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Chapter One
Pearl Angelica stopped at the foot of the bluff and patted the leather carry bag that swung from her shoulder. She sighed and absorbed the scents of soil, mossflowers, forest trees, and distant frost, herald of the changing season.
When she peered across the valley spread before her, she caught her breath. Who were those three figures who trod the yellow dirt trail that cut the moss two kilometers away? What were they? They were bipeds much like humans, and they walked erect. But something about them seemed strange, misshapen, yet not quite truly alien.
They were moving slowly toward her, weren’t they? Then she would wait right where she was, she thought, and be glad for the chance to stand still. Her calves hurt from the steep descent.
The strangers must have entered the valley along the stream that drained the lake. The path they were on skirted the center of the valley, where the tree, the Tower, her people had grown stood a solitary pillar. From time to time they paused and turned to stare toward that wonder, or toward the few orange pumpkins that served as scattered quarters and workspaces, the Macks and Roachsters on the yellow tracks that cut the moss. There, near the lake, was the pumpkin where her father, Frederick Suida, waited for death, only rarely summoning enough awareness to speak sensibly or stare out the window at the Tower he had proposed and planned. To the north of the Tower, a dozen dozen slabs of grey stone marked the small graveyard that held those bots and humans who had died on the planet.
She touched her bag again. There was very little in it besides the papers that had wrapped her lunch. This region, so close to the base, had long since been picked quite clean of novelties, and there were field workers whose job it was to sample more distant regions. What she really sought were the panoramas of this world, for her heart yearned for whatever their equivalents might be on the homeworld she had never known. That those equivalents existed, she had no doubt. The pictures her people had brought with them could not lie.
Nor did they look much like what lay before her. Not even the autumn pictures, for here the trees went only from green to grey. And instead of grass, First-Stop—Tau Ceti IV—had thick mats of a plant that resembled moss, if moss could have purple leaves and myriads of tiny white flowers and plump white berries. This ground cover softened the floor of the valley right up to the edges of the small lake off-centered to the west, where it was replaced by reeds and other water-loving plants. At the landing field a little to the east, the yellow soil was darkened by the scorchmarks of plasma flames. Where the encircling bluffs plunged to meet the valley, the moss rose up, thinned, grew patchy, gave way to shrubs and other plants. Above, the nearly cloudless sky was an inverted bowl, its rim scalloped by the bluff-tops and bordered by the now dimming green of the forest that thrived on higher ground.
She looked upward, past valley, Tower, clouds, and sky. If it were night, she might be able to see the orbiting Gypsy, the starship her people had carved from an asteroid and fitted with Q-drives.
Pearl Angelica shook her head in frustration. She and many of her colleagues sought creatures whose genes might give the gengineers new tools or which might fit whole into the Gypsy’s contained ecology. The great ship held people, their creatures, the plants that produced both food and oxygen. But they had left Earth without being able to gather all the organisms and genes they needed. For one thing, they had no bees to pollinate the plants. They had to fertilize all their flowers by hand.
The Gypsies of the Gypsy were wanderers just like their namesakes of old Earth. But the latter had only had to carry their homes with them. Wherever they went, they were surrounded by a living environment that met all their needs. Yet…Those ancient gypsies had long forgotten their land of origin. Their roots were a matter of guesswork for storytellers and scholars. Would that happen to her own people? Would they move on through the starfields of the galaxy? Would they lose even what little contact they still maintained with Earth and the Orbitals and gengineers who had chosen to remain in its solar system? Would they forget Earth, reduce it to the status of myth or less? Would she never get the chance she craved to see once more the world of her ancestors, the world of her roots?
That dream was hopeless. She was a bot herself, and the Engineers would never let her taste the soil of Earth. Morosely, she let her roots uncoil from the bushy ruffs that covered her calves and grope for the dirt beneath her feet. Her mood began to lift at the first comforting rush of root-ease. Her posture relaxed. A hint of a smile appeared on her lips.
But then she sniffed, her shoulders tensed, her roots retreated from the soil. There was in the air an animal muskiness that had not been there a moment before. It was not the strangers. They were still far off, and the wind was toward them.
There was sound, the lightest of scratchings, the crunch of one pebble against another on the ground.
She turned toward the trail that descended the bluff at her back. It was flanked by moss and shrubbery, shadowed by saplings, paved by dirt that shaded from the valley’s yellow to a rich brown, almost black, where the forest’s trees overhung the top of the steep slope. Weathered slabs of stone jutted from the surface as if to form an irregular staircase.
At the base of the trail stood three round-bellied Racs, quietly staring over the valley and grooming each other’s thick fur as they waited for her to notice them. Each wore a belt and shoulder strap that supported several small pouches; Pearl Angelica knew they held stone blades, herbs the Racs found satisfying to sniff or eat, polished bits of wood and bone, of Gypsy glass and metal debris.
