us very well. We stink of fear, Martin thought.

“Good,” Hans said. “If Stonemaker agrees, we’ll try a larger group next. Twenty of our crew, twenty of his individuals. Then we’ll combine Dawn Treader and Journey House and carry on with the Job.”

Stonemaker chirped and the room smelled of tea and lilac. The cord dropped abruptly from Cham’s chest and landed on the floor with a hollow smack, then aligned with the other cords beside Stonemaker and reassembled. The braid reared and stretched until it touched the base of the pylon, twelve feet over their heads.

“We my components reproduced and made Shipmaker,” Stonemaker said. “He is either brother or son, perhaps we we talk which sometime.”

Twenty of the human crew and twenty Brothers gathered in the schoolroom. Martin could not tell the Brothers apart yet. Clicks and chirps and bowed violin speech; Rosa Sequoia, approaching and embracing a Brother; Paola Birdsong singing to another; there was a carnival atmosphere to the meeting that set Martin at ease. However strange the Brothers might seem, there was enough common ground and likable traits for both sides to demonstrate quick, almost easy friendship.

Ariel stayed close to Martin after the first ten minutes. “It’s going well,” she said.

“Seems to be.”

“I thought it would take a while,” she said.

“So did I. They haven’t broken down into cords yet. Cords aren’t quite as personable.”

“So Cham told me. The difference between animals and people. Will that cause problems?”

Martin pushed his lips out, frowned. “Probably,” he said. “I think we can adjust.”

“We’ve been stuck with each other for so long,” said Jennifer. “It’s nice to have somebody new to talk to.” She walked past Martin and Ariel, a Brother following closely, chattering in broken English about numbers. Martin smelled cabbage cooking and wrinkled his nose.

Giacomo played a finger-matching game with another braid. He lifted his closed hand, shook it twice, opened two fingers. The aggregate reared back, shivered with a sound like corn husks, weaved its head through a figure eight, said, “I we am wrong, wrong.”

Rex Live Oak approached Martin. “Hans wants the past Pans to convene in a few minutes in his quarters.”

Cham and Joe Flatworm accompanied Martin along the connecting hallways. Joe was ebullient. “Christ, they’re snakes, but they’re real charmers.”

“Snakes charming us, is that it?” Cham asked.

“Ha ha. Much easier than I thought,” Joe said. “We can work with them.”

Hans seemed gloomy as they entered his quarters. They sat in a broken circle and Hans squatted to finish the loop. Rex Live Oak stood outside the circle, arms folded.

“Stonemaker and I talked a little,” Hans said. “He still has the best English. I asked questions about their command structure. Here’s what I’ve learned so far. Every few days—our days, not theirs—they create a command council by pooling cords, each braid donating two. The pooled cords make a big slicking braid called Maker of Agreement or something like that. This braid uses memories from all the cords and makes decisions. The cords take these decisions back to their braids. There’s nothing like giving orders. That worries me.”

“Why?” Joe asked.

“Because it implies no flexibility. What if we’re in the middle of a crisis and we have to communicate with them? I think they’ll stick with what Maker of Agreement told them, no matter how things have changed… Unless they can go through the whole process again, and we can talk to Maker of Agreement directly. I couldn’t get a clear answer on that.”

“You think they’d do that in battle?”

Hans shrugged. “It’s too early to tell, but it’s never too early to worry. That’s all I’m saying.”

“We should find out what their disaster was like,” Cham said, looking down at his crossed knees. “Where they failed.”

“I’m working on it,” Hans said. “Martin, you don’t seem to have hit it off with any of them… Paola and a few others have made fast friends.”

“I haven’t made friends, either,” Joe said.

“The more we bond, the faster we can learn. Like marriage,” Hans said.

“And we should help them improve their English,” Joe said.

“They’re quick, no doubt about it,” Hans said. “They may be a lot quicker than we are. But there’s still a hell of a lot to learn before we can mesh with them in battle. Am I right?”

“Absolutely,” Rex said from the sidelines.

“I want to find out how our ship’s mind and the moms are going to integrate with Journey House’s mind, whether there will still be moms, or some form acceptable to both groups…”

“The libraries have become huge,” Martin said.

“Anything we can use?” Hans asked.

“Right now, it’s just a big light show,” Martin said. “I hope it can be translated.”

Hans nodded. “I’m satisfied with our progress, for the time being. But I don’t want the crew to be so ecstatic about our new friends that we lose sight of the problems.”

Cham and Joe nodded. Martin fingered the cuff of his overalls leg.

“Something to add?” Hans asked, observing this fiddling.

“You’re managing Rosa now,” Martin said.

Hans hesitated, then nodded with a bitter expression. “I’m managing,” he said. “It isn’t easy, believe me.”

Rex snorted. Hans looked at him with sharp disapproval, and Rex colored and backed away.

“How’s Rosa going to integrate the Brothers into her world view, her… religion?” Martin asked.

“She’ll find a way. She’s good at that sort of thing.”

“I know,” Martin said. “But what you’re doing is dangerous. It’s a game that could backfire any day.”

“Better than letting her run loose, am I right?” Hans asked.

None of the ex-Pans answered.

“Or getting rid of her,” Hans said. “Of course, I’d hate to have to do that. But if worse comes to worse, there’s always that possibility.”

Martin’s face paled. Nobody said anything for a long time, ten seconds—an impressive lull for such a conversation. “Not very smart,” Joe said finally. “Making a martyr.”

“Well, shit, something will happen,” Hans said. “We’re facing a lot of problems more frightening than Rosa.”

Hans invited Stonemaker to meet the full complement of Dawn Treader’s crew, to familiarize them with a Brother, and to explain, in person, the Brothers’ history, in particular their experiences with the Killers.

Hans led Stonemaker into the schoolroom, laddering toward the central star sphere. The crew watched in polite, stiff silence as the Brother undulated through his own ladder field—a cylinder—into their midst.

Martin had learned to identify Stonemaker by the color patterns of two components in his “head”—bright yellow and black stripes on the anterior portion.

“Stonemaker is a friend,” Hans said, arm around the braid’s neck. Smell of burnt cabbage—a sign of affection, Martin had learned, and one he hoped he would find more pleasant as time passed.

Those of the human crew who had not yet met a Brother wrinkled their noses apprehensively. To hear tales was very different from direct experience.

“We we have similar lives, memories,” Stonemaker said.

The repetition of pronouns was going to be unavoidable. By linguistic and cultural convention even deeper than religion, Brother language used two personal pronouns, the first referring to an individual braid or a group of braids, the second to the braid’s or the group’s component cords. I we, we we. Possessives became more confused: we mine, with cords first, individual’s possessive second; we our or we ours for group possessives. Other complications—this we, I we myself, we our ourselves—crept in on an unpredictable basis.

Interestingly, references to humans always relied on single pronouns. Martin hoped this did not reveal prejudice on the part of the Brothers.

“I we myself will pass on to you some of we our lives,” Stonemaker said. “When we we work together, to kill those who killed we our past—” smell of something like turpentine “—we will find common thought, strength.

“We we believe we our worlds were much like your Earth and Mars.”

Inside the star sphere, images of two planets, the first a rich and almost uniform green, the second half as large and yellow ochre and brown in color. “We our kind grew young first on the world you can call Leafmaker. We our time past was long, hundreds of thousands of times year.” Smell of dust and warm sunlight on soil. “Your time past shorter than we ours. But we we able to travel between worlds often, as you did not. We we made young on second other planet, Drysand I we will name it. Ten thousand times years we we lived there, not making weapons, having no enemies.

“Killers come to we us as friends, smelling we our innocent radiation. Killers come as long friends made of jointed parts.”

Stonemaker projected an image of a collection of shining spheres beaded together, a giant chromium caterpillar. Martin was instantly reminded of the Australian robots, shmoos they had been named; these might have been variations on the same form. “Long friends like machines for you, but living, alive within. They tell of wide places beyond, full of interest, that we we are invited to join, to learn, and then we we smell we our world is sick with weapons, it is dying. We we make power-filled ships, leave our kind to die. We we can’t travel between suns, but leave anyway, and watch we our worlds be eaten, made into millions of killer machines. Then come the ones you name Benefactors, and there is a war. We our worlds are gone, only a few alive, but we we are taken in by Benefactors, and removed from the war, to seek Killers. This is short version; long when library smells good to you.

“We our weakness comes when we find suns and worlds infested by Killers, too late to save, hundreds of times year past. We we are caught in this tide, Journey House, and many die, Journey House is damaged. Hundreds of times year past. We we flee.” Smell of turpentine.

Martin saw tears on the cheeks of both Wendys and Lost Boys.

“We we hear there is another Lawship.” Smell of lilac and baking bread. “Hear we we will join and work with others not smelling of our own, singles not manyness. We we are fearful, for singleness is strange, manyness is accepted. I we am proud both can grow together, fight together. We we are all manyness, all aggregate, group brave, group strong.”

Stonemaker, Martin thought, had the makings of a good politician.

“We our Lawship is watched over by machines. They are long and flexible like ourselves, but I we mink they are the same as your machines. Ships’ libraries will join and we will teach each other to smell, to read, to see.

“Our ships will be one ship, manyness made one, group strong, group brave.” Smell of cooked cabbage, not burnt. “We all selves will wait in one space while ships aggregate,” Stone-maker concluded.

The human crew rustled uneasily. Martin heard whispers of assurance from the familiarized, and saw nudges of encouragement. Not so bad. Wait and see.

Rosa stepped forward and raised her arms. Martin wanted to turn away, embarrassed for her, for all of them.

