On the microscope’s stage was a small clear-sided box containing a many-legged creature she had found burrowed into a scrap of bone. Its head was fixed to the interior surface of the box’s lid, and a computer screen showed its oscillating mouth parts grinding away at the box’s plastic.
But at the moment the bot was paying no attention to the inventory maps or her specimen and its potential as a biological drill or, enlarged, as a tunneler. She was leaning her buttocks against the edge of her worktable, facing the doorway in the room’s fourth wall. “Uncle Renny,” she was saying to the man who had just knocked on the door’s frame.
“I came down as soon as I heard.” Renny Schemer was of medium height, lean, the bridge of his nose a straight slope from his forehead, his silver hair cut short and stiff. Prominent canines gleamed whenever he opened his mouth. He was one of those who piloted the Gypsy’s Q-ships. “Is Freddie all right?”
Tears gleamed in her eyes. “He wasn’t hurt, but…” She shrugged. “It did shake him up. He’s not making much sense.”
A look of pain crossed the man’s face. “Less than usual, you mean.” His old friend’s illness had left him able to do little more than breathe and twitch an occasional muscle. Sometimes he could talk, but his mind was only rarely lucid. “I had hoped to say hello.”
“He probably won’t recognize you. Though maybe he’ll improve a little when they get his place repaired and he’s back in familiar surroundings.”
“Have they got any better idea of what’s wrong with him?”
She shook her head. When Frederick Suida had fallen ill, his physicians had said the engineering technology that had made him a sentient pig in the first place had been too primitive. So had been the gene-replacement techniques that had later made him human. Now his chromosomes were disintegrating, apparently at random, scrambling the operating instructions in each of his many trillion cells, and each cell was going awry in its own way. Some cells turned cancerous and could not be repaired by tailored viruses. The physicians removed the resulting tumors as rapidly as they made themselves apparent, but they could do little when the masses of rogue tissue were deep within the brain. Some cells stopped working; the physicians cloned replacement organs, but again they could do little when the cells were brain cells and other neurons. Some cells began to act like other types, skin cells secreting stomach acid or hormones; these were the easiest to repair, often simply by reprogramming their errant genes.
“There are just too many things wrong,” she said. And they went wrong far too rapidly for any lasting help.
Renny was not really her uncle. But he had been a friend of her father’s for so many years, and the two men had had so much in common, that he felt like kin. She had called him “uncle,” and his wife “aunt,” as long as she had known how to speak. She tightened her lips as she hoped that the gene manipulations that had made him a sentient dog, and later given him his human body, had been more polished, less clumsy. Otherwise, he too might…
She stared at the wall beside the man. It held another rack of shelving and a freezer cabinet whose shallow drawers held several thousand preserved tissue samples. It also bore a poster-sized photo of the display case in which one of her biologist predecessors had mounted the few insects and spiders that had inadvertently accompanied the Gypsies into space. The insects included a dozen flies, several fleas, a few cockroaches and lice, and a number of beetles and moths. There were also three bedraggled bees which had died and been preserved before anyone had thought to try to multiply them. Pearl Angelica did not even know whether they were male or female, but she thought that did not matter. If the gengineers had gotten to them while they were still alive, before their own internal enzymes, and then bacteria and molds, had destroyed their DNA, they could have cloned as many as they wished. They might even have been able to make a queen, and then…
Following her gaze, Renny tried to help her change the painful subject. “Where’s the original?”
“Up there. On the Gypsy.” But then her mind jerked back to her father and his illness. “The bots…”
Uncle or not, he understood. “It doesn’t happen to the Maces and Roachsters and Bioblimps. And anyway, bots don’t live long enough to worry about genetic collapse.”
Ten years. Twelve at most, with few exceptions. “But me…?”
He sighed and reached out to clasp her shoulder with a large and comforting hand. “Yes. But the technology was better developed when Hannoken worked on your seed. You’ll live longer, as long as me. You’ll have time enough to deteriorate quite naturally. But it may never happen. I hope it won’t. You have so much potential.”
“Potential!” She said the word as if it were a curse, though she knew what he meant. The people around her had been telling her the same thing—“You have so much potential!”—for as long as she could remember. Humans said it to any child who could tie her own shoelaces.
Bots said it more selectively and more accurately. They could link their roots within the soil, directly or through the honeysuckle that had once served them on Earth, and still did in parts of the Gypsy, as a sort of extended nervous system. They could thereby gauge each other’s intelligence more precisely than any human test. They could also pass information directly from brain to brain, which was in fact how bots learned enough in their brief childhoods to function as adults. Pearl Angelica had been learning in that way, as well as others, for far longer than any bot had ever managed. When her longevity had become clear, her bot kin had begun to watch her carefully and to say those words of promise—“You have so much potential!”—more often than ever.
Potential! As if all that mattered was what she might become! As if what she was already—a biologist laboring to prepare a species’ legacy and to sort through a whole world’s fauna and flora for future usefulness—meant nothing! As if her value, her contribution to the bots, the Gypsies, and the future, depended on…Not on her intelligence; intelligence was ability to learn or capacity for knowledge, efficiency and speed of information processing, ability to solve problems, all those brain functions essential to survival. But on how much she knew.
