Anvil of Stars (58 page)

"How long is it going to take?" Ariel asked.

"The war? I don't know. Could be weeks. Months."

"It doesn't look like it will take nearly that long. I'm tired." She sounded like a child.

Martin cradled her in his arms.

Number eight, the gas giant Mixer, expanding like a sick, bruised balloon, shell upon shell of brilliant gases like the petals of flowers. Thousands of years of construction and technology and how many individuals, how many beings even more developed than the staircase gods? Imagine so many possibilities not shown. Who is winning

Eat sleep share a part of the wall that sucks away our wastes

Ship no larger than an automobile

How many survived fromTrojan Horse

Most of the seed-puffs gone now exhausted or served their purpose. Four worlds dead or dying, others under siege. God the power. What will we do after, knowing this? Maybe Hans is right they will snuff us.

Gas giants ripping apart in slow motion can it be we did this? They are like suns now, spinning tails of brilliance from poles and equator, prominences. Did Hans know we could do this

No messages and two days have passed. We sweep away from Leviathan. Sleep much of the time, eat rarely now, there is no space to exercise. Breathe slowly, watching worlds writhe and die across hours and days.

All the rocky planets and moons seething surfaces uniform deep red

All! All! Jesus, ALL of them!

Ariel leaned over him, hand on his shoulder. "I can't get the ship to talk," she told him. "It won't answer." Martin tried. Still no answer. "That means we're going to die, doesn't it?"

"I hope not," he said. Ariel pounded a fist on the gray wall. "Hey! Talk to us!"

No images no information. Try exercising, pushing against each other, feet to feet, wrestling she is almost as strong as I am strain a muscle.

Tell her I'm dreaming more now of Earth. Of forests and rivers, of our house in the woods in Oregon with the broad patio. My toys, soldiers my parents bought me. We talk until we get thirsty. Trickle of water from the wall, wastes still sucked away something is working but the mom does not speak and we can't see anything outside. Sleep most of the time and talk of spaces outside, times past, places gone.

* * * *

Getting cold actually now. We hug each other but no energy left to exercise. Saw Theodore in the cabin playing cards with himself. Smiled at me. Offered a deck to me. Maybe he's a ghost and the dead are going to greet us soon.

Such a great tide of dead rising from this place, trillions we've killed. What do staircase gods look like reporting to the afterlife, already stripped of material bodies? No battlefield so crowded with dead in long lines and we stand in queue waiting our turn to be inspected passed through. Salamander and Frog ahead of me; the babar and sharks up ahead, looking angrily at us. Don't get too close to them don't want fights in line Theodore says.

* * * *

"Martin, wake up. There's a little water now. Drink."

"Did you have yours?" he asked.

"I've had mine. Drink."

He sucked globules from the air. One got in his eye, burned a little. The water didn't taste good. But it was wet.

No food.

For some time, Martin felt no hunger, until he saw Ariel looking visibly thinner, and felt hungry in her place, for she did not complain.

"It's been at least six days," Martin said.

"It's been eight days exactly."

"How do you know?"

She held up her right hand and pointed to the middle ringer. "Eight. I trim my fingernails with my teeth. See? These two are long."

* * * *

Are my parents dead? How would I know? Maybe we'll meet them soon. Is Rosa in this line? I see her. Won't look at me, won't give up her place to come talk to me. Theodore goes over to talk with her. He doesn't care about his place.

"Who is Theodore?" Ariel asked. Her lips had cracked and bled sluggishly. She looked elfin with hunger, eyes large and high cheeks gaunt.

"He died."

"On the Ark?"

Martin shook his head and his neck muscles hurt, bones grinding. Muscles atrophying. No exercise no energy. "On Dawn Treader. Killed himself."

"I don't remember him."

"He killed himself."

Ariel wrinkled her face in concentration. "Maybe my mind is going. I don't remember him."

Martin looked at her and felt something cold. His lips were parched and cracking and he licked them. "Very smart," he said. "Smarter than me."

Ariel shook her head, and the coldness grew in him.

"I remember him," Martin said, but there wasn't enough energy for either of them to carry the question farther.

Captain Bligh in his boat carving up a bird between the men

sound

Water dripped onto his lips like rain.

"Martin?"

Moved, lifted, weight. Pressing of hands weight on his back. Voices familiar.

