End of the Circle Page 13

  Maybe they are right not to respond to us, he thought. Their way of saying they want no part of whatever it is we are offering …But something told him there was more to it than that. From somewhere within him arose a belief that the dominant life-forms on this world were simply too self-involved to answer. That deep in the dense forests below, an experiment of grand design was taking shape. And perhaps even now those beings were cursing their misfortune, decrying the fact that in this vast universe someone had found them—had found them out!

  The dropships were standing by, Vard was telling him from the hatchway. With hailings still unacknowledged, ship’s General Command was recommending accompaniment by surface-effect drones and a full complement of armed Troopers. What General Command called standard operating procedures.

  The method had been utilized on dozens of worlds to no lasting ill effect, but Zor could not suppress a feeling that such techniques might prove calamitous here. He could argue the point, of course, but Command would ultimately have its way.

  He turned to give the planet one final look before following Vard out into the corridor. In place of the anticipation he normally felt prior to a drop came apprehension.

  “You are from this day forward changed,” he said aloud, uncertain whether his words were directed to the planet or to himself …

  Rem had been found lying unconscious in a rec-level corridor.

  And Dr. Wenslow, astrogation’s wide-scope expert, had detected a planet orbiting Lang’s indecisive second star from the right.

  The two messages had arrived simultaneously in Lang’s lower deck study, where Rick and the scientist were still poring over star charts and indices. While Rick attended to the former, Lang linked systems with Wenslow to see for himself just what was out there.

  “We’ve got him down in med lab, sir,” a female lieutenant named Clay reported over the intercom.

  “Any idea what caused it?” Rick asked.

  “Not yet, sir. He was found outside the music room.”

  Rick checked a half-formed expletive. Music room, he thought. This was the “emergency” he had excused himself for a little over an hour ago?

  “He was alone? No one else around?”

  The lieutenant cleared her throat. “Mister Grant and Miss Minmei were inside the room, sir. But they apparently had no knowledge of Rem’s presence.”

  “Minmei?” Rick said. “She was there?”

  “Yes, sir. Singing, sir.”

  Rick’s mouth fell open. “You must have gotten that part of it wrong, Lieutenant.”

  “I don’t think so, sir. She was singing with Mister Grant and the two Tiresian women.”

  Rick pushed a hand through his long hair. What the hell was happening to his ship? he wondered. What had this place—those lights—done to everyone? He exhaled slowly and brought out his command voice. “Lieutenant, I want you to find some excuse for keeping Rem under close medical observation for the next, let’s say, two hours.” Rick glanced at his watch. “He is not to be released until 1900 hours.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Rick patched himself through to security next and instructed the chief of station there that Rem’s whereabouts were to be discreetly monitored at all times until further notice.

  “And have someone keep an eye on Minmei as well,” he added as an afterthought.

  That much accomplished, he turned to Lang, who favored him with an enigmatic smile.

  “We’ve actually got ourselves a planet?” Rick said.

  Lang shrugged. “It would appear so.” He activated a screen on his desk and beckoned Rick over. “Polar caps, mountain ranges, a verdant equatorial belt, Earthlike atmospheric conditions … Custom-made for us, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Rick raised an eyebrow, one hand flat on the intercom control panel again. “Yeah, a little too custom-made,” he started to say as the bridge responded.

  “Bridge, Commander Forsythe.”

  “Raul, Hunter. Put me through to Lisa, would you?”

  “Sorry, Rick. She’s not here. You might check the nursery.”

  Rick felt his face flush. Another “emergency,” no doubt, like Rem’s need for a stroll around the ship and Minmei’s sudden urge to sing. “Raul, what the hell is going on around here? Is everybody going space-happy? Who’s running this ship, anyway?”

  Forsythe was quiet for a moment. “Which question do you want me to respond to first, Rick?”

  Rick let out an exasperated sigh. “Skip it, Raul. Just stand by for new course headings. And when the admiral returns, tell her I want to see her in the briefing room, ASAP.”

