Wasteland of Flint

by Thomas Harlan

  "What good can you do, then, if you cannot stop these powers?"

  Hummingbird's eyes glinted angrily and Gretchen swallowed another acerbic comment.

  "We watch, Anderssen. We watch in the darkness at the edge of human space. As a famous general once said, 'We stand guard so you may enjoy the untroubled sleep of the innocent.' Your attitude, I realize, is a testament to a job well done by my brothers and their predecessors. We are rarely idle. Many times men have stumbled into danger. Colonies have been abandoned, stations lost Ships disappear with dreadful frequency. In Tenochtitlán, in the district of the Weavers, there is an unremarkable building which holds room after room filled with anthracite tablets. The names of my brothers who have fallen in our quiet, unseen struggle are inscribed therein. This is not a pleasant universe, Anderssen-tzin, where man can roam without care."

  The old Náhuatl scratched the back of his head. "We might be lucky here. The dust will help consume our tracks, our equipment, all traces of our visit. We just have to make sure there are no more 'memories' trapped along Russovsky's path."

  "What about the cylinder on the Palenque?" Gretchen asked quietly. "You really think it is a trap? That it will have to be destroyed?"

  Hummingbird nodded. "I know what the cylinder means to you. But such devices are far too dangerous to be deciphered or allowed into human space."

  "I see." Gretchen felt ill. "Does your 'unseen struggle' include explaining these things to my Company? Maybe a receipt? Or am I expected to suffer quietly as well?"

  "I will do what I can." The old Méxica did not look away, but Gretchen didn't see the slightest hint he would help her, either. She sat down on the forward wheel of the Gagarin.

  "What do you think will happen now?"

  Hummingbird shrugged, squatting easily on the windy ledge. "All we can do is follow her trail and clean up what we can. There will be other... apparitions. We will have to break up their patterns, try and return things to their usual course. And quickly too, before we become part of the flow ourselves."

  "Do your skills let you tell which boulders should be removed from the 'stream'?"

  He nodded sharply. "The tlamatinime learns first to see. If the gods smile, what I cannot perceive, you will."

  "Me?" Gretchen's nose twitched as she made a disbelieving face. "What do you mean see?"

  "Perceive, then," Hummingbird said in a wry tone. "In the cavern, you felt something was out of place—this is the beginning of the seeing. I was surprised at your reaction. Most humans are nearly blind."

  Gretchen felt insulted. "I'm a trained, experienced observer, Hummingbird-tzin. It's my job to see subtle differences in a substrate, in a dig layer, a field of loose stone and gravel."

  "Trained by science," he said, almost dismissively. "Trained with one set of tools at the expense of others. You're a specialist, Anderssen. A tool designed for a single task. Your personnel records are filled with praise, but this is not an archaeological excavation. This world is not depth-tagged or laser-gridded."

  "The science you dismiss has built an entire civilization, crow." She tapped the breather mask covering the lower half of her face. "We're alive because of specialized tools. I wouldn't dismiss them as if they were toys!"

  Hummingbird looked at his gloved hands, then at her. "Do you believe everything can be measured? Everything can be described?"

  "What?" Gretchen was nonplussed. "Well... yes, I think so. Eventually. Our tools and techniques are constantly improving."

  "I thought so once." Hummingbird turned his hands over, apparently interested in the pattern of the material covering his palms. "But I have learned—at cost, Anderssen, at cost!—this is not true. There are limits to human perception and human science—but those limits do not correspond to the limits of the universe. Not at all."

  The old Méxica looked up, gauging the progress of the sun against the dome of heaven.

  "Time is passing, Anderssen. Consider this, while we are in flight: We—by we, I mean humans like you and I—exist within a bubble of the known. What we can see or hear or taste or feel. From this we have derived a description. This description is your science. Within the known, we build tools, live our lives, raise our children. Those tools let us manipulate the known, the material.

  "But what of the unknown, Anderssen? What about the things we do not perceive? There is a universe of ghosts and shadows just beyond our living sight. Do you doubt the presence of the unseen?"

