Which meant taking a trip down that road and looking around. A ground car or flyer would probably bring me into hard contact with whatever had knocked out the spy drones. And if the K'fondi preferred to shoot first and sift the wreckage later, I would end up in some alien coroner's in-basket. But there was another way: risky, but I thought it just might work.
Then I paced out my own situation. If Livesey meant to sweeten the bitter taste of his failure by kicking me into prison, why should I spend my last days of freedom helping the Bureau?
If I solved the K'fond mystery, Livesey would still probably go under; even last-minute success couldn't divert BOOT discipline once it was wound up and set loose. Livesey, falling, would use me as something soft to land on. Livesey, saved, would ruin me out of sheer spite.
But I wouldn't be doing it for the Bureau or the chief. This was for me. I had always had to know what made alien societies tick, and if making the pickings easier for ECS's interstellar swindlers was the price of that knowledge, then it was a price I was at least used to paying.
Before I was dragged off K'fond and chained to a bulkhead, I wanted to know what the hell was going on.
Five minutes later, I walked into the supply hut and began pulling things off the shelves. The quartermaster clerk decided he had better things to do than to ask questions of an eco-soc with a reputation for lunatic behavior. In the medical stores I found an antiseptic wash that dyed the skin. A jumpsuit stripped of its Bureau insignia would pass at medium range for a K'fond coverall. I scooped up a belt and pouch, which I filled with rations, depilatory creams, and some other useful items. Finally, I took a geologist's hammer to the arms locker and selected a small pulser that tucked into the palm of my hand.
The motor-pool guard was prepared this time to stand his ground when a purple Kandler climbed into a surface car. But the pulser's output end convinced him to decamp quickly enough to avoid being run down.
On the open road, the wind of the car's passage chilled my newly bald head. Where I began to meet Maness's automated local traffic, I turned at the first major intersection and drove on for a couple of kilometers. I parked the car on the side road's grass border, pulled out the connections on the com panel to stop its annoying chirping, and settled down to watch the robot trucks go by.
Before the long K'fond day drifted into evening, I spotted the kind of transport I had been looking for. But, fully loaded, it was outward bound. I marked its size and characteristics, and was able to identify the same kind of vehicle heading empty in the direction of Maness. I put the car back on the road and followed.
The empty truck wove through an increasingly dense grid of industrial streets. Here there were no houses, and apparently no K'fondi were needed to run the automatic factories. The truck pulled into a side street leading to a low-rise, open-sided building. By the sound and smell of the place, I knew it was what I was looking for.
I slowed the car to a crawl as it bypassed the street the truck had turned onto. Pushing a few buttons on the car's console told it to go home and it whirred away, leaving me alone on the empty street.
It was now full dark, and the K'fondi hadn't bothered with many streetlights in this part of town. Keeping to the abundant shadows, I crept around the rear of the building where the truck had gone. The vehicle was nudged up against a loading ramp, behind which was a corral full of tapirlike creatures with curly horns and sad, muted voices. By the ringing in my ears, I judged they were being induced into the trucks by some kind of general sonic prod. No herders, either live or robot, were in sight.
That made it easier. I hopped the corral fence and stooped to hide among the cattle. Gritting my vibrating teeth against the sonics, I bulled my way up a ramp and into a slat-sided transport. The animals stamped and brayed at my smell; for me, the feeling was mutual. Inside the truck, the sonics were damped. I crouched in a rear corner.
The truck soon filled. Its rear gate swung closed, and the engine murmured through the floorboards. The vehicle jerked forward, sending a set of horns scraping across my back. It turned to exit the stockyard, and then it stopped.
I held my breath. Were sensors in the truck reacting to my shape or size or the smell of my sweat? Would alarms suddenly ring, floodlights sweep toward me, robot cops come to hustle me off to the interrogation rooms? But then the engine coughed and, with another lurch, we were mobile again. A few minutes later, I was rolling out of Maness. My compass told me we were heading north.
The chill bars of first light through the truck's slats brought me awake. I had spent the night in a hay-filled corner, pressed by warm bodies, and dozing despite the cattle's tendency to snore. I got up, stretched, and peered out at the suburbs of a city. It could have been Maness, except that it was bigger, lacked a lake, and was built halfway up a mountain range that rivaled the Andes. By my rough reckoning, I was five hundred kilometers from the station. I should be out of any K'fond quarantine zone.
The truck was now well into the city's industrial district. Time to move—my fellow passengers might be heading directly for the whirring blades of an automated slaughterhouse. I climbed the truck's side and sliced through its fabric top with a knife from my belt pouch. I boosted myself up and out, clinging now to the outside of the vehicle. I lowered myself until my feet dangled over the pavement blurring along below. When the truck slowed for a curve, I hit the street running.
Seconds later, I was your average K'fond, purple and bald, taking an early morning constitutional through the city's empty streets. A broad avenue led down toward the heart of the city, and a half-hour's walk brought me into a grid of residential streets. In a postage-sized park near a high-rise complex I found enough undergrowth to keep me out of sight. I'd lie low until the K'fondi came out of their homes, then blend in with all the other purple and pink inhabitants.
