Andre Norton - [Time Traders (Ross Murdock) 07]

by Atlantis Endgame (epub)

  Such as no one going in and out of a specific building— something Eveleen had not considered.

  "What now?" Linnea asked, bending to look at urns full of dried lentils, all dusted with ash.

  "Mark the place, report to the others. Keep looking."

  "How do we mark it?" Linnea asked.

  Eveleen fingered a rug. "Make a mental map. I'll do that."

  They kept moving, Eveleen itching to get back and investigate that mysterious little house. But she forced herself to keep moving along the narrow little streets, though now her observations were at best perfunctory.

  Nothing. Nothing. No sign of Baldies ... no signs at all.

  At the very top, they stood in a faint breeze and looked down at the jumble of ruins, hide and reed-mat roofs, and rubble piles below them. "All right, now we try it, just to see how far we get, and what happens," Eveleen whispered.

  Linnea nodded once, swallowing visibly.

  They bought more cheese on the way down, and fresh bread, all piled into Linnea's basket. Eveleen led the way to their little court. The children were all eating now, except for two of them asleep on rugs next to walls that cast a bit of shade. The women with the fava beans still worked. The spinner leaned out a window, talking in a low voice to a man who held a donkey by a rope, the animal still except for the switching of its tail to chase flies away.

  No one was near the plain building.

  Eveleen rummaged at her pouch, closed her hands round lapis rocks, pretended to stumble, and cast the blue stones that way. Only one rolled in the right direction. She gave a cry of dismay and chased after them, Linnea with her.

  One, two, three, and there was the fourth, over by that empty door. She started over and faltered when danger prickled down the back of her neck, tightening her shoulder blades. She glanced behind her: no one there. No one paid her the least attention.

  A step, another, and her fingers closed around the stone.

  It wasn't a force field, then; it was some kind of mental impulse or even just subsonics. She permitted herself one glance inside that open door.

  Nothing.

  She turned away, put her lapis lazuli into her pouch, and fought the instinct to look back.

  "All right, we know there's something weird there," she murmured.

  Linnea nodded once. "And now we have to find a market spot or at least an apartment. Do you want to negotiate or shall I?"

  Her tone of voice, so polite, indicated she wanted to try. From what Eveleen had seen, the older women commanded the most authority, if not respect. So she shook her head. "You do it. I want to watch some more."

  They continued on, Linnea now seeking the best vantage. Eveleen's mind was back on that strange room.

  The place Linnea chose was next to the building that evidently belonged to the Priestesses of the Serpent, which showed the most signs of repair of any. Not just young women about to embark on religious duties stayed there, but it seemed to be a kind of hotel, or hostel, for women from the harbor. Linnea successfully negotiated a little room, and no one gave them any false reaction, any strange questions, any sign of trouble. Eveleen stood at the one window and looked down at the sweep of market and the edge of the harbor. It was a prime spot for observation.

  Yet her shoulder blades stayed tight all the rest of the day.

  CHAPTER 8

  IT WASN'T THERE. At least, that's what our instruments tell us now."

  Silence.

  Ross braced himself for the stupid questions. They didn't come. Linnea Edel, who had been with Ashe when they had discovered the alien tech in the vent, looked surprised, but then she sat back, folded her hands, and waited.

  "So we tested again, with Ross's equipment, and it came up as negative as mine."

  Silence again. Eveleen rubbed her thumbnail along her bottom lip, then said, "So, what, they have detectors on their device that registers pings?"

  "It would appear so," Ashe said.

  "Then they definitely know we're here," Linnea murmured, looking about in question.

  "That makes it more convincing that it was a Baldy welcome committee that tossed our camp," Ross stated.

  They sat in the boat, under cover of truly inky darkness. Thick clouds, mixed with smoke, obscured the sky. The water was fretful, with little shivering rows of choppy waves—the result of several minor quakes all through the evening. There was a sharp smell in the air, a combination of hot rock, ozone, and sulfur that mixed unpleasantly with brine.

