Homegoing

Chapter 21

The process of coming of age is not easy for any organism, anywhere in the universe. Insects cocoon themselves and emerge winged, their larval stages forgotten. Crustaceans painfully molt and often enough are eaten by predators before the new shells form; snakes shed their skins, birds leave the safety of the nest, young carnivores are driven from their dams. It is usually painful. Sometimes it is fatal. It is not much better for human beings, even though the change is only partly physiological for them. When a human child ceases to be a child his rites of passage are as painful, and as dangerous, as for any softshell crab. The process of maturing is difficult for anyone, but maybe most difficult for those who—like Lysander Washington—have thought they already were mature, all along.

Lysander was not surprised to find them approaching the InterSec building. “Are you going to show me some more pictures of what the Hakh’hli are building?” he demanded.

“Not this time,” Marguery said, flashing her badge to the guard. “They’re still doing it, though. Fast.”

“And do you still think it’s a weapon?”

She gave him an impenetrable look. “No, I don’t think that is a weapon any more. Give it a rest, Lysander. You’ll hear it all. Here’s Ham Boyle.”

The strange thing about Hamilton Boyle was that, this time, he wasn’t smiling. The champion smiler had a set, determined, unyielding expression on his face. He didn’t say anything until they had gone through the ritual of the passes, the unlocking of doors, and the elevators. Lysander noticed that this time the elevator went down instead of up, and for quite a distance. Both Marguery and Hamilton Boyle watched the numbers flick across the indicator as though they were stock-market quotations on a bad day.

“Here we go,” Boyle said at last, ushering them into a small room. It was not much larger than a cell, Lysander noted as warily he entered. “Sit down,” Boyle commanded, waving Sandy to the strongest-looking of the chairs. There was a smaller one right next to it that Marguery could have taken, but she ignored it. She walked across the room without looking at Sandy, to take a stand by a desk with a keyboard and a video screen; behind her was a slatted thing of the kind they called a venetian blind. The slats were tilted so that no light from the other side came through. But no light could, Sandy thought, since the building had no outside windows.

Sandy frowned. His senses were all tensely alert. This was a hostile place. There was an almost inaudible sound now and then, like a distant keening. It made him uneasy, but he couldn’t be sure of what he was hearing.

“So what are these secrets you don’t want the Hakh’hli to know?” he demanded.

Boyle blinked at him in surprise. “You’ve got it backward. We’re talking about secrets the Hakh’hli didn’t want us to know. Like their plans to attack us.”

In spite of everything Marguery had said to him, the idea remained preposterous to Lysander. “They don’t have any plans like that,” he said positively.

“But, Sandy,” Marguery put in reasonably, “they do. They want to stay here. They want to take over the continent of Africa. They’re going to propose that they will settle for building habitats in orbit around the Earth, but that’s only a stall; what they really want is to live here. In Africa—for openers, anyway.”

“What do you mean, habitats?”

“Big metal shells in space, Lysander,” Boyle said somberly. “Like spaceships, but immense. They’ve got all those millions of eggs waiting to be hatched. They want a place to hatch them.”

“I don’t believe one word of that!” Sandy shouted, leaning forward. His chair creaked alarmingly. He paid no attention. He added, “Even if it were true, what’s wrong with it? They wouldn’t hurt anything on Earth as long as they stayed in orbit, would they?”

“But, Sandy, dear,” Marguery said gently, “they aren’t going to stay in orbit. Once all those unhatched eggs grow up, they’ll move in. Polly told us so.”

Lysander stared at her in total shock. That was the most preposterous thing either of them had said yet. He tried to make them understand. “Polly? No way! She wouldn’t ever tell you anything she wasn’t supposed to—if there were any secrets to tell in the first place, I mean.”

“She didn’t have any choice,” Marguery said somberly.

He glared at her. “What are you talking about? You couldn’t make her. What would you do, threaten her? Torture her? But I told you that wouldn’t work!”

Marguery sighed. “But you also told us what would,” she said, in a leaden tone. She got up and pulled a cord on the venetian blind.

Behind the blind was a window, apparently of oneway glass. Behind the glass was Polly.

Lysander stared incredulously. Polly! Alive! But it was Polly as he had never known her before, crouched bedraggled and whimpering before a communications screen. Marguery turned up a sound control, and the almost inaudible pleading voice Sandy had heard before grew louder. It was Polly’s voice. Begging. In Hakh’hli and in English: “Please! My eggs! Don’t let them spoil!”

Lysander shuddered in horror. The arm of his chair splintered as he pushed on it to rise. Half-stumbling, he glared up at them. “You bastards!” he shouted. “How could you?” He couldn’t find any other words; so Marguery, too, had betrayed him; so there was no one at all Sandy could trust!

Boyle flinched momentarily before Sandy’s rage, but stood his ground. “We had no choice,” he said sharply.

He denied nothing. Sandy listened, appalled at what they had done. To threaten a Hakh’hli female with the destruction of fertile eggs—it was cruelty inconceivable! And how had they managed to make them fertile, without a Hakh’hli male to do the job?

Marguery, face white and expressionless, gave him the answer. “But we did have a male, Sandy. We had your friend Obie.”

