“My children,” said Pearl Angelica. “I was never ready for them before. But now…” Before her trip to Earth, she had rarely even thought about reproducing herself. She had known that she was expected to do so, to pass her genes on to another generation of her kind. But she had never felt the pressure of dwindling time, even though she had long known that she was outliving generations of her kin. She had been too busy. Perhaps too self-centered. And she had found no prospective mate.
Now she looked up at Anatol. At Esteban, who was shaking his head and saying, “That’s an awful lot of kids to take care of.”
“No,” said Crimson Orchis. She indicated the other bot. “Boston Lemon is in charge of the nursery. This is where we sprout our seeds and grow the saplings until they can be taught.”
“I can’t set seeds,” said Pearl Angelica.
“No. You’re too nearly human. But we need your genes. We had no choice. If you reproduce yourself, you will surely raise your children in the human way.”
Pearl Angelica looked at her friends and aunt. Esteban looked relieved, Anatol sullen, Lois McAlois wistful, as if she wished that she and Renny had…Were her inclinations and her dilemma that obvious?
Did she really have to choose between the two men? They each had a claim on her loyalty, and even on her affection, but…
“With these,” said Boston Lemon. A buzzing sound drew her eyes to a small insect circling above her head. She grinned broadly when the bee alighted on one of her blossoms. “A bee. At last.”
Crimson Orchis picked up the thread the other had dropped. “If you will teach them, merge roots and memories, all you are, then they will be much like you.”
Pearl Angelica stood up. “They’re doing fine,” she said to the elderly bots. “I don’t think we need so many of me, though. Let them be their own people.”
“Eldest.” Crimson Orchis and Boston Lemon bowed their heads together.
She grimaced uncomfortably. She had not expected to come home to this. “I’ll look in on them again. But for now…”
“Of course.”
“Where are they now?” asked Renny Schafer.
“We found them quarters,” said his wife. “Though the way they were looking at our niece…”
Renny snorted as if he were still a dog. “They have other rooms in mind?” He turned to Pearl Angelica. “Do you want them? One of them? Or both?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. They…”
“You feel you owe them something.”
“Not that gratitude’s enough,” said Lois McAlois.
When Pearl Angelica nodded, Renny went on. “Anatol let you out of the cage first. When Anatol got caught, Esteban got you—and the others—loose again and led you all off the Moon. He also gave you that cuff.” He shook his head admiringly. “I can hardly wait to get one of my own.”
Pearl Angelica curled one hand around the wrist where the cuff had ridden until she had left it with the Orbitals. Very briefly, she smiled at her uncle. “He’s smarter. But Anatol is braver. He took the first risk, after all.”
“They’re both brave,” said Lois McAlois. “Esteban wasn’t playing it safe when he shot those guards and stole the Teller.”
“Then…”
“Don’t force it,” said Lois. “If the answer isn’t clear now, give it time. You might even decide you don’t want either of them.”
“But it is, really.” And so it was, she suddenly realized. “When Anatol first came to me, he was wishing for the Good Old Days of his own childhood. He was looking backward just like the Engineers. Like me. But Esteban…He looks forward. He could have been born one of us.”
“Should we take him back, then?”
“Anatol?” She paused thoughtfully before shaking her head. “Not until he decides he’s left his Good Old Days behind. I don’t think he’ll turn into a saboteur.”
“And Esteban?”
She grinned. She knew what his answer would be if she asked him to be her mate. Yet she was reluctant to move too fast. “There’s only one thing I’ve ever been in a rush for. And that was a mistake, wasn’t it? I’ll have to see.”
“How did you get so many Engineers on your side?” Caledonia Emerald was asking.
“You’re surprised that some of us can be rational?” Esteban was laughing.
“They didn’t used to be,” said Renny Schafer. The doglike wrinkling of his lip that bared his canines seemed quite involuntary.
“It wasn’t that hard,” said Pearl Angelica. She glanced at Anatol, whose expression said he was not happy to see her sitting closer to the other man than to him. “Anatol came to me. Then he took me to meet the others. They weren’t happy in the first place.”
