Thomas Easton - Organic Future 04 - Seeds of Destiny

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Seeds of Destiny
by Thomas A. Easton
This story copyright 1994 by Thomas A. Easton. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use.
All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.
Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.
* * *
CHAPTER 1
"Sir?"
A hand reached toward Marcus Aurelius Hrecker from a shadowy alcove in the painted tunnel wall.
Automatically, he raised a warding arm and shifted his step to stay out of reach. Olympia, burrowed into
the bulk of the grandest mountain in the Solar System, was as safe as any place, safer than any city on
Earth or the Moon. But you could never tell. Even in a crowded tunnel.
"Sir? Please!"
The hand belonged to a small woman, stooped and wrinkled and smelling of years. Her hair was so
gray it was practically white. Almost against his will, he stopped and faced her. Other pedestrians flowed
past behind him.
"Did you know I'm being evicted? I had such a nice apartment. And they say they need it for someone
else. They're putting me in a home. Just one room and a cafeteria and a lounge full of old wrecks. Like
me."
"I'm sorry." He shook his head. "But there's really nothing I can do." Why was she even telling him?
He didn't know her, and he could imagine no reason why she would think he might change the housing
office's mind. Certainly he couldn't take her home with him. His own apartment was barely large enough
for him.
"Of course you can't!" She nodded rapidly, her eyes bright, her mouth set in a pursed line. "Not about
that. But..." She reached into the shadows behind her. Light glinted on polished metal wheel-hubs and
basket wire. He recognized a cart of the sort many people used when shopping. "I have to get rid of my
flowers, you know. I can't take them with me. They just won't allow it. There's no point in even asking.
But you look like a nice fellow."
She swung back toward him, something in her hands. He shied away from her, stepping backward,
thumping into a passerby, lurching forward again, and she thrust that something against his chest. "Here."
Suddenly he was holding a smooth-sided cylinder and staring at a spray of fuzzy green and white-edged,
yellow-centered violet.
Oh, no, he thought. Fear washed over him even as his fingertips stroked the side of the cylinder and
told him it was made of some smooth ceramic. It was surely a local product, made of Martian soil. No
one shipped raw clay or pottery between the worlds, not even in an era when Q drives tapped the raw
energy of space itself to power rockets.
No one made flowerpots either, and here was the handle and now it made sense.
"Here," she said again, and her nod was insistent, demanding, dogmatic. "You can have an African
violet. All it needs is light and water, and maybe a little fertilizer."
But he was not listening. "No!" he cried. "You keep it! I can't!"
He pushed the mug full of greenery toward the old woman, but she seized his wrists and with
surprising strength turned him toward the center of the tunnel. "No," she said. "I really can't, you know.
They're evicting me. But I can't keep my flowers. And they're so pretty, aren't they? You take good care
of it now."
"But-- !"
"Go on. I have lots more to give away." There was a push at his back. He staggered a step, and the
flow of traffic swept him up and on.
Fortunately the shirt he wore did not have time-consuming buttons, snaps, zips, or strips. It wrapped
diagonally across his chest, and he thought he got the flower out of sight before anyone could recognize it
for what it was. An African violet, she had called it. A plant, of all things.
At least she had sense enough to stay away from the more brightly lit portions of the tunnel.
Plants were most definitely not approved personal possessions. They were acceptable only in
agricultural domes and tunnels. House plants were prima facie evidence of Orbital/Gypsy sympathies at
best, of disloyalty and treason at worst.
If Security spotted the African violet, it would not matter a bit that his father, his grandfather, and his
great-grandfather had all been Security agents. An uncle had even been chief of Security on the Munin
habitat until a blowout caught him without a suit.
He tried to look innocent.
He tried not to stare at his fellow pedestrians. That just wasn't done. Only the very young and the
guilty failed to pretend they were alone in the tunnels, on the way to work or home or running errands.
He tried not to search the tunnel walls and ceiling for Security cameras. But if he couldn't look at the
African violet and he couldn't look at people, there was nothing else at which to aim his eyes.
