Sam had been puzzled. “How can you admire their guns when they…?”
“It’s not the tool that matters,” Narcissus Joy had said. “But the aim of its user.”
It was a cliche of history and philosophy and ethics, Sam knew, that a good end could never justify evil means. She had seemed to deny that, though he had had to agree that a bad end could befoul good means. Yet he had not tried to argue. He had said only, “I’m glad their aim isn’t any better.”
Now he said to Jackie Thyme, “Let’s get into the hallway.” Windowless and shielded by interior walls, that was the safest place on most of the building’s floors. It was not, however, completely safe, as the holes in wooden doors and plaster partitions insistently reminded him. At least, the snipers couldn’t see them there.
“This,” gasped Sheila. “This is a helluva way to get to talk to my husband.”
“Hush,” said Sam. “We’ve both been busy.” He positioned a light blue leech on the side of her throat. Then, while he waited for it to secrete its dose of painkiller, he used a scrap of clean bandage to wipe blood from the snakeskin along her jaw. When the pale green of her skin—it would have been white with her pain if she had been an unmodified normal human—began to darken toward its normal hue, he stroked her cap of orange and brown feathers and began to work on the damage.
“So have those snipers.” Her wound was low on her ribcage, a tear in the skin, a broken rib, blood. By the time the bullet had penetrated the corridor wall to find her, its force had been more than half spent.
The children she had been leading toward the elevators to the basement squatted quietly by the wall, low, below the level of the windowsills in the apartments to either side, so that bullets would be less likely to find them as well. The youngest children, still too young to withdraw their roots from the soil and walk, even too young for their stalks to begin the changes that would give them legs, had been transplanted into earthenware pots that now rested on children’s wagons shaped like miniature Tortoises, Armadons, and Beetles. The older children held the wagons’ handles; until their guide had been shot, they had been pulling them down the hall.
Except for Sam’s mutterings as he worked, the few words he exchanged with his wife, the noises that bullets made as they punched holes in walls and plaster fragments rained upon the floor, the hallway was silent. The younger bots in their pots could not yet speak. The older ones did not.
Sam finally looked up from his wife’s wound. “Jackie,” he said. “Get these kids downstairs. And stay down there yourself.”
“Uh-uh,” said the young bot. “I’ll be back.” But she obeyed his first command, gesturing to the others, starting the parade once more moving down the hall.
When the last of the wagons had passed, Sheila stared yearningly after them. “They’re making shields,” she said as her husband applied a last clip and began to wrap her chest in yards of bandage. “For the windows, you know? They’re using doors. Some are steel. Most are just wood, and there won’t be enough, but that’s my next job. As soon as all the kids are downstairs. Gotta get the adults down there too. All except the marines.”
“The marines?”
“They have a few…” She gasped as he tightened the wrapping that would help her rib heal. “A few who have studied war. No experience, but they’ve read a lot. They’ve got weapons. And plans.”
“Good,” said Sam. “I hope it works, but…”
Sam began to notice differences among the bots who passed him in the building’s halls. Some, the majority, kept their heads ducked while they carried dismounted doors toward the windows and equipment such as bioform computers toward the elevators, as if that would keep them safe from the Engineer snipers. Others, the marines, Sam thought, held their heads higher and moved with an air of brisk determination.
Not all the bots he treated could walk away from him. They needed stretchers and stretcher-bearers. Unfortunately, no such luxuries were available, and when he tried to commandeer a door, Shasta Lou stepped from a doorway to shake the pale blue blossoms of her head and say, “No. We have to seal the building.”
“And let her die?” He stared pointedly at the bandages he had tied in place over the injured bot’s abdomen. He hoped she had some notion of how easily his crude patchings could come loose. “I don’t dare carry her myself, or let anyone else. She needs support, and even with that, she could bleed to death internally.”
“The group comes first,” said Shasta Lou.
With a quiet shudder, the patient rendered their argument moot. Sam sighed and bent and carried the body to the wider patch of corridor onto which the elevators opened. He had just laid it on the floor when a door sighed open and Jackie Thyme emerged.
