Strings

by Dave Duncan

  Some of the units were small, some high, some just plain enormous. Two things like rows of houses must be SKIV-10’s, which were the biggest made, despite some fanciful holodramas Cedric had seen. A hangar-size door had opened in the far wall, and another of these monsters came rumbling out, heading for its mates like a sociable condominium. The closer the watchers came, the more crushingly huge the equipment seemed.

  Baker continued to lead the way, muttering into his handcom and presumably receiving replies in his earpatch. Belatedly Cedric remembered his duty again and glanced at Alya. She was holding on to him tightly, but her face glowed with happiness and an excitement as great as his own. On her other side, Jathro was watching her carefully. The guards followed, with guns at the ready.

  “First scan of the robbie data’s fine,” Devlin announced. “No mirror-image crap this time. Trace elements are okay. Orbital parameters good. This looks very right, Princess.”

  “We have enough altitude to launch aerials,” Baker announced. “Proceed when ready, Clem.”

  Mechanical things moved in the clutter around the pit. Metal arms lifted and swung. Cedric saw something rise from the far side, saw wings unfold and brighten as they caught the light, and watched it swoop down and vanish into the pit. Other aerials swung for a moment from the gantries and then dropped.

  Baker knew exactly where he was going. With the others trailing in single file, and the gunmen still at the rear, he led a winding course between giant wheels and throbbing behemoths, finally attaining the edge of the pit, at a clearing where rails marked off a spectators’ gallery—not that the railings would have lasted long had one of the skivs made a wrong turning.

  And there was another world, floating below them, hot with sunshine and gaudy with fall colors. Copper and gold trees filled a valley floor, flashes of silver showing where a stream wound. The flanking uplands were gentle, and greener than any hills Cedric had ever seen. As though he were riding in a balloon, he watched the landscape slowly twist, drifting by in silence below him. He searched in vain for signs of animal life, wondering how he would feel if a road or a barbed-wire fence came into view.

  “Bring her up!” Baker’s voice said, but the result felt more as though de Soto Dome were dropping. The ground rose and began to turn more quickly. Baker shouted about that, and the twisting slowed. Then a dark shadow came crawling over the woods and Cedric’s heart spasmed. No one commented, and at last he worked out that it was the shadow of the pit, the transmensor string itself, the hole between worlds. How could a hole cast a shadow?

  “Get away from these damned trees!” Baker shouted into his com. The woodlands began to twitch sideways in uneven jerks, even as they continued to rise toward the viewers.

  Alya squeezed Cedric’s hand. “That’s impossible, you know?”

  “What is?” The disk of shadow was growing larger, and closer.

  “It’s theoretically impossible to move Contact around!” She sounded just as thrilled as Cedric was. “The 4-I people can do it—a little, they can—but theory says they shouldn’t be able to. Math insists that a transmensoral string must end at a null value on the first differential of a gravity gradient, which means the surface of a planet, or some dense body. Maximum gravity will always be at the surface of the geoid, so that’s why Contact is always close to sea level. The surface is sharper on a solid, which is how they tell NSB’s from stars, and it’s why they usually find dry land and not ocean, but there is no theoretical way they can shift around and change the location of—” She stopped and bit her lip. After a knife-twisting moment she said quietly, “Sorry, Cedric!”

  “No problem,” he said, and managed to smile. He thought there would have been less of a problem if she had not said “Sorry” quite so intensely. Obviously Alya was a genius. She had studied everywhere and everything. She knew real science, and all he knew was science fiction—he was ignorant. He could barely read. They had nothing in common except the physical attraction of healthy young animals. He was just a stud to her, a pleasant and conveniently malleable male, a well-equipped, clean-limbed country lad to play with. She was royalty, rich and well-traveled, probably accustomed to having a gigolo on call wherever she happened to be. She must regard him as nothing more than a mental health measure, like a masseur. He just hoped he had satisfied her—he had tried as hard as he could in the night. He thought he had been quite impressive, but of course he could not be sure. No matter. He would accept whatever she offered. Nothing as good as Alya would ever happen to him again.

