But for the others, curiosity exceeded caution. “I’d like to find as large a clearing as I can,” Touli said, “to minimize interference from the trees. It looks like there’s a bigger opening just ahead.”
And yet, the larger clearing he needed kept receding, miragelike, in front of them. Always it looked as if the forest opened up just beyond the next curve; always it proved to be an illusion. At last they had to give up and admit they would not find the perfect place. They heaped the equipment they had been carrying on the ground and began assembling it.
It was late afternoon and the sun’s light was slanting when they had their mechanical observers up and running. Touli tested the satellite link; the focused beam heading straight into the sky suffered only a slight degradation from the surrounding trees. Sara straightened up from the solar collector she had been helping with and scanned the clearing. “Which way did we get in here?” she asked. Ordinarily she had good directional sense, but the change in lighting had made the forest look different.
Atlabatlow and Touli each pointed in a different direction. “That way,” they said simultaneously.
Sara laughed at them. “Our wilderness scouting skills a little rusty, are they?”
Atlabatlow did not seem nearly so amused. “Wait here,” he said, and set off toward the forest opening he had indicated. Suspecting that the security chief would find it hard to admit if he were wrong, Sara went to check out the one Touli preferred.
The path was lined with low, spiny plants whose leaves were like serrated sabers. Sara had no memory of having passed them, but she continued on a few more paces to make sure. Ahead, there was a movement through the trees. She glimpsed a khaki jumpsuit and black boots, and realized it was Atlabatlow. The two paths evidently ran parallel, and probably converged. She called out to attract his attention, but her voice came back to her, echoing from every direction, and he did not notice. She sped up to overtake him, but he was moving fast. Again she called out; again he ignored her.
The sound of footsteps to her right made her glance in that direction, and she saw a person in a khaki jumpsuit following her. Thinking it was Thora, she stopped. Her companion stopped as well. Only then did she realize she had been following her own reflection.
She was standing in a grove of trees with trunks like mirrored, many-sided columns that jutted up into the curtain of tinkling chime-leaves overhead. Everywhere she looked were reflections of reflections, infinitely repeated, creating endless corridors that did not exist. She saw herself—far away, close up, approaching, receding, her own back in front of her. Completely disoriented, she turned around to find the way back, but the only thing in the grove was herself, and herself, and herself.
She heard a step to her left and whirled around to see that she was surrounded by a host of towering black Worwhas. Touli caught her elbow, and she clutched at him, relieved to have located a patch of solid, tactile reality.
“I was following my own image, like some sort of damned solipsist,” she said, trying to laugh.
“So what’s new?” Touli muttered like a distant explosion.
“I guess this isn’t the way back,” she said.
“I guess not,” he agreed.
They turned to retrace their steps, Touli leading, but again the path misled them into a cul-de-sac. Laughing a little anxiously at themselves, they tried again, and this time managed to stumble on the clearing where they had left the monitors.
Atlabatlow was there, pacing impatiently. “I told you to wait here,” he said.
“That’s the thing about Balavatis,” Touli said good-naturedly. “Give them a rule and they think it’s their duty to disobey.”
“That could be a dangerous trait in a place like this.” Atlabatlow looked around. “Where is Emissary Lassiter?”
“She was here a minute ago,” Touli said.
They called out, but as before, their voices came back from a thousand directions. There was no response. With a mutual glance, they began to search the clearing’s edge, peering into the now-shadowy forest, inspecting the ground for any hint of which direction she might have gone—footprint or broken branch or torn cloth. There was nothing.
Atlabatlow became very cold and focused. Without a word, he went over to the satellite dish, unplugged the monitor they had spent so long setting up, and plugged his radio into it. It took him several tries, but at last his radio crackled with a startled response from the ship.
“I need a fix on Lassiter,” he said.
The reply took several seconds, and then it was so full of static Sara could understand nothing. Atlabatlow seemed to make it out, though. “Can you locate us?”
This time Sara heard the radio give coordinates for herself, Touli, and Atlabatlow, then for the others at base camp.
“That’s it?” Atlabatlow demanded. The radio sputtered in response. “All right,” he said, and unplugged the radio, returning it to his belt. He glanced at the sun, which was barely skimming the tops of the trees by now. “We need to get back to the shuttle,” he said.
“We can’t leave her here,” Sara said.
“She isn’t here.”
“That’s absurd! How could she not be?”
The glance Atlabatlow threw at her was so full of fury and venom that it took her breath away. “You tell me.”
In the silence that followed, the chiming of the trees sounded discordant and sinister. There was no other sound—not a pinfly’s flight, not a breath.
It was impossible, but Thora Lassiter had vanished as if she had never been.
chapter four
They slunk back on board the questship, all five of the remaining “nonessential personnel,” banished from the planet. Iris was officially off-limits until Thora Lassiter was found, or her disappearance explained. Only Atlabatlow remained below with his guards, the pilots, and the lightbeam technician, to conduct the search and rescue mission. In orbit above, half a hundred research projects froze in mid-plan, and as many unhappy scientists faced indefinite imprisonment on a ship where no one trusted each other. The members of the exploring party were as welcome back as viruses.
