Anvil of Stars

Hans put his arm around Rosa, smiled, and said, “We’re grouping here in the schoolroom. It’s big enough to hold us all. The Dawn Treader can make food for the Brothers. We’ll stay here, all of us, and all of the Brothers, until the ships have joined.”

No grumbling from the crew. Martin sensed an electric anticipation that had only the slightest tinge of fear.

Joe stood by Martin as they awaited the arrival of the full complement of Brothers. “We keep using the masculine pronoun for them,” he observed. “Is that justified?”

“No,” Martin said. “But they are Brothers, aren’t they?”

Joe gave him a quizzical look, one eye squeezed shut. “Martin, you’re getting a bit…” He waggled his hand. “Cynical. Am I wrong?”

Martin zipped his lips with a finger.

“The comment Hans made about Rosa…”

Martin looked meaningfully at the crew a few paces away.

Though he had spoken in an undertone, Joe sighed and said no more.

Fifty Brothers, seventy-five Lost Boys and Wendys, for the time being separated, with a star sphere in the middle of the schoolroom, showing the ships already joined bow to stern, like mating insects:

The air smelling of cabbage and lilacs and all manner of unidentifiables:

The moms and the Brothers’ robots, quickly called snake mothers, two of each in the schoolroom, the moms bulbous like copper kachina dolls, the others resembling flexible bronze serpents two meters long and half a meter thick in the middle, biding their time:

The schoolroom sealed off with an exterior sigh of equalizing pressure:

Martin: We’ve been through this before. This is not new.

Hakim saying to him: “I am learning to interpret their astronomy. Jennifer says they have marvelous mathematics. What a wealth, Martin!” Hakim is overjoyed:

Ariel not coming very close to him, keeping a fixed distance, watching him when he is not looking at her:

Have I truly gotten cynical, or am I just terrified? We are such a dry forest, any spark, any change—

Sounds throughout the ships, silence among the humans, and no smells now, the air swept clean of communications, the equivalent of Brotherly silence, and vibrations under their feet.

Rosa stood strong and quiet near the star sphere in a theatrical attitude of prayer.

One of the Brothers quietly broke down into cords. The cords seemed stunned and simply twitched, feelers extended, searching, claw-legs scratching the floor. Other braids quickly moved to gather the cords into small sacks carried in packs strapped around their upper halves.

Chirps and strings of comment; smells of turpentine and bananas. The cords struggled and clicked in the sacks.

“Fear?” Ariel asked Martin, moving closer.

“I’ve never seen the cliche brought to life before,” Martin murmured.

She raised an eyebrow.

“ ‘Falling apart,’ ” he said.

She raised the other eyebrow, shook her head. Then she chuckled. Martin could not remember having heard her chuckle before; laughing, smiling, never anything between.

“Not a very good joke,” he said.

“I didn’t say it was,” Ariel replied, still smiling. The smile flicked off when he didn’t return it; she looked away, smoothing her overalls. “I’m not asking for anything, Martin,” she said softly.

“Sorry,” he said, suddenly guilty.

“I haven’t changed,” she continued, face red. “When you were Pan, I said what I thought you needed to hear.”

“I understand,” he said.

“The hell you do,” Ariel concluded, pushing her way to the opposite side of the group of humans.

Another braid disintegrated. Hakim bent over a straying cord. A Brother clicked and swooped down to grab the cord, head splaying, extended clawed tail sections from two of its own cords closing on the stray. He paused with the limp cord hanging just under his head, then said, “Private.”

“Don’t mess with them,” Hans warned Hakim. “We’ve got a lot more to learn about each other.”

“Merging begins,” a mom said, moving to the center, near the star sphere. Martin looked at the sphere intently, watching the two ships melt into each other, impressed despite himself by the Benefactors’ capabilities.

The snake mothers chirped, sang, and released odors. Martin’s head swam with the tension and the welter of scents; more bananas, resinous sweetness, faint odor of decay, cabbage again. Snake mother voices like a high- pitched miniature string orchestra, braids responding; stray cords mostly grabbed and bagged, the last few pulled from the air by Brothers coiling like millipedes in water.

So damned strange, Martin thought, feeling the hysteria of creeping exhaustion. It’s too much. I want it to be over.

But he floated in place, one hand clinging to a personal ladder field, eyes blinking, head throbbing, saying nothing. Hakim also clung to a ladder, eyes closed, as if trying to sleep. Actually, that was sensible. Martin closed his eyes.

Giacomo patted his shoulder. Eyes flicking open, disoriented by actually having slept—for how long? seconds? minutes?—Martin turned to Giacomo and saw Jennifer behind him.

“Completion of merger in five minutes,” the mom announced, its voice sounding far away.

“We can’t wait to get into their math and physics,” Giacomo said, round face moist with tired excitement. Humans were adding their own smells to the schoolroom, now seeming much too small with two populations. “Jennifer’s spoken to their leader—if Stonemaker is their leader.”

“Spokesnake,” Jennifer said, giggling, punchy.

“Some fantastic things. Their math lacks integers!”

“As far as we can tell,” Jennifer added.

“They don’t use whole numbers at all. Only smears, they call them.”

Martin’s interest could hardly have been less now, but he listened, too tired to evade them.

“I think they regard integers, even rational fractions, as aberrations. They love irrationals, the perfect smears. I can’t wait to see what that means for their math.” Giacomo saw Martin’s look of patent disinterest, and sobered. “Sorry,” he said.

“I’m very tired,” Martin said. “That’s all. Aren’t you tired?”

“Dead tired,” Jennifer said, giggling again. “Smears! Jesus, that’s incredible. I may never make sense out of it.”

Martin smelled lilacs; dreamed of his grandmother’s face powder, drifting through the air in her small bathroom like snow, spotting her throw rug beneath the sink. In the dream, he lay down on the rug, curled up, and closed his eyes.

When he awoke, the schoolroom was quiet but for a few whispered conversations. Hakim slept nearby; Giacomo and Jennifer lay curled together an arm’s reach in front of Martin. Joe Flatworm slept in a lotus, anchored to a ladder field. The moms and snake mothers floated inactive.

The Brothers had all disintegrated. Cords hung from ladder fields like socks on a neon clothes net.

Cham was awake. Martin asked him, “Is that how they sleep?”

“Beats me,” Cham said.

“Where’s Hans?”

“Other side of the schoolroom,” Cham said. “Asleep with Rosa holding his head.”

Martin turned to the star sphere and saw for the first time their new ship, the merger largely completed. He judged it to be perhaps as big as the original Dawn Treader, with three home-balls again; but this time the aft homeball was larger than the others. There were no obvious tanks of reserve fuel; Martin assumed the fuel must now be stored in the aft homeball. That might reflect a design improvement; the more he saw, the more he was convinced that the Brothers’ Ship of the Law was a later model, with major differences in