  “Hold it there!” Baker said. The field of view had cleared the trees and settled lower, almost to the grassy surface beyond. Pocked with low bushes, it lay only five or six meters below the watchers, almost all of it in shadow. The edge of the pit was a shallow steel bevel above a dangerous blur, a roiling hazy contact between light and dark. The wise stayed well away from the edges of strings. A man who strayed too close might find his substance spread over a billion light-years.

  Contact! Two ramps roared out from the sides of the pit, just above the ill-defined edge. They touched down on the grass, not quite facing each other.

  And something like a haze rose from the ground, as though at a signal. Baker yelled a warning, and the two armed rangers whipped up their weapons—but there was no target, only a mist. Cedric moved to pull Alya back from the rail as the fog streamed upward.

  “Butterflies!” she cried, and Cedric stopped to stare.

  The cloud of butterflies distilled, condensed into a smoke, and came whirling upward, sparkling in a million hues. They ranged in size from mere midges to beauties as large as dinner plates. Peacock blue and ruby, pearl and amethyst and chrome yellow, they spun in a multicolored helix.

  “Beautiful!” Alya said. “Oh, they’re lovely!”

  “Don’t be sure, Princess,” Devlin growled. “I’ve seen beauty that could kill.”

  “It’s a welcome!”

  “As long as they don’t drink blood or something.”

  But the butterflies seemingly meant no harm. They circled and danced, and gradually sank back down to their own world and dispersed. Soon they were gone. If they had been an omen, it had been a very touching one.

  Now the skivs were rolling, roaring down the ramp and rocking off across the grass, raising faint dust. Some of the other vehicles were of types that Cedric did not know, although he could make easy guesses at the rocket launchers and the trailers bearing sail planes. And silence descended again. Soon the great dome was empty.

  “Well, my lady?” Baker Abel wore a puckish grin on his homely face. “The string seems stable. The window will be open for hours yet. Would you care for a stroll on Tiber?”

  “Yes,” Alya said fervently. “Oh, yes!”

  “Hold it!” Devlin boomed. “Regulations, Abel!”

  Baker donned an expression of great innocence. “It’s good grassland, Grant. Nothing sharp that I can see.”

  Devlin seemed to chew his moustache in doubt. “You understand the risk, Princess?”

  “Bubble suits?” Alya said, looking woebegone.

  He nodded, visibly wavering. “They’re not certified for surface. One tiny puncture and you can’t come back—not without a two-year quarantine!”

  “I’ll risk it,” Alya said defiantly.

  Cedric made a quick move before he could be displaced from his position as escort. Holding her hand, he led the way around the lip of the pit to the nearer of the two ramps. Together they strolled down into another world.

  14

  Tiber/Cainsville, April 8

  SOON THEY STOOD on the grass, and all that remained visible of the world that had birthed them was a vast circular darkness overhead, mysteriously balanced on its two ramps, seeming to contain nothing but a few lamps gleaming high on the gantries in the dome. Cedric led the way forward, out from under the shadow of that dark umbrella, until they reached the sunlit grass and could walk beneath the clean blue sky, frilled with new-washed white clouds. Soon the window was invisibl
e, and the ramps seemed to end in midair.

  The guards looked around longingly for something to shoot at, but no threat showed on Tiber.

  There should have been a fresh smell of crushed grass from the skiv tracks. The bubble suits masked that, and they masked the wind also, diluting it to a mere crackly flopping of their own material. But they could not conceal the warmth of the sun, or the lushness of the hills, or the autumn glory of the woodland in the valley bottom. Far off to the east lay a hazy blue range, snowcapped. Baker announced that there was an ocean westward—the aerials had photographed it already, and didn’t the clouds that way have a maritime look to them?

  Cedric did not care. The one lush little valley looked good enough all by itself. Four head to the hectare, easy. He would settle for this—and Alya, of course.

