Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  “Little sister? Answer—answer if you can!”

  She tried to speak, but no voice came.

  “Where are you, little sister?”

  “Here—” She was gaining strength from its glow of love. “Here I am.”

  “Wait for us!”

  She waited, and a shining thing came out of the darkness. It had no shape she had known, though the wings of it made her think of the mariposa she had chased one morning when it fluttered across the garden where Panchito had kept her hidden from the gringos. It had no color she had seen, but it was brighter than el arco iris he had once pointed out, that great bridge of light bent across the blue rain-curtain beneath a thundering cloud.

  “Who—” The strangeness and the beauty of it shook her voice. “What are you?”

  “You have no words for what we are.”

  “Are you de fuego?” She tried not to be afraid. “I see you shining like el fuego en la noche. Like lire in the night.”

  “If you see us as fire, we are fire.” It seemed happy with the word. “You may call us the people of fire.”

  “I am Meg,” she said. “Alphamega. El querido Vic gave me that name. Do you have a name?”

  “None that you have learned to say. You may call us—” She felt it touch her mind. “Call us Elder Brother.”

  “Hóla!” She wanted to smile. “Hello, Elder Brother.”

  “Hello, dear Meg.” It brushed her with its wings, and she felt a glow of love. “We have come to find you because we felt your troubles. We welcome you to live with us, if you can live without your body and leave it where it is.”

  “No! No! Nunca!” Her voice came like a whisper. “I must not leave it to die alone. Without it, I can never finish the work Vic created me to do. I must not die!”

  “Never fear us, little sister. We will never harm or hinder you.”

  “Can you—can you help me?”

  “We wish we could.” She heard sadness in the voice. “But your world is unknown to us. We cannot reach it, even to help you save your body. You must learn to live without it. Why should your old world matter to you now?”

  “Because of what the great Vic planned me for.” Her voice seemed to flicker in the dark like a candle in the wind. “He told me he had shaped me to help that poor world because he loved it. Men around him were making bad mistakes. He tried to warn them, but their blunders destroyed his dream. He died in the lab before he ever told me what I am to do. Now nobody knows.

  “A menos que—” Looking again at the being of fire, she felt the warmth of goodness. “Unless you know how to teach me.”

  The dancing colors dimmed.

  “We have no way to see your world.” The voice seemed saddened. “Though we had felt the glow of your mind, we could not feel or reach you while you were in your body. We cannot tell you what your task is, but we can give you new strength and understanding if you will come with us.”

  “Can I ever return to wake my body and learn the work Vic meant me for?”

  “Perhaps,” Elder Brother said. “If you grow strong enough. If your body lives. If you can find the way.”

  “Take me. Show me your land.”

  “We have no land.”

  “Cómo?” The rainbow wings were reaching to touch her, but she shrank away, afraid of their strangeness. “How can that be?”

  “We know of land,” he told her. “Many of us were born on worlds not too different from your own. We are those who learned to leave them.”

  “I—” She trembled. “I have never learned.”

  “Let us teach you. Let us lead you.”

  His fire-wings wrapped her, warm with love, and their power moved her fast and far. When they slowed again, great new stars were blazing in the darkness, more glorious than las estrellas that Panchito used to show her over the garden at night. One seemed nearer than the rest. They swam toward it. She saw that it was not a star, but a spinning pool of fire.

  The wonder of it dazzled her. It was brighter than the sun and flat like a plate. Close to the center, it whirled very fast. Farther out, more slowly. The colors of it were very strange, like none she had known, and more splendid than the rainbow.

  She felt afraid again.

  “We are safe, little sister. Nothing here can harm you.”

  “It seems very terrible.” She trembled again, and the bright wings wrapped her. “I thought it was a star. Panchito says the stars are terrible fires, like great bombas far in the sky.”

