Rogue Powers (46 page)

"And we tell
Ariadne
to send us a pick-up ship, something we can run like hell in if we have to. Some ship that can reach the barycenter or the League, and tell them what we have learned about the Outposters."

Pete was astonished. "Mac, we came down here knowing we were risking our lives. If we're going to cut and run the moment we're in danger, we shouldn't have bothered coming. And this Gustav character sounds like a valuable asset. Our side can't risk him just for our sakes."

Joslyn knew her husband, understood what he was thinking. "It's not us dying, it's the
knowledge
dying, or the knowledge going straight to the Guards and not to our people," she said. "With what we've found out today, already, we are the best-informed League personnel. It happens that the knowledge we've gained makes our hosts think they've insulted us. Suppose that runs the other way? Suppose some innocent bit of knowledge about us is a deadly insult to them? Suppose they kill us, and sign up with the Nihilists? We have to be ready to warn our side."

Lucy wanted to protest Joslyn's hypothetical case, but there was too much truth in it. She had lived among these people for months, and still was shocked by what she learned. "A little knowledge," she said, "is a dangerous thing."

"You're certain the signals were authentic?" Gustav asked.

"Absolutely," Cynthia Wu replied. "It was Lucille Calder, and she handed the mike to both Mac and Joslyn Larson. I recognized all three voices."

Gustav allowed himself to close his eyes and breathe a sigh of relief. So far, she was still alive. But there were other considerations. He thought carefully, and stared up at the ceiling. He looked tired, drawn. "Okay. Two reports. One, Cynthia Wu shot trying to escape. Tonight. You vanish now. Two, loss of a ballistic lander two days from now. That's still putting the incidents too close together, but I don't know what else to do. I'll tell them a fusion system malfunction on the lander forced us to cut it loose and dump it into the planet's oceans by remote control before it blew. You stow away in the lander tonight— and don't touch the controls until the remote system is cut off. In the report, I try and distract them from my incompetence by complaining that this is the third fusion malf in two months, and that we were just lucky to get the first two under control. I ignore the fact that the previous complaints were phonies I sent in myself for verisimilitude in case I needed a lander to vanish. I assume your people found the unaccounted for C
²
generator that wound up in the quartermaster's shop last week? It wasn't easy to arrange."

"Spotted it the day it arrived. The crate's already filled with scrap instead, and we have the C
²
unit hidden. Schiller will smuggle it aboard the lander tonight, and I can wait to do the actual installation once I'm on the planet."

"Good. Any questions?" Still, Gustav stared at the featureless ceiling. His fingers fussed anxiously with the buttons of his tunic.

"Two. First off, how sure can you be that they won't catch on?"

"They'll be too busy. In a few days' time the Guardians launch their counter-offensive. I don't know exactly when. No one in the fleet will have time to investigate a penny-ante engineering malf, and who ever cares about a CI to start with? I hope. And once that battle is over, no matter who wins, this little scheme won't really affect me one way or the other. If the Guards win, and have the leisure to investigate what's been going on around here—they can only shoot me once. If the League wins, I don't know and never have known what happens to me. What was the other question?"

"You want the war ended so it won't expand any more than it has. You want the killing to stop. I understand that. But this—it's not directly related. Why are you doing it? Why are you risking so much for this?"

For the first time, Gustav looked down, and stared straight at Cynthia. "Because," he said,
"she's
down there."

Everything was a bit stuck until Pete got stronger. He was the only one of the League group empowered to discuss much of anything with any real authority. He was prepared to discuss technology trades, exchanges of ambassadors (or whatever the local equivalent was), and most importantly, a mutual assistance pact against the Guards and the Nihilists. But it would have to wait—and the flap over the transfusion made the situation that much more delicate.

All the humans were dumbfounded by the way L'awdasi, by all accounts a mere hobbyist in such things, had duplicated human blood overnight, but Charlie Sisulu was hit much harder by it than the rest. He knew better than the others just how complicated blood was. And if one amateur Outposter could do that overnight, what could a team of crack professionals do in a week, given the raw materials of a few human cells to work with? Clone a man? Clone an army of men? If they could make blood, surely they could make diseases, nightmare plagues. And none of them had even
seen
a human before last year. And with such biological power, what could they do to each
other?
With a biological science that powerful, Charlie could almost understand the medical tabu. Better the thousand natural shocks than the unnatural horrors a thousand L'awdasis might accidentally whip up any weekend.

And yet, it didn't quite play. Any element of human medicine could be abused, used to kill, from a scalpel used to slash a throat to an overdose of aspirin. Humankind had had the knowledge to unleash plagues at will for one hundred fifty years—but that didn't make anyone want to ban doctors.

Well, no percentage in playing until he understood the game. And Charlie did not yet know enough.

Lucy had mentioned to C'astille that Charlie was a biologist, and C'astille had instantly wanted to talk with him. There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask. Charlie, needless to say, was delighted with the chance himself. So, an hour or two after getting the message safely off to
Ariadne,
C'astille met the two humans by the entrance of their wagon and the three of them went for a walk. C'astille led them to a quiet corner of the clearing. The two humans sat down on the ground, a bit awkward in their pressure suits. C'astille folded her legs up beneath herself and curled her long tail around her body. Lucy thought the moment proper to offer her gift, the big picture book of Earth and the solar system. She pulled it out of her carrypack. "Here you go, C'astille," she said. "Take a look at this and you'll be all set to play tourist when you get there."

