Thomas A. Easton - Organic Future 04 - Tower of the Gods.pdf

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Tower of the Gods - Organic
Future 04
Thomas A. Easton
Chapter One
Pearl Angelica stopped at the foot of the bluff and patted the leather carry bag that swung from her
shoulder. She sighed and absorbed the scents of soil, mossflowers, forest trees, and distant frost, herald
of the changing season.
When she peered across the valley spread before her, she caught her breath. Who were those three
figures who trod the yellow dirt trail that cut the moss two kilometers away? What were they? They were
bipeds much like humans, and they walked erect. But something about them seemed strange, misshapen,
yet not quite truly alien.
They were moving slowly toward her, weren’t they? Then she would wait right where she was, she
thought, and be glad for the chance to stand still. Her calves hurt from the steep descent.
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The strangers must have entered the valley along the stream that drained the lake. The path they were on
skirted the center of the valley, where the tree, the Tower, her people had grown stood a solitary pillar.
From time to time they paused and turned to stare toward that wonder, or toward the few orange
pumpkins that served as scattered quarters and workspaces, the Macks and Roachsters on the yellow
tracks that cut the moss. There, near the lake, was the pumpkin where her father, Frederick Suida,
waited for death, only rarely summoning enough awareness to speak sensibly or stare out the window at
the Tower he had proposed and planned. To the north of the Tower, a dozen dozen slabs of grey stone
marked the small graveyard that held those bots and humans who had died on the planet.
She touched her bag again. There was very little in it besides the papers that had wrapped her lunch.
This region, so close to the base, had long since been picked quite clean of novelties, and there were field
workers whose job it was to sample more distant regions. What she really sought were the panoramas of
this world, for her heart yearned for whatever their equivalents might be on the homeworld she had never
known. That those equivalents existed, she had no doubt. The pictures her people had brought with
them could not lie.
Nor did they look much like what lay before her. Not even the autumn pictures, for here the trees went
only from green to grey. And instead of grass, First-Stop—Tau Ceti IV—had thick mats of a plant that
resembled moss, if moss could have purple leaves and myriads of tiny white flowers and plump white
berries. This ground cover softened the floor of the valley right up to the edges of the small lake
off-centered to the west, where it was replaced by reeds and other water-loving plants. At the landing
field a little to the east, the yellow soil was darkened by the scorchmarks of plasma flames. Where the
encircling bluffs plunged to meet the valley, the moss rose up, thinned, grew patchy, gave way to shrubs
and other plants. Above, the nearly cloudless sky was an inverted bowl, its rim scalloped by the
bluff-tops and bordered by the now dimming green of the forest that thrived on higher ground.
She looked upward, past valley, Tower, clouds, and sky. If it were night, she might be able to see the
orbiting Gypsy, the starship her people had carved from an asteroid and fitted with Q-drives.
Pearl Angelica shook her head in frustration. She and many of her colleagues sought creatures whose
genes might give the gengineers new tools or which might fit whole into the Gypsy’s contained ecology.
The great ship held people, their creatures, the plants that produced both food and oxygen. But they had
left Earth without being able to gather all the organisms and genes they needed. For one thing, they had
no bees to pollinate the plants. They had to fertilize all their flowers by hand.
The Gypsies of the Gypsy were wanderers just like their namesakes of old Earth. But the latter had only
had to carry their homes with them. Wherever they went, they were surrounded by a living environment
that met all their needs. Yet...Those ancient gypsies had long forgotten their land of origin. Their roots
were a matter of guesswork for storytellers and scholars. Would that happen to her own people? Would
they move on through the starfields of the galaxy? Would they lose even what little contact they still
maintained with Earth and the Orbitals and gengineers who had chosen to remain in its solar system?
Would they forget Earth, reduce it to the status of myth or less? Would she never get the chance she
craved to see once more the world of her ancestors, the world of her roots?
