“Not quite the same,” said Sunglow. “But does it look like— ”
“No!” cried Gypsy Blossom in clear frustration. “I told you before, I have no memories of the Gypsies. I was only a seed. I know no more than you.”
“All our attempts at communication are futile,” said the face on the VC screen. “We have tried every radio and VC frequency. We have used lasers. We have even aimed floodlights at the ships’ viewports. And they do not respond.”
An off-camera voice asked, “Are you sure there’s anyone aboard? They’re not just automatons?”
“We have detected ship-to-ship messages, so…”
All that day the mystery possessed the world.
The strange ships remained in orbit hard by the embryonic space station. They remained deaf to all attempts to contact them, silent except among themselves, aloof. The aliens’ identities and their intentions remained unknown.
Many of First-Stop’s people remained in the streets, staring into a sky where they knew the ships hovered high above them, made invisible by day. Others stayed close to their radios and VCs, anxious for any and every scrap of information that might ease the mystery. Others hosed down the coals that lingered in the ruins of the buildings that had burned in the night and began the task of clearing away the rubble.
Dotson Barbtail spent part of the day in his Worldtree Center office, trying to finish his report. When the words kept blurring before his eyes and his thoughts could not stop chasing questions about the aliens through his brain, he wandered the hallways and found no one else, not even Senior Hightail, in the building. He wound up in his lab, next door to his office. But his ability to concentrate was no better there. When he dropped the second flask of cultured bacteria— neither broke, thank the Founder!— he set himself to other tasks. He washed dirty glassware and other tools. He dusted his bookshelves. He organized his desk. He washed his windows. And when he ran out of chores to keep him busy, he went home, where Gypsy Blossom and Sunglow had remained near the VC.
Not, he thought, that the bot had much choice.
Once more it was dark outside the apartment window. Once more the streets were full of people and the street lights were off. This time, however, the crowd was almost silent as it stared into a sky where wisps of cloud threatened to blot out the view of the alien starships. Most of the noise came from the windows beside the street, where residents had set their VCs with their sound turned up as far as it would go.
There was view after view of great ships rotating in space, spinning, twirling. “Centrifugal force,” said a Rac voice. “It gives them a sense of weight inside those ships. We’ll need to do that ourselves when we build bigger stations. And starships of our own, of course.”
Here was the rim of a mushroom prow and a row of round hatches, and an expert saying, “…much smaller. Too small for personnel scaled to fit the viewports and handholds we can see.” The view shifted to show viewers what the speaker meant. “Are they for weapons? Missiles? Are they covered to protect them from dust and debris while the ship is moving? Or to keep us from seeing these alien creatures’ true intentions?”
Here were rows of symbols painted upon the alien ships’ metal skins. “The characters look like distorted or decorative versions of those the Remakers wrote on their plaques. That tells us these aliens are kin to our Remakers. They must come from the same world, speak the same language, share the same history.” No one dared to speak out loud the obvious truth: If the aliens were kin to the Remakers, that did not mean they were necessarily friends to the Remakers and their makings.
“What do the characters say? They come in combinations we can pronounce, which says they spell out words. Most of these ‘words’ are meaningless, but perhaps they are names such as we paint on watercraft. If so, the largest of these ships is the Ajax. The rest are the Bolivar, Bonami, Cascade, Drake, Gorbachev, Pizarro, Saladin,Toledo, and Villa.”
Here was an interview via VC with the spaceworkers who were building the space station. The spaceworkers were burly, their faces rounded by retained fluid, their fur spiky with low humidity and static. Their interviewer was a carefully, sleekly groomed female whose face told anyone who didn’t know that kidneys worked much better with the aid of gravity. “How do you feel with these mysterious beings so close?” she asked. “Are you nervous?”
“More like mad,” was the high-pitched reply. “They’re too short-tailed close.” Sunglow snorted at the adjective.
“Are you worried?”
“Who wouldn’t be? Aren’t you? Aren’t the folks down home?”
“What will you do if— ”
“Die. What else?”
And finally, at long, long last, the suspense ended. The images on all the screens shattered into jagged lines and colorful fuzz. The sound spat and hissed and sparked. And as soon as Dotson and Sunglow and Gypsy Blossom, as well as all the Racs in every street in every city on all the world of First-Stop, were staring at the nearest VC screen, the picture and the sound returned.
The picture was first, and it was such that if there had been words, no Rac could possibly have heard past their compulsively fixated focus on that image— naked skin, fur only on top of the skull, ears on the sides of the head, flat face.
“Remakers!” rose the scream in the streets. “The gods are back! They are!”
Dotson Barbtail stared at the bot by the window. The face on the screen was much like hers, though it had hair where she had petals. He had also seen faces of the same type, the same species, on the Remakers’ plaques.
But were these truly Remakers?
The gods had enemies, didn’t they?
And when the gods had left the Racs to develop on their own, once they were gone, absent, those enemies would try to destroy their works. The Founder had said so.
Sunglow was looking at him as if she were sharing his thoughts despite his silence. He guessed they showed on his face.
