Anvil of Stars

The farthest-scattered craft came in fifteen minutes after the simulation’s end.

Stephanie licked her index finger, stuck it up to an imaginary breeze, swayed her arm toward Martin, and smiled. Confidence was returning.

The children gathered in the first homeball’s cafeteria and analyzed their performances, Martin and Hans overseeing. The self-criticism flowed steadily, without hurt feelings, and Martin felt a knitting of the teams that had gone out on drill.

Afterward, they ate dinner, then listened to music performed by Joe Flatworm and Kees North Sea: raucous, lively folk music from the Ukraine and Tennessee, barely slowed by the extra weight.

Their bodies had grown stronger, stockier. No need to ask if the moms were responsible.

The performance lasted less than half an hour; they rested after, Martin in Theresa’s quarters, in the heavy darkness, watching the ceiling, mind passing over the day’s events.

He slept peacefully, without dreams.

Two days until coasting resumed; five days from passage through the pre-birth material.

Martin exercised in the second neck, climbing along the ladder fields instead of letting them haul him up or down. He had climbed almost the entire distance from the second homeball to the third, enjoying the exertion, almost used to the heaviness, when he heard the screaming, thin and far away, sliced into ghastly echoes by the shapes in the wormspace.

Theresa was in the third homeball, above him, doing private practice in a bombship. She quickly descended on a field, pausing beside him where he hung, and listened, frowning. “Did you hear that?” she asked.

He nodded, hoping it was nothing. It did not sound like nothing. It sounded horrible, even more horrible when distorted, and they were used to the distortions of voices in the necks.

Nothing for seconds. Then, a barely audible keening, voices of concern, two or three people trying to comfort.

They descended quickly, ladders dropping them to the second homeball.

In the main corridor, they found Rosa Sequoia weeping, surrounded by five others, two Wendys and three Lost Boys. Her broad, strong face wet with tears, Rosa could not catch her breath, and she could not speak beyond a few gasped words.

“We didn’t see anything,” Min Giao Monsoon said, patting her on the shoulder. “There is nothing in the halls!”

“What’s wrong?” Martin asked.

“Rosa saw something,” Kees North Sea said, narrow face nervous, eyes shifting. “She’s scared out of her wits.”

“What did you see?” Theresa asked, moving in closer to Rosa. Rosa kneeled in a tighter crouch, large frame forming a round obstruction in the corridor.

“Rosa, stop it,” Martin said, an edge in his voice. “Please get yourself together.” She had piloted a ship outside and performed well in exercises; he had thought she was coming around. Now he was irritated, and then ashamed of his irritation. Doesn’t she know she makes this more difficult for us?

But that was truly beside the point, and he buried his resentment at her weakness. He knelt beside her, touching her wet cheek.

“No!” she shouted, starting up, falling back painfully on one arm. She looked so clumsy, so pitiably overwrought, that Martin’s anger surged almost too quickly to be hidden. “You didn’t see anything,” she said. “You won’t believe me… But I saw!”

“What did you see?” Martin asked, teeth tight together.

Resonant, almost silky, Rosa’s voice carried down the hall to other children gathering, ten, then twenty, coming from both directions. “Something large and dark. It wasn’t a mom.”

Martin looked up, shoulders and neck tensing, less at Rosa’s proclamation than at an intuition something was going to go very wrong, and he could not stop it.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said.

“Did it do anything?” Theresa asked. Martin winced inwardly at her implicit affirmation that there had been something.

“It stared at me… I think. I couldn’t see any eyes. It left marks.”

“Where?”

Rosa got to her feet, wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands, swung her shoulders back and stood tall. She apologized in a barely audible voice. “I was in the C wing, coming down for my team exercise… The lights were down. I don’t know why.”

“Lights are always down in C wing,” Martin said. “Nobody has quarters there.”

“That’s the way I come here,” Rosa said, glancing at him resentfully. She avoids the place where she saw Theresa and me making love. “It was in the dark, just… being there, sitting or standing, I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Show us,” Martin said. He turned to the children gathered on both sides and said, “I’ll handle this.”

“We’d like to help,” Anna Gray Wolf said, face eager—something different attracting her, attracting all of them. She stared owlishly at Rosa.

“It’s okay,” Martin said. “Theresa and I will take care of it.” In case they doubt the masculine touch is sufficient.

The children dispersed, and Martin took Rosa’s elbow.

“You don’t think I saw it?” Rosa asked as she led them along the hall to the empty C wing.

“I don’t know what you saw,” Martin said. Then, trying for a joke, “Maybe you saw a mom without makeup.”

Rosa looked at him resentfully, sadly, then straightened and pointed to the area of the hall where she had seen the shape. Martin ordered the hall to brighten—wondering why Rosa had not already done the same.

He examined the walls. Never dirty, never dusty, the surfaces within the Ship of the Law cleaned themselves; it was taken for granted by the children. The walls showed no marks.

“I saw scuffs when I came through here,” Rosa said.

“It was dark,” Martin said.

Quietly, desperately, Rosa began to weep again.

“You could have turned the lights on and seen whatever it was,” he said.

“We don’t disbelieve you,” Theresa said, holding Rosa’s shoulder firmly, massaging it with her fingers. “But why didn’t you turn the lights on?”

“I was afraid! I didn’t want to see it, whatever it was… I didn’t want it to see me.”

“How big was it?” Martin asked. Dangerous, dangerous.

“It filled this part of the hall,” Rosa said, stretching her arms to the ceiling. The hall was two meters wide, marked with blue circles where quarters might be chosen and doors made by the ship on request.

The entire ship had completely adapted itself to deceleration. The circles that had once marked doors in the ceiling and floor had been absorbed by the ship; only circles on the walls remained. Perhaps Rosa had misinterpreted some function of the ship, or seen something nobody else had witnessed.

He tried to express that diplomatically. “The ship usually cleans up or changes when we’re not watching; maybe it accidentally allowed you to see something.”

“It wasn’t part of the ship… I don’t think it was,” Rosa said. She had lost her tone of hysteria. Her face appeared calmer now, puzzled, and she seemed willing to cooperate, to help them solve the mystery.

“Was it metal, or something else?” Theresa asked.

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

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

“I saw it,” Rosa said, stubbornly defensive.