“As well as ever. I keep trying to coax her into doing things and meeting new people, but she always says no. Our fractious and stiff-necked people killed Oom Albert as surely as a bullet, and I doubt whether she will ever completely forgive them. Friedrick and Bret visited her last Thursday to talk her into moving in with Bret and his wife, but she called my foster brothers a pair of amiable louts and threw them out.”
Vereshchagin knew both of Betje Beyers's sons, well meaning, middle-aged engineers. To their credit, they never begrudged Rikki the place she had usurped in their mother's affections. Still, Vereshchagin sympathized with Vroew Beyers. “Before I explain my plans, what are yours?” be asked, his eyes half-shut.
She reached out to touch the cenotaph. “I can sit for the last part of my degree anytime I choose. Simon Beetje wants to give me a faculty position in his department.”
With Albert Beyers's connivance, twenty years earlier Raul Sanmartin had established the university's Department of SuidAfrikan Ecology, and Simon Beetje and his wife Maria were two of his first students. Rikki Sanmartin, who had a houseful of pets to take care of by the time she was five, had inherited his passion.
“When did Simon say this?” Vereshchagin asked.
“A week ago.” She studied his face. “Other than you, Simon and Maria are about the only ones who have noticed that little Hendricka is all grown up. I told him that I would have to think
about it and consult with my crafty old Uncle Anton.”
“Me?” Vereshchagin protested.
“Yes, you.” She tilted her head sideways to observe him better. “For as long as I have been alive, not very much has happened on this planet that you have not had a hand in, and for the last few years I have felt you watching and waiting.”
“So what do you think of Simon's offer?” Vereshchagin asked in a neutral tone of voice.
“I wish the timing were better. This is the first election that I am old enough to stand for. Steen's Reformed Nationals can be set to take a tumble, so this is a chance to make my mark. If I wait, it might be years before another opportunity comes. 'Green fruit will make your stomach ill, but you must pick it when it ripens'-- isn't that what Oom Albert used to say?” She searched Vereshchagin's eyes. “Friedrick and Bret have never had any interest in politics, which makes me the heir apparent.”
“Who has been after you to stand?” Vereshchagin asked, understanding her.
“Adriaan Smith. Dear old Adriaan, of course-- he is tired of being burgemeester and is hoping I will be ready to take the job from him in five or six years. I remember sitting on his knee listening to him tell droll stories about the other sharks in SuidAfrika's political pond. He was really very sweet about it He thinks that if he can set me up in a safe Jo'burg assembly seat, he will pay the debt he owes my mother.”
“And what do you think?”
She sat down among the short ferns carpeting the cemetery. “I think that this is the year you should run for president If anyone can sink Steen, you can-- people love war heros. I will ride to victory on your coattails. I think that you have thought about it, and I think that Heer Mutaro dropped by to tell you that His Imperial Majesty will not object.”
Vereshchagin smiled. Little Rikki was a curious mixture of wistful idealism and hardened cynicism. “An excellent surmise, but not a correct one. Tell me, do you think enough of politics
to wish public office upon me?”
“It is a filthy business,” she said with callous candor, “but it is filthier when good people avoid it” “And would the people here elect me?”
“Dear old Uncle Anton.” She clicked her teeth disapprovingly. “You were the first one to call me a precocious brat and mean it. I could count votes before I had my teeth straightened.” She tossed her hair. “Adriaan will get the Union party's edorsement for lack of anyone better, but he doesn't want to be president. He would rather be gelded, I think. So he expects to run and lose. It is a shame--he is a good man. If you announced as a candidate, he would be the first to cheer.”
“And who told you this, young lady?”
“My little voice, but anyone else who pays attention could tell you the same,” she said indifferently. “You will pick up at least half the Afrikaners even if Steen runs well, which he won't, and the cowboys and the sects would vote for you to a man.”
While 66 percent of Suid-Afrika's population was of Afrikaner descent, both the cowboys, a mixed population from the continent’s largely agrarian south, and the descendants of the five sects who were the planet’s original colonists were guaranteed representation in the Assembly.
