“Uh-uh. I’ve got to…” Renny was staring out his port toward the Quentin. It had arrived safely. It had the dust pod with it. But…
“I know.” She was young, pale blonde, boyishly slender, clad in a lime-green coverall. “You’ll need a lot more than this when you get home.”
“I’ll cut it off.”
“You bang it up much more, and that’ll be your only choice.” A voice from the Nexus com center was saying, “We have them on the spysats. They’re surrounded, and they can’t run. The fires are spreading. The troops are firing more heavily. The farmhouse is in ruins and burning. You’ll have to hurry.”
“Quentin? Buran? Stacey? Where’s my dust?”
“We’ve got some trouble here. Those workers…They want to talk to you. Chuck?”
Static crackled on the com line. “We’re on strike.”
“Say again?” said Renny.
“One load of those mechin’ bots is more than enough. We don’t need any more.”
Renny snarled and hit the keys to focus his screen on the pod to which the Quentin was attached. The three workers were visible. He snarled again, louder, baring his fangs even though he knew they could not see them. “I’ll rip your suits,” he said.
The Nexus com tech’s voice broke in. “Why don’t you just take them back to Earth. Drop them right in the middle of a labor camp. We’ll get a crew out there to handle the hoses.”
“Wait a minute!”
“He needs that fuel now! If he gets there too late…”
Renny watched as the three workers finally began to move, freeing a long hose from the side of the pod and snaking it in his direction. There was a clang as it hit the side of the Quincy, and he winced. There were more noises, the hum of the pumps came on, and the gauges began to indicate his tanks were filling.
What had Buran called one of them? Chuck, and they had met a Chuck on their first visit to Probe Station’s dining hall. The two were surely one, for that first Chuck had not wanted to share space with bots either. Renny wrinkled his nose as if smelling something foul. He had met no other examples of that sentiment on the Station, but they plainly existed. There were three out there, and all had tried to strike. There had been no sign of disagreement.
The Engineer troops had actually withdrawn in the face of the forest fire they had set to raging, but they were still within artillery range of the refugee encampment, or what was left of it. Puffs of smoke issued from the mouths of what Renny could now see were antique mortars and field guns, museum pieces from another age. Explosions cratered the earth. The farmhouse was flaming rubble. The bots and their human companions huddled in small groups in the open. As he watched, a shell landed in the midst of one such group. The bodies flew.
Renny clenched his teeth and ignored the pain in his tail. The medic’s spinal block had worked for a while but that second round of heavy gees…The anesthetic had settled out or been flushed by accelerated blood flow. Or the area was now so abused that anesthetic was not enough.
The fires had leaped the lanes he had swept before. They were nearing the refugees, while the hammer blows of shells came faster, eager to prevent escape, perhaps to destroy his ship.
He swore and swept his plasma tail across the troops and their artillery. He swept again and forced the fires back, at least for a moment. He landed, popped the hatches, and screamed for the refugees to board. They ran and climbed and entered, humans, greenskins, bots.
Then the ship was full, and there were still refugees on the ground. They stared at him, silently, bleakly. He said, “I’m sorry. There won’t be time for…”
A bot with soot-streaked orange blossoms raised one hand. “Thank you,” she said.
As he lifted off for the last time, a mushroom cloud of flame and greasy smoke was lifting skyward not far away. The fire had reached a grove of oil trees, and their sap had burst into flame all at once.
* * *
CHAPTER 20
A beam of filtered, reflected sunlight came through the small porthole in the wall of the compartment Frederick Suida and Donna Rose shared, illuminating the trough of soil in which she spent much of her time. She was kneeling before it, patting dirt into place around the roots of a small shoot of honeysuckle. “Someone brought it with them,” she said. “Someone took the time to pull it up and tuck it in their leaves and keep it safe.”
