He too knew what was about to happen.
Tamiko closed her fingers on the handgun’s grip and pulled the trigger.
Johnny Gatling’s left eye disappeared.
CHAPTER 12
The Racs had no difficulty with the idea of rapid, drastic punishment. They had officials whose job it was to investigate crimes and find criminals, but they came into play only when the miscreant was not caught in the act or persuaded to confess. Thieves were turned over to the police who immediately shipped them to labor camps; repeat offenders had their tails docked— if they had tails— and were banished to Farshore. Rapists lost more than their tails. Murderers were executed quickly and quietly.
Yet the Racs had always thought their gods more benign than they were themselves. They were creators, the Remakers who had raised Rackind from the animals in the forests and given them both knowledge and the thirst for more. They were nurturers and teachers. They were as loving and forgiving as only a mother could be.
“They left us only one myth that has anything at all to do with destruction,” said Gypsy Blossom. She remained rooted in her pot, but every muscle, bone, and joint were clear beneath the thin leaves that covered her furless skin. It was impossible to look at her and believe she was more plant than animal, that she had grown from a seed.
“The one about the enemy among them,” said Sunglow. “The one who tried to kill a…”
“Yes,” said the bot. “And they were victims, not actors. They did not even punish, for the enemy leaped to his own death.”
“We have no way to tell if that was how they handled such things all the time. There’s only that one example, one incident, one myth, if you like.” Sunglow seemed to be groping for some way to say that the humans now on their world were indeed the Gypsies of which all Rackind dreamed. “But Johnny Gatling did that too. He handed her his gun, and he must have kn— ” She stopped abruptly, panting lightly. The contradiction was too much. Yes, he had aided his own death. But if they were Gypsies, he could not have done what he had done before that. And Tamiko could not have…
“Could they have changed that much?” asked Dotson Barbtail. He stood by the window, hands clasped behind his back, his muscles taut with tension, his mouth open. He too was panting. The heat had penetrated indoors now.
“If they are even Gypsies.”
“They have to be!” cried Sunglow. “Who else could they be?”
“The enemy the Founder mentioned.”
“They must have changed,” said Dotson. He looked at the bot. Her skin and leaves were dry despite the heat. But of course, he thought. Plants transpire. They cool themselves by letting water evaporate through pores. Bots were thus an improvement on the human or the Rac design. “It’s been just as long for them as for us.”
“Time-dilation,” said the bot.
“Okay.” He nodded. “A little less, depending on how far and how fast they’ve traveled. But still… I can imagine a Remaker making Johnny Gatling’s error. Thinking he was under attack. Acting immediately, reflexively, to protect himself and those around him. But what Tamiko Inoue did— ”
“She wanted to show us that her people would not tolerate savagery.”
“She did not succeed.” When Racs executed a murderer, they did it discreetly, away from public view.
“But they are Gypsies!” cried Sunglow. “Remakers! They said so!”
“Did they really?” asked Gypsy Blossom.
But neither Rac could recall any human actually saying, “We are the Gypsies. Your Remakers. Your gods, come back to you.”
“They aren’t all like Tamiko,” said Sunglow at last. “Or Johnny Gatling.”
“There’s Mark,” said Dotson.
“I like him.”
“So do I.”
“She’s a soldier, isn’t she?” There was no note of surprise in Sunglow’s voice, for the Racs made little distinction between the sexes in their armies.
“And he’s a scholar.”
“How do you know that?” asked Gypsy Blossom.
“He didn’t say. But it shows. He respects knowledge, he cares about books. It pleased him to hear that the reason for our rapid development is our own love of knowledge.”
“That shouldn’t have surprised him,” said Sunglow.
“Then it’s another reason to think they are not Gypsies.”
“And the others?” persisted the bot.
“Huh?” Dotson had lost the thread.
“When they heard… ?”
“I think… I think it scared them.”
All three fell silent.
All three stared out the window. The Worldtree was there, the emblem of the Gypsies and all their gifts. Beyond it, not visible but there, a presence in their minds, was the Bonami, the human ship. Above, in orbit, was the rest of the human fleet.
How could the humans possibly be Gypsies?
If they were not, were they friends?
Or were they enemies? The enemies of which the Founder had warned, who would, if they could, destroy all the Gypsies’ efforts, all the Remakers’ makings. Who would therefore try to destroy the Worldtree, the Racs, even First-Stop itself.
“They have to be Gypsies,” insisted Sunglow. But her voice was plaintive and uncertain. “They do.”
“It wouldn’t do any good to ask them,” said Gypsy Blossom.
“Why not?” Dotson turned to face the plant.
“If they are Gypsies, they would say so.”
“Of course. They would,” said Sunglow.
“If they are not Gypsies but are friendly, they would say so.”
“And if they are foe,” said Dotson. “If that’s the case, they would not say so. They would say they are Gypsies, or that they are friends.”
“Or they would say nothing,” said Gypsy Blossom. “They would let our own wishes tell us lies.”
“They have hinted,” said Dotson. “I think they have.”
The petals on the bot’s scalp trembled as she shook her head. “They have said nothing plain.”
“They could have lied.”
