Anvil of Stars

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.