I went over to the Sandalman’s gate and looked up at the lantern. It was just out of my reach or I would have lifted it off its hook and gone off to the shelter of an alley where I could read the message without anybody seeing me. Including the Sandalman. I didn’t think he’d take kindly to somebody opening his mail. I huddled against the wall and pulled out the burn pouch.
“No one in,” the bey said. She still had the press card in her hand. It looked gnawed around the edges. She must have been sitting on the steps ever since this afternoon, trying to get the holo-letters out.
“I have to see the Sandalman,” I said. “Let me in. I have a message for him.”
She was looking at the burn pouch curiously. I stuck it back in my pocket.
“Let me in,” I said. “Go tell the Sandalman I’m here and I want to see him. Tell him I have a message for him.”
“Message,” the bey said, watching the pocket whore the burn pouch had gone.
I gave up and pulled the pouch out of my shirt. I took the plastic packet out and showed it to her. “Message. For Sandalman. Let me in.”
“No one in,” she said. “I take.” Her hand lunged through the iron gate.
I yanked the packet away from her. “Message not for you. For Sandalman. Take me to Sandalman. Now.”
I had frightened her. She backed away from the gate toward the steps. “No one in,” she said, and sat down. She began turning the press card over and over in her dirty-looking hands.
“I’ll give you something,” I said. “If you take the message to the Sandalman, I’ll give you something. Better than the press card.”
She came back to the gate, still looking suspicious. I had no idea what I had on me that she might like. I rummaged in my torn shirt pocket and came up with a pen that had holo-letters down its side. “I’ll give you this,” I said, holding it out in one hand. “You tell Sandalman I have message for him.” I held the packet out, too, so she would understand. “Let me in,” I said.
She was faster than a striking snake. One minute, she was edging forward, looking at the pen. The next she had the packet. She grabbed the lantern off its hook and ran up the steps.
“Don’t,” I said. “Wait.” The door shut behind her. I couldn’t see a thing.
Great. The bey would make a nice meal of the message, I was no closer to a story than I had been, and Evelyn would probably be dead by the time I got back to the dome. I felt my way along the wall till I could see the jeep’s lights. They were starting to dim. Great. Now the battery was going. I would not have been surprised to find Bradstreet sitting in the driver’s seat, burning a story on my equipment.
I didn’t have a prayer of finding my way back to the dome in the pitch black that was Colchis’s night, so I left the lights on and hoped Lacau wouldn’t see me coming. Even with them on, I high-centered the jeep twice and crashed into a chunk of lava that cast no shadow at all.
I took my shredded shirt off and left it in the jeep. It took me forever to get down the ridge in the dark, carrying the translator and my burn equipment, and the slit I had made in the tent wasn’t big enough for me and the bulky boxes. I set them down, slipped through the slit backwards, and pulled the burn box through after me. I hefted the translator onto my shoulder.
“What took you so long, Jack?” Lacau said. “The Sandalman’s guards have been gone a couple of hours. I knew I shouldn’t have tried to get them to help me. Now they’ve run away and you’ve gotten in. Is Bradstreet here, too?”
I turned around. Lacau was standing there, looking like he hadn’t slept in a week.
“Why don’t you go right back out the way you came in and I’ll pretend I never saw you?” he said.
“I’m here to get a story,” I said. “You don’t really think I’ll leave till I get it, do you? I want to see Howard.”
“No,” Lacau said.
“Right to know,” I said, and reached automatically for the press card the bey was probably chewing on right now. If she hadn’t already started on Evelyn’s message. “You can’t deny a hotline reporter access to the principals in a story.”
“He’s dead,” Lacau said. “I buried him this afternoon.”
I tried to look like I had come to get a story about a treasure, like I’d never seen the horror that lay in the hammock down the hall, and I guess I did okay because Lacau didn’t look suspicious. Maybe he had stopped looking and feeling shock and didn’t expect it from me. Or maybe I looked just like I was supposed to.