“Yes, potential,” said her uncle. “Even at your age, that has to count for something. The good you might do…”
She cut him off with a curt flap of her hand and indicated the corridor at his back. Light, reflecting off the walls outside the lab’s entrance, was vanishing as the door to the outside of the pumpkin sighed closed once more. They could hear the soft sounds of unshod feet approaching down the hall. Renny stepped backward half a pace and turned his head. “A pair of Racs,” he said. “I wonder what they want.”
When they stopped outside the lab, Renny moved aside to let them enter. “Wetweed,” said the one in the lead, introducing herself as Racs almost always did when they met a bot or human. Her pelt was marked with swirls of a green so dark that it was almost black. In one hand she held a small wicker cage containing a two-legged animal that looked like a cross between a hummingbird and a bat. It was the size of the former and it had feathered wings striped with yellow, but its body was covered with dense, brown fur; neither feathers nor fur were quite like their Earthly equivalents. Its head bore large semicircular ears and a long, bristly snout from which protruded a coil of tongue like a butterfly’s.
“Cloudscurry,” said the second, eyeing Renny as both Racs touched their muzzles. “Blacktop sent us.”
Wetweed held up her cage. “You wanted…”
The man and the bot returned the greeting gestures. “A dumbo,” said Pearl Angelica. “Thank you.” Dumbos were one of First-Stop’s principal pollinators. There were many species, differing in size and markings, in the flowers they serviced, in the time of day when they preferred to be most active. This one was one of the smallest she had ever seen.
As she took the cage and set it on a shelf beside the window above the sink, Cloudscurry asked, “Is your father all right?”
“He seems no worse,” said Pearl Angelica.
“No worse?”
The spoon banged against the side of the small beaker in which she was mixing sugar and water with which to feed the dumbo. Didn’t they know? But most Racs, all except the very few like Blacktop who wandered through the Gypsy settlement and learned to read of gods and other matters, mingled very little. They were not hostile, and they could pass the time of day quite pleasantly when they crossed a Gypsy’s path, but they preferred to live their own lives in their own way.
“He has been ill for a long time,” said Renny.
“If that assassin, that terrorist, had succeeded,” said Pearl Angelica, “he would have lost only a few weeks or months.” The words suggested that she thought her father’s death would not matter much. Perhaps it wouldn’t to Frederick, to the Gypsies, to the universe as a whole, but her posture, hunched stiffly, rigidly, over the beaker of sugar water, said that it would matter enormously to her. He was rarely even resident in the home of his flesh; soon he would not be there at all to feel the pain of his body’s dissolution. He had made his contribution to his people. And the universe never even knew he was alive. But she knew. She would miss him. She would feel the pain. She would grieve.
She wept quietly.
“The terrorist was human,” said Renny to the Racs.
“The enemy within,” Cloudscurry said smoothly.
Renny nodded. “An Engineer. At least a sympathizer. He must have been among the refugees we took from Earth, and he must have stayed quiet until he felt he had to act. Then he knocked out the Bioblimp’s pilot and tied her up. I wish we knew why.”
Pearl Angelica choked words past her tears: “Maybe it was the first time he thought it would work.”
Renny shrugged. “It almost did. I’m glad he won’t get another chance.”
“Surely he was not alone,” said Wetweed. “Did he have helpers? Did someone tell him what to do?”
“If he did,” said Pearl Angelica. “We won’t find them. They’ve had over thirty years of practice at keeping their mouths shut.” Then, as if declaring the topic done, she poured the sugar water she had mixed from its beaker into a large test tube and busied herself with attaching a rubber stopper pierced by a bent glass tube.
“True,” said Renny. “But we’ll try anyway.” He faced the Rac. “We have security people, specialists in such matters. They’ll talk to his friends and neighbors, his work mates and supervisors. If there’s anything to find, they’ll find it.”
Pearl Angelica attached the feeder she had prepared to the side of the dumbo’s cage. She stood still then, staring intently as the creature approached the glass tube that projected into its space, sniffed, extended its hollow tongue, and began to drink. Her silence spoke loudly enough to make the others fall silent too, to bring them to stand beside her and watch the dumbo’s throat and abdomen pulsing as it drew in the fuel it needed to remain alive a little longer.
It was several minutes before the creature stepped back from the feeder and fanned its wings. By then its abdomen was visibly distended and there was a sizable bubble of air in the feeder bottle. “Tell me, Wetweed,” said Pearl Angelica, “what do you know about these things? Where do they lay their eggs?”
“In water,” said the Rac.
“She watches them,” said Cloudscurry. She laughed in the Racs’ way, snorting and showing teeth. “Like her name, she hangs over the edges of streams. And that Stonerapper should be called Stoneturner. That’s all he does all day, turning over stones and studying what lives under them. Just like her.”
“I like him,” said Wetweed. “I study what I see, and so does he.”
“Bah!” snorted her companion.
