Seeds of Destiny

by Thomas A Easton

  “Yessir.”

  “I want a report,” said Senior Hightail. “You’ve got a week.” With that he turned and left.

  When he was a safe distance off, Dotson told Sunglow, “Don’t mind the old fart.” A moment later, he squeezed her arm and added, “I like being distracted. At least by you.”

  She squeezed back. “But you won’t go to the Field with me.”

  “You heard him. Now I’ve got to write a report for him.”

  “You didn’t have that excuse an hour ago.”

  He said nothing as he led the way off the steps and onto a gravel path that pointed toward his apartment.

  “You’ve never had me in your place, you know. So I’ll go home with you now. You dictate. I’ll type. We’ll be done in no time. And then…”

  “Uh-uh,” he said, and despite his best effort, his voice squeaked. “I work better alone.”

  She stopped on the path and swung to face him. “You’re lying. You’re afraid of me. Or you have something else going on. Do you have a mate there?”

  “No!” But his voice squeaked even worse.

  “I don’t believe you!” she cried quite shrilly.

  He could not possibly tell her the truth. But what else could he say? In silence, he tried to smile. He let the effort go when Sunglow’s only response was wide open eyes, flaring nostrils, one hand raised in fury, its claws extended.

  He backed a step. She froze and stared at her own hand, realizing what she was doing. She let it fall. And then she walked away from him.

  Dotson Barbtail’s apartment consisted of two alcoves and two rooms. One alcove, its opening shielded by a curtain, held a shower, a sink, and a toilet. The other was a tiny kitchen with a hotplate, a coldbox, and three cupboards for food, dishes, and utensils. One of the rooms held a table, a desk, two chairs, a rack of shelves filled with books and stacks of paper. The other was equipped with a sleeping pad and another rack of shelves that held harnesses, extra pouches, two cloaks, three caps, and copies of all those Remaker plaques that pertained to his research.

  The sleeping room also had a broad, multipaned window that faced the morning sun. Before that window was an oversized earthenware pot full of dirt. In that dirt stood what looked like a large plant. A broad rosette of green leaves lay flat on the soil. From its center rose a waist-high stalk as fat as Dotson’s thigh. Its lower half was creased as if it would someday divide in two. Its upper half was swollen and misshapen. The top of the stalk bore a fat terminal bud.

  Dotson tried to work when he got home. Just as he had told Sunglow, he had the work to do, and it had gained urgency from Senior Hightail’s words. But…

  He sat at his desk, staring at his typer and the piece of paper it had held for three days. It was in fact the first page of a progress report. Unfortunately, he did not have much progress to report.

  As they had with so much, the Remakers had left full accounts of their own biology and of the techniques by which they had manipulated the material of heredity to create such things as Racs. Dotson Barbtail’s predecessors had established that Rac and Remaker biology were in all but details the same. The cells of both stored information in genes built of DNA. The Remakers had used protein enzymes found in bacteria to snip and splice the genes, and their plaques noted that the most useful such enzymes came from bacteria that lived in hot springs and volcanic cracks in the deep sea bed. Unfortunately, they had not been able to leave samples with their records. It was up to the Racs to find or make their own tools for genetic engineering.

  That is, it was up to Dotson Barbtail. He had been assigned to screen First-Stop’s bacteria for the necessary enzymes. He had even found some, transferred their genes to bacteria he could grow in vats in the lab, and hoped soon to have restriction endonucleases and heat-stable polymerases in quantity. Unfortunately, the bacteria refused to grow as they should. It almost seemed that the enzymes poisoned the cells that made them.

  He had said all that before. He had told his superiors. He had requested more samples from hot springs and the sea bed. He had put himself at the mercy of other workers, and when the submersibles had run into problems of their own, he had actually been pleased.

  Could he have solved his problems by himself? Perhaps, he thought.

  If he had never raided the Great Hall for that Remaker seed.

  If he had never planted it in his sleeping room, there by the window.

  If it had never sprouted.

