Lords of the Seventh Swarm (8 page)

And the song, the strange song at the end that sounded like reed pipes, seemed to Gallen not to be trumpeting victory, nor sounding an anthem of peace.

Instead, it was a bewailing tune, a howling
. I am the dark god of the skies
, the icon had cried.
Through victory I am diminished.

When Felph’s spindles reached the lowest bottom corners of the panel, the song ended. The glass statue receded down into the floor, where the stone doors slid back in place with a snick.

Felph turned around, pocketed the devices that let him play the recording.

Gallen stood in the solemn chamber, with his friends around him. Beside him he could feel Maggie standing close, shivering from fear. Gallen remained utterly silent, the alien music ringing through his head. No one spoke. No one wanted to be the first to break the spell the Qualeewooh music had woven. The whole battle, the symbolism, was utterly alien. But Gallen felt that, somehow, he understood.

He wondered how this cave had appeared to the Qualeewoohs, thirty thousand years ago: many nesting sites had probably been here in the cliffs. The chicks would have come into this cave, in the darkness, Gallen imagined. Perhaps the chicks would have been small, so young they hadn’t grown their adult plumage. So they would have been ugly, gangling things with small wings and large heads.

A priestess would have stood before the platinum panel and waved her wings, as if taking flight. Immediately the dark god would rise behind her, its malevolent intent glowing in its eyes. Each chick would have had its head turned to the side, gazing at the dark god with one eye only. Perhaps the victim of the murder symbolized the priestess in her flight. That sounded somehow right.

Gallen realized that the defender in the battle had been lighter of color. Female, perhaps? The death of virtue, the end of civilization. That’s what the dark god brought.

He stared at the scene in his imagination, lost in thought, until Felph said quietly, “I first came to Ruin nearly seven hundred years ago, as an archaeologist. I was part of a team that discovered this site. All the others, they’ve moved on to other worlds, other ruins. But I’ve stayed to study the Qualeewoohs and their civilization.

“You see, they are not unlike us. Their ancestors were violent hunters, lords of the skies. They traveled in great flocks that darkened the heavens. When they descended on the twisted jungles, they carried off what they desired.

“And like our ancestors, they grew to be too numerous, and began to war.

“But they were not really like us,” Felph mused, and his tone was somber. He stared at the floor, his dark eyes unfocused, his gaze directed inward.

“Man was content to live with war, and even gloried in it. But the Qualeewoohs never romanticized it, never saw it as a necessity, nor even really tolerated it. “

“What happened to them, then?” Orick asked, his deep voice full of awe. “Why did they die out?”

“They haven’t, as I said,” Felph answered. “But if our astrophysical models are correct, things here changed about thirty thousand years ago, during the fourth expansion. Ruin circles a small sun, as you can see—one too small to regularly burn away the planet’s polar ice caps. Darksun drew close to its larger sister every six years in a very elliptical orbit, and when the suns reached perigee, the combined light provided enough heat to melt the polar caps here on Ruin. With this melting, water would fill the shallow seas, and as the tangles enlarged, the local flora and fauna populations would explode for a few years.

“But about twenty-eight thousand years ago, something changed the orbits. It may have been that a large planetary body passed through the system, or even hit Darksun, skewing its orbit, making it more and more elliptical. On a cosmic scale, the variations in orbit appear minor, but the changes here on Ruin have been dramatic.

“The result has been that the six-year cycle now takes three hundred years to complete. The free water here on Ruin is becoming more and more concentrated at the poles, and now, even when the ice caps do melt, they can’t melt completely.”

“So the Qualeewoohs died out?” Maggie asked.

“No, not exactly,” Felph said. “Their numbers were on the decline even before this tragedy. That is what intrigued me about them you see, Qualeewoohs are intelligent creatures—smarter than the average human who isn’t genetically enhanced.

“No, they weren’t dying out. What happened is this: in the early days of human technology, our ancestors’ innovations concentrated in several areas—the production of shelter, transportation, food, and weapons of war.

“But the Qualeewoohs never needed these. They needed no transportation. Because they were winged creatures, they were free to hunt and move at will. Indeed, I can find no evidence that, outside of litters for carrying their sick, the Qualeewooh ever created any kind of vehicle.