  Forsythe signed off, and Rick swung back to Lang. “Suggestions, Doctor?”

  “I suppose it could be a trap of some sort, an attempt to lure us in,” Lang began. “But I don’t see that we have much choice. If the planet is inhabited in addition to being hospitable, we stand a chance of learning a bit about this place, perhaps even a way out of it. Certainly more than we’ll learn from these stars something has seen fit to provide.”

  Rick studied Lang’s expression. “You’re serious about that, aren’t you?”

  Lang nodded.

  “All right. Instruct astrogation to plot us a course in.”

  While reflex drives were carrying the SDF-3 toward a planet that had seemingly leapt into existence only moments before, the Ark Angel, recently reemerged in normal space, was bearing down on a world that had traveled hundreds of thousands of parsecs to settle itself on the dark edge of annihilation.

  The Terran legation had tried to convince Karbarra to stay its warlike hand, if only until Haydon IV had a chance to respond to the charges brought against it. In this, the Ark Angel promised to act as intermediary and arbiter. But it had been plain that Karbarra was out for more than blood vengeance. The ursinoids had agreed not to obstruct Earth’s representatives from communicating with the Haydonites but had assured everyone that a flotilla of Karbarran ships would be folding at the Ark Angel’s stern and that any hostility Haydon IV directed against them would be met in kind.

  Vince, Jean, Harry Penn, Scott, Cabell, and Nichols and his interface addict associates had passed most of the journey from Tirol gathered in the starship’s situation room, discussing strategic options and speculating on the SDF-3’s present whereabouts.

  Scott, his body hot-wired on an assortment of liquid stimulants, thought he might simply spontaneously combust before the session ended. The brief reunion with his parents had only aggravated the concern he felt for his missing friends, and to top that off he had finally taken his tortuous relationship with Marlene to its predictable conclusion.

  Back on the Angel after the nearly disastrous summit in Tiresia, he had gone to her cell—against his better judgment—where one thing had led to another, and had ultimately found the two of them pressed against a spot of bulkhead inaccessible to the prying eyes of the security cams, making love with animal intensity. Green blood or no, Marlene was a woman of human needs and passions. And while Scott was still deliciously dazed from their sensual intertwining, the encounter had left him more confused than ever.

  “I’m sorry to make it sound like this, Cabell,” Vince was saying, “but we didn’t make the jump from Earth to get ourselves entangled in Local Group affairs. We came back for the SDF-3, not to assist Karbarra in its push for control of the spaceways.”

  Cabell’s clear eyes narrowed. “Perhaps not, Commander, but I suggest the time has arrived for Earth to consider itself part of the Local Group. After all, it was at the insistence of your Plenipotentiary Council that this war machine was built to begin with.”

  The Terrans waited.

  “I would point out to you that the SDF-3 had the capacity to fold to Earth shortly after the end of the Sentinels’ campaign. You could have returned then, with the Local Group’s blessings and thanks, instead of anchoring yourself in Tirolspace for an additional three years.”

  Vince snorted. “Embark on a five-year voyage to find our homeworld occupied by the Inv
id Regess?”

  “So you chose to defeat her in a war,” Cabell said in a casual way. “The result is the same. You perhaps succeeded in chasing her off, but at what cost? The fleet you labored to construct is gone, atomized. Your planet is devastated. And your philosophy of answering might with might has had a telling effect on the Local Group worlds.” The Tiresian raised an accusatory finger. “You knew full well when you left Tirol what you had set in motion on Karbarra.”

  Scott was grateful for the momentary silence that followed Cabell’s remarks. On the voyage out from Earth, Vince had brought him up to date on Local Group grudges, but Scott had not expected the once morose Karbarrans to be so radically affected by their recent economic windfalls. And aside from problems of a localized sort, there were, to hear Cabell and Nichols tell it, problems in the grand scheme of things as well. Scott could not follow half the mathematical proofs the scientists had offered up as evidence, but something had apparently worked a bit of underhanded universal micro/macro magic, tugging matter in both realms just that much closer together. Cabell had even said something about pulsar stars disappearing entirely a “Big Crunch” in the working.

