Jack Williamson, page 23
We tramped on, finding no sign of anything human. By mid-afternoon, hungry and thirsty again, with nothing human in view ahead, we sat down to rest on an outcropping rock. Pepe dug a little holo of Tanya out of his breast pocket and passed it to show us her dark-eyed smile.
“If we hadn’t lost the radio—” He caught himself, with a stiff little grin. “Still I guess we wouldn’t call. I’d love to hear her voice. I know she’s anxious, but I wouldn’t want her to know the fix we’re in—”
He stopped when a shadow flickered across the holo. Looking up, we found a silvery slider craft gliding to the grass a few yards from us. An oval door dilated in the side of it. Tling jumped out.
“We found you!” she cried. “Even with no microbots. Here is my mother.”
A slender woman came out behind her, laughing at Pepe when he tried to repeat the name she gave us.
“She says you can just call her Lo.”
Tling still wore the blouse and skirt, with her wide-brimmed hat, but Lo was nude except for a gauzy blue sash worn over her shoulder. As graceful and trim, and nearly as sexless, as Sandor, she had the same cream-colored skin, already darkening where the sun struck it, but she had a thick crown of bright red-brown curls instead of Sandor’s cap of sleek fur.
“Dr. Yare.” Tling spoke carefully to let us hear. “Mr. Navarro. Mr. Kell, who is also called El Chino. They were cloned at Tycho Station from prehistoric tissue specimens.”
“You were cloned for duty there.” Lo eyed us severely, her English as precise as Tling’s. “How did you get here?”
“We lied to the ship.” Casey straightened wryly to face her. “We did it because we didn’t want to live out our lives in that pit on the Moon. I won’t say I’m not sorry, but now we are in trouble. I don’t want to die.”
“You will die,” she told him bluntly. “Like all your kind. You carry no microbots.”
“I guess.” He shrugged. “But first we want a chance to live.”
“Mother, please!” Tling caught her hand. “With no microbots, they are in immediate danger here. Can we help them stay alive?”
“That depends on your father.”
“I tried to ask him,” Tling said. “He didn’t answer.”
We watched Lo’s solemn frown, saw Tling’s deepening trouble.
“I wish you had microbots.” She turned at last to translate for us. “My father has gone out to meet an interstellar ship that has just come back after eight hundred years away. The officers are telling him a very strange story.”
She looked up at her mother, as if listening.
“It carried colonists for the planets of the star Enthel, which is four hundred light-years toward the galactic core. They had taken off with no warning of trouble. The destination planet had been surveyed and opened for settlement. It had rich natural resources, with no native life to be protected. Navigation algorithms for the flight had been tested, occupation priorities secured.”
She stared up at the sky, in baffled dismay.
“Now the ship has returned, two thousand colonists still aboard.”
Casey asked what had gone wrong. We waited, watching their anxious frowns.
“My father is inquiring.” Tling turned back to us. “He’s afraid of something dreadful.”
“It must have been dreadful,” Pepe whispered. “Imagine eight hundred years on a ship in space!”
“Only instants for them.” Tling shook her head, smiling at him. “Time stops, remember, at the speed of light. By their own time, they left only yesterday. Yet their situation is still hard enough. Their friends are scattered away. Their whole world is gone. They feel lost and desperate.”
She turned to her mother. “Why couldn’t they land?”
Her mother listened again. Far out across the valley I saw a little herd of zebras running. I couldn’t see what had frightened them.
“My father is asking,” she told us at last. “The passengers were not told why the ship had to turn back. The officers have promised a statement, but my father says they can’t agree on what to say. They aren’t sure what they found on the destination planet. He believes they’re afraid to say what they believe.”
The running zebras veered aside. I saw the tawny flash of a lion charging to meet them, saw a limping zebra go down. My own ankle was aching from a stone that had turned under my foot, and I felt as helpless as the zebra.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Dunk.” Tling reached to touch my arm. “My father is very busy with the ship. I don’t know what he can do with you, but I don’t want the animals to kill you. I think we can keep you safe till he comes home. Can’t we, mother?”
