Gwendolyn
Ingolfsson stood naked beside the stream. It was an early spring
day in the central Rockies, chilly and intensely fresh. Wind
whispered quietly through the fir trees dotted through the upland
valley, down from the snowpeaks to the west, and fluttered the
new leaves of the aspens. It carried the scent of grass and
trees, rock, small burrowing things, and more faintly elk and-she
inhaled-a grizzly, off a kilometer or two upwind. For a moment
she gave herself to the wind and silence, face turned to the
morning sun, watching a condor sweep its shadow across the
flower-starred meadows.
Then she turned
back to her camp. The fire was out, her last meal of hand-caught
trout and rabbit scorched scraps in the ashes. Beside it was a
tripod of spears, shaped ashwood tipped with chipped flint heads
bound on by rawhide; her obsidian knife and hide bag hung from
them. For a moment she considered taking some of the gear for
keepsake, then shook her head. The memory would stay with her, of
making them and using them these past six months; let wood and
leather and stone rot and tumble and the land grow over them. Or
let another find and use them; there were two or three species in
this reserve with the hands and the wit, perhaps even feral
humans.
She spoke to her
transducer: now.
The wait was not
long. Her ears pricked forward at the whistle of cloven air. A
speck fell out of the sky, became a matte-gray flattened wedge
ten meters long by five wide. It settled to the ground with a
faint sigh and a doorway opened. Gwen sighed herself as she
stepped through into the long open room within, regret mingled
with pleasure. Back to civilization.
"Temperature twenty-one," she said aloud.
The air warmed.
She ran a palm cleaner over her body-time for the comfort of hot
water later-and dressed in a set of blacks from a container.
Another container scanned her before releasing a leather weapons
belt, old but well-kept; she checked the charge on the plasma gun
automatically, a nostalgic feeling. Obsolete, almost as much as
the layer knife on the opposite hip, but she'd carried this very
weapon on the last human-hunts here in North America; she was old
enough to remember those hunts, the biobombs and the killsweeps.
Then she sat in the recliner at the nose of the aircraft.
"Visual,
optical, maximum." Three-quarters of the hull disappeared to
the eye, leaving only the power and drive systems in the deck
behind her opaque. "Lift, course to Reichart Station, speed
. . ." She considered. "Four hundred kph, height five
hundred meters." The craft had orbital capacity, but she
wasn't in a hurry. "Call, to legate Tamirindus Rohm."
The wedge
lifted, turning and heading southeast down the valley. A square
of space before her opened and showed quiet moving colors. Then
it flashed to display, only the lack of scent and moving air to
distinguish it from a window.
"Service,
Tamirindus," Gwen said.
"Glory,
Gwen."
The legate was
floating in zero gravity-Gwen recognized the background, an
office at the GEO end of the Kenia beanstalk; the blue-and-white
shield of Earth covered the window behind her, with the northeast
corner of Africa visible and the long curve of the Stalk
vanishing into the distance below.
Duty. The
Directorates wouldn't have called her unless something important
needed her attention.
The younger
woman-she was only a little over two hundred, half Gwen's
age-looked enough like her to be her sister. Hair bright copper
rather than mahogany, and a slightly more slender build: apart
from that they had the shared likeness of their respective
generations of Homo drakensis. Deepscan would have shown
more differences, of course, despite periodic DNA updates that
kept Gwen roughly current, and she doubted the youngster had ever
bothered with the full set of combat biomods. The Draka hadn't
had much use for them in her lifetime.
"Not my
idea of a vacation," Tamirindus went on. "Glad the
bears didn't eat you."
"Mostly
hibernating, in winter," Gwen answered. "I ate one of
them. Believe me, you appreciate the finer things more if you go
without for a while. Now, the wild ghouloon packs, they can be
really dangerous . . . and I think I spotted sign of humans,
ferals."
Tamirindus's
eyebrows went up. "Still?"
