The CIs had no solid information about the outside world at all, beyond what they could see and hear for themselves, and what they picked up from the more talkative Guards as rumor. The CIs joked the time of day was a state secret, and Security was trying to track down who kept leaking the information.
At least there were the Outposters. Officially, they too were a secret. In reality, of course, everyone knew about them. Hiding their existence from the CIs was an obvious impossibility when it was the CIs themselves who manned the communications and traffic control consoles. Starting with Lucy's first trip to the surface, pictures and words had been bootlegged onto every screen and speaker in the station. Tremendous amounts of cargo and any number of personnel had moved through Ariadne en route to the Contact Camp. Everyone knew about the 'Posters, and everyone was fascinated by them.
And there was Lucy herself, and the strange truce that had developed between Gustav and the CIs. Only Cynthia Wu and Sam Schiller knew for certain that Lucy had escaped to the surface of Outpost—and even they had no idea why. Rumors swept the station, and it was hard to miss the connection between Lucy vanishing, a lander vanishing, a drugged doctor, one dead Guard and one badly wounded. But only Cynthia knew for certain that Lucy was still alive, or at least that the beacon still moved. ... On the time-honored principle that you can't tell what you don't know, Cynthia chose not to risk either the knowledge or her friends' safety by telling them what was going on, not even Sam. The two of them never discussed what had happened that night.
And Cynthia had yet to figure out Gustav's motives. Cynthia was ready to bet that Lucy and Gustav were up to something. What, why, and how she had no idea. Neither Gustav nor Lucy had told Cynthia anything, either. All she knew was that Lucy had to be made to disappear, and that she had a hunch that Gustav knew why. His arrival back at Ariadne just after her escape was too interesting a coincidence.
And so now the XO was running the show on Ariadne. He seemed to have his own ideas about what sort of game he wanted to play. Twenty hours after he got back aboard, Gremloid vanished from the computers without a trace. In fact, every supposedly covert computer operation went missing, without explanation, without reprimand or arrest. Gustav, the former Intelligence officer, must have known about the underground files long ago. For a time, it scared the CIs. They waited for the other shoe to drop. It never did. Gustav didn't touch them.
But diddling the computer was what the CIs did best, and a few of the bolder—and more bored—hackers couldn't resist the temptation. They went back to work, invading the computers again, this time hiding everything better, using more sophisticated locks and encryptions. They waited for detection, arrest, punishment—but nothing happened. As if Gustav had merely been telling them to cover their tracks better.
Disciplinary actions against the CIs all but came to a halt. Minor infractions went unpunished, and serious violations were met with proportionate responses, not Draconian punishment. Gustav stopped Romero's policy of unannounced searches and seizures, and instead posted a schedule of regular inspections of quarters and working spaces—almost as if he wanted the CIs to have time to hide what needed hiding. The inspections themselves took on an entirely new complexion. Instead of the old, crude, and rough searches for contraband goods and printouts, caches of food and information, the inspections came to resemble boot-camp checks for cleanliness and order—two things that had, Cynthia admitted to herself, come to be in short supply. The XO treated the CIs like a station crew, not a gang of imprisoned criminals.
Somehow, the CIs remembered at least a part of what they had been. After long months of using bare surnames, they came back to calling each other by their old ranks. Gradually, their captors picked up the habit. The Guardian troopers found themselves calling their prisoners "Sir," "Ma'am," "Lieutenant," and even started treating the CIs with the respect due officers.
Ensign Cynthia Wu thought she knew who to credit. By firm prodding and decent treatment, Gustav had brought the CIs back to pride and self respect in themselves, and self-respect breeds the respect of others. Slowly, grudgingly, morale, health, and efficiency all began to climb out of the murky bogs they had been in.
Gustav seemed to be working toward some purpose— and he seemed to be waiting for something. The mood spread to the CIs. There was only one thing worth waiting for in their minds, of course, and if Gustav was expecting it, then so would they.
And so, very slowly, the question changed. It was no longer Have they forgotten us, but When will they get here?
