General Lyapunov touched another pressure pad, and a speaker came to life. They could hear the coons, their voices pitched about the same as humans.
“They’re nervous,” said Tamiko. She was standing stiffly erect by the room’s doorway, thankful for the spin that gave the Ajax an illusion of gravity. “Scared and mad and worried. If they were as calm as they look, they’d sound like bears or something.”
The General shushed her with a gesture. “Listen.”
“They’re going to eat us,” one was saying.
Someone snorted. “Then they’d’ve dressed us out already.”
“That’s Sunglow,” said Tamiko.
“They want to hear the main course scream. I scream, you scream— ”
“Shut up.”
“Torture us.”
“Put us in a zoo.”
“We got the tailless ones from Farshore,” said Tamiko. “The tailed coons are local. But you wouldn’t know they’re enemies, would you? They sound like old friends. Classmates. Neighbors. Their enemy is us now, not each other.”
The General grunted.
“A museum,” said one of the tailed coons.
“They already had enough for that,” said Sunglow.
“Dissection, then.”
“They aren’t about to let us go when they’re done with us.”
“Not their style.”
One of the screens showed the room’s door swinging open. Through it stumbled a slim coon whose fur was almost white. As soon as the door slammed shut behind her, she slumped against the wall.
“What happened?”
“What did they do to you?”
“What…”
She shook her head. “Just… questions. And wires.” She pointed weakly at her tongue, her crotch. Her tail jerked convulsively.
The General was not smiling, but his lips were parted. When he noticed Tamiko’s stare, he said, “Interrogation.”
“Did you learn anything?”
He shrugged. “I haven’t seen the report yet. And I won’t until they’ve processed the rest. But no, I don’t expect to learn a thing.”
“Then why… ?”
“Do the electrodes bother you?” When she nodded jerkily, he went on. “Then why don’t you take over the job? You’ve got one advantage. That one knows you.” He was pointing at Sunglow.
“What do you want to know, sir?”
“Where are they hiding their guerrillas? They can’t stop us. They can’t even slow us down much. But they’ve killed too many of us. I want to step on them.”
“Are you going to use the wires on me too?” The coon’s voice was almost shrill.
Tamiko shook her head and made a face. “I’m not a professional interrogator. I don’t want to be. But the General told me to talk to you.”
Sunglow did not answer as the guard shoved her onto the seat of a wooden bench whose carvings said it had come from Farshore. A heavy strap anchored it to the wall so that in zero gee it would not float free.
“You can take off the cuffs,” said Tamiko, but the guard shook his head. “One hand,” she added. The coon’s posture, the arm in the cast crooked across her front, the other elbow thrust backward and to the side, the shoulder hunched, all to bring her wrists close enough to chain. “Fasten it to the leg of the bench.”
The guard hesitated, but then he seemed to see that this would serve the purpose of preventing escape just as well. He obeyed.
When he was gone, Tamiko said, “I’m glad you survived. But what were you doing in the valley that night? What were you after?”
Sunglow did not say a word.
“Not that it really matters. We’re winning, of course. But your people keep shooting at us. They set traps and ambushes. We have to stop them.”
There was only silence in reply.
“We have to stop them, you know.” After a moment’s pause, Tamiko said, “We know where your people hide. In the jungle. But what about the coons who lived in and around the valley? We didn’t kill them all. I hope we didn’t.”
Did the coon lift her eyes in wary doubt?
“It’s true.”
“Then why… ?”
“We have to. We’re giving you back your natural lives. Restoring your culture to something more like what it should be, what it would be if the Gypsies hadn’t interfered.”
“You want to kill us all.”
Tamiko shook her head, but instead of saying, “No,” she changed the subject. “You and Dotson surprised me, you know.”
There was no answer.
“You’re of different types, different races, tailed and tailless. Yet you’re lovers, mates.” The human leaned over her metal desk and stared intently at the coon. “They exploit you. They hold you down. They refuse to admit that you’re as good as them.”
There was still no answer, but was that a hint of agreement in the coon’s eyes?
“Doesn’t that bother you? Of course it does. That’s why you coons have wars.”
“They won’t share the Worldtree with other Racs.” She emphasized the last word.
Tamiko did not miss the hint that the coons did not like that label, but she refused to change her usage. It was humans, not beasts, who named the universe and all it held. And besides, she told herself silently, the coons were in no position either to make demands or to express preferences. Soon their Worldtree would not be there to share, not even with other coons. “We could change that, you know. If your people helped us.”
Sunglow glared at her, and her claws clutched at the arm of the bench.
“You tailless coons used to be in charge, didn’t you? We could put you back on top.”
“I thought we were starting to be friends. Mark and I, you and Dotson. You were showing us your world, and we were liking you. You seemed to be liking us.”
“Not that much,” said Sunglow. She was on the bench once more, but this time the pipe-and-wire handcuffs rested on Tamiko’s desk.
The human woman seemed to be coming to trust her. She promised herself she would say or do nothing that might weaken that trust, for without it she could have no hope at all. With it…
“And then we had to go and spoil it, hmm? We could use some help.”
