Seeds of Destiny

by Thomas A Easton

  Now it was his turn to shake his head. “You could just wait a while before leaving. The Navy’s techs have been working with us all along. It wouldn’t take many more weeks to finish training them.”

  “We can’t do that.”

  “Why not?” said Hrecker. “The aliens aren’t going anywhere.”

  “They have satellites. They might, if we take too long. They could escape, just like the Gypsies.”

  “And you can’t have that, can you?” His expression turned sad. “You want to be a Crusader and destroy the infidels.”

  “The Crusaders were the infidels. They were after the heathen Moors.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She didn’t answer. She sat up in the sleepsac, her arms crossed beneath her breasts, and stared through the gap between his ceiling and the wall. A shadow swept across the plastic, a head flashed into view and vanished. There was no telling whether the passerby had glanced in her direction.

  When Hrecker tried to lift an edge of the sleepsac to cover her, she brushed his hand aside. “Are you advertising?”

  “I might as well. I’ll need to find someone else if you’re staying.”

  “That won’t be hard. Pretty thing like you.”

  She pushed his hand away again. “Hard enough. We’ll be busy. Not much time for socializing.”

  “Not that busy. We’ve improved the drives a lot, but you’ll still be on the way for weeks.”

  “We’ll use it all for weapons drills, defense, evasion. It’s a military expedition, after all.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “We don’t know what to expect.”

  They were silent, listening to the sounds of other people: a rhythmic slapping, thudding, grunting that said a pretense of privacy could be enough; an ancient song about a truck that had lost its brakes on the way down a mountain road; a tensely whispered argument; a veedo report claiming, “…ses of samples and tapes brought back by the Explorer. There is no sign of human or Earthly DNA, but the natives there bear a marked resemblance to raccoons. We are now more confident that the Gypsy gengineers were there. The coons are therefore lab-made monsters, abominations, corruptions we must wipe from the face of the planet.”

  “Coons,” someone in the distance laughed. “That’s what they called my great-great-great grandfather.”

  At last Hrecker said, “I want to be with you. I want to see Tau Ceti too. But I’d miss Earth. Not that I’ve ever spent much time there, but at least on Mars and the Moon there are farms and greenhouses. A link. I miss that here. I’d miss it worse there.”

  “There’s life there,” said Tamiko. “You’ve seen the tapes. Green leaves and trees. Animals. And for all our worries about the Gypsies, it looks a lot more natural than Earth has been for centuries.”

  “Except for the coons.”

  She nodded. “We’ll have work to do when we get there.”

  Neither of them said out loud what that work seemed likely to entail.

  The Navy’s uniform was a light blue coverall with darker blue shoulder panels. The left breast was embroidered with a golden cogwheel of a size that could be covered with a palm. Insignia of rank were pinned to the right breast.

  Marcus Aurelius Hrecker looked at his reflection in the surface of the small screen that showed Belt Center 83 shrinking to a distant speck behind the ship. His cogwheel was surrounded by a second, larger one to mark his position in the technician corps. A silver bar said that he was, just as Tamiko had foretold, a lieutenant. Below it, a pair of dice said that his specialty was the probability shifters that made Q-drives and macroscopic tunneling and faster-than-light travel all possible.

  The shifters themselves were silent. The energy that flowed from the quantum vacuum under their influence was too. But as dust from the storage pods was fed into the reaction chamber to be vaporized and thrust from the rear of the ship, a whisper grew to a roar and acceleration pressed his feet to the deck.

  The controls he had been set to watch showed no irregularities. The shifters worked flawlessly, and satisfaction in the development work he and his colleagues had done showed in the set of his lips.

  “On our way,” said Meyer Smith, the chief technician.

  “No problems,” said Hrecker.

  Smith flipped a switch that would confirm what the crew on the bridge already knew. “Happy?”

  Hrecker nodded. Yes, he was happy. He had wanted to go back to the university and his lab, but he had also not wanted to part from Tamiko. She had refused to give up her place on the expedition. Eventually, he had given in. And here he was.

