Going from child to child, Wendy to Lost Boy, talking, encouraging, until his throat was hoarse and his eyes bleary; talking across the days to all at one time or another, maintaining the contact, as his father would have done, across that unreachable spatial and temporal gulf, where simultaneity had no meaning but in the deceived, dreaming mind.
All like a dream, eerily unreal; the new spaces of Tortoiseworking against their sense of having belonged, triply removed from the realities their bodies had come to understand: Earth, Ark, Dawn Treader. They belonged nowhere but in their work.
Theodore Dawn would have hated this, Martin thought. He would have chafed at the single-minded life-in-illusion; he would have demanded some bridging truth, some connectedness of purpose between what they had once been, on the Ark, and were now, purpose and connection gone missing.
He would have done poorly, or he would have changed as they all had changed, as Ariel had changed, subduing her obvious doubts, hardly ever complaining, drifting with the rest of them on the descending sweep of Tortoise's orbit.
But later Martin thought, Theodore would have done well; better than I have done, he would have been, chosen Pan, he would have this responsibility; he would miss his ponds andchaoborus, wonderfully glassy ugly denizens of Earth, but he would bear down and focus his energies. The children would respect him and he would not expect them all to like him.
The Earth did not speak for revenge. It spoke for survival.
Down, down.
Martin went from child to child through the Tortoise, the image of his father and mother leading, trying to be to the children what the moms could not.
Strangely, Martin found old experiences opening to him as he spoke to his shipmates, flowers of memory suddenly revived: sucking on his mother's breast, the warm rich smell of her like roses in a gymnasium, the smile on her face as she looked on him, cradled in her arms, an all-approving smile the moms could not produce, all-forgiving, all-loving, the soft ecstasy of her milk letting down.
He remembered the discipline and love of his father, less gentle then his mother; the guilt of his father when he punished Martin, especially when Martin provoked a spanking; his father's solemn depression for hours after, locking himself away from wife and son while his mother sat quietly with Martin. The later years, spankings much less frequent—none after he was six—and the days of togetherness in the summers before Earth's death, after his father's return from Washington, D.C., investigating the river in a raft, exploring the forest around the house, talking, his father taciturn and solemn at times, at other times ebullient and even silly.
Arthur's love for Francine, filling Martin's childhood as a constant like sunlight. Martin did not forget the arguments, the family disputes, but they were as much a part of the picture as wrinkles in skin or mountains on the Earth's surface or waves on the sea… ups and downs of emotional terrain.
The memories helped Martin keep that sense of purpose they had had when they left the Ark and climbed out of the sun's basement, up into the long darkness.
"We still haven't found anything that is obviously a defense," Hakim pronounced on the eighteenth day. The children of Tortoisefloated around him in the cafeteria, listening to the latest search team report. "Planetary activity hasn't increased or decreased. We haven't been swept by electromagnetic radiation of any artificial variety we can detect. We seem to be catching them by surprise."
Martin hung with legs crossed at the rear of the group, Theresa beside him. He laddered to the center of the cafeteria when Hakim had finished.
"We have some choices," Martin said. "We can drop makers and doers into Nebuchadnezzar first, then the same to Ramses, and hope they find enough raw material to do the Job. Or we can convert all of our fuel and most of the ship into bombs and concentrate on skinning one planet. Because of the lack of volatiles, we probably can't do much damage to more than one, not right away. Just to skin one planet will probably take most of our fuel and large chunks of Tortoiseitself. Or we can sleep and wait for the makers and doers in the pre-birth cloud to send their weapons down."
"Let's vote," Ariel said when he paused.
"No." He shook his head patiently. "This isn't a matter for voting."
"Why not?" Ariel asked, her expression languid, without passion. We all wear killing faces. Faces showing nobody home, nobody responsible.
"Because the Pan makes all decisions now," Stephanie Wing Feather reminded her.
Martin half-expected Ariel to leave the cafeteria in anger, but she did not. She relaxed her arms, closed her eyes, sighed, then opened them again and watched his face intently.
"This is a tough one," Martin said. "If we wait long enough, we might learn whether we should hit Herod, or even focus on it. If there are no defenses, if the risk is low, we can suck out all of Nebuchadnezzar's atmospheric volatiles beforethe planet is destroyed—much easier and faster than after blowing it up…"
"Strip the atmosphere…" Andrew Jaguar said, shuddering. "Like vampires."
"We're going to blow it to dust anyway," Mei-li reminded him, small voice like a bird's chirrup.
"Hakim, how close do we need to be to investigate?"
"I don't think there's any real gain from being closer than a few thousand kilometers. If need be, we can send out remotes at this distance and create a bigger baseline, gather as much information as we would if we flew right down to the surface… But obviously, we could make a bigger blip in whatever sensors they have."
"What kind of baseline?" Martin asked.
Hakim conferred with his team for a few seconds. "We think at this distance, about ten kilometers. We could resolve down to bugs in the air, if there are any."
"The makers and doers have to be delivered from a distance of no more than one hundred kilometers," Stephanie said. "The bombships, fully fueled, have a range of forty g hours, and that can translate into however many kilometers of orbit we wish, if we're patient… We know that none of us can live in a bombship for more than about four tendays without going crazy. We could induce sleep, but that wouldn't be optimum."
The parameters were now clear to all the children. Each advantage had to be weighed against risk; Martin had worked through the momerath days before, and found several courses equally matched for danger and benefit. Theresa had checked his calculations, as had Stephanie Wing Feather and, he presumed, Hakim Hadj.
"We send out remotes and expand our baseline," he said. "That seems to involve the lowest risk. We can gather all the information we need in a few days. We pull in the remotes, coast in quietly, release the bombships, pick them up again after they've injected the weapons into Nebuchadnezzar, drop our doers to gather volatiles in the ruins, accelerate outward to Ramses as fast as possible, and execute again. If we haven't found any further signs of activity on Herod, we rendezvous with the robots after a fast orbit around Wormwood. Then we measure our resources, report to Hare, drop doers to mine what few resources there are on Herod, and boost out. The best estimate for a rendezvous with Hare is two years. Another year to swing back to Wormwood to gather up the robots and their gleanings."