by Bill Adams
“Arrange it right now,” I insisted. “Call the packet boat and tell the captain to hang on another forty-eight hours, because we’re leaving with him.”
“I don’t see how I could,” Bunny said.
“Well, let’s not argue,” I said reasonably, and, grabbing him by belt and collar, backed him up against the nearest wall. “Let’s just do what I say, and review the decision in the maturity of old age. All right?”
Limp, but glaring down at me from his greater height, he hissed, “Don’t get physical with me, playactor! At school I won two ribbons in Shih Ho!”
After enough of a pause I let him go. You never know—prep schools do offer the martial arts, while my own repertoire is limited to basic military stuff and a few dirty tricks.
“I could call the ship myself,” I said, “but our cover requires my aide to do it for me. Now get this: later today, in front of everyone, I’m going to ask you if you’ve made the call I ordered. The cover binds you, too.”
His face was sullen, but he said, “All right, all right. I’ll take care of it now and join you at the flitter. The radio is in the manager’s office.” I didn’t think to ask how he knew this. He wandered off without my bag, and I had to remind him to carry it.
Ariel found me soon after that. She suggested some tea to tide us over until breakfast at the Stone Hut site, and led me outside, through warm darkness and a jasmine-scented garden, toward the commissary. I noted with appreciation that she was less severely dressed today, her black slacks tailored to show off the tidy curves of her legs. Apologizing for my strategic bad temper of the day before, I said I hoped I’d be less of a bear this morning.
“Bear?”
Unsure whether it was the animal or the idiom that was unfamiliar, I tried “Grouch.”
She laughed so merrily that I wondered about that one, too. The fringe worlds just barely speak the same Interlingua, for all the efforts of universal education. And despite seven years in this century and a talent for mimicry, I still dated myself at times.
The garden path at our feet glowed dimly with guide lights, and she pointed out a few flowers; we exchanged the different names we knew them by. She remained attentive and amused.
All very ingratiating. She must have been an ambitious girl to have reached her present position in her late twenties, but she didn’t strike me as a sycophant. Just a healthy young woman marooned for months on a planet where the only men were off-limits, under her command. And I had something else going for me; I’d sensed it the day before when she looked over my uniform, and now, electrically, when she inquired about one of “my” service medals, actually brushing her fingers against it. Hint of a fetish? That entertaining possibility sent the blood rushing to my brain and elsewhere. Forty-eight hours would still leave tonight free. Screw everything up, Condé had said, in and out.
The commissary’s tea was as bracing as tea ever is. Ariel gave a lusty yawn. “I guess I’m ready to face Foyle now,” she said as we went outside again, heading for the lit end of the complex’s landing field.
“Foyle?”
“No first name, or at least she doesn’t use it. She’s the archaeologist you…didn’t care to see last night. Sir. Very bright, very talented. A wonderful person once you get to know her, but she can be hard to handle.” Some sleepy process of free association made her add, “A widow, I think.”
“She’s in charge of the dig?”
Ariel frowned. “No one’s in charge that I can see. They’re just guests, sir, amateurs on vacation.” She seemed a little embarrassed. “I asked Foyle to make the presentation because she’s the only one who might do it…coherently.”
The flitter stood in the center of a ring of bright lights, its blowers and foils trimmed in a military fashion. It was a heavy workhorse model, not the sleek executive bird I’d been expecting, with an extra impeller on each stubby wing for cargo lifts. And it was old, two or three times rebuilt; no advance on the military jobs I’d trained in so many years before. Bunny was making himself useful by kicking one of the tires.
A side access panel hung open, and as we approached, a pair of long legs emerged, feet first. When they found the tarmac, an equally lithe and slender torso followed, in a form-fitting dove-gray jumpsuit stained here and there with oil. The whole woman, when finally unfolded, was tall enough to look me level in the eyes, and I am not short. Her own eyes, above high cheekbones and an assertive straight nose, flashed green in the bright lights; their lids lent them a slight tilt that seemed to go with the touch of copper in her complexion.
