“The eggs have hatched!” the older man laughed. “Remember? You got one in the Breed, I’m sure. So did I. We’re going to be papas in a couple of days!”
Somehow I’d just forgotten that experience, or over-looked it anyway. Now the evidence became too much to ignore. It wasn’t exactly being pregnant, but it was close enough.
I remembered Mara’s description of the Breed’s aftermath.
“Hey!” I protested. “It was supposed to be out in eight to ten days! It’s been longer than that.”
“Probably the freezing,” George guessed. “Remember, we are not independent organismswe exist in symbiosis with the virus. Turn off the virus and you turn off most of the processes it controls. Humans have gene patterns to direct this sort of thing; we don’t. The virus replaces the genes, the DNA in the cellsor, at least, their function.”
I nodded. It didn’t bother me as much now that the invisible partner was no longer controlled by an outside intelligence. Left alone, the reconstructed mutated virus was doing what its own DNA and RNA molecules directed and no morewhich did give rise to a disturbing thought, though.
“George, what if somebody else knew about our viruses? Couldn’t they take us over?”
He shook his head. “I doubt it. Remember, there’s more to this than just knowing about the things. You have to know what to tell them to do, and, most important how. And, of course, they were designed to Moses’ specifications. I suppose it’s possible, though, with a lot of time and a lot of guinea pigs.”
This concept gave me pause. “George, there’s a whole planetload of guinea pigs back there once
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Moses is destroyed. We might have added a new wrinkle to Seiglein Corporation’s repertoire.”
He considered this for a while. Finally he looked up at me and said, seriously, “Bar? Do we dare do what we’re doing?”
This question bothered me as well, but I knew the answer.
“You know we do,” I told him. “This is the lesser of two evils. After all, we know what will happen eventually if we don’t. We don’t know how they’ll react. We can only hope they’ll blow Moses and let us run the planet.”
Four days later the children emerged. Not all at once, just the head first. With no hornsthank good-ness!they had the preprogrammed color-sense and hearing but little else. Even so, when I ate, junior leaned out and ate as well. George’s emerged not a day after mine, looking identical according to my senses.
George was the expert here, and I followed his example. Even while the young were in the pouches, their education began. It consisted mostly of George, then me, saying words like “food” and “eat” when the kid was in the proper position or doing the thing we labeled.
We labeled everything. After a few days it got to be a habit, and it seemed to work very well.
Mine grew fast, and weighed exceedingly heavy on me. In short order he could no longer retract completely into the pouch, was always head out, then head and forelegs. This forced me to go on all fours all the time; it was too awkward to balance. My only solace was that George, who’d done this many times before, was having the same problems.
Although mine had been the first to emerge, George’s was the first to drop, and he sighed with obvious relief. The kid still had only small nubs of
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homs and no real vision, and so had to be guided around; but the little guy was developing with the rapidity that only the Choz could experience. Twelve or more years of growth and development was being done at six times normal speed. You couldn’t actually see them grow and develop, but every day the kids changed.
Mine dropped the day after George’s, and we discovered why it’d taken so long. It was a female, and females were smaller.
“No doubt about it,” George said after turning the kid over and looking to make sure. “You’re a real freak, Bar. But it figures. Remember, Moses expected you to return to the ship: you’re the only one who could; the only one who he could be sure of; and you’re the only one he had particular control over when changing.”
We understood, now, how Moses planned to build up his population while carrying his seed to distant stars.
“It’s a wonder he didn’t make me female, like he did some of your original crew,” I remarked.
“No, he thought it through,” George replied. “You only need one male, you know, and you were the only one he was certain would come to the ship, the only one able to come.”
We named George’s boy Ham, in the older man’s one-syllable tradition and, I found out, from his holy book. My daughter he talked me into calling Eve, since she was woman out of man, some story from his book again.
It was okay with me. I wasn’t used to being a father.
The children were a welcome addition nonetheless, since it helped jam the seemingly endless days in L-jump. No two Choz, even the Seconds, had ever gotten so much attention, or so much teaching. Both were already miniature versions of full Choz, and speaking sentences after a fashion by the time the eightieth day rolled around. Ham and Eve had been
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so much of an experience, and so welcome a diversion, that we’d thought little of the ethical problems and possible consequences up to now.
