The Orbitals, the refugees they had saved, they would be above the poisoned world, safe. Before too long, the Gypsy would be ready, and they would leave. The Engineers and their heirs would be left alone to make what they would of their world, of what was left of what had once been Eden.
The last of the refugees, a human with no visible signs of genetic modification, was on the ladder. Renny waited until the woman entered the hatch and then withdrew the ladder and sealed the ship. Once more, he activated the Q-drive. Once more, he rode the plasma thrust toward orbit.
But he did not make it safely.
He rode his ship, grimacing with pain, his tail screaming inside him, straining to watch his screens and indicators, to listen to the voice of the com tech crying warnings. He knew when a missile rose out of the distance toward him. And he knew he responded too slowly as he pushed his thrust to dangerous levels, screamed with increased pain, and thanked whatever gods there were that this time his load was light, that he had some hope, even as doped as he was, of accelerating beyond the missile’s reach.
When the warhead went off, he was still too close. His screens blacked out. The Quincy bucked, rolled, spun, and twisted as the shockwave hit. He screamed again, and then he lost consciousness.
The ship’s computer struggled to maintain course. It knew nothing of Renny’s damaged body, nor of the fleshy wreckage in the passenger compartment, though its microphones registered moans and screams and the fluid sounds of broken bodies. But it did have a program, a course to fly, and its structure was enough stronger than those of flesh that it remained capable. It attained orbit, and when it neared those bubblesats that still waited for their liberated cargos near where Nexus Station once had been, it took position precisely as it should.
Lois McAlois was already there in the Quentin. When Renny did not position his ship for unloading, she tried to call him. His com remained silent, and the tech at Probe Station said, “He took a close one.”
She began to weep.
“Can you see him through the ports?”
She moved her Quentin closer, drifting it across the Quincy’s bow, and peered into the other ship’s control room. “Yes,” she said. Renny was there, but his head lolled and his eyes were shut. He did not seem to be alive.
She bit her lip. Tears flooded her eyes. He had insisted on flying despite his tail. He had insisted that the painkillers would not interfere with his piloting. But they had. They must have. Fate could not possibly have struck him down without that help. Could it? But then fate had certainly claimed the Quito.
She had to fight to keep her voice calm when she answered Probe Station’s repeated query: “He’s dead,” she said. “But the ship seems okay.”
“Can you get a tow on him?”
“I think so.” She had towed pods full of supplies and passengers to Mars and the Belt, after all, and with a smaller ship. The Quincy would be just another pod. Its cargo did not matter now, except to her.
* * *
CHAPTER 24
The five remaining Q-ships were safe in orbit. The refugees they had saved were in their new quarters in Hugin and Munin and on the Moon. The bubblesats had not been needed for residence after all. They had been invaluable for transport, freeing the ships for faster turn-around, more rescue missions, more lives saved. But not enough. The camps had too soon become unsafe to raid. The refugee groups in the wilderness had been too small. The Quito had been lost too soon.
Frederick had given Alvar Hannoken the numbers: They had had room for 4,600 new refugees, added to the 600 they had already yanked from the Engineers’ jaws. They had saved barely 3,000. There would be no more.
And there had been, before Hannoken had first talked to Frederick, before he had been reunited with Renny, before the Engineers had risen up like a tide to smash the sand castle of civilization, millions of bots, billions of humans who had been genetically modified or who had owned or used the products of the gengineers or who had worked in the gengineering industry. They were gone, all gone. Or almost all gone. A few, a pitiful few, had reached space. Many fewer remained prisoner.
At Hannoken’s command, Minerva magnified a picture window view of Earth until he could see the puffs of dust that marked the appearance of new craters. Jeremy Duncan was expending the last of his rocks in a mad and vengeful orgy of destruction. The Engineers’ own warheads, exploding in the silos and in the air, pulverized by mechanical impact, had already doomed the Engineers’ version of civilization, such as it was. There would be survivors, but…Now the cities, the factories, the landfill mines, the dams and power plants, all were rubble. The Engineers would be many, many years rebuilding.
“I hope,” said a voice behind him. “I hope he’s saved a few, just incase he missed some silos.”
