Seed of the Gods

————through the solid walls of the scout's cabin, a vibrant glow which caused the small, dark animal to bristle and bark warningly. For a moment she looked directly into the child's eyes and she found them to be beautiful, almost as beautiful as the orbs of the large-eyed ones. She sent a momentary message of reassurance and then entered, causing their bodies to go limp and sink back into the seats. It took but a moment. Then the ship's clock went wild, speeding backward, other instruments adjusting. As she waited, she tried forms. This caused some minor discussion among the individual parts of her entity, but it was decided, in plenty of time, that she would take the form of a primitive. It was novel. Of course, the flesh and blood form could not appreciate the pleasures of breathing the old air of the home world, but in the absence of true pleasure it passed the time. She traced their passage through lower levels. They were, of course, empty. Chapter Nineteen Level after level yielded nothing, only empty rooms. On the evening of the second day, dusty, tired, despairing, they reached the topmost level. There were only empty rooms in the arms of the star, but at the center, encircled by a wide hall, was a solid core of the enduring plastic used for much of the buildings on the Planet of Cities. The enclosed space was large, but there were no entrances. «It could have contained a sealed power unit of some sort,» Toby guessed. «Such a large space would not have been wasted,» Jay agreed. «If we had a weapon, we could blast out a section,» Toby said; Jay produced a small hand blaster, the same illegal weapon he'd used against the rats on Orton. He stepped back. The wall absorbed the energy of the blaster. Puzzled, since no known material could resist the energy of a blaster, Jay advanced the power and tried again. The wall didn't even heat. They walked the circular hall, Jay trying the blaster at intervals without success. There was no crack, no blemish, in the whiteness of the wall. Sooly's world was ending. With a mixture of anger and despair, she faced the wall. «You in there,» she said, her voice low, emotional, her glands working, her face flushed, her tears forming. «You must help us. You can't lead us all this way and leave us with nothing.» A section of the wall in the shape of an arched doorway changed to a pleasing blue shade. Toby pushed against it. It was unyielding. But when Jay trained his blaster it melted away, giving them access. The room was huge, windowless, empty. But it was lit by a source which Toby could not discover. Sooly ran forward, paused. «Empty,» she said desolately. She listened. There was nothing. Toby took her hand, trying to console her. The woman materialized in the exact center of the circular room. The first impression was one of a blazing beauty which made one want to close one's eyes. Her hair was the blackness of space and her eyes were the blue of a summer sea and her hair was arranged in a style which none of them had ever seen. She wore a shimmering gown cut below firm, outthrust breasts but the effect was one of naturalness because of her regal bearing. She stood motionless, smiling out at them. «Yes, Lady,» Jay said, moving as he spoke, running out of the room with an agility which belied his years and the precarious state of his health. He returned with a wide angle tricorder and in the interim, Toby and Sooly tried not to stare, but their staring seemed not to bother the woman. She was as still as a statue, her expression not changing, the pleased smile frozen on her face. «Children,» she said. «Having come this far, you have shown certain traits of development for which we have been waiting.» Her words were natural, soft, without pomposity. None of them noticed, so closely was their attention riveted to her beauty, that her words were being engraved deeply into the impervious material of the walls, but the tricorder was filming the formation of the words as it recorded the sound of her voice, the engraved words being additional, eternal proof of the miracle. «Our own development dictated our actions. To achieve our destiny, we left you, for you could not accompany us. Yet, we prayed that you would follow us in achievement and would, someday, join us in—» They felt a feeling of eternal peace and joy. «Now you have made the first, tentative steps and although you do not need to know all, you may know our nature, as we were.» And they saw the Planet of Cities living. It was an administrative and scientific center and the people were tall and fair and happy. «This state of Galaxy-wide peace and plenty is within your reach. What follows is largely dependent on your own ambitions and abilities.» She paused. Sooly was deathly afraid of what was going to happen then, expecting her to disappear and leave the problems unresolved. She moved forward, and in moving saw the wall clearly through the form of the beautiful woman. In the period of silence, she gathered her courage and walked to the woman. Her hand went through the image without disturbing the smile on the beautiful face. «We erred,» the woman said, the smile fading for the first time, «in making you.» Jay and Toby gasped as fifty millennia of Ankani pride was blasted. «To prevent a repetition of such error, we implanted in you the abhorrence of genetic meddling which limited you.» «You didn't make me!» Sooly said, before she could stop herself. «No, child.» The woman looked directly at Sooly with a particular fondness. «And you are the hope. Nature—» she smiled