C'astille took the book eagerly, and spent a half hour with the humans, pointing to the pictures and asking endless questions. Lucy was pleased to have chosen a gift her friend enjoyed so much. It was good to get to safety, to the protection of the Refiners. The biggest part of her duty seemed to have been done. Charlie seemed far less relaxed. He found it very strange and incongruous to sit back in the grasslands, here on this world, with the sun shining, the sky blue, the area cleared of rapacious animals. To Charlie, Outpost would always be that deadly trek through the forest, and all the planet's other moods mere trickery and misdirection.

It was stranger still to sit with a six-limbed thinking creature nearly the size of a small horse, with a long reptilian tail, and big doll's eyes set in the front of that strange, egg-on-its-side-shaped skull—a creature who thought nothing of creating whole human blood from scratch overnight.

He found himself watching her hands most of all. Four long, slender fingers, all opposable to each other. Those were graceful, toolmakers' hands, strange to watch in their fluid motions that did what human hands did, but in a radically different way.

Finally, he got a bit tired of Lucy and the 'Poster oohing and aahing over pictures of Paris and the Outback and the space colonies. "C'astille," he said at last, in as cheerful a tone as he could manage. "We need to get started. I am so curious about you and your world! You said you wished to ask me questions, and I promise you I can match you, bafflement for bafflement. Time is short, so perhaps we might begin?"

C'astille nodded and regretfully closed the picture book. "You are right. The lovely pictures must wait until later. You have travelled far, at great risk, and the time might come quickly when we will need knowledge of each other."

"Good!" Charlie replied. "But let me say one more thing. Our peoples are quite strange to each other, and there is much we would Know. Some questions might be delicate, but we have no way of knowing which ones. So if I speak rudely, I do not mean to, and I ask that you excuse me. Lucy and I will likewise not take offense, for we know none is meant."

"Thank you!" C'astille said. "I have been hunting the words to say that to you. I am glad you found them for me. And I'll test your promise about taking offense at once," she said with a cheerful tone. "L'awdasi, in the non-incident of this morning, noted something about your genes. Due to their structure, they are far less liable to mutation than our own. That would suggest that your species should look much more like one another than ours does—and yet just the opposite is true."

Charlie smiled thinly. He thought of a lot of people back home on Earth who would say otherwise—"they all look the same to me." Black, yellow, white, whatever, he had heard people of every color say that about people of every other color. "Let me save you some time, C'astille. You're leading up to asking why I in particular look so much more different than the other humans you have seen. Why is my skin so dark, why is my hair curly, why are my nose and lips wider?"

"Yes, I suppose that you're one example. But this Mac M'Larson must be twice the size of Lucy here, and she and Joslyn have quite different proportions than the rest of you."

Charlie found himself vaguely embarrassed. What could this extraterrestrial know of racial tension, of guilt and anger for deeds done a hundred, a thousand years before? She asked about variation in a population and he got his back up on the old prejudices. "Hmmm. Well, let me explain my case. Maybe that would help illustrate the others. Forgive me if I simplify a bit, but here is the basic explanation.

"All our people probably started out looking pretty much alike, when they all lived in one place, one climate. But our race,
homo sapiens,
humankind, had settled over pretty much all of our home world, Earth, by about forty thousand years ago, maybe a bit earlier. Some people lived in cold parts that didn't get much sun. Mac's ancestors came from such a place. Light-skinned people can absorb a lot of something in sunlight that humans need to stay healthy, because their skin is transparent enough to let in a large fraction of the light. My ancestors grew up in a place with very strong sunlight. Their skin needed to be dark to protect them from getting
too much
light.

"In Mac's part of the world, if your skin was too dark, you were likely to get sick and die from a lack of this special thing in sunlight. So mostly light-skinned people, with genes for light skin, survived to pass on their genes. In my part of the world, if you were too light-skinned the sun was so strong it could kill you. So only darker people, with genes for dark skin, survived. People in temperate climates survived best with a skin color somewhere in the middle. Once people had invented civilization, and could control their environments more, it didn't really matter what color you were, so there were no selection pressures for one shade over another and people moved about as they wished. The other differences between us have similar explanations. The people who survived in various spots on the globe and lived to have children were the ones who, by chance, had traits and genes for those traits that gave them a little edge over everyone else. Obviously, they passed their genes on to their children. But in terms of evolution, these differences are trivial. We are all one species, but with each individual still carrying around adaptations to whatever climate his or her ancestors lived in.'

The explanation didn't seem to satisfy C'astille altogether. "I see. But while she was with us, Lucy's skin grew darker, and she explained this was a reaction to the sunlight. Suppose that she bore children while she was here and her skin was dark. Wouldn't those children start out darker, inheriting the tendency for darker skin?"

"No, no, of course not. That would be inheritance of acquired traits. Let's see. What would be a clearer example? Okay. There's an animal on Earth called a giraffe. It has a very long neck, perhaps two meters long, and the long neck helps it eat leaves at the tops of trees no other animal can reach.

"Long ago, it used to be thought that some short-necked proto-giraffe managed to stretch its neck through exercise, and passed that slightly longer neck along to its offspring, and the offspring did the same, and so on. The theory had the physical shape of the body affecting the genes, and not the other way around. That's the classic example of inheritance of acquired characteristics, or Lamarckism, after the man who thought of it. But it doesn't work."

C'astille looked straight at Charlie, and pulled her head in toward her body in surprise. "On Outpost, it
does
work," she said, in a strange, querulous voice. "If I cut off my finger, within a month the regulator cells of my body will record the change and implant it in my ovaries. My children, and their children, and theirs, will have a finger missing. Or perhaps they will carry the gene for a missing finger from one generation to the next, until it shows up again, after skipping many generations."