The children became quieter, more somber.

Theresa and Martin still found occasion to make love, but the love was peremptory, more necessity than enthusiasm. Ramses, slightly larger than Nebuchadnezzar, had once been covered with thick volcanic haze, high in sulfuric acid, still evident in traces in its soil. Some internal anomaly—a huge undigested lump of uranium, perhaps—had kept it hot and heavy with volcanism even into its late old age. It had been tamed only by the action of civilization, perhaps from Nebuchadnezzar if that was where life had first formed around Wormwood—perhaps from Leviathan, the closest star system, or even Behemoth before it became a red giant.

Martin studied the search team's reports on Nebuchadnezzar hour by hour. Hakim did not sleep; Martin ordered him to rest finally when he found Hakim slumped on a ladder field, hardly able to move.

Down, down…

Time passed quickly enough, too quickly for Martin; there was no time to think the thoughts he needed to think, to reach the conclusions that had to be reached.

The purpose of their journey, perhaps the main purpose of their existence, approached all too rapidly.

The makers deposited in the pre-birth material around Wormwood converted rocky rubble into neutronium bombs sufficient to melt a single planet's surface.

After reporting their status to Tortoisealong channels mimicking the cosmic babble of distant stars, in low-information drones lasting hours, the makers became silent. Not even Tortoisecould detect them, or learn where they were; the time for giving them alternate instructions had passed.

Whether Tortoisesucceeded or not, the makers would stealthily drop their weapons into the system. The weapons' journeys would take years…

Martin floated in a net beside Theresa. Both lay awake. For a long time—fifteen, twenty minutes—neither spoke, content, if that was the word, to merely stretch out next to each other, flesh warm against flesh, listening to their breath flow in and out.

"We're doing it," Martin said finally.

"You mean, it's almost done," Theresa said.

"Yes. The moms have trained us well."

"To destroy."

Martin snorted. "Destroy what? The Killers burned themselves out. Or they've left. How many thousands of years more advanced were they?" He snorted again, and stroked her arm. "Why did they kill Earth, when they still had their home worlds, and they couldn't even fill them! Was it just greed?"

"Maybe it was fear," Theresa said. "They were afraid we would send machines to kill them."

"Everybody's afraid in the forest," Martin agreed. "Kill or be killed."

"Kill and be killed," Theresa said.

"I don't like what I've become," Martin said after a pause. "What I'm doing."

"Do you like me?"

"Of course I do."

"I'm doing the same thing."

He shrugged, unable to explain the contradiction.

"Do you feel guilty?" Theresa asked.

"No," Martin said. "I want to turn their worlds into slag."

"All right," Theresa said.

"Do you?"

"Feel guilty?"

"No. Want to watch."

She didn't answer for some time, her breath regular, as if asleep. "No," she said. "But I will. For those who can't."

Falling, falling. Into the bright basement of Wormwood, around the furnace, a hundred million kilometers from Nebuchadnezzar, silent as a ghost, smaller than a midge, with snail-like slowness, observing, Hakim and his team concentrating on the five inner dark masses, Martin concentrating on the discipline, on the Job, keeping their minds tightly wrapped around this one thought.

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."