The Golden People

by Fred Saberhagen

  Adam, folding his paper receipt into a pocket, waited until he was outside again with Merit before he asked her: "Where are Ray and your husband now?"

  "They went straight from the spaceport to the physics lab, at some place called Fieldedge. Scientists to the core. I told them I'd rather try to look you up first, and see some of the scenery at the same time. Since Earth people are rather confined here—or most of them choose to be—I thought I could probably find you with a minimum of trouble."

  "Glad you did. Very glad." Adam paused. "You said that you were here partly just to be with your husband. What else?"

  "For one thing, I have an obvious interest in seeing what had become of you. But there's something else, too. Geryons."

  "Geryons. That's right, the last time I saw you you were getting into exobiology, weren't you?"

  "Yes, I'm into it, as you say, rather deeply now."

  "In fact—wait a minute. There was somebody named Creston mentioned as a source in a couple of references, last time I was over at Stem City library trying to look something up."

  "The accused stands before you. It wasn't geryons you were looking up, I trust, or I couldn't possibly have been quoted as a source. I find the idea of them fascinating—the face, of course—but I've never even seen one outside of a holograph. I'd like to begin a study, though."

  "Their faces, yes."

  "You see, it's occurred to me that their faces might be less a result of chance than an example of interspecies parallelism on different but closely similar worlds."

  "I wondered about that too. I had to study some of that evolutionary theme theory, of course, for planeteering… so, Ray's here taking an interest in the Field. I wonder what he thinks of it. What do you think?"

  "About the Field? I don't know what to think." Merit looked out over the river, past the distant line of marker poles, then closed her eyes briefly. "I don't sense it there at all. I haven't been able to sense anything about it, since we arrived. Though I suspect Ray may have… do you know if anyone with parapsych talents has tried to investigate it?"

  "I know of a few civilians who claimed to be making some effort along that line, years ago. As far as I know, they had no success. But of course they weren't Jovians… what are your plans? I mean right now?"

  "Right this moment? I don't really…"

  "Then how about a canoe ride? You can enter the Field directly and experience it first hand. Not that there's really anything to experience."

  "Oh, yes. I'd like to!"

  They walked back to where Adam's square-sterned canoe was waiting. The Space Force guard on duty in front of the trading shack looked up from his weary debate with the two Tenoka long enough to nod familiarly to Adam.

  As they got into the canoe, Merit remarked: "It looks like the Space Force is going to trust me not to start any trouble with the natives."

  "You're with me." Adam untied the canoe and shoved off from the dock. "And the Space Force usually humors me, because I'm still something of a privileged character with the Tenoka. They identify me particularly with the help we gave them against geryons, back in the early days. Of course if I ever get far enough from the Stem, well beyond Tenoka territory, things are going to be different. There are quite a number of other tribes out there, who I gather don't much like the Tenoka or their friends." The outboard started purring.

  Merit was trailing her fingers in the water. "I presume this is safe to do. Nothing's going to come along and snap some of my fingers off?"

  "Don't hear me yelling, do you?"

  The Far Landing dock was falling behind. Ahead of them, open wilderness expanded.

  "Adam, are Earth-descended people ever going to be able to see much of this planet?"

  "Frankly, I don't think so. I don't believe we know any more about the Field today, really, than we did on the first day we ran into it."

  "You don't seem unhappy about that situation."

  "Actually, I suppose I'm not."

  Merit was laughing again. "I can see already that you and Vito are going to hit it off just great. Oh, wow. He's all charged up with theoretical ideas, schemes on how to solve the problems that the

  Field poses, in what he still likes to call general field theory. I think he spent most of his time on the ship worrying that someone else would have the Field completely figured out before he got here."

  Adam found himself smiling, grinning broadly, and then enjoying a laugh too, for what seemed like the first time in years. "I'd say he may have a few days yet, before someone beats him out. Now hang on, here we go."

  Already the canoe was closely approaching the line of marker poles, at a place where that line went marching almost straight across the river, at right angles to the banks. Adam turned off the motor and let the small craft drift on its momentum toward the boundary.

  He grinned at Merit. "Look at your timepiece," he suggested. Her expression brought back to him memories of her as an—occasionally—wide-eyed little girl. The flat silvery plate that she was wearing on her wrist went totally blank a moment after the invisible border had been crossed. Then numbers and other symbols reappeared on the small surface, but seemingly at random, flickering on and off erratically.

  Adam was on the point of asking Merit why she wore the watch at all; no Jovian in his memory had ever needed an artificial chronometer just to know what time it was, only perhaps for the exact timing of a race or some scientific experiment; and this particular instrument didn't look as if it was intended for such purposes. But the convincing idea at once suggested itself to Adam that the timepiece was a present to Merit from her husband, who when he gave it to her had not known her as well as Adam did. At the thought, Adam felt a moment of superior pride, mixed with an uncertain amount of jealousy.

  With a sigh, Merit at last raised her head from contemplation of the confused chronometer and looked around her. "I still can't sense anything different here," she murmured. "Are we bound for anywhere in particular?" She sounded as if she would be satisfied either way.

  "If you've got about an hour to spare, I'll show you where I live."