  If he had never spoken to it and watched in open-mouthed delight as its stalk bent away from the light toward him, toward his voice.

  If he had been able to leave it long enough to try growing the enzymes he already had in other sorts of bacteria. Surely there were some the enzymes would not poison. Surely there was a way.

  But.

  He slammed one hand on the desktop and sang, high-pitched and angry, at the awkward, clumsy, time-consuming typer. Would it help if he had a computer, a word processor? No one had such things yet, but the Remakers’ plaques described them in detail. Five years ago, the High Priest had celebrated the first single-crystal silicon ingot. Now there were solar cells for space stations. A year ago, he had celebrated the first simple integrated circuit. Soon, soon.

  No. The problem was not his tools. It was him.

  He abandoned his desk for the sleeping room. He stood over the plant and sang at it angrily. Once more, as it always did, it leaned toward him. It did not care about his mood. “Speak to me,” its posture said. He could almost see the stalk as a body, a Rac wrapped in a green robe to blur its outlines, the terminal bud a head tipped attentively in his direction. “Speak to me. Talk and tell and teach.”

  Soon he was telling it about the service that morning, about prejudice against tailless Racs, about Sunglow’s courting of him and his reluctance to let her into the apartment, about his fear of what she would say or do when she saw the plant for the first time. Would she guess what it was? What he had done? Would she denounce him? Would the High Priest himself then come here to remove the pot and plant? What would happen to him?

  Would he be banished? That would mean the continent of Farshore, a backward place peopled almost entirely by tailless Racs. There were mines there, essential for industry and progress, and there was a need for managers. Maybe he would be volunteered for that duty, far from the Worldtree at the center of his life, at the navel of the world.

  Or… The Farshorns provided most of the miners, when they were not warring with each other or the Land of the Worldtree. Tailed criminals provided the rest.

  Sunglow was a tailless Farshorn herself, as lovely and enticing as only the alien could be. She was not backward, not primitive, not fit only to be a miner or a servant. Her mother was a teacher, her father a bureaucrat. But no matter how much he craved her, no matter how much other males envied him when she was with him, tail or no tail, he could not let her get too close.

  Did it make a sound when he got up to find a sausage for his lunch? How could it? That slightest of squeaks must have come from outdoors, or the apartment next door, or the hallway. Yet now the plant was leaning toward the visioncaster on the table beside the window.

  He turned it on, and then he stood to watch the report of a newly discovered troop of Racs. They lived in the forests of an island far at sea, eating roots and fruits and shellfish. Living in huts. They had tails, but they were more primitive even than the Farshorns outside their towns and cities.

  The announcer’s voice was saying how far these islanders showed the rest of Rackind had come since the Remakers left.

  Dotson got his sausage from the coldbox. When he looked again, the VC showed an outdoor scene, a milling crowd, a miniature Worldtree with a basket of woven steel upon its tip, and a tailless priest atop a pyramid of wooden steps. He wore a yellow cloak and cap, marked with black, just as had the High Priest of Worldtree Center’s Great Hall.

  This priest, however, never faced his congregation. Arms upthrust, head back, eyes closed, belly protruding more
than that of any priest Dotson had ever seen before, he appealed to his Worldtree icon and through it to the Remakers themselves. “We have learned,” he cried. “We have learned so much! Give us a sign! Tell us we have done well! Tell us that you approve our struggle! Tell us that our progress pleases you!”

  A line of young Racs formed to one side of the step-pyramid. Each one held a replica of one of those plaques the Remakers had left atop the Worldtree. When the priest gestured, they approached the icon one by one, found the inconspicuous clawholds in its surface, climbed, and carefully set their burdens in the basket high above the congregation.

  “Our offering! The lessons we have mastered! Tell us they are enough!

  “Or must we still struggle to unravel all the rest? You are the gods, perfect and unsurpassable! How can we equal you?

  “The heretics of Worldtree Center claim we must even go beyond. How can that be possible?

  “Give us a sign! Return to us!