“They are truly our brothers,” Rosa said. “Together, we’ll be doubly strong.”

Hans put his arm around Rosa, smiled, and said, “We’re grouping here in the schoolroom. It’s big enough to hold us all. The Dawn Treader can make food for the Brothers. We’ll stay here, all of us, and all of the Brothers, until the ships have joined.”

No grumbling from the crew. Martin sensed an electric anticipation that had only the slightest tinge of fear.

Joe stood by Martin as they awaited the arrival of the full complement of Brothers. “We keep using the masculine pronoun for them,” he observed. “Is that justified?”

“No,” Martin said. “But they are Brothers, aren’t they?”

Joe gave him a quizzical look, one eye squeezed shut. “Martin, you’re getting a bit…” He waggled his hand. “Cynical. Am I wrong?”

Martin zipped his lips with a finger.

“The comment Hans made about Rosa…”

Martin looked meaningfully at the crew a few paces away.

Though he had spoken in an undertone, Joe sighed and said no more.

Fifty Brothers, seventy-five Lost Boys and Wendys, for the time being separated, with a star sphere in the middle of the schoolroom, showing the ships already joined bow to stern, like mating insects:

The air smelling of cabbage and lilacs and all manner of unidentifiables:

The moms and the Brothers’ robots, quickly called snake mothers, two of each in the schoolroom, the moms bulbous like copper kachina dolls, the others resembling flexible bronze serpents two meters long and half a meter thick in the middle, biding their time:

The schoolroom sealed off with an exterior sigh of equalizing pressure:

Martin: We’ve been through this before. This is not new.

Hakim saying to him: “I am learning to interpret their astronomy. Jennifer says they have marvelous mathematics. What a wealth, Martin!” Hakim is overjoyed:

Ariel not coming very close to him, keeping a fixed distance, watching him when he is not looking at her:

Have I truly gotten cynical, or am I just terrified? We are such a dry forest, any spark, any change—

Sounds throughout the ships, silence among the humans, and no smells now, the air swept clean of communications, the equivalent of Brotherly silence, and vibrations under their feet.

Rosa stood strong and quiet near the star sphere in a theatrical attitude of prayer.

One of the Brothers quietly broke down into cords. The cords seemed stunned and simply twitched, feelers extended, searching, claw-legs scratching the floor. Other braids quickly moved to gather the cords into small sacks carried in packs strapped around their upper halves.

Chirps and strings of comment; smells of turpentine and bananas. The cords struggled and clicked in the sacks.

“Fear?” Ariel asked Martin, moving closer.

“I’ve never seen the cliche brought to life before,” Martin murmured.

She raised an eyebrow.

“ ‘Falling apart,’ ” he said.

She raised the other eyebrow, shook her head. Then she chuckled. Martin could not remember having heard her chuckle before; laughing, smiling, never anything between.

“Not a very good joke,” he said.

“I didn’t say it was,” Ariel replied, still smiling. The smile flicked off when he didn’t return it; she looked away, smoothing her overalls. “I’m not asking for anything, Martin,” she said softly.

“Sorry,” he said, suddenly guilty.

“I haven’t changed,” she continued, face red. “When you were Pan, I said what I thought you needed to hear.”

“I understand,” he said.

“The hell you do,” Ariel concluded, pushing her way to the opposite side of the group of humans.

Another braid disintegrated. Hakim bent over a straying cord. A Brother clicked and swooped down to grab the cord, head splaying, extended clawed tail sections from two of its own cords closing on the stray. He paused with the limp cord hanging just under his head, then said, “Private.”

“Don’t mess with them,” Hans warned Hakim. “We’ve got a lot more to learn about each other.”

“Merging begins,” a mom said, moving to the center, near the star sphere. Martin looked at the sphere intently, watching the two ships melt into each other, impressed despite himself by the Benefactors’ capabilities.

The snake mothers chirped, sang, and released odors. Martin’s head swam with the tension and the welter of scents; more bananas, resinous sweetness, faint odor of decay, cabbage again. Snake mother voices like a high-pitched miniature string orchestra, braids responding; stray cords mostly grabbed and bagged, the last few pulled from the air by Brothers coiling like millipedes in water.

So damned strange, Martin thought, feeling the hysteria of creeping exhaustion. It’s too much. I want it to be over.

But he floated in place, one hand clinging to a personal ladder field, eyes blinking, head throbbing, saying nothing. Hakim also clung to a ladder, eyes closed, as if trying to sleep. Actually, that was sensible. Martin closed his eyes.

Giacomo patted his shoulder. Eyes flicking open, disoriented by actually having slept—for how long? seconds? minutes?—Martin turned to Giacomo and saw Jennifer behind him.

“Completion of merger in five minutes,” the mom announced, its voice sounding far away.

“We can’t wait to get into their math and physics,” Giacomo said, round face moist with tired excitement. Humans were adding their own smells to the schoolroom, now seeming much too small with two populations. “Jennifer’s spoken to their leader—if Stonemaker is their leader.”

“Spokesnake,” Jennifer said, giggling, punchy.

“Some fantastic things. Their math lacks integers!”

“As far as we can tell,” Jennifer added.

“They don’t use whole numbers at all. Only smears, they call them.”

Martin’s interest could hardly have been less now, but he listened, too tired to evade them.

“I think they regard integers, even rational fractions, as aberrations. They love irrationals, the perfect smears. I can’t wait to see what that means for their math.” Giacomo saw Martin’s look of patent disinterest, and sobered. “Sorry,” he said.

“I’m very tired,” Martin said. “That’s all. Aren’t you tired?”

“Dead tired,” Jennifer said, giggling again. “Smears! Jesus, that’s incredible. I may never make sense out of it.”

Martin smelled lilacs; dreamed of his grandmother’s face powder, drifting through the air in her small bathroom like snow, spotting her throw rug beneath the sink. In the dream, he lay down on the rug, curled up, and closed his eyes.

When he awoke, the schoolroom was quiet but for a few whispered conversations. Hakim slept nearby; Giacomo and Jennifer lay curled together an arm’s reach in front of Martin. Joe Flatworm slept in a lotus, anchored to a ladder field. The moms and snake mothers floated inactive.

The Brothers had all disintegrated. Cords hung from ladder fields like socks on a neon clothes net.

Cham was awake. Martin asked him, “Is that how they sleep?”

“Beats me,” Cham said.

“Where’s Hans?”

“Other side of the schoolroom,” Cham said. “Asleep with Rosa holding his head.”

Martin turned to the star sphere and saw for the first time their new ship, the merger largely completed. He judged it to be perhaps as big as the original Dawn Treader, with three home-balls again; but this time the aft homeball was larger than the others. There were no obvious tanks of reserve fuel; Martin assumed the fuel must now be stored in the aft homeball. That might reflect a design improvement; the more he saw, the more he was convinced that the Brothers’ Ship of the Law was a later model, with major differences in equipment, tactics, perhaps even general strategy.

“I wonder if they dream?” Cham asked.

“They’re all asleep?” Martin stretched out, peering between the fields and sleeping bodies. He could see no intact braids, only cords.

“Wonder if they ever get confused and end up with parts of each other? It’s scary, how much we’re going to have to learn.”

Deceleration began. Up and down returned to the Ship of the Law; humans and Brothers explored the new order of things. The quarters were divided into human and Brother sectors in the first two homeballs. A buffer of empty quarters and shared hallways gave cords spaces in which to hide and conduct their private, instinctive affairs. Provisions were made for human capture of straying cords; boxes mounted in well-traveled halls were filled with specially scented bags (tea and cabbage odors) with which to sedate and carry any cords they might find in human quarters.

Some practise sessions were arranged; Martin learned where to pick up a cord, before and after it had been covered with a scented bag. The best place to hold a cord was along the smooth, leathery body forward of the claw legs and behind the feelers. The cord mouth parts opened ventrally just to the rear of the feelers. The only danger—as yet untested—was that a cord, away from its fellows, might defend itself if the pick-up and bagging ritual was not properly observed. It might then nip or chew on a human, and certain alkaloids in its saliva might cause a toxic reaction, perhaps no more severe than a rash, perhaps worse, so why take chances?

What the humans learned soon enough was that the Brothers’ diet was simple. They ate a cultivated broth of small green and purple organisms, resembling aquatic worms, neither plants nor animals. These organisms—Stonemaker suggested they might be called noodles—grew under bright lights; they could move freely within their liquid-filled containers, but derived most of their nutrients from simple chemicals. At one stage in their growth, they ate each other, and the remains of their feasts contributed substantially to the broth.

Brothers always ate disassembled, the cords gathering around the vats like snakes around bowls of milk. While the cords dined, two or more braids watched over the diners.

The snake mothers had nothing to do with preparing the broth. Growing food was a particularly important ritual for the Brothers, and it was apparently an honor to be placed in charge of the broth vats.

This much the human crew was allowed to observe. Other aspects of Brotherly life were more circumspect. Because cords could die as individuals—it was normal, like shedding skin—reproduction continued after a fashion. Breeding cords were sequestered and their activities were hidden from the humans.

Three braids seemed to act as intellectual reserves for the entire group. These braids appeared slow, not particularly personable; they spoke no English, communicated not at all with humans, but occasionally disassembled, and some of their parts would be used for a time by other braids. Erin Eire called them Wisdom, Honor, and Charity; the names stuck, at least among the humans.

Stonemaker became familiar to all the humans; Shipmaker and Eye on Sky also mixed freely. Others came forward more gradually to interact with the humans. Within two days, twenty-three Brothers mingled regularly. Their English improved rapidly.

