by Dave Duncan
Rangers were supposed to be strong, silent types, Alya thought—slayers of fearsome monsters. This one could have sold the monsters real estate or talked them into vegetarianism. He never paused for a reply, so she was relieved of any duty to make conversation. Yet he registered her fatigue without commenting on it; he deftly extracted her from the mob of obsequious officials and doting spouses without visibly offending anyone, and by snapping a few sharp words of command, he organized her and her companions and their baggage and attendants onto a caravan of golfies and got them moving at once. She detected a real competence behind the juvenile facade.
With Alya at his side in the lead golfie, Baker began a rapid commentary on the Cainsville complex, scattering bad wise-cracks like a tour guide—see the pyramids by moonlight, and they’re even better with your eyes closed…more than eighty hectares enclosed at Cainsville…nowhere to walk a dog—and he effortlessly spun webs of statistics.
Despite a heavy traffic of vans and bicycles and other golfies, the little cart built up a considerable speed on the straights, with Jathro and the others zipping along behind. System did all the steering.
“Just tell it where you wish to go, Princess,” Baker explained, “and it’ll get you there. Hang on for this curve. Lots of curves, because so many of the buildings are domes. Forty-two geodesic domes, and another thirty in plain chocolate…” He prattled on as the caravan wound and twisted along a bewildering variety of busy arteries. Most were large enough to rank as city streets, but sometimes Alya found herself hurtling at high speed along narrow passageways like hotel corridors, hoping that nobody opened a door in front of her. After the sharper bends, she would listen for Moala’s screams, far behind her.
“This must be a shortcut,” Baker remarked cheerfully. “Can’t say I’ve ever come this way before. I expect Livingstone Dome’s busy just now, with everyone heading home—whoops!” The golfie skittered on two wheels around a right-angle bend and shot through a doorway that was still opening. “Now this is Lewis and Clark Dome…”
Alya tuned his voice out, hanging on tight and holding a starched smile on her face to hide pure misery. Jet lag was really rattling her now. She had been up all night, in effect, and this was early morning, Banzarak time, and—and that was when she made the alarming discovery.
She was in Cainsville, and there was nothing at all she could do about Tiber until its window opened the next day. That should have been enough to satisfy the most relentless intuition. But it was not. Somewhere during her arrival she had become separated from Cedric—who most likely had been officially met also, to preserve the fiction that he was a deputy director. So now he was gone and her dread had returned. She felt a gnawing urge to ask Baker to turn the golfie and go back; she twitched and itched with the need. Apparently Cedric had become a permanent addiction for her.
She wondered with sudden dismay if her intuition could be faulty, if it might be misleading her and everyone else. That could happen. The history of Banzarak held many tales of sultans or their children being driven mad by a satori. The warnings were not specific, and they never gave reasons. A simple aversion was easy enough to understand—don’t take that plane, you don’t want the fish sauce, stay out of the water today—but sometimes the urge was not just a negative, it was a positive command to do something, a something that was never specified. Then the victim could only thrash around, trying everything possible in the hope that something might relieve the premonition. The urgency might be extreme, the directive incomprehensible—and that combination could bring on insanity very quickly.
That was the dark side of the family gift, an instinct for self-preservation bred into her genes by generations of clay pots and cobras, silk ropes and royal inbreeding. The people of ancient Banzarak had wanted sultans who were guided by the gods to make correct decisions, and so they had devised the puberty rite of the deadly snake and the harmless string. The youths who had chosen wrongly had died. Those with the right hunches had survived to bear children. Genetic selection had done the rest, and in time the Draconian test had created what it sought to find: an inherited intuition.
The sultans had served their land well, and their family, too. By repeated inbreeding, they had strengthened the gift and also retained it among their own relatives. None of them, it was said, ever swallowed a fish bone. None ever met with accidents—except for Alya’s own parents, who had died while rescuing people during the floods of 2040. Kas swore that they had known what was going to happen and had stayed on to prevent a panic that might have killed thousands more.
