"We will open the skimmer. We will tell the one human inside to come out. We have nothing to hide from you or from the others. We are beings of peace and truth."
Damn him! Jake was speechless, half from rage and half from prudence. Every negotiating instinct in him said not to contradict Shipley, that above all the humans must present a united front. But his blood boiled. How dare Shipley usurp his leadership with his namby-pamby Quaker nonviolence!
The Fur was nodding. "Good. Go." And Jake, having no choice, gave the signal he and Karim had agreed upon for Karim to open the skimmer door and emerge, unarmed. The three Furs all turned to watch. Jake turned his body away from the translator and said softly to Shipley, "Do that again and you're dead."
"I'm prepared for that, if necessary," Shipley said. "This is the right thing to do, Jake." The serenity in his voice enraged Jake further.
The skimmer opened and Karim emerged. He started toward them, ashen but not faltering, a young man risking his life when most of it still lay ahead of him. The female Fur who had stormed into the Vine shuttle now disappeared into the skimmer.
Karim reached Jake and Shipley, was briefly inspected by the Furs, and then was ignored. Jake took Karim's arm and unobtrusively turned him away from the translator. That was the best he could do. He whispered, "Karim, stay calm and quiet. That egg-looking thing is a translator. You saw them kill the Vines and Mueller?"
"Mueller's not dead," Karim said, but before Jake could ask more, the Fur leader turned back to the three men.
"Yes. You did not make these blasphemies. Sit." He strode away.
Sit? Shipley was already settling heavily on his stool. The female Fur emerged from the skimmer. They must have some form of communication among themselves not clearly evident, Jake realized. The leader had received his lieutenant's judgment on the skimmer tech before the lieutenant had emerged.
She walked from the skimmer to the Furs' own shuttle and disappeared inside.
Karim said, "We're inside the field now!" The young physicist was following instructions to sit but was doing it in a very peculiar way. He revolved as he lowered himself, his arms extended, so that he looked like a slowing top. His fingers remained bent, as if at some barrier. Jake put out his own arm and discovered that they were enclosed in a circular, invisible wall just large enough to hold the three of them comfortably.
Karim said, "They said to sit down, Jake," and Jake sat.
"How do you know Mueller's not dead?"
"I was still receiving his heat signature. The skimmer detectors can pick up a single body at that short distance, you know. Mueller's thermal energy wasn't fading. He's probably just knocked out somehow."
So the Furs hadn't killed a human who had fired on them, despite what they'd done to the Vines. That was encouraging. Jake started to say, "Do you think their equipment can detect Mueller's heat signature, or Nan's—" at the same moment that Shipley leaped off his stool, crying, "No! No!"
At first Jake didn't see what had anguished Shipley. The two male Furs stood quietly, impassive. Karim grabbed Jake's arm and turned him toward the Fur shuttle.
The tail was rising, snaking around until it pointed at the Fur village. A beam came out, a shimmery disturbance of the air rather than any actual color. It moved very, very slowly—surely electromagnetic radiation couldn't move that slowly? The beam widened as it went. One broadening side passed within ten feet of the humans' invisible cage. The beam hit the Fur village, and the village disappeared.
Jake blinked. One minute the village had stood, and the next it was gone. All of it: groundcover, ramshackle huts, cold cookfires, drunken passed-out Furs. Three Fur children.
Karim stared in disbelief. Shipley stood with his head bowed, his face a mask of pain. A cold, demonic impulse blossomed in Jake, one he'd known before. Donnie. Mrs. Dalton. It was the impulse to hurt the already hurting, who were in no position to strike back.
"You did that, Doctor," Jake said. "You taught them the word 'blasphemies.' That's what you do with blasphemies. You destroy them. Congratulations."
The moment he said it he regretted the words with a pure, hard intensity that was almost a prayer.
21
Karim said, "They're back. Two of them, anyway." The three Furs had gone inside their shuttle, to confer or radio their mother ship or, for all Jake knew, to take a coffee break. During their absence, Jake had said to Shipley, "I'm sorry." He hadn't been able to bring himself to say any more. Shipley had nodded, face averted, and said nothing.