That dream was hopeless. She was a bot herself, and the Engineers would never let her taste the soil of
Earth. Morosely, she let her roots uncoil from the bushy ruffs that covered her calves and grope for the
dirt beneath her feet. Her mood began to lift at the first comforting rush of root-ease. Her posture
relaxed. A hint of a smile appeared on her lips.
But then she sniffed, her shoulders tensed, her roots retreated from the soil. There was in the air an
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animal muskiness that had not been there a moment before. It was not the strangers. They were still far
off, and the wind was toward them.
There was sound, the lightest of scratchings, the crunch of one pebble against another on the ground.
She turned toward the trail that descended the bluff at her back. It was flanked by moss and shrubbery,
shadowed by saplings, paved by dirt that shaded from the valley’s yellow to a rich brown, almost black,
where the forest’s trees overhung the top of the steep slope. Weathered slabs of stone jutted from the
surface as if to form an irregular staircase.
At the base of the trail stood three round-bellied Racs, quietly staring over the valley and grooming each
other’s thick fur as they waited for her to notice them. Each wore a belt and shoulder strap that
supported several small pouches; Pearl Angelica knew they held stone blades, herbs the Racs found
satisfying to sniff or eat, polished bits of wood and bone, of Gypsy glass and metal debris.
The largest of the three Racs was a black-eared male whose light yellow fur bore a single black stripe
from the top of his head to the base of his spine. A stone-tipped spear leaned into the crook of one
elbow. Pearl Angelica recognized him as one of those Racs who wandered in and out of her people’s
buildings in the valley, studying the visitors to their world. Most of his tribe were content to keep their
distance. Other tribes...
The male pointed. She turned, and now the strangers were close enough for her to realize why they had
seemed both alien and familiar. They too were furred and dressed in straps and belts, but thick tails hung
to their knees.
An early model, she thought. The Racs’ ancestors had been raccoon-like forest animals, nearly the size
of a German shepherd but with larger brains. Not long after the gengineers had reached and named Tau
Ceti IV, they had blunted the muzzles and enlarged the brains even further. But they had done it in several
steps, only the last of which had removed the tail. The earlier versions had then been settled elsewhere on
the globe. Most people thought they must have forgotten by now that the Gypsies existed.
Yet here they were.
She faced once more the three beside her. They had the polite dignity of
creatures who felt inferior to no one, not even the technologically advanced Gypsies. The male stared
self-assuredly back at her with the rich, brown eyes of his kind. His eyebrows were shelves of bristling
hairs. “I am Blacktop,” he said, and he raised one blunt-clawed hand to scratch at the side of his
flattened, chinless muzzle.
Pearl Angelica nodded at him and scratched at her cheek with her fingertips. The greeting gesture was
recognizably the same in both the Racs and their wild ancestors, as if it were as wired into the Rac
nervous system as the smile was in humans.
The two females repeated the gesture. The smaller held only a basket, suggesting that she intended to
gather mossberries in the valley. The other held a shorter, lighter version of Blacktop’s spear; she, like
he, would hunt the animals that also sought the berries. Both females had more common pelt markings,
stripes and swirls of olive on grey, though the olive of the smaller was a little greener than that of most
Racs.
“Leaf,” said Blacktop, shifting one hand to the shaft of his spear and using the other to indicate his
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smaller companion. “And Cloudscurry.” Then he pointed toward the approaching strangers. His voice
rose in pitch and grew smoother, almost melodic. “Who are they?”
Pearl Angelica recognized the vocal change. When a Rac was feeling peaceful, even happy, its tone
scraped against the ear as if a snarl must lie not far beneath the surface.
“I have no idea.”
The strangers had noticed them now. They no longer paused to study the
valley’s marvels. They walked faster, almost jogging, yet it was clear that it would be several minutes yet
before they arrived.
“Winter comes,” said Blacktop to Pearl Angelica. His voice said he was still feeling anxious or
aggressive. “Will you still be here when snow covers the moss?”
