Seeds of Destiny
by Thomas A. Easton
This story copyright 1994 by Thomas A. Easton. This copy was created for Jean Hardy’s personal use. All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.
Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.
CHAPTER 1
“Sir?”
A hand reached toward Marcus Aurelius Hrecker from a shadowy alcove in the painted tunnel wall. Automatically, he raised a warding arm and shifted his step to stay out of reach. Olympia, burrowed into the bulk of the grandest mountain in the Solar System, was as safe as any place, safer than any city on Earth or the Moon. But you could never tell. Even in a crowded tunnel.
“Sir? Please!”
The hand belonged to a small woman, stooped and wrinkled and smelling of years. Her hair was so gray it was practically white. Almost against his will, he stopped and faced her. Other pedestrians flowed past behind him.
“Did you know I’m being evicted? I had such a nice apartment. And they say they need it for someone else. They’re putting me in a home. Just one room and a cafeteria and a lounge full of old wrecks. Like me.”
“I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “But there’s really nothing I can do.” Why was she even telling him? He didn’t know her, and he could imagine no reason why she would think he might change the housing office’s mind. Certainly he couldn’t take her home with him. His own apartment was barely large enough for him.
“Of course you can’t!” She nodded rapidly, her eyes bright, her mouth set in a pursed line. “Not about that. But…” She reached into the shadows behind her. Light glinted on polished metal wheel-hubs and basket wire. He recognized a cart of the sort many people used when shopping. “I have to get rid of my flowers, you know. I can’t take them with me. They just won’t allow it. There’s no point in even asking. But you look like a nice fellow.”
She swung back toward him, something in her hands. He shied away from her, stepping backward, thumping into a passerby, lurching forward again, and she thrust that something against his chest. “Here.” Suddenly he was holding a smooth-sided cylinder and staring at a spray of fuzzy green and white-edged, yellow-centered violet.
Oh, no, he thought. Fear washed over him even as his fingertips stroked the side of the cylinder and told him it was made of some smooth ceramic. It was surely a local product, made of Martian soil. No one shipped raw clay or pottery between the worlds, not even in an era when Q drives tapped the raw energy of space itself to power rockets.
No one made flowerpots either, and here was the handle and now it made sense.
“Here,” she said again, and her nod was insistent, demanding, dogmatic. “You can have an African violet. All it needs is light and water, and maybe a little fertilizer.”
But he was not listening. “No!” he cried. “You keep it! I can’t!”
He pushed the mug full of greenery toward the old woman, but she seized his wrists and with surprising strength turned him toward the center of the tunnel. “No,” she said. “I really can’t, you know. They’re evicting me. But I can’t keep my flowers. And they’re so pretty, aren’t they? You take good care of it now.”
“But— !”
“Go on. I have lots more to give away.” There was a push at his back. He staggered a step, and the flow of traffic swept him up and on.
Fortunately the shirt he wore did not have time-consuming buttons, snaps, zips, or strips. It wrapped diagonally across his chest, and he thought he got the flower out of sight before anyone could recognize it for what it was. An African violet, she had called it. A plant, of all things.
At least she had sense enough to stay away from the more brightly lit portions of the tunnel.
Plants were most definitely not approved personal possessions. They were acceptable only in agricultural domes and tunnels. House plants were prima facie evidence of Orbital/Gypsy sympathies at best, of disloyalty and treason at worst.
If Security spotted the African violet, it would not matter a bit that his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather had all been Security agents. An uncle had even been chief of Security on the Munin habitat until a blowout caught him without a suit.
He tried to look innocent.
He tried not to stare at his fellow pedestrians. That just wasn’t done. Only the very young and the guilty failed to pretend they were alone in the tunnels, on the way to work or home or running errands.
He tried not to search the tunnel walls and ceiling for Security cameras. But if he couldn’t look at the African violet and he couldn’t look at people, there was nothing else at which to aim his eyes.
At least he could refrain from scanning, couldn’t he? Then he wouldn’t look like he was searching for cameras. He wouldn’t look guilty.
Unless they watched for people who were obviously trying not to be noticed.
In which case he had better not keep looking away from shopping carts. It was quite natural to peek, to see what people had found in their shopping, to learn what foods had come from the farms. Like that purple globe of eggplant, red-skinned onions, blue-green potsters, green broccoli, pale white fish.
He forgot the fish as his eyes jerked back to the green and away.
He wished he had a reader with him.
There! Watch those! Illuminated signs that advertised beer and pizza and minerals formed when Mars had water a billion years ago. Crystals, the shop bragged. Mudstone marked with ripples. Wormtracks. Shells.
There was a diskshop stocked with newsdisks, novels, textbooks, games, and more. Its entrance was never clear, for people moved steadily in and out.
A tour shop, its entrance flanked by glass-cased, bright-lit posters showing the vast rise of Olympus Mons, the gorge of Marineris just as vast, Io spuming yellow, red, and black, the desolation of the lunar highlands, coral reefs on Earth, fishless and stark, Earth itself viewed from orbit. Next door a clothing store, its display assuring everyone it sold everything from the flimsiest of nightwear to Martian hardsuits.
