Drakon Read online

  Tom shook his head. "Technofixes wouldn't solve our problems. It's in the nature of humanity to foul its nest. We'd have to change human nature: that's why I gave up."

  "I'm glad you said that," Gwen said, her smile growing broader. "You agree then, that humans aren't fit to be in charge here?"

  "What's the alternative—a Dolphin Liberation Front?" he replied.

  She tapped the black rectangle. "Look."

  He glanced down. The surface of the square . . . vanished. It wasn't a screen; the view through it had full depth, exactly like a window. He reached out and touched it with an involuntary reflex. It was completely smooth and neutral in temperature.

  "This is Haiti," she said.

  He knew Haiti; the wasted, eroded hills barren as the Sahara, the pitiful starving people, hardly a tree or an animal besides goats left west of the Dominican border.

  This showed tropical rainforest, lush and untouched, the view sweeping down mountain valleys where mist hung in ragged tatters from the great trees. A spray of birds went by, feathers gaudy; he could hear their cries, faint and raucous. The view swept down to the coast. Here were people, squares of sugarcane, a hillside terraced and planted to glossy-leaved bushes he recognized as coffee. Workers with hand tools or simple machines were busy among them. The view moved closer; he could see they were brown-skinned, stocky and muscular, well-clothed. One laughed as he heaved a full basket onto a floating platform. In the middle distance a white stone building covered in purple bougainvillea stood on a hillside amid gardens. Beyond it was Port-au-Prince harbor. There was no city, no teeming antheap of ragged peasant refugees. Just a few buildings half-lost amid greenery, a stone wharf, and a schooner tied to it.

  And a big skeletal structure, like a dish of impossibly rigid rope.

  "That's the orbital power receptor," Gwen said. "Now, the Yangtze Gorges."

  The great river ran unbound through tall beautiful cliffs, no sign of the giant concrete dam the Chinese had used to tame the wild water.

  "Great plains, North America—near what you'd call Fargo."

  Tall grass, stretching from horizon to horizon. And across it buffalo unnumbered, in clumps and herds of thousands each. The horned heads lifted in mild curiosity; there was a stir, and a pack of great gray lobo wolves trotted through, twenty strong.

  "Bitterfield, eastern Germany."

  He knew that, too; one of the worst chemical-waste nightmares left by the old East German regime. The picture showed a stream flowing through thick poplar forest. Behind it were oaks, huge and moss-grown. He heard the chuckle of water, the cries of birds, wind in the branches. The view moved through them at walking pace, pausing at a wildcat on a tree limb, at a sounder of wild boar, in a sun-dappled meadow clearing where an aurochs raised its head in majesty. Its bellow filled his ears.

  "The Aral Sea."

  Which had disappeared almost altogether, leaving salt flats poisoned with insecticide—the legacy of the old Soviet Union's insane irrigation megaprojects.

  The window into a world that wasn't showed white-caps on blue water.

  "The delta of the Syr Darya, where it empties into the Aral." A huge marsh. Through the reeds and onto a firmer island moved striped deadliness, a Siberian tiger. Waterfowl rose from the water in honking thousands, enough to cast shadow on the great predator.

  "Paris."

  No Eiffel Tower, although Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe still stood. The air was crystal. From overhead, he could see that the medieval core remained, Notre Dame, the radial roadways laid out in Napoleon III's time. None of the great sprawl of suburbs he knew; Versailles stood alone among its ordered gardens. Dense forest and open parkland stretched from the outskirts; occasionally a building would rise above them, usually roofed in green copper. The roadways were grassy turf. Foot traffic was pedestrians, or small machines that floated soundlessly beneath their passengers. Aircraft moved through the air above, elongated teardrop shapes and blunt wedges moving without visible support; a colorful hot-air balloon drifted among them.

  "The Serengeti, looking northeast."

  A herd of hundreds of elephants, moving with slow ponderous dignity through a landscape of lion-colored grass and scattered flat-topped thorn trees. His eyes darted about; lions, giraffe, antelope, a dozen rhino . . . Snow-topped Kilimanjaro rose like an empress in the distance. Beyond it was something new, something alien: a great pillar stretching up into the sky until it turned into a curving thread, vanishing in the blue.