Sam Schiller finally knew where the Nova Sol system was—and where old Sol, the real Sol, Earth's sun, was. It had been a slow, maddeningly piecemeal job, but he had managed to get his bearings.
Strangely enough, it had been the Outposters that had led the way. The Guardian scientists working with the locals had wanted to find out just how much astronomy the 'Posters had, and requested several reference tapes on the subject—a trickier thing than it seemed, as all of astronomy was classified material to the Guards. The request had to go all the way up to Romero's office. Wu was working the comm board that relayed the order to Capital. She copied the message traffic and passed it to Schiller. He read it over, and found what looked like a series of library catalog numbers with no titles. He ran a search through the data files—and by God if they weren't astronomy texts that had been tucked deep inside Ariadne's computer all that time. Schiller printed out copies of the textbooks, and found what he was after—precise spectra of several well known bright stars. Spectra were to stars what fingerprints or retina scans were to humans—infallible means of identification. Armed with them, he could scan the starfield, find some familiar stars, and triangulate back into Earth's position.
Even with the spectra in front of him, it took months of sneaking telescope time to find any of the stars in question— the chart hadn't given sky positions as seen from the Nova Sol system. But then he nailed Aldebaran, and that was the turning point. A week later he had Vega, and Deneb. With those three bright signposts in the sky precisely located, far more than half the battle was done. His doctorate was in astrocartography—he knew the relative positions of those three giants to Earth's sun as well as he knew the family farmyard back home. An hour or two of computer time and he had what should have been the sky position of Sol as seen from Ariadne.
And so, deep into a night shift, a tiny yellow dot of light, too dim to be seen by the naked eye, lay centered in the crosshairs of Ariadne's largest 'scope. The sentries seemed to blunder past every ten minutes, and Schiller had to hide what he was doing, abort the job and start over a half dozen times. It took most of the shift to gather enough light to produce a spectrum.
But when the charge-coupled particle imager had finally accumulated enough photons, and a hard copy rolled out of the printer, Sam Schiller took that paper in his hands, looked over the slightly blurry pattern of dark lines, and wept. There was that dear old strong calcium line. He would know it anywhere, his professors had pointed that line out to him on the first spectrum he had ever made, a reading taken on the warm, friendly sunlight of a clear Cambridge spring day—but the light that formed this spectrum had left Sol decades before his professors were born. Those blurry lines were an indisputable portrait of the Sun. Home. Earth. The smell of honest dirt and the corn plants waving in the breeze and his mother sitting on the porch swing and the song of the barn swallows and the chirrup of the bats swooping through twilight, the harvest moon hanging low in the sky.
He should have burned that spectrum. It was evidence. It could get him shot. But he tucked it inside his pillow, and no one would ever know.
For what could they do? Radio for help? Even if the transmission was strong enough to be detected across the distance, Earth was one hundred fifty light years away— and none of the other populated worlds were much closer. A radio message would take a century and a half to get through. They couldn't wait on rescue that long.
There wasn't much better hope, in short term, of stealing a ship
. Lucy had managed to swipe a lander, but the lander couldn't get them home. And security had been tightened up after Lucy's escapade. Even before her little adventure, nothing with a C-squared capability had been allowed to dock with the station.
Maybe, someday, at just the right moment, knowledge of where home was would do them good; but until then, what point in raising raise hopes, why let frustration wreck morale, why risk endangering the knowledge itself if someone let slip the wrong chance remark? Why tempt someone besides Lucy into a fool stunt?
So Schiller slept with a portrait of Sol in his pillow, and dreamt of the cornfields.
But his search for home had been the thing that held him together, gave some semblance of meaning to his life. With the hunt successfully concluded, both his time and his mind were far less occupied. He was left with little more to do than watch the radar screens, track the meaningless points of light on the screen—and think.
