She fished in her pocket. ‘I poked around and came on trash the party had left. Remnants of cardboard containers for field rations, that sort of stuff. The labels are still legible in spots, but I don’t read their alphabet. Mikli?’
He took the moldered scraps from her and squinted at them.
‘Yuanese,’ he said. ‘Imperial Army of Yuan, yes, clear identification.’
Ronica saw Iern whiten beneath the weathering of this trip. Yuan! she remembered. The Maurai claim they have evidence that Yuan grubstaked his enemy. He must feel trapped. She wanted to take him in her arms and console him.
Mikli addressed her: ‘Last year, did you say? No war was going on. What was?’
Terai stiffened. Immediately he tried to relax, but Mikli had seen. ‘Do you know?’ the Norrman demanded.
Terai hunched his bull shoulders. ‘Why should I answer that?’ he replied, like distant cannonade.
We’re close to civilization again, to our olden hates – Ronica clutched Iern’s hand.
‘Let’s pool our data,’ Mikli was saying, his tone gone mild. ‘We’ve assumed we’ll be hospitably received and can arrange our passages home. But Mong societies have a xenophobia built into their foundations, and we’d better not walk into a crisis without some idea of what’s safe for us to do and what isn’t.’
Terai glared. ‘All right! I recommend this, you filthy uranium hunter – that you don’t say a word about what you’ve been engaged in, or you’ll likely get torn to shreds. Not that that would bother me, but I’d be sorry about Ronica.’ He glanced at her more kindly. ‘You’ve been duped, lass. I think I understand how and why. Someday you will too, I hope.’
‘Ah, so.’ Mikli stood for a space in thought.
‘Terai,’ Ronica pleaded, ‘I swore we aren’t making Doom weapons or, or anything evil. You Maurai are just fanatical about atomic energy. Won’t you ever try to understand?’
Mikli laughed. ‘Well,’he said, ‘we may feel friendlier after we’ve had a bite to eat. Let’s get that animal cooked, shall we? I noticed a currant patch too, not far from here. And the light will soon fail.’ He sauntered off toward the shelter.
Wairoa surprised by breaking his habitual silence: ‘Ronica, we are not fanatics, we are students of history. I know atomic power-plants could be safe – much cleaner and less harmful than the coal you burn so lavishly in the Northwest Union. Why, the isotopes released from the coal spread more radioactivity by orders of magnitude, not to speak of what the fumes and fly ash do to living things, or the mines to a land. But the atom would allow a high-energy industry to come back, worldwide, and that is what the planet cannot bear.’
‘Are you sure?’ Plik asked softly. ‘Demonic, yes, destructive of the old order; but likewise were fire, stone tools, the first farms, the first ships, metal, writing, printing, on and on. Man has always raised demons, and I think that once again –’
Several meters off, Mikli whirled about. His pistol jumped from the holster. ‘Hold!’ he called. ‘Not a move, or I fire!’
Ronica felt no shock. She never did, at the moment of danger. She was aware of how Iern recoiled and reflexively, uselessly went into a fighter’s crouch; Terai trumpeted fury; Wairoa grew motionless; Plik cast himself belly down. Her mind focused on the little man with the gun, and the evening became as clear and sharp as a splinter of glass.
‘My apologies,’ Mikli said. He peeled his teeth in a grin. ‘I really must insist we talk. Please remember I’m rated expert with this type of weapon.’
‘What the chaos do you want?’ Iern rasped.