“Dead?” I said, and tried to remember what he looked like, but all I could see was what was left of Evelyn’s face, and her hands clutching my shirt, sharp as a razor and not even looking like a hand.
“What about Callender?”
“He’s dead, too. They’re all dead except Borchardt and Herbert, and they can’t talk. You got here too late.”
The strap of the translator was digging into my bare shoulder. I shifted to adjust it.
“What’s that?” he said. “A translator? Can it do anything with distorted language? With somebody who can’t talk because of…can it do that?”
“Yes,” I said. “What’s going on? What happened to Howard and the others?”
“I’m confiscating your burn equipment,” he said. “And your translator.”
“You can’t do that,” I said, and started to back away from him. “Hotline reporters have free access.”
“Not in here they don’t. Give me the translator.”
“What do you need it for? I thought you said Borchardt and Herbert couldn’t talk.”
Lacau reached behind him. “Pick up the burn equipment and come this way,” he said, and pulled out a photosene flamethrower made out of what looked like a Coke bottle and a mirror, one of the homemade jobs the suhundulim had massacred everybody with. Lacau tilted it so the mirror was under the light bulb hanging above us. I picked up the burn equipment.
He led me away from Evelyn, through a maze of cargo cartons and boxes to the center of the tent. Plastic mesh was draped over where I thought Borchardt might be lying in a hammock like Evelyn’s. If he’d hoped to get me lost, it hadn’t worked. I could find Evelyn easily. All I had to do was follow the web-like tangle of electrical cords.
The center area looked like a warehouse, piles of open crates everywhere, shovels and picks and sifters, all the archaeologists’ equipment, stacked against them. Their packs and sleeping bags were over at one side in a tangled heap next to a pile of flattened cargo cartons. In the middle was a wire cage and facing it, directly under another mess of electrical cords and plugged into it, was a refrigerator. It was big, an ancient double-door commercial job, and I would have bet it came from the Coca-Cola bottling plant. No sign of the treasure, unless it was all already packed. Or in cold storage. I wondered what the cage was for.
“Put down the equipment,” Lacau said, and started fiddling with the mirror again. “Get in the cage.”
“Where’s your burn equipment?” I said.
“None of your business.”
“Look,” I said. “You’ve got your job to do, and I’ve got mine. All I want is a story.”
“A story?” Lacau said. He shoved me into the cage. “How about this for a story? You’ve just been exposed to a deadly virus. You’re under quarantine,” he said, and reached up and turned out the light.
Boy, I really knew how to get a story. First the Sandalman’s bey and now Lacau, and I was no closer to knowing what was going on than when I was back at Lisii, and maybe only hours away from coming down with what was eating Evelyn. I rattled the wire mesh and yelled for Lacau awhile. Then I played with the lock and yelled some more, but I couldn’t see anything or hear anything except the wheezing hum of the refrigerator. Its silence was the only way I could tell when the electricity went off, which it did at least four times during the night. After awhile I hunched against the corner of the cage and tried to sleep.
As soon as it was light, I took off my clothes and checked myself all over for honeycombs. I co
uldn’t see any. I pulled my pants and shoes back on, scribbled a message on a page of my notebook and started banging on the cage again. The bey came in. She had a tray. It had a hard chunk of local bread, a harder one of cheese, and a bottle of Coke with a glass straw in it. It better not be the same one Evelyn had been drinking out of.
“Who else is here?” I asked the bey, but she looked skittish. I had really scared her last night.
I smiled at her. “You remember me, don’t you? I gave you a mirror.” She didn’t smile back. “Are there other beys here?”
She set the tray down on a carton and poked the bread through at me a chunk at a time. “What other beys are here besides you?” I said.
She couldn’t get the Coke bottle through the wire without its spilling all over. After a minute or two of her trying, I said, “Here, look, let’s cooperate;” and I leaned forward and sucked on the straw while she held the bottle.
