“It’ll be alive,” said Parks.
I had a local anesthetic and watched the whole business through a series of mirrors. It was fascinating; and when I was finished, I was hungry as could be. I went upstairs, had dinner in my room, and thought some more.
While I was thinking, Parks suddenly buzzed me from the Market. “Captain Lee, Captain Lee — ” and then he got caught on something that sounded like choking.
“Is the kid all right?” I demanded.
“Oh, yeah, he’s fine. But Captain, the rest, they’re dying. They’re dying all over the place. I’ve lost half the supply already.”
“Has the radiation on our ship gone up?” My first thought was that the Destroyer had broken its promise and moved in on us. But the wreck of the Sigma-9 still drifted along with us.
“It’s you, Captain. Check yourself, that’s all I can think of. I checked your embryo, and it’s soaked with radiation. I can’t understand why it’s still alive. But it is, and doing very well. But some time or other, this place was blasted by enough hard gamma to upset everything and kill off half the stores here. Even I’m feeling a little woozy and had to undergo decontamination.”
“I see,” I said. “I’ll call you back and tell you what I find.”
I switched off and turned to the scintillator. It said that I had been dead since I arrived on the ship. I was going to phone Parks when I was interrupted by a beep. Judge Cartrite’s face came together on the screen.
“Captain, I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought this was something I’d better see to in person.”
“What is it?”
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to place you under arrest.”
“Arrest? For what?”
“Leela RT-857 vs. The Norm.”
“And aside from the trivia, how do I differ from the run of the mill?”
“It’s not trivial, Captain. You were pregnant. And in this City that’s unforgivable as well as illegal.”
“Who told you?” I wanted to know. I couldn’t imagine Parks giving out something like that.
But the answer when it came was all too believable. “Parks’s new assistant overheard.”
Chapter Ten
After a few more lines, the entries stopped.
Joneny closed the book. The boy, still in Joneny’s gell, was holding another book, a similar diary. “This one is Hodge’s,” he said. “Hodge, the executioner.”
Joneny took it, frowning, and as he turned through the laconic mentions of death after death, verses of the ballad threaded through his mind once more:
And the one-eyed woman who held her green-eyed child? The last few pages were in more detail. Hodge had written:
The trial is over now. It went very quickly. There was no defense. I was not there, but I heard.
I see her in the death cell every few hours when she walks slowly in front of the long thin window. Death is heavy on her shoulders. I do not think she is afraid. Once she stopped and called to me. I came over, opened the little door in the top so I could hear better, and she said: “Hodge, what’s happening in the rest of the City?”
“It’s in chaos,” I told her. “The rituals have gotten out of hand, and people have raided the web and are killing the One-Eyes. They go out in hunting parties now, with gas and spears. Ralf is dead, I know. I don’t go there anymore.”
She had looked calm before, but her face seemed struck now. “Can you get Parks here to see me?” she said softly.
“I’m not supposed to,” I said. “But I will, Captain.”
Parks, from the Market, hurried up there so fast he was panting. He looked at me like he wanted me to go away, but I couldn’t do that. So finally the Captain told him to go ahead anyway, that I could be trusted. When she said that, he glanced at me with hate and said, “Trusted to kill you?”
“That too,” said the Captain. “Go on, Parks, what about the child. Is it safe?”
He nodded. “They tried to break in, and a lot of the tubes were smashed. But after the first attack…well, I got an idea. You see, Captain, someone’s with us now.”
She frowned.
“After one of the raids on the web, when Ralf was killed, Merril came to us in the Market. She knows I’m friendly, anyway. And, well, the same way we took it out of you, we put it into her. She’ll hold it up until a week or so before normal labor would occur, and then we’ll remove it by Cesarean. At least it will be in a mobile container, and the stupid tube-smashing parties won’t get it.”
“Good,” I said.
“Just what does that child mean, Captain?” Parks asked. “There’s something special about it, isn’t there? It has to do with what happened on the Sigma-9?”
“That’s right.” And then she told him. It didn’t make too much sense to me. But she said a lot of scientific-sounding things, and at the end Parks said, “Then we will make it to the stars,” very slowly, very softly. Then, “They won’t get at it. The One-Eyes who’re left will raise it. Merril thought it was something like that. But I didn’t realize — ” He stopped. “Merril cried for you, Captain. When we were in the Market, there, talking about your execution, she — we cried.”
She just held on to the edge of the window, hard, and a muscle in her jaw jumped a few times. All she said was, “Make sure it lives.”
The last two entries in Hodge’s journaclass="underline"
“The riots are growing, they are threatening to come even here.”
And:
“Executed today, four o’clock in the afternoon, Captain Leela RT-857.”
Joneny turned to the Destroyer’s child. “It lived,” he said.
The boy nodded. “After I was grown, I could make as many duplicates as we wanted, without going through the whole process.”
Joneny suddenly frowned. “And that explains all your antics then. You, like your father, exist a little outside time, and that’s why the shimmering and the movement during time stop.” Suddenly Joneny frowned. “But the promise, he made her a promise, that you would someday reach the stars and be able to make contact!”
“He didn’t say when. Aren’t you going to take me back to the University for study?”
“Well, of course, but…” Suddenly Joneny began to laugh. “With your mind reading, you can make contact with any race. And that coupled with the extra-time facility, why, this might be the biggest discovery in galactic anthropology since…since I don’t even know!”
The boy nodded. “That’s what we were made for. We can take all the information back to my father, and he will digest it for you, and then we’ll give it to you. You’ll take us to the places where you want to make contact, and that’s what we’ll do.”
Joneny was about to burst. “And that’s living up to the promise more than ever, because you’ll be making contact for not only half humans, but for them all, the great-grandchildren of completely genetic humans as well. And you’ll be sort of a go-between for you and your father. Are you in contact with him all the time, no matter where he is and no matter where you are?”
The boy tilted his head and nodded. “My father and I are one,” he said.
—
Back in his cruiser, Joneny once more reviewed the whole of “The Ballad of Beta-2” and marveled at how clear it seemed now. The story of Leela’s attempt to save her people was as immediate to him through those compressed verses as many incidents he had lived through. Who had written the ballad? he wondered. Some last One-Eye? Or perhaps someone from the official sector in whom impotent compassion turned potently to words? He was already planning how to make use of the Destroyer’s Children in his research into Creton III, yet through his planning, still the closing verse of the hymn — it was a hymn, in a way — came back: