Anvil of Stars

Martin looked up.

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

“That’s a lot of probes,” Martin said.

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

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

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

“Seems certain they’d change some,” Martin agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A good point,” Hakim said.

“How much more time do you need?”

“A day?” Hakim asked his colleagues.

“I’ll need a break,” Min Giao said. “My momerath is fading now.”

“A day and a half,” Hakim said.

“Fine,” Martin said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jennifer—” he said, exasperated.

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

“I’d like to,” Martin said.

“They’re not final but they’re pretty compelling. I think you can follow most of it…”

“I’ll try.”

“The moms aren’t telling us everything.”

“That seems to be the popular wisdom,” Martin said.

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

“They don’t seem to think we need to know.”

“Well, curiosity is reason enough.”

“Right,” Martin said.

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

“I’m listening,” Martin said.

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

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

“Okay,” Martin said.

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

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

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

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

Martin looked at her blankly.

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

“I’m still not following you.”

Jennifer sighed, squatted in the air beside Martin, and lifted her hands to add gestures to her explanation. “Particles need to know certain things, if I can use that word in its most basic sense.