At least he could refrain from scanning, couldn't he? Then he wouldn't look like he was searching for
cameras. He wouldn't look guilty.
Unless they watched for people who were obviously trying not to be noticed.
In which case he had better not keep looking away from shopping carts. It was quite natural to peek,
to see what people had found in their shopping, to learn what foods had come from the farms. Like that
purple globe of eggplant, red-skinned onions, blue-green potsters, green broccoli, pale white fish.
He forgot the fish as his eyes jerked back to the green and away.
He wished he had a reader with him.
There! Watch those! Illuminated signs that advertised beer and pizza and minerals formed when Mars
had water a billion years ago. Crystals, the shop bragged. Mudstone marked with ripples. Wormtracks.
Shells.
There was a diskshop stocked with newsdisks, novels, textbooks, games, and more. Its entrance was
never clear, for people moved steadily in and out.
A tour shop, its entrance flanked by glass-cased, bright-lit posters showing the vast rise of Olympus
Mons, the gorge of Marineris just as vast, Io spuming yellow, red, and black, the desolation of the lunar
highlands, coral reefs on Earth, fishless and stark, Earth itself viewed from orbit. Next door a clothing
store, its display assuring everyone it sold everything from the flimsiest of nightwear to Martian hardsuits.
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker let his attention settle on a tiny robot, legs flickering as it scurried along the
floor, dodged feet, and raced up a ramp attached to the tunnel wall. There was another robot on the shelf
that ran just above all the doorways and display cases and neon signs and usually kept the machines off
the floor and out from underfoot. The first ignored the pull-outs, the ramps up and down, and the access
holes that led inside the walls. It met a third, and there was room to pass. It stopped. Its head rose,
antennae wiggled as it optimized the signal it was receiving, and it began to move again, faster, running
now, practically flying, taking the ramp that led to the next cross-path, arched riblike beneath the tunnel's
roof.
The little robots removed dust and litter and debris, searched for defects in tunnels and ducts, repaired
what they could, and signalled for human assistance when a problem was beyond their abilities. Marcus
Aurelius Hrecker shared his people's pride in the versatile machines even though he understood their
major shortcoming. They were a triumph of mechanical and electronic technology, but they were no
nearer the ultimate goal than they had been a century before. Only the sort of information storage one
found in genes could permit a self-reproducing von Neumann machine to exist.
Artificial intelligence? They had that, though hardly at a human level, not even at the level rumor hinted
had been achieved some time before the Engineers' final victory. He had heard the robots compared to
cats and monkeys, and the reason for their limitation was once more that they were not organic. In some
ways, living things had distinct design advantages.
But not this African violet. Not at this moment. Not now. Not ever.
It could kill him.
He wished he dared to set the plant in its mug on one of those shelves, or on the floor. The machines
would dispose of it. That was their job. They were everywhere. They cleaned clothes and floors,
polished shoes, mended and repaired, stripped paint and replaced it, found and fetched lost items, and
prepared food, tending Olympia and all its people just as they did in the cities of Mars and Earth, the
Moon and the habitats, everywhere the Engineers chose to live.
But no one did such things. If he did, one of his fellow pedestrians would surely notice and report his
suspicious behavior. Or the cameras, wherever they were, would pick him up.
Better he should leave the plant under his shirt.
* * *
The short side-tunnel, filled with the pink-tinged light of Mars, opened into a concourse thirty meters
high. Its far wall was a curve of steel-ribbed glass. Beyond that was the red-rock lip of the scarp that
lifted Olympus Mons a kilometer above the lowlands beyond, and then those lowlands, softened and
smoothed into plains by distance. The only signs of human presence were a distant dome and a cloud of
yellow fumes beside the concentric rings of an open-pit mine.
No one paid the spectacular view any attention at all. No one seemed disturbed by the far-off
industrial stain on the landscape. Both were routine, backdrop, as accepted as the posters in the tour
shop's display cases.
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker was no exception. When he left the tunnel, his mind was on the plant tucked
within his shirt, on his destination, on the tasks that awaited him. He turned sharp left, stepped aboard the
escalator in front of him, rode to the next level up, and entered another tunnel marked by a small brass
plaque that said "Olympus University." When Hrecker passed it, it repeated its message aloud.
