“He’s working on it,” said Rosnik. The car hit a bump in the pavement and the caduceus on her breast flashed with sunlight. “He’s collecting the tools.”
“But he isn’t one.”
“Yet. The intent is there, and that is quite enough.”
Many millions of human beings belonged to religions that insisted the thought of a sin was just as bad as the sin itself, just as worthy of repentance and punishment. What she said did not seem strange to Hrecker.
“We’ll have to kill them all,” said Kentaba.
And Hrecker knew no argument was possible. He was one man alone. He had no hope of convincing the Engineers to stay their hand, no hope of gaining mercy for a world, a species, a friend— for that, he realized, was how he thought of Dotson Barbtail even though he had first met the coon only days before.
They themselves said the Gypsies had made them. They said the Gypsies had gengineered and grown their Worldtree and filled its treasure chamber with all the secrets of a thousand years of human striving. Human striving, human secrets, secrets it was treason to share with unhuman aliens, made or not made.
Now had they revealed their dream of imitating their makers and becoming gengineers themselves just as soon as they could manage it.
It was no wonder that Engineers like Kentaba and Rosnik and, he supposed, even Catrone had to see them as anathema. It would be no wonder when General Lyapunov declared the pogrom, the jihad, the crusade that would cleanse this world.
Why didn’t he, Marcus Aurelius Hrecker, agree with them? They were expressing the beliefs by which he had lived all his life. The official, pervasive dogma of the Engineers. A dogma that had somehow not gripped him so tightly that he could not sympathize with old ladies holding out mugs of African violets or men seeking green beauty in frondlike tanks of algae.
Still… Should he have seen what Dotson Barbtail really was? Had there been clues? As the car leaned into the last curve before it left the valley’s circle and hit the straightaway leading to the landing field, he looked back over his memories of the last few days.
No. No clues. No mention of the coon’s work.
He should have asked sooner.
But he had been focusing elsewhere, and his own mind was tuned more to the physical, not the biological. Certainly not to gengineering.
Not that he had spotted the plaque with the quantum physics data, the seed of future Q-tech just as surely as Dotson Barbtail’s lab held the seeds of future gengineering. That had been Ali Catrone.
He hadn’t been paying attention, had he? He had been playing tourist.
He had simply never thought to ask the coon what he himself did.
The smell of charred ground rose around them. The ship loomed over them. The car’s brakes squeaked as Kentaba leaned on them.
“Into the ship! They’ll figure what’s going on soon enough.”
Hrecker hurried with the rest. He had liked Dotson Barbtail. “Couldn’t we stop them from developing the gengineering? Teach them? Swing them our way?”
“Fat chance!” That was Rosnik. “They’re imitating their gods. If we tried that, they’d spot us right off as the devil.”
“If they haven’t already.” But Hrecker muttered the words softly, beneath the others’ hearing, as they moved through the ship’s corridors.
“Missionaries!” said Ali Catrone. “Save the damned heathens!”
Hrecker did not even mutter his fleeting thought that perhaps the coons did not need saving.
The control room door was shut. A pair of robots on the narrow ledge above it were immobile except for their antennae. A guard stood before it and blocked their way when they approached. “Staff meeting,” he said.
“This is urgent,” Kentaba shouted. “We’ve got the proof we need.”
The door opened, and Tamiko Inoue was there. “I could hear you through this.” She patted the thick steel of the door. Behind her Hrecker could see a row of veedo screens showing General Lyapunov, his other aides, the fleet’s captains. The only other person present in the flesh was Captain Quigg.
“What have they got?” asked the General’s voice. He looked very patient.
Larry Kentaba pushed past Tamiko. As soon as he was fully in the control room, he began to talk.
“We know enough,” said Captain Quigg. “They’re trying to become gengineers themselves. It hardly matters whether the Gypsies made them or not.”
“But they did,” said one of the General’s aides, a face Hrecker did not recognize. “This world is so polluted— ”
“Burn it,” said another. “We brought warheads enough.”
General Lyapunov shook his head.
“How can we do that?” asked Ali Catrone. “I’d feel guilty for the rest of my life.”
Someone laughed.
Tamiko was quick to say, “That wouldn’t leave much for us to use later on. And it’s a pretty world.”
“Just the coons then.”
Hrecker made a face. “Our own history… We don’t remember our Hitlers fondly.”
“Because he was wrong,” said a ship captain. “He killed innocents.”
No one had to say aloud that gengineers were deliberate, cold-blooded, malicious evil, their products damaged goods to be destroyed in the name of quality control.
“They might have evolved naturally,” Hrecker added. “I’ve seen the animals they came from.” He looked at Tamiko. “You too.” She nodded. “They’re as smart as chimps. Maybe smarter.”
“But they didn’t evolve,” said Tamiko.
He sighed, looked down. Why did she surprise him? He had known all along that she was more in tune with the Engineer ideology than he. If she were not, she would never have been picked as a general’s aide. “They didn’t have the chance,” he said. “But the Gypsies didn’t give them that much!”
“They gave them enough.”
“They only moved them a few millennia ahead.”
“That gyppin’ tower full of plaques,” said Captain Quigg. “Knowledge. Science and technology.”