When I straightened up, she said, “Only me. No beys. Only me.”
“Look,” I said. “I want you to take a message to Lacau.”
She didn’t answer, but at least she didn’t back away. I pulled out my trusty holo-lettered pen and held it close to my body. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as last night. “I’ll give you pen if you take message to Lacau.”
She backed away and stood pressed against the refrigerator, her large black eyes fastened on the pen. I scribbled Lacau’s name on the message with it, and put it back in my pocket, and her eyes followed it, fascinated. “I gave you mirror,” I said. “I give you this.” She darted forward to take the message I was holding out to her, and I finished my breakfast and took a nap and wondered what had happened to the message I had given the Sandalman’s bey.
When I woke up again, it was fully light, and I could see a lot of things I’d missed last night. My burn equipment was still here, on the other side of the sleeping bags, but I couldn’t see the translator anywhere. One of the packing crates, a little one, was right outside the cage. I wriggled my hand through a square of wire and pulled the box in close enough to pull the masking tape off. I wondered who had packed the treasure. Howard’s team? Or had they started dropping like flies as soon as they found it? The crate looked like too good a job for the suhundulim to have done it. It looked almost like Lacau’s style, but why would he pack it? His job was just to keep it from being stolen.
Masking tape and padded mesh and bubbles, all very neat. I pushed my hand through the wire till it stuck, tipped the box a little forward with my other hand, and was able to get a grip on something. I pulled it out.
It was a vase of some kind. I was holding it by the long, narrow neck. In it was a silver tube that was supposed to look like a flower, a lily maybe; widening out and then narrowing toward the open top. The sides of the tube were etched with fine lines. The vase itself was made of some kind of blue ceramic, as thin as eggshell. I wrapped it up in plastic mesh and laid it back in the box. I rummaged in the bubbles some more and came up with something that looked like a cross between one of Lisii’s clay pots and something a bey had chewed on for awhile and then spit out.
“That’s the door seal,” Lacau said. “According to Borchardt, it says, ‘Beware the curse of kings and keepers that turn men’s dreams to blood.’” He took the clay tablet out of my hands.
“Did you get my message?” I said, trying to pull my hands back through the cage wire. I scraped my wrist. It started to bleed. “Well,” I said, “did you get the message?”
He threw a chewed wad of paper at me. “More or less,” he said. “Beys tend to be curious about anything you give them. What was in the message?”
“I want to make a deal with you.”
Lacau started to put the door seal back in the carton. “I already know how to work the translator,” he said. “And the burn equipment.”
“Nobody knows I’m here. I’ve been relaying stories back to Lisii ground-to-ground for burning.”
“What kind of stories?” he said. He had straightened up, still holding the door seal.
“Fillers. The local wildlife, old interviews, the Commission. Human interest stuff.”
“The Commission?” he said. He had made a sudden, lurching movement as if he had almost dropped the door seal and then caught it at the last instant. I wondered if he was okay. He looked terrible.
“I’ve got a relay set up back in Lisii. My transmissions go out through it, and Bradstreet thinks I’m still in Lisii. If I stop burning stories, he’ll know something’s up. He’s got a Swallow. He could be here as soon as tomorrow.”
Lacau put the vase carefully in the carton and piled bubbles around it. He taped it shut and put down the masking tape. “What’s your deal?”
“I start filing stories again that will convince Bradstreet I’m still in Lisii.”
“And in return?”
“You tell me what’s going on. You let me interview the team. You give me a scoop.”
“Can you keep him away till day after tomorrow?”
“What happens tomorrow?”
“Can you?”
“Yes.”
He thought about it. “The ship will be here tomorrow morning,” he said slowly. “I’m going to need help loading the treasure.”
“I’ll help you,” I said.
“No private interviews, no private access to the burn equipment. I get censorship of the stories you file.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You don’t file the story on this till we’re off Colchis.”
