Jack Williamson, page 24
He put his arm around her and bent his face to hers. Whatever he said was silent. She climbed into his arms. He hugged her, rocking her back and forth like a baby, till her weeping ceased. With a smile that broke my heart, she kissed him and slid out of his arms.
“Excuse us, please.” Her voice quivering, she caught his hand. “We must say good-bye.”
She led him out of the room.
Lo stared silently after them till Pepe tapped his bowl to signal the robots for a second serving of the crimson berries.
“It’s true.” With a long sigh, she turned back to us. “A painful thing for Tling. For all three of us. This is not what we planned.”
Absently, she took a little brown cake from a tray the robot was passing and laid it on her plate, untasted.
“Qué importa?” Pepe gave her a puzzled look.
“We hoped to stay together,” she said. “Sandor and I have worked for most of the century, excavating the site and restoring what we could here at the memorial. With that done, I wanted to see my home world again. We were going back there together, Tling with us. Taking the history we had learned, we were planning to replicate the memorial there.”
Bleakly, she shook her head.
“This changes everything. Sandor feels a duty to help the colonists find a home. Tling begged him to take us with him, but—” She shrugged in resignation, her lips drawn tight. “He’s afraid of what killed that planet. He thinks we’re safer here.
“And there’s something else. His brother—”
She looked away for a moment.
“He has a twin brother. His father emigrated, and took the twin. His mother had a career in microbot genetics she couldn’t leave. Sandor stayed here with her till he was grown. He left Earth then to look for his brother. He never found the twin. He did find me. That’s the happy side.”
Her brief smile faded.
“It’s hopeless, I’ve told him. There are too many worlds. Star flights take too long. But he won’t give up the dream.” Her words slowed. “He’s afraid his brother was on that planet.”
Can we—” Casey checked himself to look at Pepe and me. We nodded, and he turned anxiously back to Lo. “If Sandor does go out on the emigrant ship, would he take us with him?”
She shook her head and sat staring at nothing till Pepe asked, “Porqué no?”
“Reasons enough.” Frowning, she picked up the little brown cake, broke it in half, dropped the fragments on her plate. “First of all, the danger. He says it’s real. He doesn’t want to kill you.”
“Aren’t there always risks?” Casey shrugged at them. “When you have to jump across hundreds of years of space and time, how can anything be certain?”
“Nothing is.” She shrugged unhappily. “But that dead planet is toward the galactic core. So is this new one. If the killer is coming from the core—”
Her words broke off.
“Risk enough.” Casey glanced again at us and gave her a stiff little grin. “But you might remind him that we weren’t cloned to live forever. He has more at stake than we do.”
Her body stiffened, fading slowly white.
“We begged him not to go.” Her voice was faint. “But his microbots command him. And he is still looking for his brother.”
“Is he their slave? Can’t he think of you and Tling?”
Her answer took a long time to come.
“We are not slaves.” She seemed composed again; I wondered if her own microbots had eased her pain. “You may see the microbots as micromachines, but they don’t make us mechanical. We’ve kept all the feelings and impulses the primitives had. The microbots simply make us better humans. Sandor is going out with the ship not just to help the people aboard, but for me and Tling, for people everywhere.”
“If the odds are as bad as they look—” Casey squinted doubtfully. “What can one man hope to do?”
“Nothing, perhaps.” She made a bleak little shrug. “But he has an idea. Long ago, before he ever searched for the lunar site, he worked with his mother on her microbot research. If the killer is some kind of virulent organism, he thinks the microbots might be modified into a shield against it.”
“Speak to him,” Casey begged her. “Get him to take us with him. We’ll help him any way we can.”
“You?” Astonishment widened her eyes. “How?”
“We put you here on Earth,” he told her. “Even with no microbots at all.”
“So you did.” Golden color flushed her skin. “I’ll speak to him.” Silent for a moment, she shook her head. “Impossible. He says every seat on the ship is filled.”
