She clutched him in return. “I thought you wouldn’t too.” And there, close on Renny’s heels, was her friend Caledonia Emerald, reaching for her, embracing, crying, “Welcome home!” She stopped trying to control herself. At last, the nightmare was over. She was back, home indeed. She was safe. And she believed it now in a way that she hadn’t when her aunt rescued her and the fugitive Engineers from the wreck of the Teller, or even when the Orbitals had welcomed her just as happily as these, her friends and kin.
As soon as she could, Caledonia Emerald led her aside from the crowd, saying, “There’s something you have to see. Right away.”
“I know.” Pearl Angelica shook her head. “Aunt Lois told he was dead. I wish I’d been here, but… They didn’t bury him up here, did they.”
“No, no.” She tugged on Pearl Angelica’s arm. “I came up here as soon as we heard you were in the system. Just to show you this. Let’s go.”
“Yes,” said Uncle Renny. “You have to see this. Freddy can wait a little longer.”
“I’ll take care of the others,” said Aunt Lois.
“No,” said Esteban. “We stay with her.” The others nodded, and Pearl Angelica was not surprised. Neither Anatol nor Esteban, she thought, would wish to be far from her. And Cherilee Wright had come to be a good friend. As for the rest, she supposed they were unwilling to let go of the few people they knew in a world that had to be strange indeed.
Now Cherilee stood stock still in the middle of the Gypsy’s broad and curving tunnel. Two streams of traffic parted to flow around them—Armadons and Macks, Roachsters and litterbugs, bots and humans in gengineered vehicles, on bicycles, on foot. The air reeked of biological technology.
“I never dreamed,” said the botanist, “that I would ever see all this.” Her eyes were as wide as a child’s.
“It’s the way it used to be,” said Anatol. He too was enraptured by the image of days gone by on Earth that the scene evoked. Karel and the women from the Moon looked more baffled by the strangeness of the environment in which they found themselves.
“Earth never smelled like this,” said Esteban. “It had open air.” He alone, though he was gawking as eagerly as the others, seemed to retain some sense of the similarity between the Gypsy and the lunar base they had fled three weeks before.
“It smells better in the greenhouses,” said Caledonia Emerald as Lois McAlois gave Cherilee a gentle push and the group began to move once more.
“It’s mostly bots that run them, but there should be a place for you,” said Lois.
Cherilee stopped again and looked at Pearl Angelica. “I know,” she said. “I know that’s where I used to work. But I told you …”
The bot nodded. She held the beehive in her arms just as she had when they were fleeing the Moon. “She’d like to study gengineering, Aunt Lois.”
“There’s no reason why not. I’m sure someone needs an apprentice. But …” She looked at Caledonia Emerald. “We’re going to a greenhouse now, aren’t we?”
When the bot nodded, Pearl Angelica asked, “Why? I want to see Uncle Renny. And visit Dad’s grave. And then I should get back to my lab.”
“You’ll see.” Caledonia Emerald would say nothing more until they had passed through several of the Gypsy’s twisting tunnels, a zone of nearly zero weight, and two parks, and finally entered a tunnel much like the one Cherilee Wright had ruled on the Moon. It was as long and broad and as filled with green, though the soil in which the plants grew was not held in raised beds, but flush with the floor, rimmed by nothing more than low curbs, and several of the crops were very different. There were stands of grain and vegetables and dwarf fruit trees. There were also beds of bioform computers, snackbushes, and udder trees, and several whose occupants were clearly small versions of the bots that walked and stood in the greenhouse’s aisles, weeding and watering.
One of those bots rushed up to them before they could get much past the door. Both arms were outstretched, her hands grasping for arms and wrists, her now-fading crimson blossoms quivering as she bobbed her head in eagerness. “You got her! We heard, but that’s not the same as seeing. And these—” She stared at Pearl Angelica. “The ones who helped you?”
“Crimson Orchis,” Lois McAlois managed to squeeze into the rush of words. She looked at her niece.
“Eldest,” said Pearl Angelica.
“Oh, no!” Crimson Orchis’s fronds uncurled briefly from her torso, revealing how brown and ragged their edges were. “You are the Eldest now. You’re older than any of us.”
Anatol and Esteban and the others looked perplexed.
“Not old enough,” said Pearl Angelica.
“Oh, yes. We never gave you the title. We hoped you would come to seem older …”
“Slow and wrinkled,” said Lois McAlois.
“Wise,” said the bot. “Experienced.”
“I’ve gained some of that,” said Pearl Angelica. She sighed and wished she had had the wisdom to stay on First-Stop. She thought she could have done without the experiences the Engineers had forced on her. “Not many bots get kidnapped, raped, and caged at any age.”
“Not since we left Earth.” Crimson Orchis gestured, and a younger bot appeared to take the beehive, set it on a nearby workbench, and remove the crumpled paper that plugged its doorway. A single bee appeared in the opening almost immediately. “And we almost lost you, didn’t we? All that potential.” She shook her head.