“I thought I told you to stay down there.”
The young bot’s shrug belied her serious, determined expression. “I want to help.”
“Think you can handle this one? Don’t take it to the shelter. The first floor should do.”
Another shrug, and the small bot grasped the body’s ankles and began to pull. The corpse slid obediently into the elevator.
As it did so, Alice Belle stepped out of the next elevator to the left, waved one hand, and hurried off down the corridor. Behind her appeared Narcissus Joy. From a belt around her waist hung a radiophone. She was carrying a heavy pot from whose top grew a leafy bush covered with compact fruit. Curious, as soon as Jackie Thyme had disappeared with her burden, Sam followed Narcissus Joy into the nearest apartment and watched her set the pot on the floor to one side of an unshielded window. She noticed him behind her, nodded, and said nothing as she leaned toward the window and peered outside.
Sam noticed that her scalp blossoms, normally a creamy white, were now limp and bedraggled. Their orange rims seemed dirty. Fatigue, he thought. No time to stand beneath one of the building’s artificial rainstorms, nor to stand, rooted and sunlit, photosynthesizing, resting, recharging.
A shot chipped paint from woodwork near her head. She withdrew and picked one of her plant’s fruit. A long, hair-like tendril continued to link the fruit to the branch that had borne it. She found a grip on the fruit’s skin and peeled it back like that of a banana. As soon it was exposed to air, the inner fruit darkened in color and spread birdlike wings. It stepped onto her wrist, fluttered, preened, and looked at Narcissus Joy, who looked in turn at Sam and said, “A botbird.”
She flicked her wrist toward the window, and the botbird flew through the opening. Behind it trailed a continuation of the fiber that had spanned the break in its stem. “Fiber optics,” said Narcissus Joy. “So we can see what’s going on out there. It’s easier than using the honeysuckle.”
She turned toward the plant she had brought into the room and began to poke and pat at its uppermost leaves, until they formed a flat surface like the screen of a bioform computer. On that surface there appeared a view of the streets and buildings outside their walls and below the botbird.
The view blanked out. “The fiber broke,” said the bot, even as she reached for another botbird fruit, peeled it, and released it. The landscape outside once more began to slide across the screen, and in a moment they could see what the buildings hid from their eyes: a street, a block away, dotted with groups of Engineers. “More guns,” said Narcissus Joy. “And…Litter!”
“What?” asked Sam. She pointed at the image, and he stared at the heavy tubes that rested on three blue-clad shoulders. He knew what they were; he had seen them in old veedo movies and in occasional newscasts of foreign wars whose disputants could afford nothing more modern than the small missiles these tubes would launch.
A gasp behind him announced that someone else had recognized the old-fashioned weaponry as well, and probably for the same reason. He turned his head and saw Jackie Thyme leaning forward, wordlessly intent on the view. As silently, he put one arm around her shoulders.
Narcissus Joy had her phone in her hand, punching digits in a blur of motion. “They’re getting ready for the main assault,�
�� she said, staring at the screen that showed the botbird’s view. “No, I don’t think they’ll have much trouble getting in. Yes, get things up here.” On the screen, the Engineers carrying the shoulder-fired missile launchers were beginning to trudge toward the nearest intersection. “And hurry.”
The phone went back on her belt. She continued to stare at the screen, gauging the enemy’s progress. Finally, she said, “We only want the fighters up here now, Doc. You’d better go down now.” She looked at Jackie Thyme. “You too, and stay there this time. You’ll be safe as soon as they seal the doors. The Engineers will never find you.”
“What about…?” Where was Sheila? Was she upstairs? Downstairs?
“We have a few minutes,” said Narcissus Joy. “Don’t worry. We’ll send all the noncombatants down.”
Voices rang in the halls. Feet sounded in the hallway outside the apartment. Shasta Lou entered the room, followed by two bots carrying bushel baskets full of what looked like large fruits and seed pods. “And you?” asked Sam.
