“Over there,” whispered the bot. “A clump of honeysuckle. I’ll hide in the middle of it. I’ll be invisible.”
“We’re going with you,” said Sunglow.
“You shouldn’t!” Gypsy Blossom hissed. “That’s too much chance of getting caught.”
“Then we’ll all die together,” said Dotson.
Silence. Then, “You want me to say I’ll stay inside. The hell with you.”
Sunglow stifled a laugh.
“Shh.”
A single shot rang out perhaps a hundred meters off. A cry of pain.
“Now,” said Dotson. “While they’re all looking over there.”
They ran. He tripped once and stumbled, and then he was on soft dirt. The scent of honeysuckle engulfed him. He remembered that other night when he had crept through the vines toward the Great Hall and a display case full of antique seeds. As then, blossoms tipped and spilled nectar on his fur. Sunglow hissed in disgust, revealing that she too was now wet and sticky.
“Here.” Gypsy Blossom stopped in the smallest of open spaces, stood tall and still, and let down her roots. “Ahhh,” she sighed.
Dotson wondered what it must feel like to have roots, to draw water and minerals from the soil, to feed on sunlight, to be half plant. But the closest he could come was to watch as the bot luxuriated in the sensations the human attack had stripped her of, smashing her pot before she was ready to step away from it on her own. She needed this, and he… He had let Sunglow go off on her own, and she had nearly died. He didn’t want to take the same chance of losing the bot, even if it meant his own death. It would be like losing a child.
He guessed that Sunglow must feel the same way, for she was with them, staying close, the cast on her arm bumping his side, the bandage on her leg glowing white in the dark.
“It’s talking to me!”
“What?”
“Shh!”
The bot obediently whispered. “The honeysuckle! Our roots connected, and it remembers. There’s history here, and— ”
“It’s a Gypsy thing,” said Dotson.
“Yesss. It has eyes, you know. And ears. I can see the whole valley. I can hear the humans, the Enemy. And yes, they are the Enemy. They wear the cogwheel. They are the Engineers. And— ”
“Shh!” Sunglow’s hiss was desperate. “Someone’s coming!”
Silence. Distant footsteps, growing closer. A human voice growling, “I heard something over here.”
A second voice: “Another gyppin’ animal. The coons are gone, hiding in the deepest hole they’ve got.”
“Not all of ‘em.”
“All but one or two. They come lookin’ for their kids, and…” The slap of a bare hand on metal. “I’m not worried about them.”
When they had left again, the bot whispered, “There’s a warning here: Watch out for humans— ”
“We know,” said Dotson.
“There’s more than that.”
“Tell us later. We can’t stay here.” He tugged at the bot’s hand. “We’ve got to go.”
“No! It’s hours yet till dawn.”
“We’ve got to tell the rest. That warning.”
“I’ll tell you. You go. There’s so much more for me to learn here.”
“Later.”
The answer was a shifting of weight as Gypsy Blossom freed her roots, an angry sigh. “I have to come back, though. It’s like a library. There’s so much to learn.”
“Later.”
CHAPTER 17
“Is it safe out here?”
“Are you worried about the coons?” Marcus Aurelius Hrecker made a bitter noise.
“They haven’t surrendered. They put bombs in the cars and planes we use. They mine the libraries we raid. They ambushed a squad this afternoon.”
“But there aren’t any in this valley. You passed on that order yourself. Don’t let ‘em get away to talk, or they might stir up some real resistance. The only ones left are in those cages.” As if, he thought, that made much difference. The coons could stand atop the bluffs and see the entire valley and everything the humans did within it.
“What about that?” Tamiko Inoue’s gesture indicated not the bluffs, the ruins at their feet and beyond their crests, or the forests still further off in which armies could hide, but the tower in the valley’s center, less than a kilometer away. It was almost invisible, no more than a black silhouette against the near-black of a night sky wrapped in clouds.
“I think it’s safe,” Hrecker added, but she had already turned away from him. Eric Silber was there, looking past her at him, one hand urging her to take one more step, one more, and then stop just on the verge of his hearing.
He had first seen them together that very morning. He had climbed out of his bunk and found hers already empty, already neatened. He did not see her until he had his breakfast on a tray. She looked up from the table she was sharing with Silber and nodded. But she made no move to join him or to invite her to join them. Not that he wanted to be anywhere near the other man.
When had he moved to the Bonami? Or had he? Was he only visiting?
He had had to pass three tables before he found a seat. But he had still been close enough to hear Silber say, “He’s a traitor, you know.”
Tamiko had sounded doubtful when she replied, “I know his heart’s not really in it.”
“It’s worse than that. I swear, he’s only waiting for a chance to sell us all out. He…”
Why was he like that? Hrecker was sure the other man had not seen that African violet back on Mars, and he didn’t think his own hesitations and reluctances were so clear a window on his uncertain mind. All they said was that he was not a fanatic. He did not act from an automatic, unquestioning assumption of his and his people’s correctness.