The largest of the three Racs was a black-eared male whose light yellow fur bore a single black stripe from the top of his head to the base of his spine. A stone-tipped spear leaned into the crook of one elbow. Pearl Angelica recognized him as one of those Racs who wandered in and out of her people’s buildings in the valley, studying the visitors to their world. Most of his tribe were content to keep their distance. Other tribes…
The male pointed. She turned, and now the strangers were close enough for her to realize why they had seemed both alien and familiar. They too were furred and dressed in straps and belts, but thick tails hung to their knees.
An early model, she thought. The Racs’ ancestors had been raccoon-like forest animals, nearly the size of a German shepherd but with larger brains. Not long after the gengineers had reached and named Tau Ceti IV, they had blunted the muzzles and enlarged the brains even further. But they had done it in several steps, only the last of which had removed the tail. The earlier versions had then been settled elsewhere on the globe. Most people thought they must have forgotten by now that the Gypsies existed.
Yet here they were.
She faced once more the three beside her. They had the polite dignity of creatures who felt inferior to no one, not even the technologically advanced Gypsies. The male stared self-assuredly back at her with the rich, brown eyes of his kind. His eyebrows were shelves of bristling hairs. “I am Blacktop,” he said, and he raised one blunt-clawed hand to scratch at the side of his flattened, chinless muzzle.
Pearl Angelica nodded at him and scratched at her cheek with her fingertips. The greeting gesture was recognizably the same in both the Racs and their wild ancestors, as if it were as wired into the Rac nervous system as the smile was in humans.
The two females repeated the gesture. The smaller held only a basket, suggesting that she intended to gather mossberries in the valley. The other held a shorter, lighter version of Blacktop’s spear; she, like he, would hunt the animals that also sought the berries. Both females had more common pelt markings, stripes and swirls of olive on grey, though the olive of the smaller was a little greener than that of most Racs.
“Leaf,” said Blacktop, shifting
one hand to the shaft of his spear and using the other to indicate his smaller companion. “And Cloudscurry.” Then he pointed toward the approaching strangers. His voice rose in pitch and grew smoother, almost melodic. “Who are they?”
Pearl Angelica recognized the vocal change. When a Rac was feeling peaceful, even happy, its tone scraped against the ear as if a snarl must lie not far beneath the surface.
“I have no idea.”
The strangers had noticed them now. They no longer paused to study the valley’s marvels. They walked faster, almost jogging, yet it was clear that it would be several minutes yet before they arrived.
“Winter comes,” said Blacktop to Pearl Angelica. His voice said he was still feeling anxious or aggressive. “Will you still be here when snow covers the moss?”
“Of course,” she said. She scowled, knowing as they knew that it was only a matter of time before the Gypsies did indeed leave this world. “We are not ready to go yet.” The gengineers had chosen the Racs for their attention because they seemed on the evolutionary verge of sentience already. Soon enough, they would leave the new species to its own devices.
Now Leaf said, “They can’t leave.” A row of swollen nipples was visible down each side of her chest, embedded in her fur. Somewhere, in the Rac village in the forest atop the bluff, she had a litter of unweaned children. Her voice grew smoother, angry. “We still have too much to learn.”
The strangers were now within hearing range, but they said nothing. Neither the Racs nor the bot spoke to them, though all four carefully studied them and the things they carried. Their markings were much the same, olive stripes on grey backs and sides, creamy bellies, black rings around their tails. They were clearly males. Their pouches bulged as if with supplies for long travel. Stone-bladed knives were thrust through slits in their belts. Stone-tipped spears filled their hands.
“Why do you think we call this world First-Stop?” asked Pearl Angelica. “We have to leave, as soon as…” She turned back toward the valley and pointed at the tree that rose a kilometer away. It was almost two hundred meters tall. “We’re almost done with the Tower.”
The tallest of the strangers leaned his spear against one shoulder, barked, scratched his muzzle—a trifle longer and sharper than Blacktop’s—and spoke in tones that were rough enough for politeness’s sake but were also touched with the gloss of caution. “I am Wanderer.”
His companions repeated the greeting gesture. “Stonerapper.”
“Shorttail.” His tail indeed was shorter than those of his companions.
Blacktop, Leaf, Cloudscurry, and the bot answered appropriately. Then Wanderer said, “I did not expect to find the Valley of Creation.”
Blacktop grunted inquiringly.
“We have tales of a valley where we were raised from beasts, taught to speak and make things like these.” The stranger indicated his spear and belt and pouches.
“The tales are true,” said Pearl Angelica.
“I did not believe them.”
Blacktop said, “Then why are you here?”
“To see the world tree,” said Wanderer. “My mother saw it once from a distance, poking above the edge of the world. She told other stories, and people laughed. They did not believe her. I did.”
“It is no longer a tree,” said Leaf in a voice that almost purred. The fur on her shoulders was stiffening and rising, giving the impression that her arms and claws were powered by immense muscles.
“We see.” Wanderer was pointing toward it. His fur twitched in response to Leaf’s, but he managed to suppress the bristling. His companions were less successful. Their fur bristled too, and their tails swelled and jerked from side to side. Cloudscurry joined Leaf in her challenge to the interlopers, leaning forward, ready to kill or die.
