Did it make a sound when he got up to find a sausage for his lunch? How could it? That slightest of squeaks must have come from outdoors, or the apartment next door, or the hallway. Yet now the plant was leaning toward the visioncaster on the table beside the window.
He turned it on, and then he stood to watch the report of a newly discovered troop of Racs. They lived in the forests of an island far at sea, eating roots and fruits and shellfish. Living in huts. They had tails, but they were more primitive even than the Farshorns outside their towns and cities.
The announcer’s voice was saying how far these islanders showed the rest of Rackind had come since the Remakers left.
Dotson got his sausage from the coldbox. When he looked again, the VC showed an outdoor scene, a milling crowd, a miniature Worldtree with a basket of woven steel upon its tip, and a tailless priest atop a pyramid of wooden steps. He wore a yellow cloak and cap, marked with black, just as had the High Priest of Worldtree Center’s Great Hall.
This priest, however, never faced his congregation. Arms upthrust, head back, eyes closed, belly protruding more than that of any priest Dotson had ever seen before, he appealed to his Worldtree icon and through it to the Remakers themselves. “We have learned,” he cried. “We have learned so much! Give us a sign! Tell us we have done well! Tell us that you approve our struggle! Tell us that our progress pleases you!”
A line of young Racs formed to one side of the step-pyramid. Each one held a replica of one of those plaques the Remakers had left atop the Worldtree. When the priest gestured, they approached the icon one by one, found the inconspicuous clawholds in its surface, climbed, and carefully set their burdens in the basket high above the congregation.
“Our offering! The lessons we have mastered! Tell us they are enough!
“Or must we still struggle to unravel all the rest? You are the gods, perfect and unsurpassable! How can we equal you?
“The heretics of Worldtree Center claim we must even go beyond. How can that be possible?
“Give us a sign! Return to us!
“Or must we first destroy all Evil? All those who would destroy your works?”
The sausage was flavored with roasted mossberry seeds, pungent and sharp beneath the meat and grease. It was also far too quickly gone.
Dotson thought of his typer and the work that waited for him. That was not too quickly gone. On the contrary, it loomed over him forever.
He looked back at the VC, the visioncaster. Who was the heretic? It had been one of the tailless who had first proclaimed the holiness of the quest for knowledge, the drive to match, exceed, rejoin the Remakers. But it had been the tailed who listened and accepted and made that faith their own. The tailless had chosen to pray to the Remakers for approval, intervention, return, and the restoration of their own one-time dominance. They were the last of the Racs to be Remade, they claimed. They were the Final Model, the best, the closest to godhood. And someday the Remakers would return to redress all their favorites’ grievances.
Not that the tailed—including Dotson Barbtail himself—never prayed to the Remakers or wished for their return. Not that the tailed did not also believe in the existence of evil forces that opposed the Remakers or the quest for knowledge.
It did not surprise him that the beliefs of the two groups had influenced each other. Indeed, those who studied the plaques that recorded the Remakers’ history said that such influences were common.
But the tailed remained closer to the Founder’s vision. He had always been sure of that.
Chapter Five
Most of Belt Center 83 had no way to see out except through veedo screens. That had its advantages, for it meant each residential cubicle, separated from its neighbors only by thinnest plastic, could nevertheless look out on Mars’s Valles Marineris, share the view from Olympia’s glass-walled concourse, overlook an Earthly cityscape or mountain range, furrowed glacier or moving sea. Forests, jungles, coral reefs, farms, and other living views were forbidden. A few seemed to overlook vast factories full of gleaming metal and busy machines.
Most people rarely used their veedo windows, seeming to prefer the quite traditional prints, photographs, and holograms. They were no less artificial and much less prone to interruptions by veedo calls and official announcements, but the real reason may have been something more akin to agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces.
The Center had an entrance, a dome through which people could come and go and supplies could be delivered. The dome’s surface was transparent, and standing beneath its frameless curve, the floor pushing almost weightlessly against one’s feet, was like floating in space, unsupported, insecure, surrounded not by human structure but by vast emptiness and thronging stars and distant worlds.
Yet that dome was almost always empty. Few people visited to savor the view it offered. Few whose business took them through it lingered there or lifted their eyes from the floor as they hastened on their way. The human species was well established in the space environment, but those were rare who could stand to stare into the infinite depths of space without the frame of a helmet’s visor or a port’s rim to reassure them of their safety.
Those robots that scurried through clung to the angle between the floor and wall.
“I don’t like this place,” said Eric Silber.
“It’s cold,” said Miriam Panek, and it was. The material of the dome resisted heat flow far less well than the walls of the tunnels, and the chill of space penetrated to the staring humans.
“It’s the gravity,” said Renard Saucier. “Not just the view. They’ve got even bigger domes on the Moon. But your feet can hug the ground. You don’t feel like you’re about to spin off to nowhere.”
“Greenshit,” said Silber. “How long are you going to keep us here? We’re done, aren’t we?”
