Beads of Hans’ spittle hung between them like tiny jewels. Hans leaned back, face blotched with red and drawn with white. He withdrew his finger. “I didn’t fail. I got the Job done. If you want to be Pan, you can have it. I resign. You lead us to the promised land.”
“There needs to be an investigation,” Martin said.
“I said yes. Get out of here. Let someone enjoy what we’ve accomplished.
“We lost so much,” Hans said to his back as Martin passed through the door. “So goddamned much. What more do you want?”
In his quarters, Martin folded himself in a net and stared at the dead worlds, then some of the pictures transmitted by Salamander.
Hans had ripped his heart open. He did not know exactly why he persisted in asking for an investigation, but something of his father and something of his mother pushed him. He was motivated by lessons he barely remembered learning on Earth and on the Central Ark. Primal things in his life.
In the nose, Giacomo, Eye on Sky, Anna Gray Wolf, and Thorkild Lax worked to assess the damage, tally the results, before making their final report to Hans. Unable to sleep, Martin came to them and sat in silence while they worked. They played back the war at high speed, tracking the destruction, the ineffective counter-measures, the sheer disproportion of the victory.
Martin saw again the shadowy curled ribbon writing across Leviathan’s worlds like a finger, moving even more rapidly in the playback. Picture stacked over picture, Giacomo observing with a critical half-squint, Eye on Sky coiled with head cords attentive.
They came to the endgame.
“Doers and makers seeding here and here.” Giacomo pointed to a magnified image of planetary rubble blooming against darkness. Flash of that awful finger. Tiny sparks glowed in the image like fireflies in a storm cloud. “Making interceptors from the cores of Blinker and Cueball. Now—they’re not even hiding themselves. Interceptors go out on anti em plumes.” Radiant lines of white fanning out, trails fading behind them.
The wands quickly counted interceptor traces: fifty, sixty, seventy thousand in this region alone, each no larger than a car, each seeking a Leviathan ship. No targets were visible in this image, but in another, the interceptors had found their ships, and the points of light were sharp and intense. The torch glare reflected from expanding clouds of dust and gas, like welding torches deep in a cave, on and off, winking, until they became a starfield. Enacting the Law at a distance.
Completely different rules.
Hundreds more images. Torches flickering, dying, starfields of destruction vanishing.
“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.”