The word quickly spread.
General Lyapunov and his staff monopolized the laser com for days with their planning, but there were moments when general and captains were eating or sleeping. Then others seized the chance to chat with friends and share their responses to the latest discoveries about the world that waited below for their subjugation.
The coons were indeed building a space station. It wasn’t large, and it wasn’t sophisticated. It was just an unspinning framework of girders to which were attached solar panels and gleaming cylinders in which a few of the coons would be able to live and work for a few weeks or months until the lack of gravity or centrifugal force weakened their bones too much to continue.
There were no signs of Q drives or orbiting weaponry.
The small launch center from which the coons operated their infant space age occupied flat land near the equator, beside an ocean.
There were signs that the coons knew what war was. Even from their great height above the planet, the Engineers could see what could only be military bases, shipyards, and airfields. There were even two depots for armored vehicles, tanks.
The humans laughed. They were centuries ahead. They had the high ground. And all the weight of righteousness was on their side.
The coons would be easy meat.
Chapter Eight
“Have you read this?” Gypsy Blossom hefted the massive book she was reading. It had taken her only a few weeks of children’s tales and VC programs to pick up the skill. “Do you know what it says?”
“No,” said Dotson Barbtail, his voice a relaxed and peaceful snarl. He sat cross-legged on his sleeping pad. Beside him was a block of paper on which he was drafting another report for Senior Hightail. “The priests tell me all I need to hear about theology.”
The report would say that at last the samples had begun to come in, the cells had grown, the enzymes were being found, all was going well. It would not say that the true reason why he was making progress was …
“Uh!” He jerked when the fine-toothed comb found a snag. Sunglow knelt behind him, working on his fur.
“History.” Sunglow picked at the tangled fur. “You should take it more seriously.”
“I do take it seriously.” He twisted to look over his shoulder, but neither his tone nor his expression suggested that he wanted to argue. Life had become so much simpler and less stressful since she had pushed her way into his apartment. He no longer had to struggle to keep her at arm’s length, and that meant he had time and energy enough for work once more.
“But The Book of the Founder isn’t history,” he added. “It’s gossip and foggy memories, rumors and dreams. Tales told by ancients to children. Not history.”
“It says …” The VC across the room was dark and silent, the window curtained against the night outside. A gap between the drapery panels let a single doll look out upon the room. A light angled a beam across the bot’s shoulder. Other tomes were piled on the floor beside her.
“It says, ‘You are gods,’” said the Founder. “Or makers. And all gods have enemies who seek to undo their works. The battle is ancient and eternal, and it has come to us.”’”
“He was supposed to be talking to the Remakers before they left,” said Dotson. “That much I know.”
“To distant workers preparing the Worldtree,” said Sunglow. “We know these tales at home. The Founder was watching from across the valley when an enemy hidden among the Remakers tried to kill a Remaker hero.”
“What did the Founder mean?” asked Gypsy Blossom. “Can gods have enemies?”
“‘Your ancient enemies remain.’” Sunglow paused in her combing while she quoted. “‘And they are ours as well. We will hold this in our minds and in our histories. You will leave, and in your absence they may try to destroy your works. We will not permit them to succeed.’
“He meant there is a war between good and evil, light and dark, knowledge and ignorance, making and unmaking.”
Someone shouted in the street outside the building. Sunglow stopped talking and cocked her head toward the curtained window. Dotson and Gypsy Blossom did the same.
More voices rang out in cries and shrieks and shouts. The din swelled as if the number of voices were doubling with every breath.
“What’s going on?”
Dotson shook his head. “I can’t tell what they’re saying.”
Gypsy Blossom sighed and squatted on bending knees and hips to set her book on the pile beside her. She was now as tall as any Rac, and her legs were sleek with muscle. But her feet remained buried in the soil from which she had grown, while a forest of slender roots sprang from her calves and shins.
“War?” asked Sunglow. “I didn’t think we were close to that.”
Gypsy Blossom was reaching for the curtain as Dotson said, “It can’t be. I hear no guns or bombs.”
“That’s what chased the Remakers from their own home,” said the female Rac. “It forced them to come to our world and to raise us from the beasts. And when they left, it rose between the tailed and tailless as if the Remakers’ enemies were indeed among us.”
“A generation of war,” said Dotson. “But …” He had to raise his voice against the growing din outside. What was going on out there? The night should be quiet and peaceful, not …
“Two generations. And two more of oppression. My people are still crushed, confined to Farshore, still kept from the Worldtree.” Her voice edged higher in pitch as if she could not suppress a deeply embedded anger. She did not seem to be responding to the noise outside.
“Not if they accept the faith.” His own tone smoothed and tightened—she was contrary and argumentative and wrong, and … Was it that? Both knew that they could fight, but his muscles were tensing, his fur rising, his pulse pounding in the great arteries behind the joints of his jaws, far more than he had ever felt in a simple argument. The din outside must, he thought, be lowering his threshold for anger, for rage, or his body was responding to the elemental hysteria of the mob beyond the window. Was this what it was like to be a soldier among other soldiers, facing an enemy army, ready to kill or die?