  A circle of skivs had settled down as a camp near the edge of the wood; already suited rangers were out, peering at trees. Technicians fussed around the rocket launchers on a grassy hillock a safe distance away. Another group of vehicles was just disappearing over the skyline upstream.

  Cedric crouched to poke at a tire scar. The soil was dark and rich, but the grass looked a little strange. The ground was peppered with flowers and feeding butterflies. He found a flower with two red heart-shaped petals and rose to offer it to Alya.

  She took it and thanked him with a look that needed no words.

  And then he held out his other hand to show its contents, starting with Jathro, who glared and spat out an unintelligible oath.

  Cedric was startled and then started to laugh. “No offense meant, sir! I just wanted to show you. It’s animal dung.”

  “I can see that!”

  “But don’t you see what it means? Not more than two days old, and obviously something big.” Cedric glanced at Devlin and Baker, and they were way ahead of him, of course.

  Baker was grinning. “Herbivore. Could be edible, maybe.”

  “Well, something’s keeping the grass cropped,” Cedric said, “and on Earth I’d have said these were horse buns.”

  “Want to domesticate it, do you?” Baker asked. “As the sun sinks slowly in the north, gallant Sheriff Cedric forks his trusty seven-legged feathered warthog and gallops off in a shower—” He dodged as Cedric threw the specimens at him.

  Alya’s face was glowing, but they all felt it—peace and freedom and boundless opportunity. The new world, Eden regained.

  Thunder rolled over the meadow, and they turned to watch the first rocket scamper up the sky on a rope of white light. Following it with his eyes, Cedric noticed the sun. It was too yellow and too large, and he could look straight at it. There seemed to be shadowy markings on it.

  “Smaller than Sol,” Baker shouted, having seen his attention. “But closer. Also safer. No UV to worry about. You could sun-bathe here!”

  Cedric shivered at that idea. All his life he had been nagged about goggles and blocking cream and told to keep his skin covered.

  “It’s looking good,” Devlin said as silence returned. “No problems so far. Your intuition seems to be working, Highness. Almost I can envy you…and you, Abel.”

  Alya smiled at Devlin, and at Baker.

  She did not look at Cedric.

  Suddenly System’s metal voice twanged in Cedric’s ear. He jumped. He had not realized that he was still within range, and yet Devlin and Baker had not lost the preoccupied looks of men half listening to other voices.

  “Message for Hubbard Cedric Dickson from Deputy Director Fish. Text as follows: ‘Come to my office as soon as possible.’ Text ends.”

  “Message received,” Cedric told his wrist mike. He did not add, “and ignored.” Duty and pleasure required that he stay with Alya.

  “Time to go,” Devlin said. “If the old woman hears about this, she’ll have my hide for a rug. And we have another world waiting.”

  Alya seemed to shrink, her happiness dissolving like a mist. She moved closer to Cedric. He put an arm around her for comfort.

  “Don’t worry, my lady,” Baker said. “This one’ll be back in another three days.”

  “We can start the planting then?” Jathro asked.

  Devlin shrugged. “If the overnighters don’t turn up anything unexpected, and if the princess still feels that this is the one she wants…. Yes. Why not? The sooner we start, the more people we can move before we lose the string.”

  Alya nodded reluctantly and let Cedric urge her forward; but as they walked back toward the ramps, he could almost feel that he was having to push her.

  There had been one decon chamber going in to protect Tiber; there were three on the way out, and the brew in the first was powerful enough to wilt Alya’s flower into a smear of brown slime. Cedric could not be sure through two thicknesses of streaming plastic, but he thought she dropped a tear over that.

  With the outside of their bubble suits still glistening and doubtless reeking of diabolic chemistry, they mounted golfies again for the trip back to David Thompson Dome. The joy that Tiber had produced in Alya had withered like the blossom; she sat tight against Cedric with her fists clenched, biting her lip.

  He decided that conversation was required. “You said you had brothers and sisters with the same intuition?”

  She nodded. “And cousins.”

  “But it only works when you—they—are in danger, personally?”

  “Ten of us have gone. I’ll be the eleventh.”