During the years of anarchy that preceded Vereshchagin’s arrival, an Afrikaner kommando had burned the inhabitants of one sect village alive; and during the first Afrikaner rebellion, extremists had detonated a nuclear device in the cowboy town of Reading. Both the cultists and the cowboys were understandably sensitive about the incidents, and whatever slight support that President Steen bad enjoyed among them evaporated the morning after his finance minister was quoted as saying that the solution to Suid-Afrika's problems was “a bomb and some gasoline.” While the minister in question found himself unemployed even before he was sober, the damage to Steen was considerable.
Vereshchagin did not venture to disagree. “Your little voice?” he queried. sitting next to her.
“Oom Albert. I sometimes hear his voice in my head. The things he would say to me.” She grinned. “Last week. when Fanie Slabbert came by to see if I had designs on his seat, I could bear Oom Albert, clear as a bell, saying, 'Smack his nose, and he will lick your feet.’ “
“Sound advice. What about you? Are you certain that you wish to go into politics? Why not the university?”
“You taught me about duty,” she said, her inner self speaking. “You know the way of things. I can be a researcher and catalog all of Suid-Afrika's plants and animals before they disappear, or
I can put myself in a position to do something to prevent it”
“Tell me, in the university, which are the best minds? Simon has already given me his choices.”
“Simon probably left out himself.”
Vereshchagin nodded.
“Which departments then?” she asked.
“Linguistics, communications, anthropology, xenobiology, for a start”
“That is an odd assortment I still want to know what the Imperial commissioner wanted with you. Let me see if I can puzzle it out from the clues you've given me.” A sudden thought struck her, and she held her hand to her mouth.
“Yes,” Vereshchagin said, “an intelligent, alien species on our doorstep. Mutaro-san has asked me to lead the expedition. Simon has not guessed yet. You may tell him that I need a xenobiologist”
“That should have been my father,” Rikki said, reaching out to touch the cenotaph, one tear coursing down her cheek.
Vereshchagin waited to see if she would say more.
“I used to dream that he really wasn't dead, that somehow he survived and they put him in prison, and that when I grew up, I would go to Earth and rescue him. I used to act it out with my dolls. Isn't that silly? Tant Betje never knew.”
Vereshchagin smiled very slightly. “Tant Betje gave me regular reports, and from what she told me, your plan was better than some I have seen from my junior officers.”
“I always meant to ask you, Uncle Anton, whether he really had to die.”
Vereshchagin hesitated. “ ‘Had to’ is a very difficult standard to apply. In truth, to this day I do not know if he had to die, and I doubt whether he knew either. But I know that he was unwilling to accept the risk of failing, and neither was I.”
“He was the last man to die in our war for independence. At times, I hated him for it, you know. Mother only had time to write me one letter before they killed her, but he had time to plan. He left me thirty letters altogether -one for each of my birthdays and a few more besides. The one I remember best is the one he left for
my seventeenth birthday to try to make me understand why Mother died.” She looked at him. “I don't have her kind of faith. Or her kind of courage.”
“I have been a soldier for a long time, Rikki, and I know that you will not know whether you have the faith or the courage until you are asked to show it. But I would be very surprised if you do not”
“Who are you taking with you?” she asked in a subdued voice.
“I will need a team of scientists, and Hans is assembling a company-sized strike force for me. There will be Imperial scientists and soldiers as well.”
“Why would you take soldiers along? Seriously, Uncle Anton, if these aliens are unfriendly, what can one company of soldiers do?”