Sunglow’s body matched his swollen tension as she sang, “We have our own faith.”
“Which is not that of the Founder. His own people turned away from him. Ours did not, and we can already see a day when we will go in search of the Remakers.”
“We hardly need to! They will return when we deserve to see them once more.”
“You help me more than you know,” said Gypsy Blossom gently. She looked at the pair of dolls on the windowsill and the miniature ringed tower beside them. She twitched the curtain until it slid aside on its rail, let it fall back against the window’s edge, and turned toward them once more. “You tell me and you show me. If one says ‘Go,’ the other says ‘Stay.’ It almost seems that intelligence means opposition.”
“Even with your kind?” asked Dotson. He sighed relief, and some of the tension went out of his back and shoulders. They had needed the interruption.
“I do not know. I am intelligent, but there is only one of me. But there’s many more than one in the streets out there.” She gestured, and the two Racs finally joined her at the window to watch the growing crowd as it spilled from doorways and flowed around corners. Every face was tipped upward, every arm was pointing, every voice was screeching in excitement.
“What are they staring at?”
The street lights went out.
Sunglow turned out the apartment’s lights. Dotson leaned close against the glass and craned his neck to see upward. But the building’s overhang blocked whatever was there to see.
Someone slammed a fist against the apartment door. “They’re here! They’re here! They’ve come back at last!”
“Who?”
But the question hardly nee
ded an answer. There was only one “They” who had gone, one “They” who could possibly return.
“Let’s go.”
In the dark and haste, neither noticed the agony on Gypsy Blossom’s face. She too wished to see whatever was in the sky, but she could not leave her pot.
* * * *
The night outside the building was no darker than it ever was or could be on a moonless world. Yet it felt darker, for the lights that usually glowed on streetcorners and in windows were off, the skyglow from Worldtree City atop the bluffs was gone, and the Racs who milled and cried and emitted acrid scents of excitement in the street created a sense of blindness and confinement. The din rose and fell, and when it was at its lowest, one could hear more cries belling from the more crowded streets above the valley’s rim. Whatever it was that had brought every Rac out of doors had spread its influence much wider than the valley alone.
“Look!” cried a voice as shrill as flight or murder.
Arms stretched high.
“There!”
Fingers pointed.
“There!”
Eyes gaped.
“There!”
“What is it?” whined Sunglow’s voice in Dotson’s ear. Like all the other Racs in the street, she was staring upward, pointing as she spoke.
High, high above the valley, off center to the south, the spark of the space station the Racs were building floated in space.
A finger’s width to one side glowed a ragged double quincunx of brighter sparks.
Now it was his turn: “What are they?”
“They’re moving.”
And as the moments passed, she proved to be quite right. Dotson smelled the hint of coming warmth in the air, of declining rain and damp, of life only lately roused for another season of growth. Spring was only a few weeks old, another summer was just ahead, and yes, strange things were in the sky. The ten spots of incandescent light were moving indeed, drawing nearer to the space station.
“Like moths to a candle,” someone said.
Dotson’s heart was in his throat. He knew what he hoped the strange lights were. He knew what they had to be. But where did they come from? Who did they bring?
He shook his head and looked at the female beside him. “They might not be that close to the station. They could be farther out. Or closer.” But he did not believe his own words. The coincidence was too great.
“Are they attacking? Or … ?”
A red-orange glow illumined the windows of one of the hotels that overlooked the valley and made it visible in the dark. Murky shadows obscured the glass as the building began to shine from within. Tongues of flame appeared.
Sirens screamed above the noises of Worldtree City’s streets, but their sound did not seem to move. Dotson thought they must be mired in the crowds, and he wondered how many more buildings would burn.
As if controlled by a single switch, the strange lights in the sky went out.
The crowd noise stopped. A heartbeat later, so did the roar from atop the bluffs.
“Thundertrees,” said Dotson. “That’s what they have to be. They’re in orbit now.”
“Near the station,” said Sunglow. “They’re not moving now.”
“It’s hard to tell.”
“They’re not ours,” someone said.
“They must be huge,” said someone else, “for their flames to be so visible.”
The crowd was silent for a moment more, watching and waiting. When the lights did not reignite or move, a murmur rose, a susurration like wind in the leaves of a forest.
In the distance, someone screeched, and then another, and another. Soon the din was as great as it had ever been, and the streets reeked of panic and hysteria. More buildings were aflame on the valley’s rim, bonfires to greet the gods. More sirens wailed, moving now.
Finally someone turned the street lights on again.
* * * *
No one slept that night.
