The Eternal Enemy Page 9

  The Old One disappeared into the crowd with a few flashes, explaining to the Habers milling about that they would have to wait. Silently but with soft, light yellow flecked with a dark blue seeping from their eyes, the crowd ambled back toward the city. Markos’s group followed.

  The path felt cool and alive beneath his feet. The stars overhead seemed to sparkle in a pattern and harmony, a visual melody, faint and airy, impossible to pin down. The wind rustled the fields and made the grass change shades of gray in the dying light, a faint melody of its own. The flowers swayed, colorful metronomes keeping beat to the visual melody.

  It’s these eyes, Markos thought. They see things that shouldn’t be there.

  The city glowed with light, pulling him and the others toward it. The closer he got, the more beautiful it appeared to be. While the sun had been up, the city was bland, a washed-out eggshell white, a sobering, steadying part of the constantly shifting landscape. It had offered a base in reality, an unchanging vision in a world of change.

  The closer he came, the less he believed that. The city wasn’t actually moving, but he thought it was shifting in and out of phase. It was like watching a mirage dance on the horizon. It shimmered and slid, but the city was no mirage.

  But still it danced.

  When he was very close, he realized what was happening. The buildings weren’t just off-white—their outer shells were plastered with a white covering, but the covering contained tiny pieces of maroon, yellow, and orange, tiny shards of micalike crystal, crumbled bits of blue and green. The colors were embedded in the walls, and from a distance the walls seemed to move. The buildings fluoresced, and each piece of rock and crystal fluoresced in a different, flickering color, like chromatic fire from a jeweled city. When the colored rocks flickered in phase, the color of the building changed to an off-white, tinted by a soft pastel.

  He walked the path with awe and pride, overwhelmed by the constant beauty of Aurianta. The only thing he was anxious about was seeing the Habers eagerly lined up, waiting for him to act as a flow-bridge. He wasn’t going to tackle the whole city. What did they expect from him?

  But as he walked, watching their backs before him, he figured he was overreacting. They had politely accepted his answer. Too many things had to be accomplished before he could think of creating so many changed Habers. He no longer felt that acting as a flow-bridge was a proper thing for him to do. He could end up contaminating an entire race with his mutations, and until it was proven necessary, he would avoid it despite the sensual pleasures involved.

  The streets of the city were unpaved, firmly compressed earth, with small patches of weeds and grass poking up in corners and untrodden areas. The buildings themselves were clean and new, as though the whole city had been built weeks ago. There were no signs of erosion, no cracking or crumbling facades or towers; the freshness of color and the age of the streets contradicted each other.

  The city swallowed the returning Habers. Singly and in small groups they entered buildings. Other Habers stood in doorways and windows, beneath graceful, pointed arches, in alleys leading to arcades, watching the Old One lead Markos and his offspring through the streets.

  There were many Habers who resembled the Old One, though none had the same dull gray-brown covering. He was reassured by their familiar shape and size; he doubted he could feel any real kinship for those Habers whose phenotypes were radically different from the Old One’s.

  “What’s the name of this city?” Markos asked. His gargling, bubbly voice sounded obscene within the city and its beauty. He had grown so accustomed to it that he had almost forgotten how it sounded. Memories of Van Pelt’s frozen, horrified face flashed in his mind.

  “I, I believe its translation would be ‘War.’”

  “What?” Markos asked.

  “Not now,” the old Haber said, stopping before a building. “We, we are here. This is the place we, we will live in. I, I will explain about this city.”

  Markos looked around. They were centrally located, near the heart of the city. This building had no outstanding characteristics to distinguish it from all the others. “How many entrances does this structure have?” he asked.

  “There are no doors,” the Old One answered. “There are two entrances; this one and one in the back.”

  Markos nodded. “Alpha, you stay out here. After we’re inside, let no one in or out without my permission. Understand?”

  Alpha flashed red and positioned himself outside.

  “Markatens, walk around through the house. Take VeePee with you. Make sure no one is in there. When you’re done, send VeePee back out here and position yourself by the back entrance, the same as Alpha. Understand?”

  Markatens and VeePee flashed red, then entered the building.

  “What is all of this for?” the Old One asked.

  “It’s a test.”

  “There is nothing in this building that can harm us, us.”

  “I know that, and you know that, and all the children know that. But let’s stop taking chances and going on assumptions.”

  VeePee appeared at the arch by the front entrance. “It is uninhabited,” he said.

  That piece of information and VeePee’s safe passage through the building were worth more to Markos than anything the Old One might have said. He hadn’t thought the building was unsafe, but they needed to be treating their situations as real. They needed the practice. “Let’s go in.”

  They walked through the arch into a honeycomb of passageways. He immediately realized that VeePee couldn’t have possibly checked out every passageway in the building in that short length of time. He was right, then, testing them. He would have to talk with them, show them how foolish doing a sloppy job like this was. But later.

  The Haber led them through the building, explaining the basic layout of the house. He made it sound as if the building was centuries old. He assigned rooms to the children, then told them to explore the place, learn all they could about everything they saw and touched. He told them to meet him in the common area when they were done and stressed that they were not to leave the grounds. He assigned VeePee as relief for Markatens, and Triand as relief for Alpha.

  “Okay, Old One. Tell me about this city.”

  The Haber flashed red and led him into the common room. It was large enough to hold fifty or sixty Habers. They seated themselves on chairs of molded rock; Markos did the trick the Old One had taught him while on board the ship, hardening his body so that the chair could be comfortable. His breathing shifted into its rest cycle.

  “This house is yours, Markos,” the old Haber said. “It was made for you long before you were born, before we, we left for Gandji. This city was made by those Habers who needed to understand the change. It is a refuge, a community for Habers devoted to finding an answer. We, we came here, or our, our ancestors did, from all over Aurianta to find an answer to this … this … war.

  “When we, we realized the answer could not be found here, the Habers of this city built the ship. Most volunteered to sacrifice their lives and leave Aurianta for Gandji. Few were taken. Those Habers who remained behind stayed here to wait for the answer, to help when it arrived. We, we named the city, The Place Where the Answer to the Change Would be Found. In your language the city’s name is War.”

  “No, my friend. Not War. It’s closer to Peace.”

  “Peace?”

  Alpha suddenly appeared at the passageway. There was yellow tinged with blue in his eyes. “Markos?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You should come out and see for yourself.”

  Markos rose to his feet.

  He reached the front arch in full stride, then froze in his tracks. The streets were filled with thousands of Habers. Their multiple eyes, protected beneath the transparent outer coverings of their faces, were trained on him, flashing green at his appearance.

  “What the hell? What’s going on?” Markos asked.

  “You said later,” the Old One said from behind.
“It is later. They, they wait to bear the changed ones.”

  Markos fought the metallic, bitter taste as he stared out over the sea of faces. They stood there like an anxious army, or a group of starving Terrans waiting for their names to be called for the food dole. They waited in streets, overflowed into alleys and doorways of buildings, every face turned to him, every group of eyes radiating tiny pulses of green.

  “They, they have waited a long time, Markos. They, they have been ready since our, our original group left for Gandji, and from before that.”

  Did these creatures have any idea what they were doing? What they were asking? He wasn’t ready to accept the responsibility for changing a significant portion of the Haber race.

  They thought that linking up with him would stop the war? That by giving birth to a generation of changed ones everything would be okay?

  He was willing to fight for them and let the children fight for them. He was willing to teach them all how to fight. And when he’d been on Gandji, he’d been willing to be a flow-bridge for the entire population.

  But he couldn’t be a flow-bridge for them now. This wasn’t Gandji, and he knew about the war and what was really going on. First this city, Peace, Markos thought, and then the others will follow, one by one, spreading the corrupt seed of aggression through a whole race that had conquered this primitive emotion millennia ago.

  “Translate for me, Old One. I want to talk to them.”

  The Haber flashed red and worked his way forward so that many Habers could see his eyes.

  “I will not create the changed offspring you desire. Not unless that is the only answer. We are all involved in this change—a change my ancestors knew well. Our word for it is war.

  “War is fought in strange ways. If you resist the change and fight, or if you give in to the change and die, it is still war. We’ll need more than a generation or two of changed offspring to resist this change.

  “Fighting, resisting the change, is all-consuming. We would need a great number of changed Habers if war were fought on Gandji alone. Or on any other planet. We could possibly win in these small confrontations by sheer number. But war isn’t fought like that. There are no rules to war.

  “We can’t just fight in the fields, in the streets of a city, on some planet’s plains or valleys. We must learn to think in terms of fighting whenever and wherever possible. And in the most efficient way possible. Thinking like this is an all-consuming problem.”

  He stopped and looked deeply into their glowing eyes, hoping to see some colors of agreement or understanding. If they understood, they showed no signs. They remained in the streets, waiting.

  He turned to the Old One. “Forget it. Just tell them to go home. Tell them the answer is not more children.”

  The Old One stared at Markos with confused colors sparkling beneath his face.

  “Just tell them!” he screamed. His pulse rate soared, and his skin felt as if it was pierced by thousands of tiny needles. The metallic taste in his mouth made it difficult to talk anymore. His eyes glowed a pure-white light, the light of anger and frustration. “And you!” he said, shouting at Alpha. “Remain here.”

  He turned and strode away, back into the depths of the building.

  How did they expect to survive? They understand so little. If there had been a Terran anywhere on this planet, Markos would have sought him out for companionship. Even if the only Terran had been Van Pelt. He wanted to get into his cabin, crawl under the sheets, and let the massager bunk do its work on his body. He wanted to climb into the geltank and slip quietly beneath its surface and put his mind on hold for a few hours.

  But by the time he reached the common room, he had started to calm down. He knew the Habers in the city weren’t people. They were Habers, pure and simple. Markos dropped into a chair, forgetting to make his body hard, and suffered with the pain. He looked up, staring at the ceiling as if hoping to find an answer there.

  His children and the Old One stood silently, waiting for Markos to say something, to do something, to give them the guidance and instruction they wanted and needed.

  Terrific, Markos. The more involved you get, the worse it becomes.

