“I remember now,” he said. “I met your ancestors when they were new. Even before the Eldest’s generation. When I was still a pig. That’s when I first found out how special the honeysuckle is to bots. They designed it, and you must have missed it more than I could possibly miss grass and trees.”
He wished someone could bring him what he had lost, even a sprig, a shoot, a seed. “Bert’s dead,” he said. “Jeremy Duncan was in the first load, and he told me.”
“Who was he?” Donna Rose did not look up from her gardening.
“A friend. He worked at BRA. Jeremy ran a lab for me in the suburbs. He gave genimals like Renny human bodies, when that was what they wished. He went through hell.”
The bot looked up at him then. “They all did,” she said. “You got me out just in time. Then you came too, and we missed it all.
He nodded, though he did not think he had missed it all, at all. He had seen his hell years before. After a moment of silence, he told her the little he had learned of Duncan’s story.
“He must be angry.”
“He didn’t say that. But yes, of course he is. When he told me how Renny used the blast from his Q-drive against the Engineers, he seemed very satisfied.”
* * * *
Renny was the first to arrive, his fur askew as if he had not yet, in the hours since he had returned from his rescue mission, found a chance to brush smooth the marks left by his suit. Letting his tail jut out to one side, its base wrapped in a stiff bandage, he sat on one haunch near the pot that had had Donna Rose so upset, noting that it was now empty, and stared at Probe Station’s Director. Alvar Hannoken was behind his desk, muttering to his computer, glaring at screens full of reports and faces and views of rooms—the library, the game room, the dining hall—crowded with the refugees the dog had brought to orbit. Renny said nothing, seeming content to stare and smooth his fur with his hands, contorting himself from time to time to use his tongue.
When Frederick Suida and Donna Rose entered the room, Hannoken looked up from his screens and said, “We’ll have to ship them out soon. We have the room to handle some of them. So do Nexus and the other stations. The Hugin and Munin habitats could take them all but say they won’t take more than fifty each. But they will take more, eventually. They’ll have to.”
Frederick gestured for silence and glanced toward the corridor behind him. “Don’t alarm them.” As his words died, Walt Massaba appeared in the doorway. Behind him, ushered by two of the security chief’s aides, Corlynn and Tobe, came a human, a pair of greenskins, and several bots. Two of the bots were carrying a wooden tub containing a few tiny sprigs of honeysuckle and a plant somewhat like the one Donna Rose had made Hannoken destroy so recently. This plant differed in that she was taller and her head and face seemed sculpted from a single massive flower. Beside her scurried a smaller bot whose disproportionately swollen bulb hinted that she had larger brains than her kin.
“Jeremy Duncan.” Frederick indicated the human with what was almost a smile. “I knew him when… He’s a gengineer.”
“A colleague then.” Hannoken came around his desk and offered his hand.
“Sam and Sheila Nickers.” Hannoken eyed the feathers on the greenskin woman’s scalp and the inserts on her cheek and jaw but said nothing. They were, perhaps, too routine, too common, to provoke his professional interest. “I understand,” said Frederick. “I understand that they were living with the bots in the city, helping out their teachers.”
Sheila Nickers held one hand toward the bots. “Narcissus Joy. She’s a gengineer too. And Mary Gold. Lemon Margaret. Jackie Thyme.” Each one, as her name was spoken, nodded her flowery head. “Chervil Mint. She’s the one who called for help. They raided the campus to free her, and that’s what started…”
“It’s been lonely,” said Donna Rose. “I’m glad you’re here, all of you.”
“Thanks to the dog,” said Jackie Thyme, and Renny winced as his tail tip twitched against the carpet.
Hannoken turned toward the bot in the tub and her smaller attendant. “And…?”
“The Eldest,” said Narcissus Joy. “And Eldest’s Speaker.”
“Aahh!” sighed Donna Rose. Her tone was awed, almost worshipful. “I knew of you. I never thought…”
Acrid, pungent scent filled the room as the Eldest bent her head and trembled. A keening cry burst from Eldest’s Speaker.
Sam Nickers explained briefly that the Eldest could not talk in words but only in odors, perfumes. The Speaker was her translator.
“I remember.” Frederick had to raise his voice above the noise. A wary expression crossed his face. “She’s much like the very first bots. They couldn’t walk, and they used their perfumes to make men do their bidding.”
“A later generation,” said Mary Gold. “After we lost that ability. She is no threat to anyone here. Nor are we.”
Hannoken looked skeptical. “I hope you’re right.”
The keening turned into words. “We once were many,” said Eldest’s Speaker. Frederick wondered if the neural circuitry necessary for translating odor to speech accounted for the greater size of the Speaker’s bulb. “We now are few. A remnant only of a mighty people. Greatly oppressed, winnowed by fate. Escaped the slaughter.”
Narcissus Joy nodded sadly. “So many of us,” she said. “So many of us died when the Engineers took over. We thought we were the only ones. And some of us had to stay behind.”
“To burn,” said Jackie Thyme.
Sheila Nickers looked at her husband. “Alice Belle was one of them. I saw her waving.”