Blacktop and Wanderer had more presence of mind. Both males kept their fur flat, roughened their voices, and smacked the shafts of their spears across the challengers’ bellies. Leaf and Cloudscurry, Stonerapper and Shorttail blinked and settled back on their heels, though their fur did not go down.
“You called it Tower,” said Wanderer at last. “But it was the tree. My mother said it held up the sky. When it fell, the world would end.”
“It will not fall,” said Blacktop.
“It still has bark and branches.”
“Not for long.”
“It is already dead.”
The slender pinnacle that dominated the valley gleamed yellow-white where it had already been stripped of limbs and bark. Bioblimps hung in the air about it, some suspending workers on long lines while they wielded chainsaws and other tools. Others wrapped their tentacles around massive limbs that had just been cut from the Tower’s shaft, slowing their fall toward a pile of severed branches to the south.
The Bioblimps were descended from jellyfish scaled up and freed from the sea. They had been designed on Earth for hauling cargo and passengers through the skies of a resource-poor world, not for holding workers precisely still in mid-air or for following the same short paths over and over again. They were straining to do jobs for which they had never been intended, their gasbags swelling as they generated more hydrogen for added lift. The hum of the propellers on the small control cabins slung beneath their gasbags was clearly audible despite the distance.
Leaf laughed deliberately, insultingly. Cloudscurry joined her, tentatively at first and then more vigorously.
Stonerapper and Shorttail stiffened and began to sing in their throats.
Blacktop and Wanderer once more used their spears as staves. For a moment it seemed that the junior Racs would pay no attention, but then they settled back on their heels.
Pearl Angelica’s mouth was dry. She was sweating. Struggling to smile and deflect their attention, she indicated the workers on the ground. They were bent over the buttresslike roots that heaved out of the soil, boring holes, inserting hoses, activating pumps. The distance was too great to tell whether they were humans or bots except by the flashes of color that were their clothes or leaves.
“They’re flooding the wood now,” she said. The pumps would force thousands of gallons of water thick with silica and other minerals into the wood. “In a year or two, every pore will be filled with rock. It will last for millennia.”
“Tell us again,” said Leaf, her voice still ominously smooth. She meant, “Tell them.”
“The tip swells. It does not taper into thinness like on a real tree.”
“We will hollow it out,” said Pearl Angelica. Workers were in fact already standing on the flange that surrounded the bulbous tip of the Tower. “We will make a chamber at the very top. In it we will leave records of who we are, where we came from, why we came, even how we came.”
“You will tell us how to do everything that you can do,” said Blacktop.
“Even how we made you,” Pearl Angelica agreed, nodding.
“But it is too high,” said Cloudscurry. She was watching the strangers from the corners of her eyes. “We cannot reach it.”
“You must learn some things by yourselves,” said Pearl Angelica. This was policy, but she thought it made sense. “When you have learned enough to reach the top of the Tower, then you will be ready to use what you will find there.”
“It is for us,” said Leaf. She was glaring now. “Just us. No one else. Not savages with tails.”
“We made you all,” said the bot. “It’s for all of you.”
But Leaf insisted: “For us!”
“It is our world too,” said Wanderer in a voice as smooth as hers.
“It is our valley!”
“We were here before you!”
“You heard her say it,” put in Stonerapper while Shorttail lifted his spear above his head.
“You were expelled, discarded like broken pots.”
“For whoever climbs the Tower,” said Pearl Angelica. Suddenly she felt far less certain of what she and her people were doing. By making successive “editions” of the Racs, they had created races. The last made,
the one that dwelt nearest the valley when the Tower was completed and the Gypsies left, would all too naturally think itself the Gypsies’ heirs, the Tower’s owners, the god-blessed best of all Rac kinds. Other kinds or tribes or races would surely never agree to such superiority unless it was forced down their throats by force of arms.
Or was she seeing them as more human than they really were?
No. She could see it in their postures and gestures, hear it in their voices, smell it in their scents, suddenly more pungently animallike than ever. Leaf and Cloudscurry and all their tribe would do their best to keep the Tower theirs alone.
Blacktop made a placating gesture and with obvious effort roughened his tone. “God helps those who help themselves.” Then he turned back to the bot. “Are you gods?”
The comment and the question startled her. She had just thought the word, hadn’t she? She had not said it aloud. As far as she knew, no one had taught the Racs anything about religion. Speech, yes, and the making of huts and fire and tools, of pottery and baskets. But never religion.
Her father had once told her the reason why: Humans were all too prone to letting others take the responsibility for their lives, and the Racs’ intelligence, like their genes, was much like the humans’. They must therefore be protected against the human error, or else all the Gypsies’ efforts at creating an intelligent species that might someday join them in space might be wasted.
“Why do you even ask?” she said.
“I can read,” said the Rac. When the females beside him eyed him admiringly—Were they his mates? His kin?—he took a deep breath and swelled his chest. “Most of us cannot. I learned when I was young.”
“Who taught you?” She knew that she would have to pass on word of this unexpected skill. No one had thought reading was something that would do the Racs any good at this stage in their development. But the Racs were capable of numerous surprises.
“My playmates. Human children.” He paused, and then he repeated his question: “Are you gods?”
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