Within a tenday of the merger, rudimentary jokes could be exchanged. Brother humor was simple enough: sickly-sweet flower-smells marked a kind of laughter, brought on by simple stories whose punchline always involved involuntary disassembly. The Brothers particularly enjoyed stories or mimicry of humans passing gas or fainting.

With Hans’ approval, Paola Birdsong appointed herself a special student of Brotherly language and behavior.

Giacomo and Jennifer volunteered to help coordinate human and Brother libraries, working with Eye on Sky and Shipmaker. Hans suggested they first translate and integrate what the libraries had to say about galactic history and battle strategy and tactics. Jennifer was disappointed by these practical priorities; she desperately wanted to explore Brother mathematics.

Martin observed, in his library visits, that the ship’s mind was itself translating and correlating information.

Rosa Sequoia stayed in the background, watching everything intently, weighing and measuring the new situation.

The remnants of Martin’s funk had passed like fog. For hours at a time he did not think of Theresa or William.

Hakim, Harpal, and Luis Estevez Saguaro joined forces with a Brother named Silken Parts, a large (five meters long) and dapper-looking braid whose cords were, indeed, somewhat silkier in texture than those of other Brothers. Together, they organized a combined search team in the nose.

Giacomo and Jennifer acted as search team advisors, but were now absorbed in their library work and theoretical activities.

Remotes were sent out and Leviathan came under close scrutiny.

After four days immersed in studying Leviathan, Hakim asked to speak with Martin, alone and in Martin’s quarters.

They squatted beside each other and sipped strong sweet hot tea, Hakim’s favorite.

Hakim was agitated. “I will speak of this with Hans soon,” Hakim began, eyes downturned. “This is awkward, I know, but I do not know how he will react. I myself do not know how to react. I hope you can advise me.”

“About what?” Martin asked.

“Silken Parts has gone to the Brothers now, and I understand they face similar difficulties. The information from the remotes is disturbing.”

“How?” Martin asked.

“I am most embarrassed.”

“Christ, Hakim—”

Hakim glanced at him sharply, disliking religious blasphemies of any sort.

“I’m sorry. Tell me.”

“Our early information about Leviathan seems to have been completely in error. I don’t know how it could have happened, but we have major discrepancies. Our new findings are different.”

“How different?”

“Leviathan has fifteen planets, not ten, or even twelve.”

“Fifteen?”

Hakim winced and shook his head. “The star itself has much the same characteristics—some not unexpected refinements in spectral measurements. Almost everything else seems to have changed.”

“How wrong could we have been?”

“Not this wrong,” Hakim said. “I am upset to think the ship’s instruments could have misled us; even more upset to think we could have misinterpreted the facts so.”

“Fifteen planets sounds awfully crowded.”

“It is. I have referred the momerath to Jennifer and Giacomo. The orbital patterns as we see them are astonishing. We believe the system must be artificial, and artificially maintained—which would require great expenditures of energy.”

“What else?”

“The system is rich with raw materials. Two of the planets, not four, are large gas giants, and they are not depleted. The fourth planet is a true enigma—about one hundred thousand kilometers in diameter, with a distinct and apparently solid surface, not a gas giant… but with a density comparable to the gas giants’.”

“Hakim, I know you’ve checked this a dozen times—”

“We’ve made measurements more often than I can count, separately and together. The current information seems correct, Martin. I am mortified to possibly have been so in error before.”

“The Red Tree Runners were inside the system. They saw ten planets. Their charts didn’t match with our views from a distance… and they certainly don’t conform now…”

“We could be in different universes, the differences are so great.”

“Right…” Martin screwed up his face in thought. “Hakim—”

“We were not wrong!” Hakim shouted, pounding the mat. He glanced at Martin expectantly.

“I don’t think you were, either. The Brothers took Leviathan’s measure. Have you compared results?”

“They made measurements before our first efforts.”

“And they saw…?”

“From what Paola and Jennifer have translated, and what Stonemaker tells us—so difficult to interpret! They do not use numbers as we do—they saw a system of we think ten planets, with four gas giants.”

“Then they got a picture similar to what the Red Tree Runners saw. The Brothers didn’t pick up signs of civilization?”

Hakim shook his head. “Nor did they notice any reaction to Wormwood’s destruction. From what we see even now, there is no sign of armoring, or any other preparation.”

Martin felt at once a kind of dread and excitement, a chill of surprise and something he could hardly quantify. This is no simple chase now, no sitting duck. We’re close!

“Leviathan is camouflaged,” Martin said.

“I was hoping you would agree!” Hakim cried out, clapping Martin on the shoulder.

Martin could have laughed at Hakim’s relief and joy, but he did not.

“We were not measuring improperly! The death ship saw what it saw! The Brothers did not measure improperly!”

“But how do you mask an entire star system?”

“Only planets,” Hakim said.

“Are they ghost planets?”

“Perhaps,” Hakim said, raising a finger. “One of these versions may be correct, but which?”

“The deception is not infinitely varied… and it changes across fairly short intervals, on the order of years.”

“Yes!” Hakim said, face flushed with excitement. “The bastard Killers fool nobody!”

Martin touched finger to nose. “It’s obvious some massive planetary engineering has been done… You’d think the closer an observer was, the more they’d want the system to look empty,”

“With your support, I will take this to Hans,” Hakim said, rising from the cushion. “He cannot become angry if you back us.”

Martin stood. “Are you afraid of him?” he asked.

Hakim looked away, embarrassed. “I do not trust him as much as I trust you. Do you approve of him, Martin?”

“It isn’t my job to criticize the Pan.”

“I have felt badly about some of his actions, the way we have become. The games, with sexual partners as rewards. Martin, I have kept very quiet until now, but that was wrong.”

“Well, it’s stopped. We start training with the Brothers soon.”

“You are not worried about what might happen?”

“Of course I’m worried.”

“But not worried about Hans.”

“Hakim, I know how difficult it is to be Pan. When I was Pan, people died. Hans was elected. That’s that.”

Hakim regarded him sadly, then arranged his overalls with smoothing gestures of palms down chest and legs. “I will go to Hans now. I hope he will be as understanding as you.”

“He’s no dummy,” Martin said.

“He will not chastise us,” Hakim said. “He will see, as well, that these are not our errors.”

“I’m sure he will,” Martin said. When Hakim had left, Martin rubbed his eyes vigorously with his knuckles, then looked up and around his quarters, as if seeing them for the first time; ribbons of light, bare brown and silver-gray surfaces, the single cushion large enough for two; why had he asked for it to be large enough for two?

He was not due anywhere for an hour. There would be a meeting of past Pans with Hans and Rex and two of Stonemaker’s planners; they would begin to design drills, coordinate strategies.

Brothers and humans could and would work together.

Martin reached for his wand and idly tuned to the translated territories of the Brother libraries. Vast regions were still incomprehensible. The human wands did not supply scent; he could not interpret half of what might be stored. Even the best translations would never be ideal. As Hakim had discovered, even so simple a thing as numbers was subject to ambiguity. He wondered how the Brothers counted…

Perhaps counting was not important to them.

Perhaps they were better equipped to deal with Leviathan’s changing nature than humans.

He searched for Theodore’s texts in his wand, found them still intact after the disasters and merger. Randomly he leafed through the projected pages, hoping for some small insight or guidance.

Never underestimate the power of circumstance to grind your very bones, Theodore had written in the first three months of their journey. Never underestimate the perverse power of everything to go wrong, to tend toward trouble. Always the problems seem to come from within; I judge myself to be at fault, for not anticipating the unforeseeable, not knowing the way a chaotic function will collapse.

And elsewhere.

What I have lost does not make me greater, but it makes me deeper, like a hole. Take more away and I will come through to the other side, like a gaping wound. But then I will be the wound and the body will have sloughed away. Is it possible to lose more of what is not there?

Very adolescent, with the insight of resilient youth and none of the reserved silence of the experienced adult. If he had written these things, Martin might have felt a little embarrassed. But then he had always felt that way about Theodore’s writings: strongly attracted to them, even admiring, but always discomfited by them. They explored territories, emotions, and ideas Martin was not comfortable with.

Theodore had been so open. It was what killed him.

He turned off the projected pages, lay back on the cushion and asked for the lights to dim. Soon there would be much less time for sleep.

“How in hell can anyone disguise an entire star system?” Hans asked. His hair stuck out in blond spikes; clearly, he had not slept much recently. Ex-Pans, Silken Parts, and Stonemaker’s representatives, Eye on Sky and Shipmaker, gathered in the nose with the joint search team. The starfield expanded beyond, Leviathan bright and steady to one side, still too far away for planets to be visible to their naked eyes.

Silken Parts rustled; every few minutes, the braids would tremble, as if their cords needed to scratch some itch difficult to locate. Luis Estevez Saguaro had prepared a chart comparing the four views they had of the system—the view found in the records of the dead ship, the Dawn Treader’s view from just beyond Wormwood, the view obtained by the Brothers, and the present view. Hans regarded it dourly, chin in hand.

“How much energy would it take to broadcast such a disguise?” he asked.

Hakim calculated quietly. “Half the energy produced by the star itself, in one estimate,” he said.

Silken Parts softly disagreed. With violin speech and a somewhat musty odor, he said, “We cannot assume the disguise is broadcast in all directions—”

“Wait,” Hans interrupted, raising one hand. Silken Parts drew back, rustled again. Martin doubted that the Brother felt affronted, but he wished Hans could be less imperious. “You think something’s being broadcast. What—an image of the system, altered somehow?”

Hakim cleared his throat. “Jennifer and Giacomo—”

“Spare me more goddamned momerath,” Hans said. “I need something concrete.”

