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meanyou mean I’m actually going into heat, like an animal? Oh, wow! And you can see it?”
I nodded. “And Ham, too. That’s why we’ve got to closet ourselves away.”
But first we let George play supersonic music over her.
Two days later, in Hold A, Marsha discovered what it was like. As I said before, little thought was possible during the whole ritual; it was programmed, although pleasant. Even building the web-house together was part of it, although such a thing was hardly needed with us. It was still a fantastic, beautiful work of art, the first any of the entire five-person Choz race but George or I had ever seen. After the ten-day-long vigil, there were the eggs. Five of them, as George had ordained. Five this time, four for her extremely enlarged pouch, one for my normal one.
After the great sleep, we awoke, as from a coma, a pleasant, orgasmic coma, and she shook her head in wondrous disbelief.
George had explained the length of the ritual. The viral strains used in the process matched themselves to the two partners, and needed the time to build, to control, to form those eggs.
They replaced genes in the Choz biosystem, but they had to work harder for it.
Marsha’s first words after it was over were: “That’s incredible!”
I smiled. “Every two years, you know. More often for me later on.”
She nodded. “It’s a wonderful thing, really.” She looked back at the glistening silver of the web-house. “You know, I was trying to imagine a place of trees and fields and cities of web-houses like this. I can’t. But it’s so beautifulit must have been a wonderful place.”
“It could have been,” I responded gently. “Could have beenif it had existed without Moses’ overbear-
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ing control and sense of mission. That is part of what we’re working for now, here. Another Patmos, a place as wonderful as that dead world could have been, but with only ourselves in control.”
She weaved her head slowly from side to side. “It’s funny. I can hardly feel them. The eggs, that
is.”
I nodded. “You won’t for a while. George and I even forgot about ours. But they start growing, hatch-ing, building, hanging kinda heavy on you after a bit and you are carrying four times what I had. They don’t let you forget in the end.”
Later, when we’d rested and eaten to replenish our depleted bodies, we broke down the webbing that sealed the hatch and went over to the scout.
I had been most nervous about leaving George in charge. There was always the infinitely small risk of mechanical breakdown or discoveryand both pilots had been incapacitated for ten days.
If necessary Ham could have taken us into the jump, so we weren’t totally defenseless.
George greeted us warmly, and the questions from Eveand those tinged with a slight jealousy from Ham were incessant. They were answered better less than ten cycles later, when we sealed them into Hold A for their first time.
In twenty more cycles Marsha produced, one at a time, first four heads and forelegs, then, when they dropped, Ada, April, Ann, and Aud.
Marsha decided to name them by the alphabet, as long as it lasted, to keep track of the generations. It was a good, rational system.
I, too, had a daughter, being the freak. I named her
Mara.
Eve’s four offspring George named in characteristic fashion, although, abandoning his monosyllabic tradition for once. Judith, Esther, Ruth, and Mary.
Ham had a son, which he allowed George to name
Matthew.
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We were a family and a race of fifteen now. Time passed, and it was full. I used it to raise my share, and to develop the writing system I wanted. It wasn’t very good at the start, and we used computer storage until we started to run out of it, but it worked and developed. Had I had some way to manufacture things, I could have done better, but we managed, with effort, to create a primitive sort of paper out of mashed vegetation, very fragile but it had to do. And, from that, a system of pinholes, painstakingly punched in prearranged patterns with an awl or some other sharp tool held in the mouth. But you could scan the holes, read what was written in the code, which I based on the intersystem code that every spacer was taught.
And I told my lies, my spacefaring lies, to new generations, and Marsha, who’d heard those stories too many times, topped them often with her own.
Time passed, as a small group became a tiny civilization. Each succeeding Breed was limited to two females and one male (except for mine, which George managed to get limited to two, period) so we kept our ratio, our family, our mission, and roughly two females per male. By careful manipulation, George managed our society and we stayed without the strife and breed contention we had feared.
And George never seemed to run out of names.
Occasionally we’d seal the Nijinsky and I’d take a run into the human sector to check on it, to intercept radio signals, and, once in a while, to raid a beacon for additional water. Since the Nijinsky hadn’t moved, and used no fuel at idle, we needed little of it.
There was always the temptation to raid another freighter, but we’d been lucky once, and then they were Terraforming that world.
Time passed, and the living was pretty good.
In five breeds, we had 891 females and 445 males and the Nijinsky was full.
“We can’t afford another Breed,” George said to
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me one day. “We’re really over the limit now. There’s some room, yes, but water is getting stretched very thin, and we can’t recycle all of it.”
I agreed. The time had been wonderful, but our odd race of space-bom herbivores, only three of whom had ever seen planetfall, was at the do-or-die point. Nothing lasts forever.
We’d debated the point endlessly, George, Marsha, and I. The people were ready for a moveour own stories had fueled a desire for a place of their own in the universe. But deciding to act and deciding how to act are two different things.
