Rogue Powers (53 page)

Nike's
comm center had been jumpy ever since Sprunt had vanished. They were the ones who finally picked up the chatter
Ariadne
was broadcasting, though they weren't able to locate the receiving station or locate the answering frequency. They only heard Gustav's side of it, but that was enough.

Laser Gunner's Mate Henderson didn't get told what was behind his orders, but he could guess. The damned CIs. They must have taken over
Ariadne
altogether. For Henderson's money, he wished they had ordered him to blow the place up, except there were probably still loyal Guards have on her, prisoners. If there had been any ships at all left docked to the station, or orbiting the planet for that matter, they could have sent someone to arrest them all, but there weren't any ships. Which left things to Henderson. He powered up his cannon, tweaked up its long-range aiming unit, waited for the next close pass, and sliced every aerial and antennae clear
off Ariadne.
That would shut them up. And if a comm station was silenced, it couldn't do any harm.

Cynthia worked the comm controls frantically. "They're gone! Nothing, no carrier. Not just our signal, but everything that should be coming off
Ariadne
is gone. Oh, my God."

"No!" Lucy cried out, grabbing at the microphone. "Johnson! Damn it, come in!" Suddenly tears welled up in Lucy's eyes, the first tears she had allowed herself in a long, long time. "Cyn, shut the radio off," Mac ordered. "Before they can trace us, too. I'm sorry, Luce."

Thousands of kilometers away, Johnson Gustav closed his eyes, sighed, and felt defeat. The game was up. They had caught him. He thought of all the things he had never be able to tell Lucy, and cursed the universe that had brought them together only to tear them away from each other.

Thomas felt drained, used up. He knew the reasons all those ships had had to die, but he didn't have to like it, or feel good about killing them. No man or woman goes into space without falling in love with spacecraft—with all spacecraft—with the very
idea
of those splendid miracles of metal and glass and plastic that spanned the dark between the planets.

And the WorldBomb had smashed hundreds of those wondrous machines, killed thousands of people who had no greater flaw than being born on the wrong side of the line.

But he had a job to do now, still. He ordered prize crews to pick up survivors, and then turned his attention to the next task.

Unless the Guards saw sense and surrendered, he was going to have to bleed his fleet white trying to break through Capital's defense screen.

L'anijmeb performed the navigation check slowly, carefully, and then ran the whole test over again. All was well. They were on course—and no human group, League or Guardian, seemed to have spotted them yet. No human but the Guard's first Guidance, Jacquet, and a very few Guard officers, knew they were coming—and now that the Nihilists had changed the ship's course, the humans would have no idea where or when
Starsight
would arrive. There was some danger that the humans would realize what was happening and attempt to stop
Starsight,
but that was of no matter. If L'anijmeb could even get
Starsight
into the atmosphere for a few moments, that would suffice. Like most Nihilists, L'anijmeb didn't much care are about dying. She glanced across the cabin at the pathetic little halfwalker.

"You'll want knowledge, M'Romero," L'anijmeb said in her slow English. "We should be landed in just over twenty-six of your hours."
And you, little halfwalker, will be dead in twenty-seven,
she thought.

Aboard
Reunion
on Outpost

Mac stuck his head up through the opening in the deck plates and shouted through the overhead hatch. "Okay, Cynthia, run the phase-three calibration." Mac ducked back into the underdeck and watched the test meters hook up to the C
²
generator. The displays flickered briefly and settled down to satisfactory settings. Joslyn nodded at the figures. "That's it. It ought to work. Only way to be surer than we are now is to try it." She started unplugging the test gear.

A strange sense of calm had come over the
Reunion.
It was all over now. All they had to do was sit tight and wait for some word from the League. Suddenly, there was time on their hands.

Charlie watched as Mac and Joslyn climbed out of the underdeck. "I still don't see why you're bothering to hook that thing up anyway," he said. "Or even why Cynthia swiped it
off Ariadne
in the first place."

"In case we needed to get the hell out of this star system on our own," Cynthia said, climbing down from the control room.

"Yeah, but the League
won"
Charlie objected. "We won't need it. The League can come get us or we can fly out to the barycenter and meet them. Why hook it up now?"

"Could
be we won't need it," Mac said. "If so, we've kept ourselves busy, instead of just sitting around doing nothing. And let me put it this way: If we
do
need a C
⁵
generator for some reason, we'll
really
need it. They just blew up their own comm station to silence Gustav. If they track
us
down, and come for us, we're going to want to be able to run and run fast."

Pete Gesseti applauded, and winced slightly as he did. He arm was still pretty sore. "Spoken like a true paranoid pioneer. Take a lesson or two from Mac, Charlie. He's gotten out of
plenty
of nasty situations. And you do that by being sure you can use any advantage you've got, and thinking of all the unpleasant possibilities. If we keep that mind, we might up the odds on getting out of here alive.

But I sure as hell wish I knew what Gustav was going to say. Poor guy."

"Poor Lucy," Joslyn said. "It didn't take much imagination to see there was something there. Where did she go, anyway?"

Charlie shrugged. "Out. Just put on her suit and left without a word while you guys were in the underdeck hooking that thing up."

"What's she up to?" Joslyn asked. "Do you think she was going to try and patch things up with the Outposters?"

"Joslyn, you weren't there when C'astille and Lucy and I dropped our little bombshells on each other," Charlie said. 'I doubt very much that
any
Outposters will even
talk
to her."

