Anvil of Stars

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