Heritage of Flight (14 page)

"I don't want to die,” her brother Ari added. “Not if we can think or fight our way out of it."

Pauli looked about for someone to take the lead, someone able to exploit the change in mood wrought by the twins’ confession. Rafe? She turned to him, but he shook his head and gave her a tiny, encouraging shove. They were watching her; she had to be the leader now.
God, I don't want this. Especially, not now
.

You chose it
, she reminded herself. She sighed, then rose and stood before the fire.

"I haven't got Captain Borodin's experience, and you know it,” she began. “But I guess I've inherited his responsibilities. I'll do the best I can. With your help—if you'll give it to me—I'll try to do what he'd have wanted, I think: build us and the children a safe place to live. A home, please God, not a fortress.” She aimed those last words straight at Rafe.
Don't leave me. I can't manage this alone
. He smiled at her, and her voice grew stronger.

"The problem's been stated and chewed over. We can retreat and employ strategies to buy time. You all know what they are. But if we don't turn self-sufficient, the minute our reserves are gone, they're gone, and we starve. I don't think we can count on the Cynthians for help. So living off our own fat will just drag out our defeat: you all know we've got to farm here if we're to have enough food for the coming years.

"But then, we've also got to consider the prospect that we're here permanently. I suppose the moral thing would be to suicide straight off, and not inflict ourselves upon the Cynthians. Ayelet and Ari, though, have just given their reactions to that.” Pauli squared her shoulders. Her new authority felt like a lead cape settling down on her for life—
and ever afterward. How will I be remembered? As a genocide
?

"You all know I didn't want to be stranded here. By the time"—she laughed a little hoarsely—"the captain got finished explaining that, I think the whole camp knew it. But now that I'm here, I'm damned if I want to die. I don't think I'm alone in that thought, either. But even if I am ... even if some of you are ... there are still the children to consider. They're not voting members of this group yet. But as you know, they haven't had much of a life so far. That was the point in coming here, wasn't it? To give them, and perhaps the rest of humanity, a chance at a future."

But at the price of eliminating the Cynthians? What sort of future could they have, with the memory of that weighing down their lives?

"I think all of us ought to reconsider,” Dr. Pryor spoke up. Her voice, usually soft and thoughtful, rang out with a surprising resonance. “Lieutenant ... no,
Captain
Yeager..."

Pauli shuddered and shook her head, repudiating the title she once had longed for.

"She's the one who had the guts to bring up the word we all were talking around so carefully. As if that would make the reality go away.
Genocide
. It's an ugly concept. But keep this in mind: before we knew what the eaters were, we were all set to wipe them out. It wasn't genocide then; it was pest control. You might also keep in mind the fact that we've seen that the Cynthians too are revolted by the eaters. But still, they protected them. Can we do less for our own children?"

"We've got another problem,” Rafe said. “I hate to bring it up. Hell, I even hate to think about it. It isn't just the eaters that we have to deal with. Even if we do eradicate this one colony, it's only one generation of eaters. The full-grown Cynthians will simply build more hibernacula and breed more."

"I don't want to kill Cynthians,” Pauli said softly. She scrubbed at her eyes. Spots flamed, bright as the whorls and stars on a Cynthian's wings. If they made the world safe for the children, there would be no more Cynthians to exult in the cross-currents or the high passes. For their attempt would have to be as global as they could manage it. The survey of this world had been flawed; and now they must suffer for it. Who could tell them whether or not the Cynthians could survive a flight over this world's turbulent seas—or even if the same winged creatures lived on the other continents?

And did it matter? Whether or not they succeeded in killing all the Cynthians, they were genocides. It wasn't efficiency that mattered. It was intent.

No more Cynthians. She had always loved their beauty, found in it some consolation for not being able to fly herself. For she would probably never fly now, not even the gliders. She was the leader; she could not be risked.

"Can't you all think of anything else?” Beneatha's voice was husky, stripped of its usual belligerence as she sat with her arm about Lohr. The boy was still groggy from the sedative Pryor had to force down him when he refused to believe that the captain wouldn't suddenly fly back home. Three of the other children had found him sneaking out of camp to go look for the man who had become a father-presence for him.

"There is something else to think about,” Pauli said. “Marshal Becker told us that we were planted here as part of a project, a sort of genetic ... seedcorn, he called it, to be preserved in case the rest of humanity became gene-damaged or sterile in the war."

"What sort of legacy would we give the rest of humanity with our genes?” asked another one of the scientists, who frequently allied with Beneatha.

Pauli sighed. “The ability to ask questions like that,” she said. “Yes, I know that's glib. They may need us. They don't need to know what we've done for them, do they?"

She stared around the circle of faces: some pale, some dark, bearing the racial and ethnic traces of many worlds, but all with the stamp of their ultimate home upon them. They were silent as they stared at her, then one another.

"Since command has defaulted to me, I will take the responsibility,” she said. “Rafe, is there some way to make sure that this generation of Cynthians is the last? I do not want to kill the adults, but they must not reproduce themselves."

"Interfere with their breeding capability?” Rafe gnawed at his lower lip. “There's got to be a way. Say that we gave them something they liked. No,” he was muttering to himself now, intrigued by the logistics of the problem, “they'd detect the taste of an additive in a sweet syrup..."

Pauli glanced out over the listening settlers, relieved past speech that Rafe, with his skills and his ease with people, was on her side.
Accomplice
. She would try not to think of him in such terms.

He shut his eyes, dizzied by his attempt to reach a quick solution. A nagging ache at the back of his skull warned him that he was on the track of something. But he was worn out. They all were, Pauli especially.
Call this meeting off!
he willed his lover silently. They all needed sleep, and she would be in need of comfort.