The din outdoors said that hardly anyone else had similar reservations. The face on the VC screen was a Remaker face, a Gypsy face, a human face, and all Rackind was about to be rewarded for its obedience to its creators.
The face spoke, and silence fell.
“Greetings,” it said, and though its accent was strange, the word was comprehensible. The language the stranger spoke was the same as the language the Remakers had left their makings.
“We come from Earth,” said the face on the screen. “We bring gifts of peace and prosperity and purity as we have to all the worlds of our sun. But before we may present those gifts, we must land on your world. Confer among yourselves. When you have decided where you would like us to come down, call us. We will be listening.”
The VC screens were once more filled with random electronic noise, instantly replaced by the Racs’ own stations and talking heads.
The Worldtree towered high above the buildings of Worldtree Center. Its top was higher even than the crests of the bluffs that were the valley’s rim, and from it one could look down upon the environs all around. There was Worldtree City and its streets, there the valley’s lake, there the ends of the bluffs, tapering abruptly toward the valley’s entrance and the ancient landing field just beyond.
Dotson Barbtail and Sunglow had found a place to stand on one of the many low hummocks that were scattered in the gap between the arms of bluff. Not far to one side was the small stream that drained the lake and spoke of that long, long gone time when a meteorite had excavated the valley as a crater, the crater had filled with water, and the water had found a weak point in the crater wall. Their hummock had once been a mass of rock the torrent had not swept away.
The only torrent there that day was one of bodies. The ground was damp. Gray clouds rolled toward the horizon, on their way to elsewhere. And every resident of Worldtree City, the valley, and all the towns within two hours’ travel seemed to be there. Racs covered the steeply sloping tails of the bluffs. They spilled into the moss fields on either side of the road that linked field and va
lley. They sat on rooftops. All faced the landing field.
The road was blocked by a flatbed truck on which stood a miniature Worldtree. By its side stood a priest, arms raised, ritual cloak fluttering in a light breeze, voice already hoarse with exhortation. Worshippers surrounded the truck, their own arms raised in reply. Acolytes shook baskets in front of every face and begged donations.
“They are so sure,” said Dotson. “They have convinced themselves that these ships carry the Gypsies, our Remakers. They forget that our gods had enemies. They forget that the enemies of our gods must be our enemies as well.”
“No!” cried Sunglow. “You’re too cautious. They have to be the Remakers. And their arrival is a sign.”
Dotson tried not to snort. He did not believe in signs.
But others did. Beside them a young male, as tailless as Sunglow, raised a fist. “Yes! Our time is coming! We were the last of the Racs to be Remade. We are the most perfect of the Remakers’ makings. Now they will throw down the tailed usurpers. We will have our due.”
A tailed male shook his head. “It makes no difference. If they mean us ill, there is nothing we can do. We have not had time enough.”
“They cannot mean us ill,” said Sunglow. “They are good. They have to be. They are the gods.”
“Or devils,” Dotson thought, but he kept the words to himself. There was no need to argue or fight when the answers even now were riding down from orbit and would soon stand before them all. He thought most Racs must agree with Sunglow, for the faces all around him were glowing with expectancy and joy and worship. He wondered how many knew how uncertain the future truly was, how all Rackind now walked in utter darkness on a path that at any moment might disappear in a yawning pit.
When the alien ship thundered out of the sky, Dotson and Sunglow and every other Rac covered their ears with their hands and squinted and screamed great screams of neither joy nor dread. None gave a thought to the moss that was being incinerated, the soft picnic ground being baked as hard as pavement, the decades recovery would demand.
Their gods, thought most, were returning.
CHAPTER 9
The spacesuit gave Marcus Aurelius Hrecker hardly more room than did his own skin. Worse, it was stiff and unyielding, resisting every motion, and he had to play Tarzan in it.
At least, the orange cable that linked the airlocks in the unturning noses of the Saladin and the Bonami looked like a vine, twisting this way, that way, never hanging in a gravitationally defined catenary. Fortunately, he wouldn’t have to swing on it from ship to ship, or brachiate, or fight a lion. He would only have to grip the trolley that clung to the cable right in front of his face. His thumbs would turn its electric motor on, and it would tow him away from his ship into the gulf of space between…
“Ready?” The voice rattled in his helmet. The crewman was beside him, holding with one hand to the edge of the lock. “Then go.” The gauntleted fist rapped his helmet. He pushed against the ship’s metal with his boots. And…
No. Not between the stars, for wasn’t there a star, a sun, just behind the Saladin? The ship had been positioned to keep him in shadow even though the visor of his helmet would darken instantly if sunlight hit it. But that meant space seemed empty and he was all alone on the edge of an impossible precipice about to fall forever and forever and…
He stared at the world beneath his feet, and that brought him back to himself. No. He could not possibly fall forever. The worst he could do was fall out of orbit, spiral down, burn to a fiery streak of ash, and sift to earth.
Not Earth. Nor Mars. This was not his world, and even this space was alien, its shape defined by a star that was not Sol. Light years from home. If the Bonami vanished, if the cable broke, if he let go, he would die a long, long way from the ground that held the bones of his ancestors. He would be more lost than a human being, a human soul, had ever been before.
