Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  She sighed. Were they journalists? Or government intelligence agents? Were they local? Or did they come from Earth? It did not matter. She denied all knowledge of spaceship construction or operation. She laughed at the thought of attacking the Moon or Earth. The Engineers had them both, and they could keep them.

  In time the questioners stopped coming. Even the spectators thinned as the charm of a plant that looked like a human being with her feet buried in a plant pot wore off. It was not long before most of the Engineers passed by with no more than a glance, as often at the yammering veedo set or the massed flowers as at her in her cage. Yet some still did stop, and at least one returned again and again, though he always kept his back against the wall between the corridor mouths. He was a man of about her own age, dressed in the blue of the Engineers. His eyes were intent. His hair was black curls that looked always freshly wetted.

  She opened her eyes at the sound of breathing. She shuddered when she saw thin lips and coldly speculating eyes, as grey as cloud, not at all those of the man who had left his vantage point not long before though he had remained a question and a mystery in her mind. She thought she had noticed this man before too, but always surrounded by other passersby. Now he was standing among the plants that encircled the dais, studying the dais’s rim as if looking for a control panel. When he found nothing, he shifted his stare to her body, stepped close to reach through the bars, and…

  He drew back at the hum of tires on pavement, winked, and disappeared. She shuddered at the thought that he might return, perhaps at night when no one would be likely to interrupt his hands. Then she looked for whatever had interrupted him and found the veedo robot, its camera swinging to track the man as he nearly ran from the concourse. It had stopped just outside the mouth of a corridor.

  From time to time, she noticed Hrecker standing by the concourse wall, watching both her and whatever audience she had at the moment. That was when the looks of sympathy and pity vanished entirely and the laughs and threats grew louder.

  Usually she did not respond. But once, when a small boy had taken a pebble from a rose pot and hurled it at her, she withdrew her roots from the soil and turned to face him and his mother. She put her hands on the bars as if she intended to bend them aside. She opened her mouth and growled.

  The boy clung to his mother’s leg. The mother screamed and backpedalled as if Pearl Angelica’s mouth were full of fangs. Others screamed as well. Someone began to run.

  Seconds later the concourse was empty except for one man, Hrecker. He was laughing.

  * * * *

  He was a stocky man with a flattened, narrow face and a receding hairline, and he wore the coverall of an Orbital.

  Pearl Angelica leaned toward the bars of her cage. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “Marcus Yamoto.” He spoke softly as he inclined his high-browed head in her direction.

  “I haven’t seen any Orbitals here!”

  “They don’t welcome many. But I’m a trader. I have things they want.”

  A wave of suspicion suddenly made her draw back. Was he truly an Orbital? A trader? Coveralls were cheap. Had the Engineers thought they could win her confidence with an imposter?

  “What would they have to gain?” He chuckled, and then he added, “Your thought was obvious.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Shh. A message, but not one we want them to hear.” His mouth twisted when he saw the hope flare in her eyes. “Not that. Sorry. We’ve told them that only the Gypsy’s people know how to build a starship.” She nodded; that was true enough. “And the Quebec has gone back to First-Stop to report the ransom demand. It won’t be back for at least six weeks.”

  “What’s the message?” she whispered urgently.

  He suddenly looked far more sympathetic and pitying than any Engineer had managed. His voice turned even softer. “They let me wander around, but I’m sure they’re watching me.”

  She scanned the concourse. It was empty, and the veedo was displaying a late-evening show.

  “Back in the tunnel,” Yamoto said. “I didn’t see anything, but there could be hidden cameras and directional microphones. That veedo robot could be lurking just out of sight. There could even be mikes in these bars.” He touched one. “Or overhead.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Tell me!”

  “The Orbitals have no intention of trading you for the drive. They’re just stalling.”

  Her face and spirits fell even though his words did not surprise her.

  He nodded. “Yeah, it’s tough.”

  “But we really can’t afford to turn them loose.”

  He shook his head. “Not the way they are now. Maybe in a hundred years.”

  “Then…” Then they would kill her. The only question was how long they would wait before they did it. And what method they would use.

  “You have six weeks,” said Yamoto. “Maybe a little more.”

  She moaned.

  “No comfort, eh? I suppose not. But that’s six weeks when you can be useful. If you wish.”

  “How?”

  “Pretend to be a tree. It won’t be long before they’re sitting on this dais and talking to each other as if you were a tree. Listen to them. Tell me what they say.”

  “A spy.”

  “Even a femme fatale. I’ve seen the way some of the men look at you. Encourage them. Play up to them. Maybe you’ll get out and be able to move around.”

  “You want me to be a whore.”

  “If that’s what it takes. We’re at peace now, but…” He bit his lip and shook his head. He didn’t think it would last.

  “I don’t have much choice, do I?” She paused; he said nothing more. “You know about their robots?” He nodded. “Their plans to make von Neumann machines?” She explained when he looked puzzled and grinned mirthlessly when his complexion turned pale.

