"How about names for these… creatures or beings or whatever?" Donna asked, breaking the awkward silence that followed. "I have one for it."
"What?" Paola asked.
"Bishop vulture," Donna said. "Sanctimonious diplomat, eater of carrion. Color of sick vomit."
"Yuck," George Dempsey said.
Jennifer came onto the bridge after a few hours' absence, glanced at the chess game in progress, turned to Martin, and projected a series of charts with her wand.
"They can project false light paths," she said. "They can convert matter to anti-matter at billions of kilometers—maybe up to and beyond our noach limit—and they can disarm neutronium bombs. They have it all, or they want us to think they have it all."
"This is what you worked out with Giacomo?"
"And with the ships' minds."
"Then we can't do anything to them."
The crew, human and Brother, fell silent.
Jennifer stiffly turned her shoulders with her neck, looking at her crewmates apologetically. "Sorry," she said. "Before the blackout, this is all we could figure, all we could deduce, given what we're seeing."
"Any chance you're wrong?" Ariel said.
"Of course," Jennifer said meekly. "We can always be wrong."
"You say the ships' minds worked with you," Cham said. "Do they agree?"
"This last part I worked through on my own, after the blackout, after the moms went away, so I can't be sure they would agree," Jennifer said.
"Then there's some hope?" Paola asked plaintively. The Brothers remained silent, waving like grass in a soft breeze.
Jennifer bit her lip. "I'm not perfect at this sort of thing," she said.
"But you're damned good," Cham said.
Martin reached for the last thread before the void, if only to keep the crew from something they did not need at alclass="underline" complete despair. "Can the ships' minds—on Greyhoundor Shrike—learn from this… advance our technology, add to our defenses, our weapons?"
Jennifer seemed grateful for the suggestion. "That's what we were… I mean, we wouldn't figure this out just to show everybody things were hopeless. We can't do anything on Trojan Horse, but I'm hoping Giacomo and the ships' minds, and all the others…" Tears broke from her eyelids and drifted in front of her face. She batted at them absently. "There just isn't much time, and we could have figured wrong so many different ways."
"But there's hope," Paola persevered. "Real hope."
Jennifer looked at Martin, saw the beseeching in his eyes, and said, "I think so. I haven't given up."
They endured the four-g deceleration for a day. They had created liquid-filled couches for these times; Martin and all the humans kept to their couches and tried to sleep through it. The Brothers' cords clutched their rings.
Orbital insertion was now assured without any further action.
The craft that came alongside a day before they entered orbit gleamed white as snow, a sand-blasted, spherical purity of forty or fifty meters.
The dry voice and image of bishop vulture instructed them, and they pushed their made-up weapons through the mechanical airlock.
The sphere opened a black mouth and swallowed the weapons like a big fish after a school of sprat. Its brightness dulled to charcoal gray; almost lost against the stars, visible only as shadow, it slipped away.
"Nothing lost," Eye on Sky said. "They were not good weapons. They gave no comfort."
Actually, to Martin, holding a laser rifle hadafforded a kind of comfort. He hadn't held an actual gun since target shooting with his father when he was seven; the smooth gunmetal blue and gray lines of the laser rifle, though cinematic, had at least given him the sensation, however illusory, of doing something for immediate defense.
None of the weapons had ever been fired. Compared to the ability to control mass at billions of kilometers, a high-powered laser beam and chemical kinetic bullets seemed less than a stone axe against an atomic bomb.
One of the cords died playing chess. It belonged to Sharp Seeing. A brief ceremony was held before the Brothers, alone in their quarters, ate it, separating into their own cords to do so. After, with only twelve hours to go before orbiting Sleep, Sharp Seeing explained that the cord had died of frustration, facing potential checkmate and unable to find an escape. "I we begin to think perhaps this game is bad," Sharp Seeing said. The cord he had lost was not, so he claimed, an essential part.
Paola was the only human allowed to attend the ceremony, after which she emerged both deeply moved and very proud.
Sleep filled the screen in hypnotic detail. Hakim and Sharp Seeing busily gathered information, expressing each in his way the excitement of witnessing and recording such an extraordinary object.
The fourth planet's supply of internal heat was sufficient to keep its surface at a constant twenty degrees centigrade, except where molten material and hot gases leaked through, chiefly along the mountain ridges, which seemed to show where massive rocky plates ground against each other.
The physics, as Hakim had already said, was incomprehensible, pointing to massive technological adaptations. Possibly the entire planet was artificial, but the crudity and violence of its design said otherwise… and there was no way to unravel the contradiction, given what they knew and what they could see.
Sleep's crudity lay in the uncertainty of its surface. With an area of thirty-two billion square kilometers, nine tenths of it under water, hundreds of millions of square kilometers of land churned in apparently useless turmoil. Angry black clouds rose where molten material flowed into the broad seas, rolling from the wall-like mountain ridges.
The air was moist and high in carbon dioxide, low in oxygen. Martin thought it might be an atmosphere adapted for plants.
Hakim and Sharp Seeing used the Double Seed'sprimitive instruments to capture images of ocean-going forests of dark green, rising from the water like drifting continents, the largest of them wallowing for ten thousand kilometers across a smooth sea.
Low, rounded quartz-like mountains punctuated the dark basaltic crust, topped by thick crests of pink and orange.
"The colors are probably phosphates, volcanic sulfur compounds, and hydrocarbons," Hakim said. "Wonderful sights, wonderful knowledge, but our instruments are so limited! "
"Time for an open meeting, all of us, now," Martin said.
All twenty of the Double Seed'screw gathered in the cafeteria, humans and Brothers mingling easily.
Eye on Sky and Martin floated at the center. Eye on Sky spoke first in a rich sequence of odors and sounds, head cords stretching wide, claws clicking for the third, almost musical, component. Paola might have been able to understand some of this; to Martin, who knew only a few of the less sibilant sounds, the speech was interesting, but empty of meaning. Then Eye on Sky switched to English.
"Decided days ago that we we should speak before we our hosts in language we all us may understand. All we our ten on this ship now speak English enough to be understood, with Paola Birdsong giving help. Thus, we we now will use English exclusively when we are together."
"We appreciate the gesture," Martin said.
"It is some stifling," Eye on Sky said, "but necessary."