"Oh,
they're not quite extinct. It's not an elegant species,
but it's tough and they breed fast." She stretched.
"Speaking of which, how's the reproduction going?"
"Brooder's
about ready, doing fine."
"Not using
an orthowomb for your eggs?" Gwen made a tsk sound.
"And you with the Technical Directorate."
Tamirindus
grinned. "Tradition has its place. Besides, I like to watch
them swell and feel the baby kick in their bellies. The brooder's
a pet; the Rohms've used her line since the first century. Her
great-grandmother brooded me."
The aircraft
extended a cup of coffee; Gwen took it and sipped with slow
pleasure. Conversation and coffee were things she'd missed in the
wilderness too. Shapes drifted outside Tamirindus's office
wall-window, habitats, fabricators, an Earth-orbit to Luna
shuttle, the bell-tube-globe shape of an interplanetary craft.
Further away they were bright dots against the black of space and
the unwinking glow of stars, and in the middle distance the huge
frame of the next interstellar colony ship under construction.
Gwen's eyes dwelt on that for a moment. Travel from star to star
was one-way, and she had never quite decided it was time to leave
the home system. Sol-based instruments were enough to tell if
there was a life-bearing planet, and to learn much of its detail.
Uncrewed probes followed for more detailed work, to see if the
prospects were good, and so far five colonizing expeditions had
gone out in the probes' wake. Only information and a few frozen
samples ever came back; the ships themselves were part of the
equipment needed by the settlers.
"Well, if
I'm free, I'll visit Rohmplace for the naming feast," she
promised the other Draka. It was a while since she'd been to
Mars, anyway. "Am I likely to be free?"
"That
depends," Tamirindus said. "I may not be able to
make it. You know, fifty years ago I almost decided to emigrate
because this job was so boring?"
Gwen nodded. One
of the drawbacks of immortality was that promotion became
positively glacial, even with the population decline. On the
other hand, it also made it easier to wait. Though that can be
a drawback too. Patience and laziness can be interchangeable.
The other woman went on:
"Well, we
had another disaster with the space-based molehole
platform. Moving it out to the Oort didn't help at all. This one
was bad, heavy casualties. The only consolation is that the weird
shit accompanying the accident proves we're doing something
right. We haven't figured out exactly what happened or what went
where, though.
"So,
they've tried microgravity; now the neuronwhackers think a stable
planetary field might help." More seriously: "We're
trying everything at once, all possible avenues. I've got a dozen
teams working on it now. This is important, Gwen."
It was. For four
centuries the Domination and the descendants of the refugees
who'd fled to Alpha Centauri hadn't done much more than glare at
each other. By the time the Solar System recovered enough from
the Last War to do anything, Alpha Centauri was too tough a nut
to crack. War over interstellar distances was an absurdity; the
energy costs too high, the defender's advantages from being near
a sun too great. Both sides had skirmished a little, traded
information a little, and raced to colonize suitable systems
first-the only real clash had occurred when two expeditions
arrived nearly simultaneously at one such. Colonies were
autonomous, because interstellar government was even more
ridiculous than war.
In theory it was
possible to destroy inhabited planets from light-years
distant, although not to conquer them. Nobody had ever though it
worthwhile, when retaliation in kind was just as easy and the
preparations simple to spot. With communications time in years
and travel time in decades, even the closest star was vastly too
far to rule. Only the huge resources of entire solar systems made
colonization possible at all; there certainly wasn't any economic
payoff.
This project
might change all that. And the Samothracians-the descendants of
the American colonists in the Alpha Centauri system-were ahead.
They'd always been better physicists, even before the Last War;
the Domination had only started looking into moleholes because
espionage indicated the enemy were.
"Downlink?" Gwen said. Best to start right away. You
could stuff information into your brain via transducer, but
understanding it still took time and effort.