“We could take all that away,” said another captain. “We have the guns.”
“As long as we leave them their lives,” said Hrecker. “And their world. It was theirs before the Gypsies came, after all.
“Flatten it all,” said the aide on the General’s right. “Every building, every road and mine, every factory and school. Back to the stone age, and let them climb back all on their own.”
“We could always exterminate them later,” said the aide on the General’s left. “If we decide we want the place for ourselves. But it would surely serve us better to keep the coons alive. As bait. If the Gypsies ever come back to check on them, we could have a trap waiting. And then…”
No one suggested that the coons would still have their memories.
“The tower, yes,” said Hrecker. He wished they could simply leave. “Hunt out the plaques and their copies. Burn all the books that discuss what’s on them. But leave them what they’ve done themselves.”
“Impossible,” said Tamiko. “Books are too easy to hide.”
“You’d give them too much time to organize resistance.”
“Easier to— ”
“But— ”
“Enough.” General Lyapunov did not have to shout. The word and the tone of command were all he needed. “There is nothing to debate.”
He looked through the screen of the com at Captain Quigg. “Are all your people aboard?”
“One team is at the university. Another is looking over the launch facilities.”
“Get them back. Immediately. Then seal the Bonami. There may be an attack.”
Captain Quigg wasted no time in transmitting the recall signal. “Then…”
The General nodded. “The Ajax itself will take out the space station. The rest of the fleet will address the coons’ military and industrial facilities. When no more resistance is possible…”
This was their mission. Hrecker knew it, had known it fr
om the start.
But now his eyes burned. His throat clenched. His stomach twisted.
He hung his head to hide what some might see as signs of treason and left the room.
CHAPTER 14
Sunglow’s voice was pitched higher than Dotson Barbtail had ever heard it, keening, shrieking, grating like too-hard chalk on slate. “We are dead!” she cried. “All dead! They are the enemy the Gypsies fled, the enemy they warned us of. They will destroy us all, tailed and tailless gone, extinct, the Worldtree felled.” She sobbed betrayal, fear, and grief.
Her eyes were shut, clamped tight, closing out the world that had turned on her.
When she paused for breath, she struggled.
Dotson Barbtail heard her tone but not— or just barely— her words. He was staring, watching her hands and wrists twist against each other, the muscles of her arms bulging beneath the fur, the skin tearing, the blood. The humans had bound their hands behind their backs, tied them to legs of his work counter. Sunglow was fastened to the next leg over to his right.
He wished he could help her, free her, free them both. But his hands were useless. There was no way he could reach her bonds with his teeth. There were no tools.
But…
There had been no rope, no cord. They had used the roll of packing tape he kept on top of the freezer. That was plastic. And on the counter, there, in back, behind his back and toward his left, was a bottle of acetone.
He used the solvent for removing labels from glassware. But it could do more than that…
Some plastics acetone would not touch. Some it would dissolve as quickly as a summer day would melt a snowflake. The tape was like that.
He got his feet beneath his butt, swore when he stepped on his tail, twitched it aside, and pushed. His bound wrists slid up the counter leg until they were stopped halfway, where the drawers began.
They had checked, hadn’t they? Nothing but paper and cloth within reach.
He gripped the leg tightly in his hands. He grunted, strained, and twisted. His shoulders shrieked in protest, but he did not give up. One leg was up. A hip. Over the edge of the counter.
The bottle he sought was still behind him, but his foot could reach it. Couldn’t it?
No. His toes reminded him that there was more than one bottle. There were several, and toes could not read labels.
His shoulders creaked. His claws scrabbled on the countertop, against the wall behind, against the bottles’ glass.
Sunglow’s eyes were open now. Her voice was silent. She was crouching— lucky she, no tail to step on— twisting, straining to see what he was doing.
He did not try to explain. Instead he closed his eyes and struggled to visualize his own workspace. How many bottles?
“Four,” said Sunglow as if she could read his mind.
But which was the one he wanted? He cursed. He thought he knew this countertop as well as he knew Gypsy Blossom’s petals or Sunglow’s fur.
“The one on the end is pink.”
There, he thought. Then it had to be one of the other three, didn’t it? He hooked them with his foot, careful not to tip and roll and smash— though that might be just as useful— and tugged them toward the counter’s edge.
“Ahh.” He rolled off the counter and relieved the strain on his shoulders. He twisted to see the bottles, and yes. That one. One foot could tug it to where his teeth could grip the top. He could set it on the floor. And now his hands…
Fumes stung his nose and made his eyes water furiously. Sunglow blinked and cried, “What are you doing?” as frantically as she had shrieked, “All dead!”
Liquid sloshed on his hands and wrists, cold, stinging where he had abraded the skin. More fumes flooded the room and made him gasp. Tape loosened its grip. He was free.
A moment later, so was Sunglow.
The first thing he did was open the nearest window. Then he plugged his freezer and incubators in once more. He did not think they had warmed or cooled enough to suffer any harm.
“You think that matters? There’ll be nothing here tomorrow. Or next month. Not you. Not me. Not even the Worldtree!”
“Maybe so,” he said. But he could not simply give up.