Just within this tunnel was a directory board that displayed a map of the university's tunnels and a list of
departments, offices, and labs. Hrecker ignored this too. The Q-Drive Research Center where he was a
junior researcher was straight ahead and right and right and left, past the administration's side-tunnel and
the dining hall and the freshman dorms, just before the turn into the athletic complex, and late on any
afternoon the lab rocked with noise every time someone opened the main door to enter or leave.
Sometimes the din even penetrated the solid rock of Mars itself.
But the tunnels were quiet now. The day's first classes were in session. He glanced through the entry to
the dining hall and found it empty except for a few stragglers. The creak of exercise machinery was the
only sign that anyone was in the athletics area at all.
And here was the Research Center. He felt the flower mug with his wrist. Would he be able to reach
his lab before someone spotted it? Would he be able to bury it in a wastebasket? Should he flush the
plant and its soil down a toilet, wash its container, and pretend it had never held anything more
incriminating than a wooden pencil?
Of course, as soon as the entrance door swung shut behind him, Eric Silber came out of the com
room, his hands full of paper. "What's that? A tumor?"
Silber was a mathematician, but his sharply angled, acne-scarred face and cawing voice had prompted
more than one to suspect out loud that he was really a Security plant. Thereafter, no one quite dared to
trust him or to object to his bitter gibes. And of course he had seen the bulge in Hrecker's shirt.
"Just a..." He made a garbled noise, waved one hand, and turned quickly into the hall that led toward
his lab. When Eric did not follow him or say, "What?" he breathed a sigh of relief.
But the relief did not last long.
When he reached his tiny office safely, he peered beneath the metal desk and behind the books and
knickknacks on the shelf. Once he was sure none of the tiny, insectoid robots were present, he set the
plant in its mug beside the keyboard of his terminal. Then he wondered what the gyp he could do with it.
He scratched his belly where the mug had pressed. He was carefully tucking in his shirt once more
when the doorlatch clicked behind him.
"Got a min-- ? What have you got there?"
He spun and flushed and said, "Sorry. But-- "
"That's dumb," said Renard Saucier. "Suicidally dumb."
Hrecker did not think to ask why Saucier was in his doorway, belly straining against his traditional
coverall, hairline arching toward the ceiling. As usual, the man's upper eyelids folded down at their outer
edges and he looked exhausted. He was in charge of this section of the lab, supervising several
researchers and technicians, but he was rarely seen until after lunch. Mornings he spent on his own
research.
"A plant, of all things," said Saucier. "Today, of all times. I was just in a meeting..."
"An African violet." Hrecker tried very hard to sound meek. "I was going to throw it away."
"Then why did you bring it here? If Security spotted it..."
"I know."
"You'd never run another probability shifter, would you?"
Hrecker shook his head. The lab had learned how to use the probability warp that made the Q drive
possible to achieve macroscopic tunneling a decade ago. The trick had proved to be the key to
faster-than-light travel, the heart of the tunnel drive the Gypsies had mastered before they fled the system
more than a century before. More recently, they had been trying to use a variation of the technique to
control the placement of ions in semiconductors. They hoped to build electronic memories that would
match the capacity of biological ones.
A shelf on the wall to the left of the doorway held a veedo set. Saucier turned toward it and touched
its switch. Then he reached past Hrecker and picked up the plant. "I'll dispose of it. You check the
news."
Was that why he had appeared so early in the day? Was there something important happening in the
world outside the lab? Something that might affect their work? Or...?
Obediently, Marcus Aurelius Hrecker watched the screen as it came to life. And when the image
proved to be that of a familiar piece of Olympian tunnel, he reached blindly for his chair, rolled it away
from the desk, turned it, and sat.
A voice was saying: "Constant vigilance is the only way we can remain free of the green taint. Only half
an hour ago, Security noticed this woman..." A small woman, elderly, silver-haired, her bent back against
a shadowed alcove. Hrecker recognized her, and a premonition of her fate shivered down his spine.