  "What's that?" he asked, hearing his voice shake.

  "The Kenia beanstalk—think of it as a tower or a cable reaching from Low Earth Orbit to the surface." She touched the edge of the window. "And this is the Valles Marineris, on Mars."

  The sky was a faded blue, with a hint of pink. The view was on the edge of a reddish cliff, overlooking a vast expanse of deep-blue water five hundred feet or more below; miles distant across it the edge of another cliff showed. The waves were like none he had ever seen, taller and thinner in section than water could support. While he watched a whale breached, soaring out of the sea until only its tail was under the surface. A blue whale, and huge. It crashed back with a mountainous spray of surf. The view tilted downward, showing a city dropping in terraces from the cliff-face. The buildings were white or soft pastels, built with domes and arches and pillared colonnades, connected with roadways of colored stone or sweeping staircases. Gardens surrounded every building and lined the streets.

  Just below him stood a group of people. People like Gwen. He recognized a likeness in some of them. Racial? Tall, with a slender muscularity, light-eyed, their hair shades of blond or red. Some of them wore tunics or robes; others only tight briefs. Those near-naked ones were being fitted with gossamer gliding wings on frameworks thinner than thread but steel-rigid. The helpers were of a subtly different type, shorter, trim and healthy but without the sinewy tigerish look of the first variety.

  One of the figures strapping wings to her arms, he realized suddenly, was Gwen—but her skin was milk-pale, not the Indian-brown he saw across from him. She launched herself off the cliff edge, dived, then began to scull upward like one of Da Vinci's ornithopters.

  "Yes, that's me. A few years ago on my personal world-line. My skin tone adjusts automatically to the ambient sunlight, all over," she explained.

  The flyers exploded from their perch in a rainbow of colors. Condors glided along the cliff face, among the men and women.

  "One last one. Venus, north polar region."

  No greenery this time. Desert and rock, under a scourging wind. The sky was a deep greenish-blue, thick with clouds; he could see a vast pale disk in it, like a moon but too regular, touching one edge on the horizon and occupying a quarter-section arc of the heavens. In the foreground people walked, in thin pressure-suits and bubble helmets. Machines floated by, or rolled on huge wheels of spun thread; further away something enormous lifted into the sky and vanished upward with a trail of vapor and a thunder-rumble that shook the earth. There was a sense of thick, glimmering heat about the picture, almost palpable.

  "The temperature in polar winter is down to about forty degrees—that's Celsius—but the air's still unbreathable, will be for another century. The circular object is an orbiting mirror, reflecting away sunlight. Mars was relatively easy; we just heated it up with mirrors and dumped comets and pieces of the gas-giant moons on the surface, then started the biologicals. Venus had too much atmosphere, we used tailored algae and then—never mind."

  "Turn it back to Earth," he whispered. She did; this time to a seal colony, huge and thunderous with their barking cries. "Is it true? Is it true?"

  Gwen tapped at the edge of the viewscreen. "If you can match this on Earth today, I'm the greatest liar since Thomas Jefferson," she said coldly, and tapped again. Once more there was nothing but a thin sheet of nonreflective black.

  Cairstens buried his face in his hands and wept, quietly and passionately. Their table was in a discreet corner; nobody noticed until he was done,
and then Gwen signaled a waiter over.

  "Vodka and orange juice," she said. "Another brandy for me."

  The man gulped his drink in two mouthfuls. "You're from . . . from the future? You came to save us?"

  "A future. 2442 A.D., to be exact; or the four hundred forty-second year of the Final Society, we'd say. The future of a different past, with the split starting in the mid 1770s, as close as I can tell. I got here by accident; we thought we were experimenting with faster-than-light travel. Moleholes—wormholes, your people call them."

  "You're stranded," he said, his voice hoarse. Then he shook his head. "I never dreamed . . . I never thought human beings could be such stewards of the Earth."

  "They can't," Gwen replied. "I'm not human."

  His head came up. "You could have fooled me."

  "I couldn't fool a CAT scan or DNA analysis. Post-human; genetically modified, to about a six percent divergence. Homo drakensis, to be precise. Most of it doesn't show, but I'm as different from you as an orangutan."