  “Once it was a star.” His voice felt warm and calm. “A very great star, greater than your sun. When most of its burning stuff was gone, the star exploded. The shell was blown away. The core fell in upon itself, making something so heavy that it cannot, be seen, because its rays cannot escape. The fire you see comes from broken atoms falling into that dark heart. Perhaps it is a terrible thing, but it also feeds our lives.”

  They came nearer. The disk of fire spread very large and very bright, even more terrible now since she knew that it could eat a star. She began to find new points of light flying like moths all around it.

  “Our city,” the bright being said. “Your own city now, if you wish to stay.”

  The city had no land beneath it, no houses like those she had known. She saw flying bubbles of something like glass, shimmering with colors she had never seen. She saw other shining shapes she had no names for. Some were joined together; others floated all alone.

  “The children of fire.” He moved a blazing wing to point them out. “Your own people now, if you will stay.”

  She found the children of fire. They made small swarms like las abejas, the bees that had come buzzing one day to a tree near the garden. They moved faster than bees on their own shining wings, which had more splendor than the mariposa’s wings. Some looked like Elder Brother. Others were different. All of them changed as they flew. Some came from far away, diving toward the fire as if they had grown hungry for it.

  One danced out to meet them. It seemed larger than the rest, the light of it brighter. Its wings opened wide to greet her.

  “The Father-Mother,” Elder Brother told her. “Coming out to welcome you.”

  “Bienvenida, hijita!”

  Father-Mother’s voice was like the songs of las pajaritas that used to sing in the trees beyond the garden. She felt glad to hear the soft Spanish words, which it must have found in her own mind.

  “I am Meg.” She let the strange-blazing wings fold around her, and she rested in the power of their love. “I like you. But how can I be your daughter? El querido Vic made me in the EnGene lab. There is no other being like me. There will never be.”

  “Dear little Meg, you do not understand.” Father-Mother spoke with no sound at all, yet with a voice that seemed deep and warm and rich with love. “We are all of us your kindred, closer to you than your Vic or any being on the world where your injured body is, because you are what we are.

  “We no longer require feeble body-shells like the one in which your own maker formed you. We live and feel and move in the dark radiance that flows from our dark star. We felt you growing toward our way of being, as most of us have grown. That is why we brought you here.”

  Feeling too happy to speak, she let the blazing wings caress her.

  “Peace, little one. You have come home.”

  “No—no puedo—” Her heart was torn. “It hurts to say it, but I cannot stay. Gracias a todos, but I must go back to my own home to do what I was made to do. If you can help me learn …”

  Her voice wavered and stopped, because the world of Vic and Sax and Panchito seemed so far away, lost behind her somewhere in the dreadful dark, so far she was afraid she could never even find it.

  “If we can,” Father-Mother said. “We will teach you anything we can. But your planet is so far that even the glow of your own new life was hard for us to feel.”

  “—stay.” She felt Elder Brother’s gentle voice. “You must stay, because your body is hurt too badly to serve your mind again. Here, we
can feed your new life until it grows stronger. Without us, Little Sister, you can’t survive alone.”

  “We love you.” Father-Mother’s radiant wings embraced her again. “We are your people now.”

  “Not yet.” It was hard to pull herself away. “Because my own world needs me. Its sad people are still my own. El querido Vic used to talk about its troubles. He created me to heal them, though he died before he ever told me how. I must go back to do what I can, even if I die.”

  “We want you with us.” Their wings grew dim. Darkened, she thought with sorrow for her. “You must stay till you are stronger.”

  “I must go,” she told them. “While my body lives.”

  Yet she felt too weak to leave. She stayed to let them guide her into their city, which was a great ring of strange-colored wonder, spinning very slowly outside the terrible whirlpool of fire that had swallowed a star. Some of its fire-winged people came out of their bright homes to wrap her in their loving rainbow wings, and she longed to remain here in the shelter of their love.

  “We come from far-scattered worlds,” Elder Brother told her. “Worlds of land, some like your far planet. Worlds of water, with no land at all. Worlds of gas, whose people have to float or soar forever. We are those who outgrew those planets when our minds learned to tap greater energies.