  Gretchen shook her head. "No—I get your point. A human being doesn't even live in the same perceptual universe as a cat. Not without tools to extend vision, sight, smell, hearing. Are you saying your training lets you perceive the infrared or ultraviolet? See as a baleshrike sees? Smell as a truedog smells?"

  "No." Hummingbird stood up and shook out his cloak. "I am bound by my physiology, just as you are. My nose—for example—does not have the physical receptors to capture the wealth of molecules a beagle may." He grasped the offending organ between thumb and forefinger. "Anatomy limits me. But laziness ... laziness blinds men."

  "Then what are you talking about?" Gretchen stood and swung open the Gagarin's cabin door. "What do you mean?"

  "Did your eyes physically change between the time you first walked out onto that soccer field and today?"

  "No." Gretchen climbed into the cockpit of the Midge and squirmed into the lumpy seat. "They're probably worse. All right, so I know what to look for. I can recognize patterns—"

  In the other aircraft, Hummingbird shook his head sharply. "Not so. The enemy of clear sight is accepting patterns in the world around us. To see clearly, you have to let your eyes take in what is truly before you, not allow a lazy mind to fit things into a familiar shape."

  Anderssen closed the cabin door and began running through a preflight check. She started to speak and then looked closely at the control panel. Most of the Gagarin's instrumentation was held in a v-pane, but there were certain systems served by archaic-looking dials and switches. Everything you need to fly without the comp being live, she realized. Gretchen ran a hand over the console, feeling smooth metal and rubber under her gloved fingertips. Most of the dials had cream-colored backgrounds with red needles or indicators. Flecks of rust were visible where the enamel covering the metal had worn away.

  For the first time, she actually saw the console and all the minute, tiny details of wear and use. Not the sketchy, abstracted impression she'd had of the control panel before. Almost immediately, Gretchen felt her mind try to draw back—an almost physical sensation—and the sense of limitless clarity faded. She blinked and concentrated, trying to see the numbers on one of the dials. Now they were blurry and she started to squint.

  "Focus is an enemy," Hummingbird said softly over the comm. "You're trying to limit your field of view in hopes of gaining clarity. Forcing sight won't work."

  "How do you train, then?" Gretchen blinked furiously. Her eyes hurt. Her brain hurt! "How do you reach an objective without pursuing a goal?"

  "You've already started—in the cavern—when I guided you to a natural posture. When you found a comfortable place to sit." The nauallis was starting to sound a little irritated. "We will talk of this again, later. Are your engines warmed up? We should lift off."

  "Wait. Why are you showing me these things? Telling me these secrets?"

  Hummingbird smiled, white teeth barely visible through the scarred canopy of his ultralight. "My other option is to kill you. But you are alive and a human being and your presence aids me. The universe is connected in odd ways and you might tip a balance in my favor. Besides, if things come to violence, you can get in the way of the enemy for a few seconds."

  "Oh my," growled Gretchen, "that is nice. Very nice. Very Imperial sounding."

  ABOARD THE CORNUELLE

  Hadeishi entered a briefing room sandwiched in between the bridge and the officers' mess. His senior officers stood to attention beside their chairs. Koshō turned sideways and nodded as the chu-sa reached the head of the table and
set down a v-pad and some printouts.

  "Good evening," he said, unsealing his collar. "Sit, gentlemen, sit. We are off duty."

  Everyone sat down, though he couldn't say any of them were "at ease." Sho-i Ko-hosei Smith, at the end of the table, was sitting at parade attention, hands clasped tight on an engineer's workpad, Hayes and Engineer-second Yoyontzin were equally stiff. Just to his right, Koshō was watching him evenly, her face expressionless.

  "This is not traditional," Hadeishi said, shrugging out of his uniform jacket. "But I think it is necessary." A little old man in a leaf-green-and-brown kimono appeared and took the jacket away. Hadeishi spread out the v-pad and several papers. He looked around the table and pursed his lips. "We have to find this refinery ship swiftly. I fear our current approach will take too long to yield results. So—we need to try something different. Do any of you have any ideas?"

