Hatching the Phoenix

CHAPTER VIII

There wasn’t any doubt about it. The Crabbers were industriously killing each other in a kind of aerial combat that was right out of the old stories of World War I. I couldn’t see much of the planes that were shooting the blimps down, but they were really there, and what was going on was a real old-fashioned dogfight.

I don’t know what I had hoped to see when we brought the long-dead Crabbers back to some kind of life. But that definitely wasn’t it. When the scenes changed — Hans had been assiduous in zooming down to wherever on the planet’s surface things were going on —it didn’t improve. It got worse. I saw a harbor crammed with surface vessels, where a great river joined the sea; but some of the ships were on fire, and others appeared to be sinking. “Submarines did that, I think,” Hypatia judged. “Or it could possibly be from bombing planes or mines, but my money’s on submarines.” Those strange patterns of heat in the cities weren’t a mystery any longer—the cities had been burned to the ground by incendiaries, leaving only glowing coals. Then, when we were looking down, on a plain where flashes of white and reddish light sparkled all over the area, we couldn’t see what was making them, but Hypatia had a guess for that, too. “Why,” she said, sounding interested, “I do believe we’re looking at a large-scale tank battle.”

And so on, and on.

So Hans’s promise had been kept. As soon as the magnification got a little better, it all did begin to make sense, just as the shipmind had promised. (I mean, if war makes any sense in the first place, that’s the sense the pictures made.) The robots on the dish were still slaving away at adding the final mirror segments, and the pictures kept getting better and better.

Well, I don’t know if I mean “better,” exactly. The pictures were certainly clearer and more detailed, in some cases I would have to say even more excruciatingly detailed. But what they all showed was rack and ruin and death and destruction.

And their war was so pointless! They didn’t have to bother killing each other. Their star would do it for them soon enough. All unknowing, every one of those Crabbers was racing toward a frightful death as their sun burst over them.

An hour earlier I had been pitying them for the fate that awaited them. But now I couldn’t say I thought their fate was all that unjust.

Hypatia was looking at me in that motherly way she sometimes assumes. “I’m afraid all this is disturbing for you, Klara,” she murmured. “Would it cheer you up to invite Mr. Tartch aboard? He’s calling. He says he wants to talk to you about the new pictures.”

“Sure he does,” I said, pretty sure that Bill really wanted to talk about why he didn’t deserve being treated so standoffishly by me. “No. Tell him I’m asleep and don’t want to be disturbed. And leave me alone for a while.”

As soon as she had left and the door had closed behind her, I actually did throw myself onto my big, round bed. I didn’t sleep, though. I just lay there, staring at myself in the mirror on the ceiling and doing my best not to think about anything.

Unfortunately, that’s not something I’m good at. I could get myself to not think about those damn nasty Crabbers, but then I found my mind quickly turned itself to thinking whether it was better to let Bill Tartch hang or tell him to come in and then have a knock-down, drag-out, breaking-up fight with him to get it all over with. And when I made myself stop thinking about Bill Tartch, I found myself wondering why I’d squandered a fairly hefty chunk of my surplus cash on poking into the lives of a race that didn’t know any better than to take a reasonably nice little planet and turn it into a charnel house.

I thought of calling Hypatia back in for another dull session of playing with my investments. I thought wistfully of taking another look at my island. And then I thought, screw it. I got myself into this thing. I might as well go ahead and see it through. . . .

But a more pleasant thought had been stirring in the background of my mind, so first there was something else I wanted from Hypatia.

I put on the rest of my clothes and went out to where she was reclining grace­fully on the couch, just as though she’d been lounging there all along. I’m sure she had been watching those charnel-house scenes as attentively as anyone on the Phoenix ship—the difference being, of course, that Hypatia didn’t have to bother with turning the optical display on for her own needs. But I needed it, so she asked politely, “Shall I display the data for you again, Klara?”

“In a minute,” I said. “First, tell me all about Mark Rohrbeck.”

I expected one of those tolerantly knowing looks from her. I got it, too. But she obediently began to recite all his stats. Mark’s parents had died when he was young, and he had been brought up by his grandfather, who had once made his living as a fisherman on Lake Superior. “Mostly the old man fished for sea lampreys — know what they are, Klara? They’re ugly things. They have big sucking disks instead of jaws. They attach themselves to other fish and suck their guts out until they die. I don’t think you’d want to eat a sea lamprey yourself, but they were about all that was left in the lake. Mr. Rohrbeck sold them for export to Europe —people there thought they were a delicacy. They said they tasted like escargot. Then, of course, the food factories came along and put him out of business — “

“Get back to Mark Rohrbeck,” I ordered. “I want to hear about the man himself. Briefly.”

“Oh. Sorry. Well, he got a scholarship at the University of Minnesota, did well, went on to grad school at MIT, made a pretty fair reputation in computer science, married, had two kids, but then his wife decided there was a dentist she liked better than Rohrbeck, so she dumped him. And as I’ve mentioned before,” she said appreciatively, “he does have really great genes. Does that cover it?”

I mulled that over for a moment, then said, “Just about. Don’t go drawing any conclusions from this, do you hear?”

“Certainly, Klara,” she said, but she still had that look.

I sighed. “All right. Now turn that damn thing back on.”

“Of course, Klara,” she said, unsurprised, and did. “I’m afraid it hasn’t been getting any better.”

It hadn’t. It was just more of the same. I watched doggedly for a while, and then I said, “All right, Hypatia. I’ve seen enough.”

She made it disappear, looking at me curiously. “There’ll be better images when they finish with the mirror. By then we should be able to see actual individual Crabbers.”

“Lovely,” I said, not meaning it, and then I burst out. “My God, what’s the matter with those people? There’s plenty of room on the planet for all of them. Why didn’t they just stay home and live in peace?”

It wasn’t meant to be a real question, but Hypatia answered it for me anyway. “What do you expect? They’re meat people,” she said succinctly.

I wasn’t letting her get away with that. “Come on, Hypatia! Human beings are meat people, too, and we don’t go tearing halfway around the world just to kill each other!”

“Oh, do you not? What a short memory you have, Klara dear. Think of those twentieth-century world wars. Think of the Crusades, tens of thousands of Euro­peans dragging themselves all the way around the Mediterranean Sea to kill as many Moslems as they could. Think of the Spanish conquistadors, murdering their way across the Americas. Of course,” she added’, “those people were all Christians.”

I blinked at her. “You think what we’re looking at is a religious war?”

She shrugged gracefully. “Who knows? Meat people don’t need reasons to kill each other, dear.”