Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®
Page 153
“No one,” said Gypsy Blossom. “The hierarchy. The government. The ideology. The sheer momentum of history. Thank goodness they could not destroy it all. Not even if they crushed every plaque and burned every paper copy and every book that used what the Gypsies taught you.”
Dotson nodded. “We can write it down again, can’t we? They didn’t kill us all. Enough of us remain. Surely we remember what we have learned. And then there is the honeysuckle.”
“Yes, there’s that,” said the bot. “I can read that information. And so will all those other bots as soon as they leave their beds. But there’s something even more valuable that you still have.”
Dotson said nothing, but when he looked at Edge-of-Tears and Senior Hightail and the other Racs nearby, he knew that he was not the only one who failed to understand.
“It’s a way of thinking,” said Gypsy Blossom. “Knowledge as a sacred goal. That’s something the Engineers could take away from you only by exterminating all your kind.”
There was silence. Of course, the bot was right. The Gypsies, the Remakers, had given all Rackind the pursuit of knowledge as a holy mission. And yes, if every library lay in ruins, every ceramic plaque in shards, every paper book in ashes, that would be enough to restore everything the humans had laid waste. And then to advance beyond that level, into space, even to wherever their gods had gone.
“What do you think they’ll do?”
No one thought Dotson meant the humans. He was staring too intently at the sky now, toward that spot where the Ajax would be a spark at night, where Sunglow and the other one-time prisoners of the humans debated the answer to just that question.
A long moment later, Edge-of-Tears said, “It will be years before we can get up there. There is just too much to rebuild. And they cannot last that long.”
“Too many to feed,” someone said.
“They should kill the humans,” said another. “They’re outnumbered. If they don’t, there’ll be a battle, a rebellion. They’ll all die, or the humans will escape and take their ship home and bring more humans back before we can possibly be ready for them.”
“But they need the humans,” said Senior Hightail. “They can’t maintain that ship without them. They simply don’t know how.”
“Then sabotage.”
“Could they survive long enough if they could run the ship?”
Edge-of-Tears shook his head. “Not without a miracle. If we could rebuild the engines of one of these …” He indicated the nearby Saladin. “But we mangled them all far too well.”
“I wish I could help,” said Hrecker. When someone snorted, he added, “That was my field, designing drives.”
“Then you can fix these?” The voice was eager.
He shook his head and pointed at the wreckage. “I wish I could, but … Once you get your industries working again, I can show you how to build a drive. Until then …” He shook his head again.
“And there’s one waiting for us right up there.” Edge-of-Tears pointed at the sky. “Intact.”
“It’ll still be there.”
“Waiting,” said Gypsy Blossom.
“There’s no hope,” said Dotson. “It’ll take years. I’ll never see her again.”
“Probably not,” said the bot.
He craned his neck to see the Saladin’s bulging top, which concealed its bridge and the com that was their only contact with the Ajax. “I wish she’d call again.”
“There’s a lot to say, isn’t there?” said Hrecker. “I never had the chance.”
The ensuing silence lasted until Dotson said, “How long? A year? Or ten years?” His tone said he knew the answer.
“Maybe twenty,” said Senior Hightail. “In which case I won’t see it. But you will. And then what? You’ll refurbish the ship and take off, but where? Will you go looking for the Gypsies?”
“I think,” said Gypsy Blossom. “That’s what they themselves hoped you would do someday.”
Dotson made a chuffing sound with his breath and turned around. “I’m going to call her.”
* * * *
But no matter how many times he tried, no one answered the Ajax’s com until the first Rac Q-ship boosted into orbit eight years later.
Dotson was not on that ship, but he was at the spaceport control center, waiting for the com to come alive once more, at last, and tell him what he had expected for so long that the pain of confirmation seemed no worse than the pain that still lingered in the hip of his injured leg.
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker was not with him. The human had helped the Racs build their Q-drive, and then he had retreated, isolating himself in a small house on the outskirts of the rebuilt Worldtree City. Dotson thought he must have found it difficult to face the inevitable antipathies of the many Racs who had lost everything they owned at human hands, but he never complained. Perhaps he thought he deserved whatever glares and taunts came his way. Perhaps he wished for a murderer or a lynch mob that would join him with his fellow Engineers. He never said.
Gypsy Blossom was supervising the education of the third generation of bots. Like their parents, many would be intermediaries between the Racs and the data stores held by the honeysuckle. Many more would, like the Racs, be builders and discoverers.
A bank of screens showed the Ajax’s exterior. Enlarged in one, the ship’s lock stood open as it had on the Rac ship’s first approach. Another showed the ship’s bridge, a withered body strapped into the captain’s seat, its blonde pelt identifying it unmistakably as Sunglow. The controls before her included an override on the ship’s main entrance.
The Ajax held no air, no living thing. Its storerooms still held all they needed for a one-way voyage to Earth. All but two of its dust tanks, still holding much of the reaction mass for that same trip, orbited not far away. Nuclear-tipped missiles lay ready for launch in its bays. Human bodies filled two locked rooms.
Other Racs lay where they had fallen when the airlock opened.
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