"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 hadhis 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."
Martin looked unconvinced. "God again."
"It looks like it's moving really fast, but that's an illusion. It's a chain of spatial contortions upsetting ionized hydrogen, a real barometer of quark separation. That's one theory… or it's a string of some sort pulled out of the universe's sub-basement. You know, the glue that keeps us on the canvas? I haven't even begun to think about what that implies. Maybe I don't want to."
"Do you think the Killers were still at home?" Martin asked softly.
Giacomo narrowed his eyes and licked his lips. "Not my call, Martin. Back to work. Hans wants this day after tomorrow. We'll go after anything that looks like survivors."
"It isn't over," Martin said.
"Justice must be complete," Giacomo said. Swinging away, he paused, glanced over his shoulder, said, "You think the moms will let us keep what we know?"
Martin lightly tapped his temple.
"Right," Giacomo said. "They've never asked us to forget. "
Ariel sat in the cafeteria with Donna and Anna Gray Wolf. Twenty others off Hans' strict watch schedule ate in clusters. Ariel looked up as Martin entered, nodded to him almost curtly and looked away. She had cut her hair very short and wore colorless overalls. Self-consciously, Martin pushed himself in their direction.
"I'm off to help Giacomo in a few minutes," Anna said pointedly. "You two should be alone, compare notes."
Ariel's color was good, and she did not appear much thinner than he. "No hurry," she said.
"We're having a wake at day's end," Donna said. She swallowed a last bite of something green from the air and gathered her crumbs with a small field.
None of this seemed apropos of anything to Martin. "Do I make you uncomfortable?" he asked Ariel. This was the first time he had seen her since they had been removed from their escape craft. The awkwardness disturbed him.
"Park here," Ariel said. Donna moved over, and Martin drifted between them. "I'm glad you were with me," Ariel said. "You helped me stay sane."
Martin nodded, the tension not yet diminished.
"But we need to know where you stand. You know that Hans has put together a political squad."
"I've heard about it," he said.
"Nobody's enthusiastic, but they're still keeping track of us."
"Right."
"So we're talking right here in the open," Donna said. "We'll call his bluff."
"We need to know which side you're on," Ariel said.
"No sides," Martin said.
"You can't be neutral," Anna said, righteous anger in her voice. "Hans has gone way beyond his charter."
"He'll call it martial law," Donna said. "The crew went along with him during the war. But we want him to resign as Pan."
"Why?" Martin asked. "He got the Job done."
Ariel searched his face for a sign of what he actually meant, but he was stubbornly blank. "Maybe," she said. "I doubt we'll ever really know."
"I've told him there should be an investigation of Rosa's death and Rex's suicide."
Ariel shook her head. "I sympathize, but that's kind of trivial now, Martin."
"It should be done," Anna said.
"Compared to what happened here, it's damned near meaningless, a gnat in a hurricane."
"She was crew," Martin said.
"Come on," Anna said. "It's still necessary. Martin's right."
"What will it accomplish?" Ariel said. "It's just part of a larger crime. First, he doesn't let us vote on this particular case. Twenty of us go down to Sleep to play ambassadors, and he knocks us out of the circuit, doesn't even bother to keep us informed—"
"He says that was because we could have been spied upon," Martin said. "Or even controlled."
Ariel brushed that aside. "And he executes without having a proven case. Have you seenthe destruction, Martin? Can you even begin to absorb it?"
"I've seen it," Martin said, "and no, I can't."
David Aurora approached their group on a ladder field. "I'd keep it down, folks," he said in a low voice. "Patrick keeps his ears open."
"Patrick's replaced Rex," Anna said. "There are others."
"What we want to do," Ariel said, "is get Hans out one way or another, elect a new Pan, and try to convince the Brothers to stay with us, to combine ships. We think we'd have a better chance to find a home that way."
David, having issued his warning, shook his head and pulled himself to another group on the far side of the cafeteria.
"You think Hans has really gone off the deep?" Martin asked. "You think he's going to squash dissent?"
"You want to investigate Rosa's death, but you ask a question like that?" Anna asked.
"Pardon me, but I'm very confused," Martin said.
"It's pretty clear," Ariel said. Her coldness toward him was like a slap. She's reversed course again. Who can ever know her?
"It's the new order," Donna said, thin hands rubbing her thin forearms. "He cut us loose on the Trojan Horse. He used us. I don't care, I don't trust him, and we need a Pan we can trust, and we need the rest of our crew. We can't just split and go in two directions. It isn't right. We need the Brothers, too."