He clung tight as the Saladin fell behind him and the cable writhed ahead. He could feel the humming of the trolley’s motor through the fabric of his gloves. Remembering his instructions— “Don’t go too fast!”— he flicked the motor off and coasted and wished he could feel a wind of passage against his skin. But there was only the pressure on his hands, the initial inertial swing of his body, the elastic rebound of his joints, the tug of the line that tethered his canister of personal belongings to his waist. There was also the stale odor of whoever had used the suit before him.
When the cable’s solid orange showed stripes of black thirty meters from the Bonami, Hrecker turned on the trolley once more, reversed its traction, and slowed. The nose of the ship loomed before him. The trolley bumped the eyebolt at its end, set just outside the airlock, and he swung. His knees slammed into the wall, the canister bumped his tail, and he was there.
While he reached for the edge of the lock and pulled himself to what felt like better safety, the Bonami’s crewman unfastened the trolley, unlatched the eyebolt, and began to coil the cable, looping it from his elbow to the fork of his hand, over and over. Hrecker supposed that meant no more Engineers were transferring from ship to ship.
The lock’s inner hatch had a small window through which he could see Tamiko Inoue waiting for him in the suiting chamber. He waved one hand, and the outer hatch closed, air hissed from storage tanks, and as his suit lost its stiffness, infrared lamps glowed just long enough to warm its surface.
As soon as he had the helmet off his head, he said, “Renard didn’t want the job?”
“General Lyapunov thought one of his aides should go. Me.” She was undoing the suit’s fastenings. “And I wanted you.”
He grinned. “Missed me, did you?”
“Fathead. Didn’t you?” She sidestepped as his arms came free of the suit. “Not here.” One hand indicated the security camera positioned to cover the entire room. Beside it perched a mouse-sized robot biplane, its propeller still. “You know where the suit goes.”
But he only dropped the suit to the deck. “They know how long we’ve been apart.” One hand caught hers, and she did not resist his tug.
A few minutes later, he found an empty locker, hung the suit on the rack inside, and plugged the umbilical into its life support unit. The small amount of oxygen he had used on the trip between ships would soon be replaced. The ubiquitous robots would scour the interior clean of nearly all his body odor and dander. “You’re in charge?”
“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “The captain will handle the high-level stuff. We’re just supposed to get them to show us around.”
“Spies,” he said.
“Something like that. The General wants to know if there are any signs of Q tech or gengineering.”
“We already know the Gypsies were here. The language…”
“But that doesn’t say the coons are just as bad.” She was opening the canister that had protected his possessions from vacuum. Inside was a small duffel bag. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“My place.”
“No cameras.”
“And we won’t be interrupted.”
He grinned. “Shouldn’t I report in?”
“‘They know how long we’ve been apart,’” she quoted at him.
“You’re laughing at me.”
“Would I do that?”
He was not surprised to find her room much like the one he had occupied on the Saladin. It had two narrow, fold-down bunks. But only one showed any sign of use.
“No roommate?”
“I told you I had some perks.”
They needed both bunks when the Bonami lit its Q-drive to thrust itself out of orbit and down, into atmosphere, through high, thin clouds, roaring, thundering, slowing toward the moment when the Engineers would first touch alien soil. Flat upon the mattresses, they groaned and sagged and waited for the pain to end. Between burns, they talked and watched the veedo screen that displayed the expanding view of their landing site.
It was plain to see that the circular valley was a crater, either
volcanic or meteoritic. Near its center was a spearlike tower surrounded by stone buildings surrounded in turn by a parklike zone of paths and vegetation, some purple-tinged, some as green as Earth’s. The border of the valley was marked by a road and more buildings and a ringwall atop which spread more roads, more buildings, a city of aliens.
The valley’s ringwall was broken on one side, opening on a purple plain on which no one had built roads or buildings. Low, dark clouds not far away suggested recent rain.
“That’s where we’ll land,” said Tamiko. “Where the Gypsies did when they were building the tower and…”
“You sure?”
“They call the planet First-Stop themselves. No doubt about it.”
“No. The field.”
“Where else? It’s perfect. And besides, that’s what the locals called it. The ‘landing field.’”
“There’s room for all our ships.”
“Just us, for now.”
As they dropped further toward the ground, the screen began to show the waiting crowds, covering the slopes where the crater’s ringwall had long ago been breached, surrounding the landing field, staying clear of the wide zone that would soon be sterilized by flame.
The landing field was still smoldering and steaming when the delegation of coons approached the ship. They wore yellow capes or cloaks marked with black center stripes, yellow caps with black centers, arrangements of belts and pouches, thick-soled boots. Their pelts were grey and brown and yellow and olive, marked with stripes and patches and swirls. They stood erect, and if their faces had been flatter and balder, they might have looked quite human.
“They don’t look much like us,” said Tamiko.
“They wouldn’t have to,” said Hrecker. “Even if the Gypsies made them from Earthly material.” They were squeezed together in her bunk, propped on pillows to see the veedo screen across the narrow room. It would be another day before they could leave the ship.
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