  “I don’t see what Karbarra or Haydon IV’s got to do with us,” Scott interjected. “General Grant’s already said it, Cabell: It’s the Regess we’re after.”

  Scott noticed Nichols and Cabell trade looks.

  “We were hoping you could update us on that score, Colonel,” Nichols said at last.

  “Me? How so?”

  “Well, you’ve been having intimate … discussions with her agent, haven’t you?” Nichols asked. “We thought maybe Marlene had told you something in confidence.”

  Scott’s face went crimson. He might have known it was not that easy to get around the security cams in Marlene’s cell. “She hasn’t told me anything,” Scott muttered, eyes averted from the table.

  Nichols made a dismissive motion. “All the more reason for communicating with Haydon IV, then.”

  “If we only knew more about the descendants of Haydon,” Jean said.

  Cabell looked at her. “Descendants of Haydon? Surely you don’t mean Veidt’s brethren?”

  The expression on Jean’s brown face flattened. “Well, yes, I did.”

  “The beings we call Haydonites,” Cabell said, “bear no more relation to Haydon than do Karbarrans, Praxians, or any other Local Group race.” He caught sight of Jean’s puzzled look and added, “Perhaps I should explain.”

  Vince said, “Perhaps you should.”

  Cabell rubbed the side of his nose. “The one we call Haydon is thought to have been a member of an ancient, highly evolved spacefaring group, whose collective name—if indeed they possessed one—has not been passed down to us. Nor, for that matter, can we be certain that ‘Haydon’ was the name applied to a single entity or the group itself.

  “Jean, Vince, Scott, you have all seen some of the shrines erected to Haydon, and certainly you recall how dissimilar they are to one another, save for their age and gargantuan size. But not one is believed to represent Haydon as a living being.”

  “But there has to be some record of him, or them,” Jean said. “Instruments, tools, artifacts, that sort of thing.”

  Cabell chuckled to himself. “You’re familiar with Garudans, Praxians, Karbarrans, and such, are you not?”

  Jean nodded.

  “Well, Haydon’s handiwork is these very races.” Cabell adjusted the high collar of his cloak. “You see, each planetary race was in a sense ‘altered’ by Haydon. And each perpetuated Haydon in a form appropriate to their own world view. So one hears Spherisians speak of ‘the Great Shaper’ or Karbarrans mention ‘the Great Augury,’ when in effect they are all talking about the same entity or group.”

  Cabell shook his head in a self-amused way. “Where that group came from we cannot begin to guess. But from myths, legends, and fanciful historical accounts that have been handed down to us emerge—‘through a glass darkly,’ if I may borrow a Terran phrase—two versions of the final days of Haydon’s race. In one we are told that they were on the threshold of an incredible turning point in self-generated evolution when they were destroyed in some catastrophe their own tamperings may inadvertently have brought about.”

  “And the second?” Nichols asked.

  Cabell let out his breath. “In the light of recent developments, this version is by far the more interesting. For it suggests that the race did not vanish—though we are so led to believe—but placed itself in a state of what I once heard Dr. Lang refer to as suspended animation.”

  “We’re all familiar with the term, Cabell,” Vince assured him. “But what are these … geniuses supposed to be waiting for?”

  “An event,” Cabell said with a faraway look. “A cosmic event that would alter the fabric of spacetime.”

  Nichols gaped at the Tiresian from across the table. “The Invid,” he said, gazing at everyone. “Don’t you get it? Their mating with the Protoculture, their transubstantiation. That’s what Haydon’s race was waiting for.”