She paused, frowning at the ceiling. The robot was moving around the table, offering a bowl of huge flesh-colored mushrooms that had a tempting scent of frying ham.
“We are trying to plan a future for Tling.” Her pixie face was suddenly tight, her voice hushed with feeling. “A thousand years will pass before he gets back. He grieves to leave Tling.”
“I saw her this morning,” I said. “She’s terribly hurt.”
“We are trying to make it up. I’ve promised that she will see him again.”
Pepe looked startled. “How can that happen?”
She took a mushroom, sniffed it with a nod of approval, and laid it on her plate.
“We must manage the time,” she told him. “I plan to stay here in charge of the memorial, at least till she is grown. Then we’ll travel. I want to see what the centuries have done to my own home world. It will take good calculation and the right star flights, but Tling and I can plan to meet him at Tycho Station when he gets back.”
“If he gets—”
He cut off the words. Her face went pale, but after a moment she gave us a stiff little smile and had the robot offer the mushrooms again. They had a name I never learned, and a flavor more like bittersweet chocolate than ham. The meal ended. She left us there alone with the robots, with nowhere to go, no future in sight.
“A thousand years!” Pepe muttered. “I wish they’d give us microbots.”
“Or else—”
Casey turned to the door.
“News for you.” Lo stood there, smiling at us. “News from the emigrant ship. Uneasy passengers have arranged for new destinations, leaving empty places. Sandor has found seats for you.”
33
Sandor took us to our seats on the emigrant ship. Wheel-shaped and slowly spinning, it held us against the rim with a force weaker than Earth’s gravity, stronger than the Moon’s. A blue light flashed to warn us of the space-time jump. Restraints folded around us, I felt a gut-wrenching tug, and then the restraints released us. With no sense of any other change, we sat uneasily waiting.
The big cabin was hushed at first. Watching the faces of other passengers, I saw eager expectation give way to disappointment, then distress. I heard a baby crying, someone shouting at a robot attendant, then a rising clamor of voices sharp-edged with panic. Sandor sat looking gravely away till I asked him what was wrong.
“We don’t know.” He grinned at our dazed wonderment. “At least we’ve made the skip to orbit. Five hundred light-years. You’re old men now.”
He let us follow him to the lounge, where a ceiling dome imaged a new sky. The Milky Way looked familiar. I found the Orion Nebula, but all the nearer stars had shifted beyond recognition. I felt nothing from the ship’s rotation; the whole sky seemed to turn around us. Two suns rose, one smaller than our own, the brighter a hot blue dazzle. The planet climbed behind them, a huge round blot on the field of unfamiliar constellations. Red fire rimmed it, edged with the blue sun’s glare. Looking for the glow of cities, all I saw was darkness.
Anxious passengers were clustering around a few crew members uniformed in the ship’s blue-and-gold caps and sashes. Most of their questions were in the silent language of the microbots, but their faces revealed dismay. I heard high-pitched voices, cries of shock and dread.
We turned to Sandor.
“The telescopes pick up no artificial lights.” His lean face was bleakly set. “Radio calls get no answer. The electronic signal spectrum appears dead.” He shook his head, with a heavy sigh. “I was thinking of my brother. I’d hoped to find him here.”
With gestures of apology, a group of uneasy people pushed between us and surrounded him. He seemed to listen, frowning at the planet’s dark shadow, and forlornly waved them away. He spoke his final words for us.
“We’ll be looking for survivors.”
We watched the planet crawl and crawl again across the ceiling dome as the spinning ship carried us around it. That crescent of blue-and-orange fire widened with each passage till we saw its whole globe. Swirls and streamers of high cloud shone brilliantly beneath the blue sun’s light, but thick red dust dulled everything beneath.
One hemisphere was all ocean, except for the gray dot of an isolated island. A single huge continent covered most of the other, extending far south of the equator and north across the pole. Mountain ranges walled the west coast. A single river system drained the vast valley eastward. From arctic ice to polar sea it was all rust-red, no green anywhere.