I ate some rations behind a screen of fernlike plants and watched for pedestrians. About the time the morning chill began to fade, a naked K'fond child—the first I'd ever seen—came out of a high-rise and walked down the footpath to stand by a striped post. Another approached from up the street, then several more. Bus stop, I thought. And the long passenger vehicle that soon came to pick the children up must be a school bus. As it left, more children arrived to wait for the next one.
So far, I had seen no adults, but with the K'fond commitment to partying, sleeping late would be normal.
As the third busload of children rolled away, there was a noise behind me. I turned to see three kids entering the park from the opposite side. Naked as all the others, these wore belts and holsters carrying lightweight toy weapons. Playing cops and robbers, I told myself, and hunkered lower behind the ferns. I didn't want to be taken for a K'fond child molester.
I could hear them approaching, talking rapid-fire K'fondish too fast for me to catch the meaning. They seemed to be passing my hiding place without noticing me. I held my breath. Then the ferns parted right in front of me, and I was crouching eye to eye with one of the kids.
"Uh, jiao doh vuh?" I tried.
"Oh, I really don't think so, Mr. Kandler," the child replied. "No adult would say that to a child, even if they weren't all biologically set to keep their distance from us." It took me a few moments to realize that I was being spoken to in clipped Earth Basic, and that the weapon leveled at my face was no plaything.
The child gestured with the gun. "This is a device we use on adults who pose a danger to themselves or others. It's harmless to them, but we're not sure how effective it would be on your nervous system, so it's set at maximum. I advise you not to do anything unreasonable."
As the child spoke, his two companions came through the undergrowth to triple the number of weapons now surrounding me at a discreet distance. Moments later, face down in the K'fond soil, I was efficiently stripped of everything but my jumpsuit. Then the children herded me out of the park and into a no-nonsense vehicle that had pulled up at the curb. I had the last of the three rows of seats to myself. The kids sat forward, facing me with w
eapons aimed.
"I suppose my disguise was pretty obvious," I said.
One of them replied, "The disguise was fine. At first we thought an adult had wandered into that meat transport. Then we took a closer look when you were on the road. But you could never have blended in here."
"Why not?"
For an answer, the child waved at the cityscape unrolling beyond the car's windows. What I saw told me that, of course, they had to have spotted me immediately, disguise or not. To blend into this city's population, I would have had to make myself over as a small, pink, sexless doll with big eyes. The streets were full now, and not one of the K'fondi was an adult. It was a city of children.
"Where are you taking me?" I asked.
"To a place where some of us will talk to you."
I couldn't read the inscription on the building we arrived at, but it had government written all over it. The council chamber I was ushered into could have passed for the ECS seat of power in Belem—if everything hadn't been half-sized. But there was nothing diminutive about the authority of the K'fond children gathered around the gleaming, crescent-shaped table. I knew power when I met it.
They gave me a large enough chair and sat me down in the middle of the space enclosed by the crescent. For a few seconds, the K'fond world council looked me over in silence. Then the child at the center of the table's arc leaned across the glossy expanse. The voice was thin, but I didn't doubt the note of command it carried.
"Welcome to K'fond, Mr. Kandler. We've been looking forward to meeting you. Your personnel record told us more about the Earth Corporate State than a month's subspace communications."
"You've read my record? But how?"—then I got it—"You've been using the survey orbiter's com link to listen in."
"True, Mr. Kandler. We went up and got your probe shortly after it alerted your sector base. We don't mind telling you, its technology fascinated our scientists. And of course we were overjoyed to learn that interstellar travel is in fact possible.
"Which brings us to the point of our meeting. Mr. Kandler, what can you tell us about the Dhaliwal Drive?"
Three days later, the station com center received and recorded a signal from the project's missing exo-soc. I reported that I had penetrated to the core of K'fond society and was "making progress." Then I signed off without waiting for a reply. It was my last direct communication with the station.
Two days after that, Sector Administrator Stavrogin arrived to take charge.
If Livesey was everything a by-the-book Bureau chief should be, then Yuroslav Stavrogin was a sector administrator to delight the book's authors to the lowest flake of their flinty hearts. Pinch-faced and slim, with the eyes of a bored shark and the delicate hands of a Renaissance poisoner, he perched primly on the edge of a K'fond chair and waited. Beside him, Livesey looked nervously around the alien reception room and sweated. Through the open window came the sounds of Maness at play.
I watched through a concealed aperture as the brass cooled their heels. I remembered Stavrogin. Back at sector base, he had once made me rewrite a lengthy field report from scratch—a week's pointless work imposed on me for no discernible reason. When I was bold enough to ask why, he had coolly replied, "Because you need to be reminded of who I am, and of what you are not."