"Not on the
Web. Infoplaque by courier; you know, Suicide Before Reading
secret. It's waiting for you, along with your stuff. We need to
know if it's worthwhile putting more resources into this
subproject; the energy budget's enough to notice, even these
days."
And really large
energies were difficult to handle on a planetary surface; that
was probably why the project had been put in sparsely populated
North America, just in case. With the Atlantic Ocean to act as an
emergency heat sink.
"Glory."
"Service," Gwen replied in farewell. "I'll have a
report for you as soon as I can."
She held the
coffee cup out for a refill and frowned as the link disappeared.
Tamirindus was worried, which meant the Technical Directorate was
worried. Which means I should be worried. Something
of a novelty; this last century or so had been very peaceful.
"Manual," she said, tossing the cup into the cycler. To
her transducer: news.
The aircraft
swooped and dove as her hand settled on the joystick it extruded.
Mountains gave way to high rolling plains, green with new grass.
Life swarmed, wild horses, antelope, once a herd of bison a
million strong. On the shores of a lake a pack of centaurs
surrounded a mammoth, shooting with thick recurved bows,
galloping in to stab with long heavy lances. Bogged in the
lakeside mud, the giant reddish bulk raised its trunk and
trumpeted in agony. The females and colts waited at a distance,
setting up dome tents and preparing to butcher the great
curltusker. None of the stallions looked up from their task, but
the others pointed in wonder at the low-flying aircraft, the
young running in circles and kicking their hind feet up in sheer
glee.
Meanwhile
information flowed in; there were a hundred million of her people
in the Solar System, and ten times that number of servus,
enough to generate considerable news. Gossip, politics,
tournaments, duels, wingflying in the domed craters of the Moon,
a redirected comet streaking through the nearly clear atmosphere
of Venus as the long trouble-plagued terraforming came to an end,
sailboats drifting down the ocean that filled the Valles
Marineris on Mars. The Cygnus Nine probe had reported in, and
there was not only a habitable planet, but an intelligent species
on it.
That made her
flip the aircraft up, let it do the piloting and take notice;
that was only the second race of sophonts found so far, in scores
of systems. Planets were the general rule around Sol-type stars,
life more common than not, biochemistries roughly compatible with
Earth's rare but not impossibly so. Sapient, language-using,
tool-making species were very uncommon. The previous discovery
hadn't been made until after the colonizing expedition landed,
the natives being the equivalent of homo erectus, very scarce and
not having made much impact on their planet. This new bunch were extremely
interesting. Weird-looking, two big eyes and two little ones near
a perforated beaklike projection in the middle of their . . .
well, probably faces. A Bronze Age-equivalent technology, so they
wouldn't be any trouble for the colonizing expedition. A few
thunderbolts and the Gods from the Sky would be worshiped with
fervor.
Of course, the
natives would be wild. It would probably take a while to
understand the biology and produce a proper domesticated strain,
but even so it would be useful to have a population in place
rather than breeding from frozen ova alone.
Below, grassland
dwindled. Forests appeared along rivers, and grew thicker. Fields
drew their swirling lines across the landscape, each clustered
around a manor house and its dependencies, the estates separated
by kilometers of wilderness. Settlement faded again east of the
Mississippi, until the Appalachians reared blue and silent,
covered with ancient woods of hickory and oak. A thread of smoke
rose from one mountain valley; probably goblins. Gwen grimaced. Loathsome
little things. One of the Conservation Directorate's
mistakes, in her opinion-although they did make good, tricky
game. The Adirondacks flashed by, spruce and white pine broken
only by the blue eyes of lakes.
A scattering of
manors marked the Hudson valley, but nobody had ever bothered to
resettle Long Island or Manhattan. Thus it was free for Technical
Directorate use. Beyond, the Atlantic stretched silver and
immense.
"Query," the aircraft said. "Security query from
Reichart Station . . . Confirmed access."
Just as well,
since the orbital weapons platforms would be tracking her. Back
to work.