“Probably is,” gasped China. “A line of oxygen-rich, punky tissue, perhaps even tissue laced with the propellant fuel.”
“What is it firing off? Seeds?”
“Spore cases,” China murmured. “Probably.” Then she had no time to say anything more, as she and the med-tech struggled to let a seemingly reluctant child come forth into the world which might survive barely long enough to receive it.
• When the last of the Central Management people had departed for the heights, they had left the Baidee prisoners behind to comfort themselves with a final word from Dern Blass.
“Consider your sentence interrupted. You can go back to Thyker through your Door, the way you came.”
Since every member of Churry’s group knew that the Combat Door, which they had disassembled and moved to CM as their first act upon reaching Hobbs Land, was losing about twenty percent of its shipments on a random basis, the Baidee decided to put off escaping through it until the last possible minute. They did draw lots for the order of escape, so there would be no confusion when the time came. Their only alternative action, self-defense, depended upon their being furnished with weapons. They had already sent a dozen pleas to Thyker, one after the other, hoping at least one would get through. Now they repeated the exercise. It would have been wiser, they all knew, to be somewhere else, but if they were somewhere else, they couldn’t use the Door.
“What are they like?” asked Shan Damzel from a dry mouth.
“They, who?” responded Churry.
“The soldiers of Enforcement?”
“I don’t think anyone knows, except the people who made them and the people who maintain them.”
“If you want to know,” said Mordy Trust, who was scanning the horizon with a long-distance viewer, “Look here. I think the first one just showed up.”
They shared the viewer to look toward the west where a lurching monument clanked along the horizon, a thing the size of the barracks in which they lived, bristling with turrets and eyes and lashing tentacles.
“Did you ask Thyker to send de-bond rifles?” someone asked plaintively. “You did specify de-bonders, didn’t you?”
Above them in the sky, something popped. It was a small sound, like a cork withdrawn from some aerial bottle. Haze spread across the sky, covering the stars, which twinkled briefly green.
• On Authority, Lurilile crept mouselike through enigmatic spaces. Now and then she would cry out, “A key for the last lock,” her voice falling to silence among crates and sacks and against walls of dials. Wherever the last lock was, she had not found it. Perhaps Rasiel Plum had been wrong. Perhaps there was no last lock in Supply. Perhaps it was in Administration, or Environment, or Planetary Liaison.
She went back to the temporary worker’s quarters and reassured herself that the Door was there. She set it for Ahabar and left it at the ready, needing only the push of a button to set off. Why had no one come through this Door to help her? Why was she still alone?
She went back to the monitoring screens and checked the upper levels. Among the ruins there were moving blobs. At first she did not identify them. When she realized what they were, she could not at first believe they were there at all, though it was easy to imagine what had happened. Someone had left a Door open. A Door between Ninfadel and Authority. Now Porsa had come to Authority. Porsa had come to Authority, and she, Lurilile had left a Door on Authority open to Ahabar.
She watched in awe as a soldier of Enforcement reduced a Porsa to bubbling stew with a flame gun. When the soldier moved on, the unburned remnants blobbed themselves up and began sliming off in all directions. If they found something to eat, shortly there would be twenty Porsa where one had been before.
Lurilile Ornice, daughter of the Chief Counselor of Ahabar, bent double and retched. Then she went back to the Door to Ahabar and shut it down. The Porsa were intelligent, but they were not familiar with Door operation. They would slime through an open portal, but they were not likely to program one for a destination.
She went to the vestibule, got into the car and set her destination as Noxious Waste. The Door which led out of Noxious Waste had only one destination. She went to that Door, keyed it to continuous feed, and locked it on that setting. Then she found her way back to the Supply area, not by car but through long corridors with many compartments. She opened every gate and locked it open, every hatch and locked it open. Some doors without locks she wedged, to be sure they could not swing shut. Once more in Supply, she found the protein stores and went back to Noxious Waste, strewing protein chunks behind her, leaving a clear trail. Then she left Noxious Waste by car and made her way into the wall-ducts once more. It was futile to search Supply for the lock any longer. Instead, she would work her way to the small robing room behind the Authority Chambers, hiding in the walls until after the Porsa left.
They would leave eventually, she assured herself over a bubbling hysteria which threatened to break forth. They would swallow every living thing they could, and once whatever they had swallowed died, they would digest it. That was the nice thing about Porsa, they never started to digest you while you were still alive. If the Porsa got as far as Supply, they would find a trail leading them to Noxious Waste. In Noxious Waste, they would find an open Door. If they decided to go on exploring through that Door, it would take them into the heart of Big Sun and nowhere else.
Lurilile argued with herself whether she would report her destructive and genocidal actions to Native