“Too restrictive,” said Cherilee Wright. They were sitting at a table in one of the Gypsy’s many small cafes, this one in a park beside a fountain. A single dumbo, perhaps a last reminder of Pearl Angelica’s search for a local pollinator, perhaps a pet released by some other Gypsy, hovered in the spray that arched from a dolphin’s mouth.
“Most of us,” she went on. “We wanted things the Engineers would not allow. I wanted genetic engineering. And here she was, telling us that the best thing human beings can do is to pursue knowledge freely. Some of us would have helped her even if we hadn’t liked her.”
Now it was Renny’s turn to laugh. “There’s hope, then!”
When Pearl Angelica finally insisted that she could stay away from First-Stop and her work no longer, Caledonia Emerald said, “I have to go back too. And I want to show you what the Racs have been doing.”
“What do you mean?”
But she refused to be more specific. “I’ll reserve a couple of shuttle seats.”
“Can we go down there too?” asked Anatol.
“I’d like to see the place,” said Esteban. “A new world. And aliens.”
“Later,” said Renny Schafer. “You have enough to learn up here.”
“Yes,” said Pearl Angelica. She avoided Anatol with her eyes, knowing that she had to be hurting his feelings. For a moment she wished she had the nerve to tell him plain what she had already told her aunt and uncle. “You’ll get down there soon enough. And it won’t be long before I’m up here for good, along with everyone else.”
The next scheduled shuttle flight was not until late the next afternoon. By noon, Pearl Angelica had a headache, her stomach was churning, and her forehead and neck were drenched with sweat.
“I have to go down there,” she said. She and Caledonia Emerald were in her aunt’s and uncle’s apartment. “I have work to do. So why…?”
“Your father?” asked Renny Schafer.
After a moment’s pause, as if she were trying the fit of his words to her feelings, the bot shook her head. “No. I expected that. I’ve been expecting it for years. We all have.”
“You’re scared to death, aren’t you?” asked Caledonia Emerald.
She nodded jerkily. “I don’t understand this. I was fine an hour ago.”
“It’s a planet,” said her Aunt Lois.
“And I’m safe in space. But not…”
“There’s no Engineers on First-Stop. No cages. No cells.”
A picture of a falling branch played itself across the screen of her mind, but she knew her uncle was right, excepting only those mad anomalies no one could escape anywhere. She sighed. “I know.”
Her anxiety did not disappear after that, but it diminished. By the time she and Caledonia Emerald boarded the shuttle it was hardly more than apprehension. And when she stepped from the shuttle to see the Tower rising like a gleaming needle from the bowl of the valley, it washed away in a flood of relief and satisfaction and bittersweet awareness that soon she would leave this place behind forever.
“I didn’t think it would be so nearly done.”
“You were gone for a long time.”
“And what’s that?” She was pointing at the arch of stone wall, the pyramid, the pole, the basket. Long lines of Racs were winding
down the encircling bluffs and across the moss-covered valley. Each one bore a large stone in his or her arms.
“Their watching place.”
“It’s grown.”
“And more than that. Come on inside.” Caledonia Emerald held the door to the pumpkin that was the Rac Surveillance Office. “We’ve got the altar bugged.”
A little later, Pearl Angelica was peering at a screen and saying, “That’s Blacktop. He’s still the chief?”
“High priest, more like,” said Lucas Ribbentrop. His fingers were dancing over the controls of what seemed to be recording equipment. His white hair glowed in the dim light of the office.
“Listen to him,” said Caledonia Emerald. She too had controls to work, and now the image of the priest brightened as she compensated for the falling dusk.
The Rac stood on the second step of the stone pyramid, his arms spread wide. He scratched his muzzle in the greeting gesture, and his voice sang out in a glossy smoothness that even to human ears rang with fury.
“Savages!” he cried. “You broke their spears! You beat them! You chased them from the valley!”
