“They don’t look made at all. Not mixed, not hybridized, no seams and patches.”
“We think the gengineers were evil, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t know what they were doing.”
“I don’t see boots on the ones out there.” She indicated the spectators at the edge of the field.
“The ground’s still hot.”
The ship’s officers waited for the coons, standing stiff, unmoving, on the charred soil outside the ship. The stiffest of them all was Captain Quigg, whose face and body might have been assembled by a child. His mouth turned down, his cheeks puffed round, his nose was an angled blade, and his head was twice the size to fit his bony frame. The computer operator and navigator, Elspeth Keck, was younger and too plump. The ship’s security chief, Johnny Gatling, was thin and tense and his eyes peered at the world over dark, half-moon shadows. A machine pistol with an oversized magazine was slung from his belt. The chief technician, Meyer Smith’s stocky Bonami counterpart, was the fourth; her name was Ali Catrone, and her hair was gray, her lips tight. All wore their dress uniforms, complete with glittering cogwheels.
“They all look the same,” said Gatling. “Fuzzy wuzzies in drag.”
He was wrong, Hrecker thought. The creatures’ fur coats were not all marked the same. Their faces differed too— here a thicker brow ridge, there longer whiskers, here a shorter or more steeply sloping snout, there a canine that refused to tuck behind a lip.
The coons approached slowly, their steps as measured and deliberate as those of humans in procession. Their cloaks swelled in the breeze but did not billow; the hems were weighted. As they neared the ship, they stroked the sides of their abbreviated snouts and lifted their arms high.
“That one,” said Hrecker, pointing at the one in the lead. “He’s the High Priest. We’re about to get worshipped.”
The Bonami’s captain seemed to have the same impression, for he extended one arm and hand as if he were a pope giving a blessing.
“Oh, no,” said Tamiko.
Two smaller coons emerged from the pack behind the High Priest. They carried between them a pear-shaped wicker basket with openings on two sides. It was stuffed with what looked like books.
“Acolytes?” she asked. “And an offering?”
It seemed that way, for the two coons set their burden down in front of the humans and retreated hastily. The High Priest stopped when he reached the basket. He lowered his arms to chest height, spread his hands, and said in a gravelly voice, “We pray you will approve what we have done with what you gave us.”
“He thinks we’re Gypsies,” said Hrecker.
“The General thought they might. Captain Quigg has orders not to set them straight.”
“We are pleased,” said the captain on the screen. He did not look pleased. “That you still speak our tongue.”
The High Priest showed his teeth in what might have been a smile. “What else should we speak? We never had another until you brought it.” He bent to take a book from the basket and hold it toward the captain. “We write it too, as you taught us.”
Captain Quigg leafed through the book. Elspeth Keck looked over his shoulder. “A mathematics text,” she said. “Not terribly advanced. Just calculus, though the notation is a little strange.”
“For our young,” said the High Priest. “We have a great deal more to show you.”
“There is a great deal more we wish to see,” said Captain Quigg.
“Where’s your gun, Johnny?” Ali Catrone’s expression— nearly as dour as the captain’s— did not match her cheerful voice. “Quigg take it away after yesterday?”
“Just the big one. But they won’t pull any tricks on us.” Gatling touched a pocket to say he was not helpless. The bags beneath his eyes were worse than ever.
Catrone shrugged. “There’s not much to worry about. They think we’re gods.”
“Or maybe sacrifices.”
The local spectators were gone. A multipassenger helicopter waited on the road, swinging lazy rotors above a fat body and a strangely tapered tail. In the distance, the tower in the center of the valley was visible. A breeze from that direction carried the odor of honeysuckle blooms.
“They were here,” said Marcus Aurelius Hrecker. There was no other explanation for the smell. “What else did they plant?”
“Hush,” said Tamiko Inoue. She gestured toward the four approaching coons, and Gatling and Catrone fell quiet too. No one wanted the natives to overhear any hint of what might be in store.