sadly. «You see, in spite of our great advances, we do not have all the answers, either. So let us call that force nature and say that she, as the millennia crawled past, worked to rectify our mistakes. She took what we gave her, you, the large-eyed ones, the others which were placed on your Earth, child, and combined them to put life back on the track, to lead upward once again. Together, you can achieve.» Once again they felt that unearthly joy and wonder, bliss, pleasure, fulfillment. «The men of Ankan, outnumbering women five to one, find the daughters of the Earth to be fair and the women of Earth outnumber men. You must take up the surpluses by intermingling, for the seeds of both are necessary. The vitality of Earth. The knowledge of Ankan. Continue your abhorrence of altering the building blocks of life which nature has provided you, but moderate your position, men of Ankan, to work with the scientists of Earth to understand the mind. You have far to go, because it is the nature of man to be rigid. Your women of Ankan will protest and the men of Earth will resent the strangers who take their women, but,» her face grew serious, «you are not alone and there is the danger.» Images of alien life, strange, menacing, utterly different, came to them. The tricorder took the emotions and implanted them. They saw the ancient war, the aliens coming from inter-Galactic space in their strange ships. Confrontation. Mutual destruction. «They are crowded.» In their distant Galaxy they saw the aliens, teeming, expanding. «People first the outlying worlds, for the Techcals have seen the ability of the people of this Galaxy and your mere presence on the outlying worlds, which they would have to colonize first, will be your first defense.» She faded. «Wait,» Sooly cried. «Please wait.» But she was gone. And the order to sterilize her Earth was speeding across the wastes, leaping from star anchor to star anchor faster than any ship could travel, at the same speed, with an impossible head start, that a following message would travel. Jay, having discovered the engraved copy of the beautiful woman's words, was recording it head-on, so that it would be distinct and readable. Sooly sat on the floor and wept. They had come so near and the only hope was that they could get to Ankan, show the proof to the powers there and dispatch an order canceling the sterilization message and hope that the ship had delayed long enough in executing the order. It was, as Toby had explained, a remote possibility. Garge Cele Mantel was an efficient woman. It would take her only a matter of days to prepare the ship for the sterilization. Sooly tried to get hold of herself, rose. «Toby,» she said, «let's go.» The scout blinked out from the Planet of Cities and held at the first anchor point, building power. The wait seemed endless. Time ticked past and the death of a planet came ever closer. Jay, who had taken his last troleen in the aftermath of the appearance of the beautiful woman, felt fine and bemused himself by playing back the tricording of the event. Toby was gnawing his lips in concern and Sooly felt as if she were going to have Jay's heart attack, so great was her fear and horror. «If there were only a way to blink directly to Orton,» Toby said, knowing that he was repeating himself, for he'd made that futile wish many times. But they were in the dense star fields, near the central bulge of the Galaxy. Between them and Orton, on any straight line, were hundreds of stars, and blinking was a straight line process. The immense fields of the stars distorted, had to be bypassed. He studied his charts, hoping desperately to discover a route overlooked by the expo ships, but he knew that he could not possibly hope to discern, with one human mind, what banks of computers and hundreds of years of expo work had failed to find. He felt anger toward the beautiful woman. She had known, even if she were merely some sort of image. She'd known of the developments which brought them to the Planet of the Cities, so she should have known about the crisis on Orton. She could have helped. If she had the abilities she had to possess in order to achieve the things she'd intimated, she could have helped them. «Stars of Ankan,» Jay exploded, the portable triviewer still in place before his eyes. «Copy this.» He read a series of numbers. Toby recognized them immediately as blink coordinates. He checked his charts. «At the very end of the written message,» Jay said. «She didn't speak them, but they were there.» «From the Planet of Cities into space outside the Galaxy,» Toby said excitedly. «They computed the mass of the Galaxy and used it as an anchor point!» Power was nearly total. The blink back to the Planet of Cities was a short one. Once there, there was time to check and recheck. The blink coordinates led, indeed, to Orton, and in three short blinks. The first went vertically out of the plane of the Galaxy and the second anchored to a star near Orton and the third would put them in sight of Orton's sun. Power built, they blinked and stared out in awe at the ponderous wheel of the Galaxy, used the power of the entire Galaxy to build the banks and blinked in an amazingly short time. The rest was elementary. Chapter Twenty Cele Mantel nodded grimly when the message was received. She approved. It was a terrible thing to contemplate erasing all animal life on the planet, but there was no other choice. Five hundred thousand years of civilization was in the balance and there were no other choices. The evil scientists of Orton had