Yet sometimes the intuition went beyond the mere avoidance of danger, as Hubbard Agnes had guessed. All afternoon Alya had been trying not to think of Kas’s account of his first meeting with Thalia. “Instant bird song” was the way he described it.
Cedric had worn an aura of fire.
Oh, hell!
He was a nice kid, but unlucky, unpolished, uneducated…He had nothing to offer except mere physical satisfaction. And probably little of that—finesse would not be his forte.
Couldn’t her genes have found someone her own size?
And he was not available anyway.
“Columbus Dome,” Baker Abel said, bringing Alya out of her black reverie. The golfie had come to a stop before a narrow doorway that led into a stairwell—containing a very curious staircase.
“You’re not familiar with spiralators?” he inquired as Alya hesitated. “Just reach for the handle at the back and jump in. Now!” He took her by the waist and lifted her bodily inside. Then he moved to follow, tripped, and landed on his knees on the tread below her.
He rose, grinning up at her rather sheepishly. “Gimpy leg,” he explained. “Not quite healed yet. Got bitten by a rock. Well, it looked like a rock. There should have been a sign: ‘Danger: Do not feed the rocks.’”
Alya was certainly not familiar with spiral escalators. She watched with interest as a doorway to the next floor went curving by and vanished downward. “What happens at the top?” she asked.
“Not sure at all. We sent a guy up to find out once, but he never came back. Expect he’s still going.”
“Smartass!”
Baker grinned. “This column in the middle is the newel, okay? Well, there is a school of thought that says that at the top the steps level out like an ordinary escalator and then curve around and vanish into the newel. The treads are sliding up vertically on the newel tube, you see, and it’s the newel that’s doing the turning. The theory is that they flip over and come back down inside the tube. I don’t believe a word of it. It’s done with mirrors. Next door’s ours. Stand by to leap…”
Alya stepped out nimbly. Baker stumbled again and would have clutched at her to steady himself—had she been there. Moreover, in her hasty efforts to help him, she ineptly thumped him on the back of the neck with one hand and behind the bad knee with her foot, and thus spread Baker Abel flat on the rug. And then she trod on his fingers.
“Oh, I am extremely sorry,” Alya said. “That was clumsy of me.”
He scrambled up, completely unabashed. “Black belt?”
“Brown.”
He grinned with no trace of a blush on his pallid Nordic face. Cedric, had he tried that and been caught out, would have glowed like a neon lamp. Baker Abel was little older, but infinitely more confident than Cedric, and his foolery was hiding arrogance, not shyness. As he turned to help Jathro and the others emerge from the spiralator, Alya allowed herself a small smile.
Baker enjoyed watching her, and she knew that he would certainly accept the challenge and try again for a fast grope as soon as he got the chance, but her instincts told her that his intent was not serious. His real interest lay elsewhere; his heart was already mortgaged.
She did not know how far other women could judge men’s intentions, but she had never been wrong yet, so perhaps the buddhi helped. Baker would play for fun, with no attempt to follow through. The antler-moustached Devlin Grant had been calculating when he could make room fo
r her on his calendar. To Jathro, she was a potential meal ticket. All three men looked upon her differently.
And Cedric had fallen hopelessly in love the moment she had spoken a kind word to him.
Baker made a sweeping gesture at the room. “Circular. You get sick of circles in this place. This is the guest lounge. Eating machines over there for snacks. Bar over there. Full cafeteria two floors down. You get Room One, of course, Your Highness. Dr. Jar, Room Two. Grant said he’d call for you at 0200. Until then, what pulls your string? Food, rest, dancing, swimming, exercise, stamp collecting?”
“Sleep,” Alya said.
“Alone?”
At that, of course, Jathro exploded in roars of pompous indignation, which was exactly what the jokester had intended. Baker’s juvenile silliness was going to be a pain in the posterior, but he had his moments.
