Anvil of Stars

Martin did not look forward to briefing Hans. Hans immediately took them to his quarters, with no time to recover. Harpal and Jennifer came as well, but no others.

“The moms let you see what you recovered?” Hans asked.

“They did, as much as we could understand,” Martin answered.

“Most of the memory is ship’s mind data,” Hakim said. “We do not know what that contained.”

Martin produced his wand. “We’ve tried to translate and edit. You can look over the crew records in detail… For purposes of a briefing, I thought this might cover the important points.”

They watched in silence as picture and sound unfolded. The unfamiliar visual language of the recordings made viewing difficult; different color values, different notions of perspective and “editing,” attempts at three- dimensional images which did not match human eyes, all added to their problems.

But the salient points were clear.

They watched hour after hour of sauropod crew history, rituals, ceremonies; and as the other Ship of the Law moved farther and farther from Leviathan and their encounters with the civilization there, the sauropod social structure became less and less firm.

Martin pointed out what must have been acts of murder. The sauropods needed a kind of reproductive analog without full reproduction; non-fertile eggs provided essential nutrients, apparently. But egg production dropped off, and the egg-producing sex—not precisely females, as three sexes were involved—underwent chastisement, isolation, and then death for their failures.

All of this was recorded with a solemn and unwinking attention to detail, a little slice of hell from human perspective, but day-to-day existence for the sauropods.

“Don’t they see what they’re doing?” Jennifer asked, aghast; they saw the ritualized execution of the last egg-producer, multiple hammer-blows by a group of dominants, all of one sex.

Hans grunted, turned away from the flickering images.

“It’ll take us a long time to riddle some of this,” Giacomo said, clutching Jennifer’s hand.

“Seems pretty clear to me,” Hans said. “They went to Leviathan, they were given the runaround, they gave up and left. Play back the meetings.”

In much clearer detail, they saw selected images and motion sequences of Leviathan’s worlds, conferences with multiple-eyed, bipedal creatures that seemed to represent the civilization; these segments were particularly muddy, almost useless in terms of linear history.

A mom entered Hans’ cabin. “The ship has translated all Benefactor and ship language records,” the mom said. “We may call these beings Red Tree Runners.”

“Why would we want to?” Hans asked.

“That is a close translation of their name for themselves. Their home system was invaded four thousand three hundred and fifty years ago, Dawn Treader frame of reference. They had already established a pact with representatives of the Benefactors. The killer probes were defeated and their worlds were not substantially damaged. Perhaps half of their original population survived, and they were able to rebuild. They were outfitted with ships and weapons suitable to seek out the Killers. They became part of the Benefactor alliance.”

“But they weren’t Benefactors themselves?” Hakim asked.

“No. You might call them junior partners.”

Hans chuckled. “Higher rank than us.”

“A different arrangement, under different circumstances. The Red Tree Runners traveled over one hundred light years, a journey lasting thirty Earth years by their reference frame.”

“And?” Hans said.

“They arrived at Leviathan nineteen hundred years ago. Leviathan has changed considerably since then.”

“We noticed,” Giacomo said.

“Reasons for the changes are not clear. But they were convinced Leviathan was not their target, obtained fuel from the inhabitants of one of the worlds, and departed.”

Martin shook his head. “That’s all?”

“The memory store has undergone considerable decay. The Red Tree Runners may have discovered how to deactivate the ship’s mind, or interfere with its operations. Over ninety percent of the records are too deteriorated for retrieval. One third of the shipboard recordings have survived, but all biological, historical, and library records of their civilization have decayed.”

“Of course,” Hans said dryly.

“They fell apart,” Jennifer said. “They lost it and they killed themselves. Or decided to die.”

Martin recalled the mummified corpses, the last of the crew, saw them lying down to accept the end.

“By God, that won’t happen to us,” Hans said.

“Will this information be made available to all crew members?” the mom asked.

Hans seemed startled by the question. He mused for a moment, squinted one eye, looked at Martin as if about to dress him down for some unspecified offense. “Yeah,” he said. “Open to everybody. Why not. Warning to us all.”

“It’ll be our albatross,” Harpal said. “I don’t know what the others are going to think…”

“It’s a goddamned bloody sign from heaven,” Hans said. “Rosa’s going to have a ball.”

Wild Night was not, as the awkward name suggested, a free-for-all; boredom with lust had settled in. The occasion was treated as both a welcome home for the three travelers and a chance for the crew to let off steam after absorbing news of the death ship; to get back at authority—at the moms, and more implicitly, at Hans, with his planning and approval.

In the cafeteria, the crew enjoyed the first dinner they had had since the Skirmish that tasted like anything.

Martin had not participated in the Wild Night planning, and so was as surprised as anybody by the depth of vituperation Hans endured. Rex Live Oak cut his hair to resemble Hans’, and performed a skit with three Wendys about Hans’ sexual escapades. The jokes were explicit and not very funny, but brought hoots and cackles from the crew. Hans smiled grimly and tilted his head back in mock chagrin.

Martin wanted to leave before the third skit, but saw clearly that that would not have been appreciated. Group action was the call of the night, cooperation and coordination: laugh together, poke fun together, rise from the pit together. The entire atmosphere only deepened Martin’s gloom; on Earth, he had never seen a social gathering turn sour, but this must have been what it was like: forced hilarity, insults and insincerity passing for humor, bitterness and sadness masking as camaraderie. Hans presided over it all with dogged equanimity, sitting slightly apart from the others at a table.

The unexpected came, of course, from Rosa Sequoia. She had been quiet for the months when Martin, Giacomo, and Hakim had been away, “Biding her time,” as Hans said. Now, as the skit’s players took a break, she climbed on top of the center table and began to speak.

The show’s presenters could not intervene without breaking the fragile, false mood of all for one and one for all; they had started something, and Rosa took advantage of it.

“You know me,” she said. “I’m the crazy one. I see things and tell stories. You think Hans is funny. You think you are funny. What about me?”

Nobody said a word. Uncomfortable shufflings.

“What about us?” Rosa’s loose robe did not hide the fact that her bulk had turned to muscle, that while neither thin nor graceful, she had grown much stronger in the past four months, much more self-assured.

Her face radiated simple pleasure at being in front of them; of all the people in the crew, now only Rosa could manage a genuinely pleasant smile.

“We’re flesh and blood, but we allow ourselves to be dragged across hundreds of trillions of kilometers, to fight with ghosts… to take revenge on people who aren’t there. That’s funny.”

Hans’ expression solidified, dangerous, head drawn back as if he might snap at a passing bug with his teeth.

But there was something about Rosa’s tone that kept them in their seats. She was not going to harangue them for being foolish; nor play the doom-saying prophet, holding up the example of the corpse of a Ship of the Law