Sara returned with her suspicions blazing. During the long trudge back to the shuttle she had had time to think: in fact, neither she nor Touli had been last to see Thora. Atlabatlow had been closest to her at the time of her disappearance, and they had found him standing in the spot where she was last seen. Moreover, he was the only one among them with any reason to wish her ill. So he had motive, opportunity—but means? That was where Sara’s thinking stuck fast.
During that long walk, the colonel shadowed her so closely that she could not pull Touli aside to talk in private. Only once did Atlabatlow leave them, when he went into the shuttle to report to the Director, and emerged shortly after to order them all back to the ship. In the face of his icy authority, Sara’s suspicions flared even brighter, and for a reckless moment she thought of confronting him. But a glance at the guards flanking him, and at the worried and flustered group of witnesses, made her think better of that plan. So, with a show of false obedience she sensed he did not believe for an instant, she went to the lightbeam translator, determined to flank him the instant his scrutiny was turned elsewhere.
To her frustration, they had instituted quarantine procedures on the ship. When she arrived in the translation chamber she was greeted by a moonsuited technician who gave her a plastic garment to seal herself in, then ushered her into a room where she was forced to wait until all the explorers had assembled, looking like deep-sea divers in the low gravity. They were then fumigated and herded down to the clinic for medical checks.
Sara volunteered to go in first to see the doctor. She found that the news was all over the ship.
“How the hell could you just lose her?” David said when he had conducted his initial checkup through the plastic. “It seems downright careless.”
“She lost herself,” Sara said, unwilling to share her suspicions just yet. “She was always wandering off, daydreami
ng.”
“Hmm.” David frowned.
“What is it?”
“Lie down and let me scan you,” he said.
The scanner gaped like an open mouth, ready to swallow Sara whole. Inside, concentric circles of emitters were ranked like teeth, ready to bite down. She tried not to think of the invisible forces probing all the secret malfunctions inside her.
When she emerged, the doctor was sitting across the room studying a holographic image. “Hmm,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“With you? You’re pigheaded, Callicot.”
“Your scan shows that, does it?”
“I wish. I could declare half the staff disabled.” He turned around, pocketing his light pen. “Well, there’s no Irisian cooties that I can find. You can take off the suit.”
With relief she peeled it off; it had long since gotten sweaty and unpleasant. “All right, David, now you have to tell me what you meant by ‘hmm.’”
“Meant? When?”
“When I mentioned Thora wandering away.”
“Oh.” He hesitated, looking down at his crossed arms.
“Listen,” Sara said, “I know about her … medical condition.”
The doctor speared her with a look. “How?”
“She told me.”
He looked skeptical, so she barged on. “What I’m wondering is, does Atlabatlow know?”
David shook his head. “Not that I…” He stopped. “Come to think of it, he had access to the files, for the murder investigation. I suppose he could have looked it up.”
Oh, what a handy murder it had turned out to be for the head of security. It had gained him information, authority, and cooperation he never would have had without it. Sara could hardly believe what she was thinking. An anxious sense of failure was tugging at her gut.
“Thanks, David,” she said. “Could you do me a favor, and check out Touli next?”
She waited outside the clinic till Touli loomed through the doorway. “I’ve got to talk to you,” she said.
Her berth was close to the clinic, so she led the way there. It was barely big enough for two under normal circumstances, and Touli had to fold himself like an army knife to fit in. Sara sat on her desk to give him room.
Quickly, she explained her suspicions. He listened, shaking his head with the ponderous speed of a wrecking ball, as he realized where she was heading.
“Listen,” Sara said, “if Atlabatlow finds Thora alive I’ll eat my words, and my pride too, if you like. But I’m willing to bet he won’t. Sure, he’ll make it look like there’s been a search, just like he made the murder investigation look convincing. But somehow it’ll come up empty, or find only her body. In the meantime, we can’t afford to wait. Touli, you and I were the only witnesses; if I’m right he’s going to try to pin it on us.”
“What do you propose to do about it?” Touli said.
“We’ve got to find out what really happened.”
* * *
Ashok met them this time in the communications center, a circular room slightly more spacious than the pepci control room, but just as lined with equipment. Through this hub were routed the internal ship communications, the links with the planet, and messages to and from the satellites they had launched. Ordinarily, there was a staff of four, but at this hour everything was running on automatic.
Sara had jokingly offered Ashok a bribe—his choice of chocolate or beer—but the real inducement was the opportunity to subvert authority. As he opened the door for them he said, “We’ve got an hour before Security checks this area.”
“We’ve got to work fast, then,” Sara said.
They shoved three chairs around the terminal that accessed the archive. Ashok sat at the keyboard, dramatically flexing his fingers before inputting a passcode. “That can’t be traced to you, can it?” Sara asked.
He gave her a look of wounded pride. “Give me some credit.”
They went first to the log from the locator beacons they had all been wearing on the planet. Speeding through the display, they watched themselves, represented in colored lights, leave the shuttle, arrive at the forest edge, then split apart. Sara pointed to the four beacons that represented herself, Touli, Atlabatlow, and Thora, and said, “Follow those.”
