Dog Warrior (30 page)

“Cool.” Kyle's pout slipped away in the face of far-flung alien civilizations. “Why doesn't ‘transmitter' make sense? E.T. phone home.” This got a blank look from Ukiah. “They're sending messages back to the home world.”

Ukiah shook his head. “No. You don't understand the Ontongard.”

“Pretend we know nothing,” Atticus said. “That shouldn't be much of a stretch.”

“The Ontongard can't stay on one planet,” Ukiah said. “Eventually they wipe out the ecology by becoming the ecology, and cannibalism follows. So they gear all the planet's industries toward building seed ships. They build
thousands, until the planet's resources are depleted, and then they leave, each ship traveling on a different vector. It's completely blind. One ship might travel one light year to the next star system, and the next ship could travel thousands.”

“So the transmitters are used to keep the scattered colonies connected,” Kyle guessed.

“No.” Ukiah shook his head. “There is no home world. There is no plan. This isn't an effort to build a civilization to span the universe. The Ontongard is just one organism, reproducing mindlessly. After they find a suitable planet, they pull their ship into orbit and dismantle it, parachuting everything down to the surface in an all-or-nothing try to take over. If they succeed, they reproduce until they wipe out all life on that planet and then leave. If they fail, who cares?”

“The ones that die.” Atticus felt the need to poke holes in Ukiah's theory. He found his brother's knowledge annoying in the face of his own ignorance. “It might be a long shot, but the ones here on Earth might be desperate enough to take it. Why not send out a message saying there's a perfect planet here, waiting to be plundered, if another ship was so inclined to head in this direction?”

Ukiah gave him a lost look, uncertain.

“These translations the cult had you do.” Ru gave Ukiah a nudge like he would if they were questioning a witness. “They never mentioned the transmitter?”

Ukiah closed his eyes and sat still for a minute. Atticus sensed that he was flicking back over hours of spoken conversation. “A lot of the same equipment goes to building a lot of things: computer controls, monitors, switches, gauges. They could be building anything—but they
are
all things found in a transmitter. The Ontongard would have needed years to bring everything together, and I listened only to a few months of recordings.”

“They're still building it, or they wouldn't be talking about parts,” Kyle guessed. “Any indication how close to finished they are?”

Ukiah made a face. “It could be done now and still be useless.”

“Huh?”

“Well, these things are more like cell phones than radios, if I understand human technology right. The transmitter isn't like a radio tower, where it broadcasts out and anyone out there with a radio can pick it up. It's like a cell phone, where there's two-way communication set up. There's what Max calls ‘the handshake' going on—signals that go from sender to receiver and back.”

“What's the protocol?” Kyle got a blank look. “How do they initiate a message?”

“They would have to . . .” Ukiah said slowly, grinding through the process,“ . . . detect another transmitter first, which might take years . . . unless they know something that the Pack doesn't—like the Ontongard on the last world or two decided to set one up at a certain location, or knew of one they were going to take over.”

Atticus blew out his breath in exasperation. It sounded like lots of unknowns, maybes, and dependings. He wasn't even sure why they were talking about it, since only finding the Ae mattered.

Kyle, however, was intrigued. “Let's just assume they are building this transmitter. How do we find it? What does it look like? Is it bigger than a bread box?”

“It's massive. The housing for the containment field would be, like, thirty feet tall, and waveguides are very long and straight. It's not something they'll be able to hide.”

“When you say very long, what measurements are you talking here?”

Ukiah thought for a minute, translating out the measurements. “They would have to be nearly half a mile in length.”

“And how thick around is the waveguide?”

Ukiah measured it off with his hands. “But there would have to be, like, twenty-five feet of earth acting as a buffer from outside interference.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” Atticus asked him.

“I have Rennie's memories.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“He's Coyote's Get, who was Prime's only Get.” He saw Atticus's blank look. “Ontongard store their memories in their genetics because in essence, each cell is an individual, but they function as one vast creature. The Ontongard pass mice back and forth all the time to keep all of themselves on the same page. They all remember back for thousands of years.”

“But what does that have to do with you and Rennie?”

“Pack is just like the Ontongard, only completely different,” Ukiah said.

“Well, that's completely clear.”

“Have you ever seen the movie
Blade Runner
?”

“Can we have a straightforward conversation? One without all these weird jumps?”

“Max has this big-screen TV and surround sound and
Blade Runner
on DVD. When you watch it, you're immersed in that world, and throughout the entire movie it rains and rains. So at the end, when you go outside and the sun is shining, you think—for one split second—Wow, it's stopped raining.”

“It never was raining.” Atticus refrained from asking who Max was, since it would derail the conversation even further.

“Exactly.”

“Just get to the point.”

“The movie infringed on your reality, but only so you're disoriented for a moment, just a second or two, and then it all goes back to being just a movie you watched. When Pack trade mice, they can tell what is the movie and what is the real world. Where the other person's memories end, and theirs start.”

“A good book that you can put back on the shelf?”

“Yeah. For the Ontongard, both your world and the
movie are equally real. You are yourself, and all the characters in that movie, and all the movies ever made in the history of the art. A million lives, all equally weighed.”

“How can they think that way?”

Ukiah shrugged. “But that's really the only difference between Pack and Ontongard. We have a mutation that lets us remain individuals, with all the hates and desires and free will that implies—but the ‘me' of an Ontongard host is lost under the flood of ‘them.' You say that humans should deal with this. The Pack were all born human. They were infected by Coyote with Prime's mutation. They're genetically aliens, but in their hearts and souls, they're still human.”

