Dreams (6 page)

Jerom's voice was harsh. "Get a grip!"

"Nothing personal," Dr. Chen went on.

"I said,
Get a grip!
This is a crisis that could make all the wars in human history look like playground squabbles."

"I'm sorry," Chen said. She was calmer now. Her nerves were jumping. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest. It must be beating close to two hundred beats a minute. Her breath was coming in desperate gasps.

She recognized the phenomena. Some ancestor was reaching down to her, reaching through the genetic matter that carried ancient reflexes. Her body sensed her desperation, prepared itself for combat or for flight. Appropriate reactions for a Cro-Magnon, for
Pithecanthropus erectus,
for an ancestor even more ancient. But hardly apt for
Homo interplanetarius.

She was in control of herself. "What are my instructions, Dr. Jerom?"

"For now, observe and report. What do you see on Yuggoth?"

Chen returned to the telescopes. She activated a third screen, one for an electron image, one for an optical image, one for a superimposed combination.

"It's daytime down there. You know, it's always daytime on Yuggoth. The planet rotates but its light comes from its core so it doesn't really matter. The city that was destroyed by the shock wave—I see Yuggothi arriving from all directions. I suppose they're rescue crews. The devastation is terrible. The casualties—I can't even guess at the number. Some of them are still alive, though. I see Yuggothi crawling through the ruins. Some with dreadful injuries. Some are just—just—it looks as if their body parts, when they were ripped off by the shock wave, some of them didn't die and now they're flopping around, moving like torn starfish. And—and—I can't go on, Harleyann. I can't."

"That's all right, Jing-kuo. You've done what you can. And we're getting feeds from
Beijing 11-11's
instruments."

There was a pause, then Harleyann Jerom resumed. "You're convinced that Kimana Hasani's EEP set off the explosion on Yuggoth?"

Dr. Chen's eyes were still focused on the screens showing conditions on the surface of Yuggoth. "I'm certain, Harleyann. The only explanation—I'm convinced it's the only explanation, the only way that little EEP could cause the devastation—the only explanation is that Yuggoth is composed of antimatter. Once Kimana's EEP hit the atmosphere, that was all it took. The EEP and Kimana himself were cancelled out. Converted to pure energy, along with an equivalent mass of Yuggothi atmosphere. He—"

Her words were cut off by a gasp from Harleyann Jerom. Then the voice of the woman on Luna said, "They're here!"

"Who? What are you saying, Harleyann?"

"The Yuggothi."

"Impossible. I just saw them leave their planet."

"They're here. They're circling overhead. Their ships are unlike anything else I've ever seen. They look like—like cyborgs. They're monsters, something like bats, something like octopuses, something like humans. And machines. They're machines, too."

"But—they can't have traveled that far in a few minutes."

"They can, Jing-kuo. They must have—I don't know—we manage to skip message through wormholes or subspace or however our system works. We don't really understand, do we, we just know that it works. And they've found a way to travel, oh, not through space. Between space. Whatever. And they're heading toward Earth, Jing-kuo. I can see. I can see waves of blackness sweeping across the planet. The atmosphere is burning, the oceans, forests, ice caps. Oh, my God, my God, my God. It's worse than—"

The transmission ended.

Chen Jing-kuo studied the surface of Yuggoth, pulsing red, filling the sky above
Beijing 11-11.

The virus doesn't hate its host, she thought, and the host doesn't really hate the virus. There is nothing personal about it. Nothing personal. If the host doesn't destroy the virus in time, the virus will kill the host. But even if that happens, once the host is dead, the virus also will die.

Chen Jing-kuo turned the telescope toward Earth. The image was magnified until it filled a screen. As she watched, bits of black appeared on the blue-and-white disk. They spread from points to irregular blots. More of them appeared, and more, until they began to run together.

For a moment the planet disappeared against the solid black background of space. Then points appeared again, became blots, multiplied and grew until Earth was a red disk. Like Yuggoth, it began to pulse, to pulse like a malevolent heart. Now Chen Jing-kuo understood what she was seeing. The Yuggothi, she realized, had devised a means to convert the normal matter of Earth, contact with which would have been instantly, disastrously fatal to them, into contraterrene matter. Antimatter.

Now they could live on Earth, and now there remained no other life to compete with them.

But Yuggoth itself was also contraterrene. The Yuggothi had erected no shield against a potential plunging space station of terrene matter. For all Chen Jing-kuo could tell, the Yuggothi were as unaware of the station as a human would be of a single fatal bacterium.

Earth was dead. Chen Jing-kuo knew that now. The Yuggothi had wiped it clean. The atmosphere was gone. The oceans, the forests. The ice caps were gone. The planet had been wiped clean. It now had new owners. Octopus-bat-man-machine
things
that even now were walking or slithering or flying across the black, dead surface of the once blue-green, beautiful world. The black surface that was now pulsing with a red, evil beat.

The oblate globe of Yuggoth spun beneath
Beijing 11-11.
Chen Jing-kuo set the controls, activated the verniers, sent
Beijing 11-11
plunging toward Yuggoth. This time, the sequence of events was reversed. The host had killed the virus, but the virus retained enough vitality for one final act. The virus would kill the host.