I believe in first impressions, emblems, and omens. Foyle held a torque driver and a work light as if they were sword and scepter. Handsome rather than beautiful in her early thirties, she was still a little too good to be true, and I was almost relieved when she peeled off her skullcap and a wealth of glossy hair fell to her shoulders, surprisingly red. I was saved. My tastes are broad, but I have a definite aversion to redheads. Think of it as a conditioned response—or a dueling scar.
“Citizen Foyle, I take it.” She just nodded, and the curl of her upper lip said Go to hell. A much more rational reaction to the Column uniform than Ariel’s, actually, but it was going to be hard not to take it personally.
“Archaeologist and mechanic, too?” I said.
“I told her she should let the locals handle all repairs, Excellency,” Bunny said.
“He told me that,” Foyle said dryly. “It was just a few bolt heads that the computer considered too tight. Ground crews tend to ignore those.” She racked the tools, closed the access port, and shot the cams home. “I don’t fly what I can’t fix,” she added. Then she ascended as lightly, and claimed the pilot’s seat as definitely, as any cat.
Bunny took the other front seat without asking, but I was just as glad to sit with Ariel in back. As I pulled down the overhead door, Foyle checked her repair work on the diagnostic box. I noted with approval that she had pushed the Standard F dash over to Bunny’s side, out of her way, and had brought the manual controls forward instead. She knew how to use them; our liftoff was as smooth as Ariel’s cheek—
Which, not too long afterward, came to rest against my shoulder. Ariel had fallen sound asleep. The cabin was nearly dark, the white noise of the impellers as lulling as silence. The frame of renegade blonde curls—some executive cut outgrown, so far from civilization—still lent her an adolescent air. But her other features were so faint in the starlight as to suggest only the generalized female. Another Dark Lady, another mystery, though never the same. Pale skin unblemished, fine nose up-tilted, gullwinged brows delicately traced.
Not quite the same line of jaw. Nor neck, nor ears, nor time to argue the finer points, my love,” I said, “so long as we agree on principles.”
“But do we?” Domina asked in the lower range of that spine-tingling contralto, and would have finished buttoning her dress if I hadn’t slipped my hands in again. We swayed together lip to lip until we were propped against our own flickering shadows on the wall of the Labyrinth entrance. But when she finally pulled away, her face was cool and ironical, only the flare of her aristocratic nostrils suggesting the hammering heartbeat I’d just felt beneath my fingers. “Myths are not principles.”
Somehow I’d lost the topic of conversation. Wild contrasts in the candlelight—the whiteness of her skin, the darkness of her eyes and nipples; the quintessentially female neck, the almost soldierly haircut; the seductive softness, the will to power.
“But it’s all here,” I said, trying to lead her inside the maze. “It’s not just a game, it’s our heritage. If I could get them all to understand it, to feel it as they walk it. Do the ritual for real, the way it was intended…”
“The way you will know it?” Domina said, her voice like mocking music. “They must grope their way along the Shining Fare, but it’s all right for you to sneak in at night and memorize it.”
“I told you, it has to be part of my play—”
“In other word
s, you have to give away the deepest secret of the fraternity, have to be above it all, master of the game. No, don’t defend yourself. This is the Larkspur I love. Why don’t you just wake up? Admit you’re one of us, the natural rulers of the human sphere?”
“I want to wake you up, Domina. Let me show you something.”
“I’ve been through it. Properly. I know what lies at the center of things.”
But I thought that if I took the candle, she would have to follow me into the maze…
Image of Odysseus, disguised in a beggar’s rags. The suitors surround him, no longer laughing, for he has strung the great bow and suddenly looks capable of sending the arrow down the line of double axes, threading that narrow channel between the recurving upper blades.
“But when will you claim your crown?” Domina murmurs, and I lead her on through the twists and turns and the mosaic images that mark them. Dozens of stories, Persephone…Orpheus…Pandora…
And now, for some reason, we are above the maze, on the high roof of the lodge, looking down at the college town below…and I’m still talking but with less confidence:
“…so, so Daedalus makes wings of wax and feathers and escapes the Labyrinth with his son, Icarus.”
“But Icarus flies too high,” Domina says.
She is dressed all in black now, as if in mourning, and as she approaches I find myself backing away from her.
“This didn’t happen,” I say. “You didn’t follow me this far. There is one more image to see, down that ladder, but you and I never saw it together.”
“No,” she says, and I can’t retreat any farther, the edge of the roof is at my heels. The night is full of stars, and blinking among them, out of place and out of time, is the survey cruiser Barbarossa, the lost Barbarossa. My ship.
A cold draft runs up my back from the void behind me. Domina raises one hand, rests its fingertips on my chest. There is no slightest trace of love or affection left in her face, and her voice is cold:
“You thought you could fly away from me…”
And her hand pushes. And when I lose my balance and reach for her, she dances back. My arms swing wild, my feet lose their purchase, and I am falling backward in the night, falling to my death…
To shudder awake, a curse on my lips. Of the recurring ones, Nightmare Number Two, mild version. The same hashed-up memories, the same lost Dark Lady, sensing that another woman had touched me, however lightly. Ariel had shifted against the window at my sudden move, but she was still asleep, still caught up in the dying night. I waited for the flitter to carry us east and clear of it.
◆◆◆
Gloomy minutes passed. I perched on the end of my seat and leaned forward into the red and green instrument lights.
“I’m glad to see you prefer the manual controls,” I said. “I never trust an emulator board myself.”
But Foyle looked surprised. “You have to trust them most of the time,” she said. “It’s that or earn a new set of licenses, every planet you go to.”
I saw her point. One wouldn’t want to live the way they did in classical times: model variations from nation to nation, and technology remaking the world beneath everyone’s feet every twenty years. But the Standard Flitter solution insults the integrity of well-made machines. One admires the classic simplicity of the Rawlins-Kurosawa flitter control panel, but no one’s made an RK chassis in five hundred years. The emulator board has to translate RK commands into whatever applies to the model you’re actually flying, and—
“The problem arises,” I said, “when things go wrong. The malfunctions are reported to you in Standard F terms that may have little to do with your actual machine. You respond, and sure, your command is supposed to be translated into something appropriate to the situation, but how precise can an analogy be? I always fly bare-stick when I can.”
Foyle sounded appalled. “You must have run into some incredibly archaic equipment somewhere. They fixed those interface bugs decades ago. I just prefer the feel of the manuals, that’s all. I don’t think they’re any safer.”
“Less safe, if anything,” Bunny insisted.
“What is he for, anyway?” she asked me.
“Now, now,” I said.
“Remind him that I have licenses in five classes. I fly my own freighter, for God’s sake. Don’t pretend you haven’t both read the Shadow file on me.”
I saw Bunny sit up straighter in his seat. So she had a record of some kind. She still retained full citizenship, though, so it couldn’t be too bad. It was typical of her generation to think that every last branch and twig of the Column’s clumsy bureaucracy had access to secret police files. The naïveté of cynicism.
“I’m sure the senator checked you out,” I said. “But it’s not really our department.”
She made an unbelieving noise.
“How does a private citizen come to own a freighter?” I asked. “And what does it have to do with archaeology?”
She was silent for a long time. I watched her fingers move among the red and green instrument lights.
“I spent…the family fortune on it,” she said finally. “It’s my livelihood now. Charter transport. I’ve no unpaid bills, and I break even. I’d do better, but I like to stick to the art and archaeology trade. Newcount Two is the fieldwork I need for my doctorate. That will open the way toward more specialized contracts. Though I must say, if I’d known how little there was here…”
“Yes, there’s not much to it, is there? I don’t suppose the site will be visible from the air?”