Her lips pressed tight, Lo shrugged as if she had forgotten us.
“Please, mother. I know they are primitives, but they would never harm me. I can understand them the way I understand the animals. They are hungry and afraid, with nowhere else to go.”
Lo stood motionless for a moment, frowning at us.
“Get in.”
She beckoned us into the flyer and lifted her face again as if listening to the sky.
We soared toward a rocky hill and landed on a level ledge near the summit. Climbing out, we looked down across the grassy valley and over the ridge to Sandor’s memorial just beyond. Closer than I expected, I found the bright metal glint of the rebuilt spaceplane on the mall, the Capitol dome and the Washington obelisk, the white marble sheen of the Egyptian pyramid looming out of green forest beyond.
“My father picked this spot.” Tling nodded toward the cliff. “He wanted to watch the memorial built.”
While her mother stood listening intently at the sky, Tling inspected our mud-stained safari suits.
“You need a bath,” she decided, “before you eat.”
Running ahead, she took us down an arched tunnel into the hill and showed me into a room far larger than my cell below the station dome. Warm water sprayed me when I stepped into the shower, warm air dried me. When I came out a human-shaped robot handed me my clothing, clean and neatly folded. It guided me to a room where Tling was already sitting with Pepe and Casey at a table set with plates around a pyramid of fragrant fruit.
“Mr. Chino asked about my mother.” She looked up to smile at me. “You saw that she’s different, with different microbots. She comes from the Garenkrake system, three hundred light-years away. Its people had forgotten where they came from. She wanted to know. When her search for the mother planet brought her here, she found my father already digging at the Tycho site. They’ve worked together ever since.”
Pepe and Casey were already eating. Casey turned to Tling, who was nibbling delicately at something that looked like a huge purple orchid.
“What do you think will happen to us?”
“I’ll ask my father when I can.” She glanced toward the ceiling. “He is still busy with the ship’s officers. I’m sorry you’re afraid of my mother. She doesn’t hate you, not really. If she seems cool to you, it’s just because she has worked so long at the site, digging up relics of the first world. She thinks you seem so—so primitive.”
She shook her head at our uneasy frowns.
“You told her you lied to the ship.” She looked at Casey. “That bothers her, because the microbots do not transmit untruths or let people hurt each other. She feels sorry for you.”
Pepe winced. “We feel sorry for ourselves.”
Tling sat for a minute, silently, frowning, and turned back to us.
“The ship is big trouble for my father,” she told us. “It leaves him no time for you. He says you should have stayed on the Moon.”
“I know.” Casey shrugged. “But we’re here. We can’t go back. We want to stay alive.”
“I feel your fear.” She gave us an uneasy smile. “My father’s too busy to talk to you, but if you’ll come to my room, there is news about the ship.”
The room must have been her nursery. In one corner was a child’s bed piled with dolls and toys, a cradle on the floor beside it. The wall above was alive with a scenic holo. Long-legged birds flew away from a water hole when a tiger came out of tall grass to drink. A zebra stallion ventured warily close, snuffing at us. A prowling leopard froze and ran from a bull elephant. She gestured at the wall.
“I was a baby here, learning to love the animals.”
That green landscape was suddenly gone. The wall had become a wide window that showed us a great spacecraft drifting though empty blackness. Blinding highlights glared where the sun struck it. The rest was lost in shadow, but I made out a thick bright metal disk, slowly turning. Tiny-looking sliders clung around a bulging dome at its center.
“It’s in parking orbit, waiting for anywhere to go,” Tling said. “Let’s look inside.”
She gave us glimpses of the curving floors where the spin created a false gravity. People sat in rows of seats like those in holos of ancient aircraft. More stood crowded in aisles and corridors. I heard scrap of hushed and anxious talk.
“…home on a Pacific island.”
