“It’s a symbol,” said the Baron. “Nuke it.”
Silber grinned. “We’re not in any rush, you know. And we’ve got the guns.”
“I still think it’s wasted effort.” Hrecker kicked at a flake of petrified wood. “All that high explosive, and all we get is that.”
“Ask the General,” suggested Bela B’Genda. “Send a memo.”
He nodded as Tamiko and Silber both laughed. “I’ll do that.”
“But you’d better drill some more holes while you’re waiting for the answer.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Hrecker nodded.
Hrecker rolled out of his bunk the next morning, stretched, and scratched. He was yawning when the door opened and Tamiko held two sheets of paper toward him.
“What’s this?” Hrecker was still in his shorts. She was dressed, combed, and apparently already fed.
“They were waiting for you.” She was not looking at him. Instead, she was crossing the narrow room to open the drawers and cupboards in which he kept his things. All of them.
He looked at the top sheet in his hand.
It was a room assignment form.
He sighed.
“They had a vacancy,” she said. She had found his duffle and was already putting his clothes in the bag. “Unless you’d rather go back to the Saladin.”
“What’s the other?” When she said nothing else, he looked for himself.
It was a comprint. Its heading identified its origin first as the Ajax and second as General Lyapunov’s staff. Its message was simple: “We understand your feeling that destroying the tower is a wasteful diversion of resources from our true objectives. However, the tower is clearly the soul of this world. Removing it will make any resistance impossible and greatly retard the day when the coons will pose any threat to Earth. You and your demolition crew should waste no time in ensuring its fall.”
“At least they’re polite,” he said.
CHAPTER 18
Dotson Barbtail ran his fingers over the smooth surfaces of the heavy gun in his lap. The stubby barrel, the horizontal clip that curved like a crossbow’s bow, the massive, stabilizing stock. Warm where a bit of sunlight struck metal or wood. It held sixty-four rounds, each one a high-velocity bundle of metal slivers that would come apart on impact. One was enough to kill, for if it penetrated the body-armor the humans wore, its fragments would shred and tear beyond repair.
Not that he was likely to see a human on the ground. They flew overhead in stolen jets and helicopters and landed only to burn and loot and then kill whatever they found alive.
He clicked the safety on, off, on, off.
Could he use it? He hadn’t yet, but…
The slab of concrete beneath which he squatted was the largest remaining piece of an apartment building. His water bottle sat on the stained and broken shell of what had been a VC set. A doll, a miniature Rac as blond as Sunglow but tailed, lay on a pile of half-burned clothing. He had put it there himself after spotting its tiny hand under a piece of wood and thinking of the toys he had once bought for a seedling bot.
He wrinkled his nose. The air was tainted with the musty sweetness of death. He thought the odor would still be there when spring and summer came round again, though by then it would seem so normal that no one would notice.
Sunglow had a gun just like his, as well as a sack of mines, and she was out there somewhere, she and five other Racs, visiting a neighborhood library the humans had not yet found and burned, though bombs had opened it to the elements. If they were lucky, they would find a copy of Leaves of the Worldtree. If they weren’t, they would still save what they could, and they would leave the mines behind.
How did one salvage a civilization as it was being destroyed? Information was the key, of course. Libraries. Museums, too. But it was impossible to rescue every record, every textbook, every work of art. Every Remaker plaque, every replica or copy. Nor was there the time to search through the shelves and storerooms and select the most important, most valuable, most irreplaceable.
If they found a Leaves, they would take it. For the rest, they carried rolls of plastic sheeting. In the time they had, they would lug everything they could into the library’s basement, or into the basement of a nearby building. Then they would wrap and cover it against the rain that would trickle through broken roofs and tumbled walls overhead. With luck, the books would still be useful after the humans left.
If they ever did.
Gypsy Blossom was closer by, just over there, half hidden in a clump of honeysuckle that had survived intact the explosions and the fires.
His job was to protect her if any humans came by. To kill them all, and if he failed, to die with her and keep the secret of all the Racs hidden beneath their feet. It was no accident that they could not see from here the tunnel the Racs had opened.
Yet he wasn’t worried. Gypsy Blossom had assured him that they could be discovered only from the air. The honeysuckle would tell her if any humans were approaching on the ground.
He shook his head. How could he believe that? But the bot did, and she herself was proof enough that the Gypsies could make plants with eyes and ears, or animals with roots.
And even if he was safe, what about the others? He heard distant shots, the boom of a mine, a missile, or a bomb. He clenched his fists around his gun, and he told himself that even if Rac bombs and human warheads made different sounds, he could not tell who was attacking whom. The humans had seized all the Rac planes and helicopters they had not destroyed. They were using Rac guns and Rac bombs, and… Dotson told himself it made sense. A starship had to be limited in what it could carry.
But it was like chopping off someone’s arm so you could use it to beat them to death. Not fair. Not fair at all.
There were noises closer by as well. The creaks of shifting, settling rubble. The chirpings of small insects. The scraping noises made by vermin that did not care whether they found broken cans and ruptured freezers or bodies, so long as it was food. The buzzings of flies hovering above a narrow cleft in the rubble; the food was there.
