Moonbane

he used it as a shield between us.

“I’ll let you work with me,” I offered, having difficulty with the human words. In my mind, the Song of Blood sought to overwhelm speech. I held my right paw out, claws up. “I’ll make it painless.”

He looked horrified by the reasonable tone of my voice. “Jesus, Jase, can’t you fight it?”

“I don’t want to fight it,” I explained. “This is what I am now.”

He fumbled in a pocket of his jumpsuit and brought out a book. “What about this? You were going to inscribe it for me.”

My right arm scythed a graceful arc toward him, cutting the book from his hand. Its severed pages floated magically around us.

“Goddamn it, isn’t there anything human left about you? Do you really want to do this to your own people?”

I threw back my head and brayed.

He reached beneath the copilot’s seat and produced his Uzi. I leaped at him, knocking the gun aside before he could fire. It was all over very quickly.

Again, I went into a dream state. My mind traveled back with my ancestors, watched through their eyes the huge blue Earth rising above their Moon. I stared up through their thin, opaque, beautiful atmosphere, where the nights were clear and dark, high breaths of cloud sifting through the palest of blue skies during the day, fragile seas lapping leisurely at the shores of vast brown deserts, where palid rows of pyramids, dwellings in death of our fathers, stretched to the horizon.

The dream changed. I saw through my fathers’ eyes a later time, where I gasped for breath, saw the thinning air above me, felt the gulping gravitational thievery of the blue, rich, huge, fat, jovial, taunting Earth that mocked the sky above. A wave of hatred swelled within me—rage at the slow death of my race, the sucking of air from our betrayed planet, the gasping, bloodless deaths of our children, the dried oceans, the constant upheaval of our planet’s crust, the fiery volcanoes, the shattering of meteors, the triumph of desert and gray dust—

While that hateful blue Earth hung like a smugly smiling, life-bursting lamp over us, as we ready the deep pits of the sleeping, curled upon themselves in stasis, awaiting a day when the air returns and the deserts are once again green with life, and the Song of Blood fills the air…

I awoke from my trance. Pettis’s bones floated from the deck and scattered, victims of their own inertia. I breathed deep oxygen. My eyes focused on what surrounded me.

I heard howling, sounds of struggle.

Proctor thrashed wildly in his sleep restraint. A line of blood was drying on his arm. I controlled an urge to rip him open. Hartnet was sheathed in sweat, transformation taking place in his eyes. They had lightened from brown to dark yellow. His face had begun to shape, the brow pushing out, deepening, snout lengthening. He growled, and even now I sensed communion in his eyes.

“Soon,” I said to him.

~ * ~

Later. I have done everything I could tonight. I wait for orbit tomorrow. I sit in the captain’s chair, staring out at my homeland and feeling as if I am looking into the face of a nearing god. Proctor and Hartnet cry out now and again. They are more birth cries than ones of pain. By morning, they will be with me.

A half hour ago, Mission Control called frantically.

We did not check in when we were supposed to. I let their calls go unanswered.

Let them wonder.

There is nothing to do but wait, and watch the god above.

CHAPTER 27

Genesis

What more to tell?

I must write all of this down, awkward as it is for my hand to use a pen. I want to preserve this for our ancestors.

This morning, the Lexington swung automatically into orbit around our home. I continued to ignore communication with Mission Control. Hartnet said there was no need to contact Kramer until we need them.

I was afraid that Hartnet and Proctor might be uncontrollable when I unbound them this morning. But there were no problems. The light scratches I gave them produced, as I had hoped, a comparatively smooth transition.

Within two hours of their release, Proctor had recalculated the drop points, and Hartnet had recalibrated the timings for the nuclear devices. Wyatt assured me that his new calculations were infallible.

“They were first formulated by Dr. Baines,” he informed me with a glint in his eye.

By the time Hartnet and Proctor had finished their work, we were passing perigee on the near side. We sat in reverential silence, witnessing at close hand the area where the crater Aristarchus had once been. It was now a huge blasted depression, filled with the uncovered remains of our original civilization. Row upon row of tall spires thrust proudly into the sterile atmosphere. Some were broken at the top, chipped at the sides. Deep in the angry, red-eyed center of the volcanic hole, barely visible from our height, were vast stacks of glass storage spores. How right Doc had been—except that he had not made the final leap and deduced that the spores themselves were made of glass and had formed, when fused by volcanic action, the tektites that had so long baffled human astronomers.

The scene glided all too swiftly beneath us. Even as we watched, there was a silent flare of the red eye, and another mass of fused spores flew up and past us toward Earth. I knew the others were affected as I was, knowing that some of those spores had been inevitably destroyed during the immense volcanic explosion that had shot them out of the dead planet to the living one.

As the scene passed away beneath us, and we eclipsed the sunlit limb of the Moon and passed into the far side, I studied Hartnet and Proctor carefully, looking for reassurance.

“It will work,” Wyatt said thickly. “Don’t worry.”

I still wasn’t sure. “Perhaps we should leave things as they are—”

“They won’t give up as long as there’s a chance,”Hartnet growled. His amber eyes glowed. “We have to make sure they’re overwhelmed.”

Wyatt added, “And if it works—”

“Yes,” I said.

~ * ~

Two hours later. Hartnet went to work arming the bombs a little while ago, while I assisted Wyatt in opening the massive, long doors in the shuttle cargo bay. When Hartnet assured us that all was ready, we watched through the windows as Hartnet launched the bombs. We felt a slight bump as they were ejected from the bay. They spun off below us, the tiny jets of their rockets flaring into life after a count of twenty, spreading them like a formation of dancers. In a short while, their retro-rockets landed them as soft as cotton at their points around the far side.

In thirty hours, they will detonate, and then we will know.

~ * ~

Later. I have just finished speaking with Earth. I had to look away from Luna while I spoke with Mission Control; a sense of victory had inflamed me, and I wanted to howl and tell them their own destruction was imminent.

“What in hell has been going on?” Mission Control asked.

I struggled to keep my voice human. “Rogers and Pettis are dead.”

There was shock in the reply. “What in God’s name happened?”

“An oxygen tank blew while they were working on it.”

“Jesus.”

I asked them if they could guide us home.

“We can do that from the ground.” There was a pause. “What about the bombs?”

“We got them off,” I said. “Hartnet did his job well.”