The two Furs, the leader and the other male, strode toward the humans' invisible cage. Jake was struck all over again by their contrast to their impassive clones and their drunken clones. Truly, behavior made the species.
Karim, who had been watching not the aliens but the aircraft, said, "Oh ... no!" Jake spun around to look.
The weapon/tail on the Furs' shuttle was activating again. It snaked up in its eerily hypnotic rhythm until it pointed to the Vines' shuttle, beside which the remaining Vine still stood silently on its cart. The very slow beam was emitted from the tail, widening as it went. From Jake's vantage point, it passed within a yard of the cart. Then the shuttle no longer existed.
Karim cried, "But it was originally their own!"
"Contaminated," Jake heard himself say. Karim had said the inside was coated with slime, presumably part of the Vines' self-sustaining life-support system. They couldn't stay in their domed carts all the time.
The tail snaked through the air again.
"No," said Karim, but this time it was a whisper. The leisurely beam was sent out, and the skimmer disappeared.
The two Furs had reached Jake. At his feet the translator said, "We go now. We return later. You humans will be here."
"All right," Jake said, because it seemed expected that he reply. "How long will you—" But the Furs had turned and were striding back to their shuttle. A few minutes later, it lifted. Jake watched it until it became part of the bright morning sky.
Karim said unsteadily, "The cage is gone." He walked through what had been a clear wall. Shipley remained sitting on his stool, head bent.
Jake breathed deeply until his head felt clearer.
"All right. We know that they're coming back, but we don't know when. How do they know we'll still be here?"
"Where would we go?" Karim said. "No, that's not it. We could probably hide. Their thermal-signature detectors can't operate over too great a range or they'd mistake large mammal-analogues for us. My guess is that we're still in a cage, but a much larger one."
"Find the limits," Jake said. He raised cupped hands to his mouth and yelled, "Nan!"
"I'm here!" she called back. "Coming!" A moment later he saw her break cover and run toward him, carrying her recording equipment. Jake waited to see if Karim's "larger cage" would stop her from reaching him. It didn't.
"Nan, leave that stuff here and go see about Franz Mueller. If you can get to him."
She nodded and was off again. Whatever else the girl might be, she was useful in a physical emergency.
Jake said, "Karim?"
"It's curious," he said. "The wall is right here on this side, but it seems to veer off to take in a wide territory in the direction Nan was hiding." Karim was feeling with the flats of his palms along nothing.
"You look like one of those old-time mimes," Jake said, despite himself, but didn't wait to see if Karim smiled. He started toward Mueller.
Nan and Mueller came out of the woods, the soldier leaning on the wiry girl. Nan called, "He's very dazed."
"Dr. Shipley!" Jake called. "We need you!" It was good to give the old man something to do besides brood.
Nan sat Mueller on the ground and Shipley lumbered toward him. She came up to Jake and said, "That energy-wall-thing curves right behind him. It's weird. They calibrated it to include him but then stop."
He studied her carefully. Nan had championed the Greentrees Furs, thought of them as "hers." Now their older, meaner big brothers had shown up. How
did she feel about Furs now? Her face, taut around the eyes and with a stony set to the mouth, made Jake decide this wasn't the time to ask. Like her father, she needed to be kept busy, too.
"Nan, Karim's tracing the wall clockwise. Start right here and do the same thing counterclockwise. If we're in a cage, let's see how big it is."
Now the hardest thing. Jake walked over to the one Vine left alive. "Alpha?"
"Beta," came the calm, uninflected voice that was, under the gruesome circumstances, the most awful thing Jake had ever heard.
"I'm so sorry for your loss. Our loss, too. For what happened to your ... your brothers."
"We do not have their death flowers," the Vine said.
Jake had no idea what it meant.
"We do not have their death flowers forever."
"I'm sorry," was all he could think of to say. Along with everything else, the pronoun disconcerted him. Did Beta think of itself as plural? "Can I ... can I do something for you?"
"Yes. Later."
