"No," the little mom said. "It ceased performing its mission."

"Why?"

"We have insufficient information to answer," the little mom said. Martin watched an extrusion of glowing scrap push against his bubble. He slowed and moved deeper, through layer after glimmering layer; walls, distorted cubicles, warped structural members. Sheets of disengaged matter—real matter, not subject to deterioration—hung undisturbed, brushed against his bubble, bounced aside silently, rippling like cloth. He could see now how little real matter actually coated the fake matter within a Ship of the Law; no thicker than paint.

"I'm inside the second homeball," Giacomo said.

"I'm entering the first neck," Hakim said. "It's really thinning out here—not much holding it together. I'll go forward."

Within a dark cavity, wrapped by sheets of pitted matter, Martin saw an intriguing shadow, something that did not appear to be part of the ship. He extruded a green field to push aside the sheets. A shriveled cold face stared at him, eyes sunk within their orbits, long neck desiccated to knots of dried skin and muscle around sharply defined bone.

"I've found one of the crew," he said.

"Freeze dried?" Giacomo asked.

"Not exactly. Looks like it died and mummified, then was exposed to space, maybe centuries later."

"One of our sauropods?"

Martin transmitted an image to satisfy their curiosity. A flapping sail of matter tapped the corpse and knocked lines of powder free.

He maneuvered around the corpse and pushed deeper.

His bubble pulsed suddenly, glowed pale green, returned to normal.

"That is the beacon," the little mom said. "We are near a deep time memory store."

"I've found more bodies," Giacomo said. "Dozens of them. They look like they fell asleep, or died quietly—like they're lying down."

"The ship must have been accelerating when they died," Hakim said. "Unless we are seeing peculiar patterns of rigor."

Martin wiped his eyes with a sleeve. "Really awful," he murmured.

"Do you think they just gave up, or did they run out of fuel?" Giacomo asked. Nobody could answer. "What happened to them?"

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."