“But there is only one possibility that says nothing.”
“Those hints…”
“We cannot know,” said Sunglow. “We cannot be sure.”
“Until…”
Those Worldtree Center priests and scholars and administrators of highest rank held the offices and laboratories closest to the shaft of the Worldtree and highest above the floor of the valley. Those with the highest ranks of all held rooms for which the Worldtree itself formed one gently curving wall. They could lay their hands on rock that had once been wood as Remade as their own flesh. Those highest in the Center’s buildings had windows and a view as well, but what counted was the sense of a thin, thin barrier between one’s hands and the heartbeat of the gods. Some even swore they could feel a pulse, faint and far away, or a quiver, a trembling of walled-off flesh.
Dotson Barbtail had windows in his office and lab because he had hardly any rank at all. If he were any further from the Worldtree, he would be outdoors among the moss and honeysuckle. Yet he did not mind. Power and hierarchy were not what drove him. Curiosity and inquisitiveness were. Like many Racs, he did not feel that his gods had set him an unpleasant task when they said, “Go forth and learn.”
If he glanced through a window, he would see long shadows that said the afternoon was nearly done. Soon he could go home to Gypsy Blossom. Sunglow would be already there, or she would arrive soon after. She had had the humans to herself this day, guiding them about the city and the Center.
Were there limits to that task of learning? He had known he would be in trouble if anyone caught him stealing a seed from the Great Hall, but he had felt that he was acting in perfect consonance with the Gypsies’ prime directive. What would grow from those seeds? Plant one, and see. That was the soul of the scientific method: Check it out. All else was commentary.
Limits? There was no knowledge the Rac mind should not seek, no question too touchy to
ask, no topic too sacrosanct to study.
That was also the official philosophy of the culture centered on the Worldtree, although some things— the Remakers themselves, the making of the Racs, the quest for knowledge the Racs believed they had been set— were givens, fundamentals of the Rac identity. They were not to be doubted, not to be challenged, never to be changed.
What the priests debated was whether the quest for knowledge should end once the Worldtree had been scaled, or once the first thundertrees had been launched, or once the first space station had been built. Whether the Gypsies, the Remakers, would return to raise their makings to their celestial heaven, or whether they must be sought among the stars. Whether effort could be rewarded and, rewarded, end, or whether it must go on and on and on, forever.
For Dotson, it was enough that there were unanswered questions such as the nature of a seed, or the match between the Remakers’ own biology and the Racs’. The records the Remakers had left behind, describing the science and technology behind what they had done when they Remade the Racs, were mostly accounts of the former. He needed the technology as well and the equivalence between science and technology if the Racs were ever to become makers— remakers— in their own right.
The first step was the enzymes he sought now. The restriction endonucleases, ligases, and polymerases. The tools which would allow Racs to cut and splice the material of their genes just as the Remakers had done so long before. The tools to make singing dumbos, mossberries as big as heads, trees so filled with explosive liquids that they could be used as thundertrees indeed!
His lab was shelves of bottles and jars, a microscope, a device for casting electrophoresis gels, an ultraviolet spectrometer, a centrifuge, a freezer, a pair of incubator chambers. He was bent over his work counter, carefully removing three small ovals from a gel, when the door opened.
He paid no attention. He could not take the risk of mixing the ovals up. Each one had to go into its own labeled and stoppered tube, where the material of the gel would dissolve and the purified protein the electrophoresis process had concentrated in it would be released. Later, once he had accumulated enough of these proteins, enzymes, molecular tools, he and others could use them to isolate the genes behind them, to splice those genes one to another and stimulate their activity, to make the tools in ever greater quantity. And then…
“Dotson?”
The voice was Sunglow’s. He ignored it. This one, here. This, so. This, ah. Doublecheck the labels. Add the reagent. Stoppers. In the rack. Stand and turn and open the nearest incubator.
“Dotson?”
Set it down carefully, carefully, quite paranoid about the possibility of dropping and breaking and undoing all the work and having to wait for more deep-sea and hot-spring bacteria to grow and then to harvest them once more.
And finally turn and smile at golden Sunglow, welcome now that he could spare attention, and say, “Yes?”
“They wanted to see what you did here.”
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker stood behind her shoulder, peering into the lab and looking as confused as he surely would himself if he visited a physicist’s lab. Tamiko Inoue was not with him, but another human female was. Ali Catrone— was that her name? But she was a colleague, not a mate. Their stances held no hint of attachment between her and Mark.
The three visitors pushed into the lab. Behind them were two more strangers he did not recognize. The man was muscular, relaxed, a little shorter than Mark. The woman wore brown hair in a tight coil above a pale face.
“Larry Kentaba,” said Mark. “He’s Johnny Gatling’s replacement. And Sarah Rosnik.” The cogwheel on her breast was pierced by a staff around which twined what seemed to be a vine. He did not say what the woman’s job was, but Dotson thought she seemed to recognize the apparatus in the room.
“Where’s Tamiko?”
“Back on the ship. Her boss is having a staff meeting, and she has to be there even though it’s only over the com.” Mark glanced at the other humans. “Like Sunglow said. We wanted to see your lab. What do you do?”