On Earth, Frederick had lived and worked in old-fashioned buildings of masonry and steel. But he had been surrounded by living things as well. There had been trees and grass outside, honeysuckle vines around the windows, potted plants inside, bioform computers and snackbushes and a myriad more. Here the walls were as hard as ever. They had to be, steel walls and ceiling, steel floor beneath the carpet, all to keep the vacuum at bay and contain the air and warmth that living things required. There were none of the curves and softnesses of Earth’s organic reality except in the people that surrounded him and in the few fragments of Earth they had brought with them. Plants existed only in pots and…He stood behind Donna Rose, a bot, half plant, half human. He stretched out one hand and gently touched the yellow blossoms of her scalp.
“I remember now,” he said. “I met your ancestors when they were new. Even before the Eldest’s generation. When I was still a pig. That’s when I first found out how special the honeysuckle is to bots. They designed it, and you must have missed it more than I could possibly miss grass and trees.”
He wished someone could bring him what he had lost, even a sprig, a shoot, a seed. “Bert’s dead,” he said. “Jeremy Duncan was in the first load, and he told me.”
“Who was he?” Donna Rose did not look up from her gardening.
“A friend. He worked at BRA. Jeremy ran a lab for me in the suburbs. He gave genimals like Renny human bodies, when that was what they wished. He went through hell.”
The bot looked up at him then. “They all did,” she said. “You got me out just in time. Then you came too, and we missed it all.”
He nodded, though he did not think he had missed it all, at all. He had seen his hell years before. After a moment of silence, he told her the little he had learned of Duncan’s story.
“He must be angry.”
“He didn’t say that. But yes, of course he is. When he told me how Renny used the blast from his Q-drive against the Engineers, he seemed very satisfied.”
Renny was the first to arrive, his fur askew as if he had not yet, in the hours since he had returned from his rescue mission, found a chance to brush smooth the marks left by his suit. Letting his tail jut out to one side, its base wrapped in a stiff bandage, he sat on one haunch near the pot that had had Donna Rose so upset, noting that it was now empty, and stared at Probe Station’s Director. Alvar Hannoken was behind his desk, muttering to his computer, glaring at screens full of reports and faces and views of rooms—the library, the game room, the dining hall—crowded with the refugees the dog had brought to orbit. Renny said nothing, seeming content to stare and smooth his fur with his hands, contorting himself from time to time to use his tongue.
When Frederick Suida and Donna Rose entered the room, Hannoken looked up from his screens and said, “We’ll have to ship them out soon. We have the room to handle some of them. So do Nexus and the other stations. The Hugin and Munin habitats could take them all but say they won’t take more than fifty each. But they will take more, eventually. They’ll have to.”
Frederick gestured for silence and glanced toward the corridor behind him. “Don’t alarm them.” As his words died, Walt Massaba appeared in the doorway. Behind him, ushered by two of the security chief’s aides, Corlynn and Tobe, came a human, a pair of greenskins, and several bots. Two of the bots were carrying a wooden tub containing a few tiny sprigs of honeysuckle and a plant somewhat like the one Donna Rose had made Hannoken destroy so recently. This plant differed in that she was taller and her head and face seemed sculpted from a single massive flower. Beside her scurried a smaller bot whose disproportionately swollen bulb hinted that
she had larger brains than her kin.
“Jeremy Duncan.” Frederick indicated the human with what was almost a smile. “I knew him when…He’s a gengineer.”
“A colleague then.” Hannoken came around his desk and offered his hand.
“Sam and Sheila Nickers.” Hannoken eyed the feathers on the greenskin woman’s scalp and the inserts on her cheek and jaw but said nothing. They were, perhaps, too routine, too common, to provoke his professional interest. “I understand,” said Frederick. “I understand that they were living with the bots in the city, helping out their teachers.”
Sheila Nickers held one hand toward the bots. “Narcissus Joy. She’s a gengineer too. And Mary Gold. Lemon Margaret. Jackie Thyme.” Each one, as her name was spoken, nodded her flowery head. “Chervil Mint. She’s the one who called for help. They raided the campus to free her, and that’s what started…”
“It’s been lonely,” said Donna Rose. “I’m glad you’re here, all of you.”
