Anvil Of Stars Part 30

Hans chuckled. "Higher rank than us."

"A different arrangement, under different circ.u.mstances. The Red Tree Runners travelled 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 s.h.i.+p's mind, or interfere with its operations. Over ninety percent of the records are too deteriorated for retrieval. One third of the s.h.i.+pboard recordings have survived, but all biological, historical records, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d d.a.m.ned b.l.o.o.d.y 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 l.u.s.t 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 s.h.i.+p; 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 partic.i.p.ated 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' s.e.xual 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 pa.s.sing 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 Hans is funny. You think is funny. You think you you are funny. What about me?" are funny. What about me?"

n.o.body said a word. Uncomfortable shufflings.

"What about us 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-a.s.sured.

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 pa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+p of the Law to chasten them; she was up to something else.

"How many of you have had strange dreams?" she asked. That hit the mark; n.o.body answered or raised their hands, but a stiffening of bodies, a turning away of eyes, showed that most had. Martin looked over his crewmates, neckhair rising.

"You've been dreaming about people who died, haven't you?" Rosa continued, still smiling, still disarming.

"What about you?" Rex barked.

"Oh, yes, I've been dreaming; if you could call it dreaming, the crazy things that happen to me. I've got it bad. I don't just talk to dead people; I talk to dead ideas. I visit places none of us have thought about since we were little children. Now that's that's crazy!" crazy!"

"Sit down, Rosa," Hans said.

Rosa did not flinch, did not s.h.i.+ft her smile or narrow her eyes; she was oblivious to him.

"I've been dreaming about people who died on Earth," Jeanette said. "They tell me things."

"What do they tell you?" Rosa asked. Target acquired, audience responding, some at least warming to this change, welcoming relief from the previous cruel absurdity.

Kai Khosrau jumped in before Jeanette could answer. "My parents," he said.

"What do your parents tell you?"

"My friends when I was a little girl," Kirsten Two Bites called out. "They must be dead; they weren't on the Ark." "What do they tell you, Kirsten?"

"My brother on the Ark," Patrick Angelfish said.

"What does he tell you, Patrick?" Rosa's face reddened with enthusiasm.

Martin's skin p.r.i.c.kled. Theodore. Theodore.

"They all tell us we're in a maze and we've forgotten what's important," Rosa answered herself, triumphant. "We're in a maze of pain and we can't find a way out. We don't know what we're doing or why we're here any more. We used to know. Who knows why we're here?"

"We all know," Hans said, eyes squinted, looking from face to face around him, shrewd, a.s.sessing. "We're doing the Job. We've already done more than all the others before us..."

He cut himself short, glanced at Martin, grimaced.

"We know up here," Rosa said, tapping her head. She placed her hand over her breast. "We do not know here."

"Oh, Jesus," Hans groaned. No one else said a word.

"We play and we try to laugh. We laugh at Hans, but he doesn't deserve our laughter. He's Pan. His job is tough. We should be laughing at ourselves. At our sadness."

Paola Birdsong cried out, "You're sick, Rosa. Some of us are still grieving. We don't know what to think...Stop this c.r.a.p now!"

"We're all grieving. All our lives is grief," Rosa said. "Grief and vengeance. Hate and death. No birth, no redemption. We are like mindless knives and guns, bombs, pigeons in rockets."

"Make your point and get off," Hans said, sensing that taking her off by force would meet with strong disapproval.

"Something else speaks to me," Rosa said, chin dipping, shoulders rising.

"Monsters in the halls?" Rex Live Oak called out.

"Let her talk," Jeanette Snap Dragon demanded, angry.

Hans started to rise.

Rosa lifted her arms. "The things we fight against, we might have called G.o.ds once, but we would have been wrong. They are not G.o.ds. They aren't even close. I saw something last tenday that nearly burned me alive."

"The G.o.d of our mothers and fathers!" Jeanette sobbed.

Martin slipped from his chair and started to leave. He did not want to be here, did not want to face this.

"No!" Rosa cried. "It has a voice like chimes, like flutes, like birds, but it crosses this span of stars like a whale in the sea."

Martin froze, eyes welling up. Yes. So huge and yet it cares. Yes. So huge and yet it cares.

"It touches everything, and around it swirls parts of itself like bees around a flower. It..."She nodded self-affirmation and wiped her eyes.

"Stop this now!" Hans ordered. "Enough!"

"It loves me!" Rosa cried, hands held out, fingers clutching. "It loves me, and I do not deserve its love do not deserve its love!"

A few of the men walked out past Martin, shaking their heads and muttering. None of the women left, though Ariel looked as if she might spit fire. Her body shook with anger, but she said nothing.