Tamiko didn’t either, did she? Yet her bias was obviously closer to Silber’s than to Hrecker’s. That was why…
Hrecker shook his head and sipped deliberately at the glass of cloudy liquid in his hand. Gin and… Something new. Spicy, tart, smoky. Sweet, of course. He liked it.
He held up the glass. “What is this?”
“Gin and mossberry juice,” said the crewman behind the drink table. It had been set up a little nearer to the ship, where a single small spot could provide the light to read the labels on the bottles and pluck ice cubes from the dented metal chest in the table’s center. It had been found in the ruins.
Why was he here if he was not like Silber? He had wanted to see First-Stop and the Racs. He had wanted to see the results of his labors on the starships’ drives and even the particle beam weapons. He had wanted to be with Tamiko. All of those, and it had been far too easy to find himself here, assisting in deeds that would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.
He finished his drink and began to pay attention to the others once more. Captain Quigg and Ali Catrone and the representatives of the other ships in the valley stood a little further out, just within the circle the ship had charred into the ground. They too were watching the tower.
Did they dream?
Not far away, not far enough by half in the black of the First-Stop night, Eric Silber was saying to Tamiko Inoue, “Well?”
Well, what? Well, could he move in with her, or she with him?
To one side stood Meyer Smith, Bela B’Genda, and the Baron from the Saladin. The Baron still wore a twitching robot pinned within the circle of his cogwheel badge. He had a mug of beer in one hand, and he was saying to B’Genda, “Didn’t have the faintest, did he? Not till we showed up and I said, ‘Stuff it. Make it go boom.’”
Would that be enough to convince Tamiko that he was no traitor?
He didn’t really care at this point whether she threw him out of her quarters. Even for Silber, he told himself, though he knew he lied.
“It’s dark enough,” said Quigg. “You can start the fireworks anytime.”
Hrecker set his drink on the end of the table and fished the control box from his shirt pocket. It was about the siz
e and weight of a deck of cards, made of black plastic, and it looked like a calculator in all but two respects. It had a numberpad and a rectangular display, but it also had a small whip antenna and a bright red pushbutton centered in its upper rim. It was, he thought, just as much a sledgehammer as the tool he had used to destroy all those plaques.
Hrecker drew the antenna from its recess and punched in the code that unlocked the device’s transmitter function. He poised his thumb above the pushbutton. He looked at the captain.
Quigg nodded. “Go ahead.”
It was darker now, and even the little light that spilled over the drink table was enough to spoil their night vision. But the fact that no one could possibly see a thing kept no one from facing the tower and craning their necks as if they could indeed make out its bulbous tip, the flange around it, the twin openings in its sides.
Hrecker’s thumb twitched.
An instant later those openings vomited flame. The tower sprang into view, and the valley with its ruins, the starships, the human watchers. The tower’s bulb, the chamber that once had held a wealth of knowledge, cracked and cracked again, splitting, crazing, every sudden gap a line of fiery light. The sky lit red and yellow and orange.
The bulb was gone. In its stead was only an expanding fireball.
They could just have put the plaques back where they had come from, couldn’t they? Except that there were too many to fit. Copies, and copies of copies. Better to smash and burn and—
The blast reached them, less sound than a blow, staggering them, forcing them to clap their hands over their ears. Hrecker’s mouth opened, his face contorted, and when he looked at the others, they too were grimacing. He cried out, but he could not hear even his own pain, much less that of the others.
Someone fell, her shirt blooming dark and shiny with her blood. But when he leaned toward her, staring desperately, she was not Tamiko, not Silber. Just a stranger he did not know.
Something stung his cheek. When he raised his hand, it came away wet.
They were too close.
Or they had packed the chamber with much, much more than would do the job.
A chunk of rock the size of his head struck one end of the drink table. Bottles, glasses, and chest of ice catapulted to oblivion.
Why couldn’t he hear anything?
The bang, of course. The sheer hellish gyppin’ noise of it had stunned his ears. Perhaps…
He stuck a finger in one ear. It came away dry except for a bit of wax.
At least his eardrums were intact.
The display of flame was fading. As the light diminished, he noticed Captain Quigg staring at the Bonami. Its metal was streaked bright where bits of rock had struck it. There were dents. And there was an actual tear, damage worse than anything the coons had managed to do, and he had done it himself. He wished he could hide.
He bowed his head, and there, practically beside his foot, was a piece of rock that had not been there before he pressed the button. He reached for it, but even as he lifted it into the air he was swearing and jerking his hands away. It was still blistering hot from the blast that had hurled it into the air.
Yet he had time to notice its finest details. It had rings, striations, stairstepped edges, structure. Just as the coons had said, the tower had once been wood, a tree. The Gypsies had grown it and petrified it, and it had stood for all the years.
Until he had packed its tip full of high explosives.
“Great show!” A hand clapped his back, and he glimpsed the captain of the Drake already turned toward Quigg. “Worth the trip from Earth.” The words were just audible through the ringing in his ears.
The coons’ sacred tower was still taller than any of the human ships, still higher than the valley’s rim, but where it once had bulged smoothly to form a stone-walled reliquary, it now was tipped by jagged teeth. Cracks extended downward for twenty meters, growing narrower and fewer until they disappeared, resisted and vanquished by the nature of the tower’s substance.