“Please have patience,” Hakim said, looking to one side, face darkening.

Hans lifted a hand, flicked a finger: go on.

“Jennifer and Giacomo have taken time from the work in the combined libraries. Jennifer believes that several regions of space may have had their ray tracing, their radiation-transit bit structures, interfered with. Photons could seem to appear out of nothing. These regions, each perhaps as wide as the star system itself, but having no depth—located perhaps at the periphery of the system—would act like giant projectors, revealing convincing full-spectrum images of… a nonexistent system.”

Hans poked his finger into a projected image of the fifteen-planet system. “Like this one, but a lot bigger. You mean, if we were to enter, we’d pass through the deception, see what was really there?”

“Not at all,” Hakim said. “It would be possible to shift these ray-altered regions to continue to deceive. I admit, it would be a massive undertaking, but not nearly so great as wrapping the entire solar system in a sphere of deception.”

Silken Parts said, “Our ideas cross difficult. Please project.”

Hakim quickly sketched in diagrams showing their positions, regions of ray-alteration shaped like shields, camouflaged or deceptive images perceived from great distances.

“Very powerful,” Silken Parts said. “Could change field of battle. Great blindness and confusion.” He explained to Eye on Sky and Shipmaker.

“Scary stuff,” Hans said. “Any way we can penetrate it?”

“If it is constant, no,” Hakim said. “But if the images are maintained only at certain intervals, we may receive a correct image with constant vigilance.”

“But we wouldn’t necessarily know which was correct.”

Hakim shook his head, eyes downcast.

“So what do we plan for?” Hans asked.

“Stonemaker should be in on any planning,” Harpal said. Martin agreed.

“Right. But what I’m asking is, how can we make plans, when we can’t know what to expect, what is real and what is not?”

“Possibly nothing is there at all,” Silken Parts said.

Hans’ eyes seemed to glaze over. He put his hands behind his neck, shook his head slowly, said, “I haven’t the slickest notion what we can do, but we need a war conference.”

As they prepared to leave, Paola Birdsong arrived with a string of ten braids, all eager to see the unobscured stars. She smiled at Martin as they passed, happy with her new occupation. “They feel better if they can see the stars once or twice a tenday,” she said.

The braids rustled like leaves poured from a bag.

Martin learned from Silken Parts that Stonemaker would not be available for four days. Hearing the search team’s latest information had caused quite a stir among the Brothers, and Makers of Agreement had been called for.

Donating two cords apiece, the Brothers had created three large new individuals, the Makers of Agreement. They served one function only: to look over the present situation and render fresh judgment, unclouded by whatever prejudices the former braids might have had.

Hans received this news from Martin and Eye on Sky with intense vexation. He conferred with Rex for a few moments in one corner of the schoolroom, then returned and said, “All right. We’ll hold a conference with the Makers of Agreement. Is that okay with you?”

Eye on Sky smelled of cabbage and old tobacco smoke, showing intense cogitation, and replied, “It will be adequate.”

“Maybe they’ll give us a fresh perspective as well,” Hans said. Martin watched from one side, arms folded behind his back.

The discussion took place in the Brothers’ territory. It was dark in the corridors there; the air smelled moist and electric, like a storm. Sometimes Martin caught a tang of beach, salt and organic decay. Eye on Sky led Hans, Rex, Paola, Martin, Harpal, Cham, and Joe to a small, close chamber. Martin had requested that Paola join them, since she was most expert at Brother speech.

The walls were coated with dripping oil. On the floor of the chamber, three braids lay, undulating slowly to a steady wind of intensely organic, fishy smells and the sound of waves breaking on a shore.

The braids rose and coiled like cobras as the humans entered. Martin could not recognize any of them; all patterns had been rearranged. They did not even smell familiar. In the past few tendays, Martin had learned to pick up a few of the subtle odors of individual braids, even giving some of them code names: Teacake, Almond Breath, Kimchee, Vinegar.

Eye on Sky, the best of the Brothers at speaking English, would act as translator for the temporary braids. “Makers of Agreement will seem disoriented for a time, but when the braids return cords to all, we they all will remember discussions.”

“Not ideal,” Hans commented dryly. “Still, we’re coming into Leviathan in the next three months. We need to begin strategic planning. War councils. Understood?”

Eye on Sky translated, with Paola’s help. While Paola could not make Brother sounds, she had modified her wand to provide a basic vocabulary.

Hans wrinkled his nose at the effusion of smells. “I’ve been studying your conflict. We all have, I assume.”

“Conflict?” Eye on Sky asked.

“Your battle. When your ship was severely damaged.”

“Yes,” the braid said. “We might translate it more as the Sadness.”

“You entered a stellar system ten light years from here, to take on what you assumed was a world colonized by Killers… And in fact, you were probably correct. You made an effort to be certain your judgment was correct. That took a year and a half, our time… An extraordinary effort. During that time, you were detected, but you maneuvered through the defenses, sterilized the surface of the planet, then encountered a squadron of killer probes fleeing from the destruction. You were subjected to a bombardment of neutronium weapons; you survived with high casualties and severe damage to your ship.”

He paused. Eye on Sky added nothing to this summary.

“You accelerated out of the system, and with your available resources, looking back, you saw what might have been the surviving killer probes returning to the planet.”

“Yesss…” said Eye on Sky, with the peculiar musical upturn in its voice. “Mostly correct.”

“Anything incorrect?” Hans asked, eyebrow raised.

“Mostly correct.”

“All right,” Hans said, shoulders slumping, hunching his upper body over where he sat. He lifted his wand and projected some crude colored sketches of the Brothers’ battle. “It seems obvious to me that you faced a decoy world, much as we did around Wormwood. It may have been a less sophisticated decoy—it was farther away from Leviathan—but that in itself could be important. We both got our asses wiped. Pardon me—”

“The analogy, for we us, is cords were skinned,” Eye on Sky said. “I we understand.” A steady progression of violin sounds, chirps, and smells wafted from Eye on Sky to the three temporary braids.

Hans smiled. “And after you were done, it seemed likely the killer probes would repair the decoy, start all over.”

“Yes,” Eye on Sky said.

“So in effect, your sacrifice was for nothing.”

“Yes,” Eye on Sky said.

“We’re all pretty awful at anticipating what the Killers can do. But then, so are the moms—your snake mothers, too, I assume. The closer we get to Leviathan, the more sophisticated the traps, until Wormwood itself seemed to actually be the target. I think we can assume Leviathan is the real center of interest. And the deceptions and defenses are going to be extraordinary. Am I right?”

The three braids stirred as Eye on Sky conveyed this to them.

“There is general agreement we our survival not good chances,” Eye on Sky said.

“But we have an advantage,” Hans said.

“Combined resources and knowledge,” Eye on Sky translated for the largest braid.

Martin added, “And the chance to compare notes and pool our minds. The Killers don’t know that we intercepted the Red Tree Runners’ ship. They don’t know that we’ve combined forces with you.”

“Right,” Hans said. “Some of our best brains are working with some of yours, and we’re getting along just fine. Now it’s time to make serious plans.”

The three braids moved closer together, heads almost touching. Smells of bananas and musty wine.

“I’d like our weapons crews to join with yours. I’d like the moms and snake mothers to make ships we can fly together.”

Martin felt a sudden and unexpected renewal of respect for Hans.

“We’re in this together,” Hans said, rubbing his face with his palms and wiping them on his overalls as if they were greasy. He looked at Cham and Martin, smiled, turned back to the braids. “We’re family. Am I right?”

“It is a good time for this,” Eye on Sky translated.

“We’re going to need a joint planning team,” Hans said. “Myself, Rex, Harpal, Martin, will be on it from our side. As soon as possible, we’ll need to know which braids will represent your side.”

“Agreed,” Eye on Sky said. “Makers of Agreement look sharply at we our crew, and choose, and then reassemble normal in two days your time. Stonemaker will announce to yours.”

“Perfect,” Hans said. He clasped his hands, bowed to Eye on Sky and the Makers, gathered up his party, and prepared to leave the Brothers’ territory. The largest temporary braid suddenly screeched shrilly and all turned to look at him.

“I we sees water clear, air clear,” he said, voice like a child’s recorded on a bad tape machine.

Hans nodded, waiting for more.

“This is the one,” the large temporary continued. “As you sound words, this is the one. Fine all if we we die for this.”

“Right,” Hans said.

“I we believes this one means—” Eye on Sky began.

“I understand him perfectly,” Hans said, raising his thumb. “We are in accord. Am I right?”

The humans nodded. In the corridor, once in human territory and away from any Brothers, Hans murmured, “God damn, I love the way they talk. If we could only speak their lingo-smello half so well-o!”

Martin felt unexpected tears begin in his eyes. Hans was still capable, still a leader; his decisions and ideas were strong and forward.

The moms and snake mothers took the joint weapons team into the weapons store and showed them three modified craft. Each could carry a braid and a human in separated compartments; this, they explained, in case one was injured or suffered problems that might interfere with the other.

Meeting after meeting, planning session upon session, ruminations between Brothers and humans, preparations for joint drills, yet despite their best efforts, never a sense of resolution, of full understanding. If this was what the defenders of Leviathan had hoped for, they had achieved it in spades: a deep sense of unease, far worse than when Dawn Treader had descended toward Wormwood.

Leviathan hung three and a half light months distant, a steady image of fifteen worlds.