‘Nothing you personally need fear, I believe,’ Mikli assured him. ‘For openers, I would like to think aloud, if I may.’ His free hand stroked his beard as he murmured:
‘Like the Imperial Yuanese Army, Terai, you’ve left more clues lying about than you realized. You suspected us of seeking fissionables in Uropa. This implies that, earlier, your service had discovered that somebody was gleaning them wherever possible. It would be natural for Maurai to assume the Northwest Union was involved, and thereafter to alert the Mong, requesting their assistance. Your Federation hasn’t the resources to investigate everywhere by itself. But I’d guess that your primary assignment in Uropa, Terai, was to find out if collection was being attempted there, and, if it was, to enlist Skyholm in tracking it down and suppressing it.… In any event, I don’t think you’d have suggested that Krasnayans are ready to kill anyone accused of looking for fissionables, unless they’ve heard about this activity. No public announcement, no; as much discretion as possible; however, inevitably, quite a few civilians will have gotten wind of what all the official excitement was about. Especially after Yuanese military detachments entered this country. Krasnaya hasn’t the capability of rummaging its own hinterlands. Doubtless the Tien Dziang offered, ah, assistance to his good friend the Supreme Gospodin. I don’t suppose the search turned up anything. At last the Yuanese went home. But they left their scat for Ronica to find, eh? And thereby hangs a tale that my service will find very interesting.’
It couldn’t have happened like this before the Doom War, flashed through Ronica. Then everybody was under everybody else’s surveillance. But spies today, or even observers, they’re widely scattered, they lack the equipment and the sophistication – Do I really want that ancient world revived?
Mikli’s voice crackled: ‘Is my analysis right?’
Terai kept silence, but Wairoa, perhaps less used to the malevolent games that governments play, let out: ‘Yes, you are! Now do you see why you’d better not brag in Dulua?’
Terai laid a warning clasp on his countryman’s arm. Mikli smiled anew, askew, and said, ‘Oh, indeed. Nor should you, tomorrow or ever.… Ronica, stand aside. I had to give you your way earlier, but from here I can make the rest of the distance alone. Behave yourself, and you can come along.’
Terai roared and plunged forward. Mikli took aim.
Execution! Ronica knew. He’ll shoot the Maurai, and anybody else who might be inconvenient –
The rabbit stick flew from her hand. Strangely, what was in her mind at that instant was Terai’s talk once while he and she were at work together, about his children when they were small and his desire for grandchildren.
The pistol banged. It missed Terai, who was charging crouched and zigzag. The stick hit straight and hard across Mikli’s right arm. He yelled. The pistol dropped. He staggered, dazed by pain. Ronica reached him barely ahead of Terai.
Rage made a lion mask of the big man’s face. He must intend killing. Ronica snatched up her stick and rammed it into his midriff. Hard muscles were a corselet, but Terai also lurched, went to his knees, and gagged.
Ronica took the firearm, ran to the bluff edge, and cast the thing as far as she could into the lake.
When she returned, her victims were on their feet. Wairoa assisted Terai, Iern and Plik hovered uneasily in the rear. She slid her knife forth, resheathed it, and looked them over. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘there’ll be no more of this foolishness, and we’ll let bygones be bygones. How about starting a fire? I’m hungry.’
‘You were magnificent,’ Iern told her after dark; and he proceeded to be.
During the night, a nudge and whisper aroused her. Their softness was sufficient, for she had been sleeping warily. ‘Come outside,’ Mikli hissed. ‘We must talk. For the sake of Orion.’
They left the shelter and sought a point some distance off, under a giant spruce. Tinged by a waning moon, its branches roofed them beneath fragrance, and a measure of warmth stole from the forest at its back. They were nearly invisible to each other in its shadow. Beyond, turf stretched rime-pale until the bluff toppled into the lake, which mirrored stars in its darkness.
‘Listen,’ said Mikli’s disembodied voice. ‘Listen well. This day you were idiotic to the point of betrayal –’
‘Shall we take that matter before a Lodge court?’ she retorted.
He chuckled. ‘I don’t belong to any Lodge, remember? I only serve, in
my fashion. Well, you wanted us to forgive and forget. I can’t forget – my arm still hurts abominably – but I do see what motivated you, and I’ve grown resigned to the fact that the human species has a capacity for idealism which costs it megadeaths per century. So let us two dismiss the past and simply resolve that Orion shall rise.’
Those words never failed to make her spine tingle. And this bastard knows it, she thought. Just the same – An ancient saying crossed her mind. He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch … I suppose. … ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t allow coldblooded murder. But I agree we have a problem. How do we keep the Maurai from spilling their news? It could bring their outfit onto the real scent, couldn’t it? Before Orion is ready.’