Vereshchagin smiled. “We took less than a company to Tokyo and accomplished a great deal.” He touched the ferns around him. “Mostly, we will have them for reconnaissance, which is field research by another name. Orbital sensors are effective at gathering certain types of information, but even if the natives are extraordinarily friendly, we will need men on the ground observing and collecting specimens to tell us more about the planet and its inhabitants. Certainly, some of it will not be terribly different from the wildlife research we do for Simon and Maria. Moreover, if these aliens are unfriendly, although I can do a great deal with warships and precision-guided munitions, they are no substitute for poor, bloody infantrymen; and I know that the men Hans will select will accomplish whatever I require of them.” He looked up. “So, Rikki, are you the promising young xenobiologist or the budding politician?”
“You are asking whether I want to go with you. And my answer is yes.” She tried not to allow her voice to falter.
“What I am really asking is whether you are willing to stay behind if I need you to do so. I am very much afraid I might”
He left her lost in thought beside the cenotaph and walked inside Coldewe's headquarters bunker to meet with Coldewe's “brain trust”--- Danny Meagher, his executive officer; Battalion
Sergeant Aleksei Beregov; and the officers commanding his four maneuver companies: Tikhon Degtyarov, Per Kiritinitis, Jan Snyman, and Sergei Okladnikov. Saki Bukhanov, Vereshchagin's former intendance officer, was also seated, wearing mufti and looking ill at ease. A ninth officer, Detlef Jankowskie, still orbiting overhead in his ship, was present via a telecommunications relay.
“We were almost ready to send out a search party to look for you.” Coldewe joked.
“Rikki accosted me on my way in.” Vereshchagin took a seat.
“I've brought everyone up to the mark, and we've looked at the materials Mutaro-san provided” Coldewe glanced at his officers. “Jan, do you want to tell us what they mean?”
Snyman rose and turned on the room's large electronic map. “This a space shot of the planet the Imps have named 'Neighbor.' It is a shade closer to its primary, and a hair smaller than Earth. The planet has a rotation of about nineteen hours, a modest axial tilt, and two small satellites--- orbiting cover and concealment, as Detlef would say--- with a combined mass about a quarter of Luna's.”
He superimposed a closer shot. “As you can see, there are three major landmasses: one equatorial supercontinent and two island continents, one about the size of Australia and another
slightly larger than Greenland. Mutaro's climatologist says that all three continents exhibit severe seasonal patterns of rainfall distribution, which means, in English, that they alternate between monsoon season and drought season. In general, winds are fierce, particularly in storm bands north and south of the equator, and tides are minimal. There is very little snow except at higher elevations.”
“Polar ice?” Okladnikov asked.
Snyman focused in on the top third of the planet “No ice caps. The continents are superhot---equivalent to Earth's Eocene-- in the equatorial band.” He switched the map image to a shot of the main landmass. '“The mountain chains are not much to look at. Based on this and some other data, the geologists think that Neighbor has significantly less vulcanism and crustal plate movement than either Earth or Suid-Afrika. While marine life appears abundant and sophisticated, the vegetation on land isn't especially impressive. Significant portions of all three continents are desert-hot as blazes during the day and chilly at night”
“We remember Ashcroft-we were young once,” Coldewe commented Ashcroft had been a hellish, barren world with only scraps of an atmosphere. “We can think of it as déjà vu all over again.”
“The planet shows obvious signs of cultivation and urbanization,” Snyman continued, focusing on a medium-sized city. “Interestingly, it doesn't appear to have anything resembling grasses, which provide most of humanity's staple food plants.”
Danny Meagher rubbed his eyes impatiently, “Jan, is this the best resolution the probe can give us?”
Snyman turned off his magic map. “For some reason, the people who designed the probe never considered the possibility that it might come across an inhabited world. We have all kinds of
things-- atmospheric content, weather patterns, spectral analysis of vegetation. But if we want any useful military data, we will have to look for it ourselves.”
Coldewe turned to Saki Bukhanov, who had red-rimmed eyes from studying shipping manifests and who was arguably the most important person in the room. “How do the logistics look?”