“But what has he seen? I have seen the dumbos coupling in the air above the water. I have seen them lay their eggs, and the eggs hatch into tiny wiggling tasty-tails…”
She fell silent as Cloudscurry opened her mouth, revealing numerous pointed teeth and arcing ropes of glistening saliva, and closed it again. “Yes,” said Wetweed. “They devour each other, small fish, whatever they can find. They grow…” She held her hands before her, half a meter apart, to indicate how big the tasty-tail larvae of the largest dumbos could get. “And we eat them, don’t we? They’re delicious! If they escape our hands and traps, they become the dumbos that fly from flower to flower.”
“I wish they would do,” said Pearl Angelica. “They’re pretty. But we don’t have open water on the Gypsy. Not in any form that would let them reproduce. Can you keep looking? For one that nests in trees or underground?”
Wetweed shook her head dubiously. “I have never seen such things. But I will look.”
When the Racs had gone, Pearl Angelica told her Uncle Renny, “I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. But I looked at the dumbos years ago.”
He glanced toward the cage, where the captive dumbo was once more drinking sugar water. “Did you actually try them out?”
She nodded. “I took a few up to the ship, just males to keep them from accidentally moving in for good. And yes, they liked some of our plants just fine. But not all of them, and not enough to solve the problem. And besides, they spent much of their time searching for open water, running water.”
“Maybe they were looking for females?”
Now he was looking at her face, his expression sympathetic. She knew her eyes were swollen, her cheeks tear-streaked. “I found them by a park fountain.”
“Wouldn’t the fountains do for…?”
“We drain them when we’re maneuvering.” She found a tissue and scrubbed at her face. “The larvae look like giant earwigs, with pincers like so.” She gestured with both arms and smiled wanly when he shuddered.
“A little tinkering?” he asked.
“Maybe, later, when the gengineers have the time. I have some samples on ice.” She indicated the cage by the sink. “That’s where this fellow will go. But what we really need is bees, from Earth.”
“They would add a homey touch.”
She nodded. “It’s too bad no one brought any. We’ll have to ask for some, the next time a courier goes back.”
“Your Aunt Lois is the next one scheduled. Should I speak to her?”
Pearl Angelica shook her head. “I’ll do it myself.” After a moment’s hesitation, she added, “Maybe I’ll even beg a ride.”
Later, when he had left her alone once more, Pearl Angelica asked herself, Why shouldn’t she go herself? The Gypsy’s couriers only made the trip once a year, taking turns between their journeys to other stars in search of more worlds worth visiting. The trips home maintained contact with the Orbitals and gengineers and bots who had remained in Earth’s solar system, in the habitats and stations, on Mars, and elsewhere. They kept intact the thread of common culture, common history, and passed back and forth whatever new ideas had occurred to each group’s scientists, gengineers, and engineers.
If only she could be sure that Frederick would live until she returned! The trip wouldn’t really take very long. The smaller drives of the Q-ships were much more efficient than the behemoths that moved the Gypsy. They bit off larger chunks of distance as they tunnel-skipped through space, and they cycled faster. The Gypsy had taken years. A Q-ship needed only weeks.
And the trip would give her the chance she craved. She would be able to see Earth again. Perhaps she could even visit the world that had given birth to her ancestors, both plant and human. Perhaps she could stand in a field or forest beneath blue sky and white clouds and gaze upon lakes and streams, rivers and oceans, mountains and plains…
First-Stop had them all. They looked much the same as the pictures the Gypsies had preserved in books and on veedo-tapes. But they weren’t the same. First-Stop was an alien world. The colors were different. And while it nurtured life so much like that of Earth in its chemistry that the two could eat each other with impunity—only the outer forms differed to any significant degree, and nothing Earthly with fur or feathers, much less both, metamorphosed from larvae the way the dumbos did—while its landscapes and e
cosystems were instantly recognizable to anyone who had seen or read of those of Earth, while the DNA and proteins were so much the same that the gengineers had only needed to map the genes and isolate the protein tools, the enzymes, used by First-Stop’s living things before they could redesign the Racs’ animal ancestors for sentience, First-Stop was not Earth.
Despite all the similarities, she craved the planet of her origins. She yearned to sink her roots into its soil, to taste its deepest flesh. She dreamed of knowing Mother Earth and all her secrets, and even of living out her life within the embrace of her gravity. She did not entirely agree with what most other Gypsies accepted without a qualm, that exploring the cosmos, seeking other sentients and creating them where they were lacking, was the best of all possible destinies.
She knew the dream was futile. Earth was ruled by those who would not tolerate bots and gengineers and all the rest of what they had once rejected as blasphemous, obscene. At very best, the most that she could hope to have was a distant view of the homeworld, root-home, through a viewport or on a veedo screen, before she must return to her present place. But even that, that moment of even distant contact and then the fading memory, would be better than what she had now.
Yet maybe—she dreamed, she hoped—maybe the Engineers had eased their dogmas. Maybe they had come to their senses, found it possible to accept the technological novelties they had once rejected, given up the worst of their murderous bigotry. Maybe they had even embraced the novelty she represented and with it change and prosperity.
Tower Of The Gods Page 3