“As far as shelter goes, their needs seemed minimal. The Qualeewoohs, unlike humans, cannot live in extreme cold. Their wings and necks dissipate too much heat, so they were never free to expand beyond their lower temperate regions. Nor can they nest near the tangles, where predators steal their eggs. So they nest in mountainous areas above the tangles—and there were plenty of nesting sites.

“Also, the Qualeewoohs, unlike humans, are pure carnivores. The ancients did develop methods of ranching—controlling predators and unwanted herbivores. The tangles provided them with hundreds of different natural pesticides and whatnot. But because the Qualeewooh are carnivores, their numbers naturally stabilized at smaller populations than human populations would. Indeed, food became the predominant limiting factor in their expansion.

“But war, of course, was their big problem. When driven by hunger, Qualeewoohs engaged in the worst sort of cannibalism. A well-fed Qualeewooh is a magnificently moral creature, but when a Qualeewooh starves, when its brain suffers from a lack of sugars, it enters a dark state that the Qualeewoohs call ‘The Voracion.’ A Qualeewooh, so afflicted becomes a terrible, mindless predator—slaying anything but its own mate in an effort to survive. Thus, starving adults would forage into the nesting territories of enemy flocks, slaying the females, eating eggs and chicks. In lean years, terrible things happened.”

“In an effort to abolish the slaughter, the Qualeewoohs focused their research efforts. The Qualeewoohs did not seek to protect themselves from their neighbors, as humans did. Mankind developed all sorts of fascinating myths about how other tribes of humans were ‘evil’ and inferior so we could continue to justify our war efforts.

“But among Qualeewoohs, who could fly, there was no boundary between peoples. A global language developed early in their civilization, along with two or three very similar global cosmologies, and everyone understood one another. One Qualeewooh could join with any flock he or she chose, and, it appears to me, the Qualeewoohs’ territorial instinct never developed as strongly as did mankind’s.

“And there is one more thing you must understand: the Qualeewoohs were brilliant mathematicians. They could estimate populations of animals, count their citizens, study the prevailing weather, then calculate accurately how many of their own people they could supply with food and water.

“So when the Qualeewoohs turned to the problem of war, they took a pragmatic approach. Instead of trying to search endlessly for new sources of food and water, instead of trying to defend themselves from the inevitable depredations of others—their technology focused on self-control.”

“You mean to limiting their numbers?” Gallen asked.

“No,” Felph said. “That was but a small part of their program. I mean that they turned toward social and genetic manipulation. That they practiced genetic manipulation is obvious. We’ve found fossilized plants from the tangle and compared their DNA to that in current samples. The dew trees, which serve as the platform for all other life here on Ruin, show a common pattern of genetic manipulation across twenty-three separate species. The Qualeewoohs inserted the instructions for a common root and hibernation system through all those species. It is only because of these genetic manipulations that any life at all still thrives on this planet.

“But even more importantly than their manipulations of the flora and fauna, they developed a genetic upgrade which they spread among their own kind. They inserted a gene into their thirty-second chromosome that makes it terrifying, utterly intolerable, for one Qualeewooh to be near another adult of the same sex. The very sight of an adult Qualeewooh of the same sex sends both individuals into flight. “

Gallen considered. The Qualeewoohs had not been territorial, but by assuring that any two Qualeewoohs of the same sex who saw each other would immediately flee, you created a tremendous buffer zone between territories. Yet something more happened. You dismantled society. The Qualeewoohs who had developed the technology he’d seen here had been flock animals, nesting together. Social, communicative. But they’d doomed their descendants to become solitary hunters, living in exile.

To Gallen the implications seemed horrifying.

Felph looked up at him, a gleam in his dark blue eyes, and stroked his beard. “Mankind chose to tolerate violence, to seek eternal expansion in the hopes of outrunning his own overpopulation. But the Qualeewoohs, in spite of the fact that they are raptors, could not live with such a choice. For them, the only purpose civilization ever served was to find the root of their own violent nature, then destroy it. Better to end civilization, they decided, than to live with the madness.”

