The Children Star (26 page)

She considered this. “If you are called, so be it. But beware. When the authorities capture you, they will not treat you kindly.”

“I'll take that risk.” One of his more interesting subjects at the Academy had been survival under torture. Students had protested it was outmoded, in the age of the Free Fold, but the Academy Master had only smiled.

“Very well,” said Mother Artemis. “I think it would be best if I disable the octopods with a stream of radio noise. As you say, they are servos; it may take some time for them to come round and ‘repair' my circuit.”

Rod swallowed hard. “Thanks,” he could barely whisper.

“But first you shall ask Haemum and Chae.”

“What? They're children. It's too dangerous. They have lives ahead of them.”

“They've earned the choice. It's their planet, too.”

In the dark nursery, as Haemum and Chae watched, Rod pried the boards off the window, hoping not to wake the little ones. The odor of the tumbleround below was enough to knock him out, but he braced himself to get used to it. A
shaft of moonglow fell across Gaea in her bed, her hands stretched before her face with the peaceful abandon of a sleeping child. Rod paused, wondering if he would ever see her again. Mother Artemis was right, he realized; without company, he could never have torn himself away.

Haemum and Chae were poised at the window, backpacks in their arms, awaiting the first step. At last Rod's pocket holostage beeped once; it was the signal from Mother Artemis, disabling the octopods.

Rod crouched on the window, then he leaped forward, out over the tumbleround. He landed in the garden behind it, amid its discarded travel roots. Haemum and Chae tossed the backpacks out to him, including his own, which he quickly slipped on. Then they, too, jumped out, and the three of them sprinted down the noxious trail the tumbleround had made through the garden. The gluish secretions got all over their hands and clothes; unpleasant, but any nanoplastic pursuer would avoid their touch.

Ruddy moonglow flooded the fields as if to bathe them in blood. The three of them jogged for a kilometer or so, until the wheelgrass came up again where the tumbleround trail grew old, and they had to pick their feet heavily through it. Rod noticed Chae falling behind, and he slowed a bit more. Still there was no sign of pursuit.

A hollow song arose, the manifold voice of the nearest band of singing-trees. The trail of the tumbleround, which had grown faint, seemed to widen and take on fresh odor, as if more than one of the beasts had traveled there. Reluctantly Rod entered the forest, wary of what might drop from the trees. The eerie song of the trees rose to a roar, drowning all else.

They continued through the forest, along tumbleround trails that seemed to cross each other, winding around the
great arches of the singing-trees. Rod wondered why no actual tumblerounds appeared. As the night wore on, the singing quieted, and other creatures could be heard. Long squirming rings dangled from the arches, groaning to each other, and the sidling of a hoopsnake gave Rod a start. His toe snagged so often, his hands were cut and bruised from catching himself. He wished they had the sturdy llamas to ride.

Finally the first trace of dawn appeared, from the east behind them. Rod called the youngsters to halt. “We'll sleep here, until night falls again.”

Haemum nodded without speaking, her face surrounded by matted curls. Chae sank exhausted against the trunk of the singing-tree. What would become of them—such promising students, now stateless refugees. As for himself, Rod could not begin to think of it. Suddenly he remembered 'jum, that day he first found her, alone in the universe amid the hovels of death. What would become of her? Now all of them were like her.

For the moment, though, the three of them had each other. Rod caught Haemum and Chae each in his arms, and held them both close. He wondered about the others, Mother Artemis and Brother Geode alone with all the little ones, and the llamas—how had they all managed? And where were they now? It was hard to think of the colony deserted and desolate, all their fields of brokenhearts unattended.

He set up the tent in the arch beneath the singing-tree, and the three of them slept until late in the day. In the evening they roused themselves and ate from their packs, sparingly. Haemum found water to boil in the solar unit recharged during the day. Chae caught a hoopsnake to supplement dinner for himself and Haemum; Rod did not yet
dare to eat it, lest he sicken without access to help. The gentle twilight rainfall dribbled down their tent as they prayed.

With nightfall, they had to move on, farther along the forest band, to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the pursuers sure to follow. But Chae walked with a limp, though he denied it, and Haemum stopped frequently to press her forehead. “Take one of your medicines,” Rod urged.

Haemum shook her head, saying cryptically, “That won't help.”

As they slogged on through the loopleaves, the scent of tumblerounds began to grow. They stumbled at last upon a clearing among the singing-trees. Rod stopped, nearly crying out in amazement.

There beneath the star-studded sky were a group of tumblerounds, at least a dozen of them. They were standing quite still, like old truck tires covered with cobwebs.

After staring for a minute, Rod shook himself and turned to the youngsters. “We could rest here a while,” he said. “The octopods will avoid this place like the plague.” At least he hoped so.

Chae agreed readily, sinking down to rest. Haemum seemed more reluctant, but agreed. Rod wished he could do more for her. He sat himself down against a singing-tree trunk, not admitting the real reason he had stopped.

What if these beasts actually were the masters of Prokaryon? What if he could get across something more from them, more than a raised hand?

Rod watched the tumblerounds, trying to relax and empty his mind as he did when calling the Spirit. For a while nothing happened, and he half slept. Then the bright spots reappeared, shaping themselves in his eyes. They
formed random shapes, pinching off and coming together, as if a sculptor were playing with clay. A crude line figure formed, a bar with three branches. Three fingers?

The figure lasted for a minute or so. Then two of the three lines dissolved, and the topmost lengthened above the vertical bar. With a shock, Rod saw that it was the letter “E.” Soon it was joined by a “T.”

“Haemum,” Rod whispered.

“Yes, Brother Rod?”

“Do you ever . . . see odd things? When you get headaches?”

