Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear

Author:Greg Bear
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780765318145
Publisher: ORB BOOKS
Published: 1993-02-01T07:07:24.335000+00:00

There was some satisfaction to Martin in seeing that most of the victors eschewed Hans’ rewards, walking from the matches with wary, embarrassed glances. Rex Live Oak eschewed nothing, taking Donna Emerald Sea to his quarters.

Exhausted, bruised and sore, Martin spent half an hour in his quarters before sleep exploring the libraries of Dawn Treader. The libraries had re-opened in the past few days. There were gaps, but not large ones; about ninety-five percent had been saved or reconstructed from damaged domains. The libraries now integrated the remnants of the derelict’s deep time memory store.

With the libraries restored, he felt some of the pressure of turning inward pass away. He could venture outward again, through the ship’s information universe.

The zero-sum competition was not nearly as divisive as Martin had feared. There were casualties; there were abstainers. Rosa Sequoia and a few of her followers did not compete, and Hans did not compel them to. Some refused after a few attempts, and Hans did not subject them to ridicule.

Days passed.

Nobody talked much about the upcoming rendezvous. It would be like inviting strangers to join a family already having enough troubles; the thought frightened Martin, and he realized with some elation that at least now he could genuinely feel uneasy, that the journey and Hans’ outrages had pulled him out of the gloom that had returned since the voyage to the death ship, lifted that gloom sufficiently to have emotions other than blanketing, all-too-comfortable despair.

Perhaps Hans had been right again.

Sixty-four of the crew listened to Rosa’s storytelling. Hans was not there; Ariel and Martin, at his request, attended.

Ariel had accepted Hans and Martin’s attempt to bring her into the fold of authority with surprising composure. Martin thought of two explanations for her placidity: proximity to the center of things gave access to crucial information, and Ariel was no fool; and she would be closer to Martin.

Ariel sat beside Martin in the cafeteria. Martin was reasonably sure she had been making her moves on him, in her peculiar way, since the Skirmish.

He had been celibate since Paola Birdsong. The lure of the flesh was nothing compared to the other conflicts he had to resolve.

The crew came to the cafeteria singly and in triples; few entered in pairs. The dyad structure had broken down in Hans’ exercises and rewards; those who had lost partners in the Skirmish had not yet made new matches, and only one or two new dyads were apparent.

Rosa began her session with a parable.

“Once, back when Earth was young, three children came upon a sick wolf in the woods. The first child was a girl, and her name was Penelope, and she was sweet and younger than the others, and spoke with a lisp. The second was Kim, her brother, who did not know where to go in life, and who always worried about fighting and winning. The third was Jacob, a cousin, the oldest, frightened of his shadow.

“They circled the wolf and Penelope asked the wolf what was wrong with it.

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