The camera caught a woman with a crown of what looked like bright golden feathers instead of hair. Holding a whimpering baby in one arm, the other around a grim-faced man, she was answering questions from someone we didn’t see. The voice we heard was Tling’s.
“It’s hard for us.” The woman’s lips were not moving, but the voice went sharp with her distress. “We had a good life there. Mark’s an imagineer. I was earning a good living as a genetic artist, designing ornamentals to special order. We are not the pioneer type, but we did want Baby.” An ironic wry smile twisted her lips. “A dream come true!”
She lifted the infant to kiss its gold-capped head.
“Look at us now.” She smiled sadly at the child. “We spent our savings for a vision of paradise on Fendris Four. A tropical beachfront between the surf and a bamboo forest, snow on a volcanic cone behind it. A hundred families of us, all friends forever.”
She sighed and rocked the baby.
“They didn’t let us off the ship. Or even tell us why. We’re desperate, with our money gone and Baby to care for. Now they say there’s nowhere else we can go.”
The wall flickered and the holos came back with monkeys chattering in jungle treetops.
“That’s the problem,” Tling said. “Two thousand people like them, stuck on the ship with nowhere to live. My father’s problem now, since the council voted to put him in charge.”
Casey asked, “Why can’t they leave the ship?”
“If you don’t understand—” She was silent for a moment. “My mother says it’s the way of the microbots. They won’t let people overrun the planet and use it up like my mother says the primitives did, back before the impacts. Births must be balanced by migration. Those unlucky people lost their space when they left Earth.”
“Eight hundred years ago?”
“Eight hundred of our time.” She shrugged. “A day or so of theirs.”
“What can your father do for them?”
“My mother says he’s still searching for a safe destination.”
“If he can’t find one—” Casey frowned. “And they can’t come home. It seems terribly unfair. Do you let the microbots rule you?”
“Rule us?” Puzzled, she turned her head to listen and nodded at the wall. “You don’t understand. They do unite us, but there is no conflict. They live in all of us, acting to keep us alive and well, guiding us to stay free and happy, but moving us only by our own consent. My mother says they are part of what you used to call the unconscious.”
“Those people on the ship?” Doubtfully, Casey frowned. “Still alive, I guess, but not free to get off or happy at all.”
“They are troubled.” Nodding soberly, she listened again. “But my mother says I should explain the microbot way. She says the old primitives lived in what she calls the way of the jungle genes, back when survival required traits of selfish aggression. The microbots have let us change our genes to escape the greed and jealousy and violence that led to so much crime and war and pain on the ancient Earth. They guide us toward what is best for all. My mother says the people on the ship will be content to follow the microbot way when my father has helped them find it.”
She turned her head. “I heard my mother call.”
I hadn’t heard a thing, but she ran out of the room. In the holo wall, high-shouldered wildebeest were leaping off a cliff to swim across a river. One stumbled, toppled, vanished under the rapid water. We watched in dismal silence till Casey turned to frown at Pepe and me.
“I don’t think I like the microbot way.”
We had begun to understand why Sandor had no place on Earth for us.
32
Dear sirs, I must beg you to excuse us.”
Tling made a careful little bow and explained that her mother was taking her to dance and music practice, then going on to a meeting about the people on the stranded ship. We were left alone with the robots. They were man-shaped, ivory-colored, blank-faced. Lacking microbots, they were voice-controlled.
Casey tried to question them about the population, cities, and industries of the new Earth, but they had been programmed only for domestic service, with no English or facts about anything else. Defeated by their blank-lensed stares, we sat out on the terrace, looking down across the memorial and contemplating our own uncertain future, till they called us in for dinner.
The dishes they served us were strange, but Pepe urged us to eat while we could.
“Mañana? Quién sabe?”
