Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  And finally, at long, long last, the suspense ended. The images on all the screens shattered into jagged lines and colorful fuzz. The sound spat and hissed and sparked. And as soon as Dotson and Sunglow and Gypsy Blossom, as well as all the Racs in every street in every city on all the world of First-Stop, were staring at the nearest VC screen, the picture and the sound returned.

  The picture was first, and it was such that if there had been words, no Rac could possibly have heard past their compulsively fixated focus on that image—naked skin, fur only on top of the skull, ears on the sides of the head, flat face.

  “Remakers!” rose the scream in the streets. “The gods are back! They are!”

  Dotson Barbtail stared at the bot by the window. The face on the screen was much like hers, though it had hair where she had petals. He had also seen faces of the same type, the same species, on the Remakers’ plaques.

  But were these truly Remakers?

  The gods had enemies, didn’t they?

  And when the gods had left the Racs to develop on their own, once they were gone, absent, those enemies would try to destroy their works. The Founder had said so.

  Sunglow was looking at him as if she were sharing his thoughts despite his silence. He guessed they showed on his face.

  The din outdoors said that hardly anyone else had similar reservations. The face on the VC screen was a Remaker face, a Gypsy face, a human face, and all Rackind was about to be rewarded for its obedience to its creators.

  The face spoke, and silence fell.

  “Greetings,” it said, and though its accent was strange, the word was comprehensible. The language the stranger spoke was the same as the language the Remakers had left their makings.

  “We come from Earth,” said the face on the screen. “We bring gifts of peace and prosperity and purity as we have to all the worlds of our sun. But before we may present those gifts, we must land on your world. Confer among yourselves. When you have decided where you would like us to come down, call us. We will be listening.”

  The VC screens were once more filled with random electronic noise, instantly replaced by the Racs’ own stations and talking heads.

  * * * *

  The Worldtree towered high above the buildings of Worldtree Center. Its top was higher even than the crests of the bluffs that were the valley’s rim, and from it one could look down upon the environs all around. There was Worldtree City and its streets, there the valley’s lake, there the ends of the bluffs, tapering abruptly toward the valley’s entrance and the ancient landing field just beyond.

  Dotson Barbtail and Sunglow had found a place to stand on one of the many low hummocks that were scattered in the gap between the arms of bluff. Not far to one side was the small stream that drained the lake and spoke of that long, long gone time when a meteorite had excavated the valley as a crater, the crater had filled with water, and the water had found a weak point in the crater wall. Their hummock had once been a mass of rock the torrent had not swept away.

  The only torrent there that day was one of bodies. The ground was damp. Gray clouds rolled toward the horizon, on their way to elsewhere. And every resident of Worldtree City, the valley, and all the towns within two hours’ travel seemed to be there. Racs covered the steeply sloping tails of the bluffs. They spilled into the moss fields on either side of the road that linked field and valley. They sat on rooftops. All faced the landing field.

  The road was blocked by a flatbed truck on which stood a miniature Worldtree. By its side stood a priest, arms raised, ritual cloak fluttering in a light breeze, voice already hoarse with exhortation. Worshippers surrounded the truck, their own arms raised in reply. Acolytes shook baskets in front of every face and begged donations.

  “They are so sure,” said Dotson. “They have convinced themselves that these ships carry the Gypsies, our Remakers. They forget that our gods had enemies. They forget that the enemies of our gods must be our enemies as well.”

  “No!” cried Sunglow. “You’re too cautious. They have to be the Remakers. And their arrival is a sign.”

  Dotson tried not to snort. He did not believe in signs.

  But others did. Beside them a young male, as tailless as Sunglow, raised a fist. “Yes! Our time is coming! We were the last of the Racs to be Remade. We are the most perfect of the Remakers’ makings. Now they will throw down the tailed usurpers. We will have our due.”

  A tailed male shook his head. “It makes no difference. If they mean us ill, there is nothing we can do. We have not had time enough.”

  “They cannot mean us ill,” said Sunglow. “They are good. They have to be. They are the gods.”

  “Or devils,” Dotson thought, but he kept the words to himself. There was no need to argue or fight when the answers even now were riding down from orbit and would soon stand before them all. He thought most Racs must agree with Sunglow, for the faces all around him were glowing with expectancy and joy and worship. He wondered how many knew how uncertain the future truly was, how all Rackind now walked in utter darkness on a path that at any moment might disappear in a yawning pit.

  When the alien ship thundered out of the sky, Dotson and Sunglow and every other Rac covered their ears with their hands and squinted and screamed great screams of neither joy nor dread. None gave a thought to the moss that was being incinerated, the soft picnic ground being baked as hard as pavement, the decades recovery would demand.

  Their gods, thought most, were returning.

  Chapter Nine

  The spacesuit gave Marcus Aurelius Hrecker hardly more room than did his own skin. Worse, it was stiff and unyielding, resisting every motion, and he had to play Tarzan in it.