Pearl Angelica grimaced. “You could have …”
“We did. Over here.” Crimson Orchis led them all to a bed that held two dozen thick stalks topped by knobs whose dents and bumps suggested human faces. Unlike the infant bots that grew in nearby beds, these had no fronds. Their bases were surrounded by rosettes of small oval leaves.
Anatol looked from the bed to Pearl Angelica just as she fell to her knees and reached to touch the nearest knob. “Clones?” he said, and then, as if realizing that of course there could be little resemblance between adult and infant bot and that of course Crimson Orchis could mean nothing else, he repeated more definitely, “Clones.”
Lois McAlois was nodding. “They were starting them before I headed back to Earth.”
A second elderly bot appeared beside them. “We couldn’t wait any longer.” She paused to produce a liquid cough that said she was nearer the end of her life than Crimson Orchis. Her blossoms were almost colorless. “We’re fading now. Soon we’ll be gone. So we decided to take no more chances. We need your longevity.”
“That’s why so many,” said Karel. He nodded as if remembering that the short lives of bots were no secret, even among the Engineers.
“My children,” said Pearl Angelica. “I was never ready for them before. But now …” Before her trip to Earth, she had rarely even thought about reproducing herself. She had known that she was expected to do so, to pass her genes on to another generation of her kind. But she had never felt the pressure of dwindling time, even though she had long known that she was outliving generations of her kin. She had been too busy. Perhaps too self-centered. And she had found no prospective mate.
Now she looked up at Anatol. At Esteban, who was shaking his head and saying, “That’s an awful lot of kids to take care of.”
“No,” said Crimson Orchis. She indicated the other bot. “Boston Lemon is in charge of the nursery. This is where we sprout our seeds and grow the saplings until they can be taught.”
“I can’t set seeds,” said Pearl Angelica.
“No. You’re too nearly human. But we need your genes. We had no choice. If you reproduce yourself, you will surely raise your children in the human way.”
Pearl Angelica looked at her friends and aunt. Esteban looked relieved, Anatol sullen, Lois McAlois wistful, as if she wished that she and Renny had … Were her inclinations and her dilemma that obvious?
“With these,” said Boston Lemon. A buzzing sound drew her eyes to a small insect circling above her head. She grinned broadly when the bee alighted on one of her blossoms. “A bee. At last.”
Crimson Orchis picked up the thread the other had dropped. “If you will teach them, merge roots and memories, all you are, then they will be much like you.”
Pearl Angelica stood up. “They’re doing fine,” she said to the elderly bots. “I don’t think we need so many of me, though. Let them be their own people.”
“Eldest.” Crimson Orchis and Boston Lemon bowed their heads together.
She grimaced uncomfortably. She had not expected to come home to this. “I’ll look in on them again. But for now …”
“Of course.”
* * * *
“Where are they now?” asked Renny Schafer.
“We found them quarters,” said his wife. “Though the way they were looking at our niece …”
Renny snorted as if he were still a dog. “They have other rooms in mind?” He turned to Pearl Angelica. “Do you want them? One of them? Or both?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. They …”
“You feel you owe them something.”
“Not that gratitude’s enough,” said Lois McAlois.
When Pearl Angelica nodded, Renny went on. “Anatol let you out of the cage first. When Anatol got caught, Esteban got you—and the others—loose again and led you all off the Moon. He also gave you that cuff.” He shook his head admiringly. “I can hardly wait to get one of my own.”
Pearl Angelica curled one hand around the wrist where the cuff had ridden until she had left it with the Orbitals. Very briefly, she smiled at her uncle. “He’s smarter. But Anatol is braver. He took the first risk, after all.”
“They’re both brave,” said Lois McAlois. “Esteban wasn’t playing it safe when he shot those guards and stole the Teller.”
“Then …”
“Don’t force it,” said Lois. “If the answer isn’t clear now, give it time. You might even decide you don’t want either of them.”
“But it is, really.” And so it was, she suddenly realized. “When Anatol first came to me, he was wishing for the Good Old Days of his own childhood. He was looking backward just like the Engineers. Like me. But Esteban … He looks forward. He could have been born one of us.”
“Should we take him back, then?”
“Anatol?” She paused thoughtfully before shaking her head. “Not until he decides he’s left his Good Old Days behind. I don’t think he’ll turn into a saboteur.”
“And Esteban?”
She grinned. She knew what his answer would be if she asked him to be her mate. Yet she was reluctant to move too fast. “There’s only one thing I’ve ever been in a rush for. And that was a mistake, wasn’t it? I’ll have to see.”
* * * *
“How did you get so many Engineers on your side?” Caledonia Emerald was asking.
“You’re surprised that some of us can be rational?” Esteban was laughing.
“They didn’t used to be,” said Renny Schafer. The doglike wrinkling of his lip that bared his canines seemed quite involuntary.
“It wasn’t that hard,” said Pearl Angelica. She glanced at Anatol, whose expression said he was not happy to see her sitting closer to the other man than to him. “Anatol came to me. Then he took me to meet the others. They weren’t happy in the first place.”