"It spoke to me. Its words ripped my head apart. Even when it was gentle, it overloaded me."

"Pray for us!" Kimberly Quartz shouted. Others yelled, "Back to the show! Get off!" Voices strained, bleating, angry.

"Then it showed itself to me," Rosa said in a stage whisper.

"What did it look like?" Kirsten Two Bites asked.

"It didn't come as a shadow. That was my preparation, my illness. I had to become sick to see, to want to see; sick and desperate and completely lost. It came to me when I was most ready, weakest and least myself. It was not a shadow, not a presence, but a folding-around. I cannot fold myself around this; it must wrap me. I saw it was not just a whale among the stars; it covered everything known. The parts of itself that I saw buzzing like bees were bigger than galaxies, dancing so slowly in endless night, trying to return to the center..."

"They can't! We can't!" Kirsten Two Bites said.

Hans got up, caught Martin's eye, gestured for him to follow.

Martin followed him outside the schoolroom. "What the h.e.l.l am I going to do?" Hans asked, shaking his head. "Some of them are into it. I should have kept the death s.h.i.+p secret."

"How?" Martin asked.

Hans shook his head. "If I ordered everybody out now, what would happen?"

"It would get worse," Martin said. He could still feel the tingle, the gooseflesh. He was confused; he feared Rosa, but part of him needed to hear what she had to say. He realized her message was crude, that she was undoubtedly crazy, but she had had a message, and no one else did. a message, and no one else did.

"If we don't do something, what'll happen to us?" Hans asked. "We might end up like those poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, drifting for thousands of years!"

Martin lowered his head. He did not want to acknowledge what such an awkward, unattractive person had made him feel: the depth of their lostness.

Hans stared at him and whistled. "You too, huh?"

"No," Martin said, shaking his head. "We should break it up now."

"Just you and me?"

"I'll get Ariel and the past Pans. You stay outside. We'll meet here and go back in, announce..."

"Training," Hans said. "If we can get back to some kind of training..."

"All right," Martin said, unable to think of anything better.

Martin entered the cafeteria, Rosa started to step down, and collapsed into the arms of Jeanette Snap Dragon and Kirsten Two Bites.

The meeting broke up with a scatter of hard, fragile laughter. Jeanette and Kirsten supported Rosa out the opposite door, away from the crowd. Martin subdued an urge to follow them, to question Rosa; instead, he collected Cham and Harpal and Ariel, and told them they were meeting with Hans. Ariel was puzzled.

"Why does Hans want to see me?" she asked. "Maybe he doesn't know yet," Martin said. "But I do."

"We're two months away from rendezvous." Hans folded his hands behind his head, leaning back on a chair that rose from the floor. Six gathered in his quarters; the past Pans, Ariel, at Martin's insistence, and Rex Live Oak, whom Hans had invited. "We're losing our edge. Martin sees this, and I'm sure the rest of you do, too. This is a s.h.i.+tty way to fight. Rosa isn't too far wrong; we fight ghosts, we lose our friends and gain nothing really deeply satisfying-just another step in the Job. And now we have nothing to do for months.

"We find a s.h.i.+p full of corpses, and the moms force us to go take a close look, stick our noses into the stink of failure. Meanwhile, we're waiting to receive strangers-new crewmates, not even human beings. Any wonder we start listening to Rosa?"

The six said nothing, waiting for a point to be made. Hans drew his lips together, said, "Am I right?"

"Right," Rex said.

Hans raised his hand over his head, spread the fingers, contemplated them.

Very melodramatic, Martin thought. Martin thought. Childlike. Childlike.

Hans' mood was unreadable. n.o.body else dared to speak. Martin felt some dreadful kind of grit being revealed in their Pan; tough, determined and perhaps a little perverse, even uncaring.

"The moms say we won't practise in simulations for a tenday, perhaps two," Hans said. "The h.e.l.l with waiting. We forget games and freeforalls. I don't want anybody slicking with anybody until this s.h.i.+p is fully prepared. I want some real tensions and angers, not these fake, s.h.i.+tty boredoms we have now. I'm going to have to slap this crew, hit them with work, busy work if necessary. Martin, can you figure the moms?"

Martin showed his surprise. "Beg pardon?"

"Any more insights into what they're up to?"

He fumbled for a second, shrugging, finally said, "They're making repairs still. I don't know what you-"

"Repairs h.e.l.l. They made your G.o.d d.a.m.ned racing boat to visit the death s.h.i.+p. They gave up a quarter of the fuel we gathered around Wormwood-at the cost of how many lives? Are they keeping anything else important from us?"

"I don't think so," Martin said. Ariel did not react. She seemed frozen, listening, waiting.