It was getting crazier—and worse! “But Obie is dead!”

She nodded. “But we had his body, you see. We didn’t tell you the truth at the time. We didn’t cremate his body. We gave it to a laboratory for investigation. All right, for dissection, then! What else could we do? We had to know all we could!” She was looking pleadingly at Lysander, but he had no compassion left to give her. She went on, “And we saved all the tissue samples, frozen. Including his sperm. When Polly was in stun time we—we took her prisoner. And then we brought her here and inseminated her.”

“Show him the tapes,” Boyle ordered.

Imagined horrors were not worse than real ones. What Sandy saw as the screen began to light up was nastier even than he had guessed. First they showed Polly waking up, impregnated. She was already beginning to lay her clutch of eggs—half-dazed from stun time, bewildered, confused—it was by all odds the most unhappy egg-laying Lysander had ever witnessed.

Then he heard Boyle’s voice, speaking to her through a microphone. “Hippolyta, listen to me. You are our prisoner of war. You cannot leave this room. You will be fed, but you can’t leave and you can’t communicate.”

Sandy tore his eyes off the screen and stared at the unhappy reality behind the one-way glass. “Polly!” he shouted. “I’m here! I won’t let them do this to you!”

“She can’t hear you,” Boyle said coldly, “and you can’t help her. Listen!”

On the screen she was saying bravely, “. . . my people will know at once!”

“Your people,” said Boyle’s disembodied voice, “will be told you insisted on going skin-diving by yourself and drowned, and your body was lost.”

“They won’t believe that!”

“They’ll believe you do foolishly risky things, Hippolyta. They won’t doubt it. They’ll remember Oberon.”

On the screen Lysander could see her shaking with fear and rage. Frantically she cried, “My eggs!”

Hamilton Boyle’s icy voice: “There is a supply of nutrient fluid by the freezer. You may do whatever is necessary for them, and then store them in the freezer. We believe the system is as good as the one on the ship. The eggs will be all right—if you tell us what we want to know.”

“Turn it off!” Sandy shouted. “Marguery! You’re a shit!” He glared at her, cold and furious. She returned his look without speaking, but Boyle spoke for her.

“What she is, boy,” he said heavily, “is a human being. Aren’t you? Don’t you want to protect the human race?”

“Against what? The Hakh’hli aren’t going to hurt you!”

Boyle shook his head. “Before you make a bigger fool of yourself than you already have, listen to what Polly says. Get to the important part, Marguery.”

The picture flickered and whirred forward; and then Sandy did listen. With mounting horror.

It was not simply that she confirmed everything Marguery had suggested. Yes, the Major Seniors were determined to have Africa for their own; yes, all those frozen eggs were to be allowed to hatch to fill the continent. Yes, if that were not feasible, then they would insist on building a lot of great orbital habitats out of asteroidal materials; but, Polly confessed, that was only a temporary stratagem. When the eggs were hatched and grown and ready, how could the Earth humans prevent the Hakh’hli from taking whatever they liked? All that was horrifying enough for Lysander to hear.

But when she talked drearily of the landers that were being prepared to move into Low Earth Orbit he sat up in shock. He glanced at Boyle, bewildered. “But—what are they going to do there?”

Boyle said succinctly, “Bombardment.” He turned off the tape, waiting for Lysander to speak.

“You mean like bomber airplanes over Hiroshima? But the Hakh’hli don’t have anything like bombs—I’m sure of that! almost sure,” he amended.

Boyle was shaking his head. “They don’t need bombs, Lysander. They’re there already. Don’t you remember, we talked about the possibility at the science center? Eighteen thousand big objects in orbit, and the Hakh’hli can time them so they all hit cities.”

“Like Albuquerque,” Marguery put in. “Like what almost happened to Perth.”

“And if that didn’t force us to submit,” said Boyle, “you know what they’ve got in reserve. The entire asteroid belt.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he sighed and looked straight at Sandy. “There’s a lot more, if you want to hear it.”

“I don’t think I do,” Lysander said bitterly. “I’ve had enough bad news for one day.”

Marguery said diffidently, “It isn’t all bad, you know. That thing they’re building? It’s just a communications antenna. Polly said they haven’t heard anything from their home world in centuries, and they’re hoping with a big enough antenna they can at least hear if they’re still broadcasting.”

“They’re lost, you know,” Boyle said brutally. “They’re getting desperate, too. So what about it, Lysander? The ball’s in your court now. Make up your mind. Which side are you on?”

“Do I have any choice?” Lysander flared.

“Not much. You can have an accident as easily as Hippolyta. But if you want to help us—”

“Help you how?”

Boyle hesitated. “We have a plan,” he said. “We can make it work with or without your help, but it will go better with it. That big ship is pretty vulnerable right now. But we don’t have a lot of time. Those Hakh’hli landing vessels could be getting ready to nudge some big pieces into place right now, targeting Seattle or Hudson City.”

Lysander looked at each of them in turn, finishing with Marguery Darp. There was nothing to read in her face. She was quite expressionless as she waited for him to speak.

“Tell me what the plan is,” said Lysander at last. It was his first venture into adult guile.