“No,” said Blacktop. “They have told us much already. They promise even more in what the Tower will hold when they leave us. Yet they also say that we must learn some things by ourselves, without help.”
“Why?”
“So that we will also learn how to find secrets they have not found. So that someday we will be able to surpass our gods.”
The congregation had heard this all before, yet still it grew more hushed. Eventually one Rac stood up. The light was too dim to reveal his markings, but his voice identified him as Firetouch. “Then the Tower is not our final goal. It is only the edge of the bluff we see from the valley. Beyond it…”
“We cannot know,” said the priest. “Maybe even the Gypsies cannot know. But if it is the edge of a bluff, then there are forests and mountains and more bluffs beyond.”
After a moment’s pause, he added, “And you are the first to offer up a secret of your own.”
“It was only a question.”
“Questions are the most desirable of secrets, for without them there can be no answers. And this one was your own.” Blacktop was silent for a long moment while he stared toward the other. From the corner of his eye, he registered a change in Stonerapper’s posture: straighter, prouder, less uncertain. Next time then, perhaps, he would offer up the question he had found.
“The more questions we ask, the more answers we find,” he continued. “The more offerings we can make. The sooner we will be able to climb the Tower. The sooner we too will be gods, and perhaps even more than gods.”
He scanned the congregation. “I hope others will soon set foot beside you on the path out of our valley.”
The Bioblimp hovered, one tentacle anchoring it to the shaft of the Racs’ miniature replica of the Tower. Another tentacle snaked through the open hatch of its control cabin to curl around Caledonia Emerald’s legs and hold her fronds against her chest. “Is he still there?” she asked.
Lucas Ribbentrop sat at the console, his hands ready to work the controls that would make the Bioblimp pluck the bot from the cabin and lower her toward the ground. A screen before him showed a single source of infrared within the watching place. It occupied a stone seat beside the aisle and about a third of the way back from the opening of the U. It moved only as if to shift its weight from one buttock to the other.
“Blacktop never misses,” he said.
“Wants to make sure we come clean out the Lost & Found box.”
“If we didn’t show, he’d have to do it himself.”
“Couldn’t let it get choked up.”
“Not a chance. I want Leonardo’s scribbles for the museum.”
“Gil Abenden just wants his little black book.”
“If they found it, he’s got it.”
With one hand Ribbentrop moved a slide and touched a pressure pad. With the other he reached for a joystick. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
The Rac Surveillance Office occupied an entire pumpkin not far from the base of the Tower. One room was devoted to monitoring the tiny cameras and microphones that clung to trees in the Rac villages and to the basket that overlooked the watching place. Another room was where, during the day, a technician made and repaired the bugs. A third was a storeroom. The fourth and largest held the broad table on which Caledonia Emerald was dumping the Racs’ evening offerings. Firetouch’s strip of bark was already propped on a shelf.
“At least they keep the place picked up,” said Ribbentrop. He was crumpling sheets of paper and throwing them toward a wastebasket.
“So do litterbugs.” The bot was sorting through the trove as well.
“But they never give it back.”
“Do you think Firetouch’ll start a fad?”
“Get the rest of them thinking for themselves, you mean?”
“Some of them, anyway.” As the bot bent forward, a blue petal, streaked with orange, fell from her scalp. It too wound up in the wastebasket.
The man snorted. “Maybe a few. Most of ‘em—litter, most people—just can’t. They pick up scraps of knowledge all their lives. They haven’t a clue how to make it.”
“But people are always being told, ‘Take my word for it.’ In school, at home.” She picked up a palm-sized notebook covered in brown plastic; when she fanned its pages, she saw it was half full of names and numbers, many of them scratched out.
“Religion too.”
Caledonia Emerald laughed and set the notebook aside. “Not very human, is it? A religion that doesn’t insist on keeping its worshippers on their faces in the muck, that says here’s a leg up, come on, join your gods, even go beyond them.”
“We’re not gods, dammit.”
“That’s what they’re calling us in that baby cathedral out there.”
“Huh.”
“We should have known we couldn’t prevent religion.”
“We never mentioned it, never taught it. It was just too easy to invent.”
“And look what they invented,” said Caledonia Emerald.
“It’s embarrassing is what it is. Who the hell wants to be a god?”
“Our kind, anyway.”
“That’s it.”
The sorting was done. The useless, outdated papers were discarded. The rest were arranged in rows upon the table.
“We can get things back where they belong tomorrow.”
“Gil bunks next door to me. Did you find his little black book?”
“It’s brown.” When she handed it to him, he laughed and added, “The Quebec is back.”
From a Rac, her snarl would have indicated a very good mood. “I’ve heard. What a screw-up. If Pearl Angelica had asked…”
“The bot council?”
The bot’s answering nod was curt. “She’d still be here.”
“You’d have had to tie her up.”
“Such a waste. She had so much potential.”
Some bots aboard the Gypsy chose to put down their roots in the spacecraft’s parks. Many lived alone, as family units, and as small groups of friends in apartments that were much the same as those the humans used, though their floors were dirt and their ceilings were banks of sun-mimicking lights. Many more lived in the large chamber that had been set aside for the bots to build a community of their own if they wished. The community had never developed because the bots had found much more acceptance here than on the Earth they had fled, but the chamber remained, brightly lit by artificial sunlight, the ground covered with grass, vines, shrubs, and trees, some of them always in bloom and the air oppressive with honeysuckle and other scents.