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker let his attention settle on a tiny robot, legs flickering as it scurried along the floor, dodged feet, and raced up a ramp attached to the tunnel wall. There was another robot on the shelf that ran just above all the doorways and display cases and neon signs and usually kept the machines off the floor and out from underfoot. The first ignored the pull-outs, the ramps up and down, and the access holes that led inside the walls. It met a third, and there was room to pass. It stopped. Its head rose, antennae wiggled as it optimized the signal it was receiving, and it began to move again, faster, running now, practically flying, taking the ramp that led to the next cross-path, arched riblike beneath the tunnel’s roof.
The little robots removed dust and litter and debris, searched for defects in tunnels and ducts, repaired what they could, and signalled for human assistance when a problem was beyond their abilities. Marcus Aurelius Hrecker shared his people’s pride in the versatile machines even though he understood their major shortcoming. They were a triumph of mechanical and electronic technology, but they were no nearer the ultimate goal than they had been a century before. Only the sort of information storage one found in genes could permit a self-reproducing von Neumann machine to exist.
Artificial intelligence? They had that, though hardly at a human level, not even at the level rumor hinted had been achieved some time before the Engineers’ final victory. He had heard the robots compared to cats and monkeys, and the reason for their limitation was once more that they were not organic. In some ways, living things had distinct design advantages.
But not this African violet. Not at this moment. Not now. Not ever.
It could kill him.
He wished he dared to se
t the plant in its mug on one of those shelves, or on the floor. The machines would dispose of it. That was their job. They were everywhere. They cleaned clothes and floors, polished shoes, mended and repaired, stripped paint and replaced it, found and fetched lost items, and prepared food, tending Olympia and all its people just as they did in the cities of Mars and Earth, the Moon and the habitats, everywhere the Engineers chose to live.
But no one did such things. If he did, one of his fellow pedestrians would surely notice and report his suspicious behavior. Or the cameras, wherever they were, would pick him up.
Better he should leave the plant under his shirt.
The short side-tunnel, filled with the pink-tinged light of Mars, opened into a concourse thirty meters high. Its far wall was a curve of steel-ribbed glass. Beyond that was the red-rock lip of the scarp that lifted Olympus Mons a kilometer above the lowlands beyond, and then those lowlands, softened and smoothed into plains by distance. The only signs of human presence were a distant dome and a cloud of yellow fumes beside the concentric rings of an open-pit mine.
No one paid the spectacular view any attention at all. No one seemed disturbed by the far-off industrial stain on the landscape. Both were routine, backdrop, as accepted as the posters in the tour shop’s display cases.
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker was no exception. When he left the tunnel, his mind was on the plant tucked within his shirt, on his destination, on the tasks that awaited him. He turned sharp left, stepped aboard the escalator in front of him, rode to the next level up, and entered another tunnel marked by a small brass plaque that said “Olympus University.” When Hrecker passed it, it repeated its message aloud.
Just within this tunnel was a directory board that displayed a map of the university’s tunnels and a list of departments, offices, and labs. Hrecker ignored this too. The Q-Drive Research Center where he was a junior researcher was straight ahead and right and right and left, past the administration’s side-tunnel and the dining hall and the freshman dorms, just before the turn into the athletic complex, and late on any afternoon the lab rocked with noise every time someone opened the main door to enter or leave. Sometimes the din even penetrated the solid rock of Mars itself.
But the tunnels were quiet now. The day’s first classes were in session. He glanced through the entry to the dining hall and found it empty except for a few stragglers. The creak of exercise machinery was the only sign that anyone was in the athletics area at all.
And here was the Research Center. He felt the flower mug with his wrist. Would he be able to reach his lab before someone spotted it? Would he be able to bury it in a wastebasket? Should he flush the plant and its soil down a toilet, wash its container, and pretend it had never held anything more incriminating than a wooden pencil?
Of course, as soon as the entrance door swung shut behind him, Eric Silber came out of the com room, his hands full of paper. “What’s that? A tumor?”
Silber was a mathematician, but his sharply angled, acne-scarred face and cawing voice had prompted more than one to suspect out loud that he was really a Security plant. Thereafter, no one quite dared to trust him or to object to his bitter gibes. And of course he had seen the bulge in Hrecker’s shirt.
“Just a…” He made a garbled noise, waved one hand, and turned quickly into the hall that led toward his lab. When Eric did not follow him or say, “What?” he breathed a sigh of relief.
But the relief did not last long.
When he reached his tiny office safely, he peered beneath the metal desk and behind the books and knickknacks on the shelf. Once he was sure none of the tiny, insectoid robots were present, he set the plant in its mug beside the keyboard of his terminal. Then he wondered what the gyp he could do with it.
He scratched his belly where the mug had pressed. He was carefully tucking in his shirt once more when the doorlatch clicked behind him.
“Got a min— ? What have you got there?”
He spun and flushed and said, “Sorry. But— ”
“That’s dumb,” said Renard Saucier. “Suicidally dumb.”