"Twenty-two days."

"Martin."

Small pain in his arm nothing compared to a chorus of fresh pains all over his body. Tingles, stabs, bones grinding, eyes opened to whiteness no detail.

Then snakes of lights. Freeway rain in Oregon with tail-lights last year of the world. Snakes of lights in a cabin, ceiling and floor, weight.

"Hello."

No longer in line of dead.

"Hello," he said, voice like rocks in a slide.

"You look pretty shitty, my friend."

So who was it? Familiar.

Shadow in the light, another shadow. "I can't see."

"You both died, you know that? I mean literally, your hearts were stopped and something in the ship, the ship's last energy, wrapped you in a field so you couldn't, you know, decay. Absolutely incredible. Martin, come forth."

Who would talk like that.

Joe Flatworm.

"I'm on the ship?" Martin asked. "Greyhound?"

"We picked you up five days ago. The sores are gone. You're looking a lot better. We got four of the other ships. Saved seven Brothers, seven of us."

"Ariel."

"She's alive. It's been a season of miracles, Martin."

He saw Joe's face more clearly. "The war?"

"It's still going. We're still here." Joe's broad, pleasant face, supple brows, wide smile. He held Martin's hand firmly between his hands. Skin warm, dry, like sunned leather.

Martin craned his neck and looked at himself, wrapped in a medical field, surrounded by warmth, an electric tingle moving from place to place through his body. Relaxed his neck. Swallowed. Throat raw. "Hans?"

Joe's smile vanished. "Hey," he said. "We're getting it done. That's enough."

Add to the list: Hakim Hadj, Erin Eire, Cham Shark. Silken Parts, Dry Skin/Norman, Sharp Seeing, missing or dead as well. Presumed dead after so many days.

Still weak, Martin insisted on leaving the medical field to join Hans and view the war. The war had been on for twenty-four days; most of the damage, Joe said, had been done. "We've whipped them," he said with an uneasy smile. Then he took Martin to the nose of Greyhound.

Hans hung in a net before dozens of projections. His appearance shocked Martin; hair almost brown with sweat and oil, face thin, stinking of sweat and tension. Hans wore only shorts and a sleeveless shirt. His arms seemed knotted with muscles, empty of fat; legs likewise. He did not turn around as Martin and Joe entered.

Giacomo curled asleep in a rear corner, hand reflexively grasping a net.

"Martin's back," Joe announced. Hans shivered and looked around.

"Good," he said.

The projections showed planetary cinders, wreaths of fading plasma, oblong chunks of moons, seed structures scored and headless and broken like sticks.

Hans kept his shrewd and weary eyes on Martin, evaluating, smiling faintly. "How are you feeling?"

"Okay," Martin said. He had never imagined they would ever summon such destruction.

"Kind of stirring, isn't it?" Hans said, nodding at the projections.

Martin shook his head.

"Hard to take it all in, sometimes," Hans said. "I've spent hours up here just… assessing damage, looking for something we haven't destroyed. It's complete. Last two days, even Sleep has broken up." He pointed to a large image of scattered masses, some dark, some flickering with light, floating in a gray, hazy void. Within the debris, a piece of what must have been crust, thousands of miles wide, rippled like fabric, its edges crumbling away. "No more staircase gods."

Martin forced himself to breathe again. The intake of breath sounded like a groan. Hans chuckled. "Glad to see you're impressed."

Martin shook his head. Tides of conflicting emotion pulled him one way, then another. We've done the Job. How do we know? We've done it. It's over.

"Whenever you're ready to lend a hand, there's a lot of scut work to get done," Hans said. "We're taking a break now. Ship is on relaxed alert. You should have seen us at the peak. Every Wendy and Lost Boy had their hands on some weapon or another. Giacomo and the ships' minds… the ships' minds, mostly, once the evidence was in… really went to town on new weapons. Long-range noach conversions, quark matter pitfalls, spin shattering, they made a whole new arsenal."

Did they? Or had the ships' minds kept them hidden, waiting for necessity?

"We sent out fifteen craft, mostly for reconnaissance. We got twelve of them back."