  “Or must we first destroy all Evil? All those who would destroy your works?”

  The sausage was flavored with roasted mossberry seeds, pungent and sharp beneath the meat and grease. It was also far too quickly gone.

  Dotson thought of his typer and the work that waited for him. That was not too quickly gone. On the contrary, it loomed over him forever.

  He looked back at the VC, the visioncaster. Who was the heretic? It had been one of the tailless who had first proclaimed the holiness of the quest for knowledge, the drive to match, exceed, rejoin the Remakers. But it had been the tailed who listened and accepted and made that faith their own. The tailless had chosen to pray to the Remakers for approval, intervention, return, and the restoration of their own one-time dominance. They were the last of the Racs to be Remade, they claimed. They were the Final Model, the best, the closest to godhood. And someday the Remakers would return to redress all their favorites’ grievances.

  Not that the tailed— including Dotson Barbtail himself— never prayed to the Remakers or wished for their return. Not that the tailed did not also believe in the existence of evil forces that opposed the Remakers or the quest for knowledge.

  It did not surprise him that the beliefs of the two groups had influenced each other. Indeed, those who studied the plaques that recorded the Remakers’ history said that such influences were common.

  But the tailed remained closer to the Founder’s vision. He had always been sure of that.

  CHAPTER 5

  Most of Belt Center 83 had no way to see out except through veedo screens. That had its advantages, for it meant each residential cubicle, separated from its neighbors only by thinnest plastic, could nevertheless look out on Mars’s Valles Marineris, share the view from Olympia’s glass-walled concourse, overlook an Earthly cityscape or mountain range, furrowed glacier or moving sea. Forests, jungles, coral reefs, farms, and other living views were forbidden. A few seemed to overlook vast factories full of gleaming metal and busy machines.

  Most people rarely used their veedo windows, seeming to prefer the quite traditional prints, photographs, and holograms. They were no less artificial and much less prone to interruptions by veedo calls and official announcements, but the real reason may have been something more akin to agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces.

  The Center had an entrance, a dome through which people could come and go and supplies could be delivered. The dome’s surface was transparent, and standing beneath its frameless curve, the floor pushing almost weightlessly against one’s feet, was like floating in space, unsupported, insecure, surrounded not by human structure but by vast emptiness and thronging stars and distant worlds.

  Yet that dome was almost always empty. Few people visited to savor the view it offered. Few whose business took them through it lingered there or lifted their eyes from the floor as they hastened on their way. The human species was well established in the space environment, but those were rare who could stand to stare into the infinite depths of space without the frame of a helmet’s visor or a port’s rim to reassure them of their safety.

  Those robots that scurried through clung to the angle between the floor and wall.

  “I don’t like this place,” said Eric Silber.

  “It’s cold,” said Miriam Panek, and it was. The material of the dome resisted heat flow far less well than the walls of the tunnels, and the chill of space penetrated to the staring humans.

  “It’s the gravity,” said Renard Saucier. “Not just the view. They’ve got even bigger domes on the Moon. But your feet can hug the ground. You don’t feel like you’re about to spin off to nowhere.”

  “Greenshit,” said Silber. “How long are you going to keep us here? We’re done, aren’t we?”

  “You want to go home, don’t you, Eric?” Miriam’s voice was wistful. “Back to Mars and its tunnels.” She was staring through the dome, into space, and Hrecker thought her face seemed softer, younger, than usual. “I don’t see much difference.”

  “There’s weight. There’s a view. You can go outside for a walk. Or you can be alone in a room with solid walls.”

  “Ah, well,” said Miriam. “Then you’ll be happy soon. We’re almost done. That’s why Renard brought us here, to this dome.”

  “Just to stare at the gyppin’ ships?”

  Saucier said nothing, letting Miriam nod and smile sweetly and say, “I wish…” The probability shifters had successfully been given larger fields. The drives had been designed and built and installed. The ships had been finished, and there they were.

  “What do you wish?” Silber’s tone was now a sneer. “You want to go with them?”