"Obviously a Gypsy sympathizer," the voice went on conversationally. "Perhaps even an actual agent.
She was distributing emblems of that subversive movement." The camera swung toward one of the
woman's hands, the image enlarged, and the screen filled with a plump cactus rooted in a small glass jar.
"She is in Security's custody now, being interrogated. Once she has divulged the names of everyone who
accepted one of her emblems, they too will be arrested and questioned. Then she will be-- "
"Executed." Saucier was back. "So will they."
"She practically forced it on me!"
"You should have screamed for help."
"For what? Assault with a deadly flower?"
"It's deadly enough when Security is watching."
Hrecker nodded. "Yeah. Is that what you wanted me to see?"
The other shook his head as the weathergirl came on to speak of dust storms and unusual cold
sweeping across the face of Mars. "I didn't even know about that one. Give it another minute."
"But why? The last time anybody saw a Gypsy was a century ago. That was when we conquered the
Orbitals and took over the whole system, not just Earth and the Moon."
"There might be a few left."
"Enough of them?" Hrecker asked. His tone was insistent. "Every time something goes wrong, every
blowout, every equipment failure, every... Enough to take all the blame?"
"They're useful that way, aren't they?"
"There can't possibly be a resistance movement!"
Saucier nodded. "Don't say that outside the lab."
"Do you think I'm suicidal?"
"You had that flower."
He fell silent. So he had. He supposed he wouldn't have if he hadn't felt able to trust the lab. He would
have found some way to refuse the cursed gift, or to get rid of it. He might even have cried out for
Security to seize the treasonous old woman.
He had been quite astoundingly foolish to do what he had done. He loved the lab for its tolerance of
difference, for its atmosphere of intellectual independence, for its old-fashioned free speech. But talk was
one thing. Doing was quite another.
"What did you want me to see?"
The weathergirl was done. The soccer report from Earth was nearly over.
"There it is." Saucier didn't really need to point as the screen filled with a Q-ship, all swollen nose and
slender shaft jutting from a bundle of cylindrical reaction-mass tanks. "The Explorer."
The newscaster, his voice urgent with professional emotion, was saying:
"...back from Tau Ceti, where they found a world with intelligent life. It may be the Gypsies'
First-Stop, according to Commander Dengh."
Pictures flashed across the screen. Humanoid aliens, large-skulled, round-bellied, and blunt-muzzled,
standing erect but fur-covered, some with tails, some without. Cities and fields and roads, ships and
trucks, a high, high tower centered in a nearly circular valley, a handful of artificial satellites. A world with
two large continents separated by no more ocean than lay between Europe and Africa, each one
wreathed in arcs of islands.
"How long have they been back?" asked Hrecker.
"A month. They've kept it quiet."
"Why? What's the secret?"
"The Gypsies. The best our people could tell, the age of the buildings, the size of the road network, the
amount of environmental damage, all indicate a very young civilization. And that tower. The locals aren't
quite advanced enough to build it. And they speak a kind of English. Our biologists think the Gypsies
must have gengineered them from animals."
"I hope they spent the month arguing over what to do," said Hrecker.
Saucier nodded. "We're not our ancestors. But we do need to do something. If we don't, the
conservatives will gain power and we may turn as destructive as ever. Or the underground, if there really
is one, will sense weakness."
"Then-- "
"That's what that meeting was about." When Hrecker looked puzzled, he added, "Just before you got
here. That's why I came in here in the first place, things to tell you, and then the rest. They're moving us."
"Why?"
"The Explorer's our only starship, and it's small. We need more and bigger if we're to send a force to
Tau Ceti." He shook his head. "It will study the place in detail. It will see whether the Gypsies really did
do anything. And then it will do whatever it thinks appropriate."
Hrecker closed his eyes and shuddered. "So they want more ships."
"The government is drafting every Q-drive designer and engineer there is."
"Whether they're in the spaceship business or not."
"We used to be. We gave them the tunnel drive."
"But we're not anymore. We're scientists, not engineers, and we've moved on."
Saucier shrugged. "They want us too. We're what they've got."