chosen their own destiny. Her only regret was that the deserters would not be on the planet when she unloosed the killing rays. Ship's instruments had recorded the departure of the scout, blinking out toward Ankan weeks past. But they would not escape. Their travel would be limited to known starways and sooner or later they'd blink into a beacon station with an Ankani ship. At best, if they had incredible luck, they would find sanctuary on some empty planet and go into a permanent exile until some Ankani ship revisited, because the scout was incapable of traveling to uncharted planets. It might be a slow process, but they'd be caught. The alert had been given and soon all Ankani ships would be on the lookout for the scout. The conversion to sterilization power occupied the crew for days, while Cele fretted with impatience and Babra Larkton examined her face in the mirror to see if the bruise on her face had really faded, at last. There was an atmosphere of gloom aboard the Entil, for, although she'd told the entire ship the vital reasoning behind sterilization, it was a serious, unprecedented action. She sympathized with the younger officers who repeatedly asked if there weren't some way to do it differently, just punish the offenders and leave, at least, the amazing variety of lower animal and bird life. Cele tried to console them by saying that the rays would not penetrate into the depths of the oceans and that, therefore, the seeds of life might survive to crawl out of the ocean again, if, indeed, the theories of evolution on Orton were correct. It was small comfort. When, at last, the engineering section reported that the weapons had been altered and were ready, Cele set the hour. It would begin on the western continents, radiating in hundreds-of-miles-wide bands sweeping from pole to pole and overlapping to prevent any survivors. At the appointed hour, she positioned herself at control. She would not merely give a cold command. She would push the button herself, for it would be, at best, a traumatizing experience and she was not a Garge who would ask her subordinates to do something she would not do herself. «We are prepared, Lady,» said a glum-faced rating standing before the power switch. «Five minutes and counting,» Cele said, going through the countdown procedure to emphasize the seriousness of the operation. «Four and counting.» Time crawled. Chronometers crawled, oozing out the last minutes of a world. «One minute and counting,» Cele said, «Fifty-nine, fifty-eight—» Her heart was pounding surprisingly. For a panic-filled moment she took her eyes off the clock and looked at the viewer to see the blue planet swimming in space below them. She felt tearful regret, but her determination was as hard as steel. She was going to insure the continued survival and supremacy of her race. «Thirty seconds and counting,» she said, her voice choked with emotion. «Lady—» A rating on the censors. «Twenty seconds,» Cele said. «A vehicle,» said the rating. «Approaching under power.» «Ten, nine, eight,» Cele counted, her finger on the button. «He's coming on a collision course,» the rating yelled. «He's going to ram us.» «Hold!» Cele cried, leaping from her command chair to see the small scout brake, ran its nose into the orifice of the main battery with a jar which was felt even through the vast bulk of the partially loaded Entil. «Use the grapples and get them inside.» This part she was going to enjoy. For she knew her own scout when she saw it and providence had delivered the rebels to her. They'd come in a vain attempt to stop the sterilization. She should have known they'd try. They'd gone native, adopted the ways of Orton. Naturally they'd make some dramatic, manlike gesture to stop the destruction of life on their chosen world. Toby felt the grapples engage. «They'll wait now,» he said. «She'll want us down there before she begins.» The scout was drawn into the Entil. A reception committee of officers and ratings were waiting outside. «Follow me out,» Toby said, Jay's blaster in his hand. He popped the port and leaped out to confront the startled officers. Unaccustomed to the ways of mutineers, they were not expecting an armed and determined man, but a cringing, begging, rating seeking mercy. Manto Babra Larkton reached uncertainly for her weapon and looked, for the first time in her life, into the orifice of a blaster. «I'll fire,» Toby told her and she believed him. She'd never seen such a look of determination on the face of a rating. «I want to see the Garge, quickly.» Unthinkable! A mere rating giving orders to females. «Now,» Toby said, as Jay and Sooly arranged themselves behind him and Bem, in strange surroundings, gave one short, hoarse bark from the open port. «You can't hope to stand against an entire ship,» Babra said with a cold fury. «Move,» Toby said, surprised at himself. He added, «Move, please, Lady,» to calm the sense of guilt. The passage to the bridge was uneventful, although surprised, white-faced ratings watched as the little group moved swiftly through the corridors, winding around the central cargo hold to the Orton-oriented command room where Cele Mantel waited with impatience. «What?» she gasped, when Babra entered first, Toby holding his blaster at her back. «He's mad, Cele,» Babra cried tearfully. «Blast him. Don't concern yourself with me.» «Lady,» Toby said. «There is no need for blasting. If you will only listen.» «Take him,» Cele said, her voice shrill with shock. «Seize them.» «Lady,» Toby said. «I've never killed a man, but then no one has ever