Just after two A.M., with the lights dimmed to a moody gloaming, Alya found herself being graciously assisted into the down spiralator by Devlin Grant. Her efforts to sleep had been fruitless. She felt at once hungry and nauseated, exhausted and feverish. She had a headache again, and a hollow, used-up feeling. This journey to inspect a world called Rhine was a totally useless exercise, she was certain. It did not frighten her, nor did it excite her—it was merely irrelevant. The thought that she would see Tiber later in the day had power to stir her, but even that seemed less urgent than something else…someone else…someone she should go looking for. She cursed herself for being a brainless infatuated ninny even as she knew that what she was feeling had nothing at all to do with conventional physical desire. She certainly had no patience for the bedroom eyes and predatory scrutinies of Devlin Grant.
Jathro sat in glowering solitude in a second golfie, while Devlin squired Alya in the first. He chattered, although much less painfully than Baker Abel would have done. The golfie ride itself was considerably more sedate—Baker must have given System some very unorthodox instructions on the earlier occasion.
“We shall be using de Soto dome, princess,” Devlin explained. “We actually have six transmensors operational at the moment.”
That surprised Alya. “I thought one was the limit?”
He flashed his teeth at her. “We can only use one at a time. Prometheus Dome is the power source. About once an hour System turns on that equipment for a moment and cranks the temperature up a few thousand degrees. Stars are easy to find. You would never want to visit Prometheus.
“For exploration work, though, de Soto and David Thompson are our largest and best equipped, but with so many NSBs to investigate all at once, we may have to use Bering and van Diemen, as well.”
Under the orange dimness the passages and halls were eerily barren of traffic. Alya struggled to suppress yawns. Her eyelids weighed a ton apiece. The golfie halted at a door for an automated identity check, and Devlin paused in his lecture until they were under way again.
“We picked up Rhine’s shadow on prelim scan back in February—we always have a hundred or so leads ready to follow up. We’ve only made one real pass at it, and that was more than a week ago. The specs looked good, and we dropped a robbie. We’ll see what it has to tell us.”
The golfies came to a halt at an armored door. If the whole of Cainsville was regarded as a secure area, then some parts were more than just secure, for certainly the men who were rising from their poker game to inspect the passengers were guards, and there were two more checks before the drive ended.
Eventually Alya found herself being assisted into a person-shaped plastic bag. Apart from its sickly chemical odor and a tendency to whistle when she walked, it turned out to be surprisingly tolerable. Its air supply was cool, and it muffled voices slightly, which was not all a bad thing. It also fended off Devlin’s wandering hands, which was a very good thing. She shuffled along between him and Jathro, both similarly garbed, heading for the next stage. She thought she would give anything in the world—in any world—for about a week’s sound sleep.
They passed through two successive airlocks with circular doors a meter thick, like those on bank vaults, through a decon spray, and finally entered a gloomy, red-lit control center, loud with anonymous voices. Devlin guided Alya to a couch and then excused himself to go and attend to business. Fine by her.
Jathro sat on her left, being darkly inscrutable, either suppressing excitement or possibly just sulking over Alya’s continuing lack of interest in him. She did not care which. He did offer to find her a coffee. She declined, without asking him how she could drink one when sealed inside a bubble suit.
The room held half a dozen people seated at coms, all in the same sanitary packaging, half of them jabbering into mikes over other voices coming from speakers. Two walls were transparent and showed larger and busier rooms beyond, where more troglodytic shadows moved in ruddy-tinged dimness. Another wall held a giant circular window, and after a moment Alya guessed that the blackness beyond must be de Soto Dome itself. The glass—or whatever the port was made of—could probably withstand anything up to and including stellar infusion.
A constant rain of voices splattered through the air around her, individually quiet and calm and confident, but in the mass conveying a sense of turmoil and confusion. Once in a while she recognized Baker Abel, sharp and imperative, devoid of jocularity. Often the voice was the nasal twang of System.
“Four-seven…four-six…four-five…Stand-by, Prometheus. Three-five…three-six…Bering finalizing, Prometheus engaging…calibration, is that a shadow on seven?…Confirming shadow on seven…shadow noted…mark two-nine.”
