“What do I care for sympathy? I am all-powerful.”
“Yes, but someday, your winds will die, and my kits will tell this tale even when you are gone, of the time Great-great-greatgrandfather Fox was carried by the winds and lived and learned their secrets.”
“But then they will not be afraid of me, and what good am I if I do not inspire fear?”
“Oh, no living thing could ever be so strong they would not fear you. I give you something more. I give you a voice throughout time that is more than a wordless bellow of rage.”
Dawn Treader spiraled through the plumes of gases rising south from Wormwood’s pyre, and gathered fuel. It scooped hundreds of thousands of tons of hydrogen and helium and lithium, compressing them, storing them in envelopes around its waist as a bee stores pollen.
There was a kind of joy in its flight away from the dying system; it had subverted the last-ditch attempt by the Killers. The Killers’ trap became a cornucopia.
The crew spent a silent, still year in the schoolroom, another chunk of time reassigned.
Behind them, receding into a reddened hole, Wormwood’s nebula engulfed the system’s farthest reaches. All traces of ancient crimes were obliterated; planets, orbital warning systems, clouds of depleted pre-birth material, needle ships.
The tar baby burned to cosmic ash. That alone was worth their deaths, but they did not die.
The ash of gases flowed around and ahead of them and they breathed their fill, as a drowning man draws long, grateful breaths of air.
Martin accepted a glass of water from Hakim.
Ten bodies lay in parallel around the outer perimeter of the schoolroom. Hans stood over them, chin in hand, silent, as he had stood for the last half hour. Every few minutes he would shake his head and grunt, as if in renewed astonishment. The new dead, Jorge Rabbit, David Sasquatch, Min Giao Monsoon, Thomas Orchard, Kees North Sea, Sig Butterfly, Liam Oryx, Giorgio Livorno, Rajiv Ganges, Ivan Hellas. The bodies bore no marks of violence but for faint purple blotches visible on the face and hands; they lay with eyes closed.
They had died in confinement.
Twenty-three of the survivors kneeled by the bodies, still dazed.
With a start, Martin realized they were standing in full gravity. The Dawn Treader accelerated again.
“How did this happen?” he asked, throat still dry and sore.
Hakim drank deep from his bulb of water. “Their volumetric fields must have weakened… Neutrino flux may have transmuted some of their elements. They were poisoned, or perhaps just…” He swallowed. “Burned. I have only looked at them briefly. There are no moms to talk with.”
“The moms couldn’t keep them alive?”
Hakim shook his head.
Rosa Sequoia walked among the crew, making weird and meaningless hand-gestures that most of the others ignored. Jeanette Snap Dragon and Kimberly Quartz followed her, heads bowed.
Cham approached Martin and pointed to Sig Butterfly’s body, still and gray in the lineup. “One of our own,” he said.
“They’re all our own,” Martin said.
“That’s not what I mean.” Cham screwed up his face. “We’re losing the experience of our own leaders. We should arrange a full inquiry. We need to know what happened. Why the moms failed us again.”
“I don’t think they failed us,” Martin said. “We’re here. Most of us are alive.”
“We need to know the facts,” Cham said, getting more irritated.
“I agree,” Martin said. “But Hans is Pan, and he calls the shots now.”
“Not if he’s too stunned to move,” Cham said. “Where’s Harpal?”
They looked for the Christopher Robin, but he was not in the schoolroom. Most of the surviving crew had gone elsewhere, perhaps to recover in privacy. Martin itched to get things moving, but he resisted. “I’ll find Harpal,” he said. “Hakim, tell Hans we need to inspect the nose and the star sphere.” He pointed with his chin. “Let’s give him something concrete to think about.”
“Then I will gather the search team,” Hakim said.
The ship’s corridors smelled cooked, as if a fire had swept through the Dawn Treader while they were in confinement. The neutrino storm of dying Wormwood had done them more damage than Martin had first guessed; and that meant their escape had been something new for the moms, something experimental.
They could have lost many more.
I should be arranging for the burial of the bodies, Martin thought. The moms had always disposed of bodies before; why were they left out in the open now?
He stopped in a corridor and referred to his wand. Where were the moms? He called for one. None appeared. The wand itself acted fitfully, its projections weak and flickering.
He waited several minutes, beginning to shiver with a new fear: that the ship itself had suffered substantial damage, that its resources were diminished, that they might all die in a vessel without a ship’s mind or the moms.
He was about to continue toward Harpal’s chambers when a mom floated into view several meters ahead of him. “Thank God,” Martin said. He embraced the robot gently, as if it might shatter. The mom did not react to his relief.
“I’m looking for Harpal,” Martin said. “We have a lot of organizing to do, a lot of… psychological work.”
“A description of damage is necessary,” the mom said. “We will present an assessment before the entire crew.”
“The bodies…”
“We cannot recycle for the time being. Repair work is under way now. Some of our facilities are limited or inoperative until the work is done. The dead will be kept in fields—”
Martin shook his head and held up his hand, not wanting to hear the minute details. “We just need reassurance,” he said. “There could be a bad reaction if we don’t have a meeting soon.”
“Understood,” the mom said.
“Where is Harpal?”
“He is in the tail,” the mom said.
“I’ll go get him.”
Ariel came up behind them, sidled around the mom as if it were a wall, looked directly at Martin. “Hans is fuguing out,” she said. “He’s scaring the crew. Let’s find Harpal, and fast.”
They walked aft, not speaking until they were in the spaces of the second homeball. Here, the peculiar singed odor was even stronger.
Ariel wrinkled her nose. “Are we as bad off as it smells?” she asked.
“You heard what the mom said.”
“You know how I feel about the moms,” Ariel said.
Martin shrugged. “They saved us.”
“They put Us down there in the first place. How grateful should I be that they got us out?”
“We chose—”
“Let’s not argue,” Ariel said. “Not while Hans is sucking his thumb and Rosa is back there acting like a priestess. We have to move, or we’re going to be in more trouble than we ever imagined—our own kind of trouble. The moms aren’t going to pull us out of a fugue. They don’t know how.”
“Hans isn’t sucking his thumb,” Martin said. “He’s… putting it all together.”
“You sympathize with everyone and everything, don’t you?” Ariel said. She smiled as if in admiration, and then the smile took on a tinge of pity.
Harpal Timechaser looked at them with a frightening blankness as they approached. He had hidden in a dense tangle of pipes.
Martin’s temper had worn thin; now he was angry at Harpal, angry at everybody, not least angry at this woman who mocked him at every step and followed him for reasons he couldn’t understand.
“What is it?” Harpal asked too loudly, as if using the question as a wall or a defense.
“We have to get the crew together,” Ariel said before Martin could speak.