Seed of the Gods

not meant for her alone but for all, for all of them. But in spite of it, of all the vast importance which she knew to be attached to that command, that invitation, she could not bring herself to go bugging off into the stars without telling her parents. Mom and Dad. I'm going off to a distant solar system with Toby. Don't worry. Jeeeeeeesus. Flip? They'd die. They'd be sure she'd fallen into the hands of pimps and dope addicts and was strung out on some wild drug scene. It was a time for crazy, almost comical happenings. Like an alien space ship slowly easing down into the cleared space in the lot next to the darkened Kurt house. Hey, Mom and Dad, there's a space ship on the lot next door. How about that? Toby, who didn't share Sooly's complete confidence that a blink to the Planet of Cities would solve all problems, was not hard to convince that Sooly should leave some kind of message for her parents. He was more than willing to postpone the nerve-racking trip to the heart of the Galaxy, because all the odds were against them. So he put her down on the vacant lot in a small clearing among big oak trees and she stepped out. Bem was sleeping outside. She always did when Sooly was out, waiting up for her on the coolness of the cement stoop to greet her with wagging rump and snorting breaths. Bem was a silent type. A bark from her was an event and was not inspired by ordinary events such as the passage of a cat, a coon or a fox through the yard. The last time she had barked was when the bobcat got on the roof after a field mouse and so it was out of complete surprise that she gave one strained yap as she saw the ship come down. She was undecided, at first, but she caught Sooly's scent and came lumbering out to meet her, her whole backside wagging with happiness. «Hi, old fatty,» Sooly said, bending to pat the dog. «Old black dog.» The house was quiet. It was late. She imagined her mother inside, wakeful, perhaps. At best sleeping fitfully. How wonderful it would be to use her key, go in, wake them. But she couldn't. There would be hours of explaining and her father would yell. He was the type of father who had to be told everything and she'd never objected to that. It gave her a feeling of being valued and having to give information about where she was going and when she'd be in was a small price to pay for the place she had in that household. She left the note pinned to the inside of the rear screen with a bobby pin. Luvs Please don't worry. I'm fine and in no danger and I love you both very much. I'll be back soon and when you hear about it you'll forgive me for causing you this concern. Sooly Bem followed her back to the scout, snorting her disapproval of Sooly's behavior. «You can't go, baby,» Sooly said. «You have to stay.» The dog trembled and snorted. Sooly was crying. It was bad enough to worry her parents, but this poor, dumb old dog would never understand why she'd been deserted once more. «She won't eat when I'm away,» she sniffed to Toby. «Bring her if you like,» Toby said. «If you think she can eat concentrated rations.» «She'll eat anything when I'm around,» Sooly said, with a burst of silly happiness. Bem curled up in the seat beside her and went to sleep, snoring loudly. It was going to be a long, fantastic trip, but Sooly had something, at least. With Bem along, she would not feel that she was leaving everything behind on the world which grew small and disappeared as the scout blinked. Chapter Sixteen Seldom in the fine history of the Ankani Fleet had a blink been made in more discomfort. The scout, built for short-missions, had no sleeping facilities, only four seats and a space just wide enough to accommodate a body between the banks of engines. As always on a blink, it was the long periods of waiting at the blink beacons which were the most deadly. To the pure tedium was added the tensions of uncertainty. As the stars grew more dense and the blinks became shorter, the Ortonian route merged with other starways. If an Ankani ship had blinked out while the power banks were gathering energy, the explanations would have been, to say the least, sticky. Curious officers would have wanted to know why a scout was at such a distance from the mother ship, and both Jay and Toby knew the impossibility of hiding the truth long from an officer. The long blink was difficult for Toby in another way. He could see and touch the most fascinating woman he'd ever known, a woman for whom he'd given up so much, and yet common decency prevented him from opting with her. This tension added to all the other considerations made him, at times, moody. The redeeming feature was that the long periods of waiting could be used for talk, for speculation about the nature of things, for personal confidences. By the time three-quarters of the distance between Orton and Ankan had been covered, Toby knew everything there was to know about his woman. His woman! The very words made him grin with a fierce joy. He was the first Ankani man in thousands of years to have his own woman and that wondrous fact made it all worthwhile. As for Sooly, she asked thousands of questions and expressed loud and indignant surprise at each new revelation of the Ankani way of life, a life which had been controlled by women for fifty millennia. During a discussion of opting customs, she realized with a feeling of sadness that Toby had known many beautiful Ankani women, but she did not ask him specific details. He, sensing her hurt, kissed her, ignoring the scornful snort from Jay. «All that is past,» he said. «I have made my final opting.» And that satisfied her. The message from Fleet Board was intercepted one short blink from the nearest Ankani world, with the communications gear monitoring all frequencies and both Jay and Toby on the alert for Ankani ships. It