Anvil of Stars

“Not yet. Not until you say I’m adventurous.”

“You’re adventurous.”

Martin heard something, a breath or a rustle of cloth, and turned to see Rosa coming back. Her quarters were somewhere near here; they were in her path. She looked both sad and embarrassed, reversed, laddered back around the curve.

“Sorry,” Theresa called after her. “It’s your hall, too, Rosa.”

But she was gone. Martin lowered Theresa and made a face.

“You were right,” Theresa said, chagrined. “She’s so shy… she didn’t need to see us. But it’s nothing to do with your being Pan.” She pulled up her overalls. “Your quarters,” she said.

He lay beside Theresa in the darkness, awash in an abandonment he had not known in some time. He was free of care, loose in body luxury, all demands satisfied or put aside where they would not nag. Theresa lay still, breathing shallow, but she was not asleep. He heard her eyelids opening and closing. Long, languid blinks. Such sated animals.

“Thank you,” he said.

She caressed his leg with hers. “You’re so quiet. Where are you?”

“I’m home,” he said.

“Thinking about Earth?”

“No,” he said. “I’m home. Here with you.”

And it was true. For the first time in thirteen years, here in the darkness, he felt at home. Home was a few minutes between extreme worries and challenges; home was a suspension outside any place or time.

“That’s sweet,” Theresa said.

“I love you.”

“I love you, Martin. But I’m not home. Not yet.”

He pulled her to him. The moment was fleeting and he wanted to grab it but could not. Temporary, ineffable. Not home. No home.

Martin entered the nose dressed in exercise shorts, neck wrapped in a sweat towel. He had just worked out with Hans Eagle and Stephanie Wing Feather in the second homeball gym when Hakim signaled that they might have enough information to make the next decision.

The Dawn Treader’s long nose extended a hundred meters from the first homeball, a slender needle only three meters wide at the point. Hakim Hadj and three of the search team—Li Mountain, Thomas Orchard, and Luis Estevez Saguaro—kept station in the tip of the nose, surrounded by projections.

Transparent to visible light, the tip of the nose revealed a superabundant darkness, like an unctuous dye that could stain their souls.

The remotes, four thousand tiny sensors, had departed from the third homeball two days before, returning their signals to the Dawn Treader using the same point-to-point “no- channel” transmission their weapons and craft would use when outside the ship. Within a distance of ten billion kilometers, information simply “appeared” in a receiver, and could not be intercepted between; hence, no channel. The effective rate of transmission was almost instantaneous. The children called the no-channel transmissions noach.

Moms, ship’s mind, and libraries were unresponsive to inquiries on the subject of noach; it was one of the tools bequeathed without explanation.

With the remotes, the “eye” of the Dawn Treader had expanded enormously, and was now nine billion kilometers in diameter, nearly two thirds as wide as the solar systems they studied.

Hakim pushed through the haze of projections and glided toward Martin. Li Mountain and Luis Estevez Saguaro watched, fidgeting with their wands, but controlling their enthusiasm enough to let Hakim take charge.

“It’s even better,” Hakim said. “It’s very good indeed. We have resolution down to a thousand kilometers, and estimates of energy budgets. The nearest system is inhabited, but it’s not consuming energy like a thriving high- tech civ should. Still, it’s the most active, and it’s where we might expect it to be.”

Hakim’s wand projected graphics and figures for Martin. Assay fit very closely indeed. “We’ve been looking through the stellar envelopes and we’ve put together a picture of the birthing cloud in this region. Shock-wave passage from a supernova initiated starbirth about nine billion years ago, and the supernova remnants seeded heavy elements along these gradients…” Hakim’s finger traced a projected purple line through numbers describing metals densities, “metals” meaning elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. He jabbed at a clustering of numbers. “The Buttercup is right in this gradient, right in this magnetic pool, to receive the only dose of exactly these proportions.” Red numbers bunched within a dip in the galaxy’s magnetic field, where gases might collect, waiting to be condensed into stars. “No other star system within a hundred light years matches the Buttercup’s assay.”

Martin felt numb, not yet realizing with all of his faculties how significant this was.

“Time for another gathering,” he said thoughtfully.

“I’ll report to the moms,” Hakim said.

* * *

They had never before seen more than three moms together, although they had suspected there could be many more. Several times the children had kept track of their whereabouts in the Dawn Treader and tried to count them, as a kind of game, but they could never be sure how many there were. Now, all eighty-two children—Lost Boys and Wendys-— gathered in the schoolroom to make the final decision, and there were six identical moms, all with the same patient, neutral voices.

More than anything that had happened before, this gave Martin chills. He had personally estimated there were no more than four moms in the entire ship. It seemed likely to him now that the Dawn Treader could manufacture the robots at will; but that meant the ship itself was a kind of giant mom.

Putting six into the schoolroom was a symbolic action, surely… And it communicated to Martin, at least, with full force.

Four moms hovered at the periphery of the schoolroom, silent and unmoving, like sentinels. Two moms floated in the center of the schoolroom, beside the star sphere. They waited patiently until the children were quiet, which took less than a minute. Martin saw Ariel enter with William and Erin just as the first mom began to speak.

The mom at stage left advanced and said, “The information on the candidate stellar group has increased. If the ship alters its course now, and begins deceleration, you are less than three months from this system, ship’s time. Deceleration will use most of our reserves, and we will need to refuel within one of the stellar systems, the Buttercup or the Cornflower. There are unlikely to be sufficient volatiles available in the Firestorm system.”

A diagram of their orbital path and velocities spread before the children. Deceleration for three tendays at one g, ship’s reference, which would drop their speed to about ninety percent c and increase their tau considerably, bringing them into a position to enter the Buttercup system. Then deceleration of two g’s for twenty-three days. They would enter the system at just over three fourths the speed of light, crossing the system’s diameter of eleven point two billion kilometers in just under fourteen hours.

Martin noted that their trajectory would take them through the dark haloes of pre-birth material, through the plane of the ecliptic, and then under the Buttercup’s south pole, considerably below the plane of the ecliptic. They would pass within two hundred million kilometers of one rocky world, and a hundred million kilometers of the second, directly between them, when both were nearly aligned on one side of the system.

“The remotes have given your search team more information. You will now be provided with the expanded figures to make your next decision.”

Ariel watched Martin from across the room. Her expression said nothing, but he could feel her disapproval.

Hakim Hadj pushed forward from the search team. “The information is wonderful… Very provocative.” He raised his wand, and the wand of each sang in tune, and projected images into their eyes.

They saw: