Shades of the White Messiah the Indians thought Cortes was-- but that's history, and you've made history this time, I promise." And on he went until at last, unable to bear it anymore, I tried-- indeed, I'm still trying-- to explain to him that what had happened on the mountain was not for the corporation.

  "Nonsense," he said. "Couldn't have done anything better for the corporation if you'd stayed up a week trying to think of it."

  I tried again. I told him about the men who had died, what I owed to them.

  "Sentiment. Sentiment's good in a man. Nothing to risk your life over, but you were tired."

  And I tried again, fool that I was, and explained about the vow, and about my feelings as I decided to carry the thing through to its conclusion. And at last Tack fell silent and thought about what I had said, and left the room.

  That was when the visits with the psychologists began, and while they found me, of course, perfectly competent mentally (trust Tack to overreact, and they knew it), when I requested that I be transferred from the planet, they found a loophole that let me go without breaking contract or losing pay.

  But the word was out throughout the corporation that I had gone native on Worthing, that I had actually performed an arcane rite involving blood, ice, a mountain peak, and a dead man's half-digested dinner. I could bear the rumors of madness. It is the laughter that is unbearable, because those who cannot dream of the climb to the mountain, who did not know the men who died for me and for Crofe-- how can they help but laugh?

  And how can I help but hate them?

  Which is why I request again my retirement from the corporation. I will accept half retirement, if that is necessary. I'll accept no retirement, in fact, if the record can only stay clear. I will not accept a retirement that lists me as mentally incompetent. I will not accept a retirement that forces me to live anywhere but on Ylymyn Island.

  I know that it is forbidden, but these are unusual circumstances. I will certainly be accepted there; I will acquit myself with dignity; I wish only to live out my life with people who understand honor perhaps better than any others I have known of.

  It is absurd, I know. You will deny my request, I know, as you have a hundred times before. But I hoped that if you knew my story, knew as best I could tell it the whys behind my determination to leave the corporation, that perhaps you would understand why I have not been able to forget that Pru told me, "Now you are Ice, too; and now your soul shall be set free in the Sky." It is not the hope of a life after death-- I have no such hope.

  It is the hope that at my death honorable men will go to some trouble to bid me farewell.

  Indeed, it is no hope at all, but rather a certainty. I, like every modern man, have clung since childhood to a code, to a law that struggled to give a purpose to life. All the laws are rational; all achieve a purpose.

  But on Ylymyn, where the laws were irrational and the purposes meaningless, I found another thing, the thing behind the law, the thing that is itself worth clinging to regardless of the law, the thing that takes even mad laws and makes them holy. And by all that's holy, let me go back and cling to it again.

  I PUT MY BLUE GENES ON

  Orson Scott Card

  It had taken three weeks to get there-- longer than any man in living memory had been in space, and there were four of us crammed into the little Hunter III skipship. It gave us a hearty appreciation for the pioneers, who had had to crawl across space at a tenth of the speed of light. No wonder only three colonies ever got founded. Everybody else must have eaten each other alive after the first month in space.

  Harold had taken a swing at Amauri the last day, and if we hadn't hit the homing signal I would have ordered the ship turned around to go home to N£ncamais, which was mother and apple pie to everybody but me-- I'm from Pennsylvania.

  But we got the homing signal and set the computer to scanning the old maps, and after a few hours found ourselves in stationary orbit over Prescott, Arizona.

  At least that's what the geologer said, and computers can't lie. It didn't look like what the old books said Arizona should look like.

  But there was the homing signal, broadcasting in Old English: "God bless America, come in, safe landing guaranteed." The computer assured us that in Old English the word guarantee was not obscene, but rather had something to do with a statement being particularly trustworthy-- we had a chuckle over that one.

  But we were excited, too. When great-great-great-great to the umpteenth power grandpa and grandma upped their balloons from old Terra Firma eight hundred years ago, it had been to escape the ravages of microbiological warfare that was just beginning (a few germs in a sneak attack on Madagascar, quickly spreading to epidemic proportions, and South Africa holding the world ransom for the antidote; quick retaliation with virulent cancer; you guess the rest). And even from a couple of miles out in space, it was pretty obvious that the war hadn't stopped there. And yet there was this homing signal.

  "Obviamente autom tica," Amauri observed.

  "Que m quina, que nƒo pofa em tantos anos, bichinha! Nƒo acredito!" retorted Harold, and I was afraid I might have a rerun of the day before.

  "English," I said. "Might as well get used to it. We'll have to speak it for a few days, at least."

  Vladimir sighed. "Merda."

  I laughed. "All right, you can keep your scatological comments in lingua deporto."

  "Are you so sure there's anybody alive down there?" Vladimir asked.

  What could I say? That I felt it in my bones? So I just threw a sponge at him, which scattered drinking water all over the cabin, and for a few minutes we had a waterfight. I know, discipline, discipline. But we're not a land army up here, and what the hell. I'd rather have my crew acting like crazy children than like crazy grown-ups.

  Actually, I didn't believe that at the level of technology our ancestors had reached in 1992 they could build a machine that would keep running until 2810.

