by Timothy Zahn
"Me, neither," Bilko said. "Maybe we ought to forget the whole thing and get out of here." I gazed out the viewport at the rapidly approaching asteroid below. "But it doesn't make sense," I told them. "For starters, if it's a predator or whatever—"
"If they're predators, plural," Bilko interrupted me. "Another InRed just went past."
"Fine; if they're predators," I amended, "then why haven't we seen them before?
More to the point, what are they doing hanging around the Freedom's Peace in the middle of nowhere?"
If Bilko had an answer, he never got to give it. Without warning, there was the faint flicker of a laser from the asteroid and our comm speaker crackled.
"Approaching transport, this is the Freedom's Peace," a female voice said.
"Please identify yourself."
Bilko and I exchanged startled glances. Then I dove for the comm switch.
"This, uh, is Captain Jake Smith of the star transport Sergei Rock. We, uh... who is this?"
"My name is Suzenne Enderly," the woman said. "Are you in need of assistance?"
"We were just about to ask you that question," Kulasawa said, stepping through the hatchway behind me onto the flight deck. "This is Scholar Andrula Kulasawa, in charge of this mission."
"And what mission would that be?"
"The mission to see you, of course," Kulasawa said. "We would like permission to come aboard."
"We appreciate your concern," Enderly said. "But I can assure you that we're doing fine and have no need of assistance."
"I'm very glad to hear that," Kulasawa said. "But I would still like to come aboard."
"To study us, I presume?"
I looked up at Kulasawa in time to catch her cold smile. "And to allow you to study us, as well," she said. "I'm sure each of us can learn a great deal from the other."
There was a brief silence. "Perhaps," Enderly said. "Very well."
And on the dark mass below a grid of running lights suddenly appeared.
"Follow the lights to the colony's bow," Enderly continued. "There's a docking bay there. We'll use our comm lasers to guide you in."
"Thank you," I said. "We'll look forward to meeting you."
The laser winked out, and I keyed off the comm. "Well?" I asked Kulasawa.
"Well, what?" she countered. "You have your docking instructions. Follow them."
I had envisioned some kind of makeshift docking umbilical stuck perhaps to one of the hatchways we'd spotted on our approach. To my relieved surprise, the docking bay proved to be a real bay: a wide cylindrical opening leading back into the asteroid proper, fully equipped with guide lights and beacons. And, at the far end, a set of ancient but functional-looking capture claws that smoothly caught the Sergei Rock and eased it into one of the half dozen slots set around the inside of the open space.
"What now?" Kulasawa asked as we touched gently onto the bare rock floor and the overhead panel slid closed.
"We wait," I said, switching off the false-grav and fighting against the momentary disorientation as the asteroid's rotational pseudogravity took over.
"Wait for what?" Kulasawa demanded. This close to the asteroid's axis the pseudogravity was pretty small, but if she was suffering from free-fall sickness she was hiding it well.
"For them," Bilko told her, pointing out the viewport.
From a door in the far wall three people wearing milky-white isolation suits and gripping carrybag-sized metal cases had appeared and were making their slightly bouncing way toward us. "Off-hand," he added, "I'd say it's a medical team."
He was right. We opened the hatchway at their knock, and after some stiffly formal introductions we spent the next hour having our bodies and the transport itself run through the microbiological soup-strainer. Their borderline paranoia was hardly unreasonable; with 130 years of bacteriological divergence to contend with, something as harmless to us as a flu virus could rage through the colony like the Black Death through Europe.
In fact, it was something of a mild surprise to me when, after all the data had been collected and analyzed, we were pronounced safe to enter. The team gave each of us a broad-spectrum immunization shot to hopefully protect us from their own assortment of diseases, and a few minutes later we were all finally riding down an elevator toward the colony proper.
The ride was longer than I'd expected it to be, and it wasn't until we were well into it that I realized the elevator had been made deliberately slow in order to minimize the slightly disconcerting mixture of increasing weight and Coriolis forces as we headed "down" toward the rim of the asteroid. Personally, I didn't have any trouble with it, but it appeared this was finally the combination that had gotten to Kulasawa's heretofore iron stomach. Her eyes gazed straight ahead as we descended, the expression on her face one of tight-lipped grimness. I watched her surreptitiously, trying not to enjoy it too much.
Considering the historic significance of our arrival, I would have expected a good-sized delegation to have been on hand. But apparently this wasn't a society that went in heavily for brass bands. Only three people were waiting for us as the elevator doors opened: two stolid-looking uniformed men, and a slender woman about Kulasawa's age standing between them.
"Welcome to the Freedom's Peace," the woman said, taking a step forward as we stepped out. "I'm Suzenne Enderly; call me Suzenne."
"Thank you," I said, glancing around. We were in a long room with an arched ceiling and no decoration to speak of. Set into the wall behind our hosts was a
pair of heavy-looking doors. "I'm Captain Jake Smith," I continued, returning my attention to the woman. "This is my first officer, Will Hobson; my engineer, Rhonda Blankenship; my musicmaster, Jimmy Chamala. That one's a little hard to explain—"
"That's all right," the woman assured me, her eyes on Kulasawa. "And you must be Scholar Andrula Kulasawa."
"Yes, I am," Kulasawa said. "May I ask your title?"
Suzenne tilted her head slightly to the side. "What makes you think I have one?"
"I recognize the presence of authority," Kulasawa said. "Authority always implies a title."
Suzenne smiled. "Titles aren't nearly as important to us as they obviously are to you," she said. "But if you insist, I'm a Special Assistant to King Peter."