Something hit the top of the slab above him. It banged and bounced, and sun-dried dust sifted onto his head.
He flinched and shuddered, bit back a whine of fear, and nearly pulled his trigger. Then he looked at the bot, but she did not seem to be alarmed. In fact, her eyes were closed. Had the honeysuckle told her this was nothing?
Footsteps, and he poised his rifle. He stared upward, scanned the edge of the slab, looking for shadows, legs, danger, targets. But… The sound was not that of the boots the humans wore. Nor was there enough weight behind each step for…
He was not surprised when a pair of wild Racs dropped off the edge of the slab, cocked their ringed tails high, and stared at him, panting lightly against the heat of the summer day. His own mouth was open, his breathing hard, his eyes wide. He felt like he was looking into a mirror that threw back a distorted, double image of himself, but he did not relax his grip on the gun until they had scurried out of sight to the left.
So they were coming out of the woods now. Were they curious about why so many of the buildings were now ruins? About what the explosions and fires had done? Or were they taking the opportunity to return to the lands their Remade descendants had seized and transformed and barred them from? They were intelligent enough, but was he imputing too much— ?
“They made it.”
He jumped. Gypsy Blossom was beside him, and he had not seen her move.
“You were watching the animals. And I can be quiet.”
He snorted and showed his teeth in a Rac grin. “Sunglow, you mean.”
“Her whole squad. They’re on the way back already.”
“Those shots?”
“Another group. They’re all dead.”
He made a pained face and brushed dust from his fur. The humans were far too good at that. “I’m glad.” He reached for his water bottle and shook it. It was empty.
“Shall we go back?” She didn�
�t say a word about his comment, for she understood that he was glad not that Racs had died but that Sunglow had not.
From any distance at all, the roadway seemed to be entirely buried by rubble, just as it had been after the humans’ first attack. Yet there was a path that wound between overhanging sheets of floor and roof, shadowed by a single burned-out, windowless building. It was exposed only intermittently, when it struggled over mounds of broken masonry or when the buildings had failed to collapse in a way that offered any cover.
“Let’s wait up there.”
Inside the building, a stairway still reached the third floor. The walls that surrounded one corner were intact enough to shield observers. The unburned litter said they had.
“It’ll be a while.”
“I know.” He stared only briefly from the window that overlooked the approach to the tunnel. Then he moved to the one that faced the valley and the truncated, snag-topped Worldtree.
The Enemy. There had been legends. And when Gypsy Blossom had discovered what waited for her in the honeysuckle, there had been a message: “Watch out for humans,” it had passed from its roots through hers to her nervous system. “If they ever come here again, don’t trust them. Don’t mistake them for Gypsies. Don’t tell them more than you must.”
They had done that, hadn’t they? And it had been his own lab, his own work, that had triggered the disaster. He should have kept his mouth shut, been less eager to impress them with what good little students the Racs had become, taken them to visit a hospital or a school or a mine.
Yet that would only have delayed the disaster. A few days. No more. Humans were humans.
“Gypsies travel with bots,” the honeysuckle had told Gypsy Blossom. “If the humans come from Earth, if they don’t have bots with them, they’re Engineers, who hate and fear and destroy every hint of biological technology. They are the ones who slaughtered all the genetic engineers except for those refugees who became the Gypsies.”
And now… He stared at the remains of the Worldtree. It was damaged, yes, but it still stood though Worldtree Center and Worldtree City lay in ruins all about it.
When the top of the Worldtree had exploded, many Racs had despaired. They had remembered their temple lessons and a prophecy that the world would end when the Worldtree fell.
But it still stood.
Even though the humans nibbled at its base with drills and blasts.
“Someone’s coming.”
He moved to the other window, but the Racs advancing toward the tunnel, guns in hand, spread out and wary, pelts stained with mud and blood, were not the ones he wanted to see.
He did not show himself. Neither did Gypsy Blossom. Both were waiting, watching the Racs below disappear into shadows and a tunnel, safety and what comfort remained on a devastated world, eying the sky and a distant plane sketching interlocking circles like rings of condensation left on a tabletop by cold drinks. It was searching, scanning. Looking for Racs such as Sunglow’s team, or for targets such as the library that team had left.
A line of smoke marked the launch of some small missile toward the plane. Its path never twitched, but its crew must have responded in some way Racs could not match, for the missile exploded when it was much too far from its target to do damage.
As soon as the plane’s circling path aimed its nose roughly toward the origin of the missile, it fired something of its own. The explosion on the ground was more than large enough to destroy an entire squad.
“They weren’t in that area,” said the bot.
His hands did not loosen their grip on the gun he held. He clicked the safety on and off again. If that plane flew overhead, the temptation to fire at it would be immense. Yet he would have to refrain. Not only would the rifle be impotent, but it would draw attention, reveal his position, perhaps unveil the tunnel, perhaps betray Sunglow as she approached.
“Where is she?” Hadn’t they had long enough to get from there to here?