Saki patted his belly-- the way his wife, Petronella, fed him, his old uniform didn't fit, but five years as a banker had done little to dull his mind. '“The Imperials have severely underestimated requirements, and bringing an additional company will make matters worse. They are only shipping thirty days ammunition at a limited conflict expenditure rate, which might last all of a week if you had to use it, and they omitted a lot of ancillary equipment—I don't know where they expected to find a machine shop. But the food situation concerns me most. I doubt whether there will be any food on this planet that men can eat, and hydroponic gardening to recycle nutrients is well and good, but in practice, the wastage rate is far higher than is assumed here."
"Can we do the mission with the shipping space available?'' Coldewe asked.
"How long do you plan on staying in orbit?" Bukhanov asked.
"Plan on at least two years," Vereshchagin said.
Bukhanov consulted the little laptop computer that rarely left his side. ''We'd have to freeze-dry everything and Heer Mutaro would have to guarantee two supply ships a year," he conceded reluctantly. "I will get with Vulko Redzup and put something together. We will still have to dip deep into our stocks to get the expedition outfitted initially."
"Give me the figures," Vereshchagin told him.
WHEN SIMON BEETlE TOOK THE CALL, HE LISTENED FOR SEVERAL minutes. Stunned, he hung up the phone. His wife, Maria, looked at him.
He slumped down in his chair. "That was Rikki." Unlike most Afrikaners, the Beetjes spoke English at home.
"Well, is she going to accept or not? If she is, we will have to ask for a supplement to the budget by Tuesday at the latest," his wife replied, ever practical, as she busied herself cleaning up from dinner.
"We didn't discuss that." Tall, extraordinarily thin, and perpetually youthful, Simon Beetje fit no one's image of a department head, while Maria was short and rounded. Their students called
them "stick and stone."
"Well, what did you discuss?'' She gave the countertop a final flick with a cloth.
“The Imperials have discovered an intelligent alien species not very far from here. They have asked Anton Vereshchagin to lead an expedition to contact them."
"That's silly." For a moment, she seemed surprised. ''Rikki must be imagining things. The Imps would never trust Anton Vereshchagin with anything."
"What if it is true? It would be the opportunity of a lifetime!"
He looked away. "It must be true. Anton asked me yesterday who the brightest faculty members were, but at the time, I didn't know what he was after. Rikki said he plans on leaving about six weeks from now. He wants to kn
ow if you and I are interested.”
“You don't imagine that we could leave. do you?” She held up fingers to make her points. “The university would never give both of us a leave of absence at the same time. Who would look after the department? Surely not Karol or Mannie! And they couldn't take all of our classes. And what about our ongoing research-we cannot simply abandon it. And if we did go, what would there be for us to do? They will not allow xenobiologists to study these aliens--the linguists and the anthropologists will do that--and there is no reason in our going off to study another planet’s ecology when there is so much still to be done here.”
“Don't you see bow important this could be?”
Maria pushed aside her hair impatiently, and her voice took on a sharp edge. “What I see if we go off like that is our department being abolished and our tenure taken away. We would lose everything we've worked for. And the idea that we could pick up our lives and flit off into space is simply ridiculous. With time dilation, how could we ever pick up again when we returned? Don't be silly. Think of the work we are doing here and the students we are preparing. Rikki is a young girl and can do flighty things if she likes, but we are established professors.”
When he failed to respond, she said, “For dinner tomorrow, why don't you make something light, maybe a chicken dish.” Her point made, she left the room, leaving Simon Beetje staring at the surface of the table.
Thursday (1167)
HENDRICKA SANMARTIN FOLLOWED SENIOR COMMUNICATIONS Sergeant Esko Poikolainnen into the small room that served Coldewe as office and living quarters. “Uncle Hans? Are you here?”
“Down here. With the rest of the mess.” The room held two chairs, a field desk with a computer terminal, a hammock, and a fair amount of junk. Coldewe was seated cross-legged in a corner.
Rikki moved a rumpled battledress uniform from one of the chairs and sat down. “Could you be more specific?”
“The maid doesn't come until Wednesday.”
“Of what year?” Rikki inquired innocently.
Cain's Land Page 3