  When they were quite near the Field-side shore, Adam spotted something moving in the bushes there, and rested his paddle for a moment, watching alertly. Two Tenoka children, a boy and a girl, came out into the open as soon as they §aw that he was aware of them. Then they stood on the shore giggling and dumb with shyness, impressed by the strange woman in the canoe.

  "You have a couple of admirers," he told Merit. "Wave to them."

  Merit and the two children had a waving good time until the canoe reached Adam's little dock. At that point the kids vanished back into the leafless winter brush, too shy to approach the stranger closely.

  He led Merit up along the well-worn narrow path, that wound a hundred meters up the side of a low bluff, to the shelf of land near the top where his cabin stood. The cabin was built mostly of native logs, the chinks between logs filled with local clay and sealed with a little liquid plastic. The small house, hardly more than one room, had a shingled roof that had been sealed with plastic in the same way, and a chimney of clay and stone.

  Merit appeared to be enchanted by his home.

  But a thought struck her. "How do you lock up when you leave?"

  "I left the latchstring hanging out this time. There, see? Any of my local friends who happen to come along can walk in, but animals are kept out."

  "Don't the Tenoka ever steal?"

  "Rarely from a home. Quite rarely. And anyway I'm something of a privileged character, as I told you. If the tourists get much thicker out this way I may need to devise some more protection." He swung open the stout wooden door, that moved easily and silently on its Earth-fabricated hinges of neat modern metal, and gallantly bowed his visitor in.

  Merit, following Earth custom, slipped off her shoes at the door. Once inside, she was instantly fascinated by his hearth and hewn furniture, and by the couple of trophies he had mounted on his walls. The heads were of different species of larg
e carnivores, evidence of Adam's bow-hunting prowess.

  A small fire was still burning, to which Adam now added fuel. The cabin was reasonably warm.

  Merit was gazing at a mounted head. "Leopard-variant theme, I take it."

  "Though it doesn't really look that much like a leopard at first glance. Right. You're the expert."

  "But the rug—it isn't real fur." It covered much of the rough wooden floor.

  "I bought the rug in Stem City," he said. "Keeps my feet warm, when there's no other way." He was still standing just inside the front door, and now he gently made sure that the door was tightly closed, and pulled the latchstring in, not wanting interruption. Then he went to Merit, and turned her around so they were face to face, and pulled her gently, firmly against him.

  She didn't pull back. She didn't argue, or protest, or say anything at all, but after a moment he knew that it was never going to be any good like this, not with her.

  He said: "You didn't always say no."

  "I wasn't always married."

  Adam raised his hands to her shoulders, and held her that way, still very gently. He said: "I guess this husband is pretty important."

  Smiling, Merit hugged Adam as if she were his sister, with a kind of tired tenderness. "I'm glad to hear someone say that," she told him.

  And so it seemed that someone had said otherwise.

  Chapter Ten

  The outboard purred faithfully into life as soon as they had re-passed the line of markers in midstream. Adam asked: "Back to Far Landing?" He could be calm; he knew it wasn't over yet between him and Merit.

  Her voice was ordinary, and he supposed she knew it too. "Vito and Ray were heading for a place called Fieldedge, and since it's a physics laboratory I've no doubt they're still there. Is it far?"

  "Fieldedge. No, not far, just a few kilometers. And we can take the boat right to the door." Adam headed the canoe downstream.

  Ahead of them now the river curved deeply into the Stem. Falling behind the canoe now, the line of marker poles marched in their great steady circle toward the river's wild bank, up onto it, and on away from the water, vanishing from sight.

  Now the land on both sides of the river bore new roads, a number of new buildings, and a great many enigmatic surveying markers, bright-colored poles and pylons. People and machines were at work at scattered sites on every hand, clearing nature from the land's surface and building what they wanted in its place. Adam sat silently in the stern of the canoe, steering with the motor. Merit occupied the seat ahead of him, her trousered knees aimed at him but her face as often as not turned away, while she took in the sights of the new land around her.

  Watching the beauty of her face, the curved grace of her body as she turned from side to side, Adam tried to imagine that they had grown up together in some normal family, that Merit was his sister.

  The effort failed totally.

  After curving majestically almost two kilometers into the Stem, the river's course bent back to the Field again. The great circle of marker poles reappeared, marching toward the water and into it, here crossing a bend of the river at an acute angle. Just where the line of markers came closest to the Stem bank, a large new building of concrete and glass jutted out over the water, projecting deliberately across the invisible line. The relatively small portion of the laboratory building that extended beyond the markers into the Field had been constructed mainly of simple interlocking plastic slabs, resting on stone piers.

  The canoe was still several hundred meters away from the building when Adam saw three men walk out of a door on an upper level of the structure, to stand on an esplanade steeply terraced above the Fieldedge dock.

  Vito Ling's mind, energized now by anger, was working with the speed and skill of an acrobat's warmed-up musculature, juggling mathematical equations and shuttling values in and out of them. Every calculation he could make assured him that Kedro had been right: they should have insisted that the time—quanta device be redesigned, before they agreed to leave Earth with it. Now, of course, it was too late for design changes. And in its present form the device was not going to be of the least help to them in understanding the nature of the Field.