What did it all mean? Did anyone know?
Did anyone care?
“Prometheus counting…three…two…one. Stellar infusion.”
Machines clicked and clattered somewhere in the dimness. She yawned until her jaw ached. Her interest in Rhine was absolutely zero. Tiber, fine. Tiber felt good. And at the moment a certain long young man would feel good. She wondered where he was billeted. Her head was clogged with fatigue.
Devlin reappeared and settled on her right, too close. “Just a minute or two, now. We’re stoking up Prometheus to heat Nauc’s morning bathwater. Rhine’s next, if it’s there. Abel’s laying bets that Contact’ll be around on the night side this time. Lord alone knows how anyone can tell, but that guy’s right more often than he’s wrong.”
“Perhaps he has intuition also, Dr. Devlin.”
Devlin flashed a big smile to show he was unwounded. “Grant! Call me Grant. I doubt it. You are unique; a unique woman.” If he was trying one of his steamy glances, the dim lighting masked it. “Baker’s goddamn baby sense of humor riles me, but he’s a good operator.”
Voices weaved and twined in intricate polyphony.
“Perhaps I should explain some of the physics here,” Devlin remarked, sliding closer and laying his arm along the back of the couch.
She made a noncommittal noise.
“Her Highness studied superstring theory under Gutelmann in Ankara,” Jathro said with satisfaction.
“The hell she did!” Devlin said, and for a moment he was speechless.
Except that Her Highness has forgotten every integral and fractal tensor she ever knew, Alya thought. Four-dimensional space-time was a special case within ten-dimensional superspace—that much had been known by every schoolboy for sixty years—but the way in which the Chiu-Laski transmensor realized one of the normally nonoperational dimensions by exchanging it for one of the three spatial dimensions was something that could only be expressed in math.
And the resulting string could be regarded as being of either infinite length or of no length at all. That had never made any sense to Alya, but as Gutelmann himself had said, “Just because we don’t understand it doesn’t stop it working.” On a clear night a telescope swept across the heavens would catch a million stars. So the transmensor could sweep a string through superspace, finding stars whose location relative to the Earth could not be expressed in real quantities. A transmensor gave strings, not answers, Gutelmann sa
id—more knots than yesses. Baker Abel might appreciate that one.
“Four-two…elevation…”
Prometheus had disengaged. Alya gathered that much. Just as well, or it would have melted the planet. She heard a sudden tremor of excitement in the dryness: “Response at predicted coordinates. A little high on tange…No rippling.”
Pause…
Tange?
“Ah! Here we go,” Devlin said with satisfaction.
The voices began picking up again, muttering their incomprehensible muddle of sounds.
Then she sensed a sudden crackle, and everyone seemed to look toward the window. Was that a faint bluish tinge she could see?
“Young devil’s right again,” Devlin said. “That’s moonlight out there. Two moons, both a fair size. Come!”
He rose and insisted on assisting her. They went over to the port and peered through.
There was nothing startling, for Alya had seen such places on a hundred holodramas and even a few newscasts. The sheer size of the dome impressed her. It was larger than any stadium she had ever seen, and she had seen many. Of course, its relative emptiness was making it seem larger. The floor saucered down to flatness in the center, where an indistinct clutter could just be discerned as a ring of armored skivs like patient dinosaurs, plus a blur of other equipment, anonymous in the muddled glow of red lamps high above and moonlight blue streaming up from the middle.
It was all irrelevant. If they suggested Alya go out there and take a look, she would obey without argument and it wouldn’t make any difference. Tiber. Not Rhine, Tiber!
The voices rose again, and then fell still, listening to a warbling rattle on a solitary tinny speaker.
“They’re picking up the robbie!” Devlin explained tensely.
A robbie would be a robot of some sort, some gadget that for the last seven or eight days had cruised around—crawled? flown? swum?—and now was radioing in its findings.
