The Eternal Enemy (6 page)

Markos shook with rage, but he still couldn't advance. The rage had awakened something—a new, compelling, overpowering emotion, now just a spark, but a spark that glowed with enough intensity to blot out everything else. It took him by surprise. It warmed him from deep inside, a raging fire spreading warmth and energy. The needlelike pains vanished, the hot and cold spots on his skin were gone. His mind was clear—clearer than he could remember it ever having been. He saw what he would become if he stayed with the Terrans.

He felt taller, larger, deeper, more massive with each passing second as if his feet had roots capable of tapping the power of Gandji. He knew what he was, what the Haber had done. His eyes no longer burned.

They glowed.

“Look at me,” he said.

Van Pelt looked.

The room had been bathed in a glittering, almost blinding display of colored light when Markos had spoken.

“You may not care, but when I woke up after being changed, I was angry.” Reflected beads of light danced on Van Pelt's corneas. “I resented what the Habers had done. And then, much later, I blamed you. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, what I'd become, but that's over now.”

Van Pelt was swaying back and forth, his eyes glassy, his gun by his side.

“Do you understand? I know what to do now.”

He stopped to look at Van Pelt, to consider the best way of phrasing what he was about to say, when he realized he'd taken too much time. Van Pelt had stopped swaying, and his eyes were clearing.

Momentarily free of his control, Van Pelt immediately leveled his gun at Markos's chest. Markos saw his finger tighten on the trigger as if in slow motion.

“Stop!” he shouted.

There was a blinding, intense pulse of light.

And Van Pelt stopped. He went rigid, frozen in position as if dipped into liquid nitrogen, and then went limp in the next instant. He collapsed to the deck.

One flash of an intensity Markos had never dreamed possible had stopped Van Pelt, all right—right down to his autonomic nervous system. The pulse of light must have triggered all of Van Pelt's neurons to discharge simultaneously, and his neural network probably overloaded. Fried his medulla. The pulse remained with Markos, a visual echo etched into his own neural pathways.

Markos's body jerked and spasmed for a second. The metallic taste slowly faded, his head and eyes pounded with pain. All he'd wanted to do was to get Van Pelt to slow down, to consider the Habers as sentient creatures—as friends instead of enemies. But with Van Pelt's body on the deck before him, he realized the idea had been doomed from the start.

Only one path was open to him now. He gathered himself, fought back the still-fresh memory, and opened the cabin door. He found Wilhelm leaning against a bulkhead looking confused and apprehensive. He used his eyes to calm Wilhelm, being careful to control their intensity. Wilhelm escorted him out of the ship.

At the bottom of the hill, safe within a grove of trees, Markos was prepared to face himself, to let remorse and guilt overcome him. He was prepared to face the fact that he'd committed murder. But he only felt good. Complete.

And very much in control.

He walked alone, enjoying the sights and sounds and smells of the planet of his birth, a permanent tourist, a visitor in exile, a newborn child thrust into a world that seemed to be made just for him.

He walked and touched and smelled and experienced things his crewmates could never have fathomed.

Haber settlements were spread across the plains, the mountains, and the forests but he made no effort to find one. Even though he was ready this time for what they expected, he wanted them to ask him directly. And he knew, sooner or later, that they would seek him out.

Eating still presented a problem—he wasn't sure he wanted to extend his life. He hadn't yet come to grips with eating on those terms. It was taboo for an adult Haber, and he needed to know what they thought of him before deciding anything else. They would tell him.

A flash of sparkling emerald caught his eyes. The standard Haber greeting. There were two of them, side by side.

“Hello, Markos,” the larger, younger one said.

Markos returned the greeting with his eyes, adding a little orange to the edges of his.

“Are you ready to help us, us now?”

“Yes,” Markos said.

“Please, Markos, have some food,” the older of the two said, holding out what looked like an edible tuber.

“Thanks,” Markos said.

And in return, he held his hands out to them for the thing they wanted. They approached, touching him lightly at first, then more firmly as the physical bond occurred, as the chemicals started to flow into his body.

He needed to shout his joy but knew better.

It was the first time he'd felt pleasure coursing through his new body. He'd never even thought that possible. He soared, his spirit lifting, blanketing the whole planet. And as their genetic material flowed into and through him, Markos realized how constant his pleasure could be. He could walk across the plains, greeting countless pairs of Habers.

He would be a different kind of flow-bridge for them, the flow-bridge for which they had been waiting.

His first generation would be strange. He shaped them in his mind's eye before returning the genetic materials. And if these mutations weren't the right ones, there would be others. And there might even be enough time, Markos thought. Enough time to create new ones, others more suitably equipped to deal with the change.

5

He sat in a small village, surrounded by Habers. The huts were simple, one-room dwellings, formed out of the native grass. His children were newly born, more Haber than Terran in appearance. The two sets of Habers who had birthed them had found the children were more like Markos than themselves and had left them in his charge. He was proud of them and the role he'd played in their births, in the changes he'd made to them as the flow-bridge.

The children had more human musculature, though the muscles themselves didn't resemble their Terran counterparts beyond function. They were a little larger at this stage of their development than a normal Haber child would have been—about ten centimeters taller than Markos.

Their coloring was odd. They had the normal furlike skin that all Habers had, but there were streaks of color that shone through the brown-gray covering. They were beautiful to watch as they moved, expending energy, getting to know their world and their people.

They played noisily, pushing and pulling each other, knocking each other down, playing as though they were normal, Terran children.

The Habers took this aberrant behavior the best they could.

One old Haber seemed genuinely pleased, as if watching this group of young, changed Habers fulfilled a lifelong dream. He stayed by Markos's side everywhere he went, and Markos took to calling him the Old One.