came in a one-minute burst and was extended by the repeater. «Sterilize?» Sooly asked, upon hearing the message. «What do they mean, sterilize?» But she was deathly afraid that she knew. She'd been told of the Ankani taboo against genetic meddling and her stand was that such a taboo was fine for Ankanis if that was the way they felt, but that they had no right to impose their taboo on the people of the Earth. «It means wipe off all traces of animate life,» Toby said sadly. «We have to go back,» she shouted. «We have to stop them.» «How?» Toby asked. «I don't know. We can go to Ankan. We can talk to this Fleet Board of yours.» «They wouldn't listen,» Toby said. «Our only chance is to go on to the Planet of Cities. If we can provide the Board with the secret of the Wasted Worlds, perhaps they'll listen.» He sighed. «We're two blinks away. It will take the message approximately four of your weeks to reach the Entil, about another week for the ship to prepare the sterilizer. We have time to get to the Planet of Cities and back to a point where our message might just get there before they carry out the orders.» «But if we don't learn anything?» Sooly asked. «We can only try,» Toby said. He was thinking of the small birds and animals around the base, back there on Orton. They would feel nothing. But for a long time the stink of carrion would pollute the atmosphere of the planet while a few surviving micro-organisms toiled away to decay unthinkable mountains of flesh. For the first time in his life he was not proud of being Ankani. In spite of Sooly's desperation, there was no way to hurry the two remaining blinks. But then, with the sense of urgency that had an almost tangible force in the cabin of the scout, the Planet of Cities was below, magnificent in ruins, lit by a mild sun whose benevolent rays glowed golden on the enduring age-old buildings. Jay, who had made two trips to the planet as a youthful crewman on scientific ships, found the star tower by trial and error, with only a few wasted hours. There was a gentle breeze. It made its way through the deep canyons between buildings to caress them, to belie the grim message of death which was flashing and resting, flashing and resting, through the stars behind them. The entranceway penetrated to the center of the square and led them into a tremendous, domed hall. The walls were niched, but all the recesses were empty, save for a fine, ancient dust. Sooly paused in the center of the hall, looked around, listening. Not even the sigh of the wind could be heard inside the huge building. Her feet left tracks in the fine layer of dust on the floor. She had never felt so lonely. She'd seen the extent of the empty cities and the vastness of the planet. On that entire world four entities breathed. A woman, two men and a fat, black dog. Dust got in Bem's nose and made her sneeze. «Anything?» Toby asked. «No,» she said, her brow furrowed in concern. She walked slowly around the great hall. Doorways led off at angles into the points of the star. The wall niches were irregularly shaped. She completed the circuit of the hall and stood with Toby, feeling despair. «This is the place,» she said. «I know it is.» «It's estimated that this planet was deserted as long as five hundred thousand years ago,» Toby said. «But they told me to come here,» she said. «This has to be it.» «There are other deserted cities on other planets,» Jay said. «The planet I saw was this one,» Sooly said. «I saw it in my mind. It was one vast city from horizon to horizon. No oceans. No mountains. Are there others like that?» «We know of none,» Toby said. «But—» «Oh, goddamn,» Sooly said. She raised her head. «Speak to me, you bastards. We've come all this way. Now you speak to me.» The only sound was Bem's troubled breathing. «We can search the other rooms. The other floors.» Toby's voice contained little optimism. «We have to hurry,» Sooly said, remembering that deadly message winging its way to the Ankani ship in orbit around her home. «Let's separate.» Toby frowned. «If this damned place is as deserted as you say, there's no danger.» «Some of the buildings are in an advanced state of decay,» Toby said. «And we'll have to get power belts to reach the upper stories. The elevators don't work, of course, and there are no stairways.» «We have to do something,» Sooly said desperately. «I'll start on the ground floor while you two get your belts or whatever and begin on the upper floors.» It took two days to search the building. After Toby and Jay went to the scout for power belts, Toby suggested that a separate search would be useless, since Sooly had been the only one able to hear the message back on Orton. None of them knew exactly what they were looking for, but judging from the way the message was received by Sooly on her own planet, there would not be, perhaps, any external sign of the hidden communications device. So having to guide Sooly through every room of the huge building took time and energy. Bem was left outside, snorting and worrying when Sooly was lifted by the power belt to the upper stories, but she soon grew calm when she realized that Sooly wasn't going far away and would come back at intervals. Level after level yielded nothing, only empty rooms, odd-shaped rooms, surprisingly conventional rooms, long tunnels, unexplained shafts. Toby, able to find good in most everything, applied his brain to a detailed and complete study of the architecture of one Wasted Worlds building, but it was an exercise in futility with no reward in view, for he was resigned now to being an exile. He was angry about, but also broodingly resigned to, the destruction of Orton. He was powerless to stop it. Late in the evening of the second day, dusty, tired, despairing, they reached the topmost level. The tips of the star were much the same as on