“Of course,” she said. She scowled, knowing as they knew that it was only a matter of time before the
Gypsies did indeed leave this world. “We are not ready to go yet.” The gengineers had chosen the Racs
for their attention because they seemed on the evolutionary verge of sentience already. Soon enough,
they would leave the new species to its own devices.
Now Leaf said, “They can’t leave.” A row of swollen nipples was visible down each side of her chest,
embedded in her fur. Somewhere, in the Rac village in the forest atop the bluff, she had a litter of
unweaned children. Her voice grew smoother, angry. “We still have too much to learn.”
The strangers were now within hearing range, but they said nothing. Neither the Racs nor the bot spoke
to them, though all four carefully studied them and the things they carried. Their markings were much the
same, olive stripes on grey backs and sides, creamy bellies, black rings around their tails. They were
clearly males. Their pouches bulged as if with supplies for long travel. Stone-bladed knives were thrust
through slits in their belts. Stone-tipped spears filled their hands.
“Why do you think we call this world First-Stop?” asked Pearl Angelica. “We have to leave, as soon
as...” She turned back toward the valley and pointed at the tree that rose a kilometer away. It was almost
two hundred meters tall. “We’re almost done with the Tower.”
The tallest of the strangers leaned his spear against one shoulder, barked, scratched his muzzle—a trifle
longer and sharper than Blacktop’s—and spoke in tones that were rough enough for politeness’s sake
but were also touched with the gloss of caution. “I am Wanderer.”
His companions repeated the greeting gesture. “Stonerapper.”
“Shorttail.” His tail indeed was shorter than those of his companions.
Blacktop, Leaf, Cloudscurry, and the bot answered appropriately. Then
Wanderer said, “I did not expect to find the Valley of Creation.”
Blacktop grunted inquiringly.
“We have tales of a valley where we were raised from beasts, taught to speak
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and make things like these.” The stranger indicated his spear and belt and pouches.
“The tales are true,” said Pearl Angelica.
“I did not believe them.”
Blacktop said, “Then why are you here?”
“To see the world tree,” said Wanderer. “My mother saw it once from a
distance, poking above the edge of the world. She told other stories, and people laughed. They did not
believe her. I did.”
“It is no longer a tree,” said Leaf in a voice that almost purred. The fur on her shoulders was stiffening
and rising, giving the impression that her arms and claws were powered by immense muscles.
“We see.” Wanderer was pointing toward it. His fur twitched in response to Leaf’s, but he managed to
suppress the bristling. His companions were less successful. Their fur bristled too, and their tails swelled
and jerked from side to side. Cloudscurry joined Leaf in her challenge to the interlopers, leaning forward,
ready to kill or die.
Blacktop and Wanderer had more presence of mind. Both males kept their fur flat, roughened their
voices, and smacked the shafts of their spears across the challengers’ bellies. Leaf and Cloudscurry,
Stonerapper and Shorttail blinked and settled back on their heels, though their fur did not go down.
“You called it Tower,” said Wanderer at last. “But it was the tree. My mother said it held up the sky.
When it fell, the world would end.”
“It will not fall,” said Blacktop.
“It still has bark and branches.”
“Not for long.”
“It is already dead.”
The slender pinnacle that dominated the valley gleamed yellow-white where it
had already been stripped of limbs and bark. Bioblimps hung in the air about it, some suspending
workers on long lines while they wielded chainsaws and other tools. Others wrapped their tentacles
around massive limbs that had just been cut from the Tower’s shaft, slowing their fall toward a pile of
severed branches to the south.
The Bioblimps were descended from jellyfish scaled up and freed from the sea. They had been designed
on Earth for hauling cargo and passengers through the skies of a resource-poor world, not for holding
workers precisely still in mid-air or for following the same short paths over and over again. They were
straining to do jobs for which they had never been intended, their gasbags swelling as they generated
more hydrogen for added lift. The hum of the propellers on the small control cabins slung beneath their
gasbags was clearly audible despite the distance.
Leaf laughed deliberately, insultingly. Cloudscurry joined her, tentatively at first and then more
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