Perhaps that final goal was not far off. Rac engineers and physicists had learned how to fill metal towers like hollow Worldtrees with liquid hydrogen and oxygen and put devices into orbit around their world. The latest such thundertree was the largest; when it was finished, it would carry a pod containing three Racs into space. In a few years, First-Stop would have what the Remakers’ records called a space station. There would be trips to other planets of the Tau Ceti system. Eventually…
Dotson Barbtail shook himself. This Great Hall was designed to awe, to fill Racs with a sense of history and destiny, to stop them in their headlong rush from task to task and awaken reflection. It rarely failed with him, not even when he knew he could not afford to give it the time it demanded.
That lump of clay he had prepared was hot and damp in his hand. He turned again, away from the miniature Worldtree, away from the mural. There was what he sought. There, at the opposite end of the chamber, a glass display case in which rested the seamless metal casket Kitewing himself had found atop the Worldtree.
Legend said that the two dozen seeds within the casket were the seeds of the Remakers themselves.
No one knew how a walking, thinking, talking creature could possibly sprout from a seed like a plant, but that was what the legend said.
Once the Racs mastered every lesson the Remakers had recorded on the plaques the Worldtree had also held, they should plant the seeds. The Remakers’ children would then be with them to guide them to where their parents dwelt among the stars.
He unsnapped the flap of a pouch and removed the key he had found on top of the display case earlier that day.
Would it fit?
Would he trigger some silent alarm that would bring Worldtree Center’s guards running to seize him?
He inserted it in the keyhole at the base of the case’s wooden side panel.
It turned easily, and the panel swung down.
He chose a seed, just one, and replaced it with the lump of painted clay he had carried all this time in his hand.
He closed and locked the panel once more.
He set the key on top of the case, precisely where he had found it.
Then he fled.
The pot full of rich valley loam was already waiting in his quarters.
CHAPTER 3
The new lab did not look much like the old. For one thing, Belt Center 83 had not been embedded in a very large rock. Its gravitational field was just barely strong enough to define a vertical and so slight that it took many seconds for a dropped tool to reach a floor. This meant that a few square centimeters of velcro were all it took to anchor cupboards, storage bins, display screens, and other gear against the walls. A grid of narrow metal bars was slung a meter below the ceilings. People pulled themselves from bar to bar as they traveled about the lab. The ubiquitous little robots ran atop the bars, though they could and did go everywhere in search of dust and litter and pinhole leaks in the tunnel lining. Many were equipped with small propellers and stubby control surfaces that made them look like ancient biplanes so they could move quickly despite the lack of weight. The same modifications also equipped them for zero-gee.
For another, except in that portion of the Center occupied by Security and Administration, there were no individual offices or other rooms. There were only endless tunnels winding beneath the surface of the rock. Elastic cords and plastic sheets created walls and partial ceilings, but they only approximated privacy. The sheets, no thicker than a sheet of paper, were both flimsy and translucent, and Security forbade complete ceilings even over toilet facilities. Always, overhead, the way was clear for passersby to look in on whatever might be going on. An etiquette of averted eyes and hasty passage had quickly developed, but even when people did not look, they could only pretend to ignore smells and sounds. Everyone knew that there could be no real secrets of work or toilet, sleep or sex.
The new lab differed in one other crucial feature as well: Security was everywhere. Guards hovered at every tunnel intersection. They daily scanned the records in every computer and read mail before addressees ever saw it. They peeped over every flimsy partition, and no one knew when they were listening.
No plants were visible, but that was nothing new to those who had come to Belt Center 83 from Mars or the Moon where no scrap of green was permitted outside officially approved greenhouses and agricultural domes and tunnels. Yet in such places people at least had known the greenery was there. If one were careful, it could even be visited.
Here, though, there were no such places. Those who craved a glimpse of green could only visit the vatrooms near the lab’s surface, where the light of a distant sun glowed through vast tanks of algae that absorbed carbon dioxide and wastes and supplied the lab with oxygen and a pasty goo to be processed into food.
There were more guards in the vatrooms than anywhere else, and it was no mystery why. Those who craved green, those who had some sympathy for living things, could not be decent Engineers. They might even be secret Orbitals or Gypsies, or their silent allies. Certainly they could not be trusted.
Few of Belt Center 83’s workers, not even those few from Earth who missed green the most, not even those few who did indeed doubt the wisdom of their masters, thought it worth being seen staring into the algae tanks.
What passed for Marcus Aurelius Hrecker’s private workspace looked much as it had at Olympus University. There was a desk, a screen, a keyboard. A veedo set and a shelf clung to the one wall that was solid. Self-stick memos stuck to the plastic sheeting of the others. There was, of course, no African violet. Nor was there a door, not when he and all his visitors dropped in from overhead.
One frequent visitor was Tamiko Inoue. Half Hrecker’s mass, she seemed to smile whenever she looked at him with her deep black eyes. He knew he did the same.
“They can spare you for a while?”