  The officers looked nervously at each other, then back at the chu-sa. No one spoke. Hadeishi hid an expression of dismay, but he understood their wary surprise. He had served in the Fleet for nearly twenty years, on a dozen ships. In all that time, he'd never attended a staff meeting where the agenda, problems and solutions presented had not been decided in advance. A commander might consult with his exec or with senior department heads about specific technical issues but he did not discuss problems in an open forum. Meetings were a venue for the command authority—be he a ship's captain or an admiral—to issue orders, perhaps make a small speech and show honor to Emperor.

  Koshō, in particular, looked as if she'd sat on a porcupine. Hayes was surprised and Yoyontzin was petrified. Only young Smith-tzin—who had finally worked through Hadeishi's reference to being "off duty"—had relaxed at all, allowing himself to sit back in the chair.

  "Does anyone want tea?" Hadeishi turned away from the table and lifted his chin at the attendant. The little old man blinked in surprise and then scurried off down the corridor to the officers' mess galley. When the chu-sa turned back, Koshō and Hayes were staring at him in amazement. "I am having tea," Hadeishi said, emulating Smith and leaning back in his chair.

  "Here is our problem," he said, spreading his hands. "We are hunting for a relatively small object in a huge volume filled with a great deal of obscuring debris. Our objective is to find the refinery ship quickly and quietly and remove it, by one means or another, from this system."

  The attendant sidled up to the table, attempting to be unobtrusive, and Hadeishi paused. The little old man froze, staring at him in something like horror, as the chu-sa gathered up the porcelain cups from the tray and handed them around. Koshō took her cup reflexively, then stared icily at her own hand, which seemed to have betrayed her.

  "I'll pour," Hadeishi said to the attendant and waved him away. Clutching the tray to his chest, the little old man backed out of the room, eyes wide in fear. "Patrick, you take a great deal of sugar, I believe?"

  "Hai Hayes said weakly, goggling at the chu-sa. Hadeishi filled his cup, then pushed a fat green bowl toward him.

  "Help yourself." Hadeishi turned politely to Koshō, who had frozen into complete immobility. "This is a particularly good bancha," he said, guiding her cup—still clutched in a tight grip—to the tabletop. Hadeishi caught her eye. "Not the nasty stuff I drink in the morning."

  Both of the sho-sa's cheeks were suddenly suffused with two pale rose-colored spots. Hadeishi—though he felt tremendously cheerful—ignored her blush. He filled her cup halfway.

  Neither Smith nor Yoyontzin wanted tea. The engineer was hunched down in his seat, trying to hide behind Koshō. The communications officer had finally realized there was a queer tone to the meeting, so he was trying to make himself as small as possible. Hayes had nearly emptied the sugar bowl into his cup before taking a long sip.

  "How do we find the refinery quickly?" Hadeishi posed the question again and looked around at them expectantly.

  "Not by poking around in the dark with a sharp stick," Hayes muttered, then froze. Koshō had turned her head to glare icily at him. The weapons officer became rather pale.

  "I agree," Hadeishi said quietly. Koshō turned her head fractionally, her eyes narrowing.

  "We are following Fleet doctrine," she said in a clipped, toneless voice. "Which is sound."

  "It's too slow," Hadeishi said, leaning forward. "We don't have time to run down every particle trail and false reading our drones find. We do not have time to quarter this entire belt and peer in the radar shadow of every asteroid. We need to find the refinery now."

  "Without going to active combat scanning," Koshō stated. Hadeishi nodded.

  "What," the sho-sa said tentatively, "if we broadcast a message on the commercial comm channels, indicating a systemwide emergency. We could promise not to pursue or attack any ship immediately making gradient to hyperspace."

  Hadeishi considered the proposal for a moment. Then he looked at the weapons officer. "Hayes-tzin, do you think the commander of the refinery ship would respond to such a message?"

  Hayes blinked, stole a look at Koshō and then faced the chu-sa again. "Ah ... probably not, sir. He'd think it was a trick."

  "If the Palenque made transit immediately upon receiving the message," Koshō said, rather stiffly, "the wildcatters might become worried. The clumsiness of our message could be interpreted as honesty in a moment of crisis, rather than a ruse to draw them out."

  "And then?" Hadeishi was almost smiling at his exec. "What happens if they appear on our sensors, engines hot?"