Joslyn shook her head sadly. "I still can't get over it all. The poor, poor Outposters. To have your sex drives force you into sex with mindless animals, the bloody
stumble-bugs
—it amounts to bestiality. And to
know
your whole life long that you're
sure
to turn into a dribbling idiot."

"You know, they can't possible have any notion of an afterlife or a soul," Pete said thoughtfully. "They know for
sure
there is no life after death—they see death
in
life every time a stumblebug flutters past. They see the death of mind
during
life. They see life as
detached
from mind. Our life cycle allows us what are probably comfortable illusions about the soul and the afterlife."

"The poor Outposters," Joslyn said again. "Their whole lives warped by their reproductive cycle."

Charlie snorted. "And ours
aren't?
Then what's marriage? Where did divorce come from? Why the very, very large importance we place on the male/female dichotomy? Think about child custody. Pornography. Incest taboos. Monogamy. Polygamy. Polyandry. Rules and traditions that encourage marriage with someone from outside the tribe. Homosexuality. Age of legal consent and statutory rape. Family reunions. Teen-age dances that are rehearsals for courtship. Royal lineages. Inheritance laws. Dowries. Adoption. Illegitimacy. Keeping women at home—the way the Guards and a lot of other cultures do. Prostitution. Birth control. Population pressures and immigration. Hell, any shrink will tell you
gambling
is related to sexual impulses, and a lot of them will tell you starships are the ultimate phallic symbol. You could make a pretty good argument for just about every human activity being affected by our reproductive urges.

"Practically all of the things I just mentioned, and a thousand more that are basic to human society, must not only be unheard offer the Z'ensam, they must be impossible. And all of them are tied up, directly or indirectly, in the way we make babies, or avoid making babies, or decide who should make a baby when, and who stands in what relation to the child. We define so much of ourselves, and our culture, sexually. And all of that is right out the window with the Z'ensam.

"Every
human culture invents marriage and marriage rituals. It's so ingrained into us, we don't notice it. But can you imagine a human culture where there were no marriages—for anyone, anytime, throughout all of history? Can you imagine there being a dichotomy more important than male/female for humans? Our lives are every bit as warped by biology and reproductive strategy. But human and Z'ensam are used to being the way they are."

Cynthia squatted down on the decking and stared at the gunmetal gray of the cabin bulkhead. Her mind's eye saw the murky, dismal green fields and forests beyond. "I don't envy them their way one little bit," she whispered.

For the hundredth time, C'astille resisted the urge to fling her picture book into the pond and be done with it. But she
couldn't.
She was so angry with the humans, so infuriated with all they did and built. They were
blessed
by their perversities. Without foreknowledge of doom, with intelligence lasting to the end of life, they had apparently invented the bizarre idea of the mind actually
outliving
the body—if she was inferring from the captions of the pictures properly. Their self-confidence, their incurable optimism, their huge monuments to themselves, all stemming from the crazy idea that they would live forever. And that live-forever idea stemmed directly from their weird, disgusting sexual practices! Practices that they probably saw as natural and right.

C'astille flipped through the pictures. Paris. The Moon colonies. The great bridges. The space stations and the huge starships. The observatory in the rings of Saturn, the lab nestled in among the craters of Mercury, the towers of New York, the Kremlin, Ulan Bator, the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall, the Washington Monument, the Pyramids, the Parthenon, Kennedy Space Center. All of them so big, so
grand.
And the Roads! Grand highways that made the widest Road on Outpost look like a rough-and-tumble game path. How had these puny halfwalkers done it all?

Their self-confidence, their lifelong intelligence, and their foul, foul medicine that extended lives, were the difference between humans building future glories, and Z'ensam, at best barely holding onto their modest present; between huge cities suffering from
overpopulation,
of all things, and a tiny Z'ensam populace that wasn't big or organized
enough
to build proper cities.

Their perversions had not been punished, they had been rewarded. Their vile ways had been their Road to the stars!

She wanted so much to hate them. Her jealousy was so strong, her anger at being accidentally deceived so great, her pride so wounded by talking to
implanters
all these months. She tried to hate them, tried to keep her anger alive. All she had to do was keep silent, offer no warning of the
Starsight,
and the humans would soon be no more.

But the picture book, and the grand works of the human hand—she wanted to
see
those things. Could she really let the Nihilists inherit them through murder? And Lucy was her friend. Lucy could not help being what she was.

With a sudden burst of understanding, C'astille realized something more—the worst, the absolute worst. The
humans
would feel
sorry
for the
Z'ensam,
would pity them. But she remembered their shock and fear at L'awdasi's simple trick of making their blood, and their fear of the Nihilist bioweapons. The humans would have some fear and respect, as well. Perhaps that would be enough. But perhaps not. She turned the pages of the book, and stared hard at a picture of Earth as seen from orbit. She wanted to see that! Her very soul was knotted in anger and confusion.

Lucy had been walking in the clearing for hours; at first with no clearer aim in mind than getting away from people, being out by herself, but after awhile, she found herself looking for C'astille. The other Z'ensam gave her a wide berth. They didn't want to interfere with her and meet with the revenge of her people in return—but they certainly wanted nothing to do with her. Lucy knew she couldn't rely on non-interference for long; she had the very definite sense of being surrounded by tolerance that was near its end.