In the nearly empty schoolroom, Silken Parts coiled near the star sphere and spread three grasping cords from below the tip of its trunk, each grasping a human wand. The first three pairs of claws along each cord curled around the wands with impressive dexterity. Images flew through the air for the benefit of Stone-maker and Eye on Sky, faster than Martin could intercept; the Brothers had the advantage of multiple sensory systems, each capable of absorbing and holding for braid assimilation. The Brothers’ briefing took less than a minute. Silken Parts than transferred all three wands to one cord and handed them to Hakim, Luis, and Jennifer.

“Thank you,” Silken Parts said, leaning forward to the human observers: his comrades on the joint search team, and Hans, Harpal, Rex, Cham, and Martin.

Hakim sighed in admiration. “It is frustrating to be human,” he said to Silken Parts and Stonemaker. Stonemaker made a sound like water over gravel and emitted a sickly-sweet flower scent, olfactory and auditory laughter, which Martin suspected was more politeness than true humor.

“I will present the results now for humans,” Hakim said, lifting one wand. “Slower, but with no more joy. We have spread our remotes to their farthest position, as agreed to by Hans and Stonemaker, and we have seen the Leviathan system with much greater detail.

“Civilization is apparent. It is very, very busy. There is continuous commerce between the fifteen worlds, especially in the vicinity of the fourth planet. If this is a false projection or deception, it is a masterpiece.

“Every planet is occupied. The density of activity on each planet is marvelous, even from what we can see at this distance. Commerce between the worlds flows unceasingly, and it appears to be conducted by a variety of beings. At least, that is my intuition, and it is shared by Silken Parts.” Hakim projected images of five of the planets, arrayed around his head like balls frozen in a juggling act.

“We are using numbers and Greek designators for each body,” Hakim continued. “The first planet outward from Leviathan is a rocky world. Yet as you see, it is very fuzzy. We believe the fuzz is a heavy layer of tethered stations suspended in orbit. We are seeing this planet from an angle of sixty degrees, and the fuzziness increases on this, the southern, limb of the planet, which indicates to me much activity around the equatorial plane, perhaps out to synchronous orbit. The planet is heavily modified, but must at one time have been comparable to Venus in size and composition.”

“I assume there will be more news on these tethers or whatever as our parallax changes,” Hans said.

“Yes indeed. In fact, I will have a ninety-degree shifted view within a tenday, because of our speed, because of its precession—it has a natural polar angle of thirty degrees with relation to the ecliptic—and because of parallax change.”

“Do you think they’re defenses?”

“They do not appear to be defenses. If they are tethers, they may be extended surface habitats—hanging buildings. How such a network of tethered structures could be maintained in orbit presents an awesome challenge.”

“Sounds like a bustling metropolis,” Harpal commented. “Why do you think there’s more than one intelligent species there?”

“Actually, we posit nothing of the sort—only that there are varieties of intelligent forms. For a civilization at this stage of development, the moms tell us speciation is not a useful concept. Biological forms, if any, may be entirely artificial and arbitrary.”

Hakim sipped from a bulb of water and continued. “The second planet is very different from the first. It possesses no fuzziness and perhaps few if any tethered structures, yet has a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, high in water vapor, maintained at a steady planet-wide temperature of eighty-five degrees centigrade.”

“Why?” Hans asked, frowning.

“To provide a different habitat, perhaps,” Luis suggested.

“The planets are quite different, as if designed for some particular environment or function. To highlight the most interesting, the fourth is not a rocky world, nor a gas giant, but we do not know what it actually is. I once thought it might be a brown dwarf, but that makes no sense now. It has an enormous surface area covered by what appears to be a thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide and oxygen and argon, and an actual solid surface—a lithosphere, which would have to be artificially stabilized. The lithosphere may float on a fluid core, but the surface temperature is remarkably warm, twelve degrees centigrade, which would point to internal heating.”

“All right,” Hans said. “Why do they have lots of different environments?”

Silken Parts rustled his cords before speaking. “In we our records, we we see and smell of many species developing intelligence in a local area, and creating great communities. They are not common. They exist, but.”

“It’s all deception,” Hans murmured. “Why worry about it?”

“If it is not deception…” Hakim said, lifting his hands.

Hans laughed. “We’ve faced nothing but deception from the Killers from the very beginning. This is perfect—something to make us hesitate, lose confidence. It’s just goddamned perfect.”

Stonemaker rustled now, then coiled and uncoiled. A single cord disengaged from his tail and crawled out the door. Eye on Sky retrieved and bagged it; it squeaked plaintively. “I we beg pardon,” Stonemaker said. An odor of something akin to embarrassment—fresh salt air with seaweed. Minor spontaneous disengagement was not uncommon for the Brothers, but discomfiting if noticed.

“Think nothing of it,” Hans said. “I detect a conspiracy here. Not just Hakim… does somebody else think this isn’t a blind?”

Stonemaker rustled again. Clearly, something irritated the Brother. “The ship must be cautious, or I we is a Killer attitude.”

Hans knit his brows.

“We must not rush into blind judgment,” Hakim said.

Hans looked around the schoolroom, flabbergasted. “We’re seriously thinking the Killers aren’t here after all? This is what’s really here—a zoo of cultures, cooperating and prosperous, waiting for us to just drop in and visit?”

“The deception is incredibly dense,” Hakim said.

“We know of no such deception succeeding over vast periods of time,” Silken Parts said.

Hans’ face reddened. Rex started to say something, but Hans cut him off with a raised hand. “So we should vote again… pass judgment again.”

“Yes,” Stonemaker said. “All our crews.”

“I’m for that,” Hans said, stretching cat-like. “Anything to build consensus. When?”

“After much more seeing,” Silken Parts suggested. “Much more research.”

“We have time,” Hans said. “Meanwhile, we should begin drills and exercises. I’d like Martin, Paola Birdsong, Ariel, Giacomo, and… Martin, you choose three others. I’d like all of you to go through the libraries and find whatever precedent there is. Make a case. You’ll be defense. Hakim, you take Jennifer, Harpal, Cham, and three others, and prepare a case for prosecution. Stonemaker, I’m not yet familiar with the way your legal system works, but I think something similar should be done by the Brothers. Then we’ll bring the entire crew together, humans and Brothers, and judge.”

Silken Parts gave off an odor of wet clay. Stonemaker said, “We we will regroup, assemble Makers of Agreement, make a decision.”

“Grand,” Hans said. He looked at Martin. “We need to talk,” he said. “Alone.”

They went to Hans’ quarters, passing four Brothers and five humans as they exercised in a corridor. The humans tossed balls to the Brothers, who passed them along their backs from cord to cord and flipped them with their tails. The contest—a kind of football—was desperately uneven; the Brothers were winning handily, and the humans cheerfully shouted their complaints.

“Competitive, aren’t they?” Hans said. He opened the hatch to his quarters. Within, Martin saw a room as spare as his—except for vases of flowers. Rosa’s touch. Hans lay on a pad and motioned for Martin to get comfortable.

“You’ve been quiet lately,” Hans said. “I should be grateful…”

“Why grateful?” Martin asked.

“That you’re not screaming your head off. The ex-Pans don’t approve of my style, do they?”

Martin didn’t answer.

“Ah,” Hans said, nodding. “There it is.”

“Not really,” Martin said softly. “Every leader finds fault with the next in line. I argued with Stephanie.”

“Never mind,” Hans said, dismissing the subject with a wave. He stared up at the blank ceiling, as if talking to someone far away. “Harpal has resigned. I need a second—let’s not use the name Christopher Robin any more, all right?”

“Fine,” Martin said.

“Rex is loyal as hell, but I need somebody critical right now. A balance. Cham grates on me as much as Harpal. I keep coming back to you.”

“Why?” Martin asked.

“Because when you keep quiet, I wish you’d talk. If you’re my second, it’ll be your duty to talk to me, and I won’t wonder what you’re thinking. Besides, Stonemaker already acts as if you’re next in command. Might as well make it official.”

Martin sat on the bare floor, crossing his legs. “That doesn’t seem reason enough.”

“I said it before, I’ll say it now; you weren’t responsible for the Skirmish going wrong. Nobody could have seen it coming. We got away. We did what we came to do. I think you got blamed for all the wrong reasons.”

“I don’t worry about it,” Martin said.

“You lost someone you loved.”

“More than one,” Martin said.

“I think you were perhaps the best Pan we had, or at least a close match with Stephanie. She was hot, she had guts. You were quiet and deliberate. I’m flying on instinct through a thick fog. You know what my problems are.”

Martin took a deep breath.

“We’re friendly with the Brothers. That’s a relief. They scared the hell out of me, just looking at them the first time. That cord crawling on Cham…” Hans chuckled. “I would have wet my pants. I think they’re good for us. But they’re different, too. They screwed up royally in battle. They hesitated, they gave the Killers every benefit of the doubt… And they’re going to do it again. I can just smell it coming from Silken Parts and Stonemaker. They see this blind, this big cooperative solar system, all bustling and peaceful… And Christ, Martin, they want to hug the slicker, not kill it.”

“We can work around that,” Martin said.

“Can we?” Hans turned to glare at him.

“I think so,” Martin said.

“But you agree it’s a blind.”

“Hakim seems to have his doubts. Hakim’s smart—”

“Hakim’s too goddamned gentle,” Hans said.

“He’s not a coward,” Martin said.

“I didn’t mean that. He’ll be turned by the Brothers. They’ll put all kinds of doubts into his reasonable head. I wish sometimes they’d chosen a bunch of dumb-ass soldiers and not all these mental high-performance types.” Hans slapped the floor with his palm. “I could lead a bunch of blockheads anywhere, do anything, come out with most of us alive. But not thinkers and doubters. And if I add Rosa…” He pointed to the flowers, tossed his head back dramatically. “You noticed? God save me. She’s pretty good in bed, you know that?”