Tallea said, “How sad. Think of all they lost!”

But Orick simply shook his head. “How noble. Think of all they gained!”

“Indeed!” Felph said. “You see it. The Qualeewoohs are utterly unlike us in so many ways. With mankind, our whole system of values is incongruous, illogical. But the Qualeewoohs’ society works for them—in many ways far better than ours ever worked for us.

“That is why I’ve stayed here for so long. I’ve studied their social relations, considered the implications in our own society, weighing them against the dronon threat.”

Gallen found Felph’s tone very disturbing, incongruous. Half an hour ago, he’d talked casually about how humans slaughtered modern Qualeewoohs. Now he spoke reverently of their respect for life. Gallen recognized that Felph’s respect for the Qualeewoohs was directed toward “the ancestors,” the Qualeewooh gods, as he’d called them earlier.

Modern Qualeewoohs, in spite of the fact that they were kindly philosophers, in spite of the fact that they glued spirit masks to their faces in order always to be guided by their ancestors, were somehow not worthy of Felph’s respect. He saw them as creatures, not creators.

His position annoyed Gallen. Felph seemed to have an almost schizophrenic attitude about the creatures.

“What conclusions have you reached?” Maggie asked, and there was an edge to her voice, a threat. She, too, was perturbed by Felph’s attitudes.

Gallen recognized the source of Maggie’s concern. Felph’s genetic experiments, the way he treated the people above, the way he enslaved his own children—all suggested Felph was involved in something sinister. Could he be an aberlain, Gallen wondered—altering the human genome to fit his own whims, seeking to modify his own children as the Qualeewoohs had done? Gallen glanced at Felph’s beautiful, silent children. His slaves.

“Conclusions? None, for certain,” Felph said. “I suspect the Qualeewoohs’ solution was at once noble and desperate beyond anything I could condone. They doomed their descendants to lives of isolation. They doomed their species to eventual extinction. And they lost too much in their quest for peace—the opportunity for social discourse that we as humans take for granted.

“Still, I could almost congratulate them for the devil’s bargain they made, if not for the dronon. In time, the Qualeewoohs’ shortsightedness will condemn this world. The Qualeewoohs never anticipated alien invaders, either human or dronon. This world, with its dull red sun, is a perfect habitat for the dronon. When the Lords of the Swarms discover this place, as they surely will, the Qualeewoohs won’t be able to defend themselves.”

“Perhaps that won’t happen for a long time,” Gallen said.

“One could only hope,” Felph replied. “Unfortunately, what seems long to us is actually a short time on a cosmic scale. Five hundred years, a thousand? The Qualeewoohs don’t have that long.”

Gallen said, “Don’t you think mankind can find an answer to the problem?”

“No,” Felph answered. “What answer could we come up with? The dronon have had plenty of time to duplicate most of our higher technology in the past eighty years. A full-fledged war is almost too horrific for either species to consider, not when entire worlds would burn to ash.

“Mankind, I think, would gladly strike up negotiations for treaties with the dronon, but the dronon psyche does not allow for such things. They seek dominion above all, while mankind putters about, trying to find peaceful solutions to the problem.

“I hear—I hear,” Felph continued, “that some humans back in the Milky Way have finally won the title Lords of the Sixth Swarm. But what will they do with it?”

“I couldn’t say,” Gallen answered, stifling the urge to laugh at the irony. What would Felph think if he knew that at this very moment he was entertaining the Lords of the Sixth Swarm?

“I’ll tell you what they should do,” Felph said emphatically. “They should go to each dronon queen in each hive of the Sixth Swarm and sterilize them. Then let it be known to the lords of the other swarms that if they challenge mankind again, and mankind wins, this will happen to their swarms. That’s what we should do! With the extinction of their swarms as a threat, the dronon would never dare challenge us again.”

Maggie said, “But, if you destroyed the Sixth Swarm, you would be committing genocide against dronon on hundreds of worlds.”

“Not genocide—” Felph argued, “sterilization. Those living on such worlds could continue to live out their natural life spans.”

Orick shook his head. “I don’t think that will happen. I don’t see how we could do it.”