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker turned away from his supervisor. He looked at his desk, the keyboard with
the smudges where his hands touched most often, the corkboard with the photos of his father and sisters
on Earth, the... "And I'll bet the university isn't secure enough for them."
"We have the rest of the week to pack."
"Where?"
"A construction base in the Belt."
Hrecker made a face. "Maybe Security should have spotted that plant."
"They'd have jailed you as a gypsymp, a Gypsy sympathizer."
"More work for the rest of you."
Saucier showed his teeth in a grim smile. "You wouldn't be any better off yourself."
* * *
* * *
CHAPTER 2
* * *
Once upon a time, the valley had been a bowl rimmed by steep bluffs, its floor purpled by a carpet of
low, mosslike plants and watered by a small lake a little to the west of center. In the woods atop the
bluffs had lived creatures about the size of German shepherds. They had eaten the plump white
mossberries and drunk from the shore of the lake. They had caught small amphibians and fish and the
larvae of the bird-like dumbos, dug for roots and grubs, raided the nests of egg-layers. Occasionally one
group had met another, and then they had screeched and screamed and thrown things. Sometimes they
had fought, all tooth and claw, blood on the ground, tufts of fur on the shrubbery, even a body or two to
eat.
Strangers had fallen from the sky on tongues of flame, burning the moss away where the bluffs
flattened to the east, blackening the yellow soil with char. They had named the creatures Racs, studied
every detail of their structure, and in time decided to tweak the blueprints that made them what they
were. The new Racs that resulted walked erect, had hands instead of paws, and had larger brains.
The lake was still there. The landing field was green again, covered with moss. The Racs picked
berries there, played games, and on suitable occasions gathered by the thousands to stare into the
heavens where their Remakers had gone.
There were legends of that day, when the night-sky spark that was their vehicle, the Gypsy, had
spouted flame and vanished.
The center of the valley was still dominated by the Worldtree the strangers had grown before they left.
Yet that Worldtree was no longer a simple spike that jutted from the ground, its tip swollen to hold the
strangers' heritage. Its base was surrounded by a complex of stone buildings several stories high. Beyond
the buildings the moss remained, broken now by gravel paths, stone benches, and thickets of alien vines.
It stretched almost to the bluffs, where dormitories and homes and shops for those who served the
Worldtree formed a wall of masonry and wood as imposing as the bluffs alone had ever been.
A Rac standing on one of the gravel paths that linked the valley's center to its rim could have glimpsed,
through arched passageways and alleys, the stream of traffic on the ring road that encircled the valley just
outside the wall of buildings. The road's tributaries led to the mouths of tunnels carved into the bluffs to
reach a maze of natural caverns where masons had leveled floors, built walls and ramps, and installed
reinforcing pillars. Roadways wound through the caverns, and the widest sloped ever upward, finally
opening to other roads above the bluffs, outside the valley. Narrower ones led to warrens that had once
sheltered Racs from war. Now they were storehouses and parking garages for the local citizenry's
vehicles.
The forest atop the bluffs was gone. Once small villages had been scattered among the trees. Brush
and thatch construction had given way to wood and stone. Farms and workshops had appeared. The
population had grown, and the valley floor had remained empty, holy ground occupied only by the
Worldtree and the ruins of the first Temple, used only for worship, for picking mossberries, and for
battles between tribes and nations that craved possession of the Worldtree. Until...
Dotson Barbtail trembled in the honeysuckle thicket. His pelt kept him from noticing the chill of the
mid-autumn night, but his ears alternately pricked alert and flattened against his head. His voice sang with
tension in his throat. Quiet, he thought. Quiet. Don't move. Don't make the vines shake. Don't let anyone
see you. And thank your Gypsy Remakers that it is not cold enough to turn your breath to clouds of
steam.
The pedestrian whose presence on the gravel path had made him freeze passed by obliviously. No
others were in sight, which was as it should be. It was late at night, halfway between dusk and dawn, and
every good Rac in the valley should be in bed.
Except for late-working scholars.
He shifted just enough to watch the pedestrian grow distant on the path. Did he have a tail? Was he a
scholar? Or a tailless servant?