  Ashe finally stretched out his feet tiredly and said, "Yet we still haven't seen them. Well, to the rest of our report. We put on the flame suits and our breathing masks and went down as far as we could, doing infrared scans as well as Baldy-tech pings, but of course we had no idea what to expect. We didn't know if it had been moved, turned off, or cloaked; whether or not it would be buried or in plain sight; how big it would be." He sat back and reached for one of the disguised flagons of pure water.

  Ross said, "What looking around' really means is we slipped and sweated in the darkness until it was too damn hot to do anything but broil. The coolers on those suits don't have enough capacity for really long searches; they need a lot more. I wish we could score a few of the Baldy suits."

  Their suits used the same technique as space suits: tubes running throughout the thick insulated fabric carried cooling fluid all over the body. He recalled that shimmering blue-green fabric that the Baldies used not just as clothing but also as insulation, filters, and conduits for their mysterious mental radar. Its insulation function actually included refrigeration, preventing heat from entering while exhausting heat from the interior as needed, operating on the same strange power source as all the Baldy tech. Which was why they couldn't bring the stuff they'd captured: the Baldies would have known they were there the moment they pushed through the time-gate.

  Ashe said, "So what did you women find, besides a base for observation?"

  Linnea opened her hand in a little gesture toward Eveleen, who said, "A house, seems to be empty, with some kind of mental repulsion field or subsonics. No other sign."

  Ross frowned. "Could be a trap. To see who pokes around."

  Eveleen nodded once. "I thought of that while we were waiting for you. In any case, we only checked it once, and didn't go back."

  Ashe said, "Why don't we investigate the buildings around it, then, and see what we find?" He nodded at Linnea. "Eveleen can take one of the suits and my gear and help Ross up on the mountain."

  Ross knew what that meant: a long, dreary day of trudging up, searching for vents, and checking them, in case the mysterious device had been put into another vent. Having Eveleen come along was his way of acknowledging a spectacularly dangerous and tiring day's work.

  "Oh, thanks," Eveleen said, and the others chuckled. She turned Linnea's way. "At least one of us will get a thrill, eh?"

  "Oh, it seems to me that there might be potential thrills enough in exploring volcanic vents," Linnea said, smiling. "But I confess: to see the spectacular frescoes inside those buildings still standing when the paintings are still relatively fresh and new, and not crumbled and age-ruined, would be a joy I'd never forget."

  Ashe nodded and then turned to Stavros. "Any suspicious activity to report on the waterfront?"

  "No sign of Baldies—no attempted attacks, overt or covert. The fishermen are upset about the numbers of dead fish," Stavros said. "The water temperature is several degrees higher than it ought to be, which would be devastating for many types of fish. It's apparently worse closer to the pre-Kameni Island."

  The pre-Kameni Island did not even exist up the timeline. Ross mentally examined the map of the island complex: Kalliste and its appendages looked, to him, like nothing so much as a blob of dough floating in the middle of a donut with a bite out of it. The mountain up behind them was, of course, only a small part of the biggest, crescent-shaped island on which they now stood. The caldera would be about eighty miles in diameter; its center—the dough blob—was, according to t
he scientists' models, the island that Ross could see lying north of them. This little island, which would be blasted into nothingness during the Big Blow, had been termed pre-Kameni by the scientists.

  Ross remembered watching it earlier, through field glasses, from one of the western cliffs. They could just make out buildings there, most of them ruins, with some little boats plying round it. Squatters there, too, but very few of them.

  Kosta said, in his heavy accent, "The people are worried that the oracle does not speak. The harvest is worse than anyone remembers, the quakes worse, the biggest one three months ago sending up serpents of fire-spewing smoke and bringing down a rain of pumice. Abruptly the quakes have eased since then, but the smoke is worse. Fish dead. They are afraid the gods are angry and won't talk to them through their oracle anymore."

  Ashe looked over at Linnea. "Can we become a new oracle, as a last resort, to save lives? There are far too many people here. I do not want to see them incinerated without at least trying to get them to flee."