  What really angered Vito most was the fact that Kedro had been a step ahead of him again. This time they had really been on the same side, arguing against the false economy of the Research Foundation administrators. But he, Vito, keen to come to grips with the Field directly, had been willing to give in to the administrators, for fear that otherwise they might call off his trip to Golden altogether; and Kedro on the other hand had remained firm in his opposition, only yielding at last, gracefully when he did so, to the opinion of Vito Ling who was supposedly the senior scientist.

  It was as if Kedro had been using some precognitive talent to foresee their present trouble. Of course with the Jovian Kedro, something of the kind was possible. But looking back, Vito had to admit to himself that parapsych talent would not have been necessary to have predicted the trouble, the blind alley in which they already found themselves with their experiment. Looking back now, melding what he knew of physics with what he knew of the behavior of administrators, he was able to see it himself with perfect clarity. But only Kedro had been as certain of the result when looking forward, not letting himself be blinded by impatience or anything else.

  The perfect intellect, thought Vito now, angrily, watching Kedro's massive tapering back as the Jovian man moved ahead of Vito out the door at the side of the Fieldedge lab. The perfect man—or would Kedro perhaps object to being called a man? Would it be better to say the perfect being?

  Vito was jealous and angry, and angrier because he knew himself to be thinking unreasonably now.

  "Well, we can't be sure today," said the calm voice of little Dr. Shishido, director of the Fieldedge lab, coming outside behind Vito. "Tomorrow, we are certain to learn more."

  Vito suppressed an angry answer. They certainly knew enough now to be able to predict total failure for the time-quanta gadget in its present form. And if it failed, after much investment of time and money, what chance did they have of learning anything of importance without it? He might as well turn around and go back to Earth tomorrow.

  He wouldn't do that, of course. Having come this far, he would stay on for a while, and try.

  Ray Kedro, his fair hair stirring in the faint breeze, was leaning now on a railing overlooking the small dock and the broad river, and had apparently given himself up to staring across the width of moving water. It was as if the Jovian were trying to pierce the mystery of the optically invisible Field with his unaided senses.

  The hero posing, Vito thought. Challenging the mystery too great for mere humanity to solve. Well, we'll see. I don't admit a damned thing about your so-called Jovian superiority, and Merit is my wife, and she enjoys being my wife, and wouldn't trade her life with me for anything that you could give her. And I bet that fact gripes you yet, for all you act like her older brother.

  And I hope you're reading my mind.

  Then, for some reason, a recurring question nagged at Vito: Why, really, didn't Merit yet want to have a child? Early on in their relationship they had agreed they would. But now…

  Little Dr. Shishido, who had been last out of the lab, came to stand between Vito and Ray Kedro, drawing deep breaths of the mild winter air. "Why don't both of you come and have dinner with my wife and me tonight?" the lab director asked. "And bring your, er, sister, of course, Dr. Kedro." No doubt about who Shishido considered the senior scientist to be. "We're looking forward to meeting her. And, ah—"

  "Maybe I'll bring my wife, too," said Vito.

  Ray turned round, sensing minor difficulty, "Ms. Creston I expect will be glad to attend, in both capacities. You're right, of course, Dr. Shishido, Merit and I do usually consider ourselves as siblings for social purposes."

  "Er, yes. That's what I was…"

  Shishido actually appeared to be made somewhat nervous by the Jovian superman's mere presence. Damn fool, thought V
ito.

  Out loud he said: "I usually consider Merit as my wife. We find it works out well. We'll be glad to come." It took him an effort right now, gritted teeth, to achieve even that modest degree of civility. Temper, if you could only watch your temper, friends sometimes said to him. To hell with them, he'd like to show them what real temper was.

  But with another effort he managed now to ease his mental wrestler's grip on the problem of the

  Field, and started to take notice of the new world surrounding him.

  A stair led down from the open space where the three men stood, down to a small dock where a couple of the indigenous people were sitting, onlookers without any visible purpose. The country on this side of the river looked to Vito like it was only beginning to be settled, and that on the other side was to all appearances utterly wild.

  Kedro, still gazing out over the water, said: "Doctor Shishido, I think you're going to meet Merit before this evening."

  Only now did Vito really notice the small boat that had been slowly and steadily approaching from upriver, with two figures in it. The two people were still too distant for any certain identification, but one of them was a blond woman wearing a bulky jacket that certainly looked like Merit's. The other appeared to be a man, and not a Golden native.

  Had Merit hired a boat? But she had said something about going to look up a childhood friend. Yes, some former planeteer who had lost his wife.

  The three men at the railing watched in silence as the boat drew near, heading right for the dock. There was no doubt now that the woman was Merit. She waved up at them cheerfully, said something to the man who was with her, and then hopped out nimbly on the dock. Her companion was a rough-looking character, bearded and dirty, and wearing a knife at his belt. After one glance up at the three men watching, and a quick wave, he busied himself with securing the canoe. Then the two native men came over to him and began a conversation, while Merit started up the stairs.

  Vito stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at her, while she climbed toward him, smiling happily.