“You’re the rear guard,” said Jackie Thyme. “I…”
“No. You’re too young.” Narcissus Joy gave them both a mirthless, toothy grin.
“And so are you,” said Shasta Lou. She was pointing to show the other bots where to set their burdens. “Get out of here. Go with them.”
“We’ve got a war to fight.”
“I can sell myself just as dearly as you can. And a lot more dearly than any mechin’ Engineer. And we only need one of us at a window.”
When Narcissus Joy finally and reluctantly nodded, Shasta Lou turned to Sam and Jackie Thyme. “See?” she said. “She developed the botbirds herself. Others did these.” She held up one of the seed pods, brown and patterned with lines of small bumps. “Grenades. Mother Nature already had small ones, for spreading seeds. They beefed them up and grew them right here.”
A cry of alarm, echoing from another room, brought their attention to the window. Forgetting for a moment the risks posed by the snipers, they looked out and saw, kneeling on the sidewalk across the street, a missile-man. The streak of smoke and the explosion downstairs seemed to be simultaneous.
The building shook. There was the groan of stressed masonry, the rattle of falling walls and ceilings, the screams of the wounded and the dying. Sam prayed that Sheila was safe in the basement shelter, or higher in the building and on her way to safety, anywhere except within reach of the explosion.
Shasta Lou picked up a fruit whose pink and purple skin bore an unwholesome sheen. “And gas bombs,” she said. “It will cost them a lot to get into this building. Now go! Before they seal the shelter.”
They went, all three, leaving Shasta Lou to throw her grenades and gas bombs at the Engineers. In the hall they joined a steady flow of others toward the basement. An elevator door hissed open, and two bots elbowed them aside. They were carrying what seemed to Sam no more than a large plant, rooted in an oversized pot, and he wondered why they were bothering with their pets at this late moment. But other bots stepped out of the way, clearing an ample path into the elevator, and Jackie Thyme whispered an awed, “The Eldest! She wouldn’t leave until the last minute!”
“Let’s take the stairs,” said Sam. That word was enough to make him realize that he had finally seen one of the ancestral bots. It was as large as any member of the current generation, but it was legless, armless, more profusely leaved, its bulb embedded in the soil, its head a massive flower. Scent accompanied it, and a sense of mingled panic and resolve.
* * *
CHAPTER 13
“Someone,” said Alvar Hannoken. He was standing before the broad picture window in his office, facing outward, his hands clasped behind his back. His fingers worked obsessively at a twist of leaves he had taken from the kudzu plant beside him; they were green with plant juice. From time to time his elongated, goat-like feet shifted restlessly on the carpeted floor. He was as frustrated as Frederick. “Someone doesn’t want you talking to anyone at BRA. You can’t call your boss. You can’t call your friend. Not at the office. Not at home. You can’t even call BRA employees you don’t know, and no one else here can call for you.”
“It’s like they built a wall between you and them,” growled Renny. His tail thumped the floor.
Frederick Suida sat backwards on a long-legged stool the Probe Station Director had produced from a cupboard in his office wall. His arms were crossed on its back-rest, his chin propped on his forearms, and his eyes fixed morosely on the room’s blank veedo screen. Two steps away, Donna Rose stared worriedly at his back. Neither spoke.
“Between us and them,” said Hannoken. “Probe Station can’t get through to BRA. No other station can get through unless it’s on their own business. If we ask them to call for us, boom! the circuits go out. Or so Star Bell tells us.”
“They’re wired right into the computers,” said Lois McAlois. She was in her wheelchair, as she was whenever she ventured out of the low-gee zones in which her stump-legged body functioned most efficiently. One hand rested on Renny’s back, just behind the collar. “They have to be,” she added. “There’s no other way they could stop us every time.”
Renny pointed his nose at Frederick, jerking it upward almost as if he were trying to lift him out of his depression. “You’re not doing any good whining about it.” He added a small whimper as if to show them what he meant. “Maybe there’s a reason, and we’ll find out in due time. In the meantime, give Freddy something better to stare at than a blank wall. Turn on the news.”