“Yesterday,” said Ribbentrop. He was pointing at another veedo screen and the image of a mob of Racs hurling stones. Four other Racs fled in desperate haste. Three of them streamed tails behind them. Two had actually dropped to all fours.
“The strangers,” said Pearl Angelica. “But…”
“Spies!” screeched a voice from the congregation within the watching place’s walls. “They plotted to seize our valley and our Tower!”
Blacktop slumped where he stood. “Not ours,” he said. “Our world’s. For every Rac, whether they have tails or not.”
“That’s what they said, just before the riot.” Caledonia Emerald was shaking her head.
“No!” screamed a voice from the mob.
“Ours!”
“We will kill them if they return!”
“Kill them all!”
“It was Wanderer himself,” said Ribbentrop. “But not only.” The other veedo screen showed the three visitors standing in a clump beside the watching place’s stone wall. Beside them stood a tailless Rac.
Facing them was a larger group of tailless Racs with Leaf in the forefront. Her fur bristled insanely as she screeched, “The Tower is ours! The gods are ours! They made us, and they made the Tower for us!”
“That’s Wetweed,” said Pearl Angelica, pointing at the fourth.
“She got friendly with Stonerapper,” said Caledonia Emerald. “She had to run with them.”
“They made us too,” Shorttail was saying.
“They discarded you. They threw you to the wind like the trash you are. You will never climb the Tower! We will not let you!”
“None of us can climb it yet,” said Wanderer. The watchers of the recorded scene could see him struggling to keep his twitching fur from bristling in automatic challenge. “But the time will come.”
“We will have learned enough to try,” said Shorttail.
“We may have tails like our ancestors,” said Stonerapper. “But our brains are not made of stone.”
“And our people will insist on trying,” said Wanderer, and now his fur was standing as madly erect as Leaf’s. So was that of every other Rac in the scene. “If we must, we will destroy all who stand in our way.”
“Nooo!” screamed Leaf, and the rocks began to fly.
Pearl Angelica refused to watch as the rocks struck flesh, blood flowed, and the strangers with their single friend turned and ran. She shifted her gaze to the screen that showed the present moment and a rising hysteria that seemed every bit as threatening as that which had sent the others fleeing.
Only one Rac was now not screaming threats of murder. He squatted just outside the wall, to the left of the pyramid. “That’s Firetouch,” said Caledonia Emerald.
“Bright boy,” said Ribbentrop. He indicated a strip of bark pinned to the wall above his console. On it Pearl Angelica could recognize drawings of dumbos’ wings.
Blacktop’s voice softened with urgency and outrage: “They are only ourselves. They have tails, but they seek only what our Makers have told us to seek. Knowledge. And indeed, they understand what knowledge is far, far better than most of you.”
The congregation sang threat in unison, but he stiffened his back once more, raised the fur of his shoulders, and refused to retreat.
“You pick up the scraps our Makers drop and call them knowledge.” He gestured toward the basket atop the pole behind him. “You call them offerings. You insult the gods.”
“They’ll kill him!” breathed Pearl Angelica.
“I hope not,” said Ribbentrop. “He’s the best thing they’ve got going for them.”
“Only one of you!” screeched Blacktop. “Only one of you knows how to pursue real knowledge! Only one of you knows that we do not deserve the Tower and its treasure if we do not study our world and learn and build. Only one of you, and the three strangers you nearly murdered!”
“Does he mean Wetweed?”
“Firetouch,” said Ribbentrop. He pointed once more at the bark strip that spoke of a wish to fly. “That was his offering to the gods.”
“Us?” Pearl Angelica’s voice was disbelieving, but she could say nothing more. Blacktop’s words had quieted once more and even gained a hint of roughness. “We must,” he was saying. “We must learn enough to climb the Tower. We must build a foundation on which our Makers’ gift of knowledge can stand. We must earn that gift.”