  On the other hand, here he was. On the Saladin. And she was on the flagship, the Ajax. After all, that was where General Lyapunov was, and she was one of the man’s aides.

  But he could talk to her occasionally. He would see her when they arrived. And he would see a new world, a new people, alien and strange, frightening and tempting.

  The drive room was a smaller version of the bridge. It didn’t have a big viewscreen, and it didn’t have in the center of the chamber a padded couch for the captain, but it did have all the controls needed to fly the ship. It also held enough room for the second and third shifts to gather near the entrance, there to watch as the expedition took its first steps into the interstellar dark. He glanced in their direction. Saucier was on the Gorbachev, Major Saucier indeed. Miriam Panek was on the Cascade. But Eric Silber was here, on the same ship as he, looking sour.

  He could not help but wonder if he was here because rumor was right and he did indeed work for Security. If they had assigned him here despite his wishes…

  “What are you staring at me for?” he snarled.

  Hrecker shrugged. “Just glad you decided to come.”

  “I had to when the rest of you signed up. Twiddling my gyppin’ thumbs till you got back would have driven me nuts.”

  “Vacuum flux on the curve,” said Bela B’Genda on the other side of the room. She was a short, stocky, dark woman who had left a husband on Ganymede. Her voice was warm and resonant.

  “Dust flow’s fine. The mills didn’t leave any lumps.” That was the German, a brush-cut blonde everyone called the Baron because he once had mentioned aristocratic ancestors. He sounded like he was giving orders, and in the center of his ornamental cogwheel he had pinned a robot the length of his thumb. From time to time it twitched and wiggled legs amd antennae.

  Smith flipped two more switches. “Six weeks,” he said. “And then— ”

  “We need a planet-buster,” said the Baron.

  “What the gyp’s that?” asked Silber.

  “Old stories,” said the Baron. “They used to write about blowing up whole worlds, even stars.”

  “Hah.” That was Bela.

  “Truth. I had a great-great-something uncle, they say. Made donuts for a living, but he dreamed up some of the damnedest gadgets.”

  “So what would we want a planet-buster for?” asked Hrecker.

  “We wouldn’t need a whole gyppin’ fleet. One ship, one big warhead, and the job’s done. No more First-Stop. No more coons.”

  “Pretty drastic,” said Smith. “Overkill.”

  “Nah,” said the Baron. “Who cares about a bunch of alien trees and bugs, as long as we get the monsters? It ain’t Earth, after all.”

  “And that’s the only place that counts, eh?” asked Bela.

  “Right.” The Baron jerked his head in an affirmative that brooked no argument.

  Hrecker glanced at Eric Silber. He was grinning. Bela and Smith were not. Their faces looked as stiff as his own felt. They too were struggling to contain their reactions to the Baron’s bloodthirsty chauvinism. They too, perhaps, feared that the Baron might really be an agent of Security, there as much to provoke disloyal attitudes as to watch drive-room displays.

  It was hard to imagine that anyone could seriously wish to destroy an entire world.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Tell me, Dotson. You look sad.”

 
He ignored her, staring past her out his bedroom window across the evening-shadowed valley, the high Worldtree, the complex of buildings that huddled around its base. A flock of dumbos, leathery wings flapping, flexible proboscises trailing from their round heads, swooped above nearby roofs. They were already gathering for their fall migrations. Behind him the VC muttered through its repertoire of dramas, sermons, exhortations, and lessons in history, calculation, and the study of the plaques for all those children and adults who did not choose to sit in classrooms. He had not turned it off when he came in.

  “Tell me, please.” The voice was reedy, thin, yet sweet and clear, young, still new to speech though its owner was the size of a half-grown Rac. She had not been talking for very many weeks. “Tell me, do. What happened to you?”

  He sighed. He said nothing. Then he sighed again. “Senior Hightail. As usual. He says I’m not in the lab enough. I’m ignoring my work. Not making progress.”