  Part Two

  CATHY STRAKA

  10

  The Paladin traced a long, slow orbit around Alpha Indi. Cathy Straka sat in the command chair of the control center watching the viewscreens that covered the bulkheads, ceiling, and deck. A bored, tired look was on her thin, pointed face. She looked drawn, haggard, and was aging far too fast for a woman in her thirties.

  In every direction she looked, Straka saw black space studded with points of light. Sitting in the captain’s chair was like sitting in a chair floating through space, unprotected and unobstructed. Just Straka and the stars.

  The ship’s exterior cameras supplied the computer with holographic images, and the computer re-created the images to scale, giving anyone sitting in one of the chairs the feeling of being surrounded by the depths of space, as if the bulkheads weren’t even there.

  “We should have gone to Earth,” Jackson said. “This idea of yours is ridiculous. We don’t even know he’s here.”

  Straka turned slowly and carefully as if afraid of spooking the skittish man and said, “He’s here.”

  “He is? Where?”

  “Be patient, Jack. He’ll show.”

  They were on a platform that had four chairs, each facing a different quadrant of space. Before each chair was a console with controls. At one end of the platform a narrow ramp led back to the door, though with the screens on, the door was invisible.

  Jackson shook his head and rose to his feet. He turned around full circle, staring out into the lonely blackness, searching for a sign of motion that didn’t belong. He walked up the ramp to the door.

  Straka continued to scan the surrounding space, waiting. He would show up, all right. That murderous freak was here, somewhere, hiding in Alpha Indi’s system. He would show. It was only a matter of time.

  Jackson opened the door, and light streamed in. Straka squinted against the light, glancing at Jackson’s outlined figure. “Why don’t you check the tau translators?” she said to Jackson’s back.

  “Check them yourself,” Jackson said, disappearing behind the closing door.

  Straka was plunged into blackness and the depth of space again. She shrugged, shaking her head. “Suit yourself,” she muttered. “I don’t care if they don’t work. We’ll just never see Earth again.”

  Which was fine with Straka. It was to her advantage to stay as far away from Terra as possible. By now NASA 2 had probably assumed that the mission had been a failure. Since Van Pelt had never radioed their safe transition out of tau-space when they’d arrived at Tau Ceti, NASA 2 had no way of knowing if the ship had been destroyed or if something in the translators had malfunctioned and stranded them.

  Sure, Straka thought. The Paladin was destroyed, had never even made it to Tau Ceti. Everyone on board had been obliterated. Even me.

  She leaned back and let loose a loud, horsey laugh.

  Those poor earthbound slobs, she thought. I’ve got their ship, their crew, and there’s no way for them to stop us, even if they knew what we were doing. And there’s no way they can. No word from us since we left the Solar System. They haven’t the slightest hint of what’s happened.

  And the crew. Christ. They think we’re taking care of Markos so that we can go home. And why shouldn’t they? It’s a carrot that keeps them in line. Let them think what they want. At least there’s some semblance of discipline.

  She smiled as she pictured returning from space, years, decades overdue, after having stolen NASA 2’s one and only f-t-l ship. Fat chance.

  She laughed again.

  Following the alien ship had been the easiest part of her plan. Every ship burns fuel, even if it doesn’t use a reaction-drive propulsion system. It leaves some waste behind. It leaves a trail. One molecule per cubic meter of space or one atom per cubic kilometer of space—what differe
nce did it make? It was only a matter of quantity. A careful, painstaking scan of local space surrounding Tau Ceti had found the trail. It had been thin, spotty in places, but it had been there.

  The difficult part of her plan had been convincing the crew that their lives depended on following it. Once they were relatively certain that Markos was headed in the general direction of Terra, they agreed without argument.

  Straka had been certain that Markos was aboard that alien ship. What alien on Gandji had enough sense to run?

  Just by the very existence of the alien ship, Straka realized that other planets had to be populated by these soft, amoebalike humanoids, these poor excuses for biological life. Markos had somehow gotten them to take him someplace safe, someplace where he thought Straka wouldn’t follow.

  But Markos hadn’t figured Straka correctly. Straka really wanted to follow. She convinced the crew to share her ambition, but that hadn’t been easy.

  “We’ve got to find the little freak,” Straka had said.

  “Let’s just go back,” Jackson had said. “I’m willing to take my chances.”

  “Really? How naive.” Straka had paced, adopting one of Van Pelt’s command tricks. “They’ll be real glad to see us now, won’t they? Or at least they’ll be glad to see the ship.”

  “I don’t get it,” Kominski said. Ever since Kominski had been inside the one geltank that had malfunctioned, he hadn’t been right. Kominski’s round face glistened with sweat, eyes open wide, mouth hanging open as he tried to decide if there was more to say.

  “Okay, comrades, I’ll lay it out for you in detail, then,” Straka had said. “First, Van Pelt blew our directives by not radioing our safe arrival. Then he took it upon himself to start ripping up the native population. We all went along with him, remember?”

  Katawba, a tall, angular man, nodded.

  “Everyone except Markos, who deserted. But Markos’s desertion was technically the right thing to do. We should have all deserted or mutinied instead of following Van Pelt like we did.”