There seemed to be fewer of those points of light every day. Ariadne, with the job of supporting the Contact Camp, was a bustling and busy enterprise, but the other installations around Outpost were turning into ghost towns—or vanishing altogether, as the stations were towed up out of orbit to some other duty in space. Schiller watched, day by day, as the Guards pulled back from Outpost. A second attack fleet, this time made up of fifty small fast corvettes, was formed and launched. The fleet as such was never seen again. Long weeks later, fewer than ten of the corvettes straggled back into orbit of Outpost.
There were other things to be seen. The shield of anti-ship missiles around Outpost's sun had been completed, and the ships that had been involved with emplacing the missiles left. Then, there was suddenly a lot of radio traffic in the vicinity of the Nova Sol system's barycenter, encrypted in a way that seemed familiar. When Schiller trained his telescopes on the barycenter, he could detect the light of dozens of fusion engines.
So the Guards were building another anti-ship missile web around the barycenter. Not good news. It would further seal the Nova Sol system off from the outside universe, make it that much harder for the League to attack.
That was why Schiller kept his eye on the barycenter, tried to watch it through the scopes and the radio detectors.
And that was why he spotted the strange, far-off flickering lights in the center when they came.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE On Outpost, Eight Hundred Kilometers North of Guardian Contact Camp
The Road had been long, and hard. Lucy s wagon rolled on, endlessly, it seemed. The Z'ensam kept to the Road, and the trade routes, forever going on. Lucy peered through the wagon's single small window and watched the landscape roll past. She estimated that the column was doing about forty kilometers an hour, a pretty good speed, all things considered. Some of the Z'ensam would get out of their carriers and gallop alongside the column for a while, easily keeping pace, just stretching their legs before climbing back aboard. Lucy knew damn well that was far beyond the abilities of a halfwalking monster from beyond the stars, such as herself.
She had to settle for being cooped up in her own specially built truck, or mobile home, or lorry, or wagon, whatever you wanted to call it. Wagon was close enough. It was airlocked and the Z'ensam had not only managed to keep the carbon dioxide down to a level she could stand, they had gotten the worst of the stench of Outpost out of the air. They provided food for her that hadn't poisoned or starved her yet, and she had a chance at a sponge bath every day or so. She was being as well cared for as she could expect to be, under the circumstances. And her wagon rolled along with the rest of them. It seemed to be running on some sort of liquid fuel that powered a smoothly purring engine beneath the floorboards. At least some sort of fluid was poured into a hole in the wagon every night. For all Lucy knew, that could be the feed for animals running on treadmills. She was never quite sure if machines were machines or some bizarre biological thing bred and grown for a tool. Her wagon didn't seem to have a driver. She assumed that some specially bred species of driving-beast sat in some tiny cab at the front of the thing, controlling it—but she couldn't be sure. They didn't tell her a lot. Aside from C'astille, the Z'ensam kept their distance.
Much of the transport was animal-powered, pulled by six-legged beasts, larger than elephants, that had speed and endurance far surpassing any draft horse on Earth. The Z'ensam were awesomely skilled in bio-engineering, and took their miracles for granted as easily as humans accepted light bulbs, or refrigeration, or star travel. The Road itself was a living thing, or at least the product of a living thing. C'astille had tried to explain, and had quickly run into language trouble. The best analogue Lucy had come up with was to think of the Road as a variety of dry-land coral plant (though if she remembered properly, coral was actually an animal), trained or bred or forced to grow in long, precise strips a half dozen meters wide and hundreds of kilometers long. Apparently, the Z'ensam road engineers did little more than sow road seed like a farmer planting a crop. The roadplant would grow, take root, dig down into the soil to form its own roadbed, and then produce a hard, porous carapace that formed the surface of the Road and provided excellent traction. The Z'ensam were able to control the roadplant's growth exactly; Lucy paced out the width of the Road again and again as it crossed forests and fields, mountains and plains, and never did its measure vary by more than half the length of her foot.
The column seemed to be stopping again. There came booming and thumping and roars. Lucy sighed and slumped back against the wall of the wagon. The Hungry Ones were at it again. Sometimes Lucy had thought the Out-posters, the Z'ensam as they called themselves, couldn't wipe them out, other times she thought they simply chose not to.
