Hrecker hesitated. “We’re— they’re!— not that bad.” Then he told Dotson some of the techniques his fellows could and did use to coax answers from unwilling subjects.
A long moment later, Dotson said, “Tamiko said she wouldn’t let that happen. She’d be safe as long as— ”
“Safe from death, maybe. But not pain.” He laid one hand flat against the bandage on his head and winced. “Not necessarily.”
Dotson ignored the hint that the human could use a painkiller. If he was suffering, well, he deserved it. All the humans did.
He tipped his head back and looked upward, in the direction of the sky he dared not step outside to see in daylight. “We can’t do a thing. There isn’t a single thundertree left. Except for missiles, and they won’t do.”
“Give her up.” Hrecker sighed as if he had not really expected sympathy. “That’s all you can do. It’s all I could do.”
“Tamiko?”
A nod. “Another man. Our own differences.”
“But no one took her. Stole her.”
Hrecker nodded once more, though his face looked pained. “Not that way.”
Gypsy Blossom did not return from the honeysuckle until after dark. By then Hrecker had been out of his cell for most of a day and the Racs in the tunnels hidden within the bluffs had stopped bristling and singing threats of mayhem at the sight of his human form. He was not yet accepted, for Racs would bend their paths to pass as far from him as they could, but Dotson thought that that might come.
Whether he could ever be more than a pet— no stranger than the bot but far more dangerous and untrusted— he did not know.
“He’s loose,” she said when she saw the human waiting just inside the tunnel entrance with her friend.
“Why not?” asked Hrecker. He gave her a human smile. “I’m not your enemy.”
Dotson gestured toward the chambers deeper in the bluffs, where food was stored and served. “Hungry?”
The bot shook her head. “The sun was bright.”
Hrecker leaned toward her, studying the small, scalelike leaves that covered her skin.
“Learn anything?” asked Dotson.
“Nothing new. They’re still out there. Every time they find a library now, though, they just bomb it. Then they drop a firebomb in the middle.”
“You’ve been shooting too many of us.” Hrecker coughed. “Of them, rather.”
“You did come with them.”
He nodded. “But they don’t have an endless supply of troops.”
“That’s our only advantage.” But Dotson did not seem to have his mind on what he was saying. He was tilting one ear toward the tunnel’s mouth, listening. The others noticed, and all three stepped forward in time to see three Rac warplanes, flame shooting from their jets, tiny red lights glowing on their wingtips, scream over the bluff’s edge to the left, flying low and fast and intent on targets. They were not jets stolen by the human invaders and turned against First-Stop’s natives, but the planet’s own war materiel in the hands of its proper owners.
Two more appeared above the landing field in the distance, and all five were releasing missiles, firing their cannons, and arcing into tight turns around the snag-edged top of the Worldtree.
They never made a second pass. The human ships fired their particle beams and launched their own defending missiles. First one fighter disintegrated in the air, and then another, another, another. The fifth was climbing, clawing desperately at the air as it struggled to top the bluffs and escape, when it exploded. Smaller explosions marked the deaths of the warplanes’ missiles.
The explosions that peeled hull plates from the Cascade on the landing field and the Toledo in the valley were anticlimax.
“That’s half their ships,” said Dotson.
“And the last of ours,” said a thready voice behind them. When Dotson turned, he saw the tailless soldier who had passed them in the tunnel earlier in the day. He was scratching the side of his muzzle in greeting. “Call me Edge-of-Tears, though my mother named me Tailcraver when I was small.”
Dotson returned the greeting gesture. “Then we have no hope?”
“You never did,” said Hrecker. “You can’t touch the Ajax, and even if you destroyed all the rest, that one would return to Earth and bring back more forces, more ships. Or it would just use the bombs it carries.”
“All our fighters are gone,” said the soldier. “Shot down in the air like those. Or destroyed on the ground. Or seized and used against us. Our ships are sunk. Our missile siloes have been destroyed. We have nothing left but rifles and mines.”
The others said nothing to break his silence. There was nothing they could say. All they could do was watch floodlights come on around the human ships, the human crews evacuate the Cascade and Toledo and set up tents among the ruins of Worldtree Center, and then the ships glow from overloaded drives and melt.
The lights finally turned off two hours later. The only sign of what had happened was a hot breeze, a scent of scorched earth and burned vegetation, and a fading, sullen glow of molten metal in which no more than a rim of viewport, a line of rivets, a curve of hull plate was recognizable. Gypsy Blossom said, “There must be more.”
Dotson Barbtail shifted on his feet. “What do you mean?”
The bot looked at Edge-of-Tears. “Both Racs and humans plan ahead,” she said. “They think of catastrophes that might interfere with their best-laid plans, and they do whatever they can to compensate. There must be other weapons hidden away somewhere.”
“I don’t know of any,” said the soldier. He touched a medallion attached to the strap that crossed his right breast. “But I’m young. I am an officer, but not a high one. Not high enough to know of such things if they indeed exist.”
“Ask about them,” said the bot. “The generals who were assigned to use the contingency reserves might all be dead, but surely there must be someone who remembers. Or a map buried in some pile of papers.”
