“Oh, that much was simple,” George replied with infuriating modesty. “Moses had a broad-beam broadcast signal that operated only in certain frequency ranges. Your experience with our robot friend, here, gave me the idea. If Moses controlled what the virus did, it had to do it by broadcast. We knew that much to begin with. And, to produce the stimulus-response mechanism, the colors, it had to result in our responding to a frequency to which the viruses also responded. Which? Well, obviously, it had to be at or close to the range of our own vision signals, somewhere between eighty thousand and a hundred and forty thousand cycles per second. Find that, do the minus sum of our vision, and you get Moses’ frequency.”
He made the whole thing sound so simple, and it wasn’t. The logic steps involved were fantastic. It’s
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possible that nobody else would have been able to do it, and I said as much to George.
“Oh, no,” he responded. “Probably half the colony could havethe Firsts, that is. When you expect to build a colony in an alien wilderness you need biology more than anything else.”
“Well, maybe you’re right,” I told him, “but / wouldn’t have figured it out, or even known what to look for. For the millionth time, I’m glad you’re along for the ride, George.”
He smiled, muttered something about the Lord working in mysterious ways, and returned to his work. I returned to eating, which took a little time.
Finally, I asked, “Where’s Ham?”
“Up with Abel inventorying the cargo,” George muttered, not looking up. “Abel can read, you know.”
“Abel?” I asked.
“The other robot,” Eve explained. “George named this one Cain and the other Abel.”
I muttered something, but it was, thank heavens, un-intelligible. George kept coming up with these zingers.
I decided I was better off elsewhere and returned to the Nijinsky.
It took some time to find Ham ander, Abel. Ham j greeted me enthusiastically, with the usual questions on how I was feeling and the like, then turned excitedly to the robot.
“He’s been reading the mana-fistos or something big like that,” he told me. “I don’t know what he does, but he just looks at some place and instantly knows what’s there. How’s he do that, Bar?”
Memo to me, I thought seriously. Figure out a way for the Choz to have some kind of reading and writing. With the kind of families we had we couldn’t depend
on oral tradition.
“Well,” I began, trying to explain. “It’s something he can see and we can’t. It’s how the other robot can help George. Never mind about that nowwhat’s on
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the ship?” God! It was tough and complicated being the founder of an alien race!
“We are mostly through, sir,” the robot responded. “So far, skipping the smaller and personal items which we can itemize later, of the ten main holds we have in A five hundred thousand six hundred twenty-eight frozen food modules …”
Skip that. We’ll toss it when we can, I thought. “. . , In B,” Abel continued, “one million liters of distilled water . ..”
And did we ever need that! It would be our most precious commodity, I knew.
“… In C, twenty-five construction robots, deactivated, types as follows …”
“Skip it,” I told the robot. “Go on to the next.” “Very well,” Abel responded, and I could swear I heard some sort of disdainful tone in his electronic speech, “in D the elements for a prefabricated modular village for eight hundred …”
Skip that, too, I thought, unless it had some extras in it we needed.
The one thing the Choz would never have is a hous-ing shortage.
“… In E construction lasers and boring tools,” it continued, “in F a great deal of paraphernalia of unknown purpose and unstated on the manifest except as ‘miscellany,’ the same in G and H, I has chemicals and sealants of various types in containers, properly labeled as to each, and / has fifty kilometers of standard grass roll. The cargo bay, K, has, of course, the hothouse about which I believe you already know.”
Did I ever, I thought sourly. But hold J excited me most of allgrass roll! If the virus took to it, and there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t, we could carpet the whole Nijinsky in a Choz environment with lots of extras for later.
On reflection, the cargo wasn’t especially unusual exactly the sort of stuff one would send to a planet
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being Terraformed. The fact that so much of the stuff was useful to us was balanced by the amount that wasn’t; how I would have loved to have gotten into one of the really big babies! I could almost taste it. Even with half the cargo gone, those behemoths would have more of the same and a lot to spare. I was, on the whole, more than satisfied, though. Baby Seiglein, I thought acidly, one of these days the ghosts of those you killed are going to rise up and haunt you good.
Sixteen
There was a lot of work to be done, a huge amount even for four Choz and two robots, mostly because the four Choz could do so little. We could get Cain and Abel to rig up sledges and tie tow ropes around us, though, and that simplified moving things around.