  She shook her head. "You cannot just 'be' a new oracle, not here where there is only one, and that one sanctioned by the local governing body. Perhaps we could come down the mountain wailing about the oracle speaking at last and trust to the grapevine to spread the news."

  "Will they listen?" Ross asked, skeptical.

  Linnea's considering gaze turned his way. "They have no reason not to believe. The question involves community, though. People might want to question more closely who we are."

  "That's right," Ashe said. "We are known as Egyptian traders, but we still are not identified with any kinship group. I don't know if that will suffice to get them to evacuate their homes."

  Ross said with grim humor, "Right. There is no Red Cross waiting to help them, no friendly government wanting to aid refugees."

  Ashe turned back to Linnea. "You or Eveleen might have to try to get inside the oracle caves, if the priestesses will talk to you."

  "Better than the alternative," Ross muttered, but under his breath.

  "Let's keep that as a backup plan, then," Ashe said, and no one disagreed.

  They finished eating dinner, and as everyone was tired, their heads slightly aching from the oppressive heat and the polluted air, the men camped out on the deck of the ship under the stars, and Eveleen and Linnea used oil-soaked torches to light their way back to their rented room, Eveleen sleeping near the open window, where the slightest sound would waken her instantly.

  ——————————

  JUST BEFORE DAWN the women hiked back down to the boat.

  "The way I see it," Ross said to Eveleen a couple hours later, as they trudged up the long switchback trail toward the oracle, "is that it was too easy. A vent right around the corner from the oracle? We should have seen that as a setup."

  Eveleen said, "What I'm afraid of is that they have put some kind of thingie in a whole slew of vents. What the heck do we do then?"

  "Gordon said the same thing when we were thumping our way back down the mountain yesterday, nearly quaking off the trail once or twice."

  "Then he thinks it probable." Eveleen heaved a sharp sigh and paused at a turning in the trail. She looked out at the blue-green ocean, deceptively placid in the hazy early morning light. "Vents. Does that mean—"

  "Already thought of it," Ross said, grinning. "While you were in the sweatbox, Gordon told Stav to do some diving and exploring. The boys are taking the boat out to pre-Kameni Island today to do just that."

  Sweatbox: their unfond name for the tiny shower cubicle the scientists had built into the stern of the boat. Ross thought of that cramped space—the banged elbows and knees as he tried to manipulate the spray hose and the lukewarm water— and laid himself a hundred-buck bet none of the science jockeys back home actually had test-driven the blasted thing.

  "Here's the goat trail we marked yesterday," Ross said. "We may's well start here."

  The two of them checked the pathway in both directions and then quickly eased off down the narrow little trail. There was very little brush behind which to hide. They would have to trust to the haze and to their neutral clothing—Eveleen had forgone her bright kilt-skirt and jacket-underdress for a plain robe of dusty brown—to avoid notice.

  Ross squinted against the fierce glare of the sun, looking for the thin thread of smoke he'd seen wisping out of the mountain in this direction. These things could be deceptive, depending on air currents and wind.

  Up, up, pausing for sips of water in the sparse shade of smoke-withered olive trees. Eveleen bent once to touch one of the lovely red lilies. Ross grimaced, thinking of the report he'd seen three thousand years up-time: these plants were totally wiped out. Some life-forms came back. The red lilies didn't.

  They came upon the vent suddenly, feeling it first as an oven blast of sulfuric air.

  After consultation with Ashe and Linnea over breakfast, they had agreed no longer to use the Baldy-tech device. They would scan with their own equipment, which used only pulses of sonic energy and heavy-duty computing power to filter out the returns from seismic noise. There was a lot of that on Kalliste, unfortunately, the upside being that their little pings were unlikely to be detected by the Baldies amidst the stew of heat, sonics, and piezo-EM emitted by the volcano.

