Day by day their numbers grew. So did their filth and their stink. They waited in that gymnasium for weeks, helpless beneath the guns of their guards, with no soap or water for washing, with only plastic buckets for toilets, with just barely enough food to remain alive. Eventually they were herded into antique livestock trucks and driven north and east to anabandoned landfill.
How long ago was that? He did not know. But it had been long enough to enlarge by half the crater in which they lived and labored. More weeks. Months. Long enough for slaves to be worked and neglected to death. Long enough for more prisoners to be delivered, for the camp to grow, for a barracks to be built for the guards, for hope to vanish.
Yet thought remained, and the very disasters that had stricken Jeremy Duncan and his fellow slaves told him something of the troubles The Engineers must be having as well. At the beginning of the revolution, the cry had been, “No quarter!” The Engineers had taken no prisoners when they attacked the bots in their dormitory in the park and later in their building. They had killed them all.
But he had been taken prisoner. He had not been butchered. Nor had his fellow prisoners.
He thought he knew what that meant. Someone, someone high in the Engineers’ councils, had realized the difficulties they faced. They wanted the Machine Age back again. But they had no machines other than museum pieces and junkyard wrecks. They had none of the raw materials needed to make new ones, nor the factories, nor the skills, and it would be many years before they could possibly rebuild the necessary infrastructure. Worse yet, the ores that had once been plentiful had been exhausted by the Machine Age that had been. There were none but poor, low-grade ores, usable only with the application of large amounts of energy and labor, for its reincarnation. And the fossil fuels that had powered the Machine Age, either directly as fuels for engines or indirectly as fuels for electric power plants, were gone. Coal remained, but it could be mined and transported only with the aid of the machines they did not have.
The answers must have seemed obvious. The people of the Machine Age had been notoriously wasteful. Their dumps were full of metals that could be retrieved and melted down with no expenditure but labor. Of plastics that could be burned for fuel or converted back to something like the petroleum from which they had been made and then used for fuel again or as the raw material for new plastics, fabrics, pharmaceuticals. And if gengineering was anathema, its sentient products and proponents could still be exploited. Theirs could be the labor that mined the dumps for raw materials. Theirs could be the animal energy needed to process and build. And when they were worn out, dead as surely if more slowly, they would have atoned in part for the sin of their existence.
The leaders of the Engineers must, he thought, have regretted the initial purges. Human labor, slave labor, was slow and inefficient. But enough of it could do the job. It had built the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, after all. And as it made possible the construction and operation of machines, of bulldozers and trucks and factories, it could be replaced. As it was replaced, the pace of reconstruction could accelerate. Eventually, it would no longer be necessary. Nor would the slaves.
Jeremy Duncan thought they were fools. They did not realize how pervasive the products of gengineering had become, or how much machinery would be necessary to maintain civilization, or how much fuel. They would struggle for a while. They would make him labor for them, and he would be a slave for as long as he lived, which he did not think would be very long.
He wished he could live. He wished he dared to hope that he might someday be in a position to bring vengeance upon his tormentors, the murderers of the technology he loved and served, the destroyers of his world. But he knew better. He himself had no hope of bringing the Engineers down. And though they must inevitably fail, he had no hope of seeing that failure. He would not see their dreams founder, the cities they now owned die, the world return to the poverty of subsistence farming without tractors or fertilizer or pesticides.
He wished he could laugh at what he saw for the future. But it was too bleak for that. Too bleak for him. Too bleak for all his species.
The fire was almost out. Using a fragment of broken glass, he scraped ashes over the last flames, hoping the coals would last until the morning. Then he backed into his small shack, his burrow, his hide, to sleep.
* * *
CHAPTER 15
Donna Rose had turned her back to the keyboard and array of small screens at which she worked as Frederick Suida’s assistant. Bolted to the deck beneath her was a trough of soil much like that in her and Frederick’s Station quarters. Its surface was covered with a porous membrane that kept the dirt in place despite the lack of gravity; the pores were large enough to let her roots penetrate to the soil.