"All right," Jake said, wondering what he'd committed himself to. "I ... all right. May I ask some questions now?"
"Yes."
He sat, to bring himself level with the Vine. Behind its clear dome it looked as alien as ever. The projections that might have been vines or tentacles or semisolid biofilms, slimy and purple-red, sprouted off the scaly-looking trunk. Two or three of the fleshy leaves/hands/sensory organs/who-knew-whats seemed randomly distributed. The Vine stayed motionless as it "talked," and if words hadn't been coming out of the translator Jake would have had no way of knowing if "Beta" were as dead as his colleagues.
"Where do you think the Furs have gone now?"
"They destroy our other Fur colonies."
The other "blasphemies." Shared genes apparently meant nothing to the aliens. Nor did compassion, even for those made in their own image.
"Will they destroy the Fur colony on the subcontinent?" He had no idea if the Vine understood the term or not, but he plunged ahead. "The big colony of healthy Furs. Many Furs and more being born all the time. They seem healthy."
"Our control," Beta said, surprising Jake. On second thought, he realized that the Vine must have picked up a lot of English scientific terminology from the long hours of conversation with George and Ingrid. Or, at least, the translator program had.
"Yes, the control group. Will the Furs destroy them? Even though you made them healthy as a control?"
"Yes."
The single syllable chilled Jake. No mercy. He didn't bother to ask about the colony of parthogenetic females.
"How will they find all the control Furs? They have many villages and Nan says many of them go long distances to hunt."
"They will find enough of them. They will destroy all or almost all females. Females do not hunt often. The others will die out in a generation or two."
"Beta ... we have humans living in that area, too. Around a thousand. Will the Furs destroy the humans?" Larry Smith's Cheyenne, on their quixotic, ridiculous mission. Jake stopped breathing.
"We don't know if they will destroy humans."
"Including us?"
"We don't know. Fur thinking is very strange to us. Like yours."
Jake thought about this. Karim joined them. "Jake, the wall clockwise curves around where the village was and then goes west, widening at a very slight angle. From watching Nan, it seems to do the same thing counterclockwise, although she wants to go on checking. It's a very large cage, and I think it's shaped the way it is for a reason."
"What reason?"
"I think it's meant to enclose all nine humans. Gail's group as well as us."
Gail's group. Lucy. They hadn't gotten away, after all. On the other hand, if they were outside the invisible cage, where would they get away to? Mira City was four hundred miles away, through unmapped wilderness filled with alien predators.
"If I am right," Karim continued, "then they've probably encountered their end of the wall already. Or will soon."
"Send Nan after them."
"She's already gone."
Without orders. Jake couldn't afford annoyance now. "How's Mueller?"
"Dr. Shipley says he'll be fine. He just was knocked out for a while and he's still dazed. I have a theory the Furs were using some sort of..."
"Not now," Jake interrupted. "Tell me later. Beta says he thinks the Furs have gone to destroy the other experimental colonies as completely as they can."
Karim digested this. Something moved behind his dark eyes, and his skin had a mottled look.
"Sit down, Karim," Jake said, before the young man was driven to ask. "You might have some good questions to ask Beta, too."
Karim sat. "I'm so sorry about your brothers," he said to Beta, and bowed his head. Faisal's people had such good manners.
"We do not have their death flowers," Beta said. It was still eerie to hear grief expressed in that mechanical monotone.
"No," Karim agreed.
"We do not have their death flowers forever."
"No," Karim repeated politely.
Jake said, "May I ask more questions, Beta?"
"Yes."
"What do you think the Furs will do after they destroy all the experimental colonies?"
"They will talk to their ship."
"For orders, yes." That made sense. "And then?"
"They will find the other experimental colonies."
Jake and Karim looked at each other, puzzled. Jake said tentatively, "Other colonies? What other colonies?"
"On the other planet. By the other star."
Karim let out a long, low whistle, a surprising and oddly musical sound. Instantly Beta said, "Make the noise again."
Karim looked at Jake, who nodded. Karim repeated his whistle, then threw in eight bars of the "Tales from the Vienna Woods."