  “That’s the sort of thing we need to know,” he said. “It won’t make the Orbitals change their minds about ransoming you, but we need to know it.”

  “Can you stop them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Chapter Ten

  The air was cooling toward autumn frost, but the valley’s purple moss was still speckled with the white of blossoms and berries. Yet there was also change, for the yellow lines of paths were more numerous now. Most of the paths radiated from a single point, that watching place the Racs had laid out with stones, and they had been worn through the moss just in the most recent weeks.

  As evening fell, straggling lines of Racs descended from the bluffs and wound along those many radiants as they did each evening. They came from every one of the villages in the vicinity. They were males and females, adults and youths. No children were among them.

  No more than a tenth of the local population was on the move in any one evening. That tenth was chosen by strict rotation, omitting only the females with young cubs, the elderly, and the ill or infirm. The villages remained occupied by most of their adults and youths.

  They each brought a stone, just as they did every night, and when they approached the watching place they set their burdens in a pile near the entrance. The next day, other Racs would fit these and other stones in place.

  Only one seemed to think it strange that Wanderer, Stonerapper, and Shorttail, the strangers who had come to see the tree that held up the sky, joined in the community’s efforts. “Stop!” cried Leaf in her smoothest tones when she saw them pick up their stones each night and step into line. “Go away! Just sit and watch! Better yet, go home!” she cried in the morning, when they took stones from the waiting pile, passed some to other Racs, and set some on the walls themselves.

  Blacktop’s growling voice could calm her only briefly. “Hush,” he said. “Let them help. We need every hand. An
d remember, every stone they move gives them a greater sense that this watching place is theirs as well as ours.”

  “That is the trouble.”

  “They will never lead their people here to destroy it.”

  “But they will claim the right to watch with us. To attempt to climb the Tower.” Three small Racs clustered near their mother’s knees, looking up at her as if to ask what distressed her so. She cupped their heads in her hands. “To seize our children’s future.”

  “Yes,” said Blacktop. “And no. Not seize. But share.”

  Leaf snorted at him and pointed. “Look. They will destroy it. Already he takes our stones.”

  When Blacktop followed her finger with his gaze, he snorted himself, but more in amusement than in outrage. Stonerapper had picked a small slab of shale from the pile and was studying it carefully, slanting it against the light. As they watched, he nodded and put the rock in one of the pouches that hung from his belt.

  “A bone-rock,” said Blacktop. “You have picked them up yourself.”

  Leaf snorted once more and turned away from both Blacktop and the strangers he inexplicably tolerated.

  * * * *

  The watching place had grown. The arc of stone was narrower and deeper now, less like a parabolic dish antenna than a round-bottomed letter U. The triangular stem was gone, its stones scavenged for more important aspects of the construction. An observer, noting the smell of dust, mossberries, and many bodies, might have guessed that decades or centuries hence, the moss would long since have lapped across the bare dirt path that rimmed the wall outside, but the floor inside would be as bare then as now, every trace of moss worn away and kept away by the repeated passage of many feet.

  The walls were higher, stone fitted carefully to stone, the meter-high edges as straight and even as if the Racs were New England dry-stone masons transported from another age, another time. Single rounded blocks of stone stood within the enclosure, arrayed to repeat the line of the wall, U within U within U, leaving empty only a central aisle. In the opening of the arc was a pyramid of stone steps, constructed to surround and brace a bark-stripped pole four meters tall. Atop the pole was a wicker basket woven to mimic the bulbous tip of the Gypsies’ Tower.

  The Gypsies were careful not to interfere, but those whose business it was to observe the Racs had noted the resemblance of the pole to the staff Blacktop once had planted in the soil atop the bluff, of the basket to the fruit he had scooped and hollowed. Yet this pole resembled even more the Tower, which was now stripped wholly of its bark, smoothed of branch-stubs, polished so it glowed red and orange beneath the setting sun. The pumps that were filling the wood’s pores with mineral still throbbed. Bioblimps still hovered above and around the tip, while crews installed the first of the ceramic plaques that would someday reveal secrets of origin and nature to the Racs.

  The congregation filed into the watching place and sat upon the blocks, revealing their function as simple pews. They waited patiently, silently, unmoving, until every seat was taken and no Rac was left standing except one. That one then stepped onto the lowest step of the pyramid that held the miniature Tower. Anyone who stood or sat at the back of the stone-walled U could see him in line with and superimposed upon the base of the pole, while the pole itself and its basket were superimposed precisely upon the Tower beyond.

  The priest’s light yellow pelt stood out in the dusk as he lifted each hand in turn to his muzzle and scratched a formal greeting to his congregation. When they had replied in kind, he raised both arms to his sides until they were level with his shoulders. “Do we have offerings?” His voice was deep, rough, comforting to his fellows though to both bots and humans it sounded like a promise of mayhem. He beckoned with his fingertips. “Come. It is time. We cannot yet climb the Tower our gods have made to challenge us. But we can show them we stand ready to obey, to find the secrets of the world, to learn all that we must to build or climb or fly to reach the chamber of secrets so high above.”

