Anvil of Stars

“I we see no surviving escape vehicles,” Eye on Sky said, scenting the air with something like cinnamon and fresh-dug dirt.

“I don’t either, but we have to expect them. The ones we took out might even be decoys. Maybe they transfer to some point outside the system by noach. You know, wholesale pattern transfer. Mind across the void.”

“That is not a confirmed possible,” Eye on Sky said.

Giacomo shrugged. “I’m trying to think of everything.”

“Ship has already thought of everything,” Eye on Sky said.

“I won’t argue that,” Giacomo said. At the heart of a planet’s dust corpse, he pointed to more sparks and red glows. “Signature of quark sex reactions, right?”

Martin had no idea what that might be.

They worked for an hour, ignoring Martin. When they took a break, however, Giacomo climbed along a field to hang beside Martin. Eye on Sky and the others went aft.

“Jennifer’s back with us tomorrow,” he said. “She told me what happened on the Trojan Horse.” He clenched his jaw, lowered his voice. “Not right, Martin.”

“You didn’t know about it?”

Giacomo looked away, tilted his head. “I had so much new stuff to think about, having the ships’ minds really open up, go all out for us… Hans made the decision. The weapons were ready, we’d already seeded some planets with noach engineering while you were down there talking. Hans said he wouldn’t let them trap us this time, wouldn’t let them fool us.” His eyes gleamed.

“Hans said nothing about our not knowing… that it was starting?”

Giacomo shook his head, still fired by the buzz of memory. Nostrils flared. “You should have been here. It was a real circus. I mean, I had worked out some of the momeraths, and so did Jennifer and Silken Parts and a lot of the others… But the ships’ minds are working, then the moms and snake mothers bring out these plans… Makers at a distance, nothing in between. Just delude some matter into rearranging its form, ordering itself by your design. Fantastic.

“That was what the Killers were trying to do to us. But they couldn’t find us. We were small, they were big. Our chief advantage.”

“Did we discover these new weapons with the help of the moms, or were they already in the ships’ minds?”

Giacomo shrugged. “I asked the moms that question twice. No real answer.” He mimicked the flat neutrality of a mom’s voice: “ ‘You are given what you need to enact the Law.’ I’ll say this much—I had a long time to think things over, even before Jennifer and I jammed. The momeraths I did pointed to some pretty scary things.”

“Like?”

“All by myself, seeing the planets, trying to figure out Sleep, and Blinker, I came up with”—he circled his hands—“persuasion. It’s a principle, like deluding matter through hidden channels. Space is like matter—has its own bookkeeping, its own channels. I don’t think the moms knew what I was thinking, I mean, I don’t think the Benefactors… the ships at least… Christ, Martin. I’m getting all tangled.”

“They didn’t know about persuasion, whatever it is.”

“Right… until we saw Blinker, saw their noach range out to fifty billion klicks.”

Martin nodded. Giacomo was still drunk with the knowledge, the power.

“Space can be persuaded to get out of the way, shrink its metric, collapse atomic diameters to create quark matter. All by myself, without the ships’ minds, I saw that quark matter makes neutronium look like a gas. By tweaking internal bits in the quarks—a whole level below particle bits—quark matter can be split into really fanatic lovers. One must have the other, or, you know, the universe will end. You put anything between the lovers… what stands between ceases to exist. The privileged bands get incredibly vicious. The books must be balanced.

“Martin, the way it went, I don’t think the moms or the ships’ minds had to know anything. I saw it. The ships’ minds worked through a couple of hundred lifetimes of my thinking. They were way ahead of me. I talked to the moms, the ships’ minds talked to me, I talked to Jennifer, compared notes, and… There it was. Then the ship went to work making the weapons.”

Giacomo took a deep breath and shivered some of his energy away, chuckled at his state. “Sorry. It’s not that I don’t care. But sometimes I felt as if we were forcing God to make mistakes, and there was this… this indignant power making things right again, at any cost. The Killers got in the way.”

“Of God,” Martin said.

Giacomo’s cheek twitched, then he grimaced. “Whatever. All this deluding and persuading. Like seduction, playing a game. We played the game better than the Killers did.”

“Maybe they were tired,” Martin said.

“As good an explanation as any,” Giacomo said. He shook his arms put, toes poked into the field. Jittered, hunched his shoulders, eyes dancing with energy beyond exhaustion.

He’s had his religious experience.

“I keep seeing something in the playbacks,” Martin said. “It can’t be real—it looks like a big finger.”

Giacomo grinned, nodded. “The finger. That’s scary, isn’t it? Reaching out.” He curled his finger and poked the air. “It shows up wherever there are large masses of separated quark components. That’s what made me think maybe God was getting really angry and putting things right.”

Martin looked unconvinced. “God again.”

“It looks like it’s moving really fast, but that’s an illusion. It’s a chain of spatial contortions upsetting ionized hydrogen, a real barometer of quark separation. That’s one theory… or it’s a string of some sort pulled out of the universe’s sub-basement. You know, the glue that keeps us on the canvas? I haven’t even begun to think about what that implies. Maybe I don’t want to.”

“Do you think the Killers were still at home?” Martin asked softly.

Giacomo narrowed his eyes and licked his lips. “Not my call, Martin. Back to work. Hans wants this day after tomorrow. We’ll go after anything that looks like survivors.”

“It isn’t over,” Martin said.

“Justice must be complete,” Giacomo said. Swinging away, he paused, glanced over his shoulder, said, “You think the moms will let us keep what we know?”

Martin lightly tapped his temple.

“Right,” Giacomo said. “They’ve never asked us to forget.”

Ariel sat in the cafeteria with Donna and Anna Gray Wolf. Twenty others off Hans’ strict watch schedule ate in clusters. Ariel looked up as Martin entered, nodded to him almost curtly and looked away. She had cut her hair very short and wore colorless overalls. Self-consciously, Martin pushed himself in their direction.

“I’m off to help Giacomo in a few minutes,” Anna said pointedly. “You two should be alone, compare notes.”

Ariel’s color was good, and she did not appear much thinner than he. “No hurry,” she said.

“We’re having a wake at day’s end,” Donna said. She swallowed a last bite of something green from the air and gathered her crumbs with a small field.

None of this seemed apropos of anything to Martin. “Do I make you uncomfortable?” he asked Ariel. This was the first time he had seen her since they had been removed from their escape craft. The awkwardness disturbed him.

“Park here,” Ariel said. Donna moved over, and Martin drifted between them. “I’m glad you were with me,” Ariel said. “You helped me stay sane.”

Martin nodded, the tension not yet diminished.

“But we need to know where you stand. You know that Hans has put together a political squad.”

“I’ve heard about it,” he said.

“Nobody’s enthusiastic, but they’re still keeping track of us.”

“Right.”

“So we’re talking right here in the open,” Donna said. “We’ll call his bluff.”

“We need to know which side you’re on,” Ariel said.