Martin's bubble advanced through curving pipes and conduits, the ship's drive, real matter, not fake. He had come to the very bowels of the ship.
The bubble pulsed again. The deep time memory store was a white dodecahedron surrounded by an intact cage of real matter, near the center of the third homeball. "Found what we're looking for," he said. "I think."
The half-sized robot pushed closer, used fields like hands and fingers to disengage the dodecahedron, pulled it from its cage. "I will store it in the craft. You may explore more if you wish. "
Martin's horror and pity had diminished enough to bring curiosity to the fore. He moved forward through the neck to the second homeball, saw Giacomo prying his way into what must have once been a large room—a kind of schoolroom—to get at what lay within. More bodies, some hidden by membranes of surface matter, all shrunken, limbs curled in death's rigor, necks pulled back as if they were in despair or agony—rigor also, he hoped—arranged against what might have been a floor. The floor rippled under the impact of dislodged particles. The bodies drifted centimeters from their resting places, illuminated by the spooky fireside glow of fake matter coming apart.
Giacomo kept muttering under his breath.
"Speak up," Martin said, irritated.
"It's so much more… obvious, how they do it," Giacomo said.
"Who does what?"
"How the Benefactors make Ships of the Law. There must be a kind of noach transmitter, and it makes a shape… fools the privileged bands into informing other particles that matter is there, but doesn't finish the job. Leaves out mass. Something paints real matter over the fake, and voila! A big fake matter balloon. That's all Dawn Treaderis. Our ship could look like this in a few thousand years."
"I think there must have been fifty or sixty crew members," Hakim said. "I count thirteen where I am, near the nose. They all seem to have slept before they died."
"They sure as hell didn't die in combat"Giacomo said.
"Our mission is accomplished," the little mom said. "It is time to return."
Back in the craft, they sampled portions of the deep time memory store, what little was comprehensible to them. Martin confirmed what he had already suspected; the Benefactors' representatives, the moms, even on this Ship of the Law, interfered very little with their charges, and did not keep day-to-day records of activities. But they did store records kept by the crew, and that was what occupied Martin, Giacomo and Hakim in their free moments on the return voyage.
They decelerated, saw the two homeballs of Dawn Treader, and were welcomed back to the ship by a crowd of fit-looking crew.
Martin did not look forward to briefing Hans. Hans immediately took them to his quarters, with no time to recover. Harpal and Jennifer came as well, but no others.
"The moms let you see what you recovered?" Hans asked.
"They did, as much as we could understand," Martin answered.
"Most of the memory is ship's mind data," Hakim said. "We do not know what that contained."
Martin produced his wand. "We've tried to translate and edit. You can look over the crew records in detail… For purposes of a briefing, I thought this might cover the important points."
They watched in silence as picture and sound unfolded. The unfamiliar visual language of the recordings made viewing difficult; different color values, different notions of perspective and "editing," attempts at three-dimensional images which did not match human eyes, all added to their problems.
But the salient points were clear.
They watched hour after hour of sauropod crew history, rituals, ceremonies; and as the other Ship of the Law moved farther and farther from Leviathan and their encounters with the civilization there, the sauropod social structure became less and less firm.
Martin pointed out what must have been acts of murder. The sauropods needed a kind of reproductive analog without full reproduction; non-fertile eggs provided essential nutrients, apparently. But egg production dropped off, and the egg-producing sex—not precisely females, as three sexes were involved—underwent chastisement, isolation, and then death for their failures.
All of this was recorded with a solemn and unwinking attention to detail, a little slice of hell from human perspective, but day-to-day existence for the sauropods.
"Don't they see what they're doing?" Jennifer asked, aghast; they saw the ritualized execution of the last egg-producer, multiple hammer-blows by a group of dominants, all of one sex.
Hans grunted, turned away from the flickering images.
"It'll take us a long time to riddle some of this," Giacomo said, clutching Jennifer's hand.
"Seems pretty clear to me," Hans said. "They went to Leviathan, they were given the runaround, they gave up and left. Play back the meetings."
In much clearer detail, they saw selected images and motion sequences of Leviathan's worlds, conferences with multiple-eyed, bipedal creatures that seemed to represent the civilization; these segments were particularly muddy, almost useless in terms of linear history.
A mom entered Hans' cabin. "The ship has translated all Benefactor and ship language records," the mom said. "We may call these beings Red Tree Runners."
"Why would we want to?" Hans asked.
"That is a close translation of their name for themselves. Their home system was invaded four thousand three hundred and fifty years ago, Dawn Treaderframe of reference. They had already established a pact with representatives of the Benefactors. The killer probes were defeated and their worlds were not substantially damaged. Perhaps half of their original population survived, and they were able to rebuild. They were outfitted with ships and weapons suitable to seek out the Killers. They became part of the Benefactor alliance."
"But they weren't Benefactors themselves?" Hakim asked.
"No. You might call them junior partners."
Hans chuckled. "Higher rank than us."
"A different arrangement, under different circumstances. The Red Tree Runners traveled over one hundred light years, a journey lasting thirty Earth years by their reference frame."
"And?" Hans said.
"They arrived at Leviathan nineteen hundred years ago. Leviathan has changed considerably since then."
"We noticed," Giacomo said.
"Reasons for the changes are not clear. But they were convinced Leviathan was not their target, obtained fuel from the inhabitants of one of the worlds, and departed."
Martin shook his head. "That's all?"
"The memory store has undergone considerable decay. The Red Tree Runners may have discovered how to deactivate the ship's mind, or interfere with its operations. Over ninety percent of the records are too deteriorated for retrieval. One third of the shipboard recordings have survived, but all biological, historical, and library records of their civilization have decayed."
"Of course," Hans said dryly.
"They fell apart," Jennifer said. "They lost it and they killed themselves. Or decided to die."
Martin recalled the mummified corpses, the last of the crew, saw them lying down to accept the end.
"By God, that won't happen to us," Hans said.
"Will this information be made available to all crew members?" the mom asked.
Hans seemed startled by the question. He mused for a moment, squinted one eye, looked at Martin as if about to dress him down for some unspecified offense. "Yeah," he said. "Open to everybody. Why not. Warning to us all."