“What’s a zoo?” asked Sunglow.
“A place where people go to see strange animals,” said the female.
“We have one of those,” said Dreaming Tree. He looked at Dotson. “You’re late. The rest have gone already. Why don’t you start there? Then you can show them the library.”
“We are fascinated,” said Hrecker, and Tamiko nodded her head. “We want to see everything.”
“We’ll visit the Court of Ancestors first,” said Scholar Starsight.
As soon as the priest had, just as he had the day before, named Dotson Barbtail and Sunglow to their guests, he left. “This way,” said Dotson, and he led the humans along the path that circled Worldtree Center. Racs stood aside before them, exposing just enough gravel for them to pass, and flowed in again behind them. Voices buzzed, a few confident, contented growls dominated by more anxious pitches. A few failed to restrain their fleers of offense at the human odor.
“They’re following us,” said Sunglow. Her own voice squeaked and sang.
Dotson shrugged. There hadn’t been that odor the day before, when it had been cooler. It was part of their response to heat then, or a sideeffect. He glanced at Marcus Hrecker and thought the moisture on his face must evaporate like his own saliva.
The human female looked back and then scanned the watchers to either side and ahead. Her body tensed.
“No danger,” said Dotson. “They want to see you. They probably wish they dared to touch you.”
“Where are we going?” asked the male.
“Not far, Marcus Hrecker.”
“Just Mark.”
The doorway they wanted was just ahead, above a flight of stone steps paved with rubbernecking Racs. Inside, the floor was tile, the walls polished wood interrupted by doorways onto rooms full of bookshelves and tables.
“This looks like a library,” said Tamiko.
“That’s what it is,” answered Sunglow.
The ceiling was arched glass beyond which the Worldtree and the higher roofs of Worldtree Center were visible. Mark was moving as if he could not help himself toward where a ray of sun struck the wall. He touched the spines of the books, pulled one free of its fellows, examined its pages.
“A novel,” he said.
“You must have lights for night,” said Tamiko.
“Of course.” Dotson indicated a broad double door on the right. It was made of dark wood with polished brass fittings. It opened easily upon a broad and roofless courtyard. Beds of moss were separated by narrow gravel paths. A trickle of water linked two rock-lined pools above which a dozen small dumbos flapped and swirled. A clump of trees provided shade for several wooden lean-tos, and boulders seemed clustered to serve as seats.
The courtyard appeared empty, but almost immediately Tamiko was looking up and saying, “Don’t those damned coons have anything better to do?”
The others looked up too. A row of windows overhung the courtyard. Behind them was a solid wall of spectators.
“They’d rather be called Racs,” said Hrecker.
“They’re still coons,” said Tamiko. “Big ones. But not as coony as those.” Something was moving in the ground-level shadows, and then something else, and now a dozen knee-high quadrupeds surrounded them, squatting on the gravel. Their ears stood up alertly, and their muzzles gaped, showing sharp teeth. They were fat, and their tails were ringed.
“Our wild cousins,” said Scholar Starsight. “Their grandparents were ours as well.”
“We have biologists who study them,” said Dotson. “This is where they keep them.”
“No young?”
“In the dens.” Tamiko pointed toward the trees. “Did they make those lean-tos themselves?”
“Oh, no.” Dotson shook his head.
“They look like they want something.”
“Food, Mark. But we didn’t bring any.” The largest of the animals cocked its head at Dotson’s words, stuck out its tongue, and stalked off. The others followed.
“He understood you?”
“They’re quite intelligent. Is this what you call a zoo?”
“Ours have many kinds of animals, and we keep them in cages or behind fences. Otherwise they might harm each other or their visitors.”
“Or the visitors might harm them,” said Hrecker.
* * * *
“We didn’t see them very well yesterday,” said Tamiko.
“They were in those cases, after all,” said Hrecker. Both humans held ceramic plaques in their hands, tilting them to catch the light and make their engraved inscriptions more visible. Some of the lines were darkened as if by pigment or dirt.
“These are copies,” said Dotson Barbtail. “We keep the originals tucked away so that no one can drop them.”
“I understand.”
“We have paper copies too.” Sunglow reached a massive book down from a library shelf and spread it on the table. “Photographs. They rubbed the plaques with ink to bring out the lines. Then they scrubbed them clean again.”
“This book.” Hrecker tapped the open page with a finger. “It’s a complete record?”
Sunglow nodded. “Part of it.” She indicated three other volumes, each one equally massive, on the shelf.
“Could we borrow them?”
Dotson felt puzzled. “Why? You already have them. You made the …”
Tamiko’s hesitation was just barely perceptible. “But we never kept a record of what we left behind for you.”
A second later, Hrecker added, “It would save us time if we ever have to leave such a gift again.”
“Then I’m sure we can find copies for you.”
“Thank you.” Hrecker and Tamiko studied the pages in the book for some time after that, almost ignoring their hosts. Eventually, Tamiko said, “They seem very complete.”