“Ah, no.” Sam’s voice choked, and he bent his head for a long moment before he could speak again. “A friend,” he finally explained to the others. His face said that he had not known the bot had been left on Earth.
“There are others down there,” said Hannoken. He spoke to his computer and the wall screen to the right of his desk showed satellite photos. “Surveillance found some in the tropics.” He pointed to the broad region surrounding the Amazon River. Patches remained of the region’s once thick cover of jungle, rainforest. The rest had vanished to feed lumber and paper mills, to provide farmland and pasturage for the urban poor of half a continent. When the thin tropical soil soon played out…
Gengineers had reclaimed the desolation with oil trees; deep-rooted, broad-leaved paper plants, whose bark unrolled in snowy sheets a kilometer long; sugar trees, whose sap was syrup; grains that could make their own fertilizers and pesticides; potatoes that grew as purple ten-meter snakes atop the soil and needed no digging for their harvest; and more. But then the Engineers had destroyed much of the nonmechanical technology they hated. Now there were vast expanses of burned field and orchard and forest, bare red dirt, soot-streaked, charcoal-studded, as hard as rock, eroded gulleys, brushy scrub, and abandoned homes, towns, factories. There was no one to argue possession, for the land was once more derelict. That was what made it safe for refugees.
Hannoken pointed again. “And mountains. It’s hard to tell the bots from humans, except that they spend long periods standing still, outdoors. There’s a labor camp. They’re there, though it’s hard to say how many.”
“I haven’t been able to find Andy,” said Jeremy Duncan. When Donna Rose looked puzzled—Andy was hardly a bot name—he explained, “A human.”
Hannoken had the computer produce the latest view of the area from which Renny had brought his guests. “If he didn’t get on the ship…” He indicated the broad expanse of smoke-shrouded landscape. A shift to infra-red cut through the haze and showed blackened earth. There was no sign of the Engineer troops, nor of life on what had been the farm.
Duncan’s voice choked. “We met when they pulled the gengineers out of the labor camps. They wanted us to…”
Sam Nickers looked especially thoughtful when Duncan had described the cr
owds of Engineer protestors outside the Ginkgo County Community College campus. “Factionalism,” he said. “It happens with every revolution. They may wind up tearing themselves to pieces.”
“Will they leave anything for us to reclaim?” asked Frederick.
Sam shook his head.
There was another wave of scent, less acrid, more flowery. “What kind of ship?” asked Eldest’s Speaker.
Briefly, Renny explained what the Q-drive did. “We can land again,” he said. “We’ll rescue all we can. And then…”
“We’re building a larger ship,” said Hannoken. “An asteroid, the Gypsy. When it’s ready, we can leave. Perhaps we can find a world that’s all our own.”
“How many ships do you have now?” asked Narcissus Joy.
“The Quincy and the Quentin,” said Renny. “Four more are nearly done, and their pilots are being trained. There’s also the Quoi, a small test ship, but Lois took it on a supply run.”
“The Gypsy project,” said Frederick. “And Chryse Base, and Saturn. She’ll be back in a few days.”
“Then it’s fast,” said Sam Nickers. “Much faster than…”
Duncan shook his head. “Not fast enough to save us all. With just two ships of any size, it will take too long, and the Engineers will…”
“Buran and Stacey flew the Quentin,” said Renny. “They did fine, and we’ll be using all six ships.”
“And where will you put the refugees?”
“New quarters can be built,” said Donna Rose. “We’re already expanding the stations and habitats wherever we can. We’ll build new ones if we have to.”
There was another wave of scent, imperative, demanding, and Eldest’s Speaker said, “We can help. We too have minds and hands, and we too can build.”
* * * *
Over the next days, Probe Station’s communications center used the spysats that orbited the Earth to pinpoint certain sites in the wastelands of the Amazon and Congo basins, in the vast emptinesses of Australia and northern Canada and central Asia, in New England and the Yucatan Peninsula, wherever bots and others had found temporary safety in isolation and distance from the Engineers, who concentrated in the cities.
Frederick and Donna Rose were in his office in the construction shack. She was searching databases for whatever solutions she might find. He was striving to accelerate the effort to finish the last four Q-ships and to find the necessary materials to build living quarters for the bots Renny had already rescued and the greater numbers yet to come. “We need more ore,” he said. “More metal. More of everything.”
“Then send them to the Moon,” said Donna Rose. “Turn them into miners. Build quarters there as well.”
He was nodding and saying, “They could dig trenches, roof them over, seal the walls,” when Renny coasted through the doorway and growled, “Mechin’ litterheads! Won’t let me go. Won’t let me fetch them up here. Hannoken says we need places to put them first.”
“We do,” said Donna Rose. “We don’t yet have enough.” When he stopped beside her, one hand clutching at the edge of the seat to which she was strapped, she scratched behind one of his doggy ears. For a second he closed his eyes and let his tail wag, but then he growled again. “And they’re dying down there.”
She touched her keyboard, worked her mouse-glove. “Freddy? Look at this.” The screen before her showed an array of what looked like transparent globes interconnected by tubular passageways. “I’ve found an old scheme for a quick-and-dirty space station. Plastic balloons, inflated by air pressure.”
