Greg Bear: Anvil of Stars

They were new. Waiting.

“Do you agree with we our suspecting?”

“Yes,” Martin croaked, and coughed again. “Oh, God, yes.”

“We we are hoping these are the last, that no more have escaped to find and destroy other worlds.”

Martin nodded, speechless with fury and a high, horrid sadness.

“Should we we finish the Job?” Stonemaker asked.

Today we finished the Job. The Brothers asked for the honor of destroying the needles, and Ariel granted their request. The moms and snake mothers think the Job is done, but they will station watchers here, just to be sure.

I have kept this face for so long it has become natural, but when I learned that I was not wrong, I cried in front of them, and no one came to me, no one put their arms around me. So be it.

I held them together. The Killers were still here. Still shitting us all; I saw it.

I think they’ll take me in again, but I don’t know how long it will be. They’ll need me.

I don’t think anybody really cares about others only about themselves. That’s true of me too I suppose. But I’m glad to see us finally getting our reward, all of us. I can put up with being alone for a while.

I will build a shrine to those who died. When we get there. I’ll do it with my bare hands.

Donna Emerald Sea brought out the gowns today. They are very pretty but I don’t think I can wear one; I don’t like dresses and they don’t like me.

I decided against investigating Hans. Made up my mind this morning after talking with Martin. Martin feels real sympathy for Hans. I don’t know why. Hans is perhaps the only real shithead on this boat.

I am sorry the Brothers will not be going with us, but at least all the Lost Boys and Wendys are sticking together. We saw it through, and that’s something to be proud of. We didn’t end up like the death ship, but almost. Boy it was close.

Today we left Leviathan. The ship is big again and well stocked with fuel. All the crew gathered in the schoolroom and we had a naming ceremony. It was special. We christened the ship Dawn Treader II. Someone suggested Mayflower but that caused a lot of argument about colonialism and other sensitive stuff, religion and such, so I stepped in and suggested we stick with what we had. Really asserted myself. I’m not sure I like doing that sort of thing but I can do it at least .

I feel funny about Martin. He put me off for so long and now he looks lost. Most of us are lost, or at a loss might be more accurate.

The Job is done and we’re free to go where we please. The moms will take us there, but who knows how long we’ll have to look? How far we’ll travel? More centuries, I guess. Anyway, about Martin: I am going to try it one more time. He is such a funny fellow.

Martin made up a name and started writing under it, things I guess he didn’t believe he could write himself. He made up Theodore Dawn and then he made up that Theodore had committed suicide. He said Theodore was his balance and atonement.

For a while I thought that Theodore was the sign of something really crazy. But Martin knew what we’d end up doing, what we would become when we did the Job. Theodore might have been his first attempt to make armor, to… what? I don’t know.

A way of coping. Theodore kept him human, I guess.

We’ve all been a little crazy, each in our own way.

I love Martin, as much as I can love anybody. Maybe it will work. I’ll try.

Well now that you’re rid of me I can write down my reactions and then fade away, all right? I think we did pretty well, for humans. I think you did damned well, and learned a lot. You’re still not as sharp as I am, but then, what the hell, I killed myself, didn’t I? You are a survivor. You care. When we get to our home, you’ll do well, and you’ll keep the balance, because that’s what you’re good at.

It is time to be whole again, to forget as much as we can, to take us where we have to go to become adult human beings.

Know thyself. You are little and clumsy and need love.

Today I laddered down the aft wormspace and found a bunch of Lost Boys and Wendys playing with wet wadded clothes. Brought back such memories. I spent the rest of the day in a kind of haze, watching videos from the Ark, watching Mother and Father, wondering if I measured up to them. But I now realize they can’t judge me, or us.

We have found a candidate star. It’s about a thousand light years away. With our remotes out as far as they’ll go — fifty billion klicks on each side now. I — we can see two worlds that look very pretty, and Anna and Giacomo and Jennifer say we can live there .

The worlds are silent, but that doesn’t mean they’re not inhabited. We’ll take the risk, and just go on to somewhere else if they are . That is how we differ.

These worlds are farther away than the Sun and Mars and Venus. But we can’t go back. We don’t know what our people are like now, how much they’ve changed. I would hate to go all that way to encounter disembodied intelligences, like staircase gods.

Besides, we’re war dogs. David Aurora did a study to show that what we knew and what we’ve become would disrupt any human society we might find. The crew agreed. Classic Catch-22.

Most of the crew thinks finding the needles gets us off the hook. Nobody’s debating the matter, though. We’re all very sensitive about this. This is the one issue that could still kill us in the years ahead.

I believe Frog and Salamander and the others did not know.

DID NOT KNOW.

Ah, Christ, I don’t want to think about it but I can’t avoid it in my dreams.

Our evil is far less than theirs, but what does that mean? What did we do, and who or what has been served?

For me, nothing is resolved. I must not look again at the records sent from Sleep.

In time I might have to believe as Hans does, that it was all a sham.

I try to imagine the depths of viciousness, of evil, of the Killers, that they would hide behind their own children. I cannot .

I had hoped that with the end of the Job there would be relief from pain, and perhaps there will be, but only in deep time.

The moms did not train us for this.

We left Leviathan behind two tendays ago. Scouts still fly through the debris, searching, but we’ll have no more to do with it. We accelerate at one g, the memory of Earth in our flesh still making that most comfortable. Twenty years will pass for the ship, even at near-c; long enough that the moms will put us in cold sleep. We’ll have about a year to think and heal.

Dyads are forming again, stable ones.

Ariel is coming to visit later. She’s a very good Pan, better than I was.

Paola is seeing Hans. Can you believe it?

I wrote the last message from Theodore. Then I removed it from ship’s memory. I can take it now, the cruelty, the fear, the responsibility. I think I can.

I will take them to their chosen worlds and assist them in adapting to the new environments.

I have no instructions what to do with the fruits of our combined efforts. Having no knowledge of how other ships have dealt with intellectual collaborations with their crews, or how they have dealt with the inevitable transfer of characteristics, I can see no other option.