“You want to go home, don’t you, Eric?” Miriam’s voice was wistful. “Back to Mars and its tunnels.” She was staring through the dome, into space, and Hrecker thought her face seemed softer, younger, than usual. “I don’t see much difference.”
“There’s weight. There’s a view. You can go outside for a walk. Or you can be alone in a room with solid walls.”
“Ah, well,” said Miriam. “Then you’ll be happy soon. We’re almost done. That’s why Renard brought us here, to this dome.”
“Just to stare at the gyppin’ ships?”
Saucier said nothing, letting Miriam nod and smile sweetly and say, “I wish …” The probability shifters had successfully been given larger fields. The drives had been designed and built and installed. The ships had been finished, and there they were.
“What do you wish?” Silber’s tone was now a sneer. “You want to go with them?”
“Look at them,” said Hrecker. He pointed through the wall of the dome, halfway between floor and zenith, and spoke their names with relish: “Ajax, Bolivar, Bonami, Cascade, Drake, Gorbachev, Pizarro, Saladin, Toledo, Villa.”
All except the largest, the flagship Ajax, even though they were built in space, were quite capable of landing on a planet. If all went well, they would, and soon. They were almost ready for their cleansing mission.
For now, they orbited the asteroid that was Belt Center 83 like remoras around a shark or aides around a general. In form, they were huge mushrooms, their ten broad heads crowded with narrow corridors, missile bays, beam generators, storerooms, and sleeping quarters, cubicles equipped with shelflike bunks. The stubby stems that contained the drives were sheathed in clustered pods for the dust the Q-drives used as reaction mass. The ships wore no armor, although the mushroom heads were broad enough to shield the dust pods from whatever debris combat or space itself might throw in their way. No one wished a ship to lose its power to move.
Among the ships were several of the huge fabric spheres the dust-mills had filled with pulverized asteroids.
More were on their way.
“I suppose you want to go too.” Silber was glaring at Hrecker, refusing to look at the products of all their efforts.
Hrecker shook his head. “No, not really. But aren’t they marvelous? Haven’t we done a grand job?”
Silber snorted derisively. “It was a job, and yes, we’re done.”
“Almost,” said Saucier. “Soon enough, and you can go home.”
“They’re already being loaded,” said Miriam.
Food, spare parts, equipment, and weaponry were arriving daily from Earth, the Moon, and Mars. With them came men and women from the Navy’s bases on the Moon and Mars, Ganymede and Titan, selected for competence, loyalty, and experience with the old slower-than-light, insystem Q-ships. General Lyapunov had announced that their experience should help them adjust to the new ships.
Most were also volunteers. The worlds of the Solar System had been pacified for many decades, the Engineers’ rule unquestioned except by isolated malcontents. It had been even longer since anyone had seen a Gypsy; it seemed unlikely that they would return just now. And no one took the possibility of an alien invasion seriously. All the action would be at Tau Ceti.
As soon as Hrecker and his colleagues completed the final adjustments to the Q-drives and the crews had shaken down both themselves and their ships, the expeditionary force would be able to leave. The date of departure had already been set for three months hence.
* * * *
“I’m going to miss you,” Hrecker said for the hundredth time. He spoke in the murmur that had become second nature for all those who lived in the tunnels. He was barely aware of the sounds his neighbors made: soft music, the click of game tiles and the whisk of playing cards, occasional raised voices or laughter. The louder noises of the starship crews, billeted by twos and threes wherever space could be found or made, were more obtrusive.
“You could come too,” Tamiko Inoue answered as she always had. “You don’t have to go back to Mars. We could stay together.”
“You could stay here. Come with me.” He had made it plain again and again how eager he was to get back to the university and his lab, to the work he had been doing before this project had drafted him. He had come willingly enough. What choice had he had, after all? He had worked hard, and unlike Eric Silber he had taken satisfaction in the success he and his colleagues had achieved. Yet he was content to let his involvement with the mission end.
But she had been the one factor that most truly made life at Belt Center 83 bearable.
She shook her head furiously. “No. I want to see Tau Ceti and First-Stop and the aliens.”
“I’d like to see them too.”
“Then come.”
“And I don’t want to give you up.”
“Then come with me.” A moment later, she added, “The General says we don’t have enough techs. He’s worried about maintaining the new drives and particle beams and repairing them if they break down.”
“They won’t.”
“He’s still worried. There hasn’t been time to train any Navy technicians.”
“So that’s why you want me to sign up.”
“No!” The thought that he suspected her of being so manipulative seemed to shock her. “But … We could use you, and all the rest of your group. All you have to do is fill out the application. You’d be a lieutenant right away. Your boss would be a major.”
Now it was his turn to shake his head. “You could just wait a while before leaving. The Navy’s techs have been working with us all along. It wouldn’t take many more weeks to finish training them.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Why not?” said Hrecker. “The aliens aren’t going anywhere.”
“They have satellites. They might, if we take too long. They could escape, just like the Gypsies.”
“And you can’t have that, can you?” His expression turned sad. “You want to be a Crusader and destroy the infidels.”
