Vince deliberated, then nodded.
Louis rubbed his hands together. “Okay. So what they decide to do is see if they can’t speed things along by scouting the galaxy for likely candidates and lending a helping hand wherever they can.” Louis motioned to Cabell. “They hit Karbarra, Praxis, Peryton—all the worlds you mentioned—adding something here, deleting something there. Then they sit back to see what happens.
“But—” Louie raised an index finger. “—we’re talking millennia again. So rather than risk a second yawn they decide to build themselves a world—that world,” Louie said, gesturing out the viewport, “to do the monitoring work for them. And they equip the AI they’ve set up to run the place with instructions to call them when one of their experiments in racial transmutation bears fruit.”
Cabell saw where Nichols was headed and smiled knowingly.
Louie returned the grin. “Yeah, you see it. The Karbarrans aren’t cutting it, and neither are the Garudans or the Spherisians, but hey, what’s going on over here in Optera’s corner of the Fourth Quadrant? Why, we got some kind of war going on here between the Invid and the Robotech Masters over those Flowers Haydon left behind.”
Louie snorted a laugh. “Well, one thing leads to another, and the Invid arrive on Earth, mate with the Protoculture Zor conjured from their blessed Flowers, and bing, bang boom!—transcendence. They soar clear off this mortal coil, and an alarm clock goes off on Haydon IV. The Awareness says, ‘All right, all you slumbering spacefarers, it’s rise and shine. A trail’s been blazed, and it’s time to start settin’ out for the new frontier.’ ”
Vince and Harry Penn were hanging on his every word. Gibley and the rest of Louie’s teammates had gone back to playing video games. Louie glanced at them and aimed a laugh at the ceiling. “So, I forget, where was I headed?”
“Ships,” Penn reminded him breathlessly.
“Oh, right, ships. Well, that’s the obvious part, isn’t it? The Protoculture sure isn’t going to get Haydon into the other domain. Besides, there’s none of the pure stuff left. So what they need now is ships.”
Cabell’s forehead and bald pate wrinkled. “But if what you’re saying is correct—if Haydon actually plans to follow in ships—the Invid’s departure would have to have resulted in a detectible physical rend in the continuum.”
“That’s true,” Louie said. “And I’m betting the Awareness will be programming the location of that rend into the ships Haydon IV’s going to start spitting out.”
Vince slapped a hand down on the table. “So all we need to do is hang around until Haydon shows up to claim the ships and tag along behind.”
Louie nodded. “I don’t think they’d mind a coupla hitchhikers, do you?”
“But we don’t have any idea how long this process will take,” Penn protested. “Ships, slumbering spacefarers … The idea is absurd. But even if all this is true, suppose Haydon does mind. Suppose they don’t want to share the discovery with outsiders. What then?”
Louie pondered that for a moment. “We’ve still got one other lead—the Invid simulagent. We continue to put the squeeze on her until she talks. Once we have the location, we can get a jump on Haydon’s ships, beat ’em to the pass.”
“My God,” Vince repeated. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”
“That’s unimportant,” Penn said. “The question should be phrased, What are we getting ourselves into?”
Cabell tapped a finger against his lips and turned to the viewport. “There’s one point Doctor Nichols still hasn’t addressed. Here is Haydon IV, joined to the mineral-rich moon of a dying system orbiting a gravitationally collapsed star.” He swung around to the room. “Inside which are Haydon and his race hiding?”
Scott was not surprised when Obstat so willingly acceded to his request that Marlene be released in his custody. Intel had made it clear what they were after, and Scott had in some sense become their field agent.
They were in his quarters, side by side on the narrow bed, exhausted from stress and the fleeting sense of relief love-making had provided. Try as he might, Scott could not push the image of Sera from his thoughts. Marlene was so frail in his arms as to be intangible, and once more he had begun to fear for her life. And he kept thinking about what Cabell had said about stars disappearing, the very fabric of the universe strained. Was it that cosmic tightening that had finally brought him to his senses? Had it required nothing less than gravitational collapse to bring Marlene to his arms? She was almost asleep, but he felt the need to talk, as though spoken words might forestall the inevitable.
“These last few days have made me wish things had been different on Earth,” he told her in a whisper. “I wish I hadn’t been so stupid and blind. I wish we hadn’t waited for this …”
Marlene raised her eyes to his, her long lashes fluttering against his bare chest. “Do you mean that, Scott?”
He nodded and kissed her forehead.
“And how would things have worked out, Scott? Your love for me would have kept you from leaving? You would have launched in your fighter only to return immediately to my arms?”
“Yes.”
“And we would have traveled together to the Southlands and pitched in to farm and restore the planet while you left it up to your friends to search for the SDF-3.”
Scott’s throat seemed to dry up. To hear his wishes presented like that only undermined the sentiment and filled him with misgiving. But he answered yes to all of it.
Marlene raised herself on one elbow to study his face. “Remember Sera, Scott. You would have ended up alone.”
He worked his jaw. “It wouldn’t have mattered. We would have had each other.”
“Like you had the Marlene Rush you can’t forget?”
