Seeds of Destiny

by Thomas A Easton

  He only looked at her and twitched the skin of his shoulder and whined nervously deep in his throat. He knew she wished. He understood. He even shared the same desire. But he dared not let her find what he grew in the privacy of his apartment. If he had ever given in, if he had ever gone to her place, he would have felt obliged to let her into his. And then…

  “You spend an awful lot of time in there.”

  He whined again.

  “You’ve got something, haven’t you? Something you don’t want anyone to know about. Something that takes up all your time.”

  He wished he dared to get up and run, but all he could manage was to turn his stare aside.

  “Another female?”

  “No!”

  “What is it then?”

  He shook his head.

  “Don’t I have a right to know? After all— ”

  “It’s damaging your reputation? Then stay away from me.”

  “It’s damaging yours too. Whatever you’re doing, it’s destroying your career. You’re not doing the work you should be doing.”

  He shrugged.

  “It won’t be long before they throw you out.”

  There was a long silence. Dotson picked a few mossberries himself. He stared at them as they rolled back and forth in the hollow of his hand. He licked his lips, and when that reminded him of other berries, just a little while ago, he recalled the answer he should have given Sunglow then.

  Automatically he chose two plump berries, touched them to his own face, and held them up. When she leaned forward, he set them against her lips. Her tongue licked out to touch his fingers, and they were gone.

  “I suppose I ought to go to the lab. Put in some time. Read reports. Run some tests. Though I wasn’t making that much progress beforex I got distracted.”

  “By what?”

  He didn’t answer.

  He stayed away from his apartment as long as he could. He worked. He found signs that a polymerase he had sought for months might lie in cells that had come from a hot spring just a little to the west of Worldtree City. He ate a meal he barely tasted in one of the Center’s cafeterias. He wrote a brief report to Senior Hightail about the new enzyme. And not long after dark he could stay away no longer.

  Blue-gray light flickered in the crack that rimmed his door, and the mutter of VC talk and music was just loud enough to mask the steps behind him. He noticed nothing until his door was open and he was in and the door’s swing back into its jamb was blocked.

  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Sunglow!” She filled the doorway when he spun, silhouetted against the dim hall light behind her, her teeth gleaming in the VC flicker, her foot against the door.

  “Someone’s in here.”

  “No!” he said. “I just left the VC on.”

  “Uh-uh. I’ve been listening. The channel changed.” She set one hand against his chest and pushed. He resisted. “Don’t you think I have a right to know?”

  The anxious whine was back in his chest, struggling to become audible once more. But he gave way before her hand.

  “Where’s the light switch?”

  He pointed helplessly.

  She flipped it on. “There’s nothing here.”

  He was defeated: “In the sleeping room.”

  Sunglow stepped past him. He followed her, watching past her shoulder when she stopped in the doorway. The VC was near the foot of his sleeping pad, but it faced the window and a large plant pot occupied by a shapeless pillar.

  “There’s no one here. And I was sure I’d find her on your pad.” She pointed toward her left, where the room’s broad window made a corner with the wall and the shelves on which he kept his harnesses and pouches, cloaks and caps, were mostly bare. “Tsk,” she said, “but you’re a slob.” She bent to pick up a harness. “There should be someone here.”

  He flipped the sleeping room’s light switch and sighed. The pillar by the window was wrapped in his second-best cloak, a brown cloth with pale green stripes.

  “What is that?”

  “You can take it off now,” said Dotson.

  “Is that Sunglow?” The muffled voice grew clearer as the cloak unpeeled.

  Sunglow gasped and touched her own face as if she faced a mirror that told her she had changed in some dreadful way. When she realized what she was doing, that this was no mirror, that it was real and strange, she jerked her hands down and away from her cheeks.

  “I heard her at the door. And I knew you wanted me to be a secret. So I grabbed the cloak.” Gypsy Blossom held it out. “I’m sorry I knocked everything off the shelves.”