  “Look at them,” said Hrecker. He pointed through the wall of the dome, halfway between floor and zenith, and spoke their names with relish: “Ajax, Bolivar, Bonami, Cascade, Drake, Gorbachev, Pizarro, Saladin, Toledo, Villa.”

  All except the largest, the flagship Ajax, even though they were built in space, were quite capable of landing on a planet. If all went well, they would, and soon. They were almost ready for their cleansing mission.

  For now, they orbited the asteroid that was Belt Center 83 like remoras around a shark or aides around a general. In form, they were huge mushrooms, their ten broad heads crowded with narrow corridors, missile bays, beam generators, storerooms, and sleeping quarters, cubicles equipped with shelflike bunks. The stubby stems that contained the drives were sheathed in clustered pods for the dust the Q-drives used as reaction mass. The ships wore no armor, although the mushroom heads were broad enough to shield the dust pods from whatever debris combat or space itself might throw in their way. No one wished a ship to lose its power to move.

  Among the ships were several of the huge fabric spheres the dust-mills had filled with pulverized asteroids. More were on their way.

  “I suppose you want to go too.” Silber was glaring at Hrecker, refusing to look at the products of all their efforts.

  Hrecker shook his head. “No, not really. But aren’t they marvelous? Haven’t we done a grand job?”

  Silber snorted derisively. “It was a job, and yes, we’re done.”

  “Almost,” said Saucier. “Soon enough, and you can go home.”

  “They’re already being loaded,” said Miriam.

  Food, spare parts, equipment, and weaponry were arriving daily from Earth, the Moon, and Mars. With them came men and women from the Navy’s bases on the Moon and Mars, Ganymede and Titan, selected for competence, loyalty, and experience with the old slower-than-light, insystem Q-ships. General Lyapunov had announced that their experience should help them adjust to the new ships.

  Most were also volunteers. The worlds of the Solar System had been pacified for many decades, the Engineers’ rule unquestioned except by isolated malcontents. It had been even longer since anyone had seen a Gypsy; it seemed unlikely that they would return just now. And no one took the possibility of an alien invasion seriously. All the action would be at Tau Ceti.

  As soon as Hrecker and his colleagues completed the final adj
ustments to the Q-drives and the crews had shaken down both themselves and their ships, the expeditionary force would be able to leave. The date of departure had already been set for three months hence.

  “I’m going to miss you,” Hrecker said for the hundredth time. He spoke in the murmur that had become second nature for all those who lived in the tunnels. He was barely aware of the sounds his neighbors made: soft music, the click of game tiles and the whisk of playing cards, occasional raised voices or laughter. The louder noises of the starship crews, billeted by twos and threes wherever space could be found or made, were more obtrusive.

  “You could come too,” Tamiko Inoue answered as she always had. “You don’t have to go back to Mars. We could stay together.”

  “You could stay here. Come with me.” He had made it plain again and again how eager he was to get back to the university and his lab, to the work he had been doing before this project had drafted him. He had come willingly enough. What choice had he had, after all? He had worked hard, and unlike Eric Silber he had taken satisfaction in the success he and his colleagues had achieved. Yet he was content to let his involvement with the mission end.

  But she had been the one factor that most truly made life at Belt Center 83 bearable.

  She shook her head furiously. “No. I want to see Tau Ceti and First-Stop and the aliens.”

  “I’d like to see them too.”

  “Then come.”

  “And I don’t want to give you up.”

  “Then come with me.” A moment later, she added, “The General says we don’t have enough techs. He’s worried about maintaining the new drives and particle beams and repairing them if they break down.”

  “They won’t.”

  “He’s still worried. There hasn’t been time to train any Navy technicians.”

  “So that’s why you want me to sign up.”

  “No!” The thought that he suspected her of being so manipulative seemed to shock her. “But… We could use you, and all the rest of your group. All you have to do is fill out the application. You’d be a lieutenant right away. Your boss would be a major.”