“A rich world once.” Sandor gave a dismal shrug. “But now—”
He turned to watch a woman marching into the room. A woman so flat-chested, masculine, and strange that I had to look again. Bright red-black scales covered her angular body, even her hairless head. Her face was a narrow triangle, her chin sharply pointed, her eyes huge and green. We stared as she sprang to a circular platform in the center of the room.
“Captain Vlix,” he murmured. “She’s old, born back in the days when microbots were new and body forms experimental. I sailed with her once, centuries ago. She had known my brother, but had no clues to give me.”
Heads were turning in attention. I saw uneasy hope yield to bitter disappointment. Sandor stood frozen, widened eyes fixed on her, till she turned to face another officer joining her on the platform.
“What is it?” Casey whispered. Sandor seemed deaf till Casey touched his arm and asked again, “What did she say?”
“Nothing good.” Sandor spoke at last, his voice hushed and hurried. “She was summing up a preliminary report from the science staff. This is our second discovery of a dead planet. The first is many light-years away. The implications are—”
He hunched his shoulders, his skin gone pale.
“Yes? What are they?”
With a painful smile, he tried to gather himself.
“At this point, only speculation. The killer has reached two worlds. How many more? Its nature is not yet known. The science chief suggests that it could possibly be a malignant microbot, designed to attack all organic life. It certainly seems aggressive, advancing on an interstellar front from the galactic core.”
“It can’t be stopped?”
“Certainly not unless we come to understand it. Microbots are designed to survive and reproduce themselves. They could be impossible to stop. They are complex, half life, half machine, more efficient than either. It’s possible they have mutated into something malignant. It’s possible some madman has reprogrammed them for military use, though they themselves should have prevented that.”
“We’re helpless?”
“The captain is doing what she can. A robotic drone is being prepared to attempt a low-level survey of surface damage. A search has already begun for any spacecraft that might remain in orbit. And—”
He broke off to watch a thin man with a gray cap and sash who darted out of the crowd and jumped to join the officers on the platform.
“That’s Benkar Rokehut.” He made a wry face. “A fellow Earthman, born in my own century. An entrepreneur who has opened half a dozen worlds, made and lost a dozen fortunes. He funded the surveys and initial settlements here. He has his future at stake.”
He gave us an ironic shrug.
“And he doesn’t want to die.”
Rokehut faced the captain for a moment, and turned silently to address the room. Gesturing at the planet, pointing at features on the surface, he turned to follow as it crept overhead, set, and rose again. When Captain Vlix moved as if to stop him, he burst suddenly into speech, shouting vehemently at her, his pale skin flushing redder than the planet.
“His emotions have overcome his microbots.” Sandor frowned and drew us closer. “All he sees is danger. Though that first lost planet is a hundred light-years from this one, they both lie toward the core from Earth. He believes the killer pathogen is spreading from somewhere toward the core, possibly carried by refugees. He wants us to head out for the frontier stars toward the rim.”
The officers moved to confront him. What they said was silent, but I saw Rokehut’s face fade almost to the gray of his cap and sash. He snatched them off, threw them off the platform, waved his fists and shouted. Yielding at last, he shuffled aside and stood glaring, fists still clenched with a purely human fury.
Captain Vlix turned silently back to face the room, speaking with a calm control.
“The officers agree that we do seem to face an interstellar invasion,” Sandor said. “But blind flight can only spread the contagion, if frightened refugees carry it. In the end, unless we get some better break—”
With a sad little shrug, he paused to look hard at us.
“Tycho Station could become the last human hope. It is sealed, shielded, well concealed. The Moon has no surface life to attract or sustain any kind of pathogen.” His lips twisted to a quirk of bitter humor. “Even if the pathogen wins, there’s still one hope. It should die when no hosts are left to carry it. You clones may have another book to write before your epic ends.”