This time, only one coon wore the yellow cloak of a priest. The rest were civilians, clad only in straps and pouches. One had a tail whose markings suggested chevrons or barbs. Another was the color of sunlight on ripe grain; she had no tail. They were accompanied by the scents of spice and musk, exotic and animal.
The priest scratched vigorously at the side of his nose. “You are ready,” he said. “Come.”
“Not quite,” said Ali Catrone. She stepped forward and named herself. Then she introduced the other three humans.
The priest sighed, and his tail twitched. “I am Dreaming Tree.” He pointed at his companions each in turn. “Dotson Barbtail.”
That was the one with the chevroned tail, his posture what a human would call stiff, suspicious, wary. He does not trust us, thought Hrecker. And that name. Had his father been polka-dotted?
“His mate Sunglow. And Scholar Starsight.” The last was a drab grayish brown except for a streak of white that slashed across the muscle of his right arm and part of his chest. Perhaps it marked the scar of some youthful misadventure.
All three Racs scratched their muzzles just as had the priest. When Hrecker imitated the gesture, they showed their teeth in what could only be the local equivalent of a human grin. A moment later, the other humans followed his lead.
When they were airborne, the priest directed the pilot to swing over the city atop the bluffs. Gatling patted the wall and said, “Nice soundproofing. I didn’t have a bit of trouble understanding you. Why do you call it Worldtree City?”
The priest seemed slightly puzzled as he pointed toward the center of the valley. “That is the Worldtree, which you grew before you left. Our ancestors thought it held up the sky. And Worldtree Center, where we study the lessons you left.”
“Wh… ?” But the priest let Gatling ask no more questions. Instead he directed their attention through the copter’s windows to the city below, its streets and hotels and factories and warehouses. The pilot swung wider of the valley, and there were fields and orchards and herds.
They think, Hrecker reminded himself, that we are the Gypsies. We made them from nothing, and not that long ago. Guilt washed through him at the thought of the lie they were telling by not admitting that they were not Gypsies but rather the Gypsies’ deadly enemies, but he knew better than to say aloud any more than, “You’ve come a long way.”
The priest seemed quite righteously satisfied at that praise from one of his gods.
“How did you do it?” asked Ali Catrone.
“We will show you when we get to Worldtree Center.”
The copter swung back toward the valley, rose high, higher than any human starship could stand, and hovered beside the bulbous tip of the tower. Hrecker noted the arched openings and the chamber within, and he caught a glimpse of walls covered with shelves. The shelves were packed with oblong bundles.
“What… ?”
“This is where we put our most honored dead.”
They sank through the valley’s air and settled beside a high-roofed hall. The copter’s door slid open, and they faced more of the purple-leafed vegetation they had scorched from the landing field. To the left, a bank of green and viny growth presented huge blossoms shaped like erect wine-glasses.
“The honeysuckle,” said Gatling. He sounded suspicious, but Hrecker was not surprised. Obsessive paranoia was the man’s job.
“Do you drink the nectar?” asked Tamiko.
Dotson Barbtail made a face and shudder
ed. The blonde coon beside him, Sunglow, said, “We don’t care for it.”
“Then why grow it?”
“You planted it before you left.” The priest seemed to think that was all the answer needed, and perhaps it was.
Inside the Great Hall, they were met by the same High Priest who had led the welcoming party the day before. He gestured, spotlights bloomed, and he said, “Here we have recorded all our history.”
Hrecker was staring at the small version of the tower, the Worldtree, that dominated one end of the Hall. With difficulty, he jerked his eyes to the walls. Then, like all the other humans there, he could not keep his jaw from dropping. None of them had ever seen a mural so vast and sweeping, though perhaps they knew such things did exist on Earth.
There was the valley, carpeted only by the purple-leafed plant they had seen already. Scattered quadrupeds stuffed themselves round on white berries. “Our ancestors,” said the High Priest.