Frederick turned toward her and stared with interest at the screen. “But we don’t have the plastic.”
“We could make it. And then we could use the same material to seal the lunar trenches.”
“What would we make it from?”
“Vegetation. Renny could land on Earth with a few bots and cut trees. Or they could raid oil depots.”
Renny laughed. “Yes!”
Moments later, Hannoken’s face was on the screen and they were laying the proposal out for him. He in turn was asking his computer whether there were any chemical engineers on the Station who could set up the factory they would need to turn whatever organics Renny might bring to orbit into plastic. When the answer was positive, he gave Renny the go-ahead.
He had barely finished speaking when something caught his attention. He stared to one side of the screen in which they saw him. He looked pained, frustrated, angry.
Finally, he turned back to them and said, “We’ll need the space very soon. Look at this. Athena, play it again. Put it on the com.” New images filled the veedo screen, showing troops surrounding labor camps. A campus much like that where Jeremy Duncan had been enslaved was being razed, its residents marched off to a field of barracks surrounded by heavy artillery.
The image on the screen changed to show a broad, polished desk with a wooden nameplate that read “Arnold Rifkin.” Beside it rested a brass-knobbed swagger stick. On the other side of the desk sat a stern figure wearing a blue coverall bedecked with bits of polished metal.
A blare of martial music echoed throughout the construction shack to reveal that Athena had obeyed her master. The same pictures would be on every com terminal in Probe Station. The sounds would bellow from every outlet, with or without a screen.
The music fell silent, and then there were words:
“Orbitals! Come back to Earth! You are needed here more than you can possibly know! Bring back the machines, the resources, the assets you have stolen from us. Bring back the scientists and technicians who might replace them. Bring them back, and we will forgive your crimes.
“We demand your help in recreating the technology of the Machine Age. If you dare to withhold it…”
The screen showed a scene of ragged prisoners, both bots and humans, many of the latter modified in some way. They were surrounded by blue-clad soldiers holding leveled weapons. The sound of gunfire began. The prisoners fell in ragged, bloody heaps.
“We will kill them all.”
There was silence. Then the Station Director said, “That just came in. Now…” The screens in Frederick’s office subdivided to show a dozen, twenty, thirty faces wearing expressions of shock, outrage, fear. Several the computer had subtitled with “Nexus,” “Hugin,” “Munin,” “Moon,” and other labels. Most were marked “Probe,” and some of these were familiar: both the Nickers, Narcissus Joy, Jeremy Duncan, Walt Massaba. Hannoken’s own face remained at the center of each screen.
“We need…” Donna Rose’s voice was anguished.
“An all-out rescue effort?” Hannoken nodded soberly, his heavy jaw grimly set. “I agree. We’ve begun, and we have to continue. But there are some…”
“We can’t save them in any other way,” said Massaba, Probe Station’s security chief. “We can’t make them tolerant. “We can’t even conquer them and take away their guns. We don’t have the troops to take over a whole world.”
“We cannot intervene!” said a Nexus face. “It will mean war!”
“What can they shoot at us with?” asked Renny.
“Look,” said Hannoken. A screen blossomed with spysat photos. “They’ve found a few undamaged spaceplanes. And we’ve intercepted messages that make it clear they know where to find the rockets, the missiles, that the world mothballed a century ago. They can do it.”
“War is inevitable,” said Frederick. “We already have it.”
“And we’re right up front,” said the Nexus face. “In low Earth orbit, the easiest for them to reach.”
“No!” cried a Hugin face after a moment’s time-delay. “It’s all your fault! You and Director Hannoken. If you hadn’t let that creature, that dog, of yours go down there… Mechin’ cavalry to the rescue! Nothing would have happened! The gengineers would be safe.”
&n
bsp; Renny snarled. “Bots too,” he said. “The killing had already started, long before I ever met Freddy. Even before Dr. Hannoken made me.”
Frederick nodded. “Long before,” he said, remembering his own first encounters with the Engineers’ rabid attitudes. “And they’re clearly ready to bring it to us, if they can.”
“They are mad,” said Narcissus Joy.
“They will not stop,” said Sam Nickers. “Until everyone who does not agree with them is dead.”
“Can you stall them?” Frederick asked Hannoken. “Buy us time, while we…?”
“Freddy!” said Donna Rose. “No! You can’t…!”
“That is not enough!” cried Jeremy Duncan. “We have to rescue all of them, all the slaves, as many as we can. We cannot afford to stall! Every moment of delay means more deaths.”
“Yes!” said Donna Rose. “We can’t afford to stall. If we might have saved them, then all those deaths must be on our conscience. If we let them die, then we are just as much their killers as are the Engineers.”
“But we cannot save them yet,” said Frederick. “We have no room. The ships aren’t ready. And if we try, the Engineers will begin the slaughter.”
“We have to try,” said Donna Rose. “We have to threaten them…”
“Hit them,” said Duncan. “Hit them as hard as they hit us, or their slaves.”
“With what?”
Narcissus Joy was nodding in agreement with her kin. So were others, while those few fell silent who objected to any rescue effort, who thought it would lead to war as surely would an attempt to invade and force peace upon the Engineers.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 91