Hannoken pivoted on one foot to look at Frederick, who continued to stare blindly at the empty screen. He did not seem to have heard a word, but still Hannoken said, “Athena, veedo on, news.”
The picture that came to life before them showed an aerial view of: an apartment building most of whose windows had been blocked on the inside; brief openings and arms hurling round objects that promptly vanished in clouds of vapor and shrapnel; snipers firing from windows across a street; pavement littered with blue-clad bodies; Engineers crouching behind shards of floater bubble to fire anti-tank missiles from shoulder-mounted launchers; gaping holes where missiles had penetrated walls; the shattered glass of the apartment building’s main entrance. Close-ups added detail: the arms that threw what could only be grenades were green; the snipers wore the same blue as the bodies in the street, with patches and medallions and ear ornaments that proclaimed their allegiance to the Engineers; within the holes the missiles had blasted were green bodies, red blood, wreckage. The sound was rattle and boom and shriek, the sound of gunfire and explosions and painful dying.
From time to time, the veedo showed them a glimpse of media Bioblimps, each one marked with the logo of a different network. The sky beyond was the blue of a summer day, flocked with small clouds, pierced by climbing jets, pocked by distant Bioblimps and floaters. It was nature’s disdain for human folly.
There was no hint of any official attempt to quell the violence. No police. No National Guard. The Engineers seemed far too free to do whatever they wished.
“Where’s the Army?” asked Renny. “Or the Marines?” They were the traditional back-ups when local forces proved inadequate to the task of restoring order, but there was no sign of them either.
“Most of their tanks are dead,” said Hannoken. “There are apparently a lot of Engineers and sympathizers in the armed forces, and they’ve bombed the farms and depots, turned the tanks on each other, poisoned the birds. We don’t even have a Navy anymore. They scuttled the blowfish subs.”
“They’re disarming their enemy,” said Lois, shaking her head. “They’re not planning to stop with…”
“I know that building,” said Donna Rose. The others’ words had not been enough to penetrate Frederick’s depression. The veedo picture, though he was staring directly at it, had not even made him blink. But the pain in her voice, which was much like that the slaughter at the park had elicited, made him turn and ask, “What is it?”
She said nothing. She d
id not need to, for the newscaster finally spoke. “The Engineers,” he said, his voice sounding awed, excited, and alarmed together. “The Engineers seem to have declared war on what they consider the enemies of civilization. The building you see on your veedo is owned and occupied by white-collar botanicals. As you can see, they are offering considerable resistance.”
The view zoomed in on the street just as a pair of round objects arced from a fourth-floor window toward the surface of the street. They were clearly vegetable in origin. “Grenades,” said the newscaster. “One sprays seeds with lethal force.” The close-up showed a knobby brown seedcase as it disappeared with a sharp bang. Immediately, the screen filled with a noxious looking fruit through whose split side a misty vapor was billowing. “The other emits a poisonous gas.”
Yet the bodies in the street must have accumulated in the first few moments of the bots’ return fire. Even a strong arm could not throw the grenades far, and it was not difficult for the Engineers to stay out of range, remaining within the facing buildings, gathering toward the ends of the block. Meanwhile, their guns and missiles continued to batter at the building, punching aside the barriers that blocked the windows, pruning away the arms that hurled the explosive fruit, blowing ever-larger holes in the street-level walls.
The newscaster sounded fearful when he spoke again: “There is little doubt of what the Engineers will do when the resistance to their attack ends. They will search out every botanical they can find and…” Slowly, with the rhythm of a dirge, the veedo screen pulsed with images taken from the recent past, images that had, till now, too rarely reached the news: killing at the park, raping green skins in an alley, butchering Roachsters and litterbugs, chasing, hacking, burning…“And for that,” he said. His in-drawn breath was clearly audible. “For that display of anti-Engineer propaganda, I am surely doomed.”
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