  At least, the orange cable that linked the airlocks in the unturning noses of the Saladin and the Bonami looked like a vine, twisting this way, that way, never hanging in a gravitationally defined catenary. Fortunately, he wouldn’t have to swing on it from ship to ship, or brachiate, or fight a lion. He would only have to grip the trolley that clung to the cable right in front of his face. His thumbs would turn its electric motor on, and it would tow him away from his ship into the gulf of space between …

  “Ready?” The voice rattled in his helmet. The crewman was beside him, holding with one hand to the edge of the lock. “Then go.” The gauntleted fist rapped his helmet. He pushed against the ship’s metal with his boots. And …

  No. Not between the stars, for wasn’t there a star, a sun, just behind the Saladin? The ship had been positioned to keep him in shadow even though the visor of his helmet would darken instantly if sunlight hit it. But that meant space seemed empty and he was all alone on the edge of an impossible precipice about to fall forever and forever and …

  He stared at the world beneath his feet, and that brought him back to himself. No. He could not possibly fall forever. The worst he could do was fall out of orbit, spiral down, burn to a fiery streak of ash, and sift to earth.

  Not Earth. Nor Mars. This was not his world, and even this space was alien, its shape defined by a star that was not Sol. Light years from home. If the Bonami vanished, if the cable broke, if he let go, he would die a long, long way from the ground that held the bones of his ancestors. He would be more lost than a human being, a human soul, had ever been before.

  He clung tight as the Saladin fell behind him and the cable writhed ahead. He could feel the humming of the trolley’s motor through the fabric of his gloves. Remembering his instructions—”Don’t go too fast!”—he flicked the motor off and coasted and wished he could feel a wind of passage against his skin. But there was only the pressure on his hands, the initial inertial swing of his body, the elastic rebound of his joints, the tug of the line that tethered his canister of personal belongings to his waist. There was also the stale odor of whoever had used the suit before him.

  When the cable’s solid orange show
ed stripes of black thirty meters from the Bonami, Hrecker turned on the trolley once more, reversed its traction, and slowed. The nose of the ship loomed before him. The trolley bumped the eyebolt at its end, set just outside the airlock, and he swung. His knees slammed into the wall, the canister bumped his tail, and he was there.

  While he reached for the edge of the lock and pulled himself to what felt like better safety, the Bonami’s crewman unfastened the trolley, unlatched the eyebolt, and began to coil the cable, looping it from his elbow to the fork of his hand, over and over. Hrecker supposed that meant no more Engineers were transferring from ship to ship.

  The lock’s inner hatch had a small window through which he could see Tamiko Inoue waiting for him in the suiting chamber. He waved one hand, and the outer hatch closed, air hissed from storage tanks, and as his suit lost its stiffness, infrared lamps glowed just long enough to warm its surface.

  As soon as he had the helmet off his head, he said, “Renard didn’t want the job?”

  “General Lyapunov thought one of his aides should go. Me.” She was undoing the suit’s fastenings. “And I wanted you.”

  He grinned. “Missed me, did you?”

  “Fathead. Didn’t you?” She sidestepped as his arms came free of the suit. “Not here.” One hand indicated the security camera positioned to cover the entire room. Beside it perched a mouse-sized robot biplane, its propeller still. “You know where the suit goes.”

  But he only dropped the suit to the deck. “They know how long we’ve been apart.” One hand caught hers, and she did not resist his tug.

  A few minutes later, he found an empty locker, hung the suit on the rack inside, and plugged the umbilical into its life support unit. The small amount of oxygen he had used on the trip between ships would soon be replaced. The ubiquitous robots would scour the interior clean of nearly all his body odor and dander. “You’re in charge?”

  “Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “The captain will handle the high-level stuff. We’re just supposed to get them to show us around.”

  “Spies,” he said.

  “Something like that. The General wants to know if there are any signs of Q tech or gengineering.”

  “We already know the Gypsies were here. The language …”

  “But that doesn’t say the coons are just as bad.” She was opening the canister that had protected his possessions from vacuum. Inside was a small duffel bag. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “My place.”

  “No cameras.”

  “And we won’t be interrupted.”

  He grinned. “Shouldn’t I report in?”

  “‘They know how long we’ve been apart,’” she quoted at him.

  “You’re laughing at me.”

  “Would I do that?”

  He was not surprised to find her room much like the one he had occupied on the Saladin. It had two narrow, fold-down bunks. But only one showed any sign of use.

  “No roommate?”

  “I told you I had some perks.”

  * * * *

  They needed both bunks when the Bonami lit its Q-drive to thrust itself out of orbit and down, into atmosphere, through high, thin clouds, roaring, thundering, slowing toward the moment when the Engineers would first touch alien soil. Flat upon the mattresses, they groaned and sagged and waited for the pain to end. Between burns, they talked and watched the veedo screen that displayed the expanding view of their landing site.

  It was plain to see that the circular valley was a crater, either volcanic or meteoritic. Near its center was a spearlike tower surrounded by stone buildings surrounded in turn by a parklike zone of paths and vegetation, some purple-tinged, some as green as Earth’s. The border of the valley was marked by a road and more buildings and a ringwall atop which spread more roads, more buildings, a city of aliens.

  The valley’s ringwall was broken on one side, opening on a purple plain on which no one had built roads or buildings. Low, dark clouds not far away suggested recent rain.

