Seeds of Destiny

by Thomas A Easton

  “Then— ”

  “That’s what that meeting was about.” When Hrecker looked puzzled, he added, “Just before you got here. That’s why I came in here in the first place, things to tell you, and then the rest. They’re moving us.”

  “Why?”

  “The Explorer’s our only starship, and it’s small. We need more and bigger if we’re to send a force to Tau Ceti.” He shook his head. “It will study the place in detail. It will see whether the Gypsies really did do anything. And then it will do whatever it thinks appropriate.”

  Hrecker closed his eyes and shuddered. “So they want more ships.”

  “The government is drafting every Q-drive designer and engineer there is.”

  “Whether they’re in the spaceship business or not.”

  “We used to be. We gave them the tunnel drive.”

  “But we’re not anymore. We’re scientists, not engineers, and we’ve moved on.”

  Saucier shrugged. “They want us too. We’re what they’ve got.”

  Marcus Aurelius Hrecker turned away from his supervisor. He looked at his desk, the keyboard with the smudges where his hands touched most often, the corkboard with the photos of his father and sisters on Earth, the… “And I’ll bet the university isn’t secure enough for them.”

  “We have the rest of the week to pack.”

  “Where?”

  “A construction base in the Belt.”

  Hrecker made a face. “Maybe Security should have spotted that plant.”

  “They’d have jailed you as a gypsymp, a Gypsy sympathizer.”

  “More work for the rest of you.”

  Saucier showed his teeth in a grim smile. “You wouldn’t be any better off yourself.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Once upon a time, the valley had been a bowl rimmed by steep bluffs, its floor purpled by a carpet of low, mosslike plants and watered by a small lake a little to the west of center. In the woods atop the bluffs had lived creatures about the size of German shepherds. They had eaten the plump white mossberries and drunk from the shore of the lake. They had caught small amphibians and fish and the larvae of the bird-like dumbos, dug for roots and grubs, raided the nests of egg-layers. Occasionally one group had met another, and then they had screeched and screamed and thrown things. Sometimes they had fought, all tooth and claw, blood on the ground, tufts of fur on the shrubbery, even a body or two to eat.

  Strangers had fallen from the sky on tongues of flame, burning the moss away where the bluffs flattened to the east, blackening the yellow soil with char. They had named the creatures Racs, studied every detail of their structure, and in time decided to tweak the blueprints that made them what they were. The new Racs that resulted walked erect, had hands instead of paws, and had larger brains.

  The lake was still there. The landing field was green again, covered with moss. The Racs picked berries there, played games, and on suitable occasions gathered by the thousands to stare into the heavens where their Remakers had gone.

  There were legends of that day, when the night-sky spark that was their vehicle, the Gypsy, had spouted flame and vanished.

  The center of the valley was still dominated by the Worldtree the strangers had grown before they left. Yet that Worldtree was no longer a simple spike that jutted from the ground, its tip swollen to hold the strangers’ heritage. Its base was surrounded by a complex of stone buildings several stories high. Beyond the buildings the moss remained, broken now by gravel paths, stone benches, and thickets of alien vines. It stretched almost to the bluffs, where dormitories and homes and shops for those who served the Worldtree formed a wall of masonry and wood as imposing as the bluffs alone had ever been.

  A Rac standing on one of the gravel paths that linked the valley’s center to its rim could have glimpsed, through arched passageways and alleys, the stream of traffic on the ring road that encircled the valley just outside the wall of buildings. The road’s tributaries led to the mouths of tunnels carved into the bluffs to reach a maze of natural caverns where masons had leveled floors, built walls and ramps, and installed reinforcing pillars. Roadways wound through the caverns, and the widest sloped ever upward, finally opening to other roads above the bluffs, outside the valley. Narrower ones led to warrens that had once sheltered Racs from war. Now they were storehouses and parking garages for the local citizenry’s vehicles.