  Somebody had to be alive down there-- or else they'd gotten smart. Again, the surface of old Terra didn't give many signs that anybody had gotten smart.

  So somebody was alive down there. And that was exactly what we had been sent to find out.

  They complained when I ordered monkeysuits.

  "That's old Mother Earth down there!" Harold argued. For a halibut with an ike of 150 he sure could act like a baiano sometimes.

  "Show me the cities," I answered. "Show me the millions of people running around taking the sun in their rawhide summer outfits."

  "And there may be germs," Amauri added, in his snottiest voice, and immediately I had another argument going between two men brown enough to know better.

  "We will follow," I said in my nasty captain's voice, "standard planetary procedure, whether it's Mother Earth or mother--"

  And at that moment the monotonous homing signal changed.

  "Please respond, please identify, please respond, or we'll blast your asses out of the sky."

  We responded. And soon afterward found ourselves in monkeysuits wandering around in thick pea soup up to our navels (if we could have located our navels without a map, surrounded as they were with lifesaving devices) waiting for somebody to open a door.

  A door opened and we picked ourselves up off a very hard floor. Some of the pea soup had fallen down the hatch with us. A gas came into the sterile chamber where we waited, and pretty soon the pea soup settled down and turned into mud.

  "Mariajoseijesus!" Amauri muttered. "Aquela merda vivia!"

  "English," I muttered into the monkey mouth, "and clean up your language."

  "That crap was alive," Amauri said, rephrasing and cleaning up his language.

  "And now it isn't, but we are." It was hard to be patient.

  For all we knew, what passed for humanity here liked eating spacemen. Or sacrificing them to some local deity. We passed a nervous four hours in that cubicle. And I had already laid about five hopeless escape plans when a door opened, and a person appeared.

  He was dressed in a white farmersuit, or at least close to it. He was very short, but smiled pleasantly and beckoned. Proof positive. Living human beings.

  Mission successful. Now we know there was no cause for rejoicing, but at that moment we rejoiced. Backslapping, embracing our little host (afraid of crushing him for a moment), and then into the labyrinth of U.S. MB Warfare Post 004.

  They were all very small-- not more than 140 centimeters tall-- and the first thought that struck me was how much humanity had grown since then. The stars must agree with us, I thought.

  Till quiet, methodical Vladimir, looking as always, white as a ghost, pointedly turned a doorknob and touched a lightswitch (it actually was mechanical). They were both above eye level for our little friends. So it wasn't us colonists who had grown-- it was our cousins from old Gaea who had shrunk.

  We tried to catch them up on history, but all they cared about was their own politics. "Are you American?" they kept asking.

  "I'm from Pennsylvania," I said, "but these humble-butts are from N£ncamais.

  They didn't understand.

  "N£ncamais. It means 'never again.' In lingua deporto."

  Again puzzled. But they asked another question.

  "Where did your colony come from?" One-track minds.

  "Pennsylvania was settled by Americans from Hawaii. We lay no bets as to why they named the damned planet Pennsylvania--"

  One of the little people piped up, "That's obvious. Cradle of liberty. And them?"

  "From Brazil," I said.

  They conferred quietly on that one, and then apparently decided that while Brazilian ancestry wasn't a capital offense, it didn't exactly confer human status.

  From then on, they made no attempt to talk to my crew, just watched them carefully, and talked to me.

  Me they loved.

  "God bless America," they said.

  I felt agreeable. "God bless America," I answered.

  Then, again in unison, they made an obscene suggestion as to what I should do with the Russians. I glanced at my compatriots and fellow travelers and shrugged. I repeated the little folks' wish for the Russian's sexual bliss.

  Fact time. I won't bore by repeating all the clever questioning and probing that elicited the following information. Partly because it didn't take any questioning.

  They seemed to have been rehearsing for years what they would say to any visitors from outer space, particularly the descendants of the long-lost colonists.

  It went this way:

  Germ warfare had began in earnest about three years after we left. Three very cleverly designed cancer viruses had been loosed on the world, apparently by no one at all, since both the Russians and the Americans denied it and the Chinese were all dead. That was when the scientists knuckled down and set to work.

  Recombinant DNA had been a rough enough science when my ancestors took off for the stars-- and we hadn't developed it much since then. When you're developing raw planets you have better things to do with your time. But under the pressure of warfare, the science of do-it-yourself genetics had a field day on planet Earth.

  "We are constantly developing new strains of viruses and bacteria," they said.

  "And constantly we are bombarded by the Russians' latest weapons." They were hard-pressed. There weren't many of them in that particular MB Warfare Post, and the enemy's assaults were clever.

  And finally the picture became clear. To all of us at once. It was Harold who said, "Fossa-me, mƒe! You mean for eight hundred years you bunnies've been down here?"

  They didn't answer until I asked the question-- more politely, too, since I had noticed a certain set to those inscrutable jaws when Harold called them bunnies.

  Well, they were bunnies, white as white could be, but it was tasteless for Harold to call them that, particularly in front of Vladimir, who had more than a slight tendency toward white skin himself.

