Greg Bear: Anvil of Stars

Hakim moved aside for the mom’s passage and spread his ladder to where Martin waited by the star sphere.

“Hello, Pan Martin,” Hakim said. He climbed to within a couple of meters of Martin and assumed a floating lotus. “How are you today?”

“As usual,” Martin said. He bit his lower lip and gestured at the door with an unenthused hand. “The usual friendly brick wall.”

“Ah yes.” Leader of the search team, Hakim was shorter than Martin by seven or eight centimeters, with smooth brown skin, a thin sharp nose, and large confident eyes black as onyx. He spoke English with a strong hint of Oxford, where his father had gone to school.

To see Hakim blink was a wonder; his face conveyed centuries of equanimity in the midst of strife, his lips composed a genial and unjudging line. “I am glad to hear it.”

He had taught Martin Arabic a few years before, enough for him to read Arabic children’s books from the libraries, but the lingua franca of the Dawn Treader was English, as it had been aboard the Central Ark, Earth’s death having frozen the American moment in history.

“The search team may have a suspect,” Hakim said. “I would like to present the evidence to you, and then to the moms. If you do not agree, we will keep our thoughts from the moms until better evidence comes along.” Hakim was usually cautious and taciturn to a fault about the search team’s work.

Martin arranged himself in a less graceful lotus before him. “I just gave my tenday report…”

Hakim apologized. “We cannot be certain enough to render final judgment—but there is sufficient evidence that we believe the ship should send out remotes…” He caught himself, apologized again, and said, “But that is your decision, Martin.”

Martin said, “No offense taken, Hakim.”

“I am glad. We have found a stellar group of three stars less than a light-year from our present position. The spectra of the two contain a mix of trace radioactive elements and rare earths in proportions similar to those in the remains of the captured killer machines.”

Hakim presented the facts for Martin with his wand; they appeared to float before him, or he among them, words and images and icons and charts, a visual language created by the moms. Martin had become used to this method of teaching on the Ark; now he took it in stride.

At the center of the displays hung diagrams of three stellar systems. Figures surrounding the diagrams told him that these stars were no more than a trillion kilometers from each other.

The moms used stellar classifications based on mass, diameter, luminosity, age, and percentages of “metals,” elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Martin was more used to this scale than the one that would have been familiar to his father. The children had converted some of the moms’ technical terms to more informal language: Thus, the closest star was a Buttercup Seven, about nine tenths the mass and diameter of Sol, bright yellow, relatively high in metals. The second closest was a Cornflower Two, one and a half times Sol’s mass, with a lower percentage of metals. The third star in the group was an aging Firestorm Three, a brilliant bloated red giant. The Buttercup Seven had four planets, two of them peculiar, diminished gas giants.

Hakim noticed his interest in these worlds. “They are substantially smaller than might be expected—evidence of gas mining, perhaps,” he said.

Martin frowned. Tough to refuel the Ship of the Law in a system that had already been tapped out by an old civilization.

Two rocky planets hugged close to the Buttercup Seven. In addition, there were several—perhaps as many as five—invisible bodies close to the star. Together, they might have added up to the mass of Earth’s moon.

The Cornflower Two, a pale yellow giant, had ten planets, two of them apparent gas giants. The Firestorm Three was surrounded only by small rubble; at some ninety million kilometers in diameter, it could have swallowed several planets when it ballooned.

Numbers flickered in and out of his awareness; his eyes shifted around the display, picking out what he needed to know.

Martin examined the intrinsic spectra of the stars. There were intriguing diffraction patterns, unnatural ratios of infra-red versus other frequencies. A technological civilization had been at work around at least two of the stars, the Buttercup and the Cornflower.

“How long ago did the Firestorm balloon?” he asked.

“We estimate five thousand years,” Hakim said.

“Did they armor?”

“The civilization around the Buttercup apparently armored. We have no direct evidence yet for the Cornflower.”

“But they haven’t built an all-absorbing envelope…”

“No,” Hakim agreed. An envelope around each star—a Dyson construct of multiple orbiting structures surrounding the star in many layers—would have reduced the stellar images to heat-waste, dull infra-red only. Martin checked the information available on the interstellar particle fluxes surrounding the stars—the stellar winds—and felt a tickle of apprehension.

The Ship of the Law was one point eight trillion kilometers from the nearest, the Buttercup. Martin reached out to touch a glowing geometric shape pulsing slowly next to the star images. The shape unfolded like a flower into a series of pentagonal petals. He touched the petals in sequence until he had the information he desired. “The Buttercup may have large structures in orbit, besides these five dark masses. You think that’s sign of armoring?”

Hakim nodded. Martin summoned and inspected occultations, spectrum variability, brightness fluctuations. He called up absorption spectra for the stellar atmosphere, outer stellar envelope and “wind” of particles, and planetary atmospheres.

The Ship of the Law had not sent out its remotes, and the information he received obviously came from angles and distances not their own.

“I have obtained this additional information from the moms, three months ago,” Hakim said, as if reading his thoughts. “They’ve kept watch on this group for a long time. Perhaps thousands of years.”

The Benefactor machines that had destroyed the Killers around Sol had collected a fragment of a killer probe and analyzed its composition, checking for minute traces of radioactive elements and proportions of other elements. Martin thought it likely the Benefactor machines knew the characteristics of populations of stars for thousands of light years around Sol, and had sent the Dawn Treader in a direction likely to encounter stars matching the suspected origins of the killer probes. Perhaps the moms know even more …

Martin suddenly didn’t like being alone with Hakim in the schoolroom, talking about such things. He wanted the others to share his responsibility and back his conclusions. He wanted a mom present. “How about the assay?” he asked, swallowing too noisily.

“You can refer to it.”

He flushed, touched another shape marked with a spinning atom symbol, and it blossomed. The comparison between the probe’s composition and the Buttercup’s stellar spectra and estimated planetary makeup was close. The killer machines could have been manufactured in this system.

Additional information came up beneath his questing fingers. Four other inhabited worlds within two hundred and ninety light years of the group had been attacked and transformed by killer probes, all within the past thousand years. There were one million three hundred thousand stars within this radius, or roughly one star for every seventy-eight and a half cubic light years. Four civilizations had been murdered, five including the Earth; only two besides the Earth had left any survivors.

And where are those survivors? On other Ships of the Law?