Martin shook his head.

“But I don’t do it for my health,” Hans said, tone softening. “She scares me more than the Brothers. She’s a cipher, Martin. I think maybe she actually does talk to God. If so, God’s on their side, not ours. If I let her loose—and I can’t control her for long, Martin—I have no idea what will come out of her. A whole new religion. Am I right?” He stood and stretched, restless as a caged leopard. “She almost sucked you in, didn’t she?”

Martin’s face reddened. “I was hurting,” he said.

“Don’t be ashamed. If I weren’t so goddamned cynical, I’d have got down on my knees, too.”

“I don’t want to be second in command. I served my time.”

“You were cut short,” Hans reminded him.

“It was fine by me,” Martin said.

“Bolsh,” Hans said. “You have as deep a sense of duty as anyone here. You feel more deeply than anyone but maybe Ariel.” Hans grinned. “She’s sweet on you, I think.”

Martin didn’t respond.

“Well, I can choose my own second if the elected one doesn’t work out. I’ve made my choice. It’s you. You’ll replace Harpal.”

“I don’t—”

“Sorry, Martin,” Hans said, putting his hands on Martin’s shoulders. “I need help. I need balance. I don’t want to make mistakes now.”

The drills began first with physical exercise, humans and Brothers cooperating in gymnastics. The result was comic at first, and Martin worried the Brothers might be offended by the confusion, but they were not.

The entire crew involved in the exercises seemed to take it as a game, even while, performing the drill to the best of their ability.

Cham served as drill leader. Eye on Sky translated for the Brothers.

“We’re going to get used to each other, get formally introduced,” Cham said. “You can call me coach.”

The humans hooted and jumped around, pretending to shoot a few hoops or pass and intercept a clothes-wad football.

“First thing is, we have to know what we can do, and what we feel like, in terms of strength, resilience, where we’re vulnerable, where we can be hurt, how we can help. Got that?”

Silence and attention indicated assent.

“We have no idea what we’ll be getting into this time. Everything we’ve drilled for, all we’ve trained for, may have to be turned upside down soon. That’s my feeling, anyway, and I think the bosses agree. Looks like Leviathan is going to be a corker. Target-rich, the old military folks on Earth used to call it. So we have to work together closely.”

Rich smells like a seashore filled the room. Martin noted a few who seemed to find the smells unpleasant: Rex Live Oak was among them, still made uneasy by the Brothers.

Harpal stood beside Martin. He had not said a word since resigning. At least he showed no resentment against Martin. Martin was grateful for that.

“First exercise,” Cham said. “A carry. Two humans will take a single Brother across the schoolroom. The Brother will then carry the two humans back. I don’t have any idea how you’ll do these things; just do them, and learn.”

Cham and Eye on Sky picked the teams. Each team had two Brothers and two humans; Martin and Ariel teamed with two braids, one a small individual called Twice Grown, the other a medium called Makes Clear. Neither of the braids had honed their human communication skills, and both often resorted to odors rather than human words, which added to the confusion and—Ariel seemed to think—to the fun. Martin had not seen her laugh so much before.

“We have a new second in command,” Cham said gleefully. “The Brothers will pardon me if I push rank forward. Martin, your team goes first.”

Makes Clear slithered forward. “Carry long ways,” he suggested, then coiled like an upright spring. Martin and Ariel tried to find safe places to grab him, but the cords squirmed beneath their grasping hands.

“Be still,” Ariel suggested.

“Not accustomed,” Makes Clear sighed. The others watched with interest as Martin finally found the least ticklish section of a cord, about three quarters toward the rear, near the most firmly gripping claws. The skin of the cord changed texture beneath his hands, from hard slick leather to easy-to-grip rubber.

Makes Clear straightened and stiffened. Ariel fumbled, recovered her grip, and they hefted Makes Clear to hip level. “Let’s go while we’ve still got him!” Martin shouted, and they started to run across the floor.

Makes Clear vented a particularly sharp turpentine smell that stung Martin’s eyes. To let go and rub his eyes would be disastrous; but he was almost blind. Ariel was little better off. “Where are we?” Martin asked.

“You tell me!”

“I we tell! I we tell!” Makes Clear chirped. “Left, right, right.”

“What?”

“Go to the left more,” Ariel said. They narrowly missed a line of Brothers, who arched like startled serpents, adding more turpentine scent.

Martin strained his head back, teeth bared, eyes almost shut, arm muscles corded with effort. The Brother weighed at least eighty kilos. Ariel was strong, but her grip was failing, and Makes Clear slipped lower on her side. Just as they finished the trip across the chamber, they all fell and slid into the wall.

Makes Clear rustled and rose upright, then swiftly bent down, unlimbering two pairs of cords along the sides of his upper body. The cords’ claws grabbed Martin’s and Ariel’s arms and legs, and Makes Clear hoisted them from the ground with a loud buzz of effort, tossed them, and caught them around their mid-sections.

“Shit!” Ariel cried out. Makes Clear reversed course and undulated along the weaving track they had followed with comic exactness, again forcing his fellows to arch. Martin felt the claws pinching deep into skin and muscle and grimaced with pain.

The return trip was much faster. The traction of multiple cord claws along a Brother’s underside was truly wonderful, like a living tank tread, or a supercharged caterpillar. Makes Clear lowered himself and they scrambled to their feet beside Twice Grown.

“They we did well?” Twice Grown asked, his head rearing to chest level on Martin, smelling like stale fruit.

“Well enough,” Martin said, recovering his breath and feeling his ribs.

“Better next when,” Twice Grown said, weaving toward Ariel and tapping her arm with an extended cord.

“That’s affection,” Martin said, looking to see her reaction.

“I know,” Ariel said, glaring.

Cham announced the next team, and the exercise worked its way to a rather dull conclusion. By the end, they knew much more about each other, and even the most reluctant—Rex among them—had been forced to come in contact with, and to cooperate with, the Brothers.

Martin sat with his back against the wall. Ariel approached him, examining his face cautiously. “May I?” she asked.

He gestured for her to sit beside him.

“Hans didn’t pick Rex,” she said quietly.

In the middle of the schoolroom, several men and women showed the Brothers where they had been bruised, and suggested more gentle methods of handling. The Brothers, in broken English and with smells of onion and fresh bread, lodged more courteous, but no less pointed, complaints.

“My luck,” Martin said. “Getting ready to jump all over me again?”

“You’re a prick, a real prick,” Ariel said. A child-like tone of pique took some of the sting out of her words. “You don’t deserve my anger.” She squatted, lay her back against the wall, straightened her legs one at a time, and slumped beside him.

Rosa had stayed apart from the exercises; Hans had privately instructed Cham not to include her. She seemed dreamy, unfocused; Martin saw her leave the room. “How’s Rosa?” he asked.

“Like a volcano,” Ariel answered. “Hans isn’t helping her any. He may think he is, but she knows what he’s doing.”

“What do you think he’s doing?”

“Typical masculine shit. ‘What she needs is a good slicking.’ ”

“What do you suggest we should do?”

“About Rosa?” She lifted her shoulders, inhaled. “She has a mission. She doesn’t pay attention to me now—I’m not in her circle, if you haven’t noticed.”

“I noticed.”

“She doesn’t pay attention to anybody, really, except Hans—she’s like a tape-recorder with Hans.”

“You said she knows what he’s up to.”

“She’s using him as much as he’s using her. He’s given her official status, Martin. She’s strengthening her position. If Hans thinks he’s smarter than Rosa… But you’re co-opted now, aren’t you? You can’t talk about Hans or what he’s thinking.”

“I didn’t ask to be second.”

“Right,” Ariel said, nodding emphatically. “Do you disapprove of Hans?”

Martin didn’t answer.

“Right,” she said again, and stood. “Everything’s working out with the Brothers. But there are some of us besides Rosa who are on the edge, and being with the Brothers isn’t helping. You know the ones I mean. They’re traveling without any compass, Martin.”

“Thank you for believing I have some intelligence.”

“You’re welcome.” She rubbed her hands on her pants and looked at him with an expression between concern and irritation. “I know you won’t swallow the bait,” she said. “Spit it back. Rosa isn’t the most dangerous person on this ship.” Martin pretended to ignore her.

Rex lost it first.

Martin was laddering between the first and second homeballs when he heard shouts echoing from below. He clambered down to the neck join and saw a radiance of cords streaming from a pile that had just seconds before been a braid.

Rex stood to one side with a metal baseball bat, face pale and moist. He stooped and swung the bat lightly from one hand. With the other hand he fanned a sharp odor of turpentine and burned sugar.

He turned and lifted his eyes to Martin’s face. “Help me,” he said, voice flat. “This slicker attacked me.”

The braid had completely dissolved. The cords tried to climb the walls and fell back with sad thumps. Three cords lay writhing in the middle of the join, smearing brown fluid on the floor—the first time Martin had seen cords bleeding. “What the hell happened?” he asked.

“I just told you,” Rex said, pointing the bat at Martin. “It grabbed me. I had to fight it off.”

“Who was it?” Joe Flatworm asked, dropping from a ladder field behind Martin. “Which Brother?”

“I don’t know and I don’t give a damn,” Rex said, lowering the bat and standing straight. “It was a big one.”

Two of the three injured cords had stopped moving. Two more Brothers wriggled through cylindrical fields from the level below. They immediately set about bagging the uninjured cords.

Ten more humans and three more Brothers gathered in the dome. Paola Birdsong stooped beside the still cords. Twice Grown slid forward and gently picked up one of the two, not bothering to bag it.