  “That’s where we’ll land,” said Tamiko. “Where the Gypsies did when they were building the tower and …”

  “You sure?”

  “They call the planet First-Stop themselves. No doubt about it.”

  “No. The field.”

  “Where else? It’s perfect. And besides, that’s what the locals called it. The ‘landing field.’”

  “There’s room for all our ships.”

  “Just us, for now.”

  As they dropped further toward the ground, the screen began to show the waiting crowds, covering the slopes where the crater’s ringwall had long ago been breached, surrounding the landing field, staying clear of the wide zone that would soon be sterilized by flame.

  * * * *

  The landing field was still smoldering and steaming when the delegation of coons approached the ship. They wore yellow capes or cloaks marked with black center stripes, yellow caps with black centers, arrangements of belts and pouches, thick-soled boots. Their pelts were grey and brown and yellow and olive, marked with stripes and patches and swirls. They stood erect, and if their faces had been flatter and balder, they might have looked quite human.

  “They don’t look much like us,” said Tamiko.

  “They wouldn’t have to,” said Hrecker. “Even if the Gypsies made them from Earthly material.” They were squeezed together in her bunk, propped on pillows to see the veedo screen across the narrow room. It would be another day before they could leave the ship.

  “They don’t look made at all. Not mixed, not hybridized, no seams and patches.”

  “We think the gengineers were evil, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t know what they were doing.”

  “I don’t see boots on the ones out there.” She indicated the spectators at the edge of the field.

  “The ground’s still hot.”

  The ship’s officers waited for the coons, standing stiff, unmoving, on the charred soil outside the ship. The stiffest of them all was Captain Quigg, whose face and body might have been assembled by a child. His mouth turned down, his cheeks puffed round, his nose was an angled blade, and his head was twice the size to fit his bony frame. The computer operator and navigator, Elspeth Keck, was younger and too plump. The ship’s security chief, Johnny Gatling, was thin and tense and his eyes peered at the world over dark, half-moon shadows. A machine pistol with an oversized magazine was slung from his belt. The chief technician, Meyer Smith’s stocky Bonami counterpart, was the fourth; her name was Ali Catrone, and her hair was gray, her lips tight. All wore their dress uniforms, complete with glittering cogwheels.

  “They all look the same,” said Gatling. “Fuzzy wuzzies in drag.”

  He was wrong, Hrecker thought. The creatures’ fur coats were not all marked the same. Their faces differed too—here a thicker brow ridge, there longer whiskers, here a shorter or more steeply sloping snout, there a canine that refused to tuck behind a lip.

  The coons approached slowly, their steps as measured and deliberate as those of humans in procession. Their cloaks swelled in the breeze but did not billow; the hems were weighted. As they neared the ship, they stroked the sides of their abbreviated snouts and lifted their arms high.

  “That one,” said Hrecker, pointing at the one in the lead. “He’s the High Priest. We’re about to get worshipped.”

  The Bonami’s captain seemed to have the same impression, for he extended one arm and hand as if he were a pope giving a blessing.

  “Oh, no,” said Tamiko.

  Two smaller coons emerged from the pack behind the High Priest. They carried between them a pear-shaped wicker basket with openings on two sides. It was stuffed with what looked like books.

  “Acolytes?” she asked. “And an offering?”

  It see
med that way, for the two coons set their burden down in front of the humans and retreated hastily. The High Priest stopped when he reached the basket. He lowered his arms to chest height, spread his hands, and said in a gravelly voice, “We pray you will approve what we have done with what you gave us.”

  “He thinks we’re Gypsies,” said Hrecker.

  “The General thought they might. Captain Quigg has orders not to set them straight.”

  “We are pleased,” said the captain on the screen. He did not look pleased. “That you still speak our tongue.”

  The High Priest showed his teeth in what might have been a smile. “What else should we speak? We never had another until you brought it.” He bent to take a book from the basket and hold it toward the captain. “We write it too, as you taught us.”

  Captain Quigg leafed through the book. Elspeth Keck looked over his shoulder. “A mathematics text,” she said. “Not terribly advanced. Just calculus, though the notation is a little strange.”

  “For our young,” said the High Priest. “We have a great deal more to show you.”

  “There is a great deal more we wish to see,” said Captain Quigg.

  * * * *

  “Where’s your gun, Johnny?” Ali Catrone’s expression—nearly as dour as the captain’s—did not match her cheerful voice. “Quigg take it away after yesterday?”

  “Just the big one. But they won’t pull any tricks on us.” Gatling touched a pocket to say he was not helpless. The bags beneath his eyes were worse than ever.

  Catrone shrugged. “There’s not much to worry about. They think we’re gods.”

  “Or maybe sacrifices.”

  The local spectators were gone. A multipassenger helicopter waited on the road, swinging lazy rotors above a fat body and a strangely tapered tail. In the distance, the tower in the center of the valley was visible. A breeze from that direction carried the odor of honeysuckle blooms.

  “They were here,” said Marcus Aurelius Hrecker. There was no other explanation for the smell. “What else did they plant?”