A warning buzzer sounded through the ship, signal-ing emergence from the jump in ten minutes. It was so strange an intrusion, and we were so divorced from any real sense of time, that it took me a moment to realize what it was.
The kids ran to us, fearing the new, unknown sound, unusually harsh and irritating to our fine-tuned, full-range hearing.
“It’ll be another big bump,” I warned George, and turned to the kids. “A big bang is coming,” I told them softly. “It won’t hurt, but it can toss you around and hurt you that way.”
This time we had a field down below with soft grasses, and we lay down in it, bracing ourselves and the kids against one another.
The buzzer sounded again at regular intervals. I counted them off.
“Ten … nine . .. eight… seven … six … five … four … three … two … one …” Bang! The whole ship shook and shuddered, and we bounced around a good deal, but even though we all slid toward a wall we were ready for it this time and able to break the fall. The kids were scared and crying, and we comforted them first.
That done, I checked the computer. We were still some distance from the beaconI’d had to guess fast on the jumpand we proceeded toward it in norm-space. I could already hear itor, rather, the computer could hear it and send that information to me a constant, wailing tone, very distant.
It took us two days to reach it.
I knew the beacon well, since I’d placed it there last time out. And the one to which it sent as well and the one before that. This was my territory, had been for ten years.
The beacons were unmanned outposts in the dark,
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giving a horning signal, even living quarters for a long period if rescue was what was needed. And, they could shoot a message cylinder, passing it on down the line in L-jump to the next station, at velocities much faster than any human could stand.
Such a message would reach a Seiglein station in a matter of hours. The time lag then would depend on how quickly the message was decoded, interpreted, and an answer formulated by higher-ups. An immediate reply would be plus or minus seven hours, so it would be a long conversation and I was sure there’d be many questions.
Now, suddenly, the old nerves were coming back.
“What do I tell them, George?” I asked, concerned. “And how much?”
He chewed on his lip a moment.
“I’ve been thinking about that the last few hours,” he responded slowly. “We have to tell them the truth. Will there be a visual?”
I nodded. “It’s automatic.”
“Okay, then, you tell them everything. Spare no details. Make it as dramatic as you canyou’re living proof of the truth. But leave out me and the kids we’ll stay back here in the ship.”
I looked at him strangely. “Bad feeling?”
He shrugged. “Call it caution. Alone, you’re no threat. Four of usone a femalethat’s a threat Think about Eve.”
I saw his point and agreed.
The computer automatically connected to the bea-con air lock, and I could hear the thrumming of motors as the atmosphere was released from storage and the pressure was equalized. Finally, the air lock opened, then the outer one, and I hopped, hooves clattering against the bare ribbed metal floor, into the beacon station. There was no color, there being no organic material other than me in the place. I scanned and quickly discovered what I was looking for.
The broadcast console was hard to manage. For
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one thing, there was a fixed, padded chair in front of it with positioned microphone and cameras. I wasn’t built to fit there, and I had to squeeze in as best I could. Furthermore, the controls lacked the identifying markers that would have shown me which was which. I didn’t get into these things much and they changed them every once in a while. The labels were there, all right. They were just flat printing, and I couldn’t read
them.
The problem with the chair, the mikes, and the controls caused me to have problems just reaching the panel, and my hooves certainly didn’t make for easy adjustment, even when guessing which control was which. I knew there was even a picture diagram for those unfamiliar with the equipment, but, again, I couldn’t see or read it.
Finally I got everything turned on, hoped my position and the controls were all right, and reported in, telling the story briefly and as best I could. Then it took some more time to find the transmit switch, and two tries to hit it. I was wondering if I blew it, when I felt a shudder go through the station as the projectile
was ejected.
The kids wanted to explore the new place, but I was leery as to how much was being broadcast and recorded, and kept them out.
We ate, played with the kids a little until it was time to go back to the beacon station. The little shudder and bump told me that a return message had
arrived. Fourteen hours, I thought. It had no meaning. Time
had no meaning anymore.
Well, I’d guessed right on transmit, so I tried the complementary control that just had to be Receive
and it was.
“Beacon 1458936-YL,” came a human voicethe first human voice I’d ever heard as a Choz. It sounded harsh, throaty, unpleasant. “We have received a blank message cylinder from you. Please listen and follow
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our instructions, watching the screen to do as we do, so we can receive you properly. If we do not receive a message from you within fifteen standard hours we will dispatch a ship, never fear.”
