Destroyer of Worlds (5 page)

Few in the crowded, windowless room took note of Sigmund's arrival. Among those who had, he rated only desultory waves in greeting. These were the best of the best, handpicked and personally trained. It had been years since they needed much in the way of direction.

The Office of Strategic Analyses managed the real defense of New Terra.

 

SIGMUND SPENT A WHILE REVIEWING
routine intelligence reports.

New Terra's military was mostly for show. It had to be capable enough to discourage meddling, if only to hold down interference to manageable levels; it dare not even hint at growing into a serious force. The Puppeteers would strike at the first sign New Terra might become a threat. All that
deterred the Puppeteers from reclaiming their former colony, truly, was fear of disfavor with the Outsiders. Sigmund had ferreted out enough secrets to play off one species against the other—and extortion was a precarious way to live.

If New Terra was ever to achieve long-term security, he must find Earth.

With a sigh and a hand gesture he dismissed the latest report file. “Jeeves,” Sigmund called.

“Yes, sir,” his computer answered in a British accent. Some days, the AI understood Sigmund better than anyone or anything with whom he spoke. And with good reason: Jeeves, too, came from Earth.

Nearly half a millennium earlier, Puppeteers had established their slave colony using frozen embryos from a captured starship. To this day, no one in Human Space knew.

Until recently, no one
here
had known, either. They had been taught for generations to believe themselves the fortunate survivors of a derelict found adrift in space, and that the Puppeteers were their generous benefactors. Happy, grateful slaves they were—

Then the Puppeteers found out about the core explosion. Who better than expendable human slaves to scout ahead of the Fleet of Worlds?

More of Nessus' doing.

To give humans a starship, even under supervision, was a mistake. In time, Nessus' scouts found
Long Pass
, their supposed ancestral derelict. It wasn't afloat in the vastness of space; it was stashed inside a Puppeteer cargo ship orbiting another Nature Preserve world. The whole tissue of lies collapsed.

Much of the colonists' true history lay hidden in the ancient shipboard AI. Alas, Jeeves also had holes in its memory. Its ill-fated crew had managed, under attack, to erase all the astronomical and navigational data that might reveal the location of Earth. Not that the Puppeteers hadn't eventually found Earth anyway. . . .

“We're two of a kind, Jeeves,” Sigmund said. We're brain-damaged fossils from Earth.

“Indeed, sir.”

Jeeves's mellifluous voice brought England to mind, the accent reminding Sigmund of Shakespeare in Central Park. That, uselessly, Sigmund remembered, but not the shape of England, or its size, or where on Earth's surface it resided. Or, for that matter, what Central Park was at the center of.

Damn
Nessus! He had violated Sigmund's mind, and Sigmund hated the
Puppeteer for that. But in bringing Sigmund here, Nessus had acted to protect the New Terrans from the darker instincts of his own kind. Here, Sigmund had started a new life. Here, he had the family on whom he doted. On New Terra, if he only could learn to embrace it, he might find actual happiness. So thank you, too, Nessus.

“The usual, sir?” Jeeves prompted. “If I may be so bold.”

Sigmund had to smile. “Please.”

A holo globe appeared over his desk, slowly spinning. Land, sea, and ice appeared on the surface, their boundaries ever changing. Jeeves invented topography, subject to the facts, and glimmers of facts, and wild speculations from facts—anything the two of them managed to dredge up. Occasionally, one of the random variations struck a chord, and then they had one more datum to guide a search for Earth.

The globe spun on, bringing into view twinkling motes atop an island peak. A city. It evoked the omelet Sigmund had had for breakfast. “Denver, the mile-high city,” he said to himself. Whether on an island or in the heart of some continent, at least one major Earth city sat at that approximate elevation. Useless of itself, the random phrase from his subconscious had woken up Sigmund, his heart pounding, years after his arrival. Where one descriptive detail had surfaced from cultural trivia, others must lurk unsuspected.

New England clam chowder. Did England, wherever it was, have an overseas colony? It implied England had coastline.

Baked Alaska. The recipe involved ice cream and baked meringue. An implication of glaciers and volcanoes in proximity? That vague speculation evoked a second trace of memory. Who, Sigmund wondered, was Seward? Why was Alaska his folly?