"I didn't know you could whistle," Jake said. People were endlessly surprising.
"Again," Beta said, and despite the translator's mechanical, emotionless tone, Karim must have felt encouraged. He whistled more of the waltz, then a complicated piece Jake didn't know, and finally a few random bird calls, clearly showing off. When he stopped, he glanced sheepishly at Jake.
Beta said, "It brings light to my soul."
Clearly Shipley's phrase. But Jake was oddly touched. In its grief, the Vine had found some sort of comfort in human music. Maybe there were some sort of birds on that native planet where Vines sat dreaming silently in the sun. The Vines communicated by chemical signals, but perhaps that didn't mean they were entirely unaware, in some peculiar manner, of sound.
Karim said shyly, "I'll whistle more for you later, if you like."
"Thank you, Karim," Jake said. "Beta, what other colonies do you have by another star? More experimental Furs?"
"The same experiments. Different environment. We don't know the Fur planet. We never go to the Fur planet."
Jake tried to put it all together. "You mean, you made the same kinds of experimental Furs twice, in different environments? To learn which kind of genetic alteration would most make them harmless? Two of each experiment?"
"Four," Beta said.
Four. Four planets capable of supporting DNA-based, oxygen/ carbon/nitrogen-breathing, sentient life. Like Furs. Like humans. How far did they have to go to look? How long had this experiment been going on? Jake of course understood the way that relativistic time dilation made hundreds of years pass on planets but only a few on shipboard, which was how the Vines could experiment with Furs for generations. But the same hundreds of years must be passing on both their home worlds. What kind of species could sustain a war for thousands of years?
Humans had once, in a much more constrained arena, fought something called the Hundred Years' War.
Karim burst out, as if he were unable to contain the question any longer, "Why didn't you just blast all over the Fur planet with the vacuum drive on your mother ship?"
"We don't do it."
The pacifism thing again. Or maybe it was something else. Jake
said, "Did you make your spaceships? The mother ship you had in orbit?"
"The mother ship was made by Furs. We use it. They have many. We use many. We think about the ships at home, in the sun."
Karim said to Jake, "If it's all stolen tech, then of course the Furs can counter it. But ... how did the Vines—" He turned in embarrassment to Beta, "How did you capture so many Fur ships? How did you get the tech to ... to think about in the sun?"
Beta was silent. Jake thought it wasn't going to answer, but then he saw that the cart's slot was sliding open and the bioarm slithering out. Beta was going to make a drawing of some sort, and it was going to take a while.
Jake twisted to look behind him. Mueller stood on the ground-cover, doing deep knee bends. He looked fine again. Dr. Shipley lay stretched full length on the ground, his arm flung over his face. Jake hurried over.
"He sleeps," Mueller said. "Mr. Holman, I have my weapons. But against the Fur shield they did not work. Why?"
Now Jake remembered the way Mueller's laser beam had simply disappeared before it hit the Furs or their shuttle. Another mystery.
"I don't know, Franz. You can ask Karim, but I don't think he'll know, either. However, I'm going to tell you something very important. The Furs are going to return, and I don't want you to attack them unless I clearly give a verbal command. Attack will only endanger our position. Do you understand? I warn you, disobeying this order will be considered equivalent to treason."
"Yes, sir," Mueller said unhappily. Jake, feeling like a fraud for applying military structure when he wasn't military, gazed down at Shipley. The old man snored heavily. Well, sleep was probably good for him. No one knew what lay ahead.
When Jake returned to Beta, the bioarm had flattened itself into a slimy slab and colors were forming as various cells pigmented. He waited until the process was finished, another ten minutes.
Karim said, "It is a satellite array. In enormous orbits, covering an entire star system!"
Jake looked at the bioarm. He saw a large center circle, four widely spaced smaller circles that might have been planets, and hundreds of tiny dots quivering all over the drawing. He said doubtfully, "I don't think they're satellites, Karim. Their tech doesn't lean that way, and how could they have captured that many satellites from the Furs?"