I cursed under my-breath. What could I have done wrong? I wanted this over and done with.
The pictorial example was useless, of course, but the voice instructions were quite complete. I went through the whole procedure with them and found that I had done it all right. Oh, maybe the level was off, but, if so, it was on the high side.
Then, of course, I understood. First, not being able to see anything except by sonar, I’d neglected to turn on the camera lights! Secondwell, why no voice transmission? I shook my head and went back to George.
“I don’t know,” was all the help he could offer. “Unlessmaybe our speech is different somehow.”
“Of course it is!” I sighed, and cursed myself for a fool.
Our speech was entirely ultrasonic, of course. The whole story was on the cylinder, all right, but the men at the other end didn’t have the playback equipment to get at it. The recording range was designed for human speech and compressed to fit the storage requirements.
I thought about the problem and thought about it some more. For numerous reasons I didn’t want to meet that rescue ship, which, in any event, would be a good half a year away unless they had somebody closer. Three months anyway.
“I can’t understand how Moses could hear us,” George noted. “After all, didn’t the same limitations also apply to him?”
“No,” I responded. “He was picking us up directly, receiving us by his own transceiver from our number-less internal, biological transceivers. We eventually got him with a radio and just assumed he was getting us the same way.”
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Then I had the solution. The ship’s computer was almost literally a part of me. /( had its own voice, of course, for broadcast at a beacon station when the pilot was dead.
I scanned the computer logic and told it what I wanted. It complied with a direct link into the station.
The only trouble was, I couldn’t be on visual in the station and talking through the computer in the ship.
So, of course, we sent George in to smile for the cameras. They wouldn’t know the difference.
Once again I told the story, again I made the omis-sions about my own family here and about my own feelings of literal alienation from them. I needed Moses destroyed, and only they could do it.
After, we ate a little, then slept. Schedules were for the humans, and the beacon.
The second return message was quite different, and an hour late.
“Holliday!” said a voice that sounded terrible, evil, monstrous to me. “This isto put it mildlyhard to believe. Thatthat creature is now you?” It broke off a moment, then continued. “Wellwe will certainly send a force out! That an old computerwell, it’s hard to accept, but there you are and there this story is.”
There was another pause. I was troubled by a certain slight familiarity in the voice even though it sounded so strange.
The voicea woman’s, I realizedcontinued. “Well, now, we’ll proceed to the beacon immediately and from there to this Patmos to solve this, er, situation. Wait for us.”
For Seiglein to take possession of their new pets?
Not me.
Suddenly I recognized the voice. It had once sounded sweet to me, even pretty, although that was hard to imagine now.
It was Olag 4516 Brosnyak.
I tried to visualize her, remember her as she was
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when I walked out on her two years before. That was somehow hard to do. Was even memory a victim of this process? I wondered.
Oh, I remembered what she looked like, the whole relationship, which we knew was only a between-mission thing. She belonged too much to the Corporation, and I belonged to no one but myself.
I dismissed the memory as unimportant. The reply was important, and we worked it the same way.
“Good to see you, Olag,” I began, trying to sound as human as possible. “Yes, the first intelligent alien mankind has made contact with is me. Look, I want to see all this go down, and I want to be there after to talk about what will happen. Pardon me if I remind you of our talks about my faith in anything, most of all the Corporation. You have the coordinates. I’ll wait another fifteen for your reply, then, no matter what it says, I’m off for Patmos. Don’t be so shocked, either, at the way I look. Look at the people’s faces in those apartments near your office, staring into their Creativisions, munching their nutritious food cubes. At least some of these people still talk to each other, and watching grass grow is at least as constructive. See you.”
I signed off, and George pushed the transmit but-ton. I felt the shudder, and knew the capsule was off.
We went through another entire eat-teach-eat-sleep cycle before there was a reply. This time it wasn’t Olag it was somebody higher up. Another woman, but she sounded even more monstrous and evil.
Must be a Seiglein, I thought acidly.
“All right, Holliday,” the stranger said, and I wished I could see what she looked like. “You win. Your psych profile and record indicate that you are as crazy and as antisocial as scouts usually arethat’s why you’re out there, and we’re here, and you’re in this mess looking like that.”
Pig’s ass, I thought. If any of those toadies from the Corporation had been on Patmos they’d be singing halleleujahs with Moses and loving it now. But, of