Those were the choices, weren't they? Everyone in bed but late workers, scholars and servants. And
rogues like Dotson Barbtail.
Was he really a rogue?
One hand touched the traditional leather harness that crossed his shoulders and chest and circled his
waist. It supported several small pouches for trinkets, money, tools. One held a key.
Rogue. When he had been small, they had called him that. His mother had cuffed him twice for every
one she gave his brothers and sisters. Teachers had scolded and punished. Neighbors had looked at him,
and their voices had changed from the roughness of contentment to the smooth song of anger.
Perhaps he had just had too much initiative. Been too ready to act, too slow to anticipate costs and
consequences.
But he had also been smart. He had known how to learn quickly and well, and he had qualified to be a
student at Worldtree Center. Now he tried to be as much a scholar as anyone. It was a life he loved.
Why, he didn't really have to hide in the honeysuckle, did he? He was a student, a scholar with
research assignments all his own. He might be working late himself. He could walk the paths as freely as
any other.
But he didn't want to be seen by anyone who might later recall his presence here on this night of all
nights, when...
He wished it were darker. The lights of the city that surrounded the valley made the sky glow. If
someone saw him hiding there, they would have little trouble making out the distinctive color pattern of
his fur. That was what had given him his name.
The Worldtree stood high ahead of him, its silhouette piercing the skyglow. The buildings of Worldtree
Center leaned against its shaft, holding up their peaked roofs, the crenellated walkways for the guards
that had not been needed for a generation, the single high turret from which a stout rope ladder rose and
rose and rose, vanishing from sight in its reach for the Worldtree's distant, precious tip.
He wished he wore an ordinary, undistinguished, anonymous coat. Then, if he were seen, he might
have some hope of escaping unrecognized.
He would have another name too, wouldn't he? No barbtail markings. Just a reputation for getting into
trouble.
He snorted gently, quietly, and eased forward among the honeysuckle vines. Several of the cup-sized
blooms tipped and spilled their sticky nectar on his fur. Their cloying odor filled the air. He wrinkled his
nose and struggled not to sneeze. He promised himself a bath and a brush. Perhaps, when he was done,
he would go by the lake.
Trouble, he thought. He was who he was, and surely that could not be changed. Not entirely. He had
behaved himself since coming to Worldtree Center. Most of the time.
But he was who he was. Just let him think of something that seemed a good idea to do. It did not
matter whether his elders would approve or not. Better, perhaps, if they would sing with rage when they
found out, and knowing that, or thinking it, he had never been able to leave that good idea alone.
Without his markings, he would surely be known as Dotson Eaten-by-Temptation. Or would he? Sly
Evader might do as well, for the elders caught him far less often than he deserved.
Would they catch him tonight?
He really hoped they would not. He had never before plotted such an awful crime that was theft and
sacrilege and blasphemy and heresy all at once.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
It still did.
He squeezed his fingers more tightly about the lump of baked clay in his hand. He had been roaming
the streets of Worldtree City above the bluffs when he had found the potter's workshop. He had lingered
in the door to watch one rotund worker kneading red-brown clay, another making bowls on a spinning
wheel, a third painting glazes in patterns onto dry clay surfaces. He had returned again, and again, and
one day he had found the shop empty. That was when he had stolen a handful of clay. He had shaped it
later, making his lump, heating it in the oven of his apartment stove, hoping that was hot enough, then
painting it with enamels. When he was finished, he was satisfied. It was not a perfect match for what he
had wished to imitate, but it was close. Close enough.
The only question then remaining was whether he would ever have a chance to use it. Would there
ever be a time? Would he ever dare?
Every year the honeysuckle spread, pushing its way into ground long held by the valley's native moss.
Gardeners pushed it back, but still it grew. It even grew outside the valley, spreading across the face of
First-Stop much as had the Racs themselves.
Some Racs thought the honeysuckle should be removed entirely, chopped and burned and dug up by
the roots. The space, they said, could be given back to moss. Or it could be used for more dormitories
or library space. Others said the vines were a relic of their Remakers, the alien strangers who had raised
them from the beasts. They should remain, as much a remembrance and a promise as the Worldtree that
dominated the valley and the Rac culture. So far, the traditionalists had always won.