“As far as I'm concerned, the Pack are nothing but lowlife slime deluding themselves that they're saving the world. They're no different from the cult. The Ontongard are convenient bogeymen to excuse the Pack's criminal behavior.”

“I can show you.”

It took Atticus a moment to realize what Ukiah meant. “I already had my mind raped.”

Ukiah ducked his head; if he were a dog, he'd probably be flattening back his ears. “Not like that. You read me, like the Pack read you.”

“No.”

Ukiah locked his feral stare onto Atticus. “You want to stay blind to the danger until it kills you?” And he thought, but did not say aloud,
“Kills Ru?”

Twin spikes of guilt and anger hit Atticus. He matched Ukiah's gaze, until he realized that Ukiah was offering to give Atticus free access to his memories. The offer spoke to him of sincere trust. “I don't know how.”

Ukiah leaned close, locking Atticus with his intense gaze. “Just look.”

Atticus never considered
how
he remembered before—how he could focus on a nearby wall, and yet in his mind, like transversing some invisible dimension, walk through the houses of his childhood. Vaguely he knew it was neurons
firing, replaying stored information, only his recording was perfect. At some point, the past would crowd the present out of his sight with things recalled.

He looked into his brother's dark eyes with their vaguely Asian shape, marked with exhaustion. He could feel the fearlessness with which Ukiah opened himself up in a way that seemed both trustingly childlike and patiently wise. One of them took a breath, and Atticus wasn't sure which body moved.

Ukiah's thoughts traveled to a distant time and firmly guided Atticus there too.

All his life, Prime had been caged. Loose pellets of nutrients were dropped into the feeding bowl. Water flowed endlessly in the drinking trough. He and the others in his cage had learned sometime in their pasts to use the trench in the back to urinate and defecate. Their language was a dozen words, all that was needed to explain their limited world. To count was meaningless—nothing ever was added or subtracted. Day was light. Night was dark. Only their bodies changed, growing taller; things that had been challenging in the play area now seemed too simple, and they invented complex games to take up their endless time. At one point they'd learned that to copulate felt good, so they did it often. The timeless imprisonment ended after the bitter-smelling air that made him sleep. They woke with identical angry red marks on their arms. Soon afterward he felt the change work through him, a whispering of a million voices, trying to crowd him out . . .

Ukiah flicked them forward in time.

Prime was like them, but not. They seemed to have no identity other than the group self. It was as if he were immersed in the sea, their presence shifting all around him, trying to carry him away with their nearly antlike desires. Build here. Destroy here. Gather food. Distribute it. They had bodies like himself, and anywhere there was dirt, they also grew like plants and trees and moss. They were
everything until the planet was one vast organism, and the single individuals weren't even antlike anymore, but merely cells in a body.

He drifted through the world, resisting the local urges, masking his thoughts, utterly alone on a planet utterly alive. Perhaps he would have joined with them if not, ironically enough, for the memories they infected him with. They remembered the planet as it had been, the millions of species, the billions of his mother's people. And in comparison, utter worldwide genocide was unpardonable.

Ukiah took another step forward in Prime's life.

They had been pond scum, and later stolen the forms of brilliant, creative creatures, and all the ranges of life between, creeping slowly across the universe. If they ever chose to go back, they could find their home world, but its location was now lost in indifference, caring no more than a seed for its pod after it'd been cast off.

And yet, they remained true to the strictures of life formed on that planet.

Mindless as a dafi plant, they built their seed ships in orbit until L5 bristled, waiting and waiting until the last ship was built. He would have suspected that they had a reluctance to separate, tearing away from the planet that was now virtually one of them, except he knew they held no such emotion. Verily, they had nearly no emotions at all.

The time to sail, though, was now at hand.

One by one, the great solar sails unfurled, and the ships began to peel away, each on a slightly different vector as the planet circled the star, like the white heads of dafi seeds, drifting out on the wind. At the great distance, the ugly ships were merely darkness trailing behind their glistening sails.

If he didn't know that they were death spores drifting toward another planet to kill, he would have found them beautiful . . .

He had failed. They were making a landing on a new
planet to rape. A shimmering teardrop of a world, teeming with life, like so many worlds before . . .

Atticus recognized Earth, the North American continent under scant cloud cover. He recoiled. No, this couldn't be true. Ukiah was controlling what he saw. Maybe he was giving Atticus only the most damning of information. Besides, these weren't Ukiah's memories; they could be elaborate creations handed to Ukiah as real. How did they compare to the real thing? The Pack took what they wanted from him, so he must be able to do the same.

Let me see Oregon,
he thought, and pushed his way into Ukiah's memory.

It was like falling into a deep well. There was a shallow layer of civilized confusion, and then a long silence of dappled forest. At the bottom, he found a toddler, naked, hungry, alone, and scared.

Where did you go?
the child cried, and the voice was achingly familiar.

I don't know.
He drew back, away from his failing. This wasn't what he wanted. There was nothing he could do about this. He couldn't even remember how he went from wolf protector to being a child just as lost and alone.

Nor did he want to dwell on those memories of being a feral child. He passed back through them, green leaves, white snow, and shaggy gray bodies. Thoughts so centered on the forest around him, the only horizon being the next meal, that they seemed barely human.