Night was falling before we got back to the terrace. A thin Moon was setting in the west. In the east, a locomotive headlight crept into the memorial. The mall was brightly lit for evening tours, the Taj Mahal a glowing gem, the Great Pyramid an ivory island in the creeping dusk. The robots had our beds ready when the mall went dark. They had served wine with dinner, and I slept without a dream.
Awake early next morning, rested again and full of unreasonable hope, I found Tling standing outside at the end of the terrace, looking down across the valley. She had hair like her mother’s, not scales or fur, but blond and cropped short. Despite the awesome power of her microbots, I thought she looked very small and vulnerable. She started when I spoke.
“Good morning, Mr. Dunk.” She wiped at her face with the back of her hand and tried to smile. I saw that her eyes were puffy and red. “How is your ankle?”
“Better.”
“I was worried.” She found a pale smile. “Because you have no symbiotes to help repair such injuries.”
I asked if she had heard from her father and the emigrant ship. She turned silently to look again across the sunlit valley and the monument. I saw the far plume of steam from an early train crawling over the bridge toward the Washington Monument.
“I watched a baby giraffe.” Her voice was slow and faint, almost as if she was speaking to herself. “I saw it born. I watched it learning to stand, learning to suck. It finally followed its mother away, wobbling on its legs. It was beautiful—”
Her voice failed. Her hand darted to her lips. She stood trembling, staring at me, her eyes wide and dark with pain. She gasped for breath.
“My father!” Her voice came suddenly sharp and thin, almost a scream. “He’s going away. I’ll never see him again.”
She ran back inside.
When the robots called us to breakfast, we found her sitting between her parents. She had washed her tear-streaked face, but the food on her plate had not been touched. Here out of the sun, Sandor’s face was pale and grim. He seemed not to see us till Tling turned to frown at him. He rose then, and came around the table to shake our hands.
“Good morning, Dr. Pen.” Casey gave him a wry smile. “I see why you didn’t want us here, but I can’t apologize. We’ll never be sorry we came.”
“Sit down.” He spoke shortly. “Let’s eat.”
We sat. The robots brought us plates loaded with foods we had never tasted. Saying no more to us, Sandor signaled a robot to refill his cup of the bitter black tea and bent over a bowl of crimson berries. Tling sat looking up at him in anguished devotion till Casey spoke.
“Sir, we heard about your problem with the stranded colonists. Can you tell us what’s happening?”
“Nothing anybody understands.” He shook his head and gave Tling a tender smile before he pushed the berries aside and turned gravely back to us. His voice was quick and crisp. “The initial survey expedition had found their destination planet quite habitable and seeded it with terran-type life. Expeditions had followed to settle the three major continents. This group was to occupy the third.
“They arrived safely but got no answer when they called the planet from orbit. The atmosphere was hazed with dust that obscured the surface, but a search in the infrared found relics of a very successful occupation. Pavements, bridges, masonry, steel skeletons that had been buildings. All half buried under dunes of red, wind-blown dust. No green life anywhere. A derelict craft from one of the pioneer expeditions was still in orbit, but dead as the planet.
“They never learned what killed the planet. No news of the disaster seems to have reached any other world, which suggests that it happened unexpectedly and spread fast. The medical officers believe the killer may have been some organism that attacks organic life, but the captain refused to allow any investigation. She elected to turn back at once, attempting no contact. A choice that probably saved their lives.”
He picked up his spoon and bent again to his bowl of berries. I tasted one. It was tart, sweet, with a heady tang I can’t describe.
“Sir,” Casey spoke again, “those people looked desperate. What will happen to them now?”
“A dilemma.” Sandor looked at Tling, with a sad little shrug. She turned her head to hide a sob. “Habitable planets are relatively rare. They must be discovered, surveyed, terraformed, approved for settlement. These people are fortunate. It took an emergency waiver, but we’ve cleared the way for them to occupy a very promising new planet, five hundred light-years in toward Sagittarius. Fuel and fresh supplies are being loaded now.”
“And my father—” Tling looked up at me, her voice almost a wail. “He has to go with them. All because of me.”