Dotson was grateful. The honeysuckle hid him where he crouched. It let him move unseen close to the
walls of Worldtree Center, that complex of buildings that surrounded and leaned against the Worldtree
the Remakers had left behind.
He looked upward, toward those walls, those buildings. They were built of stone and mortar, designed
to last forever. They were pierced by windows, many of them lit even so late at night. He saw shadows
moving, heard voice and music, smelled food.
Now there was a walk ahead of him, an open zone that he would have to cross to reach the Great
Hall. He let his face ease gently through the screen of vines and peered first left, then right. No one was in
sight. He could hear no crunch of gravel beneath distant feet.
Still, someone might be watching from further off. From some high window, dark or lighted. He chose
a darker portion of the path, slipped sideways from the honeysuckle, and stepped forward along the
gravel as naturally and normally as he could manage. A few more steps, another shadow, and he slipped
into the honeysuckle on the other side of the path. With luck, he thought, no watcher would have seen
where he came from or where he went. There he was, following the path like any other stroller. They
would assume they had not noticed him, that he had been there, on the path, all along and was still there
somewhere, lost from sight once more in darkness.
He bared his teeth in a Rac grin. He certainly hoped he was lost from sight.
The honeysuckle on this side of the path was a thin screen, a ruff of vegetation at the base of the stone
wall, a foundation for the vines that climbed the building's side and peeped in at the windows. He thought
the vines were surely sturdy enough to bear his weight. He was also happy that he did not have to trust
his estimate. His target was low, near the ground, and here it was, glinting in the skylight just enough to
see. He reached out one hand to touch the glass. It moved.
He had been in the Center that afternoon, working in his lab, studying the copies of the Worldtree's
ceramic plaques that spelled out the basics of his field. A smudge had impelled him to seek out the
archive, to check the original, and it was passing through the Great Hall on that errand that he had found
the key, set down and forgotten. Where he found it told him what it must fit.
His recognition of the moment he had long awaited had paralyzed him where he stood. But he had
unfrozen before anyone could think his odd posture worth a question. He had palmed the key. Then...
It had taken only minutes more to find this window and set it ajar.
And no one had closed it.
Once that would have been unthinkable. Once there had been guards who patrolled all of Worldtree
Center, finding and closing off every route by which a stranger, an enemy, might invade.
He swung the window wide and clambered over the sill into a small room. The dim skylight revealed a
toilet, a door, and a sink. Beside the sink was a roll of paper towels.
When his feet clung to the tile floor, he stopped. He wished he had had the foresight to know that
honeysuckle nectar would spill, that he would walk in the sticky stuff, that it would cover his hands. He
wished he had known he would leave such unmistakable signs of his presence.
But if he had no foresight, he had luck. The Remakers must have smiled upon his plan when they led
him to use the window in this room.
He dampened a fistful of towels at the sink and scrubbed the worst of the stickiness from his fur and
hands and feet. Only then did he slip through the door into the dim-lit corridors beyond.
A mounted suit of ancient warrior armor-- helm and breastplate and skirt of metal strips-- made him
start, but only for a moment. No one, no one real and live and apt to question his presence there, seemed
to be in the building. There were no lines of light beneath office doors. No distant voices, no click of
claws on floor tiles, no echoes of closing doors.
There was no telling how long the silence would last. Surely there were still a few guards to patrol the
building and protect its treasures. Surely they would come by soon, too soon.
He stopped. Was that... ? No. Some small animal, scurrying above the ceiling panels. A creak of the
building's fabric.
He hurried, and when the corridor he followed debouched into the building's central chamber, he
stopped again. Near one end of the vast room was the tenth-scale Worldtree, at its foot a small stepped
pyramid on which the priests held forth each week, new students dedicated their lives to learning, and
officials of Worldtree Center took their oaths of office.