  "If they are in weapons range," Koshō said, eyes glittering, "we disable their ship. Huémac's Marines storm the refinery and we bring these criminals before an Imperial court."

  Hayes looked questioningly at Hadeishi.

  "Unfortunately," the chu-sa said, "we must operate under a constraint of silence. A broadcast message is out of the question. We cannot draw attention to ourselves with any kind of broad-spectrum event." Hadeishi nodded to Koshō. "So we cannot saturate the belt with mines, hoping to drive the refinery out of hiding."

  "Very well." Koshō, to her credit, did not seem to have taken the rejection of her plan personally. "Then we will have to scan the entire belt very quickly, hoping to pick the refinery out of all this debris and rubble." The exec looked expectantly at young Smith-tzin at the end of the table. The sho-i ko-hosei swallowed nervously and nodded to both Hadeishi and Koshō.

  "Leave to speak, sir?" Smith's voice was a little thin, but steady.

  "Granted!" Hadeishi was impressed with the boy. Most midshipmen in the presence of command authority could barely stand up, much less speak. "You're sure you don't want some tea?"

  "I'm fine, Hadeishi-tzin." Smith nodded in thanks. "I've been thinking about the same problem the last couple of watches. I mean—we can all see how slowly we're moving now—and I was wondering if there was a way to speed things up, search more of the volume at a time, you know, and I mentioned something to Koshō-tzin and she suggested I look at the specifications for the absorptive mesh on the skin of the ship and ..." Smith had to stop and take a breath.

  "Sho-i Ko-hosei Smith," Koshō said, smoothly interrupting the midshipman's rash of explanation, "has devised a means of improving the sensitivity of our gravitational field sensors."

  "Go on." Hadeishi fought to keep from smiling broadly at his officers. In particular, at Koshō and Smith, who had obviously been trying to anticipate his wishes. What a blessing is a good exec, he thought, considering Susan Koshō fondly. For all her cold demeanor, she is a fine officer.

  "Well, um, sir—you know we have a series of gravitational field sensors which let us track hyperspace transits, since they 'dimple' the g-field in the area where a ship made gradient. We also use them for navigational purposes, to avoid black holes and hyperspace eddies and so on. Well, a ship has mass so there is a faint distortion of the g-field around even the Cornuelle. I think..." Smith held up a v-pad showing a page of system circuit diagrams and equations. "I think we can tune the g-sensors on the Cornuelle to detect the m
ass displacement of a Tyr."

  "Even if the refinery drive is shut down?" Hayes raised an eyebrow at the younger officer.

  "Yes, Hayes-tzin, because we're going to be searching for the g-dimple caused by their antimatter pellet storage, not for an active A/M reactor." Smith started to grin, then composed himself.

  "Storage? A/M doesn't mass more than any other particle—"

  "True, true," Smith interrupted, "but antimatter is difficult to produce, so it's packed super-densely in storage—I mean, positive particles are easy to find—and that makes a difference we can see. Well, I think we can see."

  Hadeishi looked questioningly at Koshō. "Effective range?"

  "Five or six light-minutes," she answered. "A very substantial volume."

  The chu-sa nodded, fixing Smith with a considering stare. "Smith-tzin, why don't we use our gravity sensors this way as a matter of course? Why isn't this Fleet doctrine?"

  "Speed, sir." Smith's face fell. "There's a lot of data to process. Normally, the system just watches for big differentials—a ship entering normal space throws a huge, easy to detect spike—but we need to reconfigure for a mass/density differential." He paged through his v-pad to another screen of equations and diagrams. "In this case, we're looking for an object making a sharper than expected g-dimple in local spacetime. So we've got to program the sensor comps to look for a specific, rather subtle scenario. And processing all this is going to take hours."

  "How many?" Hadeishi was watching Koshō.

  "Twenty to thirty hours to complete the first scan," the exec answered. Obviously, she'd already quizzed Smith to within an inch of his life about this proposal. "We need to extract all the gravitation and density readings from the navigation survey, then build a model of the area within range, then resample with the reconfigured g-sensor array. Then we can see if something falls out into our hands."