Hrecker did not think to ask why Saucier was in his doorway, belly straining against his traditional coverall, hairline arching toward the ceiling. As usual, the man’s upper eyelids folded down at their outer edges and he looked exhausted. He was in charge of this section of the lab, supervising several researchers and technicians, but he was rarely seen until after lunch. Mornings he spent on his own research.
“A plant, of all things,” said Saucier. “Today, of all times. I was just in a meeting…”
“An African violet.” Hrecker tried very hard to sound meek. “I was going to throw it away.”
“Then why did you bring it here? If Security spotted it…”
“I know.”
“You’d never run another probability shifter, would you?”
Hrecker shook his head. The lab had learned how to use the probability warp that made the Q drive possible to achieve macroscopic tunneling a decade ago. The trick had proved to be the key to faster-than-light travel, the heart of the tunnel drive the Gypsies had mastered before they fled the system more than a century before. More recently, they had been trying to use a variation of the technique to control the placement of ions in semiconductors. They hoped to build electronic memories that would match the capacity of biological ones.
A shelf on the wall to the left of the doorway held a veedo set. Saucier turned toward it and touched its switch. Then he reached past Hrecker and picked up the plant. “I’ll dispose of it. You check the news.”
Was that why he had appeared so early in the day? Was there something important happening in the world outside the lab? Something that might affect their work? Or…?
Obediently, Marcus Aurelius Hrecker watched the screen as it came to life. And when the image proved to be that of a familiar piece of Olympian tunnel, he reached blindly for his chair, rolled it away from the desk, turned it, and sat.
A voice was saying: “Constant vigilance is the only way we can remain free of the green taint. Only half an hour ago, Security noticed this woman…” A small woman, elderly, silver-haired, her bent back against a shadowed alcove. Hrecker recognized her, and a premonition of her fate shivered down his spine. “Obviously a Gypsy sympathizer,” the voice went on conversationally. “Perhaps even an actual agent. She was distributing emblems of that subversive movement.” The camera swung toward one of the woman’s hands, the image enlarged, and the screen filled with a plump cactus rooted in a small glass jar. “She is in Security’s custody now, being interrogated. Once she has divulged the names of everyone who accepted one of her emblems, they too will be arrested and questioned. Then she will be— ”
“Executed.” Saucier was back. “So will they.”
“She practically forced it on me!”
“You should have screamed for help.”
“For what? Assault with a deadly flower?”
“It’s deadly enough when Security is watching.”
Hrecker nodded. “Yeah. Is that what you wanted me to see?”
The other shook his head as the weathergirl came on to speak of dust storms and unusual cold sweeping across the face of Mars. “I didn’t even know about that one. Give it another minute.”
“But why? The last time anybody saw a Gypsy was a century ago. That was when we conquered the Orbitals and took over the whole system, not just Earth and the Moon.”
“There might be a few left.”
“Enough of them?” Hrecker asked. His tone was insistent. “Every time something goes wrong, every blowout, every equipment failure, every… Enough to take all the blame?”
“They’re useful that way, aren’t they?”
“There can’t possibly be a resistance movement!”
Saucier nodded. “Don’t say that outside the lab.”
“Do you think I’m suicidal?”
“You had that flower.”
He fell silent. So he had. He supposed he wouldn’t have if he h
adn’t felt able to trust the lab. He would have found some way to refuse the cursed gift, or to get rid of it. He might even have cried out for Security to seize the treasonous old woman.
He had been quite astoundingly foolish to do what he had done. He loved the lab for its tolerance of difference, for its atmosphere of intellectual independence, for its old-fashioned free speech. But talk was one thing. Doing was quite another.
“What did you want me to see?”
The weathergirl was done. The soccer report from Earth was nearly over.
“There it is.” Saucier didn’t really need to point as the screen filled with a Q-ship, all swollen nose and slender shaft jutting from a bundle of cylindrical reaction-mass tanks. “The Explorer.”
The newscaster, his voice urgent with professional emotion, was saying:
“…back from Tau Ceti, where they found a world with intelligent life. It may be the Gypsies’ First-Stop, according to Commander Dengh.”
Pictures flashed across the screen. Humanoid aliens, large-skulled, round-bellied, and blunt-muzzled, standing erect but fur-covered, some with tails, some without. Cities and fields and roads, ships and trucks, a high, high tower centered in a nearly circular valley, a handful of artificial satellites. A world with two large continents separated by no more ocean than lay between Europe and Africa, each one wreathed in arcs of islands.
“How long have they been back?” asked Hrecker.
“A month. They’ve kept it quiet.”
“Why? What’s the secret?”
“The Gypsies. The best our people could tell, the age of the buildings, the size of the road network, the amount of environmental damage, all indicate a very young civilization. And that tower. The locals aren’t quite advanced enough to build it. And they speak a kind of English. Our biologists think the Gypsies must have gengineered them from animals.”
“I hope they spent the month arguing over what to do,” said Hrecker.
Saucier nodded. “We’re not our ancestors. But we do need to do something. If we don’t, the conservatives will gain power and we may turn as destructive as ever. Or the underground, if there really is one, will sense weakness.”
Seeds of Destiny Page 1