There was no trace of honeysuckle, no sign of Gypsies, but there was a single tree growing tall and taller, spreading vast branches. It became a limbless, barkless spear, polished smooth, hollow-tipped, rising above seas of opposing armies. There was the great box kite that had lifted Kitewing to the Worldtree’s tip, the hanging of the first ladder, the building of Worldtree Center. There were the first ships, trains, and cars, powerplants and rockets and communication satellites.
It was a tale of progress, of discovery and invention, of the rapid spread of science and technology. Its spirit was as proud as that of any arch of triumph.
“Romans of the Round Table,” said Ali Catrone. Hrecker followed her gaze to the the armor mounted below the mural, and he saw her point. The helms were medieval. The breastplates and metal-strip skirts might have come from an earlier millennium.
“You coons’ve had wars.” Johnny Gatling was leaning forward on his toes as if he wished to dive into the mural, into the midst of a swirl of flesh and blood so vivid Hrecker wondered for a moment why he could not hear the dying scream.
“Of course,” said Starsight, the scholar who had so far said nothing at all. He pointed here and here and here on the muraled wall. From the very beginning, the Worldtree had been a prize, and the battles had repeated every time the technology of war advanced. The first had relied on swords and spears and bows. Kitewing had flown above cannon. Then there had been tanks and rifles and bombs. In addition to the armor on display, here were hand weapons, miniature catapults and tanks, the first small rocket, battered from a landing ungentled by a parachute.
“We call ourselves Racs,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “That’s what you named us before.”
“The tails always won,” said Tamiko.
“Same difference,” said Gatling dismissively. He had settled back on his heels. “Racs or coons.”
The High Priest said nothing, though his eyes were sharply watchful. Hrecker looked again, and yes, Tamiko was right. Every battle pitted coons with tails against coons without, and the former always won. Yet surely there had been setbacks. Surely the tailed coons had sometimes lost a battle, even if they had won the wars and gained the right to record their version of local history. Suddenly he felt these alien beings might prove quite human if only there were time to get to know them.
“How can you be sure?” asked Ali Catrone. “Especially the early days. That would just be myths.”
“It wasn’t that long ago,” said Sunglow. Hrecker noticed at last that she was the only one without a tail.
“We could write from the start,” said the High Priest. “And some of those who painted what you see worked from memory.”
Hrecker scanned the mural once more. So much history, so much progress, so few years. “Wildfire,” he murmured to Tamiko. “A wildfire civilization.”
“It didn’t take us long,” said Dotson Barbtail. “You insisted that the holiest of activities was the pursuit of knowledge. Many of us took that seriously.”
Hrecker grinned. He agreed, and he could see how such an attitude would lead to rapid progress even for a small population.
But… Catrone looked uncomfortable. Gatling had a hand on his pocket.
Hrecker tried to change the subject: “Why did you give us that basket full of books?”
“To show you that we still remember our destiny. To give you a token in return for what you gave us.” The High Priest faced the miniature Worldtree, and Hrecker suddenly realized that the basket containing the books had repeated the shape of the pillar’s tip. The folks on the Bonami were still examining the books; not all were basic school texts.
“The plaques,” said the tailless blonde.
“In the next room,” said the High Priest. When they reached it, they found two rows of glass display cases full of ceramic plates, each one engraved with text and pictures.
Catrone leaned over one case and positioned a hand to block the light that reflected from the glass. A moment later, she said, “Epitaxial beam deposition. Integrated circuits. Doping.” She moved to a second display case. “Quantum physics.”
“Not my field,” said Dotson Barbtail.
“Your lessons,” said the High Priest. “You told us they were waiting for us, as soon as we learned enough by ourselves to reach the Worldtree’s top. Kitewing found the way, and ever since— ”
“My God,” said Catrone.
Johnny Gatling’s hand was already in his pocket.
Hrecker sucked in his breath. If Gatling… They could not possibly kill every coon that stood between them and the landing field.
“Then that’s what Worldtree Center is for,” he said. At the same time, he let his elbow prod the security chief in the back. “Hundreds of you. Thousands of you. All working to make sense of your heritage.”
“And add to it,” said Dotson Barbtail.
