[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
"Oh, God! How I hate them!" I spat. "All of them.
Any race that could do this, wipe out a whole planet!
And they must have planned it ahead of time! They used dirty weapons not seen
for centuries! They had to get them out of storage, along with the means of
firing them! They must have dropped the whole nu-
clear bomb stockpile down there! Nothing will ever live on that planet again!
We're the last of our race, George! The last!"
"Snap out of it!" the older man bristled sharply.
"I've lost far more than you! You have been one of us less than a year. Bar.
One Breed, and always in control! I've been one so long I can hardly recall
what it's like not being one. Those people down there
many were my own children, my associates! What have you lost except your
pride? Except the egomania?
Nobody ever beats Bar Holliday! Ha!"
His diatribe was cruel and acidic and was just what
The Web of the Chozen
I needed. I struggled to my feet, furious, but, once up and facing him, the
two kids staying discreetly back, I calmed down.
Page 70
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
This was George, dammitalll George! And he was right.
I looked over at the children. Hell of an exhibition, I thought suddenly. Hell
of an example, too. They
file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%...20-%20The%20Web%20of%20the%20Ch
ozen%20UC.txt (94 of 170) [1/19/03 4:45:38 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20The%20Web%20of%20
the%20Chozen%20UC.txt couldn't understand death, had never faced or experi-
enced it. They had lost nothing but a promise; this ship was their world, and
we were the only people they'd ever known.
I sighed and relaxed.
"Are you all right?" Eve tried, concerned.
I nodded. "I'm okay now. Don't worry anymore.
But don't forget, either! Never forget the humans and what they did to our
people! Never be too big, or too grown, or too civilized to show rage,
emotion, care." I stopped, feeling the rage building up in me again.
"We all love you. Bar," Ham said softly. "We're one together, all of us."
Love, I thought. Hadn't heard much about that in a long while. Not ever,
really. One of George's terms.
Humans always equated it with sex. But not George, I thought suddenly. Never
George. There was a kin-
ship among us four, I realized, that went beyond the biological. We were a
family, and we cared.
"We're not the last. Bar," George said in that earlier, softer tone. "We're
the first. Again. Remember what
I said about Eve? I knew they'd blow the planet, really. They had to. Our very
existence is a threat to them. The virus. Bar. It's not stable. It's pro-
grammed to maintain a Patmos condition. All we'd have to do is expose them to
us and they'd be exposed to the Patmos condition. They were doctors out to
kill an infection. They failed they got the bulk, but
Moses and we are still at large. They'll be back for us both, with full guns
blazing, sparing neither man-
power nor expense.
119
The Web of the Chozen
"Look Moses understood. All he had to do was breed a large number of us and
land us on some other planets. A passive invasion. No matter what happened to
the invaders, the real invaders, the virus, would be loose. It might take
years to breed fast enough, but eventually it would take over. Winds, flying
things, the very microbes in the air. As fast as humans could find a toxin the
virus would change into something slightly different with the same result.
You've seen how fast it can stimulate cell growth. Imagine how fast it could
breed, the immunity it could develop to almost everything!"
I stopped. I hadn't thought of any of this, really.
But George George was a lot of things, that's why he'd been a master. A
biologist by profession, really.
file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%...20-%20The%20Web%20of%20the%20Ch
ozen%20UC.txt (95 of 170) [1/19/03 4:45:38 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20The%20Web%20of%20
the%20Chozen%20UC.txt
I looked at him. "That means we're flying time bombs for the human race," I
said in wonder.
"We sure are," George agreed. "And with Eve ap-
proaching maturity, in a few months there'll be more.
And still more later. And not all that much later, ei-
ther!"
That brought another thought to mind.
Page 71
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
"George, what's going to happen when breeding starts?" I asked him. "I mean,
we can handle maybe a dozen here, no more. This ship should be good for years,
but it just doesn't have the room."
"Can we find someplace else?" he suggested. "Af-
ter all, this is a ship outfitted for that purpose, and you're a scout trained
to carry out such a mission."
"The odds! The odds, George!" I protested. "First, not more than one in a
hundred systems has planets.
Second, no more than one in a thousand has the most basic planets in the right
positions. Not more than one in a hundred thousand has the kind of planet we
need.
It might take fifty years or more to find a good one."
George frowned. "Seems to me that's poor odds.
How many scouts are there, anyway?"
"About two hundred," I replied. "About half out >
at any one time. But, you see, Seiglein's people are
120
The Web of the Chozen equipped to Terraform suitable planets. One in five to
ten thousand can be Terraformed, even have an atmosphere added. We have
nothing to do that with aboard!"
George considered this. "Sure we do. The best agent there is if the place is
anything anybody can work with, has anything organic. Remember how we grew a
field out of a small pile of manure? And you've still got lots of those little
things in deep-freeze."
The nurds, I thought. Yes, they would carry the infection, and the seed.
"But the problem is, George, that it would still take a lot longer than we've
got,-" I pointed out. "Not only that, but I couldn't use my screens or my
spectrometric equipment. We'd be flying blind."
"Then we need to buy more time," George re-
sponded. "We have to have the time to breed, the time to look, and the time to
try and move things more in our biological favor."
"What do you mean?" I asked, hope rising slightly in me again.
file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%...20-%20The%20Web%20of%20the%20Ch
ozen%20UC.txt (96 of 170) [1/19/03 4:45:38 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20The%20Web%20of%20
the%20Chozen%20UC.txt
"Well, if you can solve the first problem, somehow, I think, with your help,
we might be able to use your computer to solve the second. Remember, you've
got an entire biological laboratory here to test out new planets. You're not a
biologist so that computer of yours must know a hell of a lot about it, can do
most of it. If Moses can create and program these viruses, then we can, too!"
Nobody beats Bar Holliday. Problems are chal-
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]