  He threw his head back and laughed. “They’re getting ready to wake up. They’re figuring on hooking onto the Invid phoenix and following it right off the map!”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  Of course, we had a sizing chamber aboard [the SDF-3], but Cabell’s suggestion that micronization of Drannin or the other Zentraedi children could result in developmental problems had naturally filled Kazianna with a newfound fear of the device. I still believe the suggestion was totally unfounded, but because it was taken as gospel at the time, it meant that those Zentraedi who had elected to ship with us had done so full-size—not to mention what it meant for the work crews who now had to construct the nursery to accommodate children of vastly different sizes. Anyway, the experience of that day I walked into the nursery to check on the children’s creation left me convinced that I’d placed too much importance on all this child bonding and that maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea, after all. In retrospect I think I should have insisted that [the Zentraedi ship] Valivarre fold with the rest of the fleet instead of remaining in Tirolspace with its skeleton crew.

  Lisa Hayes, in Resh N’tar’s

  Interviews with Admirals

  “Seven worlds,” Exedore said to himself, hands clasped behind his back as he paced the alloy floor of his confinement area quarters. Max, Miriya, Dana, and the Praxians were off somewhere exchanging wall tappings with the Karbarrans. Aurora was in the front room, glued to the display screen of their monitor unit as though it were one of Earth’s old-fashioned television sets.

  Seven worlds, Exedore repeated in thought, head down, eyes on the floor.

  The past dozen hours had been punctuated by deep rumblings from Haydon IV’s artificial core, the sound of powerful machines being reactivated after who knew how long a slumber. On-screen schematics flashed by Veidt’s device told him little, but it was easy enough to imagine modules being hoisted and repositioned by robotic arms, gigantic plates retracting, a change in the very sphericity of the world.

  Exedore awaited some word from Veidt. Haydon IV was surely reconfiguring, but reconfiguring into what? An unassailable battle station, as the more nervous of the Karbarran captives were suggesting? A world turned inside out? A factory of some sort? The Awareness still had not made any external visuals available; positional data, however, indicated that the artifact was well within three hundred thousand kilometers of the small carbonaceous moon that remained the focal point of its eccentric orbit. Almost close enough to touch.

  A deafening movement from seemingly underfoot rocked level four and nearly sent Exedore sprawling. There had been several jarring moments already, but no one had been hurt. No power failures, split seams, broken seals. Buried in the Awareness’s neural programming were command codes that apparently ensured the safety of Haydon IV’s passengers and guests.

  As there were command codes that safeguarded Haydon IV from the threat of attack.

  But just what
had the historical Haydon—as individual or race—gone to such lengths to protect: the world’s passengers or the world itself?

  The Zentraedi perched himself on the edge of the bed, unconsciously adopting a thinker’s pose. Seven worlds, he thought.

  He had surmised from investigations undertaken during the Sentinels’ campaign that the Awareness had had dealings with Zor in the early stages of his self-styled rebellion against the Robotech Masters. Later, the Tiresian—Protoculture’s midwife—had for some unknown reason duplicated the route Haydon had taken through the Quadrant millennia before, using Haydon’s chosen worlds as the objects of his seeding attempts.

  Had Zor been attempting to pick up where Haydon had left off?

  He had already visited Optera, where, assuredly, Haydon had brought Invid and Flower together.

  But then he had gone to seed Peryton, for which Haydon had devised a thought-propelled instrument capable of altering the rotational axis of that dying world.

  And gone on to seed Karbarra, which Haydon had gifted with the ursine-responsive Ur-Flower.

  And Garuda, where Haydon had restructured the biosphere to facilitate a true planetary consciousness.

  And Spheris, where Haydon had experimented with the evolution of crystalline life-forms.

  And Praxis, where biological parenting had become a single-gender affair.

  And—by way of the deliberately crash-landed SDF-1—Zor had seeded Earth, where according to Dana’s accounts the Flower had taken root with perplexing tenacity.

  Which suggested that Haydon had used Earth for some purpose.

  But a larger question remained: What had Haydon hoped to accomplish on his namesake world? What was Haydon IV that it should at all costs be spared the injustices visited upon the rest?