“Doing what?”
“Finding the rest of those Gypsy plaques. Getting their alien knowledge out of your books and libraries.”
Sunglow looked away from the human woman. What she wanted deserved no answer at all. No Rac could possibly give such help.
“Would you rather just fight the tailed coons? That would do.”
“I wondered once,” said Sunglow, “if you were Gypsies, or anything at all like them. Would you give us back what the tailed ones took away from us?”
She fell silent, lifted her arms and forced them down again, looked at her feet, looked at Tamiko across the metal desk from the quaint wooden bench. Finally, she added, “But no. You want to take the same thing. You just want to take it from us both.”
Tamiko’s brief laugh sounded strained. “At least we’re fair.”
“Yes.” Sunglow sighed. “There’s that.”
“Will you tell me now where they’re hiding? The General’s getting impatient.”
“The General said I should tell you that we’re pulling out of Farshore.”
Sunglow gave her a long, appraising look. “You mean our libraries and universities are gone now.”
“Oh, no. In fact, we’re quite sure your people still have copies of the plaques, or at least of books based on them. But we want to show you we mean what we say. Help us defeat the tailed coons, and when we go this world will all be yours.”
Sunglow’s expression was thoughtful. “How can we trust you?”
Tamiko shrugged. “That’s his point. He wants to convince you. He wants to show you that we can do your people good, that we can be allies against a common enemy.”
Sunglow said nothing in reply. She did not even look at Tamiko but instead stared, her eyes half closed, at the
wall above the human’s head. It was a ploy, she told herself. Of course it was. She did not believe them for a moment. But she knew she had to act as if they had finally penetrated the doubt and fear and mistrust, as if she were thinking it over, finally taking the Engineers’ offer seriously.
Tamiko leaned forward. She wished she could read the coon’s mind as she slumped in the grip of the belt that held her in the wooden bench. As it was she could only watch Sunglow sigh and blink and look back at her quite as if she had finally given up her intransigence. “What do I have to do?”
Tamiko grinned, giddy with relief. “Just say you’ll work with us. Then we’ll take you down to Farshore. You can speak with them. Get them to attack. Just— ” She paused. “I’d like to get Mark back first. Can you tell me where he’s likely to be?”
Sunglow only shook her head.
“They tried shooting at us yesterday,” said Tamiko. They were standing before an observation port. An airlock was a few steps away, and a guard hovered there, watching the prisoner. The planet that filled their view outside, all brown land, blue sea, white swirls of cloud, seemed no farther off. “Such a lovely world, so much like Earth.”
Sunglow rapped the inner hull with her knuckles. The sound was all it took to say the ship’s metal was too thick for small-arms fire. “What with?”
“Rifles and machine guns. They were hiding in the ruins, shooting through narrow holes. They must have thought it would be impossible for us to hit them. But we used the particle beams.”
“They knew about those.”
“Then why… ?” Tamiko shook her head. “They didn’t have a chance.”
“They won’t quit until you’re gone.”
“Or they’re dead.” Now the human woman’s face said she admired the coons’ persistence even though— or perhaps because— it was such folly, doomed by the superiority of the humans and their weapons as well as by the damage done by the ferocity of the humans’ initial attack.
Tamiko stood in the doorway to the prisoners’ room and summoned Sunglow with a peremptory wave of her arm. Her face looked troubled. Two guards flanked her, their weapons ready to deal with any attempt at resistance.
As soon as the door closed behind Sunglow, Tamiko said, “Do you know what they did last night?”
Sunglow opened her mouth to say, “No, of course not, prisoners don’t get newscasts or newspapers,” but the human woman gave her no chance to speak. “Last night,” she said, “they set a bomb off right under the Bolivar. They didn’t destroy it, but…”
A guard opened the door to Tamiko’s small office. Sunglow sat down on the Farshorn bench without waiting for orders. Tamiko opened a cupboard in the room’s metal wall and revealed a screen. She touched buttons, and there was the image of a human starship tilting far from the vertical, threatening to topple, and a line of humans carrying boxes and duffle bags toward other ships.
“It’ll never fly again.”
“Then you’ll have to leave it behind when you go.” Sunglow showed her teeth, grinning to show the pleasure the scene on the screen gave her. Her people were far from conquered, and if they could strike many more blows like this one…
“The General thought of that. That they plan to analyze the wreckage. But…” The last of the humans had left the ship. The line marched on, faster now, almost running, and a light appeared within the ship, glowing bright in the viewports and the still-open entrance lock.
The light grew quickly brighter, incandescent. Smoke gushed from the lock. The metal of the ship itself began to glow and soften and run like wax.
The ship slumped in upon itself and collapsed to the ground. Molten metal ran across the charred landing circle to burst purple moss and green honeysuckle into flame.
“The drive,” said Tamiko. She sounded very satisfied. “The captain put it on maximum thrust but supplied no reaction mass.”
Sunglow said nothing. She slumped, dejected, silent, wordless.
