The Children Star (22 page)

She turned to the holostage and dimmed the light. In darkness appeared several blobs of color; Rod counted twelve. Qumum wiggled and stretched to be put down so he could scrabble over to check out something more interesting than his fingers.

“That's okay, he can't hurt anything. Let's get this in focus.” The colored blobs sharpened into ringlets, of perceptibly different hues. They seemed to be mainly blues and greens, with one yellow-orange. Darker tubes of fibers formed tunnels, connecting among the rings. “I'm going to slow down the time scale of the recording. Watch.”

Rod stared until the little rings left afterglow in his eyes. Then the rings started pulsing. No longer continuous, their glow winked in and out so fast he could barely see; but soon the recording slowed.

“You see, it will pulse several times very fast—then stop—then pulse again. Bursts of three, four, five; I've recorded up to twenty at a time. It's their message from the tumbleround.”

“Their message?” His pulse raced. “How do you know?”

Khral paused. “I don't know—because I can't read it.
It could even be they've given up their message, and what we're getting now is random noise.” Her brow creased. “Early on, we got one brief message that was different. I'll show you, but keep quiet about it.”

A string of numbers floated through the air: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 . . .

“A prime series,” Rod exclaimed.

“Sh-sh.” Khral looked around furtively for watching snake eggs.

The primes marched on, up till 103. “So that's their message.”

Khral shook her head. “It's too simple. A string of primes—so what? Since then, all we get is smaller numbers, a lot of ones and twos, occasional sevens and eights.” She shook her head. “Whatever message their masters sent, we lack the key to decode it.”

“It doesn't sound like much. How could a microscopic cell ever store a real message?”

“They're large cells, about the size of an ameba. Your own body cells each store six billion ‘letters' of DNA—and that's just a linear molecule.” Khral turned to the holostage, and it filled with a lattice of molecules. The atoms stacked and connected at right angles in all directions. “Each microzoöid stores a sentient's worth of molecular connections. The molecules can donate or pick up electrons, acting as AND gates or OR gates. Some are switched on by light. A single microzoöid can pack fifty trillion connections, about the number of synapses in a human brain.”

A brain's worth of data in a single cell. Rod felt his hair stand on end. “What about your fieldwork? Have you learned anything more about tumblerounds?”

Quark said, “We learned why no one else studied them before.”

Khral half smiled. “Tumblerounds congregate in the
singing-tree forest, leaving trails of foul stuff behind—a touch of it got through my skinsuit, and the repairs cost twenty thousand credits. They do contain Sarai's strain of microzoöids, about a billion each. Not a lot, by microbial standards. You yourself carry ten thousand times that many bacteria.”

“That's comforting. Especially if they keep them to themselves.”

“We did learn one thing. The tumblerounds ‘transmit' the microzoöids as messages—
through the whirrs!”

“I thought as much.” Rod felt sick. “But messages to whom? How do the tumblerounds
do
anything? How do they rule the weather?”

Khral dismissed the holostage; the colored ringlets vanished. Qumum toddled over to see where they went. “The whirrs can carry microzoöids everywhere—even up to the stratosphere. We've done some sampling up there. They probably seed the clouds, or they absorb moisture, depending on how their masters want to direct the air mass. Heck, even on Valedon microbes seed most of the rainfall—blindly, of course.” She stepped back to the culture vessel and crossed her arms, staring thoughtfully. “If only I could isolate a pure culture of micros from the whirrs. I've tried, but they just die. They must produce some essential pheromone.”

“Why do you need another culture? You have Sarai's culture.”

“Sarai's culture was not pure. To study a microbe, you need a genetically pure population, grown from a single ancestor. Otherwise, you can have several different species, without realizing it,” Khral explained. “The only culture we can grow is the original one, from Sarai. We can passage that one, taking about a dozen cells at a time, but never a single cell. Perhaps her culture has aged; like clickflies after
a few days, their message may have deteriorated by now. If we can't culture microzoöids directly from the whirrs, how will we ever read their message?”

“What if those whirrs try to ‘contact'
us
—more directly?”

Khral frowned thoughtfully. “We still haven't found any micros alive inside a person. But they must be trying. You'd think they'd respond to the—” She shuddered.

“If they are,” said Quark, “we sure have no evidence.”

“But I have evidence,” said Rod.

Khral's eyes widened, and Quark's eye trained on him.

“The tumbleround—it tried to show me something in my head.”

“Something in your head?” repeated Khral.

He wished he could explain better. “It showed me a hand . . . with five fingers.”

Quark's eyeball rolled around. “A Spirit Caller's visions don't count as evidence.”

“Oh, hush!” Khral gave her shoulder a fierce simian glare. “Have we done much better? Rod—”

“Excuse me.” Feeling stung, Rod gathered up the toddler from the holostage. “We have to make our appointments at the clinic.”

“Don't mind Quark. Station will run nanos through your veins, just in case. You will be at supper, won't you?”

At the cafeteria, Khral sat with Qumum bouncing on her lap, enabling Rod to manage his food with one arm while T'kela dozed in the other, her arms sticking up straight as only young infants could manage. The tiny holostage played a skeptical report on Khral's work, including some rather crude jokes about the habits of tumblerounds. It listed all the previous “hidden master” candidates over the
years: megazoöids, helicoids, and Elk's singing-trees. No wonder all the snake eggs laughed.

“We've just got to break the code.” Khral spooned stirfry from her plate; like Rod, she invariably ended up with the same item of the table's ten thousand offerings. “We have to convince the Fold the tumblerounds are sentient. I just can't believe Station made me focus on spacer's spit-up instead.”

“Can't the medics handle that?”