‘I admit I was too impulsive,’ he replied. ‘A fault of mine. I should not have invited you along to Yurrup, either. What you could do was irrelevant to my mission, and ended up compromising it.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘Done is done, and we may yet reap some benefit from the situation. In fact, we already have a better idea than before of how closely the Maurai are on our track. We need to inform our associates and get started on countermeasures.’
‘What do you think we should do?’
‘This. To the degree that chance permits. And I always have been rather good at rolling with the dice.
‘During the trip I established, in conversation, that neither Terai nor Wairoa knows any Mong language. A considerable advantage for us, hm? The difficulty I mentioned to you, earlier, was that the Krasnayans would innocently help everybody in our group go home.’ Sardonicism: ‘Except for Iern, of course. We know whom he’ll accompany.… Now we’ve deduced that the Krasnayan authorities have gotten reason to be twice leery of foreigners who come from the woods. Such an attitude can be used.’
Ronica poised herself.
‘Here’s the plan I’ve worked out,’ Mikli thrust at her. ‘I’ll see to it that we all get detained – not mobbed or shot or anything like that, but detained on suspicion. Except you. I’ll have to improvise the scenario as we go along. Basically, you get away from the rest of us at some appropriate point. You make your way to Yuan. You’re expert at sneaking, and the border isn’t far south. There you contact a certain person. You’ll have to go through the usual bureaucratic quadrille first, but I’ll give you key names to cite, and the phrase “Code Nineteen.” Do you follow that? “Code Nineteen.” When finally you’re brought to an official who knows what it means, you’ll explain that the entire project is in danger –’
‘What project?’
‘You have no need to know, my dear. An elementary principle of secret-keeping. “Code Nineteen” will serve. And the word that Yuan had better dispatch an armed force in a hurry, to take charge of the prisoners. After that, leave matters to me. I’ll get the lot of us, including your precious Maurai and your priceless Clansman, bundled off to our country.’
‘I… don’t have more than a few words … of Mong.’
‘No problem. Plenty of Soldati know Unglish. They wouldn’t like their serfs having a language they can’t eavesdrop on. The dialects aren’t too different from those in the Union. You’ll manage.
‘Is this operation permissible under your principles?’
She ignored the sarcasm. Her pulse accelerated. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The way you’ve put it. Tell me more.’
2
Vanna Uangovna was at meditation in her bower when the strangers appeared. Wind blew sharp, whipped a gray heaven, brawled in trees and tossed their limbs about, rippled the grass of the meadow. It was turning sere, that grass; her flowers were gone; the vineleaves decking the arbor were red and crackly, while a pair of birches showed gold against somber evergreens. In girlhood, Vanna would have shivered in the cold, as thin as her robe was. Today, a Gaean adept, she had chosen to make this weather the mandala she would contemplate, the Aspect that would take her into itself and so open the way to Oneness.
Again Earth spun toward Northern winter. Heat radiated out and out, until it belonged to that energy which pervaded the cosmos and whispered of the mystery at the beginning of all things. No mathematical physicist had yet developed a wave function for the primordial event, and there were those who maintained that none ever would, that paradox was the very core of reality.… But she was not separate from the farthest star or the earliest instant. The dear, familiar water she drank and that coursed in her bloodstream, most of the molecules in her quite ordinary body, these held hydrogen atoms which had formed during the first second or two of convulsion. They would endure while the universe did, save for those that escaped to space and became the stuff of new stars forging new iron. … If she was so intimate a part of the galaxies, how ultimately integral she must be with Gaea, the living Earth!
Let this austere day strip self from her – an expression of the Life Force that had had its role in evolution but could now best die out, like the seasonal rut of ancestral animals becoming transfigured into the love between man and woman. Let her, for the short while she was able, perceive, however dimly, the Organism, and seek an Insight into how she, this portion of Her, should function in the service of the Purpose. The wind blew, the wind blew.…
Meditation was not trance. As she merged her being with the world, she opened her senses more and more widely to it. Thus she heard the strangers afar, though they did not walk clumsily. She might have let them go by unhailed – no one from the vicinity would disturb her without urgent cause – but a while later they were close enough that her heightened perceptions captured their talk, and she realized from the cadence that they must be out-landers.