Martin nodded, eyes still fixed on the abstract complexity of Sleep's corpse, muted colors horribly beautiful. He could not connect the debris with what he had seen on the two journeys to Sleep's surface. Somewhere in the dust, scattered atoms of Salamander and Frog, the babar, the red joint-tentacle creature that had crawled up onto their disk ferry for a look.

Trillions.

Hans motioned for Martin to come closer. "I've got my suspicions," he said as Martin laddered forward and hung beside him. "I think the moms held back on us at first. Maybe we've been lied to all along. But frankly I don't give a shit. In the end, they gave us the tools, and that's what counts."

Giacomo stirred, opened his eyes, and saw Martin. "Hakim didn't make it. Erin. Cham." Giacomo nodded and set his lips, then shook his head.

"I know," Martin said. Resentful that he could be expected to react. He could not feel grief yet. None of this seemed real. He expected to wake back on Dawn Treader and know they still had the Job ahead of them.

Giacomo blinked slowly. "We saved Jennifer," he said. His eyes seemed darker, deeper, wrapped in exhausted, bruised flesh. "She'll be all right."

Martin shouldered Hans to peer into Hans' display. Hans made space for him without complaint.

"It's done," Giacomo said. He shook his head in disbelief. "It was a shell. Sixty percent of what we saw was fake matter. We think there were only four real planets. Sleep was one of the real ones."

"Don't cheapen our victory," Hans said.

"It was just a shell," Giacomo repeated. "We found the projectors, we figured out how to make them echo our energy, subvert the system from within… we found a few points where we could start chain reactions… We couldn't have done it before. It wasn't nothing and it wasn't easy. We used up nearly all our fuel."

"Real fireworks," Hans said. "Did you see it?"

"Is there enough real mass, are there enough volatiles for us to refuel?" Martin asked.

"Plenty," Hans said. Martin looked to Giacomo for a second opinion.

"We'll have enough," Giacomo said.

Hans reached out and grabbed Martin's shoulder, fingers hard and painful. He shook Martin lightly. "You going to fault me for this?"

Martin looked aggrieved, or perhaps simply confused.

Hans smiled. "We can go marry a planet now."

"We can't leave yet, actually," Giacomo said. "We have to finish the examination—"

"Autopsy," Joe said from the rear.

"Make sure it's dead. Do some research," Giacomo continued. "The moms need a death certificate. We still haven't talked about being released. We don't know where we're going—"

"Shit," Hans said. "Let's savor the moment. We'll have time enough for the bureaucratic stuff later."

Giacomo seemed not to hear him. "We've got to transfer Greyhound's Brothers to Shrike."

"Shrike stayed out of it," Hans said. "Can you believe it? They didn't do a thing."

"I didn't do a thing," Martin said.

"You opened the door, Martin."

Giacomo agreed. "You put yourselves in much more danger than we did. You lost many more…" He saw Martin's expression and lifted his eyebrows, cocked his head. "Sorry."

"We should hold a service. Honor the dead," Martin said.

Hans did not answer; calling up projections, baring his teeth in a grimacing smile, shaking his head in victorious wonder. "Look at that," he murmured. "Look… at… THAT."

Eye on Sky, Double Twist, Rough Tail, Strong Cord, and Green Cord had all agreed to Martin's request for a meeting in the Brothers' recovery quarters.

He visited Paola Birdsong in her quarters to .ask that she interpret for him again.

Paola had spent less time in space than Martin and Ariel, fewer than eighteen days, but she had been with Strong Cord and Green Cord, and Joe told Martin that the time had been very hard for her. None of the braids had held together; she had been alone for eighteen days with twenty-eight hungry, confused cords.

"At least they didn't chew on me," she said, her voice weak and rough. She had thinned considerably, but her color was good and she moved without apparent pain. "I'm fit enough to work. I never do eat much."

Martin smiled admiringly. "You're a tough one. My joints still ache."

"Have you visited Ariel?" Paola asked.

He shook his head. "I asked, but she's in seclusion. We spent a lot of time together. I'm not sure she wants to see me again."

"She's been sweet on you for months," Paola said.

"We've been lovers," Martin admitted.

Paola raised her eyebrows. "Better than having cords squirm all around you," she said. "I'm glad it was me. Anybody else might have come unglued. Is Ariel going to join Rosa's people and go with Shrike?"

Martin shook his head. "I don't know."

"I'm thinking about it," Paola said. "You?"