“The medics gave up. They called in an epidemiologist from Elysium, but it will take him a week to get here. In the meantime, lacking better, it's up to me.”

Recalling Mother Artemis's order to keep his weight up, Rod pressed his thumb to the table and called for a second order of shepherd's pie. “I guess the sickness might be serious.”

“Nobody's been sick more than a few days; even Three Crows thinks it's ridiculous. It affects only outbound travelers from Prokaryon, about one in ten, at the moment they try to board a starship. You just sweat and upchuck for a few days—sorry, this isn't talk for suppertime.”

“No matter.” Rod smiled. “I've known worse.” From upset stomachs to shoelaces tied to the table legs, suppertime at the colony could drive adults to the breaking point. Instead here was Khral; he imagined her in his arms again. . . . What harm was there in good food and an attractive companion? “Have you made any progress on it?”

Khral brightened visibly; any intellectual challenge seemed to turn her on like a switch. “Well, the medics ruled out all known pathogens. So it must be a toxin of some sort, reacting to who knows what. Change of pressure, perhaps?” She pushed the vegetables around in her plate. “And where does the toxin come from? Maybe from ingested micros.”

Rod's fork stopped in midair. “But you said they can't grow in humans.”

“They can't grow, but they can pass through your stomach. Whatever food you eat, you ingest millions of microbes. Everybody does.”

That was all he needed to hear. Brokenhearts were hard enough to swallow.

“But Prokaryan microbes have no effect; you're more poisonous to them than they are to you. All that acid in your stomach, and those bile salts in your colon.” Khral shuddered. “Enough to do in most of our own microbes, let alone Prokaryan bugs. Only a few last long enough to secret toxins; or maybe the toxins were there in the food already. Like botulin from
Clostridium.”

“So you think it's botulism?”

“Nothing that serious.”

What if those whirrs had infected him with enough of the tumbleround's microzoöids to make him hallucinate? “Could insects carry it?”

“The epidemiology of ‘spacer's spit-up' does suggest an insect vector. There've really been too many whirrs about; even if they don't feed on humans, their propellers could spread something. So we changed all the filters in the air system, to keep them out.” Khral gulped a forkful. “It didn't help any. In fact, the average duration of symptoms increased from two days to five—probably a statistical fluke.”

“But Khral—
what if they're trying to tell us something?”

Khral did not look up. On her lap Qumum complained for attention, and she shifted him to her other arm. “I had kind of hoped it might turn out that way. But we've found no trace of microzoöids in any patient.” She sighed. “It's
probably for the best. Suppose ‘the masters' really got fed up and sent us a deadly disease. You know what the Fold would do.”

Boil off the planet, colonies and all. Every colonist had signed the release; Rod never thought much about it, but now he wondered how little it would take. “It's always come to that, hasn't it. Valedon . . .” Valedon had gone through it, millennia before, the searing of earth and sea, the recolonization. Corn and oak, gulls and skunk; all the living things so dear to his own childhood, lived in place of a lost biosphere. Why skunk? he wondered. Did the old terraformers have their sense of humor—or was it their sense of guilt?

“Bronze Sky, too,” said Khral. “Centuries later, it's still cooling down. But my parents came from Urulan to settle there, and I love Bronze Sky as it is now. I live for those speckled hawks, the ones that soar above the geysers.” Khral's look softened, and for a moment Rod longed to feel her lips on his. Then her eyes widened to stare beyond him. “Is that—”

He turned to see. Several headless octopods had entered quietly, limb over limb. Among them passed two Elysians, their trains doubled up behind. The banker, Rod recognized, the immaculate blond president of Bank Helicon. And the master of Proteus, Nibur Lethe
shon
.

The man looked smaller than he seemed on the holo, short of stature, even for an Elysian. He walked slowly, as if in procession, as Elysians generally did, as if to show they had all the time in the universe.

It occurred to Rod, how little it would take for this small man to breathe his last, and put an end to his schemes. A thumb at the throat would do it. A blow to the temple would do it faster; the twist of a knife, more slowly.

Rod gripped the table until his knuckles whitened. Then he sank his head in his hands. The colony had nearly lost its home, and what was he doing here? Desiring a woman, and wishing death to a man—how had he come to this? How far could he sink before he lost all sight of the Spirit?

N
ibur kept his promise to Iras, to visit the Sharer lab and show her the high-diversity region of the continent. As his lightcraft from
Proteus
descended toward Mount Anaeon, nothing could mar his good humor, not even the unfamiliar skinsuit that constrained him. He caressed Banga behind the ears; the immortal retriever, too, was enclosed in a skinsuit, and took to it without biting or scratching.

The Opening had gone splendidly, with favorable reviews throughout the Fold. Now all across the continent his earthborers were plunging deep into the crust. By the time the last of the humans had cleared out, and the native biota were duly sampled, the real cleansing could begin. Then the land would fill with lucrative lanthanide mines.

On the slope below, Nibur spotted one of his species samplers. “Bring us over close,” he ordered. The sampler towered above the trees, where it had selected a choice specimen
to transplant. Shuddering, the giant structure poured its nanoplast into the ground surrounding the chosen singing-tree. At last it scooped the tree up, roots and all, and hauled it off for transport.

“Well done,” observed Iras. “Your salvage is most efficient.”

“Only the best,” he agreed.

“I trust you've sampled all thirty-six varieties? At least twenty specimens of each mating type?”

“Twenty-five, in case of losses.”

“Excellent.” Iras resumed murmuring to her internal nanoservos. Now that the Opening was done, her attention had moved on to her latest project, a new jump station for Solaris, the Fold's most distant world.