Jeeves knew more than ten thousand recipes, replete with terms that might be place names or mythological references or—Finagle knew what.

Jeeves had more than cookbooks in his memory, and Sigmund was working systematically through it all. Legends and literature. Song lyrics. Not 3-V movies. A rotating globe, the outlines of Earth's oceans and continents plain to see, had been the logo of a movie company. The memory remained tauntingly just out of Sigmund's reach. In the rush to hide Earth from those who were boarding
Long Pass
, the entire film library had been erased.

That Earth had a moon was another fact Sigmund believed he knew. Month and moon went together—didn't they?—yet the months he remembered ranged from twenty-eight days up to thirty-one days. Not that
he knew the length of an Earth day. Perhaps Earth had several moons, each with its own orbital period . . . but no. He remembered tides, twice a day. One moon.

Recently he had been sifting Jeeves's musical library for clues. Lyrics cited a blue moon, a silvery moon, a harvest moon, an old devil moon, even a paper moon. What was fact, what metaphor, what—

Sigmund started at a sharp rap on the door. The door swung open.

A man, short and stocky, dark-skinned with a long, black ponytail, stood in the doorway. Eric Huang-Mbeke was the first person Sigmund, fresh from the autodoc, had met on this world. Now Eric was the chief tech wizard for the Office of Strategic Analyses. He usually managed to get made just about any gadget Sigmund could need—and like most New Terrans, Eric was too innocent to know what needed making until Sigmund asked.

Eric looked—grim? No, stunned.

The alarms were silent. New Terra was not under attack. What, then?

“Is it
Don Quixote
?” Sigmund asked. Eric's wife, Kirsten, was aboard
Don Quixote
, its navigator and chief pilot.

Eric shook his head. “You have to see this, Sigmund. Jeeves, the incoming hyperwave message. Time—”

“I have it, Eric. A distress call, looping.”

Like a soap bubble pricked, the spinning globe vanished from above Sigmund's desk, replaced by a 3-V playback. The text crawler was all squiggles, and Sigmund did not understand a single symbol. But that was not why he stared.

The figure in the image looked like a cross between an octopus and a starfish.

 

Cowardice was overrated.

The notion was insane, even seditious. Baedeker dared to think it anyway. He lived on New Terra in voluntary exile, far from home. Among Citizens, that choice alone branded him as insane.

He crouched over his redmelon patch, patiently weeding. The suns warmed his back. Both necks ached and the joints in all three legs, but that would pass.

Besides, few things tasted as fine as vine-ripened redmelon.

Cowardice was not a Citizen concept, of course. Citizens were prudent. Cautious. Sensible. Where humans had their leaders, Citizens sought direction from their Hindmost.

Once, the flight instinct was unassailably correct. To stray from the herd was to meet the jaws and claws of predators. Any tendency to wander had been bred from his ancestors long before the first glimmerings of sapience.

But things change.

Through fear, technology, and ruthless determination, Citizens had exterminated predators from the land surface of Hearth. They could not eliminate the lifecycle of stars. Now the Fleet of Worlds fled the sterilization of the whole galaxy—

Headslong into unknown perils.

 

THE DAY WAS ENDING
, all but one arc of suns gone from the sky. Purple pollinators had begun to emerge from their nests, thrumming their delicate tunes. Far overhead, a lone terrestrial bird circled, effortlessly soaring. A cool breeze ruffled Baedeker's mane. He continued his weeding, trying to lose himself in the moment and the company of friends.

“I'm ready to stop,” Tantalus said, his voices raspy from the dust they
had raised. In truth, he had just arrived and scarcely started, hoping to hurry Baedeker along to dinner.

“And I,” Sibyl agreed. “Food all around and nothing here to eat.” His heads swiveled to look each other in the eyes. Sibyl was partial to irony, not least in the human-pronounceable label he had chosen for himself. Human independence had freed him from hard labor in a reeducation camp—not exactly how he had foretold regaining his freedom. “Baedeker, how about you?”

Baedeker was hungry, too, and so what? “I'll work a bit longer,” he sang.