“Too restrictive,” said Cherilee Wright. They were sitting at a table in one of the Gypsy’s many small cafes, this one in a park beside a fountain. A single dumbo, perhaps a last reminder of Pearl Angelica’s search for a local pollinator, perhaps a pet released by some other Gypsy, hovered in the spray that arched from a dolphin’s mouth.
“Most of us,” she went on. “We wanted things the Engineers would not allow. I wanted genetic engineering. And here she was, telling us that the best thing human beings can do is to pursue knowledge freely. Some of us would have helped her even if we hadn’t liked her.”
Now it was Renny’s turn to laugh. “There’s hope, then!”
* * * *
When Pearl Angelica finally insisted that she could stay away from First-Stop and her work no longer, Caledonia Emerald said, “I have to go back too. And I want to show you what the Racs have been doing.”
“What do you mean?”
But she refused to be more specific. “I’ll reserve a couple of shuttle seats.”
“Can we go down there too?” asked Anatol.
“I’d like to see the place,” said Esteban. “A new world. And aliens.”
“Later,” said Renny Schafer. “You have enough to learn up here.”
“Yes,” said Pearl Angelica. She avoided Anatol with her eyes, knowing that she had to be hurting his feelings. For a moment she wished she had the nerve to tell him plain what she had already told her aunt and uncle. “You’ll get down there soon enough. And it won’t be long before I’m up here for good, along with everyone else.”
The next scheduled shuttle flight was not until late the next afternoon. By noon, Pearl Angelica had a headache, her stomach was churning, and her forehead and neck were drenched with sweat.
“I have to go down there,” she said. She and Caledonia Emerald were in her aunt’s and uncle’s apartment. “I have work to do. So why … ?”
“Your father?” asked Renny Schafer.
After a moment’s pause, as if she were trying the fit of his words to her feelings, the bot shook her head. “No. I expected that. I’ve been expecting it for years. We all have.”
“You’re scared to death, aren’t you?” asked Caledonia Emerald.
She nodded jerkily. “I don’t understand this. I was fine an hour ago.”
“It’s a planet,” said her Aunt Lois.
“And I’m safe in space. But not …”
“There’s no Engineers on First-Stop. No cages. No cells.”
A picture of a falling branch played itself across the screen of her mind, but she knew her uncle was right, excepting only those mad anomalies no one could escape anywhere. She sighed. “I know.”
Her anxiety did not disappear after that, but it diminished. By the time she and Caledonia Emerald boarded the shuttle it was hardly more than apprehension. And when she stepped from the shuttle to see the Tower rising like a gleaming needle from the bowl of the valley, it washed away in a flood of relief and satisfaction and bittersweet awareness that soon she would leave this place behind forever.
“I didn’t think it would be so nearly done.”
“You were gone for a long time.”
“And what’s that?” She was pointing at the arch of stone wall, the pyramid, the pole, the basket. Long lines of Racs were winding down the encircling bluffs and across the moss-covered valley. Each one bore a large stone in his or her arms.
“Their watching place.”
“It’s grown.”
“And more than that. Come on inside.” Caledonia Emerald held the door to the pumpkin that was the Rac Surveillance Office. “We’ve got the altar bugged.”
A little later, Pearl Angelica was peering at a screen and saying, “That’s Blacktop. He’s still the chief?”
“High priest, more like,” said Lucas Ribbentrop. His fingers were dancing over the controls of what seemed to be recording equipment. His white hair glowed in the dim light of the office.
“Listen to him,” said Caledonia Emerald. She too had controls to work, and now the image of the priest brightened as she compensated for the falling dusk.
The Rac stood on the second step of the stone pyramid, his arms spread wide. He
scratched his muzzle in the greeting gesture, and his voice sang out in a glossy smoothness that even to human ears rang with fury.
“Savages!” he cried. “You broke their spears! You beat them! You chased them from the valley!”
“Yesterday,” said Ribbentrop. He was pointing at another veedo screen and the image of a mob of Racs hurling stones. Four other Racs fled in desperate haste. Three of them streamed tails behind them. Two had actually dropped to all fours.
“The strangers,” said Pearl Angelica. “But …”
“Spies!” screeched a voice from the congregation within the watching place’s walls. “They plotted to seize our valley and our Tower!”
Blacktop slumped where he stood. “Not ours,” he said. “Our world’s. For every Rac, whether they have tails or not.”
“That’s what they said, just before the riot.” Caledonia Emerald was shaking her head.
“No!” screamed a voice from the mob.
“Ours!”
“We will kill them if they return!”
“Kill them all!”
“It was Wanderer himself,” said Ribbentrop. “But not only.” The other veedo screen showed the three visitors standing in a clump beside the watching place’s stone wall. Beside them stood a tailless Rac.
Facing them was a larger group of tailless Racs with Leaf in the forefront. Her fur bristled insanely as she screeched, “The Tower is ours! The gods are ours! They made us, and they made the Tower for us!”
“That’s Wetweed,” said Pearl Angelica, pointing at the fourth.
“She got friendly with Stonerapper,” said Caledonia Emerald. “She had to run with them.”
“They made us too,” Shorttail was saying.
“They discarded you. They threw you to the wind like the trash you are. You will never climb the Tower! We will not let you!”
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 123