Dotson laughed. “Oh, yes. But they are still only summaries. A great deal of what they say made no sense until we had discovered almost all the details for ourselves. Your gift was not science and technology themselves, but a goad and a direction and a way to check our progress.”
“It seems to have worked,” said Tamiko.
* * * *
Dotson Barbtail tapped the edges of the sheaf of papers that was his report. Done at last. Despite the time it had taken to show the humans the Court of Ancestors and the library and find a bookstore with a set of all four volumes of Leaves of the Worldtree. They had taken the books back to their ship early in the afternoon. Sunglow had returned to the apartment. He had gone back to his own work.
And he had actually been able to apply his mind to what he had to do.
It was strange, he thought. If the humans had arrived a few weeks before, when he was still trying to protect his secret, to keep anyone from learning that he had stolen a seed and grown a bot in his apartment, to keep Sunglow out of his life and his quarters, when he had had so little attention to spare for his work that he had come far too near to being sent away, he would have had plenty of time to guide them all over Worldtree Center. But now … He shook his head. He actually begrudged the time they took.
He put the report in an envelope and dropped it in the bin attached to the wall outside Senior Hightail’s office. He would see it in the morning. For now …
He was sure Sunglow had told Gypsy Blossom all about the morning. So he wouldn’t have to do that himself. The three of them could talk about it all and what it meant and what must happen next. And then …
But when he opened his apartment door, he heard more than two voices. Not just Gypsy Blossom. Not just Sunglow. But both of them, and strangers too.
“They made us!” cried a shrill and angry voice. “They saw the mistakes they had made in their earlier efforts. They perfected their design. No tails and better minds and fi
t heirs to what they left.”
They were in the bedroom, their backs to the door, their ears deaf to the sounds he could not help but make. Only Gypsy Blossom was positioned to see him, and she was pretending to be as oblivious as all the rest.
All the Racs in the room were tailless. One, scraped clean of fur except on top of his head, was speckled with scabs. “We have fur,” he was saying. “They don’t. We should all shave like me.”
Gypsy Blossom laughed. “If they were bots like me, would you plant flowers in your scalp?”
The shaven Rac twitched with offense. His belly jiggled.
“That’s mere imitation,” said Sunglow. Dotson was pleased to hear the anger in her voice. She had brought these strangers, surely Farshorn malcontents, into his apartment and revealed the secret that would destroy him if it became known. Yet she did not sound entirely on their side. “When a wild Rac holds a book and pretends to read, that does not make it one of us.”
“Then …”
“We should ask them,” said the first angry speaker. “Ask them to help us throw down the usurpers.”
“The thieves of our heritage.”
“Restore us to our rightful place.”
“We could take Gypsy Blossom with us—”
“And then, we would be the ones, the only ones, with an actual Gypsy, a Remaker—”
“A Remaker’s child.”
“Even better.”
“That would prove that we were the rightful heirs to the Worldtree.”
“No,” said Gypsy Blossom.
“What?”
“I said no. You could not succeed without my cooperation. And if you take me from here and the Rac who sowed my seed and tended me, I will surely denounce you.”
Sunglow was nodding.
“You might not succeed even with my aid. We cannot be sure that these humans are true Gypsies, for they have none of my kind among them.”
“That means nothing!”
“Nothing!”
Now Gypsy Blossom was staring deliberately at the room’s doorway. Sunglow followed the bot’s gaze, and her eyes widened. She began to stand.
“You told me,” said Gypsy Blossom. “You gave me books that told me too. Many of them were bots like me.”
Dotson cleared his throat, and the others scrambled to their feet as well. No one said a word, though someone had released an involuntary hint of acrid scent from the glands every Rac carried beneath its tail.
He nodded at Gypsy Blossom in her pot. He looked at Sunglow, his expression sad, betrayed. But when he broke the silence, his voice rumbled and snarled as gently as a mother’s. “Do you forget?” he asked. “The Founder told us. Our Remakers had enemies then, foes who would destroy all they made. Including us.”
“No!” cried the shaven Rac. Seen front-on, he looked more like a newborn than an adult, for he had even shaved his genitalia. “They are gone. They have vanished. And if—”
Gypsy Blossom laughed. “But you said they are our visitors. And if the Remakers still live and can return, then their enemies surely live as well and can find us. Perhaps they have.”
Dotson Barbtail did not laugh. Still keeping his voice gentle, he said, “We cannot know. We have to study them, watch them, do nothing foolish that might destroy us all. Approach them as the Founder might have.”
“The Founder had no tail.”
“He was one of us.”
Gypsy Blossom pointed at the stack of books that still sat beside her pot. “My reading says you didn’t listen to him then.”
Sunglow broke the ensuing silence. “That’s true. We chased the tailed Racs from the valley and tried to keep it just for us.”
“But,” said Dotson, “not before they had heard the Founder say that learning and discovery were holy tasks. They took that to heart, while the tailless Racs did not, and when they returned …”
“They were no better,” said Sunglow.
“No,” said Dotson. “The tailless invited their own defeat by barring the way to the Worldtree. Then the tailed did the same, in their own way, and guaranteed more wars.”