The Old One was different from the other Habers he had met. His eyes were denser, more crystalline spheres within them, and his skin was a little browner than the others. Markos felt at home, comfortable and accepted, his human past no more than a thin memory recalled with a pleasant feeling of pain, a dull throb, a melancholy reminder of what he had been. The Habers never brought up his past, and he felt no need to either.

Adult Habers, those who wanted to mate, arrived daily in small groups. They waited with inhuman patience, watching the sunset with rapt attention, staring at the colors as if the meaning of life were contained in them. When there was nothing else to divert them, they watched Markos's offspring, communicated with the Old One, or meditated in silence.

Markos was glad he had taken the Old One's advice. He had originally planned to walk over the face of Gandji, spending the rest of his life acting as a flow-bridge. The Old One had explained that that was unnecessary; he'd said the mature Habers would come to the village and seek him out.

His children were born with a Terran's understanding of conflict and competition, something they exhibited in play, though it was as alien to the Habers in the village as to Markos himself.

“Are you ready for the next two?” the Old One asked, sitting by Markos's side.

Markos turned away from the child he had named Alpha, the most aggressive of the children. Alpha had just made a discovery: a stick can be used as a weapon to hit someone.

Markos stood and held out his hands, offering them to the two slowly advancing Habers. It struck him as strange that they would be so shy and hesitant, as if Markos might change his mind any moment and refuse the contact.

They gripped his hands firmly, melted their flesh into his flesh, changed their hands into his hands, creating the link through which their genetic material would flow. He accepted the pleasure that brought, the intense physical sensations and excitement, embraced it and tried to hold it close to his mind, but the feelings were too intense, too glorious to try to hold. He let his mind relax and take control of the genetic materials entering his body. He pictured the children he would produce, an image of stronger, taller, more solidly built Habers than anything he'd imagined before.

Then something happened in his mind that he couldn't stop. The images of the stronger and taller children exploded in size until Markos could detect vast spaces between what must have been molecules. It was as if he were shrinking, falling deep through the images and into some representation of the genetic material that made up the images. He somehow knew that molecules needed changing, and he could see the molecular structures change as he thought about altering them. With each change he made he felt a peculiar but pleasant sensation in his brain.

When the genetic materials had been molded and manipulated, he pushed them out through his hands and into the two Habers. Contact was broken.

The whole experience couldn't have lasted more than a minute or two, but he was left feeling hollow, washed out. The Old One stood and offered him a root, which Markos gladly accepted. As he ate, he remembered what the Old One had said about his eating: “We, we demand this of you. That we, we don't eat out of choice is our birthright.”

He rested, giving his mind and body the time needed to recover fully. It was a simple life, one he was enjoying. He was doing something his crewmates could never do, in a way they could never imagine—being a xenobiologist firsthand.

A Haber approached quickly, something odd for a Haber, until it stood before him. Markos flashed green to the Haber, and it returned the greeting.

“The people have destroyed the village nearest their settlement.”

Impossible. “Did you see this happen yourself?” Markos asked.

“Yes. I, I saw this happen. I, I was leaving the village on my, my way to see you.”

The crew had remained quiet and kept to themselves over the last few months. Markos had walked back to the area in which the ship rested and watched from a distance, curious as to what the Terrans planned. They had been setting up a semipermanent camp around the ship, keeping clear of the natives, being careful not to push too fast or too hard. Markos had been thankful for the time this gave him; his offspring could grow, eat, build themselves up, learn from their father about this strange race of invaders, understand what real conflict was and how to deal with it.

“Did they have a leader?”

The Haber flashed confusion.

“One who directed the others, who told the group what to do.”

It flashed red.

“What did he look like?”

The Haber did the best it could describing one of the Terrans. Markos figured it had to be Cathy Straka.

Cathy?

Wilhelm was second in command. Why should Cathy be in charge? What had happened to Wilhelm? A mutiny? Or was Cathy working on Wilhelm's orders? He wheeled around to the Old One.

“What are we going to do? We can't fight them—not yet. The young I've produced are still in their first cycle. They don't really understand what would be expected of them.”

The Old One sat quietly, watching the last rays of the sun setting the sky on fire. “This is the change we, we may not survive. I, I do not think it matters what we, we do.”

Markos's anger rekindled as he felt old frustrations rise again. The tiring experience of trying to get these creatures to understand the true nature of the Terran threat, something he'd hoped was gone forever with Van Pelt's death, was back, causing him to taste metal. The Haber before him turned his head away, took several steps back.

If Wilhelm were dead, then so were the Habers. He couldn't approach Straka and change her with his eyes as he'd done to Van Pelt. Everyone on the
Paladin
had to know of this ability and would probably shoot him on sight. Wilhelm would have told them all.

Terrific, Markos thought. Death either way.

Their only chance was to fight. But the only beings capable of fighting the Terrans were Markos and his offspring, and they were still too young.

That left only him.

“But we can't just accept it,” he said a little too loudly, a little too forcibly in his gravely voice. “They'll kill us all.”

“We, we must accept it. It is the way of all things,” the Old One said.

“Not where I come from. They can't get away with this. I won't let them.”

“Then do what you can.”

Yes, Markos thought. He's right. They don't seem to be worried—they don't even care. I'm the one who's afraid. If someone's going to do something about this it's going to have to be me.

But what can I do?

The next two Habers were waiting. The Old One was waiting. The messenger was waiting.

“We'll run,” Markos said. He didn't particularly relish the idea of becoming a hunted animal again—once had been enough to make him hate that feeling, but it was run or die. “That cave, that cavern where I was taken after I died. Do you know where it is?” he asked the Old One.

“Yes,” he said, flashing red tinged with orange.