I would have agreed to anything. This was not just a local bit of nastiness, minor potentate poisons a few strangers. There was a story here like no story I had ever had, and I would have agreed to kiss the Sandalman’s snaky feet to get it.
“Deal,” I said.
Lacau took a deep breath. “We found a treasure in the Spine,” he said. “Three weeks ago. A princess’s tomb. It’s worth…I don’t know. Most of the artifacts are made of silver, and their archaeological value alone is beyond price.
“A week ago, two days after we’d finished clearing the tomb and bringing it down here where we could work on it, the team came down with…something. A virus of some kind. Just the team. Not the Sandalman’s representative, not the bearers who brought the stuff down from the Spine. Nobody but the team. The Sandalman claims they opened the tomb themselves without waiting for local authorization.” He stopped.
“And if they did, that would mean they forfeit and the Sandalman gets the whole thing. Convenient. Where was the Sandalman’s rep while they were supposedly doing all this?”
“It was his bey. She went back to get the Sandalman. The team stayed behind to guard the treasure. Howard swears, swore they didn’t go in, that they waited until the Sandalman and his bearers got there. He says, said the team was poisoned.”
“Poy son,” Evelyn had said. “Sandalman.”
“The Sandalman claims it was some kind of guard poison put in the tomb by the ancients, that the team touched it when they opened the tomb illegally.”
“Who did Howard say poisoned them?” I said.
“He didn’t. The…this thing they caught went into their throats. Howard couldn’t talk at all after the first day. Evelyn Herbert is still able to talk, but she’s very hard to understand. That’s why I need the translator. I need to talk to Evelyn and find out how they were poisoned.”
I thought about what he had said. Some kind of guard poison in the tomb. I knew about that. I had burned stories about the poisons the ancient of all cultures put in their tombs to keep defilers from ransacking them, the contact poisons they put on the artifacts themselves. I had handled the door seal.
Lacau was watching me. He said, “I helped bring the treasure down from the Spine. So did the bearers. And I’ve been handling the bodies. I’ve been wearing plasticgloves, but that wouldn’t protect me from airborne or droplet infection. Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s contagious.”
“Do you think it’s a poison, like Howard said?” I
asked..
“My official position is that it’s a virus that was present in the tomb and that the entire party, including the Sandalman’s representative, was exposed to it when the tomb was opened.”
“And the Sandalman.”
“The Sandalman’s bey entered the tomb before he did. Then the team. Then the Sandalman. My official position is that the virus was anerobic and that after the tomb had been open to the air a few minutes, it was no longer virulent.”
“But you don’t believe that?”
“No.”
“Then why take that position? Why not accuse the Sandalman? If the treasure’s what you want, that’ll make sure you get it. The Commission…”
“The Commission will close the planet and investigate the charges.” “And you don’t want that?”
I wanted to ask why not, but I figured I’d better be out of the cage before I asked that. “But if it’s a virus, what’s your excuse for why the bey hasn’t come down with it?” I said.
“Difference in body chemistry and size. I declared the quarantine, and the Sandalman went along with it, more or less. He agreed to give us an extension of a week to allow for the variation in incubation time of the virus in the bey before he files his complaint with the Commission. The week’s up day after tomorrow. If the bey comes down with it in the next two days…”
Which explained why the Sandalman’s bey was here, in quarantine with the archaeologists, when no one else, not even the Sandalman’s guards, would set foot inside the tent. She was not Evelyn’s nurse. She was the sole hope of the expedition.
And she was not going to catch anything. The Sandalman had agreed to the extension. He had been willing to leave her with the team. He would never have done that if he had thought there was even the slightest chance of her coming down with it. So there was not any chance. Unless Evelyn knew what the poison was. Unless she had threatened to poison the Sandalman’s bey. Unless that was what was in the message.
“Why didn’t he just kill the team right there in the tomb?” I said. “If all he wants is the treasure, why didn’t he see to it they were buried by a rockfall or something and call it an accident?”
The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories Page 41