The three oldest of the bots, not one of whom was old enough to remember Earth, were gathered in this chamber, in a clearing whose bare dirt testified to repeated churnings by bot roots plunging in and out of the soil. Two showed their age in lined skin, fading blossoms, and worn fronds. One, Crimson Orchis, the youngest of the three, still had vivid petals.
“She must have reproduced?” asked Boston Lemon. Her fronds were edged with brown, and her blossoms had once been a brilliant yellow.
“No.” Titian Thyme—once red-flowered, still pungent-scented—furled her fronds tightly, defensively. “She never did.”
“Why not? She’s old enough ten times over.”
“I need the honeysuckle to answer that.” Titian Thyme let her roots enter the soil and synapse with the living cables that would link her to the records preserved in the computers that were rooted elsewhere in the chamber. She was silent then for several minutes. “The last time that subject came up, she said she wasn’t ready for a family, she hadn’t yet found anyone—bot or human—that she wished for a mate, and besides, she was too busy.”
“At least,” said Crimson Orchis, “She gave us bits of her tissues for the freezers.”
“So we’ve got tissue samples,” said Boston Lemon. “It’ll still take years to grow up any clones.”
“Better to lose the time,” said Titian Thyme, “than to lose her genes.”
“They’re crucial,�
� said Crimson Orchis, and the flowers that gave her her name shook as she nodded. “She has lived so much longer than any of the rest of us. If she would only mate…”
“Then we would have an Eldest.”
The others nodded. The title of Eldest did not go with age alone, else Pearl Angelica would have the title already. Lacking that, one of them would bear it. But it also called for experience and wisdom, and the bots had long ago realized that Pearl Angelica would accumulate more of both age and experience than any other bot. When the last Eldest died, even before the Gypsy’s departure from Earth orbit, they had chosen to wait for the wisdom.
Some thought her wise enough already. Once “Eldest” had meant nothing more than “Oldest”; that bot with the most life experience had been as well the wisest, or close enough. But Pearl Angelica had been older than the oldest while she was still a child. Granting her the title of “Eldest” had seemed ludicrous. Yet now that she was an adult, she still seemed far too young for the title.
Some said she was reluctant to grow up, to assume her responsibilities to her kind, to mate and reproduce. She had a duty, they said, to pass on and spread the genes that lengthened her life and diminished her leaves and flowers and thereby made her more similar than any of her ancestors to the humans. As long as she shirked that duty, she should not be Eldest.
“We should start the cloning now,” said Crimson Orchis.
Titian Thyme nodded in agreement, but Boston Lemon said, “Not yet. She is not dead. She may return to us.”
“No,” said Crimson Orchis. “Lois McAlois has reported that the Engineers want a tunnel-drive. She says we cannot give it to them. So she is dead, or she will be soon.”
“She could escape.”
“How? She is not human enough to pass among the Engineers.”
“We could rescue her!”
Titian Thyme shook her head. “No. That would surely cost too many lives, and we already have her tissues and her genes. Her most important parts will not be lost, no matter what.”
“But all the living she has done so far will be lost. And we will not have an Eldest.”
“We’ve managed well enough so far.”
* * *
Chapter Eleven
The man with the black curls was by the concourse wall again, his stare seeming as hot as summer sunlight on the scalelike leaves that covered her skin. He continued as always to keep his distance, wary either of her, so strange, so alien, officially anathema, or of his own kind, the Engineers, as represented by Hrecker and his security force.
Pearl Angelica ignored him. Her hands gripped the bars of her cage. Her knuckles were white. Her eyes ached with the strain of staring at the veedo screen so long, so hard. Yet she remained aware of the several Engineers who stood nearby or sat on the edge of the dais that held her planter, all of them watching as intently as she.
Hrecker had come to her the evening before, standing close, holding his hand where she could see the black plastic remote and its promise of at least temporary freedom. His other hand held up a pair of long black socks with their feet cut off. “Cover your roots. Then come with me,” he had said. “We have more questions.”
“No handcuffs?” No such things were visible in his hands or dangling from his belt.
“Where would you go?”
He had led her through corridor after corridor until they reached an innocuous-seeming chamber, the size of an apartment living room, carpeted, furnished with a metal table, upholstered chairs, and even a sofa.
“The Minister for Education.” Hrecker had indicated the only one of the four waiting men who was not wearing solely the typical uniform of the Engineers. His blue shirt was mostly hidden by an old-fashioned grey wool sports coat whose breast pocket held several pens in a plastic sleeve. His hand grasped an unlit pipe. A sunburst medallion was visible on his shirtfront beneath one lapel. The other three men wore lapelless jackets such as Pearl Angelica had seen on other Engineers; the colors were light pink and orange, and the collars were padded arcs.
Hrecker had then pushed her toward a straight-backed, unpadded seat. She did not sit until she had rocked it on its pedestal and seen that it was not built to spin and jerk. One of the others then actually handed her a cup of coffee.