  The forest atop the bluffs was gone. Once small villages had been scattered among the trees. Brush and thatch construction had given way to wood and stone. Farms and workshops had appeared. The population had grown, and the valley floor had remained empty, holy ground occupied only by the Worldtree and the ruins of the first Temple, used only for worship, for picking mossberries, and for battles between tribes and nations that craved possession of the Worldtree. Until…

  Dotson Barbtail trembled in the honeysuckle thicket. His pelt kept him from noticing the chill of the mid-autumn night, but his ears alternately pricked alert and flattened against his head. His voice sang with tension in his throat. Quiet, he thought. Quiet. Don’t move. Don’t make the vines shake. Don’t let anyone see you. And thank your Gypsy Remakers that it is not cold enough to turn your breath to clouds of steam.

  The pedestrian whose presence on the gravel path had made him freeze passed by obliviously. No others were in sight, which was as it should be. It was late at night, halfway between dusk and dawn, and every good Rac in the valley should be in bed.

  Except for late-working scholars.

  He shifted just enough to watch the pedestrian grow distant on the path. Did he have a tail? Was he a scholar? Or a tailless servant?

  Those were the choices, weren’t they? Everyone in bed but late workers, scholars and servants. And rogues like Dotson Barbtail.

  Was he really a rogue?

  One hand touched the traditional leather harness that crossed his shoulders and chest and circled his waist. It supported several small pouches for trinkets, money, tools. One held a key.

  Rogue. When he had been small, they had called him that. His mother had cuffed him twice for every one she gave his brothers and sisters. Teachers had scolded and punished. Neighbors had looked at him, and their voices had changed from the roughness of contentment to the smooth song of anger.

  Perhaps he had just had too much initiative. Been too ready to act, too slow to anticipate costs and consequences.

  But he had also been smart. He had known how to learn quickly and well, and he had qualified to be a student at Worldtree Center. Now he tried to be as much a scholar as anyone. It was a life he loved.

  Why, he didn’t really have to hide in the honeysuckle, did he? He was a student, a scholar with research assignments all his own. He might be working late himself. He could walk the paths as freely as any other.

  But he didn’t want to be seen by anyone who might later recall his presence here on this night of all nights, when…

  He wished it were darker. The lights of the city that surrounded the valley made the sky glow. If someone saw him hiding there, they would have little trouble making out the distinctive color pattern of his fur. That was what had given him his name.

  The Worldtree stood high ahead of him, its silhouette piercing the skyglow. The buildings of Worldtree Center leaned against its shaft, holding up their peaked roofs, the crenellated walkways for the guards that had not been needed for a generation, the single high turret from which a stout rope ladder rose and rose and rose, vanishing from sight in its reach for the Worldtree’s distant, precious tip.

  He wished he wore an ordinary, undistinguished, anonymous coat. Then, if he were seen, he might have some hope of escaping unrecognized.

  He would have another name too, wouldn’t he? No barbtail markings. Just a reputation for getting into trouble.

  He snorted gently, quietly, and eased forward among the honeysuckle vines. Several of the cup-sized blooms tipped and spilled their sticky nectar on his fur. Their cloying odor filled the air. He wrinkled his nose and struggle
d not to sneeze. He promised himself a bath and a brush. Perhaps, when he was done, he would go by the lake.

  Trouble, he thought. He was who he was, and surely that could not be changed. Not entirely. He had behaved himself since coming to Worldtree Center. Most of the time.

  But he was who he was. Just let him think of something that seemed a good idea to do. It did not matter whether his elders would approve or not. Better, perhaps, if they would sing with rage when they found out, and knowing that, or thinking it, he had never been able to leave that good idea alone.

  Without his markings, he would surely be known as Dotson Eaten-by-Temptation. Or would he? Sly Evader might do as well, for the elders caught him far less often than he deserved.

  Would they catch him tonight?

  He really hoped they would not. He had never before plotted such an awful crime that was theft and sacrilege and blasphemy and heresy all at once.

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  It still did.