  “I keep you busy.”

  “I suppose you do. He thinks it’s Sunglow. So do the other students. ‘Too many late nights,’ they say. ‘Go to bed alone for a change.’”

  “You always go to bed alone.”

  “Huh. I can’t say that. They’d wonder what I was doing.”

  “Talking to me.”

  “Lord Highass even said maybe I should see the career counselor. Maybe I don’t belong at Worldtree Center.”

  “Stay here!” The voice sounded suddenly worried. “Talk to me!”

  “I wouldn’t be able to take you with me if I left, would I?” He chuckled, his voice rougher now, more relaxed, more affectionate. He reached out one hand to stroke the side of the head and ruffle the pale blue petals on its scalp. He looked at the figure, still rooted in the large pot in which he had first planted the seed. Leaves still fanned across the soil. But its stem was now a body no higher than his chest. Its lower portion was divided into legs, its center swelled into hips, and a little higher its chest wore two— just two, and already larger than a Rac female’s six— mammary bumps. There were shoulders, arms, hands. The skin was pale and covered with small, triangular, bright green leaves.

  There was a face quite unlike any Rac’s. Quite flat by comparison, with no projecting muzzle. More triangular than round, broad-browed, narrow-chinned. Small teeth, gray eyes instead of brown, a thin, furless skin— leafless too— that let the cheekbones show. A chin, so squarely shelflike that it might have been designed to compensate for the missing shelves of bone above the eyes. Eyebrows thin and pale, not bristling like some prickly hedge.

  If a Rac child had ever looked like that, its parents would have called a physician, who surely would have called it underdeveloped, weak, anemic, sickly, doomed to die an early death.

  Yet the plant beside him did not seem strange to him at all. It was a Remaker in all but one little thing: Its— her— feet were still rooted; she could not walk. “You’re a big girl now.”

  “Too big to move?”

  He nodded. “Too big to hide.” He could just imagine what the neighbors would say if he lugged her out the door in her pot. They would see right away that he had something unusual and illicit. They would call the Center. She would be confiscated and examined, and as soon as someone realized what she truly was, she would be ensconced in the Great Hall and worshipped endlessly.

  While he… He didn’t think they would have much patience with him. Certainly they would not worship him. Or honor him in any way. Most likely, they would take him to some small room deep beneath the Great Hall, or even deeper within the caverns in the bluff, and he would never see the sun again. Or Sunglow.

  Nor would it help if she could walk. He thought she would. Any day now she would pull her feet from the dirt and step out of the pot. Why else would her stalk have become legs? But even then… Well, she was not the same shape as a Rac. She couldn’t possibly walk with the same gait. She didn’t have the pelt. Or the rotund belly.

  If she walked out beside him, he would still lose her. He would still be in trouble.

  One hand rose to bring his mind back from wherever it had wandered. Two fingers rubbed the side of her nose. She had learned to do that so well, almost well enough to pass, if only she looked more like a Rac and less like a god. “Read me a story?”

  He sighed once more. He scratched the side of his muzzle. “Okay.”

  Almost as soon as she had opened her eyes and shown her ability to speak, he had realized that she had to be much like a child. She would need toys and stories and playmates.

  He hadn’t been able to do a thing about the playmates. He had to keep her secret, and besides, what school would have her? She was far too strange, too alien, even without her obvious connection to religion.

  He had wandered Worldtree City for days before he had dared to go into a toy store. “Gifts for my sister’s children,” he had said, and the bored clerk had not seemed to doubt him. He had chosen a pair of dolls, one Rac, one Remaker, and a wooden Worldtree with a set of brightly painted graduated rings. Unfortunately, his talking plant had ignored them. The toys now rested on the windowsill.