“Maybe,” she said guardedly. “Like what?”

“Like letters?” The letter “A” had appeared, followed by “O.”

“I've seen letters,” she admitted.

“Why didn't you tell us?”

“Chae said you'd think we were crazy.”

Rod looked at Chae.

“We're all crazy,” said Chae. “Ever since the tumbleround came after us.”

He turned to Haemum. “ ‘E, T, A, O, N. . . .' Does that mean anything?”

Haemum said, “I asked at school. It's the frequency distribution of our language; the most common letters downward.” She caught his arm. “How do they do it, Brother Rod? How does a tumbleround . . . get inside our heads like that?”

“They send microzoöids, through the whirrs. Like nanoservos, somehow, the microzoöids contact our brains.”

Chae shrank away. “I always knew those beasts were bad.”

Rod remembered the journey to Sarai, when the poor
boy awoke to find the whirr-covered visitor leaning over them. “You needn't go through this, Chae. You can go back to Station.”

The boy shook his head. “There's bad and there's worse.”

Rod asked Haemum, “Do you ever see words?”

“Once, I think. The word ‘the,' the most common word.”

So the tumbleround knew about “words;” but it knew no meanings. Did it? How did it know enough to make letters? It must somehow see what his own eyes saw.

From his backpack Rod took a piece of nanoplast that still had enough juice to glow faintly. He pulled out chunks of the nanoplast, which he rolled and stretched into letters, to form the word HAND. He stared at the letters, outstretched on the ground next to his own hand, until his eyes watered. Then he gave up and looked away.

His forehead ached, and the bright rings reappeared in his eyesight. They flickered and coalesced to form the letters:
H . . . A . . . N
. . .

Rod vaguely realized that something of tremendous importance had happened; something the Fold had all sorts of rules and regulations about reporting, if ever such an event should occur to the human race. Except that it never had; and no one would believe it now. A Spirit Caller's visions did not count as evidence.

He blinked his eyes, but the letters remained, next to a crude shape of a hand. Why could these creatures not simply announce themselves on the airwaves, he thought, instead of inside his own head? With a sigh, he gathered up the nanoplast, still glowing faintly, and rearranged it to another word: HOME. That was no good; he needed something more concrete. CHILD, he tried, though it was hard to picture a child. LLAMA was a four-legged stick figure.
“I” was a man with two legs. YOU . . . How to picture a tumbler ound?

The presence in his head returned, YOU . . . LLAMA.

Rod blinked in surprise. The tumbleround's microzoöids must have picked up “YOU,” just from the idea in his head. The “llama” was an understandable error, for Rod himself actually looked four-legged now, as he crouched on the ground. Patiently he reshaped the nanoplast to read: I . . . MAN.

The presence immediately replied: I . . . MAN; YOU . . . LLAMA.

Rod was not sure at all how to take this. He looked out at the group of tumblerounds, wondering which one of them had sent this message. Or all of them—were they some kind of group mind? And what would the Fold do when they found out?

A
t Station, Sarai was giving her public lecture on the holostage. The purple Sharer wore no more than usual, but she carried herself like an Elysian in a full-length train. The viewing chamber was packed with the research scientists, Elk and Khral and the sentients, as well as several caterpillar-shaped medics, who had yet to bring the two Elysians out of their comatose state. Reporter snake eggs hovered overhead like bees, until Station warned them to keep out of the way.

In the corner sat 'jum, swinging her legs and feeding bits of protein cake to Sarai's carnivorous vine; it extended only an arm's length, the longest piece Quark could be persuaded to take along. She clucked now and then at the two clickflies working on their web above her head. A reporter tried to interview her for human interest, but she ignored it.

“These
microzoöids,”
Sarai began, “of species
Sarai
phycozoöidensis
, were first isolated from human cerebrospinal fluid—encased within crystals of silicate. The silicate coating protects each microzoöid from the toxic human interior, just as our skinsuits protect us from the Prokaryan
exterior
. Your nanoservos never look for silicate,” she added with a superior air. “Upon removal to standard phycozoöid culture media, the silicate coatings dissolve to reveal—”

“Whoa, there.” Elk half rose to his feet. “Human spinal fluid? I thought your strain first came from a tumbleround—”

Sarai glared.
“You
can wait till the question period. If I choose to answer any.”

Khral tugged Elk's arm, and Quark hissed at him to hush. Station announced, “We'll have ample time for questions—all day, if necessary. Please proceed.”

Sarai sniffed. “Wherever would / find a tumbleround; they never reached the mountains until they had to rescue their citizens. As I was saying . . .”

Elk opened his mouth again, but thought better of it. He fell back, looking dazed.

“. . . the silicates from the human cerebrospinal fluid dissolved in the media,” Sarai continued, “revealing typical toroid cells, with the usual ring of triplex DNA running around the hole. But these cells failed to thrive. And they were few in number; barely a hundred from the original source.” She raised her hand, spreading the fingerwebs like a fan. “That's when I made the ingenious choice of ‘universal broth,' a medium of my own invention that enables growth of a wide range of species. I inoculated eight cells. They immediately proceeded to metabolize, putting out all sorts of fascinating by-products.” The list of products scrolled down the holostage for the next half hour, while
she described them in detail. Elk slumped in his chair, but the medical “caterpillars” reared up to pay attention, for any metabolic product might be toxic to humans.

“On the second day, two individuals fell in love and began to reproduce, by a unique conjugative process.” Sarai snapped her fingers at the holostage. Two microzoöids appeared, glowing blue; the two cells came together, neatly stacked. Sarai turned to 'jum. “You're too young for this, Ushum. Go take the clickflies for a stroll.”