  He squeezed his fingers more tightly about the lump of baked clay in his hand. He had been roaming the streets of Worldtree City above the bluffs when he had found the potter’s workshop. He had lingered in the door to watch one rotund worker kneading red-brown clay, another making bowls on a spinning wheel, a third painting glazes in patterns onto dry clay surfaces. He had returned again, and again, and one day he had found the shop empty. That was when he had stolen a handful of clay. He had shaped it later, making his lump, heating it in the oven of his apartment stove, hoping that was hot enough, then painting it with enamels. When he was finished, he was satisfied. It was not a perfect match for what he had wished to imitate, but it was close. Close enough.

  The only question then remaining was whether he would ever have a chance to use it. Would there ever be a time? Would he ever dare?

  Every year the honeysuckle spread, pushing its way into ground long held by the valley’s native moss. Gardeners pushed it back, but still it grew. It even grew outside the valley, spreading across the face of First-Stop much as had the Racs themselves.

  Some Racs thought the honeysuckle should be removed entirely, chopped and burned and dug up by the roots. The space, they said, could be given back to moss. Or it could be used for more dormitories or library space. Others said the vines were a relic of their Remakers, the alien strangers who had raised them from the beasts. They should remain, as much a remembrance and a promise as the Worldtree that dominated the valley and the Rac culture. So far, the traditionalists had always won.

  Dotson was grateful. The honeysuckle hid him where he crouched. It let him move unseen close to the walls of Worldtree Center, that complex of buildings that surrounded and leaned against the Worldtree the Remakers had left behind.

  He looked upward, toward those walls, those buildings. They were built of stone and mortar, designed to last forever. They were pierced by windows, many of them lit even so late at night. He saw shadows moving, heard voice and music, smelled food.

  Now there was a walk ahead of him, an open zone that he would have to cross to reach the Great Hall. He let his face ease gently through the screen of vines and peered first left, then right. No one was in sight. He could hear no crunch of gravel beneath distant feet.

  Still, someone might be watching from further off. From some high window, dark or lighted. He chose a darker portion of the path, slipped sideways from the honeysuckle, and stepped forward along the gravel as naturally and normally as he could manage. A few more steps, another shadow, and he slipped into the honeysuckle on the other side of the path. With luck, he thought, no watcher would have seen where he came from or where he went. There he was, following the path like any other stroller. They would assume they had not noticed him, that he had been there, on the path, all along and was still there somewhere, lost from sight once more in darkness.

  He bared his teeth in a Rac grin. He certainly hoped he was lost from sight.

  The honeysuckle on this side of the path was a thin screen, a ruff of vegetation at the base of the stone wall, a foundation for the vines that climbed the building’s side and peeped in at the windows. He thought the vines were surely sturdy enough to bear his weight. He was also happy that he did not have to trust his estimate. His target was low, near the ground, and here it was, glinting in the skylight just enough to see. He reached out one hand to touch the glass. It moved.

  He had been in the Center that afternoon, working in his lab, studying the copies of the Worldtree’s ceramic plaques that spelled out the basics of his field. A smudge had impelled him to seek out the archive, to check the original, and it was passing through the Great Hall on that errand that he had found the key, set down and forgotten. Where he found it told him what it must fit.

  His recognition of the moment he had long awaited had paralyzed him where he stood. But he had unfrozen before anyone could think his odd posture worth a question. He had palmed the key. Then…

  It had taken only minutes more to find this window and set it ajar.

  And no one had closed it.

  Once that would have been unthinkable. Once there had been guards who patrolled all of Worldtree Center, finding and closing off every route by which a stranger, an enemy, might invade.

  He swung the window wide and clambered over the sill into a small room. The dim skylight revealed a toilet, a door, and a sink. Beside the sink was a roll of paper towels.

  When his feet clung to the tile floor, he stopped. He wished he had had the foresight to know that honeysuckle nectar would spill, that he would walk in the sticky stuff, that it would cover his hands. He wished he had known he would leave such unmistakable signs of his presence.

  But if he had no foresight, he had luck. The Remakers must have smiled upon his plan when they led him to use the window in this room.

