“What do you think, Mark?” asked Bela B’Genda. “You’re in bed with his aide. What does she tell you?”
“One of his aides. And I haven’t seen her for weeks.”
“Still…”
“She didn’t talk about him much.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said the Baron. “We know what he’ll do.”
“Let us in on it, O Wise One,” said Meyer Smith.
“He’s an Engineer, isn’t he? And if he was a liberal, he wouldn’t be a general. We’re carrying guns and troops. If the place is crawling with gengineered monsters, we’ll wipe them out.” He held his arms as if sighting down the barrel of a rifle. “Boom! If there are any Gypsies there, we’ll wipe them out too.”
“You’re looking forward to it,” said Hrecker.
“Sure. It’s gonna be fun. Aren’t you?”
Hrecker nodded. He did not dare do anything else.
Some studied the Explorer’s records and discovered anew that First-Stop’s population was remarkably small, its cities and roads and mines and fields notably few, its industry and technology astonishingly advanced. “It’s not much of a space program,” they said. “But it is one. Look at those satellites. Camera platforms for watching the weather. Communications relays. No space stations, but still… How can they support the effort? They can’t possibly have the economic surplus Earth needed to do as much. There isn’t the population, the industrial base, the…”
And if the Gypsies had made them hardly more than a century before? Then they hadn’t had the time. There must still be Gypsies there, helping, building, waiting for the cleansing hands of the Engineers.
Were there no signs of Gypsies except that enigmatic tower? Then the locals had to have been there much, much longer than a century. But if that was so, why hadn’t they left more scars upon the planet? Ancient ruined cities. Chinese walls. Denuded and eroded landscapes. Played-out mines.
There were no such things? Then the alien civilization had to be young, too young to have accomplished as much as it clearly had. Perhaps the Gypsies had made the coons. Yet how could even the infamous Gypsies have stimulated so much progress in so little time?
Just a century? That was how long it had been since the last Gypsy had returned to Earth’s vicinity, found the Engineers ascendant over all the system, and fled. More like a century and a half since the Gypsies had fled Earth itself.
But even if they had created the coons the very moment they had arrived at First-Stop, there had not been time enough for all the progress the Explorer’s records showed.
Were there more aliens than they could see? Did they live underground? Were there vast unseen warrens, buried slums and ruins and mushroom farms? As many billions as Earth had had to have to mount its first abortive space programs? Then, if that was so, there was the possibility of defeat.
“No,” said the Baron loudly when the possibility was raised at a table three down the mess from his own. “They thought of everything before they shipped us off. Don’t you believe that? We’re armed to the teeth, and I think we must have a planet-buster warhead with us. It’s probably on the Ajax.”
There was a moment of silence. The others had dismissed the idea of a bomb that could destroy a world when he raised it before. Now they felt obliged to entertain the possibility more seriously. Eventually someone at that other table softly cheered. “Then we’ll get the gyppers sure.”
Tau Ceti swelled from star to sun in the viewports, its light unshifted because the fleet’s instantaneous velocity was always much less than that of light, even if the “net” was something else again. Weapons systems were checked and readied, and people grew wire-tense as the time for action neared.
Hrecker was busy at his station, balancing the demands on the probability shifters as the Saladin’s tunnel drive turned off. The Q-drive would continue to provide thrust and a sense of weight until orbit was achieved half a million kilometers from the planet, well beyond the limits of the coons’ ability to detect them. At home, they would be heading for a translunar orbit, but First-Stop had no moon.
Radio traffic was forbidden for fear the coons would not only detect their presence but also overhear their plans. Yet there were also narrow, line-of-sight laser beams, and it was no surprise when a diode said his com was live with an intership call. A speaker crackled, and… “Mark?”
“Tamiko!” He could not resist glancing toward where Eric Silber had sat the last time he had talked to her.
“I’ve only got a moment,” she said. “But I couldn’t wait.”
“I’d have called soon enough,” he said. His eyes and hands were still darting over his board. “Right now— ”
“You’re busy. I know. And we’ll see each other soon. But I wanted to hear your voice, see your face. And did you… ?”
An officious voice interrupted her: “Security override. You have ten seconds to clear this channel.”
“Acknowledged,” said Hrecker.
“Command conference,” said Tamiko with the confidence of one who knew General Lyapunov’s schedule. “Did you see? They’re already building a space sta…”
The word quickly spread.
General Lyapunov and his staff monopolized the laser com for days with their planning, but there were moments when general and captains were eating or sleeping. Then others seized the chance to chat with friends and share their responses to the latest discoveries about the world that waited below for their subjugation.
The coons were indeed building a space station. It wasn’t large, and it wasn’t sophisticated. It was just an unspinning framework of girders to which were attached solar panels and gleaming cylinders in which a few of the coons would be able to live and work for a few weeks or months until the lack of gravity or centrifugal force weakened their bones too much to continue.
There were no signs of Q drives or orbiting weaponry.