“There’s honeysuckle down there.” The bot was pointing to what had been a house with a tiny yard. The viny growth that had once been confined to a hedge was already extending over the wreckage. “I could— ”
“No. It’s too open.” The bot could put down her roots anywhere, commune with the honeysuckle anywhere that honeysuckle grew, and in a few more weeks the vines would be so thick and tall she could hide in the midst of any patch, wherever it grew. So far, however, it still showed the influence of the gardeners who had striven to keep it in check. They had gone where they had gone because the vines were thicker there, and walls still loomed over that patch. It was more sheltered, safer, less exposed to view. And besides, the plane was closer now. Any movement might betray them.
“I see.” Gypsy Blossom was nodding, leaning past the edge of an empty window frame, searching the blasted wasteland that had been a city. “Though it would be so easy… Did I tell you it was bots that made the honeysuckle?”
Of course she had, as soon as she found out, within a day of that first contact root to root. But the waiting silence demanded filling.
She continued softly: “Back when they were new and feared discovery would mean extermination, the nerve-bearing roots of all the separate vines stretched out and met and merged together to form a single nervous system that permeated Earth’s soil wherever honeysuckle grew. They used it as an extension of their own nervous systems, at first just to communicate. Then they gave it senses so they could see and hear and monitor events where no bots grew.
“That’s what I was doing today,” she added. “Watching Sunglow. But before they left this world, they made it something more, combining it with the computers they also grew, storing memory in its roots, setting it to wait for me.”
“That sounds conceited.” His voice was just as soft as hers, his position as watchful, his expression twice as tense with worry.
“Not just me. You were supposed to plant those seeds as soon as you found them, you know. Not enshrine them. Then you’d have had us for helpers. You’d have had access to the information stored in the honeysuckle.”
“Isn’t it the same?”
She nodded. “Pretty much. More detailed in some areas, I think. More history.”
Would the Racs have been more advanced with the bot assistance? Would they have been able to ward off the Engineers’ first blow? Might they even have been gone already, departed in pursuit of their gods?
“What— ?” But the circling plane was now further off, and others were as aware of that as he. There were noises not far away, a scratch of claws on rock, a metallic click as something bumped a rifle barrel or magazine, and a small group of Racs, including one familiar form, dusty but golden.
“That’s her.”
“Then let’s go,” he said.
“Most of it had already burned.” Sunglow, Dotson, and Gypsy Blossom were deep inside the bluff, in a cul-de-sac so small it had never been used for more than rubbish disposal. A sheet of plastic, its underside beaded with moisture, covered the thick sponge of decayed paper, wood, and leather and less identifiable wastes that was the floor. The walls were still untouched ropes and sheets of calcite. The only light was the small lantern that sat on a stone to one side.
She had already made her official report. Now it was the turn of her mate, the bot, and the refugees who crowded the storeroom outside. The privacy of the cul-de-sac had been their neighbors’ idea of doing honor to the bot.
“Just one wing was left pretty much intact.” She was sitting near the cul-de-sac’s narrow entrance, facing outward. The bandaged leg extended straight ahead of her. The cast on her injured arm had been replaced with one that held her elbow bent, her hand braced in front of her belly as if to hold a gun. She had asked for that deliberately.
Dotson squatted beside her, combing his claws gently through the pelt of her back and side, dropping bits of unidentified debris on the plastic-covered floor. When he came to the edge of her cast, he smoothed the ruffed-up fur.
“But we were lucky,
” she added. “The reference room was there, and the weather had only gotten to the periodicals shelves.”
“No Leaves,” said Gypsy Blossom.
“No Leaves.” Sunglow shook her head.
There was a disappointed murmur from the storeroom, where their neighbors also squatted in pairs, picking through each others’ pelts, grooming and comforting. Hrecker noticed loose skin jerking beneath the fingers, a sign of short rations and lost weight. He thought it would get worse, perhaps even until the distinctive Rac paunch disappeared entirely.
“But there was a Book of the Founder, an encyclopedia, a few more good ones. They’re all safe now.”
“For how long?” someone whispered.
“Long enough,” said Gypsy Blossom. “You know about the honeysuckle. I can hear whatever they say outside their ships, as long as they are near open ground. Even in what’s left of Worldtree Center.”
“I’ve seen the honeysuckle growing there,” said another voice.
The bot nodded. “Their commanders don’t want to destroy us or our world. Just all the influence of the Gypsies, our Remakers. Just our civilization, our technology, our schools, our libraries.”
Sunglow was staring at the ceiling as if she could see beyond it to the ruins outside their shelter. “That’s why we— ”
“You’re a tailless Farshorn.” A brown Rac marked with darker swirls stood up. His voice was nasty, and he had the heavy shoulders of someone who worked with…
“Shut up, Potwheel!” someone hissed.
“They’re wrecking Farshore too,” said Dotson.
“How do we know?”
“The first reports.”
“But since then… I’ll bet they’re allies now.” Several voices indicated agreement. Most did not, though their murmur grew uneasily higher in pitch.
Dotson scowled and stood up. When he spoke, his voice was almost shrill with anger. “We do have word. There are still radios, and though the humans destroy the transmitters as soon as they dare to broadcast, we do hear a little. Farshore’s cities are also rubble. Their libraries are also in flames.”
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