“Of course so!” she shrieked. She grabbed the cord he had just plugged in and yanked. He seized her hands and pried her fingers loose, crying, “No!” as shrilly as she screamed and sobbed, “It’s useless! We’re dead! They’ll— ”
Someone pounded a hand against the lab door and pushed it partway open. “What’s going on?”
Sunglow tore herself away from Dotson’s hands and yanked the door. It boomed when it slammed the wall. “They’re not Gypsies!” she screamed at the startled Racs in the hall. The nearest, Kinky Thinson, was a student who sometimes helped Dotson in his work; his tail bent twice near its root. “They tied us up and went away!”
And there was Senior Hightail, fur frosted gray, whiskers white, growly calm. “Who is she, Dotson? What’s going on?”
Dotson ignored the first question. “The humans were just here. They saw what I do, and suddenly…” He shrugged and gulped and tried to smooth his voice. “They tied us up and fled.”
“They’re lying,” someone in the hallway said.
“Why?”
“The Farshorn insulted them.”
“They took offense.”
“She couldn’t help it.”
“It wasn’t that,” said Dotson. Why did so many people think the tailless were no better than children or savages?
“He said, ‘Genetic engineering.’” Sunglow too sounded resentful. “Then he had a gun. He wanted to kill us.”
“Yes,” said Dotson.
The murmur in the hall grew high and tense. “Not Gypsies,” came a worried voice. That much was now obvious.
“No!” Or was it?
Silence, broken only when Kinky Thinson whispered, “What will they do?”
“They are the enemy.”
“The Founder said…”
The air filled with the acrid, involuntary emissions of panic and arousal, flight and fight.
“Destroy us all.”
“Can they do it?”
“They’ll try,” said Senior Hightail. His voice too no longer growled, saying plainly that he thought it plain enough, the possibility very real. “It doesn’t matter whether they succeed. They’ll destroy so much.” He fell silent for a moment. Then he stepped forward and laid one hand on Dotson’s shoulder. “I’ll pass the word. The government. The military. They’ll know what to do, or what to try. You go home.”
“We’re dead!” screamed Sunglow, and several of the Racs in the hall echoed her cry.
Dotson closed the door once more.
“We’re dead!”
“Not yet,” he said, and his voice was somehow calmer. “We can’t just lie down for them. We have to do everything we can.”
“We can’t!”
“Shh. Easy. Easy.” He tried to calm her as he checked his electric cords once more, wishing there were more he could do for her, for him, for all his kind. But there wasn’t.
Futility welled up in him, muffling every sense, every thought. All he could do was tug Sunglow by the hand past the Racs who lingered still outside his office, saying in answer to their insistent, anxious questions, “I don’t know what they’re going to do. Yes, I’m scared. Of course we have to fight. I don’t know how.”
He kept her hand in his. He tugged her across the darkening valley, past beds of moss and banks of honeysuckle. He turned to look at the Worldtree, high against the purple sky, emblem of creation and purpose and destiny.
Already their fellow Racs were spilling from apartment buildings into the street. Their voices sang, their pelts smelled of interrupted baths and dinner preparations and outright fear, their heads bent skyward, searching for signs that the rumors their friends had called them with were true. Or not. Preferably not.
Surely crowds were also in the streets of Worldtree City above the bluffs, and a kindr
ed din and reek were rising. But Dotson could hear no hint of that. The growing crowds around him filled his ears with their noise and blocked his path even, when he finally reached there, Sunglow still in tow, on his building’s very stoop.
“What’s going on?” The voice rang from the pot near the window even as the lights flicked on to dispel the advancing dark. “Are they leaving? Are the real Gypsies here too? I can see the space station and the fleet, and nothing’s happening. What is it?”
When the bot ran down, Dotson crossed the room to crane his neck and peer upward himself. Yes, the space station and the human fleet were visible, glinting sparks in the black sky. Just the other night, they had been above the roof, visible only from outdoors. Even synchronous orbits, he knew, did not look perfectly motionless from the ground. They shifted north and south, drifting, oscillating. And there they were tonight, clear of the roof’s edge by a finger’s width.
How interesting, he thought, and he was just beginning to realize how numb he was when Gypsy Blossom spoke again: “What’s going on? Tell me!”
Obedient at last, he told the bot what had happened in his lab.
In the ensuing silence, the anxious, fearful cries of the crowds outside the window seemed very loud.
“We’re overreacting,” said Sunglow. She both smelled and sounded desperate. “We have to be. Jumping to conclusions. Misinterpreting what they said.”
“Then why did they aim a gun at us? Why did they tie us up?” He grimaced as if in pain and watched the bot do the same. How many Racs, like her now, would decide the truth was too painful to accept? How many would deny the evidence?
How many would simply turn numb and let come whatever came, even death, disaster, the destruction of all their world?
After all, the best any Rac could do was to stand in the street and watch the sky. Or perhaps they could go to the landing field and stare at the great spaceship there. Or go home and stare numbly from the window.
She shrugged. She didn’t know how many would react her way, his way, any way at all. She didn’t care. “But they’re nice people. Some of them, anyway. Why would they… ?”
Seeds of Destiny Page 14