He gestured away Ayelet, who approached with more fuel for the fire. Let it burn down. Smoke coiled from its embers, sweet-smelling, overwhelming the scent of the river, the plants, and his remembrance of the stink of charred eaters. He'd never truly be free of that smell.

Smells ... the Cynthians were incredibly sensitive to smells. And mating season was near, when they would breed a new generation of eaters, attracted to one another by ... madness ... brought on by pheromones.

"I've got an idea,” he said quickly. “It's near mating season. And we know that smell is a powerful stimulus during mating—any species’ mating—but especially to creatures like the Cynthians. Smell, and color. Like the colors on their wings. What if we gave them something that enhanced those colors, made them shine like the morning star, while eliminating their capacity to breed, or, at the very least, to produce viable offspring."

Radiation might be one way to accomplish that, he thought.

"No atomics,” said Dr. Pryor.

"I was on Marduk during the initial relief efforts,” a medical technician whispered. “Had to be transferred off. So I came here. I don't think I could bear that."

Atomic poisons were too treacherous
, Rafe thought. They could so easily contaminate their users and their land. But even as he dismissed the idea of using radioactives, he realized that the merest hint that they might be used would make any other suggestion more acceptable. That would spread, all right; spread and contaminate the world that they needed so desperately that they would steal it from creatures native to it.

That might be one escape. They would die along with the Cynthians they slaughtered, die rather than live with the knowledge of what they had made themselves become.

Except that the littlests would die too, and they had not consented, to the deed or to their death, any more than they had consented to the war that slagged their worlds. Pauli was afraid that she and the other adults of Cynthia colony were sentenced to life.

"All right,” he said. “All right! You don't need to remind me. No radioactives. Besides, I don't think we could develop or apply them with an acceptable degree of safety for us and the children. So what's left? Organics. Our trap will have to be chemically based."

Rafe would need time, Pauli thought, and ended the meeting quickly. Both of them would be too worn out for anything but sleep. Still, there was comfort in huddling together until they slept: more comfort, if the truth be known, in huddling than in sleeping. For that night, Pauli dreamed of the story of the ancient aristocrat who sold contaminated blankets to natives, and of an island where natives died off within a generation after they had been discovered by “civilization..."

"All I ever wanted was to fly,” Pauli whispered once her tears had waked Rafe, and he had shaken her from her nightmares. “How will they remember me, Rafe?"

"Was flying all you ever really wanted?” He drew her closer, coaxing her to rest in his arms. He could foresee that in the years to come, this would be one of his most important roles: to calm her and comfort her as she struggled with a burden she didn't want. Seeing as he didn't want it either, but hadn't been in line to have it dumped on his back, this seemed like the least he could do. The very least. He tightened his arms about her.

Pauli rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. “Not quite all that I wanted,” she murmured sleepily.

"Pauli ... Pauli ... Captain?"

The title brought Pauli wide awake. For one moment, as she leapt from a tangle of blankets, she had the mad hope that Borodin was back. Why else would anyone be calling for the captain? Then she remembered, and sank back with a groan. Behind her, Rafe had scrambled up and was dressing hastily.

"Don't call me that,” Pauli told the woman who had waked her. “Am I late for today's meeting, Dr. Pryor?"

"When are you going to learn to call me Alicia?” asked the physician. “The meeting can't begin until you get there. You have time to eat yet."

"Food?” Pauli said with disastrous candor. “I'd be sick."

Pryor eyed her speculatively. “It's too easy to tell that,” she remarked, then grinned. “Seriously, I wanted to tell you that you haven't got a thing to worry about. Just leave it to me."

Heartened by the physician's words, Pauli found she had an appetite, and ate hastily. Dressing in full uniform for some reassurance, and accompanied by Rafe for even more, she walked outside to call the meeting to order.

Pryor nodded almost imperceptibly at her, rose immediately, and asked to be recognized.

"David,” she turned to ben Yehuda, “last night you recoiled at the thought of killing the Cynthians even in their eater stage because you thought it was genocide. Now, let me ask you a related question. If you knew for certain—for absolutely certain—that we were the very last ... dregs of the human race, would you still feel that way?"

"Ayelet changed my mind for me. We have to stay alive."

"I think,” Pryor said, “that this is the question that Pauli's wanted us to ask ourselves all along. But she's been too tired, to say the least, to force the issue. Certainly, we liked the Cynthians. And they've liked what they've seen of us. But when they had the choice, they chose for their own children. And they'll go on fighting to protect them, no matter how horrible we think they are. That's the issue: nothing else is relevant."

"I can't give you orders on this issue,” Pauli said. “In any case, I wouldn't try. Let's put it to a vote.” Perhaps Borodin wouldn't have done that. There was room for only one captain on board a ship. But this wasn't a ship, she wasn't a captain, and she certainly wasn't about to try to fill Serge Borodin's boots. Yet, it wouldn't be shirking her responsibilities to make certain that they shouldered their own.

9

Rafe set to work. The communicators and the microcomp had preserved not only the Cynthians’ sign activity, and their curious, analogical language, but also their pattern of antenna activity and the frequencies on which they communicated. From them, Rafe discovered just what chemicals caused Cynthians to enter mating readiness and to respond to one another. The pheromones were multicomponent—long-chain, unsaturated acetates, alcohols, aldehydes, with a few hydrocarbons tacked on. Sweet. Rafe tested them first in solution, then sprayed them into the air to test them that way, since exposure to the air might dilute them, or make them act differently.

After several weeks of tests, his sinuses ached whenever he even thought of a Cynthian. He could barely breathe while doing his tests. Ironic, he thought, wheezing, that these smells that signal
here is life!
to the Cynthians almost asphyxiate me, and will—if all proceeds well (and I must think of it in that way)—bring about the death of the entire species.