  Sunglow took the cloak in her hands and automatically began to fold it.

  “Yes,” said Dotson Barbtail. He wanted to smooth the leaves the cloak had disarranged. “This is Sunglow.”

  “You’re pretty,” said the plant. Slowly and deliberately, she raised a hand to scratch at her cheek beside her nose.

  “What… ?” Sunglow’s voice squeaked. “They called them bots, didn’t they?”

  “Botanicals.” Dotson nodded.

  “And you swiped a seed.”

  He nodded again.

  “I don’t blame you for keeping me out.”

  He bent to start picking up the things the bot had knocked from the shelves when she tried to hide within his cloak. “I suppose I should be packing now.”

  “No,” said Sunglow. She set his cloak upon a shelf. “I won’t say anything. This is too marvelous.”

  He grunted in surprise and relief.

  “But there is a price.” Before he could react, she added, “I want to come back here. I want to talk to her.”

  He stood up, his arms full. “Not me?”

  “Oh! Of course! But…”

  He understood. She still wanted him, as he wanted her. But the bot was foremost in her mind for now.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Gypsy Blossom.”

  Sunglow faced the bot and belatedly returned the muzzle-scratching greeting. “Where did the Remakers go, Gypsy Blossom? When will they return? Can you tell us anything at all?”

  The bot raised her furless arms in a helpless gesture.

  “She was only a seed when they left,” said Dotson.

  “They never talked to me,” said the bot. “They did not leave me any plaques. All their messages were for you, and I think you have them all.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “I thought things were cramped at 83, but…”

  The laughter that issued from the grille in the panel before him was soft and warm, already missed. Tamiko’s face occupied the small screen, and he almost felt that he could smell her hair. “Not here, Mark. The Ajax is larger, and the General rates. I have a room all my own.”

  “I’ve got walls anyway. But I have to share.”

  There was the briefest of hesitations— was she wondering whether she should be jealous?— before Tamiko said, “I hope she’s nice.”

  “He. The Baron. Not my type at all, though he took the upper bunk.” The cubicle they occupied had only the single pair of sleeping shelves. Those for the lower ranks held six, three to a wall, with much less headroom.

  “Not your what? Type? That g… broken up. We must have… st our synch for a second there.” Her own words were suddenly choppy, as if they had been recorded by a voice-activated tape. Some were almost entirely lost.

  “It’ll get worse.”

  “I know.”

  “We should be able to talk for a few days first.”

  “Gotta g… being pa-ached.”

  Marcus Aurelius Hrecker touched the key that broke the connection and leaned back in his seat. He sighed.

  “Your girlfriend?” Eric Silber’s bitter voice made him close his eyes. Why did they have to share the same shift?

  “Think you’ll get any favors, sucking up that way? How’s she taste, anyway?”

  He refused to look at the other man. “Better than you would.”

  “Shaddap,” said Mey
er Smith. “You’re just working up to a fight. Save it for First-Stop.”

  Silber settled back and stared once more at the controls and indicators he was supposed to mind. Hrecker did the same and wished that there was more to do than simply wait and watch for some malfunction or anomaly. But he and the others, including Eric, had done their work well. The ship, the whole fleet, was working flawlessly.

  If only communication between the ships were not a problem. In two days, maybe three, he and Tamiko would no longer be able to speak to each other. Then the boredom would set in.

  The problem had its roots in the laws of physics, not some failure of design. The ships’ Q-drives provided thrust and vector and a sense of weight. They would be essential for maneuvering once the fleet reached Tau Ceti. But they were useless for bridging the light-years between Tau Ceti and Sol. That needed the tunnel drives, which skipped through space, leaping a few more meters every 1.4 nanoseconds. The intervals between leaps were so short that the net effect was faster-than-light travel, even though between leaps, when the ship existed in real space-time, speed was distinctly slower than light.