“Thanks to the dog,” said Jackie Thyme, and Renny winced as his tail tip twitched against the carpet.
Hannoken turned toward the bot in the tub and her smaller attendant. “And…?”
“The Eldest,” said Narcissus Joy. “And Eldest’s Speaker.”
“Aahh!” sighed Donna Rose. Her tone was awed, almost worshipful. “I knew of you. I never thought…”
Acrid, pungent scent filled the room as the Eldest bent her head and trembled. A keening cry burst from Eldest’s Speaker.
Sam Nickers explained briefly that the Eldest could not talk in words but only in odors, perfumes. The Speaker was her translator.
“I remember.” Frederick had to raise his voice above the noise. A wary expression crossed his face. “She’s much like the very first bots. They couldn’t walk, and they used their perfumes to make men do their bidding.”
“A later generation,” said Mary Gold. “After we lost that ability. She is no threat to anyone here. Nor are we.”
Hannoken looked skeptical. “I hope you’re right.”
The keening turned into words. “We once were many,” said Eldest’s Speaker. Frederick wondered if the neural circuitry necessary for translating odor to speech accounted for the greater size of the Speaker’s bulb. “We now are few. A remnant only of a mighty people. Greatly oppressed, winnowed by fate. Escaped the slaughter.”
Narcissus Joy nodded sadly. “So many of us,” she said. “So many of us died when the Engineers took over. We thought we were the only ones. And some of us had to stay behind.”
“To burn,” said Jackie Thyme.
Sheila Nickers looked at her husband. “Alice Belle was one of them. I saw her waving.”
“Ah, no.” Sam’s voice choked, and he bent his head for a long moment before he could speak again. “A friend,” he finally explained to the others. His face said that he had not known the bot had been left on Earth.
“There are others down there,” said Hannoken. He spoke to his computer and the wall screen to the right of his desk showed satellite photos. “Surveillance found some in the tropics.” He pointed to the broad region surrounding the Amazon River. Patches remained of the region’s once thick cover of jungle, rainforest. The rest had vanished to feed lumber and paper mills, to provide farmland and pasturage for the urban poor of half a continent. When the thin tropical soil soon played out…
Gengineers had reclaimed the desolation with oil trees; deep-rooted, broad-leaved paper plants, whose bark unrolled in snowy sheets a kilometer long; sugar trees, whose sap was syrup; grains that could make their own fertilizers and pesticides; potatoes that grew as purple ten-meter snakes atop the soil and needed no digging for their harvest; and more. But then the Engineers had destroyed much of the nonmechanical technology they hated. Now there were vast expanses of burned field and orchard and forest, bare red dirt, soot-streaked, charcoal-studded, as hard as rock, eroded gulleys, brushy scrub, and abandoned homes, towns, factories. There was no one to argue possession, for the land was once more derelict. That was what made it safe for refugees.
Hannoken pointed again. “And mountains. It’s hard to tell the bots from humans, except that they spend long periods standing still, outdoors. There’s a labor camp. They’re there, though it’s hard to say how many.”
“I haven’t been able to find Andy,” said Jeremy Duncan. When Donna Rose looked puzzled—Andy was hardly a bot name—he explained, “A human.”
Hannoken had the computer produce the latest view of the area from which Renny had brought his guests. “If he didn’t get on the ship…” He indicated the broad expanse of smoke-shrouded landscape. A shift to infra-red cut through the haze and showed blackened earth. There was no sign of the Engineer troops, nor of life on what had been the farm.
Duncan’s voice choked. “We met when they pulled the gengineers out of the labor camps. They wanted us to…”
Sam Nickers looked especially thoughtful when Duncan had described the crowds of Engineer protestors outside the Ginkgo County Community College campus. “Factionalism,” he said. “It happens with every revolution. They may wind up tearing themselves to pieces.”
“Will they leave anything for us to reclaim?” asked Frederick.
Sam shook his head.
There was another wave of scent, less acrid, more flowery. “What kind of ship?” asked Eldest’s Speaker.