Do you know how long it takes to dispose of over half a million frozen dinners down a waste chute that was naturally, half a kilometer from the hold? Of course, I didn’t let George do a lot. I wanted him to stay on the virus thing, so I borrowed Cain as I needed him to tie and rig stuff.
Things progressed in Choziforming the Nijinsky. Marsha, too, progressed. I was there when she woke up, one stage from completion, a fully formed female Choz now but still without the horns with the vibrat-ing membranes that would bring her sight of a new kind.
She struggled around, thrashing and disoriented. “Hold it!” I warned. “Best to stay put for one more
cycle. Then if you break your neck you’ll at least see
what you’re doing!”
She looked around with the bemusement of the blind. “Who is that?” she asked.
“Bar Holliday, himself, his real voice,” I responded lightly. “You’re most of the way there.” She looked a little upset.
“Am Ido I look like you, now?” she asked hesitantly.
The Web of the Chozen “Well, more like Evethe green one.” I told her.
“You look fine to me.”
She sighed and collapsed back on the grassy mat. “Was it like this for you?” she asked dejectedly. “I
meanwas it this hard on you?”
“Of course,” I replied sympathetically. “Hard on anybody not born to it, particularly when you don’t have a choice in the matter. And meI didn’t even know what was happening to me. Neither did George.”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe it. You’re too much in control of yourself. I know what scouts are like. I had two in my commune. Not that we saw them oftenbut they were just like you. Rock-steady, machines, able to cope with anything. That’s the only reason I believed youthat manner, a way of talking that came through even the computer. That symbiosis with the ship. I knew you were telling the truth
because you’re that kind.”
“Bullshit,” I responded. “About that machinelike quality and total self-control. The others will tell you about how much of that I’ve had. It’s a myth we
create.”
She shook her head sadly, then brought it up suddenly, listening.
“George isn’t here?” she asked.
“No, he’s over in the Nijinsky helping cut and position grass rolls,” I replied. “There’s nobody here but
you and me.”
“Then, listen,” she said seriously. “I’ve talked a lot
to George. I like him. He’s more like me than like you. If it weren’t for him I’d have asked you to throw me out with Nadya long ago. I actually did ask that
once, but he talked me out of it.”
I was surprised. It didn’t fit my image of her. And this must have been fairly recentlyshe would have been able to hear him for only a cycle.
No of course not, I thought. There had been Cain, of course, to translate across the frequency gap.
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“He told me about the bombing of this world,” she said softly. “He told me about the place, its people, about how beautiful it was, how beautiful they were. About his daughterMara, wasn’t it?”
I nodded, though she couldn’t see it. “Eve’s mother,” I responded.
She sighed. “Yes. And with all thathere you are. George couldn’t have done it. Bar, even if he’d known how to run this ship and could link with it. Seiglein would have fried himfried almost anyone but a scout. Moses would have had anyone but a scout.” She shifted a little, and I could feel her blind eyes staring at me.
“Do you remember how you felt when you discovered what had been done to that world?” she asked evenly.
“All the time,” I responded sincerely. “The hurt is in me always.”
“And you ranted and raved and kicked, I hear.**
“I sure did,” I admitted. “Some self-control!”
“George said he had wanted to kill himself and everyone else, but he knew you wouldn’t let him.”
I let that fall with a thud for a moment. George? Rock-solid George? The man who had calmed me down, cured my rage, reduced it to a dull ache?
Did I ever really consider what George was going through?
Suddenly I felt very, very small and very, very much like a rat. I said as much to Marsha.
“No! Don’t!” she shot back. “Don’t ever! You saved him, Bar Holliday! You saved him, and Ham, and Eve. He’s a great man. Bar Holliday. So, in your own way, are you. It would have been even more tragic to have wasted that.”
I was silent. I didn’t agree with that last bit, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“That’s why I’m still here, still turning into this creature,” she said after that long pause. “Talking to
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George, watching you both, and the childrenthose incredible children, who sprang from you both. You’re going to do something, the two of you. Something tremendous. I can feel it, even if I don’t understand it. I want to be there, in the company of great men do-ing great things. Bar Holliday. If I cannot understand them, I can at least be a part of them. It is far greater than living a robotlike existence between commune and Creatovision on a milk run.”
I smiled. I had been right after all about this woman, about the spark I’d seen in her at the start.