The soldier nodded. Dotson said, “And what is the humans’ contingency plan?”
“The Ajax,” said Hrecker, and the others nodded.
“The honeysuckle,” said Gypsy Blossom. “The Gypsies left it just in case something happened to the Worldtree. Biological memories are less constant than ones engraved in ceramic plaques, but they are continually regenerated. That is their advantage. They might lose detail, but they can remain as long as life remains within this valley or on this world. As long as the honeysuckle survives.”
Now Edge-of-Tears was shaking his head. “I’d heard of you,” he said. “But not of that.”
“Yes.” She indicated Dotson with a hand and added, “He was the only one with sense enough to…”
“Not sense,” said Dotson. “I was dumb and greedy.”
“And the only one who did what was intended. You were supposed to plant me and my sisters long ago.” Very briefly, she unfurled her roots. Edge-of-Tears looked, and his eyes widened. “We’re your access to the honeysuckle.”
“What’s there?”
“So much,” she said. “So much. I’ve spent hours sorting through it all, and there are immense amounts I haven’t even touched. Some I never will. But let me see…”
Over the next hour she told them all what she had learned as she let her nervous system merge with that of the honeysuckle net, of the vast extensions it gave her senses, of the reverberating halls of memory that opened before her, their walls honeycombed by doorways leading her mind into categories of knowledge she had barely suspected existed.
Once, she told them, the honeysuckle had been a simple vine or shrub. Some varieties had grown wild in almost every clime. Others had been decorative, ornamental. All had had thin-stemmed flowers containing sweet nectar.
The earliest bots had modified the plant. First they had made its blossoms larger and added to their nectar a euphoric drug. They had given it a gene-implanting viral vector. They had given it the ability to carry messages from one Rac to another, and then to use pr
imitive sound and light sensors to spy upon a world in which the Engineers forced them to struggle to survive.
At the same time, they had been developing biological computers whose specialized leaves could serve as keyboards and screens. Brainlike tissue stored databanks in nodules among the roots. And not long before the Gypsies left First-Stop, they had given the memory-bank genes to the honeysuckle and loaded the resulting nodules with duplicates of everything on the Worldtree’s plaques.
“It was an afterthought,” said Gypsy Blossom. “But once they had thought it, its value was obvious. They had to modify the honeysuckle and fill its memory banks. I think they did that simply by copying the memories in bot brains, which is why there’s so much there besides the plaques. I’ve seen…”
She described the first gropings toward the technology of genetic engineering, the creation of plants with animal genes that made tubers taste like meat, of plants whose sap one could not tell from milk, of animals that could serve as trucks and tanks and airplanes.
She grinned when Dotson’s eagerness to know more almost made him interrupt her. “But,” she said then, “there were people who feared the changes this new technology brought. Indeed, they feared any change. They craved stasis, the traditional, the comfort of the familiar, and when the old mechanical technologies were supplanted, they became the Engineers. At first they were a minority that did no more than call for a return to the old ways. Then they began to attack the products of genetic engineering and even the genetic engineers themselves. Their numbers grew as change spread in their society and the jobs of farmers and factory workers vanished. More people sympathized with them. And then…
“I see,” said Dotson Barbtail. “It could happen with us, could it?”
“It could,” said Hrecker. “You have differences among you too.”
Dotson thought of the chief division in the Rac religion. One group believed that once the Racs had learned enough, the Remakers would return to reward the faithful. The other said it was up to the Racs to pursue and find their gods. Learning was an endless task.
Could the complacent ones become Engineers? He didn’t think the others could, but… They wouldn’t be quite the same, but certainly the potential for intolerance and oppression was there. He nodded his head.
“The differences weren’t absolute,” said Gypsy Blossom. “The Gypsies used the old mechanical technology too. They had to, if they wanted to survive or travel in space once they fled the Earth. And the Engineers relied on biological technology for food and fuel.”
“They still do, partly,” said Hrecker.
“How did they get away?” asked Edge-of-Tears.
There was a space program, she told them. Space stations and thundertrees and jets that could reach space itself. Some of the genetic engineers made it into space, where they found sympathizers. Then they threw rocks— artificial meteors— at the planet to keep the Engineers from interfering as they rescued more.
“It’s too bad we can’t do that,” said Edge-of-Tears. “But we don’t have the high ground.”
“They do,” said Dotson. “So why aren’t they…”
“They would,” said Hrecker. “If they had the equipment to fetch the rocks. Or if you had a moon they could mine.”
Silence fell. All four— a human, a bot, and two Racs, two jumped-up animals— watched the valley. The glow of overheated metal was gone now. The only light was starlight. The Worldtree, the human starships, and the bluffs were black against the skyglow.
Eventually, Dotson said thoughtfully, “We have some high ground ourselves. Perhaps it’s even high enough.”
CHAPTER 23
The expressions of the General’s aides and remaining captains were as grim as the General’s own, though where his gray brush of hair and dark eyes made him seem sternly, militarily determined, their faces seemed variously harried, depressed, discouraged, glum, grim, and desperate.