“A glutton for punishment,” Tantalus answered. It was a human aphorism, and as he delivered it in English, it required only one mouth and throat. With his other head, he was already gathering his tools.

Tantalus' gibe was hardly fair, but Baedeker saw no reason to comment. Why match wits with his friends when to match wits with these weeds was the limit of his ambition?

He toiled all day, every day, not as punishment, although once he had been banished to another farm world and condemned to hard labor, and not as penance, although he had much for which to atone. He gardened as therapy.

With trills of farewell (and grace notes of disappointment) Baedeker's friends brushed heads with him before cantering off. They dropped their loads of weeds through a stepping disc, to a composting facility, perhaps, or into a food-synthesis reservoir, before they disappeared themselves, leaving Baedeker alone in the sprawling garden.

He knelt, picked up a trowel (carefully—it was a bladed instrument!), and resumed his task. When he had worked long enough, and hard enough, sometimes he lost himself in the rhythm of the task and forgot to think.

Thinking was the root of his problems. Thinking about impregnable hulls that weren't quite. About how to manufacture neutronium without exploding a star into a supernova. About the great sealed drives purchased from the Outsiders that moved whole worlds, and the all-but-complete mystery of the drives' operation, and of the stupendous energies involved, and—

No!

With grim determination, Baedeker refocused on gathering weeds to add to his pile. After a while, when not a single weed remained within his reach, he stood, joints cracking, to shuffle to a new spot. The sky was nearly dark now. He would have to stop soon.

The breeze hesitated, then returned from a new direction. He caught a whiff of something foul. The wind stiffened: a sea breeze.

His nostrils wrinkled at the stench. The coastal ecology had all but vanished, killed by the lack of tides.

As Nature Preserve Four, as a part of the Fleet, this world had been one of six worlds orbiting about their common center of mass. It had experienced ten tides a day. As New Terra, this world traveled alone. It had no tides.

Imminent nightfall and the reek of long-dead . . . whatever. . . that had drifted ashore to rot. Baedeker sighed, with undertunes plaintive in his throats. He would get no more relief from thought this day.

His examinations of an Outsider drive had not been entirely in vain. The mechanism somehow accessed the zero-point energy of the vacuum. Tapping the energy asymmetrically was inherently propulsive, enough so to move whole worlds. What if, he mused, one somehow superimposed the slightest of vibrations into the propulsive fields, applied a bit of a torque? Perhaps waves could be induced in the oceans, sloshing back and forth, to simulate tides.

And then? The force would not limit its effects to the oceans. A bit too much stress might topple buildings. And more than a bit too much? The strain could unleash seismic faults. An unintended resonance might build the surges higher and higher, until tsunamis crashed across the continents and washed away entire cities.

Baedeker trembled with the mad hubris his years of exile had yet to purge.

Perhaps, in these modern and perilous times, cowardice was overrated. When danger is everywhere, you cannot escape it. Except—

Quivering in shock and fear, Baedeker collapsed to the ground. His heads darted between his front legs, beneath his belly, into a Citizen's refuge of last resort: a tightly curled wall of his own flesh.

 

BAEDEKER COWERED IN HIS APARTMENT
, picking disinterestedly at a bowl of grain mush and mixed grasses, still shaking from his latest panic attack. A holo played in the background, the ballet troupe surrogates for the companionship he craved but remained too shattered to handle. He would eat first, and comb the tangles and burrs from his mane, and bathe, and sleep. Then, perhaps, he would be fit to see and be seen.

From the pocket with his comm unit, a glissando sounded, cycling up and down the scale. He ignored the music until it stopped. Moments later a fanfare rang out, louder and more insistent, denoting a higher priority call. He ignored that, too. Before it could interrupt a third time, he dipped a head into the pocket and powered off the unit, averting his eye from the display. He did not want to know who had called. The matter could wait, or it was beyond his present ability to cope.

More
tones, harsh and discordant, and from a new source: an emergencyoverride alert from his in-home stepping disc. Who? Why? Baedeker sidled away in fear.

A human stepped off, short and thickset with a round face. He was entirely unimposing—until those dark, intense eyes impaled you. Baedeker knew those eyes. He dreaded those eyes. He flinched and looked away.