“Why can’t we? Why? The tests were successful. The drive worked perfectly. It didn’t scramble Lois’s genes. It didn’t hurt Renny. The physicists say there shouldn’t be any problem handling heavy loads or flying close to stations. And there they are!” With the hand that did not wear a mouse-glove, Donna Rose gestured furiously at the larger wall screen that showed the skeletons of six new Q-ships being built outside the construction shack. They drifted in vacuum, tethered to the shack’s hull with cables, while suited workers crawled over their frames, welding and fitting and slowly bringing them toward completion. They would be much larger than the Quoi, which would be able to fit inside just one of their reaction-mass tanks. They were designed not just to test whether the drive would work, but to carry passengers and cargo.
“Why can’t we save them, Freddy?” she added.
The object of her fury hovered near one wall, not far from a handhold, and shrugged helplessly. “You know why,” he said.
“But they’re killing them all!” Donna Rose slumped as if she were indeed a plant, wilting beneath a desert sun. While they lasted, the newscasts from Earth had been a constant litany of murder. More buildings had been attacked and destroyed. Outdoor dormitories had been laid waste. Those bots and genetically modified humans who had survived the initial massacres had gone into hiding but the Engineers had searched them out, imprisoned them, enslaved them in labor camps, and slaughtered them mercilessly. There was no hope of escape, for by now most of the world’s spaceports and airports had been wrecked, and nearly all of the world’s spaceplanes were scrap.
Worst of all, the tone of the newscasts had changed. At first, some newscasters had been appalled. They had called the destruction folly and madness and error. Some had tried to sound more neutral, but within days, even they, as voices of the old order, had been replaced by people who could echo the dogmas of the Engineers: Machines were better than genes, more in tune with human needs, less of a challenge to the natural way of things. The gengineers and all their works must go, and if it was unfortunate that blood must be spilled, it was nevertheless necessary.
In time, even those half apologetic reservations had been silenced. Now there were no newscasts at all. Veedo and radio were dominated by entertainment programs and official exhortations.
Only a handful of refugees had made it into space. As far as Donna Rose knew, there had been no bots among them.
Frederick spoke more gently. “The Orbitals,” he said. That was what those who lived in space had begun to call themselves. “The Orbitals have begun to build extra living quarters. More were opened up when the Gypsy workers left. But the ships aren’t ready yet. Look at them.” He pointed at the screen, and then at the large, reinforced window on its right. The window overlooked the half that remained of the bay that had once held the Quoi. The office they were in, as well as other offices and workshops and labs where Arlan Michaels could design new drives and ships and physicists could strive for improvements in the technology, had been carved from the rest of the bay. Beyond the window were scattered several Q-drives in various stages of assembly. Beyond them was the broad iris that could open onto space.
The bot straightened as if she were summoning energy from the air. “There are others down there,
Freddy,” she said. “We’ve seen the camps, the graves. And we have the spaceplanes!” Her torso jerked as if she would like to pace, to turn and stomp and emphasize her protests with every motion at her command. But her roots were embedded in her trough of soil.
She did not withdraw those roots. She only jerked and gestured. Her leaves lashed. She pointed past the half-finished Q-ships toward Earth’s rim to indicate the low-orbit stations where several spaceplanes had been mothballed. They had not dared to return after they had delivered their pitifully few refugees. “The spaceplanes!” she said again.
“Which would have to be refueled on the ground.”
“Give them Q-drives!”
He shook his head. “No. They would need too much refitting to handle the mass tanks. It’s simpler to build the new ones. They should even be able to handle the round trip. But…” He shook his head again. “Even if they were finished, we couldn’t use them. Their pilots are still in training.”
“We have Renny!” As soon as the Quoi’s test flights had proved successful, the dog had decided that he wanted to be, like Lois McAlois, a Q-ship pilot.
Before Frederick could answer her again, Arlan Michaels swung through the office door. “We’ve got a problem,” he said as he stopped against a wall.