Briefly, Renny explained what the Q-drive did. “We can land again,” he said. “We’ll rescue all we can. And then…”
“We’re building a larger ship,” said Hannoken. “An asteroid, the Gypsy. When it’s ready, we can leave. Perhaps we can find a world that’s all our own.”
“How many ships do you have now?” asked Narcissus Joy.
“The Quincy and the Quentin,” said Renny. “Four more are nearly done, and their pilots are being trained. There’s also the Quoi, a small test ship, but Lois took it on a supply run.”
“The Gypsy project,” said Frederick. “And Chryse Base, and Saturn. She’ll be back in a few days.”
“Then it’s fast,” said Sam Nickers. “Much faster than…”
Duncan shook his head. “Not fast enough to save us all. With just two ships of any size, it will take too long, and the Engineers will…”
“Buran and Stacey flew the Quentin,” said Renny. “They did fine, and we’ll be using all six ships.”
“And where will you put the refugees?”
“New quarters can be built,” said Donna Rose. “We’re already expanding the stations and habitats wherever we can. We’ll build new ones if we have to.”
There was another wave of scent, imperative, demanding, and Eldest’s Speaker said, “We can help. We too have minds and hands, and we too can build.”
Over the next days, Probe Station’s communications center used the spysats that orbited the Earth to pinpoint certain sites in the wastelands of the Amazon and Congo basins, in the vast emptinesses of Australia and northern Canada and central Asia, in New England and the Yucatan Peninsula, wherever bots and others had found temporary safety in isolation and distance from the Engineers, who concentrated in the cities.
Frederick and Donna Rose were in his office in the construction shack. She was searching databases for whatever solutions she might find. He was striving to accelerate the effort to finish the last four Q-ships and to find the necessary materials to build living quarters for the bots Renny had already rescued and the greater numbers yet to come. “We need more ore,” he said. “More metal. More of everything.”
“Then send them to the Moon,” said Donna Rose. “Turn them into miners. Build quarters there as well.”
He was nodding and saying, “They could dig trenches, roof them over, seal the walls,” when Renny coasted through the doorway and growled, “Mechin’ litterheads! Won’t let me go. Won’t let me fetch them up here. Hannoken says we need places to put them first.”
“We do,” said Donna Rose. “We don’t yet have enough.” When he stopped beside her, one hand clutchin
g at the edge of the seat to which she was strapped, she scratched behind one of his doggy ears. For a second he closed his eyes and let his tail wag, but then he growled again. “And they’re dying down there.”
She touched her keyboard, worked her mouse-glove. “Freddy? Look at this.” The screen before her showed an array of what looked like transparent globes interconnected by tubular passageways. “I’ve found an old scheme for a quick-and-dirty space station. Plastic balloons, inflated by air pressure.” Frederick turned toward her and stared with interest at the screen. “But we don’t have the plastic.”
“We could make it. And then we could use the same material to seal the lunar trenches.”
“What would we make it from?”
“Vegetation. Renny could land on Earth with a few bots and cut trees. Or they could raid oil depots.”
Renny laughed. “Yes!”
Moments later, Hannoken’s face was on the screen and they were laying the proposal out for him. He in turn was asking his computer whether there were any chemical engineers on the Station who could set up the factory they would need to turn whatever organics Renny might bring to orbit into plastic. When the answer was positive, he gave Renny the go-ahead.
He had barely finished speaking when something caught his attention. He stared to one side of the screen in which they saw him. He looked pained, frustrated, angry.
Finally, he turned back to them and said, “We’ll need the space very soon. Look at this. Athena, play it again. Put it on the com.” New images filled the veedo screen, showing troops surrounding labor camps. A campus much like that where Jeremy Duncan had been enslaved was being razed, its residents marched off to a field of barracks surrounded by heavy artillery.
The image on the screen changed to show a broad, polished desk with a wooden nameplate that read “Arnold Rifkin.” Beside it rested a brass-knobbed swagger stick. On the other side of the desk sat a stern figure wearing a blue coverall bedecked with bits of polished metal.
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