“Is it dead?” she asked.

“It is dead,” Twice Grown said.

“Who did it belong to?”

“A cord of Sand Filer,” Twice Grown said.

“What is this, a goddamned funeral?” Rex shouted.

Martin approached Rex carefully, holding out a hand and wriggling his fingers. “Give me that,” he said.

Rex dropped the bat and stepped away. “Self-defense,” he said. Martin picked up the bat and handed it to Joe.

“He was part of your training team,” Martin said. “Are you sure he attacked you?”

“It put its claws on me and it pinched like it was going to break my arm,” Rex said, backing away from Martin, who kept edging closer.

“Was he trying to do more exercises with you?” Martin asked, working to contain his anger.

“How the fuck should I know?” Rex said. “Stop pressing me, Martin, or I’ll—”

“You going to knock his brains out, you slicking baboon?” Hans pushed through the humans and sidled around Martin, then grabbed Rex’s sleeves and shook him once, twice. “You—are—a—piece—of—SHIT!” Hans shouted, then dropped Rex and turned back to the middle of the room. “Twice Grown, is Stonemaker coming here?”

Twice Grown consulted his wand. “I we have requested such,” he said.

“I hope this one’s not badly injured.”

“Two cords still, one hurt,” Twice Grown said. “Will not be complete Sand Filer.”

“We’re very sorry,” Hans said. “Martin, Joe, take Rex to his quarters. Joe, watch and make sure he doesn’t leave.”

“What?” Rex cried indignantly. “I said it was self-defense, damn it!”

“Do it,” Hans repeated coldly.

Rex did not fight them. Rosa watched, hanging from a field in the neck as they passed. “What happened?” she asked.

“Fuck you,” Rex said.

Joe grabbed Rex’s shoulder with his free hand. “You’re swimming in sewage, buddy,” he said firmly. “Don’t stop paddling or you’ll sink.”

Rex wiped his eyes and forehead and shook Joe’s hand off. He walked between them in silence.

The inquest was held a day later, Stonemaker, Eye on Sky, Hans, Cham, Joe, and Martin presiding. Rex stood between Cham and Joe, considerably subdued. Hans had interviewed him for an hour after the incident.

Stonemaker made the first remarks. “I we have asked the individual Sand Filer for a telling, but memory is degraded. Sand Filer does not see what happened. We we must rely on your individual for testimony.”

Hans sat on a rise in the schoolroom floor and folded his arms. “Tell us, Rex.”

Rex looked at the humans in the room, all but Hans. “It’s a misunderstanding,” he said.

“Tell us,” Hans said, tone neutral, eyes downcast.

“We met in the neck join. I was going my way—”

“Carrying a bat?” Hans asked.

“The moms made it for our games. We were going to play baseball in the gym.”

“We?” Hans asked.

“We were going to choose teams,” Rex said.

“Who?”

“Four or five of us. We wanted to see how baseball was played. Do some normal, Earth-type games.”

“You met Sand Filer in the join,” Hans prompted.

“Yes. I didn’t recognize it—”

“ ‘Him,’ ” Martin said softly, “That’s the accepted pronoun. ‘Him.’ ”

Rex swallowed hard but was not about to argue. Martin saw the apprehension in him, and something else—a blunt kind of defiance, no admission to himself that he had done anything wrong.

“I didn’t recognize him,” Rex said. “I didn’t know who it… he was. He was big, though. We passed and he reached out to grab me. It hurt. He hurt me.”

“Did he give you any warning?”

“He said something, but I couldn’t understand. I can’t understand any of them.”

“Do you understand I we?” Stonemaker asked.

“Mostly, but you speak the best English,” Rex said. “It was an accident. He frightened me.”

“Did you figure out later what he might have been trying to say?” Martin asked.

“Gentlemen, we have procedures here,” Hans interrupted with a heavy sigh. “I’ll ask my questions, and Stonemaker will ask his questions.”

Martin agreed to that.

“It’s a good question, though,” Hans said. “What was he trying to say?”

“I don’t know,” Rex said.

“Something about being on your team in the exercises, the grab races?”

“Maybe,” Rex said. “I just didn’t hear him clearly.”

“Then what?”

“He got me with those claws… Grabbed me around the chest. It hurt like hell. I thought he was attacking me.”

“And?” Hans pursued.

“I defended myself.”

“Was there any reason he would want to attack you?”

“How should I know?” Rex said.

Here it is, Martin thought. Plain as can be.

“You mean, the Brothers are unpredictable,” Hans said, face clouding.

“I don’t know them,” Rex said, smiling as if on firmer ground.

Hans turned to Stonemaker. “Rex Live Oak has been to Brother orientations. He participated in the grab races. He’s carried Brothers, and been carried by them.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Rex said. “It—he tried to crush me.”

“You have bruises?”

Rex dropped his shoulder straps and showed livid bruises around his ribs and abdomen.

Stonemaker rustled, rearranged his coils. Hans put his chin in one hand and bent to examine the bruises. “Did you do anything to frighten him?”

“Nothing. I swear.”

“No reason for him to attack you.”

“Hey,” Rex said, his smile broad now, shoulders lifted.

“Stop smiling, you asshole,” Hans said. “Stonemaker, can you tell me how Rex might have frightened Sand Filer?”

“We we have not experienced aggression from our partners before,” Stonemaker said. “We we do not understand capacity for being frightened, for giving fright.”

“I don’t think that’s clear,” Hans said.

“We we do not expect aggression from you,” Eye on Sky said. “There is no reason for we us to be afraid, whatever you do, unless we we are injured. Then we we lose trust and may be afraid.”

“Makes sense,” Hans said. “It’s a pity Sand Filer doesn’t remember. I’m open to suggestions from our partners.”

The Brothers said nothing, weaving and scenting the air with baking bread, new-mown grass.

“I don’t have any guidelines myself,” Hans said. “I’m very angry at Rex. Personally, I’d throw his ass outside, if the moms would let us. Would they, Martin?”

Martin shook his head.

“You don’t know?” Hans pursued, as if shifting his anger to Martin now, Rex being such a pitiful target.

“I don’t think they would let us,” Martin clarified.

“Damned lucky for Rex. Stonemaker, I don’t know how to make up for this breach, however it happened. I think we should be blunt and say that some of our people are still frightened by your people. Rex seems a simple-minded sort, and anything can happen with idiots.” He fairly jammed the name down Rex’s throat, standing with face pressed a few centimeters from Rex’s nose. Surprise or emotion made Rex’s eyes water and he stumbled back a step.

“It wasn’t anything I planned,” he said. “It just happened.”

“Will Sand Filer recover?” Hans asked Stonemaker.

“Damage to Sand Filer will not mean breakdown and adoption by others. He will be an individual, and useful to his friends.”

“That’s… very good,” Hans said, taking two sharp and broken breaths, as if he were about to hiccough. He seemed infinitely weary as he returned his attention to Rex. “We take care of our own. Brothers judge Brothers, and humans judge humans. You’re banned from the Job. I suppose later you might try something really impressive and heroic, and get back your duty. But I wouldn’t waste my time thinking about it.”

Rex closed his eyes. “Hans—” he said.

“Please go,” Hans said.

“I was defending myself, for Christ’s sake!”

“You’re a liar,” Hans said. “I can’t prove it, but you’ve lost my confidence, and while I’m Pan, you have no work to do. You’re a free man, Rex. Leave before I decide to beat the shit out of you.”

Rex left the room, shaking his head, fists clenched. He slammed a wall just before stepping through the hatch.

Hans bowed very low to Stonemaker and Eye on Sky. “I beg forgiveness for my people,” he said. “We must work together. We have no choice.”

“We we shall work together, and this shall be lost in we our minds,” Stonemaker said.

“If we judge again, if we take a vote to enact the Law,” Hans said, standing in the middle of a wealth of planetary images, “the Brothers will probably vote to investigate. Am I right?”

Martin, Hakim, Joe, and Cham sat circled before Hans in the nose of the ship. Joe and Cham nodded. Hakim kept still and quiet.

“Martin? Will they vote to go in and learn more?”

Martin said he thought they would.

“Because the more we learn, the more ambiguous this all is,” Hans said softly. “I don’t think it’s going to get any better.”

“Terribly ambiguous,” Cham said. He pulled down a more detailed image of Leviathan’s third planet. Smooth, lovely green continents and blue oceans, no visible cloud cover, surface temperature about twenty Celsius, land masses checked with immense tan squares. Surrounding it like a fringe: huge puff-ball seeds, perhaps a thousand kilometers long, touching ocean and continent. The seeds did not limit themselves to the equator; a few even rose from the poles.

Fourth planet, huge and dark, surrounded by seas butting against dark continents spotted with glowing lava-filled rifts. The fifth planet: volatile-rich gas giant, surface temperature of eighty five kelvins, two point two g’s, hints of wide green patches and black ribbons, rotating storms. Again enormous structures studded the upper atmosphere, these shaped like giant nested funnels. The sixth: a smaller gas giant, about the size of Neptune, artificial constructs floating in orbit like braided hair, brilliantly reflective. Thick streamers of gas rose from the giant’s surface along the equator, drawn up by the constructs.

“Looks like paradise for the fuel-hungry,” Cham said.

“A very masterpiece of bullshit,” Hans said. “Designed to do just what it’s doing to us.”

“Or—” Joe said.

Hans raised an eyebrow.

“I can think of two or three ways what we’re seeing could actually be what’s there.”

“Camouflaged with real races and cultures,” Hakim said, taking Joe’s hint.

“Explain, please.”

“Well, Hakim seems on my wavelength,” Joe said.