  Arms still extended, he searched the congregation with his eyes. Then he turned, showing them his back and the dark stripe that ran from the top of his head to the end of his spine while he faced the pole and the Tower, their own simulation and past it the real one, so far unattainable. Blacktop bent his head back and up, staring at the Tower’s tip, snarled exultantly, and cried, “Who will be first?”

  One by one, the members of the congregation stood, opened the pouches that hung from their harnesses, and produced their offerings. Treasures in hand, they formed a line down the middle of the watching place and filed toward their priest.

  The first, a burly female with a scarred leg and a limp, stepped past Blacktop to the second step of the stone pyramid and held out a sheet of paper for his inspection. The priest, his arms still horizontal, nodded even though he could tell the paper was nothing but an outdated duty roster. The female then immediately put one corner of the paper between her lips, climbed the two remaining steps, and leaped halfway up the pole. Her claws sank audibly into the wood as she climbed, and in a moment her face was even with the opening of the basket. Her motions as she placed her paper within the basket seemed reverently slow, but it was only seconds before she was once more on the ground and walking back to her stone seat.

  Others followed her with books, computer cards and disks, instruction sheets, and a dozen other bits of human “knowledge” they had found dropped, mislaid, or simply set aside for a moment. The one exception was a young Rac whose creamy fur was marked with orange on his shins, belly, shoulders, and forehead. Known as Firetouch, he held out to Blacktop a length of bark covered with drawings of dumbos’ wings, leaves blowing on the breeze, and a flattened, tilted hand that bristled with narrow lines.

  “Garbage!” cried a menacingly smooth voice behind the priest. “That is not knowledge! Only pictures! Scribbles in the dirt!”

  Someone else laughed and added, “He has been doing that ever since he was a cub.”

  A third said, “How could he find true knowledge? He never ventures near the Tower.”

  Blacktop’s arms and shoulders fell. He turned to face the speakers. He shook his head.

  “Is this true, Firetouch?” His voice was as rough as ever. “Is this something of your own? Did you devise it?”

  Behind him, the other was still holding out the strip of bark, seeming confident and resolute. He nodded. When he spoke his voice too was rough. “Yes.”

  “Tell us, then, what it is.”

  Firetouch’s deep breath was plainly audible. “Dumbos’ wings,” he said. Now his tone was touched with the smoothness of apprehension. Would his gift to the Tower be rejected? Was it too crude? Too simple?

  “Like leaves in wind,” he said. He pointed with one clawed finger at the sketch of a hand. “Hold hand, your hand, in wind. Feel it push. It wants to move.” He indicated the bristling lines. “Up,” he added. “And up.”

  Clearly, Firetouch was one of those whose minds did not lend themselves to speech. Yet that did not mean his mind was useless, and he was after all articulate enough for his purpose.

  Blacktop bowed his head. Then he said, loud enough for all to hear, “You dream of flying.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it is you, and those like you, who will lead us to the Tower.”

  “But the humans already know how to fly!” cried the one who had already denounced Firetouch’s offering as garbage.

  “That is their knowledge,” said the priest. “We must learn it for ourselves, just as every cub must learn to walk.”

  “We teach them! As the humans should teach us!”

  “No,” said Blacktop. “No cub needs a teacher, but only encouragement. That…” He spun to point at the Tower with an outflung arm. “That is our encouragement.”

  He then gently pushed Firetouch toward the pole. “Go,” he said. “Make you
r offering.”

  Once the youth had leaped up the pole and down again to vanish in the congregation, once the few remaining Racs had deposited their scraps of paper or plastic in the basket, Blacktop turned back to them. Slowly he scanned his eyes across all the Racs in the enclosure of the watching place. He hesitated when he saw the visitors from that distant tribe to one side, near the wall. Near them, not an arm’s length away, sat Wetweed. Blacktop sighed at the thought that only two of his tribe, Firetouch and Wetweed, looked at the world to learn, and not just for what the Gypsies mislaid, dropped, and left behind.

  Stonerapper held something in his hands, something flat and heavy, a stone of course, perhaps the very stone Leaf and Blacktop had seen him pick up earlier.

  The priest waited patiently. Wetweed’s hands were empty. Would the visitor make of his stone an offering?

  Could a stone be knowledge?

  Other Racs realized where he was looking and turned their own eyes toward the visitors. Wanderer poked his companion with a stiffened finger, and Stonerapper jerked. He looked at Blacktop, at what he held, and then he shook his head. No. Not yet.

  The priest sighed and broke the expectant silence at last. “Only one of you.” He raised his hands imploringly. “Only one. All the rest of you believe that all the knowledge we must seek belongs to our Gypsy makers. That finding knowledge means picking up their leavings. That what they already know, there is no point to finding for ourselves.

  “They have told us that every star is a sun. Many suns have worlds. Many worlds have life. Some of that life must be as intelligent as Racs and Gypsies. And every such intelligent kind must learn the workings of its world for itself. Secrets are always new to those who have not met them before.”