  “You can do that, Little Sister, here in the dark light of our black star. The change to the new way of life may be hard for you, as it was for most of us. When your mother world is all you know and all you love, leaving it is never easy, but—believe us, Little Sister! We can make you happy here.

  “You may find us strange at first, but our star is the world you were born for. We have great wealth to offer you, all the wealth we brought when we left our first homes behind. We can teach you their old sciences and their ancient arts. We can help you know and feel the hopes and joys and fears of many different peoples, of empires rising and races dying. We can help you share the history and the drama of many thousand worlds scattered all across the great galaxy, many of them older than your own. Perhaps, Little Sister—”

  The bright voice changed.

  “Soon, perhaps, the problems of you own little planet will no longer seem—”

  “Perdóname!” She had felt a fog of sudden danger growing thick and cold around her far body. “I can wait no longer. You have been muy amable. I wish I could stay here in your world with no land. But I feel great new danger to my own far body. I must go while I can.”

  “Not yet, hijita!” Father-Mother begged her. “Not till you are stronger.”

  “If I don’t go while my body lives, I can never find the way.”

  “Wait!” Elder Brother seemed distressed. “Please, Little Sister! Wait till you are stronger, and we can guide you.”

  “I have a guide,” she said. “In the new danger-light I feel where my body is.”

  “If you go, we may never find you—”

  “No le hace.” She pulled free of his clinging wings. “No matter. I must find my work and do it.”

  She flew away alone.

  “Come back!” His calling voice grew faint behind her. “Come back, Little Sister! Come back if you can!”

  The shining splendors of their city faded behind her, and then the dreadful beauty of that great wheel of light around the dark and dreadful pit that swallowed stars. Far from the power of its dark light, she felt her strength and courage draining away.

  Again she was all alone.

  She had let them take her too far. The thread she must follow was drawn too thin. The danger-cloud she had felt around her body was only a faint red fleck in the world of nothing else at all, but perhaps, con buena suerte—

  Perhaps, with luck enough, it could guide her home.

  39

  “Somewhere,

  Dying …”

  The airport lights were still out, but Anya heard more sirens coming. The car keys lost in the dark, all she could do was wait—and wonder. Besides Sam Holliday, who else could have known she wasn’t Keri Grant? Who had been clever enough, bold enough, to steal the general’s jet? Who else had got aboard it?

  Patrol cars came roaring and skidding around her.

  “Hey? Who the hell are you?”

  Post security men were dragging her out of the car. Baffled and furious, they wanted to know who she was and who she had seen and what had brought her back from Maxon after midnight. Alphamega was missing! Clegg had exploded when he heard about it, more perturbed by the escape than by the theft of his jet. Her part in the break had to be explained. Still shaking, still bewildered, she whispered what she could about her whispering abductor, but nobody believed what she said.

  Not till Holliday arrived. Grim-faced and edgy, he took her to his office to question her himself. Still she had no answers that pleased him or anybody. Something about the queer, breathless rasp of her captor had been half familiar, but she had seen the man only as a shadow in the dark and she found no name.

  “I’ve no idea who it was,” she told him. “The guy knew a lot about me, but he spoke in a queer hoarse whisper and never let me see his face.” She shivered. “He really meant to kill me if I didn’t go along.”

  Holliday seemed more sympathetic than anybody else, but the sun had risen before he let her go home. Her head throbbed. Groggy from fatigue and stress, she was still too jittery for sleep. Two aspirins didn’t help. She was stirring instant coffee into a cup when her phone rang.

  “Grant?” The twangy Yankee drawl of her new Kremlin contact, sharp with impatience. “Where’ve you been?”

  “A problem at the post.” That was all she wanted to say.

  “Whatever happened, I want a full report.” His voice turned imperative. “I’ll pick you up for lunch.”

  “Okay.”