“Pilots or drives?” asked Frederick. Michaels was still in charge of pilot training as well as drive design. Frederick’s responsibility was overseeing the construction of the new Q-ships. He handled paperwork, saw to it that the project had what it needed, dealt with the conflicts that inevitably arose among the workers, and did his best to solve whatever other problems arose. He also learned, and if he was no Q-flux engineer or physicist, at least he could now understand some of what those specialists were saying.
At the moment, what Michaels was saying was not hard to understand. He was drifting toward the window that overlooked the drive assembly shop, pointing, saying, “We’ve got a batch of superconducting ribbons that won’t superconduct. Not at anything over 400 K, anyway. Someone cracked the casing and let air in. That let too much oxygen diffuse into the ceramic, and now it’s shot.”
“Minerva,” said Frederick. His computer was a near duplicate of Alvar Hannoken’s Athena. “Spec sheets, high-temp erbium superconductor.” To Michaels, he said, “Can you fix it?”
“If I could heat it just right, in a vacuum. That would drive the oxygen off.”
“Vacuum we’ve got.” Frederick indicated the spec sheet on the screen. “And the processing temp seems to be within reach.”
“But how do I know when to stop it?” With hardly a moment of hesitation, he answered his own question. “Run a current through it, of course. As soon as the resistance drops to zero, stop heating and seal the casing.” Such procedures had been impossible when superconduction happened only at the temperature of liquid nitrogen or below.
“Was it sabotage?” asked Donna Rose.
“I don’t think so,” said Michaels.
“Was what sabotage?” The voice from beyond the door was so nearly a yelp that the sudden appearance of Renny’s pointed nose was hardly necessary.
Frederick explained very briefly what had happened. Then Michaels said, “I’ll see what we can do,” and turned to leave. As soon as he was gone, Renny pulled himself through the doorway, positioned himself near the screen, and folded his hands beneath his chin as if they still were forepaws.
“I wish she’d get back,” the German shepherd said. His tail pumped twice. For a moment, he seemed to be staring at the half-formed Q-ships outside the construction shack. The first of them to be completed would be his. He had finished his training. He had done as well as Lois on the simulator. And Hannoken himself had done the work that gave him the hand she would need.
Then his gaze shifted, his focus moving outward, his mind quite visibly pursuing Lois. She was headed toward the Belt, towing a chain of cargo pods loaded with supplies and equipment and crew. She had taken the first such train when Renny was still growing his hands. Workers had been burrowing into the asteroid that would become the Gypsy ever since. The rock they removed in the process was processed to remove its metals. The remaining slag was ground and set aside for later use as reaction mass. Meanwhile, the workers smoothed the forming Gypsy’s rough contours, hollowed out corridors and chambers, installed cables and plumbing. Others gathered and powdered smaller asteroids, for the Gypsy’s own excavated mass would hardly be enough to propel the vast ship everywhere that it might go.
Toward one end of the immense ovoid, workers were preparing the cavern that would be the new ship’s drive chamber. When it was ready, the largest Q-drive yet imagined would be assembled within the cavern and the Gypsy would move under its own power to lunar orbit. There its conversion would be finished. It would acquire computers and furnishings, desks and kitchen ovens, all the paraphernalia that would be necessary if the Gypsy ever went, as some intended, elsewhere. Eventually, it would acquire its crew and inhabitants.
“She’ll have legs, you know,” said Renny. She had finally let the gengineers treat her stumps before she left.
“Three more weeks,” said Frederick.
“She has to stop at Mars,” said Donna Rose. Several of the pods Lois was hauling were destined for Chryse Base. Several more held cargo for the Saturn outpost, though she would not take them all the way; instead, she would bend her trajectory just so and then release them to fly a tangent course. They carried retrorockets just sufficient to slow them at the end of their journey.