He paused, and the eavesdroppers could hear an ominously smooth tone rising from the congregation. He showed no sign of hearing it himself as he half turned to face the Tower. “You want it all,” he said. “Don’t you? You want it all right now, without waiting. You don’t want to struggle all your lives, and then all your children’s lives, so that your grandchildren can enter into paradise. But that is the nature of our Makers’ gift. We must struggle for as long as it takes, even if that means that by the time we reach the Tower’s peak we have learned all by ourselves everything our Makers know.
“Be sure,” he said. “If that is what our future holds, our Makers will be delighted. It will mean we have obeyed in fullest measure the only commandment they have set down for us. And if we then go beyond their knowledge, they will even cede their place in paradise to us.”
“We will?” asked Pearl Angelica.
“Why not?” asked Ribbentrop. “Isn’t that what this kind of evolution is all about?”
“Think!” Blacktop cried now. “The Tower cannot possibly contain all the knowledge of the universe. Our Makers can put there only what they know now, and they say themselves that there is a vast unknown waiting to be discovered beyond that little bit.
“And even that they have given us. They gave us intelligence, the ability to learn for ourselves. If we use that ability and strengthen it, we may well surpass our gods.”
He was not done. His mouth was still open. But his congregation had heard enough. Its song of threat and danger grew quickly louder. It became a scream. And when Leaf emerged from the front of the crowd that was quickly becoming a mob, her words were no surprise: “No!” she screamed just as she had before she had stoned the strangers from the valley. “They made us! But they wish to keep us helpless before their might! That is why they tantalize us with the Tower. There is nothing at its tip!”
“No!” cried Blacktop.
“Yes!” Leaf turned her back on him and screamed at the rest of the tribe. “He is their creature!” She whirled and pointed at Firetouch just outside the wall. He was gaping at the madness that seemed about to engulf them all. “So is he! Kill them both!”
Someone tore a rock from the wall of the watching place and hurled it toward the pyramid. It fell short, but the next did not.
Blacktop refused to run.
Firetouch did not.
“Why? Why can’t we keep them from such idiocy?” Pearl Angelica was sobbing. So was Caledonia Emerald, while Lucas Ribbentrop looke
d haggard.
“They have to make their own mistakes.” The veedo images of Lois McAlois and Renny Schafer both shook their heads.
“But why do they have to make the same mistakes humans have made?”
Renny sighed. “I’m glad Freddy didn’t live to see this. But the pursuit of knowledge…It’s a grand ideal, but I guess some things have to come first. At least until we learn how to scrub such things as territoriality from the genes.”
“We probably can’t,” said Ribbentrop. “It’s a biological imperative to protect the resources you need to survive.”
“Did we make a mistake in building the Tower?” asked Pearl Angelica. “Should we have left well enough alone?”
Lois McAlois looked to one side as Esteban stepped into the picture. “I heard,” he said. “And I don’t think so. It will stand there, won’t it? Until they’re ready for it?”
“It’s high enough,” said Renny. “They won’t climb it by accident. They’ll have to learn a lot on their own.”
“I wonder how long it will take,” said Pearl Angelica.
“Not long enough,” said Caledonia Emerald. “It should be twice as high as it is.”
* * *
Epilogue
The Watching Place had grown over the decades. The end that faced the Worldtree remained open, giving an assembled congregation full view of the goal the gods had set all Rackind. The pyramid of steps that was the altar was broader and higher, and the pole and basket that mimicked the Worldtree was an obelisk of stone just rough enough to give purchase to the claws of climbing Racs. The stone walls were thick and tall, their massive blocks cut square and joined with mortar and ornamented with ten thousand carvings. Buttresses soared down to brace the walls against a ground whose native moss now shared space with honeysuckle, grass, flowering shrubs, flagged paths, and artificial streams filled with tasty-tails, dumbo larvae, for the delectation of priests and pilgrims. Roof beams thick as Rac torsos supported slabs of slate.
But now the obelisk was fallen. Roof beams and slates were rubble in the nave. Holes gaped in the walls, and broken stone filled the streams and crushed moss, grass, honeysuckle, and other vegetation.
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