“It’s no wonder that you’ve come so far so fast.” Hrecker’s voice bore more than a hint of awe. His own species, he knew, had never done so well, never done so much so fast. Perhaps it never could.
“Is this all of them?” asked Gatling. His hand was still in his pocket.
“Oh, no,” said the High Priest. Was his tone the least bit smoother, higher pitched? “We have many more in storage, or in our scholars’ workrooms, or on loan to other universities and libraries. There are copies, too.”
Gatling’s shoulders slumped. His hand withdrew slowly, empty, from his pocket.
“Treason!” said Johnny Gatling later, after they had returned to the Bonami.
“Not really,” said Hrecker. “Or only if the Gypsies were Engineers like us.”
“They were human!”
Hrecker shook his head again. “Even so.”
“Then heresy!”
“How so?” Captain Quigg had just entered the conference room. Tamiko described the plaques the Gypsies had left for the natives. When she was done, he grunted. “That’s not the way we would do it, is it?”
“We wouldn’t make the buggers in the first place!” said Ali Catrone.
“Was there any sign… ?”
“Not really,” said Hrecker.
“But they did,” said Gatling, while Tamiko nodded in agreement. “We know they did. They liked to play god.”
“We have to be sure,” said the Captain. “Any sign of… ?
“We didn’t see a thing to do with biology,” Tamiko admitted in a voice that said she thought that was hardly necessary. They knew enough. Now they should get on with their mission.
“Q tech?”
“I saw the basics on a plaque,” said Catrone. “Quantum theory, at least.”
“Destroy them all,” said Gatling.
“No,” said Hrecker. “Even if the Gypsies made them, their tech is clean. They’re just victims.”
“But if they ever get loose!”
“At least,” said Captain Quigg. His downturned mouth became a straight line, and his cheeks bulged even more than usual. “We’ll have to destroy the plaques. And that tower. Whatever else we find the Gypsies
left behind.”
“It’s up to the General,” said Tamiko. “But I think you’re right.”
CHAPTER 10
“It’s an honor,” insisted Sunglow.
“It’s a nuisance,” said Dotson Barbtail just as insistently. The pitch of his voice was well above the rumble of contentment. All his world was staring open-mouthed and panting at the alien humans, calling them the Gypsies, the Remakers, the gods themselves. Yet even if that was what they were, he was not happy. They interrupted his routine, distracted him from his worries. “I have work to do.” But he had to look aside even as he said the words. How could anyone think of work when… ?
“I can water Gypsy Blossom.”
“Oh, no!” He shook his head furiously. “You think you’re getting out of this? You’re coming with me.”
“Just set a bucket beside my pot,” said the bot. “I can water myself.”
“I wish the priests weren’t in charge.”
“What do you expect?” asked Sunglow. “They’ve been talking about Gypsies and Remakers for ages. Now here they are.”
“I’m not sure that’s who they are.”
Sunglow stiffened slightly, but Gypsy Blossom said very quietly, “Nor am I.”
“What do you mean?”
“I watched on the VC when you and everyone went to see them land. And there was something about them that made me wish to hide.”
“But who else could they be?” asked Sunglow.
Dotson shook his head. “They weren’t supposed to come back. We were supposed to go to them.”
“Maybe they got tired of waiting?” said the bot. “Or…”
Dotson snorted. “Then they don’t have much patience. One of them, the one called Mark, even said we were making fast progress.”
“But the priests said they would return,” said Sunglow.
“Some priests did,” said the bot.
“Ours did.”
“That’s not what the Founder told us.” Dotson stopped at that, for it suddenly struck him strange that those priests who preached the return of the Remakers were not in charge now that the gods had indeed come back. Instead, it was still the traditionalists, those who ran Worldtree Center and expected the Remakers to be waiting somewhere beyond the sky for the Racs to attain their stature. Yet at very least the arrival of the aliens reinforced the belief that the Remakers were real, just as had, many years ago, the discovery of the plaques atop the Worldtree.
Seeds of Destiny Page 10