The hungries had certainly lived up to their name in the long days before C'astille had found her lander and taken her to safety with her Group, which C'astille called the Refiners. (What they refined—sugar, ideas, oil, behavior in polite society, Lucy wasn't quite clear, though most of the Groups did tend to be bound by philosophical ideas.) In any event, several huge beasts had tried to eat the lander—and one had nearly succeeded. The Hungry Ones weren't any one species—any wild animal qualified as hungry—very, very hungry, and without the qualms of the Hungry Tiger in Oz. As far as Lucy could see, nature apparently didn't make much of a distinction between carnivore and herbivore on Outpost—anything would pretty much try to eat anything else. It was, however, the bigger species that gave the Z'ensam the worst time of it. On the other hand, Lucy had seen one species of pack-hunting animals, no bigger than mice, that didn't hesitate to attack the Z'ensam.
The sound of her landing must have scared off the animal life for a day or two, but when the great beasts returned, they were terrifying. Lucy had at first thought that she had chanced into an area full of particularly voracious carnivores for some reason, but when the Z'ensam came to rescue her, C'astille assured her that, if anything, things were a bit on the quiet side around her lander.
Riding in her specially built wagon, travelling with the Z'ensam, she had seen enough to convince her that was true. Compared to the violence, the liveliness, the voraciousness of life in the temperate-zones of Outpost, the lushest tropics of Earth were barren deserts. This world was far fuller of life. And, therefore, far fuller of death.
Now, as best Lucy could see through her window, the caravan was stopped by some pack of three-meter high, six-legged, befanged, warty, moss-colored, slavering horrors. The Z'ensam brought up their guns and weapons and calmly wiped the monsters out. There was a further delay while the massive corpses were shoved off the roadway, and then the caravan moved on.
Lucy had come to realize that the Nihilists must have been constantly patrolling the perimeter of the Guardian Contact Camp, killing or shooing away any and all animal life. Otherwise, the hungries would have wiped out the humans long ago. No doubt the need to cordon off the area around the landing zone had caused the delay between landing and First Contact. One little mystery cleared up.
There were certainly enough others to take its place. What drov
e the Z'ensam to venture out on the Road, to move from where they were to a town that might have been abandoned a week ago or a hundred years ago, to live there for a time, and then move on? They certainly had a high enough technology to settle down and build real cities and stay in one place. They didn't have to be nomads. But when Lucy asked why they didn't settle down, C'astille couldn't understand why anyone would want to do that in the first place. Trade had something to do with the constant travel, but that seemed more a holdover from pre-technical times than out of any real need. The towns had started as trading posts, but the Z'ensam didn't need trading bazaars anymore. Their machine-powered and animal-powered transports could carry as much and as fast as modern rail or road-cargo handlers on Earth. Why move the entire population to the goods when it should have been easier to move the goods to the population?
Lucy gradually discovered that there was a small number of settled folk, who lived pretty much permanently in a few larger cities. They seemed to be there to operate the manufacturing concerns too large to be made portable, to serve as brokers and to operate the communications centers, to use and operate the research libraries. All the permanently populated towns were such "company" towns or "college" towns. What slight central government there was emanated, more or less by default, from the cities, though no one much bothered with claiming territory or jurisdiction.
The settled Z'ensam had stepped off the Road and stayed in one place for much the same incentives that would tempt humans to accept hardship posts—wealth, power, the desire to escape from old ways, perhaps research into some subject. Some actually grew to like the settled life, but that was rare. Few accepted it for a lifetime. It would have been easy to form a comforting parallel with the settlement of Sumer, the birth of cities, primitive nomads inventing agriculture and settling down. Such had been the human dawn of civilization, but the simple nomads with which Lucy lived on the Road had radio, electricity and explosives far more powerful than gunpowder. They were skilled in chemistry, knowledgeable of astronomy and masters of bio-engineering. Lucy had learned nothing of their cultural lives, but there had to be such. Theirs was a mature, sophisticated civilization.
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