Hannoken turned on one black-stockinged foot. “Arlan,” he said. “Yes, there’s a reserve. What have you got? When you called, you said…”
The Q-drive physicist was grinning broadly. “We may have a way to beat the light-speed limit,” he said. When Hannoken looked skeptical, he added, “We’ve managed to get macroscopic tunneling. We can warp probability enough to make a ship stop being here and start being there. It doesn’t have to cross the space between.”
“It’s instantaneous?”
Michaels nodded. “As far as we can tell. The only trouble is the distance. Our record is 1.2 millimeters. But we’re pretty sure we can get it up to a meter or so, and maybe more. And there’s no limit on the mass we can shift, at least in principle.”
“So we’ll be able to move the Gypsy.” Michaels nodded even more happily than before. “A meter at a time, if you improve it that much.”
“And if we can cycle the drive fast enough…Once every three nanoseconds, and we beat the speed of light.”
Now Hannoken grinned. He didn’t understand how the probability warp worked—in fact, it felt much like magic to him—but he knew that many devices operated on nanosecond cycles. What Michaels suggested seemed easily achievable. The implications were obvious.
“Have you tested it?” he asked.
“Just on the bench.” Michaels nodded. “But we’ll have something to try in the Quoi in a few days.”
“So many dead!” cried Donna Rose. “So many! And we, we…”
Her head leaned against Frederick Suida’s chest, her tears soaking his coverall, her yellow blossoms fragrant beneath his nose. His arms were wrapped around her chest, his hands gently patting the leaves that covered her back, and his face wore a smile at last. It was a sad smile, for she was grieving and what had made her grieve was more than enough to make Frederick—or anyone else—grieve as well. But it was a smile. It said that his heart was at peace for the first time in many years. Something he had lost had returned to him. A void in his life was full once more.
Ah, Donna Rose, he thought happily. My Donna. But all he said aloud was, “Yes. We did. The Engineers shot them and burned them and bombed them. And so did we. When the Q-ships took off. When the rocks struck.”
“So many bots,” she moaned.
“So many people,” he murmured. “We’ll carry the guilt for the rest of our lives. So will our children, and theirs.”
“But we did save some.” She looked up at his face, blinking. He used the tip of one forefinger to sweep the tears from her cheek. “We did.”
“We did.”
“I understand why…why Duncan…” She took a deep, shuddering breath and paused. “That’s why I couldn’t stay with him. I had to leave, to come back.”
“I’m glad you did.” His smile broadened, turned silly, fatuous, and his arms tightened around her. “Very glad.”
“You’re a builder. You’ll be helping to get the Gypsy done. I want to build too. Not destroy.”
While they kissed, and later, he thought that, yes, what remained was building, creative work, life-affirming, future-oriented. What they had done on Earth, to Earth, to the Engineers and to the bots and others they had been unable to save, had been es
sential. So was completing the Gypsy, preparing it for its long voyage and…But no one knew what else they were preparing the Gypsy for. No one knew what they would find on the worlds that swung around the hearths of other stars.
Sam Nickers sat before the bioform computer, stroking keys, studying the lessons that appeared on the screen. Over him arched metal ribs, plastic sheeting, a layer of lunar regolith pierced at intervals by solid plastic cylinders to admit the sunlight. Covering the floor and climbing the curved walls was a jungle of honeysuckle vines, the flowers already open, holding out their wine to all.
No one accepted the offer. Sam was surrounded by a garden of young bots, rooted in lunar soil, linked to each other and the computer through the honeysuckle. Mary Gold, the official teacher of the class, stood to one side, watching as he selected a lesson on plumbing and activated the download to the students’ brains. Other bots paced purposefully past the class, erected plastic partitions, and arranged furniture.
As the lesson proceeded, Sam looked for his wife, scanning the tunnel-like structure from one end—occupied by an airlock that opened into a trench that sloped toward the surface—to the other, where stood the Eldest, quietly rooted, protected from the hubbub by a low wall built of lunar boulders. Within her enclosure were several other boulders, artfully placed and linked by the single branch of living honeysuckle allowed to twine across the raked soil. From the Eldest and the vine drifted faint floral perfumes that spoke of contentment and an end to conflict. The overall effect was that of a Japanese garden, serenely peaceful, all-accepting, eternal.
The traffic shifted, and he saw Sheila not far away at all from him. She and Jackie Thyme and several other bots leaned over a table spread with plans for sections of the Gypsy. In just a few more weeks, some of them would board once more a Q-ship and travel outward to work on the great ship. Eventually, when the Gypsy moved Earthward, the rest would move as well, for the last time. Then they would have to be computer engineers, systems analysts, life support experts, and much, much more. They would even have to be carpenters, electricians, and plumbers. If they were not, progress would be excruciatingly slow.