Captain Vlix left the room, Rokehut and his people close behind her. The robot attendants were circulating with trays of hard brown biscuits and plastic bubbles of juice.
“The best we can do,” Sandor said. “With zero times in transit, the ship carries no supplies or provisions for any prolonged stay aboard. We must move, yet the officers agree that we can’t turn back until we get whatever information we can from the drone.”
It descended over the glaciers that fringed the polar cap and flew south along the west coast. Its cameras projected their images on the dome and the edge of the floor. Watching, I could feel that I was riding in its nose. It must have flown high and fast, but the images were processed to make it seem that we hovered low and motionless over a deserted seaport or the ruin of a city and climbed to soar on to the next.
All we saw was dust and desolation: broken walls of stone or brick, where roofs had fallen in; tangles of twisted steel where towers had stood; concrete seawalls around empty harbors. And everywhere, wind-drifted dunes of dead red dust and wind-whipped clouds of rust-colored dust, sometimes so dense it hid the ground.
The drone turned east near the equator, soaring over mountain peaks capped with snows dyed the color of drying blood. It paused over broken dams in high mountain canyons and crossed a network of dust-choked irrigation canals.
“I’ve dreamed my brother was here.” Sandor made a solemn face. “Dreamed I might find him here.” He stopped to sigh and gaze across an endless sea of wave-shaped dunes. “Dreams! All of us dreaming of endless life and time for everything. And now this, the pathogen.”
The drone had reached the dead coast and flown on east across the empty ocean. The lounge was silent again, disheartened people drifting away. Casey asked if we were turning back.
“Not quite yet.” Sandor tipped his head, listening. “Captain Vlix reports that the search team has found something in low polar orbit. Maybe a ship. Maybe just a rock. Maybe something else entirely. She’s launching a pilot pod to inspect it.”
Back in the lounge, strange music was playing. Strange at least to me. Unfamiliar trills and runs and strains were broken by long gaps of silence. A woman with a baby in her arms was swaying to a rhythm I couldn’t hear. Silent people were dozing or wandering the aisles. A silent group had gathered around Rokehut at the end of the room, listening and gesticulating.
“He still wants us to run for our lives,” Sandor said. “For a star two thousand light-years out toward the rim. An idiot’s dream! To complete the jump he’d have to calculate the exact relative position of the star two thousand years from now. Nobody has the data.”
The attendants came back with juice and little white wafers. Rokehut and his group refused them, with angry gestures, and trooped away to confront the captain again.
“A mild sedative.” Sandor waved the robot away. “If you need to relax.”
I accepted a wafer. It had a vinegary taste and it hit me with sudden fatigue. I slept in my seat till Casey shook my arm.
“The pod has reached that object in orbit,” Sandor told us. “The pilot identifies it as the craft that brought the last colonists. His attempts at contact get no response. He asked permission to go aboard. That has been granted, with the warning that he won’t be allowed back on our ship. He reports that his service robot is now cutting the security bolts to let him into the air lock.”
I watched the people around us, silently listening, frowning intently, expectantly nodding, frowning again.
“He’s inside.” Head tipped aside, eyes fixed on something far away, Sandor spoke at last. “The pathogen has been there. He has found red dust on the decks, but he hopes for protection from his space gear. He believes the killer was already on the planet before the ship arrived. The cargo was never unloaded. All organics have crumbled, but metal remains unchanged.
“He’s pushing on—”
Sandor stopped to listen and shake his head.
“The pilot was on his way to the control room, searching for records or clues. He never got there.” He leaned his head and nodded. “The science chief is summing up what evidence he has. It points to something airborne, fast-acting, totally lethal. It likely killed anybody who ever knew what it is.”
Captain Vlix allowed Rokehut and his partisans to poll the passengers. Overwhelmingly, they voted to turn back toward Earth at once. The lounge became a bedlam of angry protest when departure was delayed, hushed a little when Captain Vlix came back to the platform.