“The Crusaders were the infidels. They were after the heathen Moors.”
“You know what I mean.”
She didn’t answer. She sat up in the sleepsac, her arms crossed beneath her breasts, and stared through the gap between his ceiling and the wall. A shadow swept across the plastic, a head flashed into view and vanished. There was no telling whether the passerby had glanced in her direction.
When Hrecker tried to lift an edge of the sleepsac to cover her, she brushed his hand aside. “Are you advertising?”
“I might as well. I’ll need to find someone else if you’re staying.”
“That won’t be hard. Pretty thing like you.”
She pushed his hand away again. “Hard enough. We’ll be busy. Not much time for socializing.”
“Not that busy. We’ve improved the drives a lot, but you’ll still be on the way for weeks.”
“We’ll use it all for weapons drills, defense, evasion. It’s a military expedition, after all.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“We don’t know what to expect.”
They were silent, listening to the sounds of other people: a rhythmic slapping, thudding, grunting that said a pretense of privacy could be enough; an ancient song about a truck that had lost its brakes on the way down a mountain road; a tensely whispered argument; a veedo report claiming, “… ses of samples and tapes brought back by the Explorer. There is no sign of human or Earthly DNA, but the natives there bear a marked resemblance to raccoons. We are now more confident that the Gypsy gengineers were there. The coons are therefore lab-made monsters, abominations, corruptions we must wipe from the face of the planet.”
“Coons,” someone in the distance laughed. “That’s what they called my great-great-great grandfather.”
At last Hrecker said, “I want to be with you. I want to see Tau Ceti too. But I’d miss Earth. Not that I’ve ever spent much time there, but at least on Mars and the Moon there are farms and greenhouses. A link. I miss that here. I’d miss it worse there.”
“There’s life there,” said Tamiko. “You’ve seen the tapes. Green leaves and trees. Animals. And for all our worries about the Gypsies, it looks a lot more natural than Earth has been for centuries.”
“Except for the coons.”
She nodded. “We’ll have work to do when we get there.”
Neither of them said out loud what that work seemed likely to entail.
* * * *
The Navy’s uniform was a light blue coverall with darker blue shoulder panels. The left breast was embroidered with a golden cogwheel of a size that could be covered with a palm. Insignia of rank were pinned to the right breast.
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker looked at his reflection in the surface of the small screen that showed Belt Center 83 shrinking to a distant speck behind the ship. His cogwheel was surrounded by a second, larger one to mark his position in the technician corps. A silver bar said that he was, just as Tamiko had foretold, a lieutenant. Below it, a pair of dice said that his specialty was the probability shifters that made Q-drives and macroscopic tunneling and faster-than-light travel all possible.
The shifters themselves were silent. The energy that flowed from the quantum vacuum under their influence was too. But as dust from the storage pods was fed into the reaction chamber to be vaporized and thrust from the rear of the ship, a whisper grew to a roar and acceleration pressed his feet to the deck.
The controls he had been set to watch showed no irregularities. The shifters worked flawlessly, and satisfaction in the development work he and his colleagues had done showed in the set of his lips.
“On our way,” said Meyer Smith, the chief technician.
“No problems,” said Hrecker.
Smith flipped a switch that would confirm what the crew on the bridge already knew. “Happy?”
Hrecker nodded. Yes, he was happy. He had wanted to go back to the university and his lab, but he had also not wanted to part from Tamiko. She had refused to give up her place on the expedition. Eventually, he had given in. And here he was.
On the other hand, here he was. On the Saladin. And she was on the flagship, the Ajax. After all, that was where General Lyapunov was, and she was one of the man’s aides.
But he could talk to her occasionally. He would see her when they arrived. And he would see a new world, a new people, alien and strange, frightening and tempting.
The drive room was a smaller version of the bridge. It didn’t have a big viewscreen, and it didn’t have in the center of the chamber a padded couch for the captain, but it did have all the controls needed to fly the ship. It also held enough room for the second and third shifts to gather near the entrance, there to watch as the expedition took its first steps into the interstellar dark. He glanced in their direction. Saucier was on the Gorbachev, Major Saucier indeed. Miriam Panek was on the Cascade. But Eric Silber was here, on the same ship as he, looking sour.
He could not help but wonder if he was here because rumor was right and he did indeed work for Security. If they had assigned him here despite his wishes …
“What are you staring at me for?” he snarled.
Hrecker shrugged. “Just glad you decided to come.”
“I had to when the rest of you signed up. Twiddling my gyppin’ thumbs till you got back would have driven me nuts.”
“Vacuum flux on the curve,” said Bela B’Genda on the other side of the room. She was a short, stocky, dark woman who had left a husband on Ganymede. Her voice was warm and resonant.
“Dust flow’s fine. The mills didn’t leave any lumps.” That was the German, a brush-cut blonde everyone called the Baron because he once had mentioned aristocratic ancestors. He sounded like he was giving orders, and in the center of his ornamental cogwheel he had pinned a robot the length of his thumb. From time to time it twitched and wiggled legs amd antennae.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 129