“Change it, then, goddammit!” he seethed. “Find the Regess and make it right for both of us! Maybe your queen can have it end differently for you. Then maybe we can have the dream you just laid out.”
Marlene curled against him and took a deep, shuddering breath. “You’re not making it easy for me to remember who and what I am,” she said softly.
His chest where the holo-locket used to rest was damp with her tears. He squeezed her to him. “Tell me what I have to do, Marlene.”
“You have to stop loving me, Scott. You have to stop treating me so human.”
Elsewhere in the Ark Angel Minmei and the sister clones sang:
Little Protoculture leaf,
Waiting for our palates,
Where will you take us?
Flower of Life!
Treat us well!
What had happened on this world? Zor recalled having asked himself only a few days before. What enchanted hand or conspiracy of sky and soil had shaped that grand experiment in life?
For as far as the eye could see there had been nothing but this: a living landscape under skies tinged with aquamarine. Life pure and unadulterated, which here had chosen but two forms of expression. The one, vegetal but without question sentient; the other, more the animal stuff of his own being but seemingly free of the gross entanglements so often given rise to by bone and sinew. The one, a flower, fruit, and tree, pulsating with occult power; the other, feeding from that power but returning everything to it, tranquil and self-sufficient, with no need to look outside itself to answer the questions that burned in Zor’s soul. It was symbiosis of the most perfect sort, true synthesis, two life-forms nourishing each other in every possible way and altering in the process of that joining the physical structure of their environment. Nothing there seemed fixed or constant, neither natural law, nor dictated shape, nor evolutionary design. All was potential …
He recalled Vard calling out to him. Vard and several of the ship’s crew on the trail below, the one that switchbacked down from that bit of high ground the creature had guided them to. An eagerness in Vard’s voice Zor had rarely heard before, excitement prompted by the thrill of discovery. Zor, come! Hurry! He had ignored the young man’s direction, still too mesmerized by sky a
nd landscape to tear himself away …
Weeks before, the dropship had put down in a boundless field of the tri-petaled flowers. Triumvirate in their groupings, they were of a coral color, with elongated teardrop-shaped buds and long trailing stamens. And oddly enough they cast forth both pollen and seeds.
The landing party had made its way into a forest of spherically canopied fruit-bearing trees—impossibly tall, some of them—with rainbow-colored fluids coursing through translucent trunks. Zor remembered: Tzuptum’s rays warming limbs still stiff from space sleep: the spongy ground cover wondrously welcome to feet too long accustomed to deckplates of cool and unyielding alloy. The air thick and redolent, almost too perfumed to inhale unfiltered. And in fact two members of the party had succumbed to a kind of delusional psychosis and had had to be returned to the ship. But for Zor those first weeks had been magical. He and his science team had run scans and collected botanical samples while other teams charted distances and topography and probed the surface for useful metals.
It was shortly after he had determined the inherent sameness of flower, shrub, and tree that the landing party had had its initial encounter with the planet’s indigenous beings.
Limbless, amorphous, asexual creatures—vaguely mushroom-shaped when Zor first saw them—they lived communally in conical, hivelike structures from which they made daily forays into the surrounding countryside for the purpose of hover-gathering fruits and flowers of the planet’s singular plant life. After several days of observing the creatures in their routines and rituals—all of which centered on the flowers and trees—Zor came to understand that the beings made use of the plant for physical as well as spiritual nutrition. Seemingly oblivious to the presence of offworlders, they ingested the flower petals and fruits of the mature crop and often sipped the sap of the seedlings, which Zor had discovered possessed strong psychoactive ingredients.
Ultimately he had approached what he took to be the hive leader and had learned that the creatures were capable of telepathic communication. He realized, too, that they had the capacity to alter their physical being to suit their circumstances. While Zor and the hive leader had conversed, the creature had actually assumed a semblance of sexually differentiated humanoid form. It was that one who had identified the race by the name Invid and first used the term “Flower of Life.” This one who led the landing party to the overlook and told Zor about the Queen-Mother they called Regess.
Zor! Are you coming, Zor? Vard had shouted once more, and, reluctantly, Zor had begun to follow him down the steep slope, along a path strewn with velvety Flower of Life petals.
And so had commenced a marvelous journey of two Tzuptum days through Flower-crowned hills and bustling hive settlements that welcomed them with silent chant and delivered them finally to the lair of the Queen-Mother …
Zor stood gazing at her now, eyes next to closing from the soporific warmth of the hive’s central chamber. She had conjugated herself in an approximation of humanoid female form in his honor.
In his honor. The phrase she had sent to him.
“We have anticipated your return to Optera for so long, Bringer of Life. Forgive me if I am not yet adept at fully mimicking your present form.”
You anticipated our coming? Zor had asked her, confused.
“The memory is ancient but deep within me. The Flowers were your gift to us.”
Zor realized that he was being mistaken for someone who had visited Optera in the dim past and was about to correct the Regess when a sudden paralysis gripped his thoughts. The flowers of this world contained a form of novel bio-energy. They endowed life—indeed, nature and matter itself—with the power to shift and reshape, to wrestle from the gods themselves the ability to control the course of evolution.