  He nodded slowly. "This is—that's why you asked me that—" With a visible effort: "You think you can bring your people here. And they'll save the Earth."

  "Among other things. I warn you, the consequences will be fairly drastic."

  His face hardened. "As drastic as losing the ozone layer? Global warming?" He shook his head decisively. "No, it doesn't matter how drastic." Curiously: "How did it happen?"

  "Explain to me the overall history of the world for the past six hundred years, in one paragraph or less," Gwen said dryly.

  He shrugged. "Yes, of course. But . . . how drastic? What's it like for people, in that world of yours?"

  "Peaceful, mainly. No war, no poverty, no sexism, very little crime, no illness except eventual death. Most people work on the land, or at handicrafts, or in domestic pursuits; we could do that by machine, but it's more . . . healthy the other way. The high-tech sector nearly handles itself."

  She raised a hand. "It isn't a democratic system. There's a genetic elite; I'm part of that. It's a static culture."

  "Yes, yes," Cairstens nodded. "It'd have to be stable, to live in harmony with nature like that; it couldn't be our sort of grasping, wasting greed-society."

  His eyes burned. "You need me to help. If this got out, every spook and spy from every government in the world would be fighting to pick your bones. They'd never allow you to contact your people."

  She nodded. "I'm going to need a large organization; and a smaller one within it, of men and women who know the truth."

  He shook his head again. "I believe it, but I can't believe it."

  "Sleep on it. Tomorrow we'll talk again."

  ***

  "Another brandy, and some more of that raspberry cheesecake, please," Gwen said.

  The waiter smiled and hurried off. Gwen finished the last sip of the VSOP Otard cognac, savoring the uncanny fresh-grape sweetness, the vanilla tang of Limousin oak. Relatives of hers held estates there; the product was surprisingly similar in this universe. One of the drawbacks of her enhancements was that ethanol was metabolized as rapidly as anything else; wine was pure taste, not kick, to a drakensis. Four or five brandies did produce a mild effect, though.

  Amazing, she thought, running over the conversation with Tom Cairstens. And every word was the truth. Even if their response to pheromonal clues was spotty, humans could be manipulated verbally. She could tell exactly what their reaction was to every word, of course—scent aside, listening to their heartbeats and watching the pupil dilation and patterns of heat on the skin—and modify accordingly.

  Cairstens was going to be invaluable; she couldn't be everywhere, and it wasn't good tactics to be under human observation too much.

  Invaluable provided he didn't go off the rails. It would take him a while to assimilate the data; humans were like that, their conscious and subconscious severely out of synch. How odd it must be, to know something was true and not feel belief in it! Like the way she'd felt for the half-hour after the accident, but all the time. Gwen shuddered slightly. That had been utter nightmare, the closest she'd ever come in all the long years to losing control of herself. No wonder the humans had such trouble maintaining clarity of thought and purpose.

  Yes, she'd have to nurture Cairstens along carefully, building up a teacher-acolyte relationship; he had the makings of a fanatic, a True Believer. Should I take him? she wondered. So many of these feral humans were just plain ugly; it was a bit of a shock. The genetic engineers had eliminated that from the world of the Final Society long ago, along with inconvenient psychological characteristics. Cairstens was an exception, lean and hard, pleasant blue eyes, longish brown hair . . . probably an entertaining mount.

  No, not for the present. Human males in this culture had odd ideas about sex and dominance. She'd wait until the parameters of the relationship were well-established, then integrate it as a reinforcement. She'd have to be careful, at that. Servus were protected against over-addiction to the stimulus of drakensis pheromones, sexual or otherwise. But wild humans were only vulnerable to a few of the more obvious stimuli, fear/dominance, lust/love, the basics—and when they were affected, didn't have any stops.

  Gwen sighed. The geneticists who'd designed her species had wanted an aggressive, energetic, territorial breed. The same hormones produced a driving libido as well; that was deep in the primate inheritance, and would have required complete rewiring to change. Normally she didn't mind, but this wasn't the Domination, where body servants expected to do concubine duty as a matter of course. One human wasn't nearly enough—she didn't want to wear Dolores out—and going too long without could produce unfortunate results, like poor Jamie Simms. Not that she'd hurt him—she had better control than that—but he'd had an alarming night. Controlling the need eventually required a counterproductive amount of energy.