  "Have you Americans been trapped down here ever since the war began?" I asked, trying to put awe into my voice, and succeeding. Horror isn't that far removed from awe, anyway.

  They beamed with what I took for pride. And I was beginning to be able to interpret some of their facial expressions. As long as I had good words for America, I was all right.

  "Yes, Captain Kane Kanea, we and our ancestors have been here from the beginning."

  "Doesn't it get a little cramped?"

  "Not for American soldiers, Captain. For the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness we would sacrifice anything. " I didn't ask how much liberty and happiness-pursuing were possible in a hole in the rock. Our hero went on: "We fight on that millions may live, free, able to breathe the clean air of America unoppressed by the lashes of Communism."

  And then they broke into a few choice hymns about purple mountains and yellow waves with a rousing chorus of God blessing America. It all ended with a mighty shout: "Better dead than red." When it was over we asked them if we could sleep, since according to our ship's time it was well past bedding-down hour.

  They put us in a rather small room with three cots in it that were far too short for us. Didn't matter. We couldn't possibly be comfortable in our monkeysuits anyway.

  Harold wanted to talk in lingua deporto as soon as we were alone, but I managed to convince him without even using my monkeysuit's discipliner button that we didn't want them to think we were trying to keep any secrets. We all took it for granted that they were monitoring us.

  And so our conversation was the sort of conversation that one doesn't mind having overheard by a bunch of crazy patriots.

  Amauri: "I am amazed at their great love for America, persisting so many centuries." Translation: "What the hell got these guys so nuts about something as dead as the ancient U.S. empire?"

  Me: "Perhaps it is due to such unwavering loyalty to the flag, God, country, and liberty" (I admit I was laying it on thick, but better to be safe, etc.) "that they have been able to survive so long." Translation: "Maybe being crazy fanatics is all that's kept them alive in this hole."

  Harold: "I wonder how long we can stay in this bastion of democracy before we must reluctantly go back to our colony of the glorious American dream."

  Translation: "What are the odds they don't let us go? After all, they're so loony they might think we're spies or something."

  Vladimir: "I only hope we can learn from them. Their science is infinitely beyond anything we have hitherto developed with our poor resources." Translation:

  "We're not going anywhere until I have a chance to do my job and check out the local flora and fauna. Eight hundred years of recombining DNA has got to have something we can take back home to N£ncamais."

  And so the conversation went until we were sick of the flowers and perfume that kept dropping out of our mouths. Then we went to sleep.

  The next day was guided tour day, Russian attack day, and damn near good-bye to the crew of the good ship Pollywog.

  The guided tour kept us up hill and down dale for most of the morning. Vladimir was running the tricking computer from his monkeysuit. Mine was too busy analyzing the implications of all their comments while Amauri was absorbing the science and Harold was trying to figure out how to pick his nose with mittens on.

  Harold was along for the ride-- a weapons expert, just in case. Thank God.

  We began to be able to tell one little person from another. George Washington Steiner was our usual guide. The big boss, who had talked to us through most of the history lesson the day before, was Andrew Jackson Wallichinsky. And the guy who led the singing was Richard Nixon Dixon. The computer told us those were names of beloved American presidents, with surnames added.

  And my monkeysuit's analysis also told us that the music leader was the real big boss, while Andy Jack Wallichinsky was merely the director of scientific research. Seems that the politicians ran the brains, instead of vice versa.

  Our guide, G.W. Steiner, was very proud of his assignment. He showed us everything. I mean, even with the monkeysuit keeping three-fourths of the gravity away from me, my feet were sore by lunchtime (a quick sip of recycled xixi and coc¢). And it was impressive. Again, I give it unto you in abbreviated form: Even though the installation was technically airtight, in fact the enemy viruses and bacteria could get in quite readily. It seems that early in the twenty-first century the Russians had stopped making any kind of radio broadcasts. (I know, that sounds like a non sequitur. Patience, patience.) At first the Americans in 004

  had thought they had won. And then, suddenly, a new onslaught of another disease. At this time the 004 researchers had never been personally hit by any diseases-- the airtight system was working fine. But their commander at that time, Rodney Fletcher, had been very suspicious.

  "He thought it was a commie trick," said George Washington Steiner. I began to see the roots of superpatriotism in 004's history.

  So Rodney Fletcher set the scientists to working on strengthening the base personnel's antibody system. They plugged away at it for two weeks and came up with three new strains of bacteria that selectively devoured practically anything that wasn't supposed to be in the human body, just in time, too, because then that new disease hit. It wasn't stopped by the airtight system, because instead of being a virus, it was just two little amino acids and a molecule of lactose, put together just so. It fit right through the filters. It sailed right through the antibiotics. It entered right into the lungs of every man, woman, and child in 004. And if Rodney Fletcher hadn't been a paranoid, they all would have died. As it was, only about half lived.

  Those two amino acids and the lactose molecule had the ability to fit right into that spot on a human DNA and then make the DNA replicate that way. Just one little change-- and pretty soon nerves just stopped working.

  Those two amino acids and the lactose molecule system worked just well enough to slow down the disease's progress until a plug could be found that fit even better into that spot on the DNA, keeping the Russians' little devices out.