  She had to agree, though she disliked everything about him. A short, bouncy little man, he wore a neat black goatee and bore a ripe aroma of chronic flatulence never entirely disguised by the Burleigh burning in his underslung briar. Mysterious about his actual name, he signed himself and his books “T. Bradleigh Barlow.” A writer of what he called exposes, he had a contract with a small New York publisher for The En-Gene Mystery: Omen of Doom.

  With no quarters available at the post and General Clegg hostile toward his reputation for lurid sensation, he had set up his word processor in a little house in Maxon, just across the alley from Anya’s own garage apartment. They parked their cars on the same vacant lot. Playing a role of casual friendship, he took her out for occasional meals at Juan Wong’s Taco Chinatown or sometimes to the Norman Towers in Piedmont.

  On those drives, he had received her reports and delivered new instructions from the Center. She disliked being alone with him in the car. Trying to play the same sort of romantic rogue he had tried to write about in novels nobody would publish, he pushed himself upon her until she looked him in the eye and told him she would kill him if he touched her again. Afterward he appeared to enjoy the harsh messages he brought her from Moscow.

  At noon today, she let him pick her up. Juan Wong’s place was only half a dozen blocks down the highway. He parked there and turned, scowling through his heavy-rimmed glasses, to talk in the car. Somehow, he had already learned as much as she knew about the escape. Trying to blame her for anything he could, he still appeared pleased with the trouble he foresaw for her.

  “So you’ve fumbled again.” Nodding, he paused to relight the briar. “I’m afraid we’ll have to find a more competent agent to complete the mission.”

  “Not yet,” she told him. “I’m still the agent in place.”

  “A double agent.” Puffing, he squinted critically through the smoke. “Sometimes we must use them, but we never trust them far. In this situation—” He paused to puff again. “You say you were kidnapped and forced to drive that guy to the plane. Which looks pretty odd. How do I know—how does the Center know you’re playing straight?”

  “You’re a courier.” She sniffed at his odor. “Nothing more.
You have no authority over me.”

  “I forward reports.” He smirked. “My own as well as yours. I tell you now that I can’t continue to express any confidence whatever in you or your mission.”

  “Reporting on me is not your business.”

  “It will be.” He blew smoke in her face. “When the Center begins to see through your ploys. Look at this Holliday. You claim you trust him because he’s Clegg’s son. On the face of it, a pretty ridiculous reason. The Center has never really understood why he should defect to you.”

  Though he had the air conditioner on, she rolled down a window.

  “He didn’t.” Her voice was carefully even. “What we have is a very limited alliance. Clegg was fighting for control of a biological weapon. Holliday and I agreed that the world will be a better place with no science of the sort that killed Enfield. The secret of what happened seems to exist only in that synthetic monster. We agreed that she ought to be destroyed.

  “That’s the situation as I explained it to the Center. I believe the matter was debated in high circles. Perhaps even in the Politburo. Certain persons were reluctant to abandon our own battle for the weapon. They were told, however, that we had very little chance to beat the Glavni Vrag. Better erase the secret than let them get it. The final consensus was to support my present mission. To eliminate that genetic creation.”

  “With what results?” Rasping the accusation, he stopped to turn the air conditioner higher. “You have let some unknown group kidnap the creature and disappear with her. God knows who they are or where they took her!”

  “God?” She grinned at him. “Or Lenin?”

  “Comrade, your own predicament is too grave to joke about.” He stabbed the pipestem at her. “You have wasted our resources and our time, achieving less than nothing. Unless I can report something more positive within a very few days, the Center is prepared to send a separate force to kidnap Belcraft for our own interrogation.”

  “Here in America?” She let her eyebrows rise. “That wouldn’t be easy.”

  “Neither was Stalingrad.” He might have been quoting the lurid spy novels he couldn’t sell. “Mother Russia is desperate. Comrade, have you let yourself forget the unsolved mystery of what killed Enfield? A holocaust that could spread to all the world. You are rolling dice for the life of all mankind.”