“There will be one more!” cried the shaven Rac.
“I hope not. Things are better now. Tailed and tailless mingle in the valley, in congregations, even in Worldtree Center.”
“There aren’t many of us there,” said a female whose dark fur shaded to cream on her belly and hips.
“There will be,” said Sunglow.
“Unless,” said Dotson, “you start another war.”
“We’d get it all then!” said the shaven Rac.
Another snorted. “Not likely. They’ve got the guns.”
“But the humans—”
“No!” cried Gypsy Blossom. “I don’t trust them.”
“And if she doesn’t trust them …” said Dotson.
The rest were silent. Perhaps they were even thoughtful.
Not long after that, they left.
Chapter Eleven
The bluffs rose steeply from the valley’s rim like the crater walls they were. Outside the valley, they sloped gradually outward and down to merge with level plain and rolling hills. Worldtree City gave way to fields and forest. Highways snaked across the landscape, leading out of sight to other cities. One ended on the plain, where grassland had been covered with strips of pavement. Beside those strips were parked squadrons of jets whose wings and fuselages bristled with armaments and antennae. There were larger planes as well, slender, wasplike helicopters, immense, half-buried hangars, and batteries of ground-to-air missiles.
“We’ve never had to use the missiles,” a young priestess was saying with every air of pride. Her name was Silverside, and indeed her fur shaded from gray back through silver flanks to white chest and belly. Like the priests, she wore a yellow cloak and cap marked with black. “But we have them, just in case the Farshorns ever get this far.”
“You have used the fighters, then,” said Marcus Aurelius Hrecker. He had never been a soldier, despite his ancestry, but he was not impressed. He knew the human ships were vastly stronger.
“Of course they have,” said Johnny Gatling. Today he wore a jacket beneath which Hrecker could glimpse an arrangement of straps. There was a bulge beneath one armpit, and his arms were crossed, putting one bony hand near whatever he carried. “Or they wouldn’t have them in the open like this. Flight-ready.”
“Maybe they just want to impress us.” Ali Catrone was as unarmed as Hrecker. “But I don’t see any propeller planes.” When their hosts seemed puzzled, she pointed at a helicopter and added, “Horizontal, not vertical.”
“Children’s toys.” The priestess mimed a finger winding up a small plane powered by a rubber band. “The very first planes we built for carrying people were jets. You helped with the plaques.”
Gatling’s face twisted into a darker scowl.
“Do you use those fighters?” asked Hrecker.
“Of course we do,” said Silverside. “The Farshorns invade our airspace, attack a fishing boat or a freighter, try to overfly on spy missions.”
“There’s a skirmish every year or so.” Dotson Barbtail shrugged matter-of-factly, as if the others’ doubts were irrelevant, as if he knew the coons’ military prowess was so great that they need not fear even the humans.
“Our planes are faster,” said the priestess. “They’re better armed and longer ranged. The Farshorns have no chance, but we have to keep reminding them.”
“That won’t last,” said Sunglow. Hrecker thought he was beginning to be able to read their voices. Their words were clear enough, but their tones did not change on any human pattern. Yet the history lesson of the day before seemed to be helping. Dotson and the priestess, both members of the dominant race, the one with tails, were confident and eve
n complacent. That scholar—Starsight, strange name, but they all had names like that—was not with them this day.
The tailless Sunglow, on the other hand, despite her obvious attachment to Dotson, seemed less confident and even resentful.
“Farshorns?”
“Farshore. The other continent.”
“Is that where the tailless coons live?” Hrecker asked.
“Most of them,” said the priestess.
Were they oppressed? Or just outclassed?
“My people’s jets keep improving,” Sunglow added.
“And so do ours. We’ll always be able to win.”
Half a dozen unarmed observation planes were waiting on the runway. Pilots and copilots were visible behind cockpit windows. Coons wearing ear-protecting padded helmets and military badges were wheeling staircases into position, opening cabin doors, and gesturing the passengers to leave the soundproof building for their tours of First-Stop.
Gatling and Catrone stayed together as they crossed the pavement. A pair of coon guides met them at the foot of the stairs, and the plane absorbed them. The other planes absorbed similar pairs and triplets of humans, with equal numbers of local guides, and then it was Hrecker’s and Tamiko Inoue’s turn to follow Dotson and Sunglow into a cylindrical cabin dominated by broad strips of tinted glass or plastic that gave an unobstructed view of the runways and departing planes outside. Comfortably padded seats waited for them. An array of six buttons in each seat’s right arm controlled swivel, tilt, and motion on the short track that crossed the cabin.
“On the left,” said the pilot’s amplified voice a little later. “The Glistens.”
Motors whirred. The plane tipped as the weight of seats and passengers shifted to the left. It adjusted.
“A fishing port,” said Sunglow.
“Named for mudflats?” asked Tamiko.
“No moon,” said Hrecker. “No tides.”
“There are cliffs,” said Sunglow. “Flat and smooth and black after rain.”
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 135