  Ross held his breath against the hot gases, knowing he should slip on his breathing mask. But the tests ought to take only a moment, and it didn't smell as bad as it had the other day. Then he remembered the basic vulcanology training all the agents had gotten:By the time you stop smelling it, it's already too late. Hydrogen sulfide is fifty times more poisonous than hydrogen cyanide, and far more insidious. It just takes one sudden puff from a vent.

  He put on his mask and motioned Eveleen to do the same. Theoretically, if there was another of those devices, the sonics would reveal it, and since it had to be manipulating the ferocious energy output of the vents in some way, the strains and currents that it produced in rocks and lava would help disclose its shape.

  They each took a reading, looked, but were not really sure what they had. There were patterns, but nothing suggested an actual object. Ross motioned to Eveleen and she held up her instrument to reveal the IR port. Ross triggered the link, and the two machines compared and manipulated the stored sonic patterns. Now a shadowy shape emerged, too regular to be natural. But the devices still couldn't nail down its distance or size well enough. "Well, now we know that they didn't move it."

  "Why can't the detectors resolve it better?"

  "Maybe there's too much seismic noise and it's turned off, or maybe it's still running cloaked but emitting sonics as part of its operation. That would scramble things. Let's find another and give the computers more to compare," Ross suggested. "Maybe then they can zero in on it."

  "Right."

  First to locate another vent.

  "There." Eveleen knocked against his arm and pointed upward, almost straight into the sun, which was burning down through thick haze just behind the mountaintop.

  "Oh, hell," Ross snarled.

  "Yeah, looks like my idea of it, too," his wife retorted.

  Ross cracked a smile, and they got busy toiling upward along tiny goat trails, often slipping and sliding in fresh rock-falls. They removed their masks once they were a good distance from the vent; it was a hot, exceedingly dangerous climb, made worse by the weather.

  They stopped at noon to eat their bread and cheese and rest in the shade of a spectacular slab of volcanic rock thrusting up from some age-old eruption.

  Out over the ocean a thin line of thunderheads marched, their outline ragged. The sea was a sick green, the sunny glare at its worst, glinting off bits of rock. Far below they could see a steady procession of folk making their way slowly up the pathway to the oracle.

  "Why would people do that to themselves?" Ross said, shaking his head.

  "Why do people in our day read weather reports, or even check the astrology predictions in the paper, much as they laugh?"

  "Eveleen, it's
too hot to even pretend that's the same as gambling their lives against whatever this 'oracle' might say."

  "But I think it's the same impulse. We don't like going into the unknown. So we use whatever tools we have. The weather reports generally work. The astrology predictions speak so generally you can always translate them to match your experience. And these people—" She waved her hand up the trail. "Well, who knows? Linnea told me that one theory holds that the priestesses who served the oracle had the best gossip network going and knew everything about everyone. I guess you could do that with a small population. Remember, even modern market research relies on something called the Delphi effect—you can get information out of large groups of people even if none of them know the actual, exact answer."

  Ross raised an eyebrow, but Eveleen's face was serious. Well, there were a lot of things he'd never heard of; evidently the Delphi effect was one of them. He sighed. "It makes sense if people are asking whether or not they should marry some person with a rotten rep, or even about crops and other information based on collective experience and knowledge, but what about this couple we saw yesterday, with a sick kid? They wanted to know if the wasting fever would go away."

  Eveleen rested her hands on her knees. "Of course they couldn't really answer something like that, but they probably told the people to make a flower offering to the gods, which at least would give them comfort."

  "Some comfort."

  "About as much comfort as 'We shall have to do more tests,' gives parents in our time, when their kid has some disease the medical field can't identify."

  Ross wiped sweat off his forehead. "Hah."

  Eveleen grinned. "You're just grumpy because it's hot, and there's thunder in the air, and no enemy to shoot at."

  "Add in a mountain-size nuclear bomb under our feet or, knowing the Baldies, something even worse, ready to blow at any moment, and you've got that right."

  Somehow that seemed the right moment to get to their feet, stash their flagons at their waists, and get moving.