She laughed and sat on the end of his desk nearest the veedo set. “I’m not that important.” She was one of several aides to Sergei Lyapunov, the Estonian general in charge of the Navy’s expeditionary force. The Navy was the Navy because it traveled in the sea of space; its commanders were generals because its ships flew.
“Or do they send you out to spy on the peons?”
She laughed again and shook her head. Her hair, as black as her eyes, was cut too short to swing and bounce, but he could imagine it longer, given life by motion and gravity. She wore a sleek coverall that brought every bulge and hollow to life. Hrecker did too, though his shape emphasized the outfit’s practicality. Clothing that flapped and billowed did not belong where gravity was not enough to keep it under control.
“Can’t think why else you’d leave the castle.” The scientists and technicians in the rest of Belt Center 83 envied their administrators, who shared one end of the asteroid with the Security forces. The tunnels there opened into actual rooms, with doors and solid walls.
“It gets lonely in there, even though there’s a lot of men would like to— Uh!”
She jumped as the veedo set beside her turned itself on with a burst of sound.
“Security,” said Hrecker.
“Of course.”
“This morning,” said a voice. “In Vatroom 3.”
The screen displayed a single man, so skinny that his bones showed at every joint, maneuvering a complex glass construction. With one hand he fended off walls and other obstacles. The other clutched a glass pipe from which rose half a dozen curving, curling, tapered shapes that subdivided in a nearly fractal way.
“That’s Ozzie Gilpin,” said Tamiko.
“He must have blown that himself.”
Gilpin was Belt Center 83’s chief mechanic. He repaired what broke. He built shelving and cabinets and tools. He machined metal into shapes called for by physicists and engineers. He blew molten glass into flasks and coils and stills for the chemists.
The vatroom’s ceiling was a broad arch of metal interrupted by narrow viewports through which light could stream. Beneath each glass stripe stood a
green wall a handsbreadth thick, a tank full of algae soup. Between the tanks were mounted fluorescent lights to supplement the distant sun. Buglike robots clustered atop the tanks and ran up and down their sides.
Dark flecks, threads of ungreen fluid, and streams of bubbles swirled in the narrow tanks. The veedo carried the throbbing sound of the pumps that kept the algae well mixed with the Center’s sewage and stale air.
Gilpin’s eyes were intent on the nearest tank. He did not seem to notice as a trio of Security guards swam into view. They were armed with short metal clubs whose grips were wrapped with black plastic tape. Elsewhere in the lab, the guards also carried sidearms.
“What have you got there?” asked one of the guards.
“You’ll see,” said Gilpin. His free hand brought him to a gentle stop beside the tank’s topmost harvest tap, nearest the window and the light. He immediately connected the tap to the pipe at the base of his intricate glassware construction.
“It’s a sculpture,” said Hrecker.
The guards made no move to stop Gilpin.
When he opened the tap, rich green fluid flowed into the sculpture and filled its every ramifying corner. “A fern,” he said, and as it caught the light it was. A cluster of sparkling, glass-sheathed fronds that shone as brightly as any in an Earthly forest.
“Oh!” said Tamiko. “It’s beautiful.”
Hrecker nodded. His hand covered hers and squeezed.
The three guards reacted in no such appreciative way.
As one, they unfastened their clubs from their belts and began to swing.
The glass shattered.
Gilpin screamed and bled and died.
The algae soup continued to flow from the tap.
Hrecker thought it should cover the wreckage with green, but red blood made it muddy and low gravity let it drift and twist and bubble in the air.
“Oh, no,” said Tamiko. Her voice was low, as if she could feel Gilpin’s pain.
The screen went dark.
The voice that had introduced the veedo tape had said nothing more after “In Vatroom 3.”
The point had needed no discussion, no lecture, no sermon. No one needed to be told that Engineer officialdom thought it heresy to value living things, or that Security was always watching for hints of treason.
“He’s not the first.” They both nodded. Ten days before, Hrecker had been on his way to work when Security agents had made him stop and cling to the travel grid overhead. In the distance, he had been able to see other agents pulling a struggling woman from a workspace.
Later, he had told Tamiko and said, “I wonder who she was. I wonder what she did.” He had not said how aware he was that the same thing might once have happened to him, might yet happen if Security ever learned about the African violet.
Tamiko hadn’t known the answers then, but by the next day she had been able to tell him: The woman had fastened a photo of her mother to the plastic wall of her workspace. Unfortunately, her mother worked in a lunar greenhouse tunnel, and she had been photographed against that background, all green leaves, red and purple fruit, even a few flowers.
The next time Hrecker traveled down that tunnel he looked for the woman, her workspace, the photo. But there was only an empty space, a desk, a computer screen and keyboard, a veedo set, flimsy walls with no sign that anyone had ever attached a thing to them. Two days later, a man was sitting at the desk and there was a photo of the Explorer on the wall.
The woman had vanished.
“I never did learn what happened to her,” said Tamiko now.
“They forget we’re animals,” said Hrecker. “We need food and oxygen, so we need the plants.”