Prospectors for bomb stuff. Detonations in the West, such as ushered in Death Time. Memory stabbed through her inner peace, which drained from the wound. Suddenly alone in her head, she stepped out and stood where the wind could stream unhindered across her.
That raw vigor brought calm, determination. They may be harmless. In any case, what reason would they have to attack me? Early in her discipleship she had learned how not to be afraid of death or pain; fearlessness about her own person became as natural to her as breathing. However, she rejoiced in her usefulness – proróchina, ucheny, Librarian, human being – and did not wish it to end before Gaea was through with her.
Following a deer trail, the newcomers emerged in the meadow. They saw her and stopped. For a minute, looks went back and forth.
They were incredibly diverse, and weatherbeaten, unbarbered, ragged. The biggest of them could only be Maurai. To judge by what was left of their clothes, the tall blond woman and the short gray man were Northwesterners. The young fellow and the scarecrow figure were puzzling, and as for the sixth member of the party – no, he was not deformed, but he was alien.
The gray man smiled, advanced, and bowed. ‘Greeting, my lady,’ he said. His Yazik was fluent but the accent did, indeed, identify the Union. ‘Please don’t be alarmed. We’re travelers in distress, searching for aid. Are we near Dulua?’
‘Yes,’ Vanna answered, less calmly than she had expected to. ‘I’ll take you there if you like.’
‘Many thanks. You are most kind, my lady. Permit me to introduce us. We are a mixed bag.’ He pointed about. ‘My name is Mikli Karst. Ronica Birken and I hail from the Territories, as I imagine you’ve guessed. Terai Lohannaso and Wairoa Haakonu are from the Federation. Talence Iern Ferlay and, ah, Plik are more exotic, from the Domain of Skyholm in Yevropea. We regret that I alone among us speak your language.’
The Domain!
Vanna realized she was gaping like a child. She mustered graciousness. ‘Thank you, sir. I hight Vanna Uangovna Kim.’ In Unglish: ‘I bid you welcome.’ She said the same in Maurai and Angley.
The young man was the most startled. ‘I didn’t expect I could talk to anybody here!’ he exclaimed.
Vanna must proceed slowly: ‘I am the Librarian. As such, I have to be able to read the principal languages of the world, and I have seen much fascinating material from your country, sir.’
�
��But you speak it, too. Without even a strong accent.’
Vanna smiled. She liked him. ‘I have recordings, and practice reading aloud. How else could I appreciate your poetry?’
Talence, she recalled. A sort of royalty in the Domain. What events have brought him to Merica, in the company of these? ‘I am eager to hear your story,’ she said.
‘Well, that may pose a few problems, honored Vanna,’ Mikli warned. ‘What we are free to tell is limited.’ He addressed the blond woman in Unglish: ‘I think this is the strategic moment for you to take off, my dear.’
Starkness laid hold of Ronica. She nodded, once, and said, ‘Aye.’ She flung herself against Iern and they exchanged a fierce kiss. She vanished into the woods.
Dismay shocked through the Librarian. ‘What is this?’
‘Be at ease,’ Mikli replied patronizingly. ‘We aren’t under arrest, are we? It isn’t compulsory to proceed to Dulua, is it? But the rest of us plan to, and will be glad if you come along. By all means, take us straight to the appropriate security officers.’
Fissionables gatherers, then? But it doesn’t make sense, not really. Vanna called upon the wind for coolness. She observed the remaining strangers, each by each, and used her gift for reading people.
Mikli stood smug. Terai was curbing belligerence, Wairoa freezing his features into immobility, but it seemed they were both surprised by Ronica’s disappearance – as was Plik, who looked around in a vague fashion. Iern appeared to have been forewarned (predictable, when he and the woman were obviously close) but not to be nursing any particular scheme, only to be trying for stoicism. No, these were no united conspirators.
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