The small launch center from which the coons operated their infant space age occupied flat land near the equator, beside an ocean.
There were signs that the coons knew what war was. Even from their great height above the planet, the Engineers could see what could only be military bases, shipyards, and airfields. There were even two depots for armored vehicles, tanks.
The humans laughed. They were centuries ahead. They had the high ground. And all the weight of righteousness was on their side.
The coons would be easy meat.
CHAPTER 8
“Have you read this?” Gypsy Blossom hefted the massive book she was reading. It had taken her only a few weeks of children’s tales and VC programs to pick up the skill. “Do you know what it says?”
“No,” said Dotson Barbtail, his voice a relaxed and peaceful snarl. He sat cross-legged on his sleeping pad. Beside him was a block of paper on which he was drafting another report for Senior Hightail. “The priests tell me all I need to hear about theology.”
The report would say that at last the samples had begun to come in, the cells had grown, the enzymes were being found, all was going well. It would not say that the true reason why he was making progress was…
“Uh!” He jerked when the fine-toothed comb found a snag. Sunglow knelt behind him, working on his fur.
“History.” Sunglow picked at the tangled fur. “You should take it more seriously.”
“I do take it seriously.” He twisted to look over his shoulder, but neither his tone nor his expression suggested that he wanted to argue. Life had become so much simpler and less stressful since she had pushed her way into his apartment. He no longer had to struggle to keep her at arm’s length, and that meant he had time and energy enough for work once more.
“But The Book of the Founder isn’t history,” he added. “It’s gossip and foggy memories, rumors and dreams. Tales told by ancients to children. Not history.”
“It says…” The VC across the room was dark and silent, the window curtained against the night outside. A gap between the drapery panels let a single doll look out upon
the room. A light angled a beam across the bot’s shoulder. Other tomes were piled on the floor beside her.
“It says, ‘“You are gods,” said the Founder. “Or makers. And all gods have enemies who seek to undo their works. The battle is ancient and eternal, and it has come to us.”’”
“He was supposed to be talking to the Remakers before they left,” said Dotson. “That much I know.”
“To distant workers preparing the Worldtree,” said Sunglow. “We know these tales at home. The Founder was watching from across the valley when an enemy hidden among the Remakers tried to kill a Remaker hero.”
“What did the Founder mean?” asked Gypsy Blossom. “Can gods have enemies?”
“‘Your ancient enemies remain.’” Sunglow paused in her combing while she quoted. “‘And they are ours as well. We will hold this in our minds and in our histories. You will leave, and in your absence they may try to destroy your works. We will not permit them to succeed.’
“He meant there is a war between good and evil, light and dark, knowledge and ignorance, making and unmaking.”
Someone shouted in the street outside the building. Sunglow stopped talking and cocked her head toward the curtained window. Dotson and Gypsy Blossom did the same.
More voices rang out in cries and shrieks and shouts. The din swelled as if the number of voices were doubling with every breath.
“What’s going on?”
Dotson shook his head. “I can’t tell what they’re saying.”
Gypsy Blossom sighed and squatted on bending knees and hips to set her book on the pile beside her. She was now as tall as any Rac, and her legs were sleek with muscle. But her feet remained buried in the soil from which she had grown, while a forest of slender roots sprang from her calves and shins.
“War?” asked Sunglow. “I didn’t think we were close to that.”
Gypsy Blossom was reaching for the curtain as Dotson said, “It can’t be. I hear no guns or bombs.”
“That’s what chased the Remakers from their own home,” said the female Rac. “It forced them to come to our world and to raise us from the beasts. And when they left, it rose between the tailed and tailless as if the Remakers’ enemies were indeed among us.”
“A generation of war,” said Dotson. “But…” He had to raise his voice against the growing din outside. What was going on out there? The night should be quiet and peaceful, not…
“Two generations. And two more of oppression. My people are still crushed, confined to Farshore, still kept from the Worldtree.” Her voice edged higher in pitch as if she could not suppress a deeply embedded anger. She did not seem to be responding to the noise outside.
“Not if they accept the faith.” His own tone smoothed and tightened— she was contrary and argumentative and wrong, and… Was it that? Both knew that they could fight, but his muscles were tensing, his fur rising, his pulse pounding in the great arteries behind the joints of his jaws, far more than he had ever felt in a simple argument. The din outside must, he thought, be lowering his threshold for anger, for rage, or his body was responding to the elemental hysteria of the mob beyond the window. Was this what it was like to be a soldier among other soldiers, facing an enemy army, ready to kill or die?
Sunglow’s body matched his swollen tension as she sang, “We have our own faith.”
“Which is not that of the Founder. His own people turned away from him. Ours did not, and we can already see a day when we will go in search of the Remakers.”
“We hardly need to! They will return when we deserve to see them once more.”
“You help me more than you know,” said Gypsy Blossom gently. She looked at the pair of dolls on the windowsill and the miniature ringed tower beside them. She twitched the curtain until it slid aside on its rail, let it fall back against the window’s edge, and turned toward them once more. “You tell me and you show me. If one says ‘Go,’ the other says ‘Stay.’ It almost seems that intelligence means opposition.”