“What? There’ll be enough light by the time we arrive, if that’s what you mean. Look at the horizon.”
“The stars are still bright, though.” I pointed behind her left shoulder. “Unless that’s one of the defense satellites.”
“That’s Catharensis,” she said. “Only a few light-years away. Remember it, if you get lost on the ground at night here. It’s more or less a polestar in the north.”
“The Catharensis? I’ve always wanted to visit Catharensis Five.”
“Strange choice for a Column official. The cradle of so many heresies—the Green Church, the Sisterhood of Astarte. All those freedom-loving survivals from colonial times.”
“Virtue fascinated by Vice,” I said, and won an honest laugh from her. I leaned back into my seat, afraid of falling out of character.
And what about the site? I thought. Stone Huts. A few crumbled stone walls inside a hole in the ground. Presumably several months’ worth of hole. Shored up, like a mine shaft, maybe? Cave it in somehow, and set their whole schedule back to zero?
Ariel was awake again, nose pressed to her window. “There’s the marsh,” she said. “Getting close now.”
I leaned over her shoulder. The sky continued to lighten, but the ground immediately below was still black in the shadow of a ridge to the east.
“Marsh lights, three thirty degrees low,” Foyle announced.
At first I saw nothing. Then I discerned a general glow that soon resolved itself into a number of phosphorescent blue wraiths, flickering elusively in a greener field of radiance.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Bioluminescence from the marsh algae,” Foyle said. “Nothing mysterious there. The bluer lights are probably methane flares. But every now and then—and only from the air—we see an especially bright one. There, look!”
I tried to get a fix on the white flash, but was distracted—our running lights had gone out. They came back on again in an instant.
“I’m piloting this boat,” Foyle snapped. “Do not touch the controls.”
“You did it! You slapped my hand!” Velasquez said incredulously. “And watch how you address me, you—”
“Bunny,” I warned.
“You may care nothing for your own dignity, Excellency,” he said, “but when she addresses me, she—”
“She does so as the captain of the vessel,” I said. “The rank has privileges. And that remi
nds me.” The occasion was public enough, and it would put him in his place. “What did the captain of the levy ship say when you told him to wait for us?”
Bunny turned, to let me see his smile. “It was as I feared, Excellency. I couldn’t catch him.”
“Catch him?”
“A victim of my own promptness, I’m afraid. I’d radioed our permission to leave last night, as soon as we arrived. So he had nine hours to reach the sun before Your Excellency changed his mind this morning.”
“Must have gone to two-percent lightspeed,” Foyle commented. “Hard on the converters.”
“He had mail to deliver.” Bunny was still grinning—as though it wouldn’t be his head in the noose, too, if we stayed too long.
“We expect a parts boat in a week or two,” Ariel offered. “If there’s a problem.”
I didn’t say anything. One week might get us out before Mehta arrived. Two?
“And here’s the site,” Foyle said as we cleared the ridge. “You wanted to see it.”
The first light of dawn disclosed a vast prairie. Dotted about it were some crude structures. Imagine a simple card house, only made with thick black dominoes. Now imagine dozens of them, scores, and scattered over several square kilometers. And the smallest was over twenty meters tall.
“Those are the Stone Huts?” I asked.
“You sound…surprised,” said Foyle.
I leaned back and closed my eyes. “Thought they’d be bigger.”
Chapter Six
“Those mysterious lights in the marsh?” said Helen Hogg-Smythe, passing her stuffed quail with a good cook’s confidence. “Ignis fatuus, Commissioner: ‘foolish fire.’ The original meaning of the Ur-Linguish expression ‘will-of-the-wisp.’ Not to be confused with ‘foxfire’—the glow of the marsh algae, or of fungi in rotting wood.”
“Or with ‘false fire,’ ” I said, watching Bunny’s face closely across the breakfast table. “A covert signal flashed by night.” He did not meet my eyes.