He smiled as he decided not to interrupt her. They were safe, at least until the Gypsy left Earth’s neighborhood and found other terrors among the stars.
In the long moment before he dared to open his eyes, Renny tried to remember what had happened. There had been agony. There had been the muzziness of drugs meant to call a halt to pain. There had been a missile and more pain and…Where was he? He should have been dead. He deserved it, after the way he had taken off, destroying the bots and humans, the prisoners of the Engineers, that he had meant to save. But the Quincy had been full. It could hold no more, and if he had let too many crowd aboard, he would not have been able to take off or to reach orbit and safety. Even more would have died. He had had no choice, not really. He had had to blast them.
But he wasn’t dead. He lived, though the guilt remained and blood-warm fluid bathed his hands. He could tell that much. But he could not raise his arms. Straps bound them to his sides. Nor could he move his legs. He could not move his tail, but—wonder of wonders!—at least it no longer hurt.
He managed to move two fingers, and his mind froze for an instant. They were not his. That was not his fur-covered side he touched. Bare skin—had he been shaved? For surgery? No. The ribs and curvatures and musculatures were not those he had grown accustomed to over the years. What, then?
He opened his eyes and blinked against the liquid blurs that filled them.
“Renny!”
He could see nothing clearly, but there was a figure leaning over him and the voice was familiar. “Lois? What happened?”
“You’re okay! You’re all right!”
His vision was clearing. He could see her hair, her auburn hair; her green coverall, the one with the chevrons, the one she had been wearing when he first met her, her face, her anxious, relieved, delighted grin. Beyond her, above her, hung a jungle of tubes and wires that he guessed must be plugged into his body. To one side were racks of intravenous bottles and the metallic casings and glowing screens and digital readouts of medical monitors. On the ceiling above him was a rectangular panel, mist-cloudy, blank.
Suddenly, he knew what had happened. He tried to indicate the overhead panel with his eyes. “Turn on the mirror.”
“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “You’re supposed to go back to sleep.”
“Not yet,” he said, though he could not help but blink once more, and yawn as well. “Please.”
She obeyed, and he saw himself.
“Jeremy Duncan and Director Hannoken both worked on the design,” she told him. “They thought you should keep a little of the old you. The way Frederick did.”
“How long…”
“You’ve been in here a few weeks.”
He was relieved to see that he did not have Frederick’s upturned, flattened nose. His was smaller than before, and pinker, and as straight-bridged as ever, and it merged smoothly into his upper lip. His torso was hairless, but its shape matched his arms, and so did his legs. The hair on the top of his head was dark, nearly black; on the sides it was blond. His canines were a little long.
“I’m still a little doggy,” he said at last. “The teeth.”
“Gives you a predatory quality.” She smiled at him approvingly. “Very sexy.”
“Very oral.” The moment of banter was not enough to keep him from yawning again.
Lois laughed gently. “You wanted this,” she said. “And so did I. And when the medics said they would have to put you in the tank anyway, to regenerate, I told them…”
“Thanks,” he said. “Though it’ll take some getting used to.”
“I’ll help.”
He stared at her deepening blush, wondered if he could do that now, too, and shifted his gaze to the mirror. He grinned then, a human grin, eager for whatever was to come.
The fatigue was suddenly worse. He had to struggle to keep his eyes open as he asked, “What about my passengers?”
“Most of them made it.”
And some of them didn’t. He sighed quietly. “Is the Gypsy on schedule?”
“No problems. By the time you’re out of this tank, it might even be parked beside the Station.”
Renny struggled against the return of unconsciousness to see again the mirror on the ceiling. He was away from Earth, away from reactionary Engineers and animal-rights fanatics. And he wasn’t just a dog anymore. Not that he couldn’t have stayed a dog and been accepted here for what he was. But he had Lois. He looked at her and felt his body responding. She blushed again.
He fought to keep his eyes from closing. But his lids were heavy. He could not keep them open. The mirror and his new body, Lois, the new and promising future that awaited them all, everything within his view narrowed, darkened, and went out.
Yes, he thought just before his consciousness disappeared as well. Yes, and now he was human too.
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