“You can’t win.”
They were not doomed, the Rac told herself. The humans wanted to crush them, to drive them all the way back to using stone-tipped spears and living in caves and lean-to huts, to deprive them of all the help the Gypsies had left for them. They wanted to be sure that the only way First-Stop’s natives ever reached space or visited Earth was as cattle on the way to Earthly zoos.
Yet they could not remove the Gypsy attitude toward learning or the Racs’ craving to find their gods. And to that they added the motivations of hatred and blood-feud.
The Engineers’ very efforts to destroy the Rac civilization could only hasten the recovery and the leap into space. No matter how thorough the destruction, so long as Racs still lived the Engineers themselves were doomed. It could only be a matter of time.
CHAPTER 22
“Kill him.”
The tunnel was blocked by a mass of Racs whose shrunken bellies testified to the shortness of the rations in the caves. But hunger was not their complaint. Their eyes were hot with rage and hatred, their fur bristled around their shoulders, and their hands were splayed to show their claws. Their voices were gruff, snarling, joyous in anticipation of human blood, though there was a bright thread of anxiety behind the joy.
“The Enemy.”
“Kill him!”
“He will tell them where to find us.”
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker and Dotson Barbtail could go no further. The crowd offered no way to pass, and now it was surrounding them, preventing retreat. They were at its mercy.
“Tell them what we plan,” someone said.
“A spy.”
“Prowling among us.”
“Choosing victims.”
“Kill him!”
“No,” said Dotson Barbtail quietly. He glanced at Hrecker. His pupils were so widely dilated that his irises did not show. Beads of water stood out on his forehead and soaked into the edge of his head bandage. His hands, raised before his chest, were trembling. He understood the temper of the mob.
“He’s our prisoner,” Dotson added.
“Then keep him in his cell.”
“Kill him!”
“He’s a spy.”
“He doesn’t want to go back, you know.” Dotson deliberately lowered the pitch of his voice to sound as reasonable as he knew how. “He doesn’t like what his people are doing. He doesn’t want to help them.”
“Kill him!”
“Not all humans are our foe. The Gypsies were humans too.”
“Not all of them.”
“But many of them,” insisted Dotson. “And just as they had enemies among them, so do those humans in the valley.” He pointed down the tunnel.
But the valley was not visible. Instead, a trio of large Racs was approaching the rear of the mob. Their erect posture and gleaming harnesses identified them as members of the military; their medallions said they were infantry officers. Only one was tailless.
The noise subsided as they approached. Racs stepped back against the side of the tunnel.
The soldiers glared at Hrecker, but they neither stopped nor spoke. When they were past, the mob once more blocked the passage. A small female pushed forward from the side of the tunnel. “Are you their enemy?”
The silence stretched, and even Dotson watched the human shake his head and blink before he finally said, “I don’t know. But I am not yours. Not anymore.”
The Rac in front of them, a burly male in the scarred harness of a physical laborer, whined deep in his throat and shifted to one side. A few minutes later, Dotson and Hrecker were pushing the blackout curtains out of their way.
“They wanted to kill me,” said Hrecker. “To get even. I’m not surprised.”
“You shouldn’t be.”
“Except that you could talk them out of it. Humans aren’t so biddable.”
“You did it just as much as I.”
The human made a strangled noise, but he said nothing in reply. Dotson pushed the heavy blackout curtains aside, and there was daylight. The Worldtr
ee still stood outside the tunnel, surrounded by three of the humans’ starships. Where a fourth should have been there was a sheet of silvery metal hummocked by those portions of the ship that had not melted.
Dotson tipped his head in that direction. A bulldozer was piling rubble to block every path on which a vehicle might approach. “We won’t do that again. Gypsy Blossom says they’ve pulled in their patrol robots, too. There’s no way to get past them.”
“Why didn’t you do them all at once?”
“We only had enough explosives to fill the back of one small van.”
“The driver?”
“A volunteer.” Dotson paused. How much could he really trust this human being? “We’re bringing in more. Small trucks, driving at night, no lights. They stop in the forest. From there we carry it by hand.”
“I’d think they’d spot the trucks, at least. They’re hot, and infrared is easy to see from orbit.”
“They do. But not all of them.” Dotson scanned the valley from the frozen silver puddle past piles of rubble and standing starships and jag-edged Worldtree. The moss was growing despite the lateness of the summer and the approach of autumn, lapping purple foliage and white berries over the edges of the scars the humans had inflicted. The honeysuckle, all green and cloying scent and sticky nectar, was advancing even faster. Gypsy Blossom was out there somewhere, communing with the databases in the roots while watching the humans and their little robots and their ships.
“What are they doing with Sunglow up there?” he asked.
Hrecker shrugged. “Asking questions.”
That much was obvious. They would hope she could help them forestall plans and root out hiding places. “But how?”
The human hesitated. “They’re not as gentle as you were with me.”
“Is that what happened to Scarback?” The messenger Sunglow had chosen had accepted his new name.
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