“We should pull out now,” said one. “I know we’re not quite done, but the coons’ll be generations rebuilding. And if we stay…”
“We’ve lost five ships so far,” said Tamiko Inoue. “The Cascade, Toledo, Bolivar, Pizarro, and the Villa. They can’t touch the Ajax, but the others are on the ground and vulnerable.”
“They shouldn’t have been able to do that. We’re far ahead of them in weapons.”
“A stone ax can kill you just as dead as a particle beam.”
Someone laughed. “They weren’t throwing rocks.”
“They were lucky.”
The General shook his head. “Spaceships are fragile things. We knew we might pay a price.”
“At least they don’t have any more jets or missiles.”
“They can’t even make them. We’ve destroyed their factories.”
“Dynamite will do,” said Tamiko.
“Use the nukes.”
General Lyapunov shook his head again. “It’s too rich a world for that. We’d like to colonize it sometime soon.”
“I wouldn’t mind living here myself. There’s a place on the northeast coast— forest and cliffs and a bit of beach. Beautiful view.”
“I’ve got an eye on an island, myself,” said the captain of the melted-down Bolivar. The screen he occupied showed a fabric backdrop, the interior of a tent in the valley far below.
“If it wasn’t for the coons.”
“They’ll make good servants once they learn their place.”
“So no nukes.”
“Of course not.”
“Then we should send someone back for reinforcements.”
“We can’t spare anyone yet,” said General Lyapunov. “Though it won’t be long before the opposition is silenced.”
“Send the Ajax.”
“We need to stay right here,” said the General.
“Supervising,” said Tamiko with a glance at her chief.
The screen that showed the image of the Bonami’s Captain Quigg emitted a snorting sound. “At least until they get the rest of us.”
“They won’t,” said General Lyapunov. “They can’t.”
“Five ships so far.”
“And five left. That should be enough.”
“Just four down here.”
“We aren’t about to cut and run,” said Tamiko. “We won’t abandon you.”
“Not until it’s too late.”
“Captain!”
“Sorry.” But Captain Quigg’s face was glowering, dark with resentment.
“Yes,” said the General. “It would be nice to have some reinforcements. But it would take weeks to go home and come back. And they don’t have the ships. It would take months more to build them. Maybe years. We’re really on our own. We have to do the job by ourselves.”
“No matter what it costs,” said Tamiko.
“I do wish we could land the Ajax. But…” The General shrugged. “Someone has to stay out of reach. If they somehow do manage to destroy the remaining ships, we’ll take the word back to Earth. We’ll have to, even though I would rather not go back at all without a clear-cut total victory. With no resistance left to plague us later.”
Many of the others were nodding in agreement with his sentiment, but their faces looked no more cheerful or optimistic than they had when the meeting began.
“Stop grinning at me!” Tamiko Inoue was scowling at Sunglow, who was once more chained to the souvenir bench in the office the human had been given.
“I can’t really help it, you know. You’ve done your best to destroy everything we’ve ever made or done, like a bulldozer in a playroom. But we’re fighting back.”
“Gyppin’ coons!”
“We’re making you bleed for what you’ve done to us!”
“You had it coming! You’re unnatural! A blight upon this world! It’s our duty to destroy you!”
Sunglow tried to laugh, but the destruction on the world below was far too real and far too thorough. She choked instead and beat her cast against her chest. When the spasm subsided, she managed t
o say, “There was a time when I thought we could be friends.”
Tamiko stared at her desktop, apparently unable to meet the Rac’s eyes. “Me too,” she said at last. “But…”
“But you’ve made that impossible.”
“We had to. Can’t you see?”
Sunglow shook her head. No, she couldn’t. She could not see any circumstances when one group had to exterminate another or destroy the basis of its identity, not even when the groups were tailed and tailless Racs.
Nor could her fellow prisoners, who glared at her every time she returned from one of these sessions with the human woman and sang suspicion deep in their throats. “You carry no pain,” they said. “They do not shock you or beat you. What do they do? What do you do? What are you telling them?”
She had tried to explain that she had met Tamiko before the human attack, that her mate, or her one-time mate, was a prisoner on First-Stop, that she thought Tamiko felt some connection to him through her even as she asked her endless questions about where the Racs were hiding.
But all they said was, “What did you tell her? Did you reveal all our secrets? How long will our friends and kin survive your treachery?”
“We told them secrets enough before, when we thought they were Gypsies. And when we told them too much, they turned on us.”
“Traitor!”
“Traitor!”
“Trai…”
Now Tamiko was asking, “Would you like separate quarters?”
Sunglow could only stare. With all their other marvelous abilities, could the humans also read minds? Silly thought, she told herself. If they could do that, they would never need to ask questions. Secrets could last no more than moments. Opposition would be destroyed as rapidly as it formed.
Then her face, gone vacant and reflective while she recalled the reactions of her fellows, had been as transparent as window glass. Or else… “You watch us, don’t you?”
“Of course we do.”
Hoping to overhear some clue to where the natives hid with their guns and bombs and last surviving remnants of the Gypsy heritage.
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