“I think I see it, too,” Cham said.

“Somebody should explain it to the poor old boss-man,” Hans said.

“The Killers have given up sending out probes,” Hakim said. “They have aligned with other cultures, made alliances, and now hide among them.”

Hans cocked his head to one side, squinting one eye dubiously.

“Or they’ve died out,” Joe said, “and other spacefaring races have taken over the system.”

“If we don’t accept that these planets are all projections or something as crazy as that,” Hans said. He slumped his shoulders and closed his eyes. “Has anybody asked the moms what they think?”

“I’ve asked for a formal meeting with a mom and a snake mother,” Martin said. “I’ve asked that Stonemaker and whoever he wants to bring should be there, too.”

“Shouldn’t I be there?” Hans asked, opening one eye.

“Of course,” Martin said.

Hans pinned Martin with a fishy gaze, then smiled. “Good. We’ve been exercising for a tenday now. Everything’s smooth.”

“There are still problems with some of our crew,” Martin said.

“But they’re doing the work,” Hans said.

Martin hesitated, then agreed.

“Let me deal with just a few hundred things at a time.” Hans stood and stretched. He had put on weight around the stomach and his face seemed puffy. “Rex is staying out of sight. I hope his example keeps the others in check. I need a plan. What are we going to do if the decision is to investigate, get right in close before we drop weapons?”

“Split the ship,” Joe said.

Cham agreed. “Maybe into two or three ships, dispersed to swing back at different times, from different angles. All black, all silent.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Hans said. “Martin?”

“The ship that goes in first… it’s a fantasy to think it will stay hidden for long, if at all.”

“So?”

“Maybe it should go in openly. Maybe it should be disguised. A Trojan horse.”

Hans leaned his head back, looking at Martin over his short nose and open mouth. “Uh, Jesus is simple, Satan is complex. We come in openly, we’re traveling merchants, we’re not hunting killer probes. We’ve just come to show our wares—”

Cham cackled and slapped his legs. Hakim looked around, still bewildered. “Don’t you see?” Cham asked him.

“I am not—”

“Slick them at their own game,” Joe said. Hakim caught on but suddenly frowned.

“They know we were at Wormwood,” he said. “They know—”

“They may not know anything,” Martin said, energized by his own idea, and Hans’ elaboration. “They could easily assume Wormwood killed us in the trap. They’re more vulnerable, but for that reason, they can’t afford to throw off their disguise—if it is a disguise—”

“Because traveling merchants might tattle on them, or be expected somewhere else, and missed if they don’t show,” Hans said. “And they have a reputation in the neighborhood to maintain. They let the Red Tree Runners go… Martin, my faith in you has paid off. Anything after this is bonus.”

“It is not a bad idea,” Hakim agreed, smiling at Martin.

“But it needs development,” Hans said. “I want a full proposal, with details, before we talk with the Brothers.”

Giacomo and Jennifer picked up quickly around their compartment, embarrassed that Martin had come to visit unexpectedly. Clothing, scrap paper waiting to be run through the ship’s recycling, sporting equipment for joint human-Brother games, were quickly stacked into piles and shoved aside. “This would be a real mess if we were coasting,” Jennifer said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Martin said, waving his hand. “I’m just dropping by on my own initiative. Hans hasn’t asked for a report on the translations, but I thought I’d inquire…”

“We’re working with two of the Brothers now, Many Smells and Dry Skin,” Jennifer said.

“Those are complimentary names,” Giacomo said, smiling.

“Dry Skin has even chosen a human name. He wants to be called Norman. Sometimes Eye on Sky helps.”

“So what do we have?” Martin asked. “Are their libraries better than ours?”

“They’re certainly different,” Giacomo said. “We’ve barely begun to translate the really technical stuff, but the snake mothers seem more open with their facts, more trusting. There’s less fear of influencing the Brothers, I think—that is, taking away their freedom to choose by overawing them. The Brothers are pretty solid, psychologically.”

“Can we learn anything more from their libraries?”

Jennifer looked at Giacomo. “Possibly, if they help us translate.”

“Shouldn’t you know one way or the other by now?”

“If their libraries stored key concepts in words, yes,” Jennifer said. “I’m sure we’d know. But the reason we had to call on Many Smells and Dry Skin/Norman is because we were having such a tough time dealing with the synesthesia—with translating smells and music into human language. Their math is disintegrated, literally—no integers. They deal with everything in probabilistic terms. Numbers are smears of probability. They don’t see things separated from each other, only in relations. No arithmetic, only algebras. How many planets around Leviathan? It’s expressed in terms of Leviathan’s history, the shape of its planet-forming cloud ages past… Only after a Brother understands everything there is to know, will he have an idea how many planets there are. Even their most simple calculations are mind-wrecking, to us—parallel processing of cords in each braid. It’s math for much more powerful minds than ours.”

“We talked about that already,” Giacomo said. “But the definite article is also missing from their languages. They have three languages, auditory, olfactory, and written—but writing is supplementary to the rest. All we’ve gotten access to is the written, so far. Norman is trying to convert olfactory into written, but he says it’s the most difficult thing he’s ever done.”

“What do the annotations tell us?” Martin asked.

“They’re intriguing,” Jennifer said, leaning forward, eyes narrowing with enthusiasm. “The snake mothers trust the Brothers—”

“Like we said,” Giacomo interrupted.

“The snake mothers seem to think there’s no chance the Brothers could ever turn into planet killers.”

“But they’re not so certain about us,” Giacomo said.

“The Brothers were littoral, beach grazers—at least, in their earliest forms,” Jennifer said. “Almost all their cities were located along coastlines. They made artificial beaches inland to feed the growing populations—that was the beginning of civilization for them. They seem embarrassed by their past, as if hunters and gatherers—us—might think beachcombers are inferior.”

“I think their world had little or no axial tilt,” Giacomo said. “No seasons, but with two moons—”

“We haven’t heard any of this!” Martin said, astonished. “Why didn’t you tell us about this sooner?”

“We were waiting to be absolutely sure,” Jennifer said.

“Couldn’t you just ask Norman or Many Smells?”

“Not nearly so simple,” Jennifer said, looking away, fiddling with the overalls at her knees. “The snake mothers may have told them to be careful about telling us too much.”

Martin let his breath out with a low moan. “Why?”

“Because while we’ve been exploring their libraries, they’ve been going through ours, and they’re a lot better equipped to understand them.”

“They’re awed by our capacity for violence,” Giacomo said ruefully. “They became really interested after Rex attacked Sand Filer.”

“Our history is so different,” Jennifer said. “Many Smells watched some of our movies. We tried to interpret for him.”

“The Longest Day,” Giacomo said. “Ben-Hur. Patton. He was particularly confused by The Godfather and Star Wars. Jennifer tried to explain The Forever War. He was pretty quiet afterward, and he didn’t smell like much of anything.”

Martin shook his head, puzzled.

“They don’t release scents when they feel threatened and want to hide,” Jennifer explained. “Sand Filer stunk things up because he was injured. That was his distress call.”

Martin shook his head. “Why weren’t you a little more… selective about what he watched?”

Jennifer blinked owlishly. “I don’t see how we can expect them to be open with their libraries, if we aren’t open with our own. We tried to find some movies we thought they might appreciate more,” she added. “Domestic comedies. Family films. He watched Arsenic and Old Lace. We couldn’t erase first impressions, and after Rex’s attack, who would blame them?”

Martin let out his breath and closed his eyes. “All right.”

“I think they’re having a hard time accepting anything made-up,” Giacomo said. “We had to explain the movies were not about real events. Except the history films—and even those were reenactments, fictionalized.”

“What about literature?”

“They’re just getting into some now. No reaction yet.”

Martin felt a sudden rush of shame: collective, human shame. He rubbed his nose and shook his head. “We may be allies, but not trusted companions.”

“Exactly,” Giacomo said.

“We didn’t want to tell Hans until we were sure. We thought he might take it badly.”

“With him in charge, I don’t wonder the Brothers are worried about us,” Jennifer said.

“He’s under a lot of pressure,” Martin said.

“Hans has gotten us through some tough times,” Giacomo said. “But he’s fragile. Who knows what will happen when things get tough again?”

“Don’t blinker yourself,” Jennifer said.

Martin looked down at the floor, hands clasped. “Tell me more about the annotations, about whatever you think you’ve learned.”

“Their information on other worlds is extensive. The snake mothers have told them more about types of civilizations, levels of technology, past encounters with different civilizations that went killer. We’re still trying to work out the implications.”

“Is it possible,” Martin began, face brightening, “that the Benefactors simply built the snake mothers and the Brothers’ ship after they built ours? Maybe things loosened up. Maybe the Benefactors became less concerned about the Killers getting strategic information.”

Giacomo shrugged. “Possibly.”

“Maybe we’re being a little too self-critical,” Martin suggested. “Letting our guilt complexes lead us by the nose.”

“Let’s not worry about it for now,” Jennifer said. “What we need to worry about is how much in their libraries is new and useful to us. I think in a couple of tendays, we’ll know enough to make a strong report to Hans.”

“You should talk with the snake mothers,” Giacomo suggested. “Not Hans. You.”

“Bring Paola with you,” Jennifer said. “They may think we’re more stable in male-female pairs.”

“Too bad Theresa couldn’t be here,” Giacomo said wistfully. “You and she, together, would have been just what they’re looking for.”

“They like working with dyads,” Jennifer said. “They really like Giacomo and me.”

“If we could all be in love and connected to each other—” Giacomo began.

“They’d feel more affinity for us,” Jennifer concluded.

Martin grinned. “We’ll try to make do.”