“He’s a biologist,” said Sarah Rosnik. “That’s obvious.”
“That covers a lot of ground.” The air Mark blew through his nose seemed to say he did not like the woman.
Dotson nodded. “The plaques tell us so much we cannot understand until we work it out for ourselves. The Gypsies recorded their own biology. They left us a brief survey of what they had found here. But the two accounts were not at the same level of detail. They expected us to study our own world’s life for ourselves.
“Which we have done, of course. But now we have to match what we have learned to what they told us. Perhaps you could help.”
Rosnik lurched backward half a step and froze. That clear signal saddened the Rac. These humans might or might not be Gypsies, but the Racs had already received all the help they would ever get.
“What’s this?”
Ali Catrone was touching the apparatus that ran heavy voltage through his gels, forcing proteins to migrate, each one at a speed depending on its size and chemical properties. He explained that, added that special dyes could reveal where the proteins wound up in the sheet of gel, and then he held up one of the tubes he had just filled. “Once I know where the proteins are, I can repeat the separation without the dyes and isolate them for further study.”
“What are you looking for?”
He crossed the room, forcing his visitors to move aside. “Here,” he said. On the wall was a reproduction of a Gypsy plaque, the lines of its engraving far darker than in reality. The humans leaned close to see.
“Jesus!” said Sarah Rosnik. Dotson had no trouble reading her face despite the gulf between their species. Her eyes and lips and nostrils, the sudden paleness of her skin, they all said that she might just have stubbed her toe and looked down to find a disemboweled child.
Mark looked puzzled. “Doctor?”
“I didn’t see this one in those books you got us,” she told him.
“They’re big books. And you haven’t had the time to study them thoroughly.”
“This should have bit me when I saw it. Plasmids.” She spoke the word as if it were the baptismal name of the Anti-Christ himself. “DNA polymerase. Viral transduction.”
“Genetic engineering. I know those words,” said Larry Kentaba. There was a gun in his hand. “Should I… ?”
Dotson Barbtail recoiled from the group. So did Sunglow. Their danger was beyond all possible mistake, and as the fur on their backs and shoulders rose they retreated side by side against the counter where he had been working. Neither one had any doubt that this Kentaba was indeed Gatling’s replacement.
Nor could they any longer believe that these humans were Gypsies, their Remakers.
Remakers could not possibly react so violently against the signs of their own technology.
The shattering of illusions was almost audible.
“No!” cried Mark, though now his face too bore all the signs of shock and revulsion.
“Not yet,” said Rosnik. “We have to tell…”
“They’ll talk!”
“Do you think that matters?”
CHAPTER 13
Just before the laboratory door slammed shut behind them, Marcus Aurelius Hrecker jerked his head and saw the wreckage of the lab’s com, the two coons staring after him, their mouths agape, their teeth showing. They looked like animals, the thought struck him. Jumped-up animals with muzzles and fangs and fur and upright ears. Their hands bound behind their backs and anchored to separate legs of the counter. But…
His heart twisted in his chest. “They haven’t got long,” he said. “Not now.”
“Shut up,” said Larry Kentaba. He was crouched, leaning forward, swiveling his head, searching the corridor for signs of danger. The gun was no longer in his hand, but a passing coon still gave him a wide berth. When it was far enough away, he hissed, “Don’t give them any clues to what we’re going to do.”
“We can’t!”
Hrecker slumped. Of course they were. Pursuing the Gypsies and all their works. Rooting out all the universe’s unnatural, genetically engineered contaminants, wherever they might be found. Except for the conveniences back home.
Ali Catrone made a spitting noise. “It was a bigger asshole who pulled his gun in there. If we’d kept our mouths shut— ”
“They’d never have suspected? We wouldn’t have had to tie them up? We wouldn’t be running now, in case someone finds them?” She nodded, but his back was to her. He didn’t see. “It’s too late now. Where’s the gyppin’ staircase?”
“Over there,” said Hrecker, pointing.
“Why they don’t have elevators,” said Sarah Rosnik.
“We’re only on the second floor.”
“Let’s get out of here before they start to shout.”
“Should have gagged ‘em.”
“The door’s thick enough.”
No one spoke again until they were outdoors, in the car the coons had trustingly provided for their use, and rolling back through air as honeysuckle-scented as that of any Earthly summer toward their ship. Then Kentaba said, “I should have shot the monsters, not the com. You shouldn’t have stopped me.”
“We’d never have made it back,” said Hrecker.
“That doesn’t matter. They’re monsters.”
“Of course it matters,” said Sarah Rosnik. “We need to report.”
“We can’t be sure,” said Ali Catrone in a placating tone. “We only think the Gypsies made them.”
“Not that.” Kentaba shuddered theatrically. “That one’s a gengineer himself.” He glared at Hrecker. “You should have spotted that already. That was your job, wasn’t it?”
Hrecker did not object that this was the first time that he had visited Dotson Barbtail’s lab to see any clue or that the coon had said anything at all about his own work. Instead, he said, “No, he isn’t. He’s a biologist, a biochemist, a molecular biologist. He hasn’t mixed any genes.”
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