Petrified wood, thought Hrecker. But not quite. Microscopes showed that the wood was still there, a mass of interwoven cellulose to strengthen and reinforce the mineral that had been crystallized in every cell and pore and crevice. Strong, resilient fibers in a sturdy matrix, like rebar in concrete, like fiberglass.
They had set him to work smashing plaques. When that was done, they had told him to destroy the tower. And when last night’s pyrotechnic display proved to be no more than a glorious decapitation, they had said, “Great show, but we want it all down. Flat.”
His fingers were slick with burn cream. He rubbed them together and told himself he was lucky the burns weren’t worse. He had dropped that rock very quickly.
The trouble was, he added, the tower had been a tree once. It tapered, and at its base it was at least ten meters through.
“No problem,” said the Baron. A bandage covered one ear to show where a piece of flying tree had hit him.
“That’s what you said before.” Bela B’Genda’s voice snapped with frustration. One cheek was peppered with tiny scabs. “You said that charge would split it to the root.”
“I’ve seen lightning hit a tree,” said the Baron. “And that’s just what happened.”
“This thing’s rock,” said Smith. He alone seemed untouched by the previous night’s shrapnel storm.
“So we need rock-cutting tools.”
“They built with rock. There’s got to be a quarry around here somewhere.”
There was, and by noon a dozen pneumatic rock drills were boring into one flank of the tower, roaring and hammering and spitting chips. Holes the size of Hrecker’s fist grew beneath their bits. By evening, those holes were deep enough to take his fist halfway to the elbow.
The explosives came from the same quarry. The attempt of the night before had used almost all the humans’ own supply.
Tamiko and Silber arrived as they were packing the last of the holes. “It’s not going to hit anything, is it?”
Hrecker showed her the arc of the tower’s circumference they had mined. Then he turned around and pointed. “It’s like cutting trees. You notch them, and then they fall into the notch.”
“What do you know about cutting trees?”
He grinned sheepishly. It had been many years since he had last seen a tree on Earth, and even then he had hardly been a woodsman. “What I’ve read. And it’ll fall right between the Bolivar and the Toledo. A clean miss.”
“You hope.”
“You’d better be right,” said Silber. “General Lyapunov doesn’t want to lose a third ship.”
Tamiko gave the man an irritated glance. She was the one who talked to the General, not he.
“Cross your fingers, then.” He turned away from them. The others were standing back from the side of the tower. “Are we ready?”
Once everyone was a safe distance away, he pressed the button once more.
Smoke and flame spouted from the holes they had drilled. Dust and gravel flew. Flakes of stone as tall as a man spalled from the tower’s surface. The tower itself neither trembled nor swayed.
The Engineers stared at the results of their labor in silence. Here the rings were more boldly defined. They formed not just stripes in the rock or stairsteps along the broken edges but boundaries along which the rock sometimes split in sheets.
Finally Hrecker said, “That’s just chipping away at it.”
The Baron said, “Try the particle beams.”
“They’re fine for sheet metal. Or flesh. But not this. Too massive. It would take forever.”
“Then we need a nuke.”
Bela B’Genda shook her head. “We should have drilled deeper.”
“Next time,” said Hrecker.
“But we’re out of explosives,” said Meyer Smith.
“Then we’ll find some more.”
“There are other quarries,” said Tamiko. “And mines. Construction sites.”
“If there’s anything left,” said Bela B’Genda.
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“There was at the quarry,” said Hrecker.
“Or we can take their bombs apart.”
“Use one of our nukes and be done with it,” said the Baron.
Hrecker snorted and waved an arm toward the nearest ship. “That wouldn’t do us much good.”
“Do it last,” said the Baron. “Set it up, and then trigger it from orbit. Just before we go home.”
And the valley would be useless for years to come. Hrecker shuddered, and he was pleased to note that Bela B’Genda did not seem to like the idea any better than he.
But Silber was nodding quite happily.
“Better to have the coons get a factory going again,” said Tamiko.
“I wouldn’t trust ‘em,” said the Baron.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Bela B’Genda. “We can keep ‘em under control. But we flattened everything that looked anything like industrial.”
“It wouldn’t be that hard to set up something new,” said Smith.
“It might not be easy to persuade them to cooperate,” said Hrecker. “After what we’ve done already— ”
“Easy doesn’t matter,” said Silber. “They dug those plaques out of the rubble eagerly enough after we shot a few.”
“And now the plaques are gone. The Gypsies might as well never have been here.”
Tamiko glanced at Silber as if she were thinking that he were right. Yet somehow Hrecker could not stop talking. “It’s a waste of time and effort. Sheer vandalism.”
Meyer Smith was nodding. “It would make more sense if we were rooting out the libraries. This?” He shrugged. “It’s just a piece of rock.”
“You’re both idiots,” said Tamiko. “We’ll get the libraries, but this is ten times as important as all the information the Gypsies left behind. It’s so important that if we had to choose, we should leave the plaques and destroy this.”
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