  “My god, woman!” he exclaimed. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Twenty-five years at least. Ask your grandma. I don’t know all of it. She hinted that there had been two others before we got involved, but there could have been more. One of them was Oak, Cedric.”

  “My parents?” But Cedric was a clone of Hastings Willoughby, so his father would have been his son, and his mother no relation at all—hell! When he thought about that, he felt as though he did not even exist. He was not anyone.

  “Yes, your parents,” Alya said. “They were part of a plantation, apparently. The tale of a broken string was a cover, but the antimony business seems to have been real, so they did die. Maybe! As I said, only your grandmother knows for sure.”

  “And System.”

  “I doubt if even System gets all the truth.” Alya was staring straight ahead, and her chin had taken on a determined set. Cedric had a curious feeling that her soul was somewhere else, that her voice was speaking words she hardly heard. “The deception is staggering. How she’s kept it going all these years is beyond imagining. It helps to have unlimited money, of course.”

  “Where does she get the bods—from Pilgrim Clubs?”

  “Pilgrim Clubs?” Alya snorted. “They may have meant something once, when the transmensor first started up and everyone had hopes. Maybe a few are still legit, but most of them are nothing but gun-toting, wife-swapping, screaming racist religious fanatics.”

  Cedric started to laugh. After a moment she looked at him with hurt puzzlement, and then seemed to realize what she had said. She smiled sadly. “On alternate days, I guess.”

  The train of golfies whizzed eagerly down a long ramp and cornered on two wheels at the bottom. Devlin must have pulled some potent override code to pry that kind of speed out of them.

  A shaky image of the Mayflower and Puritans in tall hats had faded from Cedric’s mind, giving way to pictures of giant skivs and mobile laboratories, of shining city towers rising amidst the virgin beauty of a paradise like Tiber. Of course, the line between habitable world and Class Two was so fine that a single number in a report could make the difference. “BEST!” he said. “That’s why Gran won’t let BEST people into Cainsville! To keep the secret.”

  Naturally Alya knew that. She nodded distractedly. “And nothing defines loyalties like a good feud.”

  “So where do the people come from?” Cedric asked again. “Who runs it? The Institute, obviously, but who? The rangers? How big is this?”

  “Very big. Most come from refugee camps, I think. There are so many disasters
these days—floods and famines and mass evacuations. No one can keep track of all the millions.”

  “But there must be a core of scientists for each new colony, surely? Engineers and doctors and—”

  “Perhaps a few,” Alya said with a shake of her head. “But they wouldn’t be much use. Any plantation is going to start from where? The bottom, right? You don’t need doctors. First you need peasants to till the land. Civilization is always built on the peasants.”

  And Cedric’s visions of futuristic science-cities were replaced in turn by remembered newscasts of endless dusty shantytowns under deadly sunlight, of dark brown men with ribs like picket fences, of bloated starving babies.

  “And they’ll scatter,” she said, “spread out in search of the best land. In ten years they’ll cover a continent.”

  “Huddled masses! The homeless! Chinese and Bangladeshis? And Africans, of course. And I suppose lots from Central America, the flood running before the plagues?”

  Alya agreed. “You European types are being shortchanged on this round, I think.”

  “We did better than we deserved on the last one.”

  She smiled, her distress momentarily forgotten. “That’s true, although not many of you would admit it. Some must get to go—Dutch, maybe, and Afrikaans survivors. I suppose her choice is largely dictated by the timing—by wherever there happens to be a good disaster going on and enough confusion that a few hundred or thousand won’t be missed.”

  It was staggering. “Thousands? They’re doing it on that scale?”

  “Tens of thousands. So far as I know, the last Class One world was Raven, three years ago. My sister Tal chose it—I think she had a choice of one, but her satori wanted Raven. Before that was Etna, and my brother Omar. You would have liked Omar—I remember his last call home. He mentioned Japanese—that was the time of the Nipurb floods. There would be doctors and so on in that lot. The Institute moved forty thousand to Etna; so Devlin told me yesterday.”