She had felt absurdly grateful for that small indication that someone, anyone, saw in her a fellow human being. Yet that gratitude had not lasted long. It had vanished as soon as it was clear that there would be no more introductions, replaced by a watchfulness that told her the unnamed three were just as confident in their manner as the Minister for Education. They were neither aides nor toadies but men of status in their own right. She faced, she guessed, the lunar equivalent of Earth’s Council of Engineers. She wished she knew their names and positions; their metal ornaments provided no clues.
Now she stared at the veedo screen intently, as if she thought it might relieve her ignorance. That same room was laid out before her. She was visible, captured by hidden cameras as she faced the others. Hrecker was standing by the room’s only door, and someone was saying, “Tell us about the Racs.”
She obeyed, once more describing the raccoon-like near-sentients the Gypsies had found when they reached Tau Ceti IV and the decision of the gengineers to try to raise their intelligence to human level. “We were disappointed,” she said. “The smaller ships had visited several worlds by then, and though they had found life, there were no signs of intelligence at all. We were feeling lonely.”
“Arrogant, you mean. You had no business—”
“Monsters,” said someone else.
“No,” she answered. She hoped the man meant the Racs but she knew he would apply the same word to the Gypsies. “They’re builders, not destroyers. They love their mates and children. They look at the stars and yearn. And they’re covered with fur, not slime. They have arms and legs just like us, not tentacles or claws.”
“You taught them everything you could,” said the grey-jacketed Minister for Education.
“No.” She shook her head, though she knew it was useless to argue. “Not everything. Not at all. They wouldn’t be able to use so much. But fire, yes. Basic survival skills. Language. We wanted them to have the basis for building a culture of their own. We didn’t want just to hand them ours.”
“Why not?”
One of the Engineers who had not been introduced smirked. “Don’t you think it’s good enough?”
She shrugged at her interrogators. “We wanted neighbors, friends. Not clones. We thought they would be more interesting, maybe even more valuable as allies against whatever we might someday find, if they developed in their own way for a while.”
“How long? Are they supposed to come find you when they learn how to build spaceships?”
She nodded.
“That will take centuries. Millennia!”
“So you built the Tower to speed the schedule up.”
“All of human history. All of human knowledge.”
“Hypocrites as well as arrogant. ‘A culture of their own,’ eh?”
“We gave them only Stone Age technology,” she said. “They have to develop much more on their own before they can climb the Tower.”
“That’s not that hard,” someone said. “They won’t need helicopters. Balloons will do. Or towers, skyscrapers.”
“It took humans five thousand years to go from the Stone Age to hot air balloons,” she said. “Just a few hundred years ago. We won’t speed up their development that much.”
Friends, she thought in her cage. Neighbors and allies. That was what the Gypsies craved, and there was no guarantee that the Racs would ever be such things. They might become Engineers and enemies. They might even destroy themselves as humans had nearly done. But the Gypsies had decided the Racs had a right to their own destiny.
She remembered the debate among the Gypsies. “Help them now,” some had urged. “Teach them everything. Make them Gypsies and take them with us if they’ll come.”
“No,” had
said others. “That would rob them of their heritage, just as long ago on Earth we robbed other, more primitive peoples of theirs.”
“What heritage?” her father, Frederick, had asked. “They haven’t got one. They haven’t been a people long enough.”
“But…”
“On the other hand,” he had said, “if we interfere too much too soon, we can only weaken their pride in themselves as a people, make them dependent, rob them of potential. Grow the Tower high, so high no one can climb it easily, and they will have time enough. Time enough to grow a culture of their own quite rich enough to stand the shock of whatever they learn from what we leave behind.”
“These Racs will never have a chance. We’ll cleanse them from the universe just as we have cleansed the Earth.” The voice from the veedo was stern and unforgiving, unrelenting, righteous.
“Yeah!” The voice snatched her mind from the screen to a mustached man sitting on the edge of her planter. He was glaring up at her, lips parted, teeth showing.
She shuddered just as she had the night before, just as her image was now doing on the veedo screen. “Get away from me,” she hissed. Grains of soil bounced from the Engineer’s shirt as a root tendril popped out of the soil and stretched toward him. She wriggled it. “Or I’ll push this root up your—”
“You wouldn’t…!” But he scrambled out of reach and found another perch from which he could watch the screen.
She hadn’t dared to say a word the night before, much less threaten violence. Knowing she was powerless, she had forced herself to clamp her lips between her teeth. But then the Minister had rapped the stem of his pipe against the table and spoke what at first seemed much more reasonable words. “We’re not really that different, are we? Some people might have given your Racs all the education that was available just as soon as they showed they could talk.”
When she nodded, he went on. “Fortunately, that sort of soft-headed liberalism is long, long past. It nearly destroyed twentieth-century America, you know. You don’t? No matter. We do.” He waved one hand dismissively. “My point is that we, both the Engineers and the Gypsies, know that knowledge should not be freely available to all who ask for it. It must be held close, restricted, reserved for the advantage of society. Though you don’t hold it close enough.” He shook his head. “That Tower.”
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