I closed the spy hole, picked up my new briefcase, and stepped through the door. Livesey's face opened in surprise, but Stavrogin knew better than to show his. Still, I was not what he had expected.
Yesterday, with the station in an uproar over the sector boss's arrival, a signal had come in. In clear Basic, a K'fond voice had specified that Livesey and Stavrogin, identified by name and rank, were instructed to present themselves at the Maness district office of the planet's government. Once again, detailed directions followed, and these had led the two Bureau officers to the building. A robot major-domo had shown them to the reception room and left them to stew a while. And then in walked their missing exo-soc.
"Kandler, where the hell have you—" Livesey spluttered, but was cut off by a mere lifting of Stavrogin's finger.
"Specialist Kandler," rustled the dry voice, "we can plot your recent itinerary later, but we are shortly to meet the K'fond trade negotiator. You will therefore advise us forthwith of the results of your fieldwork."
There was a desk and chair. I walked over and sat down. From my briefcase, I pulled a sheaf of paper and tossed it onto the desk. "My report," I said. "I won't give you the full details now; you can read it at your leisure. I'll just summarize.
"The K'fondi are a highly sophisticated culture, with a well advanced technology. They have been a unified planetary state for some centuries, long enough for the administrative apparatus to evolve into a kind of cooperative anarchy."
Stavrogin sniffed, but I elected not to notice.
"They are very interested in trade," I continued, "a great deal of trade, but only on rational terms."
Livesey burst in. "They're as rational as a bunch of spacers on Cinderella liberty. Drunken, fornicating . . ."
"Oh, those are just the adults," I laughed. "I'm talking about the kids."
Stavrogin's voice could have cut glass. "Tell it."
I leaned back in my chair, and put my feet on the desk.
"Well, it's that missing piece of information we were looking for. K'fond adults really are just about as useless as Livesey says. All they want to do is enjoy their retirement and make more little K'fondi. The eggs are almost a by-product, since they don't even tend their offspring after they're weaned.
"But the kids do all right," I continued. "Childhood is long here, very long. K'fondi reach intellectual maturity quite early, but puberty doesn't come along until thirty or forty years after. And they have drugs to hold their glands in check for another decade if they want to keep putting off sexual maturity.
"That gives them a whole working lifetime without distractions. They don't waste their youth in adolescent turmoil and fruitless rebellion, because adolescence comes at the end of life, not the beginning. They aren't bothered by sex or any of its complications, like jealousy or getting up to change diapers. The infants are cooperatively raised by older children.
"And when their glands finally get to them, and the hormones reduce their mental acuity to the level of alley cats, they settle into a place like Maness: a retirement community out in the country, with plenty of beds and bars. A few children stick around to patch up cuts and bruises, and protect the newborns until they can be shipped off to the nurseries."
Livesey snapped his fingers. "They're like those extinct fish, the ones that didn't mate until they were ready to die. What were they called?"
"Salmon," I said. "We didn't figure it out because the K'fondi made sure we didn't see their cities full of children or the few kids around Maness. So we kept looking at it from our own perspective, from the chicken's point of view."
"Chicken?" asked Livesey.
"Sure," I said. "To a chicken, an egg is just a means of getting a new chicken. But to an egg—or to a K'fond child—an adult chicken is just something you need to get a new egg."
"Fascinating in its place," Stavrogin cut in, "but we are about to negotiate a trade deal. You will advise."
I smiled. "Sorry, Mr. Sector Administrator. Appended to my report is my resignation from the Bureau, and appended to that is my surrender of citizenship in the Earth Corporate State. And these," I produced a document covered in cursive K'fondish script, "are my credentials as adviser to K'fond's economic committee. Shall we open negotiations?"
"You can't do that," Livesey said.
"He has done it," Stavrogin said, "though little good it will do him. Very well, 'Mr. Adviser' Kandler, you may rot among your alien friends in this backwater. But trade—if there is even to be any trade—will be on Bureau terms; only Earth has the Dhaliwal Drive."
I smiled. "Not for long, Stavrogin. These people—my people, now—have had near-space travel for generations, but until now they've had nowhere to go but up and down.
They've always dreamed of reaching to the stars, but didn't know how or even if it could be done. The survey ship's passage answered the second question; and I had enough of a layman's grasp of the Dhaliwal Drive to sketch an answer to the first."
I put my hands behind my head and stretched back in my chair. "They're smart and they have no distractions—they'll roll out a prototype starship within a year."
Stavrogin's face went paler, while Livesey's grew dangerously red. I held up a hand to forestall an outburst.
"We may decide not to deal with the ECS," I said. "After all, there's a whole galaxy of civilized races that the Bureau has been robbing. I'm sure they'll be interested in what we have to offer."
Livesey looked to be on the verge of detonation. But Stavrogin was struggling to recover. "I'm sure we can come to some mutually satisfactory understanding," he said. "As you say, there's a whole galaxy dependent on the trade made possible by the Drive. There's still plenty for both of us."
The Gist Hunter Page 30