  It was those intervals between leaps that made communication possible. Unfortunately, they grew shorter and more frequent as “net” speed increased. Slight differences in drive frequency and in timing spread the fleet out and dictated that not all the ships occupied the same space-time simultaneously. Ship could talk to ship only as long as they were close enough together, as long as the intervals were long enough, as long as the ships’ computers could keep their quantum leaps synchronized. The trick was getting a signal’s wavefront to coincide in space and time with the ship for which it was meant.

  The first signals to become useless would be real-time conversations such as he and Tamiko had just concluded. Highly redundant, repetitive coding would remain able to get messages through for a few days more. After that, total silence would fall. Each ship would be a single tiny, enclosed, self-sufficient world until it slowed on the approach to Tau Ceti. Then the signals would return.

  “I’m catching a little drift in the shifter, Hrecker.”

  “Yessir.” His fingers danced across the board before him, diagnosing, adjusting, trimming.

  Ten days later, Hrecker was in the Saladin’s mess after his drive-room shift. Across the narrow corridor that arched rimward of the storerooms, Bela B’Genda and the Baron shared one of the small tables that folded with its pair of seats from the wall. Hrecker shared another with Meyer Smith. Eric Silber had just arrived with the tray of food he had picked up at the end of the corridor. He took the next table past B’Genda and the Baron and sat so he could face Hrecker.

  The Baron could not see the glare that passed his back. “I’ve been poking around,” he said.

  “And you’ve found a planet-buster after all,” said Bela.

  “You know there’s no such thing.” But he was grinning. The robot on his shirtfront twitched.

  “No, I don’t. Besides, why not? It’s just a big warhead.”

  “Real big,” said Silber. He was still glaring at Hrecker.

  “What else?” asked their chief.

  “Plenty of other stuff. Particle beams, of course.”

  “I worked on those,” said Hrecker. They were an adaptation of the Q drive.

  “We’ve got nukes,” added the Baron. “For the missiles. One size fits all. And big enough. If we can’t blow First-Stop up, we can sterilize it.”

  “Freeze it,” said Bela. “We can’t possibly be carrying enough of those warheads to sterilize a planet. But it takes a lot less for a nuclear winter.”

  “Whatever,” said the Baron. “We’ve got what it takes.”

  “Do you?” asked Silber. “No more com, Marky,” he added. “No more chitchat with the girlfriend.”

  “Another month,” said Hrecker. “That’s all.”

  “No more sucking up.” Silber’s voice was taunting. “Can’t keep her busy. She’ll find someone else.”

  “Cut it out,” said Smith.

  “He’s always been that way,” said Hrecker. “But now…”

  “I’m worse?”

  “Too far from home,” said Bela. “Your own girl back in port.”

  “Huh!” the Baron snorted. “If he has one. If one would have him.”

  Silber’s face reddened. He set both hands on the edge of his table and began to push himself to his feet.

  “No com,” said Bela. “No more sight of shore. As crazy as a sailor lost at sea.”

  “Crazy, is it?” The man’s glare was rapidly turning dangerous. He was on his feet, crouched as if he were about to spring, shoulders raised, knuckles white. For a moment, the smells of sweat and something more, an animal pungency, rose above the scents of food.

  Then silence struck the mess and she added, “As crazy as them.” She straightened in her seat, half turned, and hooked a thumb toward a sudden clash of plastic china and metal cutlery.

  Hrecker kept one eye on the other man, but he too looked where she was pointing, past Silber, further down the corridor.

  Several men and women were hurriedly abandoning their tables as two figures struggled to their feet amid a litter of trays and dishes. They roared. One swung a fist. The other slammed a knee into a crotch. One roar turned into a screech, but neither man went down. They grappled and lurched against the table they had been using. It sagged on its hinges.

  “It won’t last,” said Meyer Smith, and he had hardly finished speaking when two burly Security guards rushed past. Two more appeared in the distance, beyond the combatants.