When they entered the forest, the signal from the beacons degraded significantly. The lights kept winking out, then popping back on in a slightly different place, looking jittery and unstable. Mapped against a topographical display, their route staggered like a drunkard’s path, much more circuitous than it had seemed at the time. Even so, they penetrated a significant distance into the forest before coming to a halt, the beacons still twinkling from interference. Then, as Ashok slowed the display, they watched Atlabatlow depart from the group, then Sara, then Touli. Atlabatlow turned and began retracing his steps toward the clearing. Then a shudder ran across the screen. Thora’s light disappeared first, then Atlabatlow’s, then Sara’s and Touli’s. Six seconds later, three of them reappeared; the fourth did not.
“Damn!” Sara whispered. “There was interference right at the critical moment.”
“Run it again slowly,” Touli said. “Can you get more detail?”
Ashok set the display to maximum resolution and focused on Thora’s beacon. When Touli left, she stayed motionless for a while; then, just as Atlabatlow returned, she moved quickly in the opposite direction, and vanished. A split second later, Atlabatlow’s beacon winked out as well.
“She started moving before he reached her,” Touli said.
“She might have seen something that alarmed her,” Sara speculated. “But whatever happened, it went down in those seconds of darkness.”
Thwarted, they sat back, silent.
“Is that it?” Ashok asked.
“Oh no,” Sara said. “We were all wearing headnets.”
Ashok gave her a sidelong glance. “Those files are proprietary, you know.”
“Thanks for the copyright notice,” she said. Of course she knew. Everyone held the rights to their own experiences; it was one of the most sacred tenets of Capellan law, not to mention ethics.
“Just tell the judge I warned you,” Ashok said, and turned back to his terminal to break into the protected caches.
Touli shifted uncomfortably. “My Gbinjadan always warned me about you Balavatis,” he said. “And I thought he was prejudiced.”
“Look, I doubt copyright infringement is uppermost on Thora Lassiter’s mind right now,” Sara said. “We’re doing this for her sake.”
It took Ashok several minutes to thwart the locks on Thora’s files, and then he found another barrier. “Not only proprietary, but classified,” he said. “It’s already been flagged and protected by someone in Security. But not very cleverly.”
Sara was glad she had insisted on doing this tonight. Once Atlabatlow came back, she doubted there would be much chance of finding the trail of evidence. She glanced at the clock. “Half an hour left,” she said.
“Don’t rush me,” Ashok answered.
At last he succeeded in gaining access to Thora’s files. Sara had located some spare headnets for them to view the recording, and now she offered them to Touli and Ashok. Touli declined with a wave of his hand. “I can’t violate her privacy like this, regardless of why.” Sara shrugged and offered the net to Ashok. He accepted it.
Sara spread the metallic beadwork mesh on her own hair and plugged it into the terminal. When Thora had worn an identical one on the planet, it had recorded the neural activities of her visual and aural cortexes, and it would now induce identical patterns in Sara’s brain, reproducing the same visual and auditory impressions. Ashok asked Touli to lower the lights so they could see Thora’s experiences without interference from their own.
He started the recording close to the end, when she was already inside the forest. “Holy shit,” Sara said when she saw what Thora had seen, “is she blind?”
“It’s probably bad signal,” Ashok said. “The headnets were bro
adcasting to a booster relay on the shuttle, just like the beacons. Whatever was interfering with one degraded the other as well. The recording on her own device would be better, if we ever find it.”
Ashok skipped forward through the routine moments of setting up Touli’s monitor. Sara watched herself through Thora’s eyes, trying not to think what a horsey face she had. At last Sara straightened up, pushed back a strand of hair, and asked, “Which way did we get in here?”
The familiar events unfolded. Atlabatlow left, then Sara. Touli spent some time fiddling with his mechanisms, then finally grumbled something about irresponsible Balavatis, and headed off to haul Sara back in.
As soon as she was alone in the grove, Thora drank in the dazzling display of the forest. In the setting sunlight the canopy was a fabric of colored gems: amber, azure, ruby. As the forest filled her visual field, Sara felt again a stab of disorientation. The world looked like a child had taken a scissors to it, cutting out portions of the scene and scrambling them, triangles and trapezoids overlapping. In places, the scene was superimposed upon itself, half of it upside down or reversed. A patrician-looking woman in khakis appeared, standing in the forest, and Sara stared back at Thora’s reflection. Then it broke apart like a shattering window.
Suddenly, the ground filled the scene as Thora pitched forward onto her knees as if struck from behind, giving a surprised gasp. A brief sight of her clutching a handful of the razor-edged grass flashed by, then the scene was jumbled motion for a second. Thora screamed for Sara and Touli. Then, darkness. The recording ended.
When Sara let out her breath and opened her eyes, she felt mentally bruised. Touli was watching her, frowning. Ashok punched the keyboard. “She didn’t see what hit her,” Sara said. “But she called out our names, Touli.”
“Just ours?” he asked.
“Right.”
They sat silent for a few seconds. Sara was thinking that she might have just relived the last moments of a murder victim’s life.
The next step would take strong nerves as well. “We’ve got to look at Atlabatlow’s,” she said.
Dark Orbit Page 7