Marsha, bless her, had a much shorter fuse than we.
“Look,” she said, exasperated. “You, Bar, you want revenge on the corporations, on humanity, on Seiglein. I’ve heard it on and off, on and off, for too many years. You’re stuck.” She turned on George. “And youyou want some sort of moral crusade to break the system. Well, nobody’s thought of meme and the rest of our people. We want a home, that’s all. A home. And to hell with revenge and moral crusades! You two haven’t stopped being little boys since you dragged me into this! Well, it’s about time you grew up! You’re responsible for all of usyou have to do not what you want but what is best for us!”
When she got started, she cut with a nasty knife. She was the real political organizer of the colony, anyway;
the closest thing to a matriarch or an ancient queen I’d ever experienced.
“Oh, shit, Marsha,” I moaned when she was through. “What’s your idea, anyway?”
She smiled. “You remember all those old Creatovision plots we had as kids?” She nodded to George. “He doesn’tthat was before him. But you know where I’m going. I think it’s almost time we did the old alien plot for real.”
I chuckled, liking what she had in mind the more I thought of it. Of course George knew the plotit was
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ffi^dSe^r‘8 awareness of other planets’
“She means,” I said, barely restraining my mirth at ^y^ the idea was ^dy’conS up vSa^ane? monsters from outer space should Ł
Seventeen
Back when I was very small, and Seiglein’s Total Care Center #31 was my whole world, the only escape from routine was Creatovision. Oh, not the superfancy type, with the programmable plots, but there you were, with a couple of friends, in somebody else’s body (as far as you were concerned), going through tremendous adventures. Sea stories could make you seasick, and if you hated the smell of salt-spray or feared the depths they were not for you. Westerns could give you very real psychosomatically induced saddle sores; love stories of the period we generally avoided.
But the kind of program that used to get to you, really get to a young child, was the invasion plot. There were lots of invasion plotsendless variations on it, just as there were endless variations of the other plots,
but this was a special one.
It was designed to scare the hell out of you. The monsters, usually from some kind of weird civilization, would arrive secretly by spaceship and creep up on unsuspecting towns on newly Terraformed worldsalways new ones. I guess it’s a lot harder to be convincing if you’re invading a superquad of three thousand prefabs. Usually the monsters would take over your best friend, or all your neighbors, and they’d march around looking weird and giving ultimatums to the government to give in or they’d take over all the
civilized worlds. Some superscientific genius, usually with the Huang
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Corporation logo, would always arise, and figure out the indivisible zap ray that would drive them out of the captive bodies.
Afterward we’d huddle together in the dorms and talk nervously about our own experiences, seeing aliens in every dark comer, sleeping with the lights on, looking strangely at Comrade Juni who’s been acting funny lately.
Now, here we were in the scout (no use risking the Nijinsky or the rest of the colony), Marsha, George, a dozen or so others, and me, sitting off a world cast adrift but still in the process of being Terraformed, maybe fifty years from superquads and prefabs, considering how to go about taking over this place called St. Cyril by the charts.
We were fifteen weird, nonhuman creatures, all but three spawned in a strange and unnatural environment, looking for a planet to take over, running through the plans one last time, checking the wording on our ultimatum. The alien invaders at last were poised to strike, as all of us kids knew they would someday, the evil mastermind directing it from his spaceship too advanced and fast to be caught
And here I wasme, the evil mastermind, directing the scenario.
It pained me that I would not actually be a party to the raid; I was too valuable to losethe only man who could direct the scoutship. But with George’s creative help, we would be able to hear, in some cases even see, what was going on, much as Moses had done back on Patmos.
Marsha was going, though, as the on-site leader. She knew more about the layouts of colony worlds, what funny shapes would be what, than anyone else.
I was nervous, not just for the mission, but for her. This planet wasn’t particularly far along as yet; there could be all sorts of hidden dangers out there, perhaps even weapons.
Our communications system was a marvel. In some
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ways, it was much like telepathy, although the basis was bionic. George could receive selectively sound waves returning from any of the party as the modulated information on a radio frequency carrier. After sub-tracting the carrier wave the resulting sound patterns within the common Choz frequency range could be interpreted as pictures or soundas if we were sending and receiving the sonar or talking ourselves. It was an eerie feelingI’d participated in many of the tests. Like being in somebody else’s body, yet totally without
control of it. Those of us on the ships could send, tooalthough
only in a common frequency band. That, also, took some getting used to, since everyone in the landing party would receive anything we said. It was agreed that, unless something extraordinary came up, all communications would be addressed to Marsha, whom we would monitor as the standardagain, unless there
was a reason to switch.
The auras of the landing party showed them to be excited, expectantand nervous as hell. Marsha was even more scared than the others, a good sign, I felt.
A scared leader is a cautious one.