  What I need is an isolated retreat, she thought. A Household, or as close as this world could come to it. That would be the best base of operations. And perhaps I should reproduce.

  No other drakensis around for gene-merging, of course, but she could clone herself. The technology was simple, not far above this world's level; remove the nucleus of an ovum, replace with cell nucleus, remove the postfetal inhibitors, and stimulate to divide. A human female would do well enough for a brooder. The immune-markers were compatible; that had been built in as a failsafe way back in the early days. For that matter, she had a functional womb herself, if she cared to spend a year to bring it up from standby status.

  She pursed her lips in distaste. Now there was a perverse thought.

  Yes, a child was definitely a possibility. It would be comforting to have another Draka to help out, if the Project took that long.

  The cheesecake arrived. "My compliments to the staff," she said, and slipped a fifty into the waiter's hand.

  He beamed at her, and Gwen smiled back. She hadn't had this much fun in centuries.

  ***

  "Hunhf. Twelve."

  Henry Carmaggio sat up on the weight bench, wheezing a little and wiping his face with the sweat towel slung around his neck. Any excuse to delay moving from the bench press to the goddamned preacher curls; last year or so they'd set off a twinge in his left shoulder, the place where he'd broken it playing touch football back when he was sixteen. It hadn't hurt since, but now . . .

  The gym wasn't very full, for a Saturday afternoon. Enough for the usual heavy smell of sweat, people pumping away at the Nautilus machines, pedaling fast to nowhere on the Life Cycles and going to the same place on foot on the StairMasters. The small windows up along the roof under the outside wall were steamed up, but the big mirrors at the far end were clear enough. They showed one middle-aged cop, a stocky thickset man with heavy shoulders and a waist only a little thicker than the best that could reasonably be expected. Heavy craggy features with a beak nose, hazel eyes, a solid frosting of gray at the temples of hair worn unfashionably short. The shorts and T-shirt he was wearing showed arms and legs corded with muscle and thick
with curling black hair; a line of old white scars ran down his left leg from thigh to calf.

  One good thing about working up a sweat, he thought. It takes your mind off itches you can't scratch. Like the warehouse case. Not just being taken off it, but he hadn't heard zip on the street, either.

  Of course, a co-ed gym also reminded you of other itches. On the good side, better than two-thirds of the men here were gay, which reduced the competition. On the bad side, the women tended to be way, way above his income and education bracket. And whatever current theories said should be, that still made a great wonking difference. And face it, you expected to stay married until you were in a wheelchair.

  He rose, wincing at how his knees crackled, and ambled over to the weights section for the preacher curls. As usual, somebody had put the weight disks back on the stands any old way, meaning you had to heave them around to get the ones you needed to fit on the bar.

  "Patron," a voice said.

  He started slightly. "Jesus!" he said.

  Jesus winced, probably because people had been making jokes about his name ever since the family moved from San Juan to New York when he was three.

  "Got a message for you, Lieutenant," he said.

  Carmaggio's eyebrows rose. It was Saturday, and he wasn't working the weekend this week.

  "Lady wants to talk to you. From the Feds."

  Ahhh, he thought, and suddenly the aches in his muscles and the sweat running down his barrel-shaped torso ceased to matter.

  "Wants to talk about you-know-what, if you're interested."

  "You bet your ass," Carmaggio said softly. His teeth showed. "Bet your ass, paisano."

  ***

  "I'm Special Agent Claire Finch," the FBI agent said, sliding into the booth.

  Carmaggio sized her up as they shook hands. Finch was small—wouldn't have gotten into law enforcement before the height requirements were removed—and extremely pretty in a businesslike way: reddish-brown hair, fox-sharp face with a hillbilly point to her chin and a very faint trace of mountain accent. Scots-Irish, probably, maybe with a trace of Cherokee: West Virginia, or East Tennessee. He'd had guys from that area in his platoon. One of them had been the best shot he'd ever met.