  Silber sat down once more.

  The fight stopped. The combatants stared at the approaching guards as if at inevitable doom, and they did not resist when they were led away.

  A swarm of tiny robots appeared as if from nowhere to clean up spilled food and repair the table.

  The bystanders resumed their seats but kept their heads down. The mess was silent.

  “We won’t see them again,” murmured Bela B’Genda.

  Hrecker thought Silber looked as puzzled as he felt himself, and when Meyer Smith looked from one of them to the other and said, “You haven’t heard,” he shook his head.

  “Signed on too late,” said Bela.

  “Policy,” said Smith. “For mutineers, rebels, deserters, dissidents. There’s no room for a brig on this ship, and there’s no way to ship troublemakers home. So… Out the airlock. Or use them for reaction mass.”

  “I don’t think there’ll be much more trouble,” said the Baron.

  “It didn’t look like they were asking who started it,” said Hrecker.

  Bela looked at Silber. He was still bristling with anger and defiance. “Then we should get out of here.” When Hrecker ignored her raised eyebrow and inviting glance, she grabbed the Baron by the hand. “Let’s go.”

  “They’ll be busy for a while,” said Smith to Hrecker. “You come with me.”

  “Not for…”

  “I’d rather play chess.”

  Behind them, Silber was left alone, clenching his fists. He did not look like he would surrender meekly if Security came for him.

  When Hrecker reported for work the next morning, Silber was not in the drive room. “I moved him,” said Meyer Smith. “C shift, 11 to 7.”

  “Just as well,” said Bela B’Genda from her station.

  “He’s got a bright green hard-on for you,” said the Baron. “Any idea… ?”

  Hrecker shook his head and took his seat. He powered up his console, checked the probability shifters, and made two fine adjustments.

  “Security didn’t object when I changed his shift,” said Smith.

  “So maybe he’s not a plant,” said Bela.

  “That’s only a rumor,” said Hrecker. A rumor with the strength to follow a man from Mars to Belt Center 83 to the Saladin. To First-Stop.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me to learn it was truth,” said the Baron.

  “More like,” said Bela. “He’s just too stand
offish. He can’t let anybody get close, so nobody trusts him. Hence the rumor.”

  “How’s the vacuum flux, Doctor Freud?”

  “Jes’ fine, boss. You think maybe he volunteered? Went for the game as long as he had the name?”

  “Who knows?” Smith touched keys and the screen above his console lit up with a flowchart. “The captain says we should try to synchronize with the other ships.”

  “I know one way to do it,” said Bela. “Though it wouldn’t be real bright.”

  “What are you talkin’ about?”

  “And every ship would have to be precisely the same in timing.”

  “Stay tightly packed?” asked the Baron.

  “In line. Spaced just so to tunnel into the next ship’s wavefront.”

  “And if the timing’s off?”

  “Bugger all.”

  The Baron laughed.

  Two hours later, after all their efforts to adjust the timing of the tunnel drive had failed to raise a single response from any other member of the fleet, Meyer Smith said, “There’s another way. Stop tunneling once a day.”

  “And if the ships are light hours apart?” asked Bela.

  “They’d resynchronize every day, right?” asked Hrecker.

  “That would still slow us down a bit, eh?” said the Baron.

  “You might as well tell the captain he’ll have to wait till we reach Tau Ceti.”

  “Another month.”

  … “Three weeks.”

  … “Eighteen days.”

  … “Two weeks.”

  “What I wouldn’t give for a game of poker!”

  “Bridge for me.”

  “Billiards.”

  “Scrabble.”

  But the only games were chess and checkers and go, games with no element of chance the probability shifters could influence however slightly. There was a library of old veedos, video games, and books stored in electronic form. There was sex and bickering and speculation on what they would find when they finally reached their destination.

  Some wondered what they would do to what they found. The expedition’s commander— General Lyapunov— would decide that, as was only right, but…