All we really needed to do to accomplish our purposes was to land and take on, but this wasn’t a ship, it was a planet. First, the virus might not take to it there might be some sort of radiation or something mutated in the vegetation that would stop it. Then, of course, there was sizethough it was a small planet, it was huge by any other standard. Moses began on Patmos with four tiny areas; we didn’t know how long it had taken him to Choziform the savannas in their entirety, but George guessed it must have been years. Perhaps that affected the timing of the reproductive
cycle. Who knew how Moses thought?
We couldn’t wait. We wanted only a small patch at the start, and yet it had to demonstrate the ongoing
process.
We had to be seen.
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I took one last survey of the place. A great deal of heat radiation from several areas, a smaller amount from a third to the north. The probe said it was warm enough for the virus, although colder than it liked for optimum performance.
The radiation survey did indicate a minor settlement, possibly a construction camp. I could get no more from my instruments, built for eyes, so that would have to be that.
I called out, “Ready!” and went in fast, braking at the last possible moment, putting them about two kilometers from the site of the radiation. The automatic pressure equalization system was activated, and, when that was done, I opened the air-lock door. The scoutship, shaped much like a spade in a card deck, rested on a bed of fifty-centimeter springlike supports all over its underside, which kept me level.
A chill wind blew in through the hatch; I turned to Cain, perched so he could see the direct readout instruments.
“Temperature?” I asked.
“Sixteen degrees Celsius,” he responded.
“Humidity?”
“Seventy-one point six percent,” the robot read.
I turned to the raiding party, an auspicious thirteen in number.
“Take care,” I said softly to Marsha, but she didn’t reply. I started the takeoff sequence setup….
“Go!” I yelled, and, like that, they were out, out into the night of the funny little woodland world.
As soon as they were clear I closed the lock, activated the autosterilization procedures, and hit the throt-tle hard. We jerked, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the L-jump despite the sustained pressure of a fast takeoff.
George and I were alone in the ship.
“I’m parking, George,” I told him. “We’re in sta-tionary orbit over them now. You can plug in any time.”
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George nodded. He was actually plugging in two different things; we would share the experiences, since the data came to the computer, then had to be channeled to the open panel through me.
But George held the keys to the keyboard. We faced the jury-rigged transceiver panel, built with the computer’s knowledge of circuitry and the tentacles of Cain and Abel from parts taken from the
Nijinsky. The panel was showing pictures. Sound pictures, as
the Choz saw.
“It’s working,” I breathed. George was silent, expectant, tense.
Marsha looked around. Lots of tall trees, most ris-ing thirty meters or more before they had any sort of branches or leaves. Thick groves of them, covering the sky, shutting out sunlight. The ground was bare except for some very primitive, mosslike growths.
She checked the nine males and three females chosen for the party. Each had specialized training or the personality for this sort of thing in our opinion but who could know? Who could anticipate everything
and everyone?
That hesitant thought went through Marsha’s mind, but she knew it was too late to have reservations.
“This way, quickly and silently,” she ordered, then started off through the growth. They followed, quickly adjusting to the slightly less than normal gravity that gave them for the first time in their lives the freedom to truly leap, to almost fly. As they moved there were sounds all around them, the most pervasive seemed like a huge singing group, humming. It was a constant tone, although it rose and fell in pitch as they passed
one spot or another.
Some sort of insect, Marsha guessed, and kept on. She almost stopped, causing a minor collision, when
something small and yellow scurried across the little
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clearing in front of her, but she kept hold of herself and just continued loping on, knowing that this was yet something of a wild world, one with little things that hummed and others that scurried.
Within minutes, they broke through the edge of the forest.
They were on the edge of an escarpment, rather gentle but long; a plain, with Terran-style groves and even a sprinkler system of sorts covering most of it; at the base and off a few hundred more meters was the campa town, really, with electricity that radiated as dull red heat to her eyes, and a single, familiar four-pattern of prefabs.
They took some time to survey the scene, to get to know it. The night sky was no help, but the lights were enough illumination for the basics of the color sense, as was the brightness that was a close, rocky neighbor planet of roughly equal size, reflecting the sun.
“The humans are in the buildings, there,” she told them, voice set and determined. “The large block to the right, there, houses the construction and maintenance robots. It’s entirely possible that we might meet a utility robot or two in the groves. If so, avoid it if possible. Your fear index will trip the disabling tone if things get too bad, and we will be there to help.”
They crept down through groves of some sort of vegetable, occasionally getting wetted down by the sprinklers, but they met no human or robot as they progressed.
Almost at the village, they came to a sudden clearing and Marsha’s hooves clattered against something hard. She looked down, sounding it, but it took a few seconds to realize what it was.
“A road!” she exclaimed. “A service road! Bar! Can you trace the road? Does it go a good distance? Is there a landing place well down it?”
I ordered the photo probe from ship’s sensors, but the pictorial was a blank to me.
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