“Need is one thing. They recognize that.” Her hand indicated the veedo set and the algae tanks they had just seen. “But we shouldn’t love them. We shouldn’t see beauty in them.”
Not even if that beauty was shaped from glass, from hardness born of furnace melt, not seed or spore. Not when it gained color and significance from lowly algae. Not when it glorified the living world.
He opened his mouth as if to say as much. But then he glanced at the ceiling and remained quiet except for, “Or we might be tempted.”
“Yes,” said Tamiko. Their hands were still entwined. When she squeezed, he thought the message clear. There was no telling who might pass or who might be hovering just out of sight, listening for any disloyal word. And whatever they might now say could be dangerous for them both.
The Engineers thought of themselves as allied to machinery, to mechanisms designed and built by human hands. Their traditional enemies, the Gypsies, had based their technology on living things, on genetic engineering. And the closer the Engineers came to confronting their foes once more, as they had not in a century, the more they purified their stance.
Nor would it be safe to suggest out loud that the Engineers’ ideology could be less absolute and rigid and unchanging, more flexible and lifelike, than one of their holy machines.
But of course it was. Ideology was a people thing, and people were not machines. Of course it stiffened when opposed and relaxed when it was not.
Hrecker took a deep breath. It would be much safer to question action instead of belief. “Why do we have to go back to Tau Ceti?”
Tamiko was shaking her head even before he finished. “We’ve exhausted Earth.”
“But we have everything we need out here. Don’t even mention the Moon or Mars. We have habitats and the Belt. Enough room and energy and minerals for centuries. And no gravity wells to fight. No interstellar distances to make shipping expensive. Why can’t we just let these creatures go on with their lives?”
“You’re right,” she said. “Of course you are. We don’t need mines or farms or colonies.”
“But we’re going anyway.”
“Idiot. You’ve forgotten the Gypsies.”
“The Gypsy stain.” He could not help the doubting tone of his voice.
She frowned at him. “First we have to be sure it’s there. But once we’re sure— ”
“We’ll get out the scrub brushes.”
“We’ll clean the place up. Get it polished and purified and ready for colonists later on.”
He knew how much of what he said he believed. But she? Her tone was definite, decisive, confident, as if she could see beauty in green plants and glass ferns filled with algae but still believe the Gypsies evil.
How much of that, he wondered, was pretense for the sake of those who might be listening?
On Mars, a large part of the lab’s work had been directed toward focusing probability shifters on smaller and smaller volumes. Now that focus was turned outward as it had been when the shifter was first invented.
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker had seen old records that claimed the Engineers had invented the shifter and the Orbitals and Gypsies had stolen it. He thought more recent historians made more sense when they said the Orbitals had been the first to learn how to warp probability and stimulate the vacuum to fountain forth the energy needed to power a spaceship. The resulting Q-drive had made it possible for the genetic engineers to escape the cleansing of Earth. Later the refugees had learned how to use the shifter to boost the infinitesimal probability that large objects such as spaceships would tunnel across gaps in space. The distances the ships could leap in this way had been microscopic at first, but when the leaps were repeated millions of times per second, the ship’s effective velocity rapidly grew impressive.
In time, the Engineers had duplicated the discovery. They had even increased the size of the tunneling leaps to meters and achieved faster-than-light travel. But the Explorer’s voyages each took many months. Longer leaps and shorter travel times were essential for a military expeditionary force.
“We got it!” said Renard Saucier. His ebullient tone and the wine bottle held aloft in his hand suggested a crucial announcement.
“Not us,” said Hrecker. “We weren’t even working on that.” His tone was flatter. The news had been on the veedo
the evening before. Each leap was now ten meters, and it took three nanoseconds. That was about twenty times light-speed, already a good deal better than the best the Explorer had ever been able to do.
“Hah!” Saucier laughed and squeezed wine into translucent drinking bulbs. The wine was not champagne. “So it was the Farside team.”
“Gypping thieves,” said Eric Silber in his abrasive voice. “I had to help them on the math, and do you think they mentioned that?”
“The point is, we got it,” said Miriam Panek quietly. Smooth, yellow-brown skin and an almost hairless scalp made her age impossible to estimate. Her specialty was the macroscopic quantum. “The trip will only take five weeks, maybe six.”
“Once we have the ships,” said Silber.
“They’re almost ready,” said Saucier. “But they’re bigger than the probability fields we can generate. That’s our job.”
“I’ve been working on that math too,” said Silber. Silence answered him, but it was not an attentive silence and no one looked his way. “I…” He shrugged and stopped.
“We’re getting there,” said Hrecker. “It won’t be long.”
Saucier lifted his drinking bulb in a toast. When the others had matched the gesture, he said, “It had better not be.”
Except for Security and Administration, Belt Center 83’s personnel lived in much the same sort of quarters as they worked: open-topped, flimsy-sided, doorless cubicles. Sleeping sacs were velcroed to solid floors and walls to keep the sleepers’ movements from propelling them into traffic or neighboring cubicles.
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