“But she’ll be at Gypsy in ten days,” said Frederick. “Three more days to refill her mass tanks and hook up the return pods.” Some of the construction workers were rotating home, back to families and friends, but Lois’ return cargo would be much less massive than what she had hauled from Earth orbit. “She’ll make better time on the way home.”
In many ways, the Q-drive was free of the restrictions inherent in normal rockets. Still, what the Quoi could do did depend on the reaction mass she could carry in her tanks, and she was a small ship. She could handle heavy cargos, but like a tugboat with a line of barges she had to strain. The necessary acceleration came much faster with smaller loads, and her peak velocity was higher.
Renny stared outwards for long moments. Frederick finally broke the silence by saying, “Do you think you could land one of the new ships on Earth?”
The answering snort was distinctly doggy. “You’ve got rescue fantasies.”
“It’s safe enough, isn’t it?” insisted Donna Rose.
“That’s what Michaels says. The drive didn’t hurt Lois or me, and he’s confident enough to have us building those.” Renny gestured toward the skeletal, half-completed ships outside the shack.
“Doesn’t it need a vacuum?” asked the bot.
Renny nodded. “That’s not supposed to be a problem,” he said slowly, as if he were thinking his way through lessons that had struck him as less than central to learning how to pilot. “For maximum power, it needs a vacuum even purer than that of the space out there.” He gestured toward the screen. “If the vacuum isn’t that good, the Q-flux generates less power, but then the flow of energy drives out any particles in the drive chamber, just as if they were fuel particles. That improves the vacuum, and then the power increases. It should therefore work just as well in an atmosphere. It might even work better, for the air itself could be used as reaction mass. The ship wouldn’t have to carry extra.”
“Then…?”
“But you haven’t got the foggiest idea of who to rescue. Or where to find them.”
“Anybody!” cried Donna Rose.
Renny shook his head. “The Engineers are in power everywhere,” he said. “The spysats don’t lie. There’s nobody left to rescue.”
“There are the labor camps,” said Frederick.
The dog shook his head again. “That’s just fishing,” he said. “Half the slaves are probably Engineers on the outs.”
Later, when Renny had returned to his training and Frederi
ck and Donna Rose were once more alone, Hannoken called. Minerva chimed, Donna Rose worked her fingers in the mouse-glove above her keyboard, embedded circuitry responded, and the image of uncompleted Q-ships on the wall screen was replaced by the face of Probe Station’s Director. His picture window was visible behind him. Before it sat a pot much like the one that had held his kudzu vine. This one, however, was empty except for a tiny shoot.
“What’s that?” asked Donna Rose.
“Your tissue sample,” answered the Station Director. He turned and gestured. “I made some changes, and…”
“What?” The bot’s voice was outraged. “I didn’t…”
“What’s up?” Frederick cut off her protests with a placating gesture.
Hannoken turned back toward his veedo pickup and grimaced. “I thought you’d like to see what the com center just picked up. It seems to be a government situation analysis.” His face faded from the screen to be replaced by text. “See what you think.”
“Hunh,” grunted Frederick. “He didn’t say much about it.”
“His face did.” Her tone was sour, as if she had much more to say about becoming a mother without her knowledge or consent.
“Let’s see…”
The document was straightforward. It said:
At the height of the Machine Age, there were over five billion people on the planet. Our ancestors knew that this population was greatly above Earth’s so-called carrying capacity. That is, it was much too large to be sustained indefinitely. The world population would have to be much smaller if it was to require no more resources—food, fuels, solar and hydroelectric energy, wood, ores, etc.—than natural processes made available each year. They were forecasting that when the population exceeded the resources necessary to support it—whether because the fuels and ores were used up and soil fertility lost, or because the population simply grew too big—billions of people would die. The world would, quite inevitably, reduce the human population to or below the carrying capacity defined by the simplest of all the laws of nature. In simple, human terms, that law is: You cannot spend more than you earn; if you try, you will empty your bank account, exhaust your credit, and wind up facing that law again, only without whatever cushion you had the first time around.
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