Then consider, Zor found himself thinking, what the result might be if the plant’s bio-energy could be harnessed and directed.
Would the power to light a thousand worlds seem too much to ask? The power to drive a thousand ships across the sweep of stars? The power to shape and reconfigure the very continuum itself? The extension of life …
And yet the secret of communicating with the Flower and harnessing that energy lay with the unknown being that had brought it to Optera. And with this Invid shape changer who had fallen heir to the Flower’s fortunes.
Zor was intrigued. He realized that the Regess was the key to unlocking Optera’s mysteries, and in an instant of mad inspiration he decided to set himself the goal of possessing that key—if he had to seduce this queen to make that happen!
“Yes, your highness,” Zor said to her at last. “I have finally returned.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
I knew Lisa was serious the moment she stepped out of the vanity, dressed—barely!—in that revealing black camisole Karen Penn gave her for her thirty-ninth birthday. I was surprised, even though I shouldn’t have been. I mean, I remembered the look in Lisa’s eye when she saw Kaziana with Drannin that first time, and, after all, we had talked over the idea some … Well, Lisa must have caught the look on my face [that night on the Ark Angel], because she laughed and started to accuse me of backing out. But I told her no way. And, well, let’s just say I put my whole heart into what naturally followed.
The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter
There was a girl in Rick’s past, a gamine, honey-blond California free spirit named Jessica Fisher, the eldest daughter of Alice Fisher, an old friend of Pop’s. Rick had met her shortly after Pop had taken the flying circus to Sacramento in search of spectators with a bit of extra wartime scrip in their pockets.
Rick had just turned nine, and he and Jessica were introduced to one another as cousins. It had not taken long, however, to understand that there was no actual blood bond between them, especially after Pop and Alice had decided to bring their own romance out from behind closed doors. Rick, in fact, had been there when things had gotten started between his aging dad and the independent Alice, the night the four of them had gone into San Francisco and “the Visitor”—the SDF-1—had made its grand appearance. Of course, very few people realized they had seen a ship in the skies that night, and Russo’s government had managed to keep the Macross project under wraps for the next five years. But Pop and Alice seemed to have been touched by something in the air, because their relationship had changed from that night on. Rick, too, had been transfigured by the event. Youthful flying ace that he was fast becoming, he had liked to think of the sky as his property—even though Neasian and other military pilots might have argued the claim—and suddenly in that same sky he had glimpsed a power that surpassed all. The impact on his young mind was as devastating as it was liberating, for while Pop had done his best to keep his only son sheltered from the disputes that had plagued Earth at the time, “the Visitor” had made it clear there would be no hiding from war’s long reach.
Jessica, ironically, had guessed the truth about what they had witnessed. I’ll bet it was an alien spaceship, she had told Rick. And it’s come down to show everybody on Earth that war isn’t the only way that things get changed, that there’re all kinds of powers in the universe we’ll never understand if we keep thinking war’s the answer.
She was almost three years older than Rick and a lot more learned about such things. And after Pop decided to remain in California instead of taking the circus elsewhere, Rick would often sit at Jessica’s feet for hours, listening carefully to what she had to say about hatred and injustice and greed, and he would pay close attention to the things she read aloud from novels and texts and some of Alice’s books on philosophy and religion. Outside the year of high school he had attended in Sonoma, the time with Jessica came as close to a standard education as Rick had received; by the time he had turned fourteen, he was completely infatuated with her.
That she was still almost three years older than he made things extremely complicated, because by then older boys had begun to show up at the Sacramento farmhouse, guys who would stop by to visit with Jessica and fill h
er head with a lot of talk about what they were going to do when they joined the war.
Rick had already tried on countless occasions to express his feelings—he had even gone as far as writing her a poem—but the words just couldn’t make it past his lips. At the same time he had tried unsuccessfully to corner her into confessing her undying love for him. There had been a bit of hand holding and a few quick kisses but nothing that approximated the passion Rick had decided the two of them were meant to share. So, invariably, when any of Jessie’s prospective boyfriends were on hand, Rick could be found retreating to his room, where he would sulk for an hour or two or stare at all the trophies and medals his flying skills had earned him and wonder why they were not doing the trick. But he certainly was not about to sit out there on the porch and spew a lot of nonsense about how many enemy planes he planned to down when his turn came. And what was Jessie doing listening to all the lies those characters were feeding her, anyway?
The truth, as it would unfold, was that she had not been listening. One night she had followed Rick back to his room to tell him just that, and damned if she hadn’t been aware of Rick’s feelings all along! But how could you even think for a minute I’d be impressed by all that war talk? she had asked him. I don’t want that kind of hero in my life, Rick. I want to fall in love with someone who isn’t afraid to look for different answers. Someone like you.
Over the next six months Jessica had led him slowly into the joys of love and sexual discovery, but by the time winter had rolled around it was plain they were not meant to be lovers, that it was more important that their friendship survive than anything else. So Jessie had moved on to the sensitive hero of her dreams, and Rick had thrown himself into stunt flying with renewed fervor. But lord, how his hormones had raged for those six too-brief months! Not even Minmei or Lisa would inflame him the way Jessie had.
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