  A bookstore had been both easier and more successful. He had brought home brightly illustrated fantasies and nonsense, legends and histories, and those she had loved. Her current favorite was the tale of Kitewing, who had ridden a soaring box kite to observe the movements of a tailless army in one of the many battles for possession of the valley and the Worldtree. He had seen how high he was and how much higher the dumbos flew, and he had cried out for his ground crew to let out more line from the winch. He had soared higher, and yet higher, and when the opposing army had sent its own kites aloft to forestall him, he had cut their cables with his sword. Only one enemy had avoided his attack, remaining below him to saw at his own cable. Kitewing had managed to leap from his kite at the last possible moment and land upon the flange that encircled the top of the Worldtree. His enemy had followed him. They had fought, and when Kitewing had thrust the other off the Worldtree, he had discovered the chamber full of Remaker records.

  “And the box full of seeds.”

  “And the box full of seeds,” he agreed. “They kept it in the Great Hall, over there.” He pointed through the window. “Until I took one of them and planted it.”

  “That’s me.”

  “That’s you.”

  Her indeed. She had grown rapidly, from seed to sprout to sapling, a swollen stalk, a fat terminal bud. The stalk had swelled still more and subdivided and taken the Remaker shape. The bud had enlarged, leaflike scales had fallen away, and a face had appeared, eyes as closed as any newborn animal’s. He had touched her skin, felt animal warmth beneath the tiny leaves that covered it, been surprised at the way she bent toward his hand and an arm reached for him, gently clutching.

  He had marveled. He still did. The Remakers had remade the plant species that had been her ancestor far more extensively than they had remade his own precursor species. They had added, he guessed, their own genes. Perhaps they had added genes from other plants and animals as well. He could not tell, but he recognized in her the flowering of the genetic engineer’s art.

  That was why…

  “Why did you name me Gypsy Blossom?”

  “That’s what the Remakers called themselves. Gypsies. And they made you. Remade you. Just as they did us. But you’re a plant. You have leaves, and your head’s a flower, a blossom.” He had explained it all to her before, but she liked to hear the words again and again, just like any child of Racs.

  He had marveled anew three days later when she had opened her eyes and blinked and softly said, “That’s the Worldtree.” She had been facing the window. When she turned, pivoting on her stalk, she added, “You’re Dotson.”

  She had learned as he had talked to her, thinking her little more than a plant. And at that moment that could only be considered her birth, she had already known enough to identify the first things her eyes saw.

  A newborn, she had already been able to speak simple sentences, express s
imple thoughts. How far would she develop with time? he wondered. Had all Remakers been so precocious? Or had they differed in this as the plaques said they did in other ways. Some, he knew, had been pink, brown, and green. Some had had hair, not petals. Some had been borne in wombs, and some had grown from seed.

  That was when he had begun to leave the VC on all day.

  “Are you going to see the career counselor?”

  “No!”

  “Maybe there is something that would suit you better.”

  “No!”

  “But…” Sunglow sat beside him in the shade of a bank of honeysuckle. In front of them two gravel paths met at an angle, and a small patch of moss was studded with white berries. Sunglow leaned forward to accept the bounty their world offered, even here in the shadow of Worldtree Center’s buildings. She picked a few berries, touched two to either side of her muzzle, and set them between his lips. He chewed, blinked at sudden tart sweetness, and swallowed.

  He did not respond as he should, even though, somewhere in his mind, he dimly recognized the significance of her gesture: courting and invitation and welcome. Even the ancestral Racs of the forests, unintelligent and wild, living in hollow trees and burrows, courted their mates with food. The Remakers had not chosen— or perhaps they had just not thought— to remove the instinct from those genes that dictated the automatic functions of the brain.

  “I can’t leave,” Dotson Barbtail said. “There’s too much to do. I’m not done. I— ”

  “You’re not doing it. That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

  He nodded jerkily.

  “And it’s not what people say.” Her tone was mournful now. “Not me. I wish it was. But even moments like this… We go to Great Hall worship every week. We’re together often enough to keep people thinking of us as a pair. But we don’t have any of those late nights. You’ve never even let me past your door. Or come past mine.”