There were more displays of armor and weapons and the inventions that marked the ascent of
Rackind from their raw beginnings. There was the great mural that covered the long far wall with a
depiction of all Rac history from the creation to the building of Worldtree Center. Though the light was
dim, it glowed with a brilliance of its own, or perhaps of memory. Every Rac knew this painting's every
detail as if it were the pattern of his fur.
There was the valley filled with opposing armies that trampled moss and honeysuckle alike. There
were the great box kites, anchored by wheeled winches, that had lifted observers above the battle. There
was that one observer who had called for more rope and let the wind lift and lift and lift, until he could
drop from his kite to the flange that ringed the Worldtree's top. His deed had earned him a new name,
Kitewing, and made him a hero for all of time.
When he looked at that portion of the mural, Dotson touched the side of his flattened, chinless muzzle
in an abbreviated version of the Rac greeting gesture. Few ever denied Kitewing that token of respect,
for legend had always said that the Remakers had left a trove of knowledge in the chamber atop the
Worldtree and that those Racs who possessed the valley and the Worldtree would, as soon as they
could reach its top, rule the world.
Not that war had stopped after Kitewing hoisted the first rope ladder up the Worldtree and brought
the first few plaques down to be puzzled over and the kinship of their language to that spoken and written
by the Racs slowly recognized. Since then the Rac tongue had shifted closer to that of the plaques. Now
only the least educated and the primitives who did not live in the Land of the Worldtree could not
understand the Remakers' gifts.
Nor had war ceased after the construction of Worldtree Center had begun. Nor after the dawn of
industry, the making of vehicles and other machines. The mural recorded it all, the bright sunlit notes of
triumph and progress, the somber, smoky, red-lit notes of further war, the tanks and fighters, guns and
bombs, fleeing civilians, death, destruction.
And always the opponents seemed to differ only in whether they did or did not have tails.
Dotson Barbtail snorted gently, quietly, careful not to produce any sound that might draw attention to a
room that should be empty at this hour. The historians said the battles for possession of the Worldtree
and its secrets had been battles between tribes, later between nations and regions, later still between
systems of belief, both political and religious, not between races of Racs. But the mural told its own story.
He did not think it quite coincidence that tailed and tailless mostly lived in different nations, different
regions, under different patterns of rule and religion. And the tensions remained. War could erupt anew at
any moment, just as it had so many times in the century since the Remakers had left First-Stop and the
Racs' story had begun.
Had it really been only a century, a little more, since Racs had lived in huts in the forest? Since they
had been beasts without even the wit to build the crudest shelters? He turned to face the miniature of the
Worldtree. The priests said their progress had been so fast, faster even than that of the Remakers before
they had learned enough to become the gods of the Racs, because those gods had not only made them.
They had also taught them... The lesson was inscribed on the shaft of the Worldtree icon at the head of
the room, on the image of the Worldtree wherever it appeared in the mural, though he could not make it
out in the dimness: "Knowledge is the road to heaven." Once the Racs learned enough, they could climb
the Worldtree. Once they learned still more, said the priests, they could join the Remakers in the sky.
Perhaps that final goal was not far off. Rac engineers and physicists had learned how to fill metal
towers like hollow Worldtrees with liquid hydrogen and oxygen and put devices into orbit around their
world. The latest such thundertree was the largest; when it was finished, it would carry a pod containing
three Racs into space. In a few years, First-Stop would have what the Remakers' records called a space
station. There would be trips to other planets of the Tau Ceti system. Eventually...
Dotson Barbtail shook himself. This Great Hall was designed to awe, to fill Racs with a sense of
history and destiny, to stop them in their headlong rush from task to task and awaken reflection. It rarely
failed with him, not even when he knew he could not afford to give it the time it demanded.
摘要：

SeedsofDestinybyThomasA.EastonThisstorycopyright1994byThomasA.Easton.ThiscopywascreatedforJeanHardy'spersonaluse.Allotherrightsarereserved.Thankyouforhonoringthecopyright.PublishedbySeattleBookCompany,www.seattlebook.com.*    *    *    CHAPTER1    "Sir?"    AhandreachedtowardMarcusAureliusHreckerfro...

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