  He dampened a fistful of towels at the sink and scrubbed the worst of the stickiness from his fur and hands and feet. Only then did he slip through the door into the dim-lit corridors beyond.

  A mounted suit of ancient warrior armor— helm and breastplate and skirt of metal strips— made him start, but only for a moment. No one, no one real and live and apt to question his presence there, seemed to be in the building. There were no lines of light beneath office doors. No distant voices, no click of claws on floor tiles, no echoes of closing doors.

  There was no telling how long the silence would last. Surely there were still a few guards to patrol the building and protect its treasures. Surely they would come by soon, too soon.

  He stopped. Was that… ? No. Some small animal, scurrying above the ceiling panels. A creak of the building’s fabric.

  He hurried, and when the corridor he followed debouched into the building’s central chamber, he stopped again. Near one end of the vast room was the tenth-scale Worldtree, at its foot a small stepped pyramid on which the priests held forth each week, new students dedicated their lives to learning, and officials of Worldtree Center took their oaths of office.

  There were more displays of armor and weapons and the inventions that marked the ascent of Rackind from their raw beginnings. There was the great mural that covered the long far wall with a depiction of all Rac history from the creation to the building of Worldtree Center. Though the light was dim, it glowed with a brilliance of its own, or perhaps of memory. Every Rac knew this painting’s every detail as if it were the pattern of his fur.

  There was the valley filled with opposing armies that trampled moss and honeysuckle alike. There were the great box kites, anchored by wheeled winches, that had lifted observers above the battle. There was that one observer who had called for more rope and let the wind lift and lift and lift, until he could drop from his kite to the flange that ringed the Worldtree’s top. His deed had earned him a new name, Kitewing, and made him a hero for all of time.

  When he looked at that portion of the mural, Dotson touched the side of his flattened, chinless muzzle in an abbreviated version of the Rac greeting gesture. Few ever denied Kitewin
g that token of respect, for legend had always said that the Remakers had left a trove of knowledge in the chamber atop the Worldtree and that those Racs who possessed the valley and the Worldtree would, as soon as they could reach its top, rule the world.

  Not that war had stopped after Kitewing hoisted the first rope ladder up the Worldtree and brought the first few plaques down to be puzzled over and the kinship of their language to that spoken and written by the Racs slowly recognized. Since then the Rac tongue had shifted closer to that of the plaques. Now only the least educated and the primitives who did not live in the Land of the Worldtree could not understand the Remakers’ gifts.

  Nor had war ceased after the construction of Worldtree Center had begun. Nor after the dawn of industry, the making of vehicles and other machines. The mural recorded it all, the bright sunlit notes of triumph and progress, the somber, smoky, red-lit notes of further war, the tanks and fighters, guns and bombs, fleeing civilians, death, destruction.

  And always the opponents seemed to differ only in whether they did or did not have tails.

  Dotson Barbtail snorted gently, quietly, careful not to produce any sound that might draw attention to a room that should be empty at this hour. The historians said the battles for possession of the Worldtree and its secrets had been battles between tribes, later between nations and regions, later still between systems of belief, both political and religious, not between races of Racs. But the mural told its own story. He did not think it quite coincidence that tailed and tailless mostly lived in different nations, different regions, under different patterns of rule and religion. And the tensions remained. War could erupt anew at any moment, just as it had so many times in the century since the Remakers had left First-Stop and the Racs’ story had begun.

  Had it really been only a century, a little more, since Racs had lived in huts in the forest? Since they had been beasts without even the wit to build the crudest shelters? He turned to face the miniature of the Worldtree. The priests said their progress had been so fast, faster even than that of the Remakers before they had learned enough to become the gods of the Racs, because those gods had not only made them. They had also taught them… The lesson was inscribed on the shaft of the Worldtree icon at the head of the room, on the image of the Worldtree wherever it appeared in the mural, though he could not make it out in the dimness: “Knowledge is the road to heaven.” Once the Racs learned enough, they could climb the Worldtree. Once they learned still more, said the priests, they could join the Remakers in the sky.