People lingered in the streets, staring upward into the haze of urban skyglow, sniffing at the smoke of the fires and the fading mob-reek, wondering together, saying, “Spaceships, yes. Starships. But could they really be our Remakers, come to inspect our space station and judge us for our suitability to join them in the stars? Or are they aliens, utter aliens, unlike both us and our Remakers? And if so, then what? Are they benign? Or not? Should we celebrate? Or mourn? Should we welcome them? Or flee?”
People went indoors to turn on their VC sets, though they found no answers there. The wonder in the sky was on every channel, but none of the experts dragged before the cameras could at first do more than ask the same questions people were already asking each other.
Yet it was not long before the experts had a little more to offer. VC cameras were patched into the astronomers’ telescopes. Space-station workers were taken off their jobs to send more images homeward. Soon every one of First-Stop’s VC screens bore the resulting images of mushroom prows and bundled pods, reminiscent of designs recorded on Remaker plaques though not quite the same.
“Not quite the same,” said Sunglow. “But does it look like—”
“No!” cried Gypsy Blossom in clear frustration. “I told you before, I have no memories of the Gypsies. I was only a seed. I know no more than you.”
“All our attempts at communication are futile,” said the face on the VC screen. “We have tried every radio and VC frequency. We have used lasers. We have even aimed floodlights at the ships’ viewports. And they do not respond.”
An off-camera voice asked, “Are you sure there’s anyone aboard? They’re not just automatons?”
“We have detected ship-to-ship messages, so …”
* * * *
All that day the mystery possessed the world.
The strange ships remained in orbit hard by the embryonic space station. They remained deaf to all attempts to contact them, silent except among themselves, aloof. The aliens’ identities and their intentions remained unknown.
Many of First-Stop’s people remained in the streets, staring into a sky where they knew the ships hovered high above them, made invisible by day. Others stayed close to their radios and VCs, anxious for any and every scrap of information that might ease the mystery. Others hosed down the coals that lingered in the ruins of the buildings that had burned in the night and began the task of clearing away the rubble.
Dotson Barbtail spent part of the day in his Worldtree Center office, trying to finish his report. When the words kept blurring before his eyes and his thoughts could not stop chasing questions about the aliens through his brain, he wandered the hallways and found no one else, not even Senior Hightail, in the building. He wound up in his lab, next door to his office. But his ability to concentrate was no better there. When he dropped the second flask of cultured bacteria—neither broke, thank the Founder!—he set himself to other tasks. He washed dirty glassware and other tools. He dusted his bookshelves. He organized his desk. He washed his windows. And when he ran out of chores to keep him busy, he went home, where Gypsy Blossom and Sunglow had remained near the VC.
Not, he thought, that the bot had much choice.
* * * *
Once more it was dark outside the apartment window. Once more the streets were full of people and the street lights were off. This time, however, the crowd was almost silent as it stared into a sky where wisps of cloud threatened to blot out the view of the alien starships. Most of the noise came from the windows beside the street, where residents had set their VCs with their sound turned up as far as it would go.
There was view after view of great ships rotating in space, spinning, twirling. “Centrifugal force,” said a Rac voice. “It gives them a sense of weight inside those ships. We’ll need to do that ourselves when we build bigger stations. And starships of our own, of course
.”
Here was the rim of a mushroom prow and a row of round hatches, and an expert saying, “… much smaller. Too small for personnel scaled to fit the viewports and handholds we can see.” The view shifted to show viewers what the speaker meant. “Are they for weapons? Missiles? Are they covered to protect them from dust and debris while the ship is moving? Or to keep us from seeing these alien creatures’ true intentions?”
Here were rows of symbols painted upon the alien ships’ metal skins. “The characters look like distorted or decorative versions of those the Remakers wrote on their plaques. That tells us these aliens are kin to our Remakers. They must come from the same world, speak the same language, share the same history.” No one dared to speak out loud the obvious truth: If the aliens were kin to the Remakers, that did not mean they were necessarily friends to the Remakers and their makings.
“What do the characters say? They come in combinations we can pronounce, which says they spell out words. Most of these ‘words’ are meaningless, but perhaps they are names such as we paint on watercraft. If so, the largest of these ships is the Ajax. The rest are the Bolivar, Bonami, Cascade, Drake, Gorbachev, Pizarro, Saladin, Toledo, and Villa.”
Here was an interview via VC with the spaceworkers who were building the space station. The spaceworkers were burly, their faces rounded by retained fluid, their fur spiky with low humidity and static. Their interviewer was a carefully, sleekly groomed female whose face told anyone who didn’t know that kidneys worked much better with the aid of gravity. “How do you feel with these mysterious beings so close?” she asked. “Are you nervous?”
“More like mad,” was the high-pitched reply. “They’re too short-tailed close.” Sunglow snorted at the adjective.
“Are you worried?”
“Who wouldn’t be? Aren’t you? Aren’t the folks down home?”
“What will you do if—”
“Die. What else?”
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 132