“Even with your kind?” asked Dotson. He sighed relief, and some of the tension went out of his back and shoulders. They had needed the interruption.
“I do not know. I am intelligent, but there is only one of me. But there’s many more than one in the streets out there.” She gestured, and the two Racs finally joined her at the window to watch the growing crowd as it spilled from doorways and flowed around corners. Every face was tipped upward, every arm was pointing, every voice was screeching in excitement.
“What are they staring at?”
The street lights went out.
Sunglow turned out the apartment’s lights. Dotson leaned close against the glass and craned his neck to see upward. But the building’s overhang blocked whatever was there to see.
Someone slammed a fist against the apartment door. “They’re here! They’re here! They’ve come back at last!”
“Who?”
But the question hardly needed an answer. There was only one “They” who had gone, one “They” who could possibly return.
“Let’s go.”
In the dark and haste, neither noticed the agony on Gypsy Blossom’s face. She too wished to see whatever was in the sky, but she could not leave her pot.
The night outside the building was no darker than it ever was or could be on a moonless world. Yet it felt darker, for the lights that usually glowed on streetcorners and in windows were off, the skyglow from Worldtree City atop the bluffs was gone, and the Racs who milled and cried and emitted acrid scents of excitement in the street created a sense of blindness and confinement. The din rose and fell, and when it was at its lowest, one could hear more cries belling from the more crowded streets above the valley’s rim. Whatever it was that had brought every Rac out of doors had spread its influence much wider than the valley alone.
“Look!” cried a voice as shrill as flight or murder.
Arms stretched high.
“There!”
Fingers pointed.
“There!”
Eyes gaped.
“There!”
“What is it?” whined Sunglow’s voice in Dotson’s ear. Like all the other Racs in the street, she was staring upward, pointing as she spoke.
High, high above the valley, off center to the south, the spark of the space station the Racs were building floated in space.
A finger’s width to one side glowed a ragged double quincunx of brighter sparks.
Now it was his turn: “What are they?”
“They’re moving.”
And as the moments passed, she proved to be quite right. Dotson smelled the hint of coming warmth in the air, of declining rain and damp, of life only lately roused for another season of growth. Spring was only a few weeks old, another summer was just ahead, and yes, strange things were in the sky. The ten spots of incandescent light were moving indeed, drawing nearer to the space station.
“Like moths to a candle,” someone said.
Dotson’s heart was in his throat. He knew what he hoped the strange lights were. He knew what they had to be. But where did they come from? Who did they bring?
He shook his head and looked at the female beside him. “They might not be that close to the station. They could be farther out. Or closer.” But he did not believe his own words. The coincidence was too great.
“Are they attacking? Or… ?”
A red-orange glow illumined the windows of one of the hotels that overlooked the valley and made it visible in the dark. Murky shadows obscured the glass as the building began to shine from within. Tongues of flame appeared.
Sirens screamed above the noises of Worldtree City’s streets, but their sound did not seem to move. Dotson thought they must be mired in the crowds, and he wondered how many more buildings would burn.
As if controlled by a single switch, the strange lights in the sky went out.
The crowd noise stopped. A heartbeat later, so did the roar from atop the bluffs.
“Thundertrees,” said Dotson. “That’s wha
t they have to be. They’re in orbit now.”
“Near the station,” said Sunglow. “They’re not moving now.”
“It’s hard to tell.”
“They’re not ours,” someone said.
“They must be huge,” said someone else, “for their flames to be so visible.”
The crowd was silent for a moment more, watching and waiting. When the lights did not reignite or move, a murmur rose, a susurration like wind in the leaves of a forest.
In the distance, someone screeched, and then another, and another. Soon the din was as great as it had ever been, and the streets reeked of panic and hysteria. More buildings were aflame on the valley’s rim, bonfires to greet the gods. More sirens wailed, moving now.
Finally someone turned the street lights on again.
No one slept that night.
People lingered in the streets, staring upward into the haze of urban skyglow, sniffing at the smoke of the fires and the fading mob-reek, wondering together, saying, “Spaceships, yes. Starships. But could they really be our Remakers, come to inspect our space station and judge us for our suitability to join them in the stars? Or are they aliens, utter aliens, unlike both us and our Remakers? And if so, then what? Are they benign? Or not? Should we celebrate? Or mourn? Should we welcome them? Or flee?”
People went indoors to turn on their VC sets, though they found no answers there. The wonder in the sky was on every channel, but none of the experts dragged before the cameras could at first do more than ask the same questions people were already asking each other.
Yet it was not long before the experts had a little more to offer. VC cameras were patched into the astronomers’ telescopes. Space-station workers were taken off their jobs to send more images homeward. Soon every one of First-Stop’s VC screens bore the resulting images of mushroom prows and bundled pods, reminiscent of designs recorded on Remaker plaques though not quite the same.
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