I felt a stir go through us over that one. The traditional concept of hereditary royalty had long since vanished from the Expansion's political scene, though it was often argued that that same role was now being more unofficially filled by the Ten Families. Still, the idea of a real, working king sounded strange and anachronistic.
For some of us, though, it apparently went beyond merely strange. "A king, you say," Kulasawa said, her voice heavy with disapproval.
Suzenne heard it, too. "You disapprove?"
For a moment the two women locked gazes, and I prayed silently that Kulasawa would have the sense not to launch into a political argument here and now.
Suzenne's two guards looked more than capable of taking exception if they chose, and getting thrown into the dungeon or whatever they had here was not the way I
had hoped to end what had become a long and tiring day.
Fortunately, she did. "I'm just a scholar," she told Suzenne, her voice going neutral again. "I observe and study. I don't pass judgment."
"Of course." Suzenne smiled around at the rest of us. "But I'm forgetting my manners, and I'm sure you're all anxious to see our world. This way, please."
She turned and walked back toward the door, the two guards stepping courteously aside to let our group pass and then closing ranks behind us. "Incidentally, the study team tells me you have several large crates aboard," Suzenne added over her shoulder. "May I ask what's in them?"
"Two of them contain my personal research equipment," Kulasawa said before I could answer. "The others contain food and some power lifters which we brought as gifts for you."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rhonda start. "Gifts?" she echoed. "But that's our cargo."
"Which if you'l
l recall I purchased from you," Kulasawa said, throwing a sharp look at her. "They're mine to do with as I choose."
Rhonda turned to me. "Jake?"
"That was part of the deal," I reminded her.
"Yes, but—" She broke off, an oddly betrayed look on her face.
"You're most generous," Suzenne said, pulling out a plastic card and holding it up to a panel beside the doors. "But I'm afraid we can't accept gifts. One of our techs will evaluate the items and issue you credit slips." The doors slid open, and we stepped out onto a wide, railed balcony—
And I felt my mouth drop open. Stretching out before us, exactly as Enderly had said, was an entire world.
It was like looking at a giant diorama designed to show young schoolchildren all the various types of terrain and landscape one might come across. Far below us, extending for at least a few kilometers, was what seemed to be a mixture of farmland and forest, marked by gentle hills of various heights and dotted with occasional clusters of houses. Numerous ponds were scattered around, glistening in the sunlight, and there was at least one river wending its way across the ground. Farther away, I could see what looked like a small town, then more greenery—grassland or more farms, I couldn't tell which—then more trees and buildings and finally the tall spires of an actual city.
"Look at that," I heard Jimmy murmur. "The edges—they turn up."
I looked to the side. In the distance, I could indeed see the edges of the landscape rising up toward the sky.
And in that moment, at least for me, the illusion abruptly collapsed. I was no longer gazing out over some nice planetside rural area. I was inside an asteroid, billions of kilometers from anywhere, driving hard through the blackness of space.
"I suppose it does take some getting used to," Suzenne said quietly from beside me. "I grew up with it, of course, so to me it seems perfectly natural."
"I guess it would," I said, following the curve upward with my eyes. It was mostly more of the same, though the pattern of farm and forest had been varied and there was what looked like a large lake visible part way up. I tried to follow the curve all the way up, but began to lose it in the glare of the sun.
The sun? "I see you have the ultimate light fixture," I commented, pointing.
"I hope that's not a real fusion generator."
"It's not," Suzenne assured me. "We don't have any problem with generating heat inside the colony—it's dumping the excess we sometimes find troublesome, particularly during the winter season. No, our sun is just a very bright light source, running along inside a tunnel through the rotational axis. It fades in at this end of the chamber in the morning, crosses slowly to the other end throughout the day, and then is faded out to give us some twilight. Then it's sent back across during the night and prepped for the new day. It's not the same as living on a planet, I suppose, but it's the closest arrangement the designers could come up with and it's probably pretty accurate."
I squinted up at it. The light was bright enough, but not the blinding intensity of a real G-type sun. "Looks like it's getting toward evening."
"About another hour to sunset," she said. "And yes, we do call it sunset. I'm afraid that's not going to leave you much time to look around tonight."
"Don't worry about it," I assured her. "We're not very far off your schedule ourselves, and I for one could do with an early night."
"That will work best for us, too," she said. "I'll arrange for rooms for all of you, and you can look around and meet King Peter in the morning." "Sounds good." I looked up again as another thought struck me. "You don't have any stars, of course."
"Not real ones," she said. "But the various city lights look a little like them from the opposite side. And there are observation rooms at the bow for anyone who wants to see the stars for real."
"The landscape looks pretty real, too," I commented. "But you seem to have forgotten about mountains."
She smiled. "Not really. You're standing on one. If you'll excuse me, I have to see to our transportation."
She walked away. Grimacing slightly, I crossed to the far edge of the balcony.
Making sure I had a solid grip on the railing, I looked down.
And found myself gazing down the slope of a rocky cliff at a pasture a kilometer or more below.
"Do you believe this?" Bilko commented, coming up beside me and glancing casually down. "Mountain climbing the easy way—you can start at the top if you want to."
"You really think people climb this?" I asked, taking a long step back from the edge.
"Oh, sure," Bilko said. "Probably designed that way on purpose. In fact, if you look around, you can see different-grade slopes all around this end of the chamber. I'll bet they ice some of them up in the winter so that the really committed nutcases can ski, too."
I grunted. "They're welcome to it."
"Personally, I'd rather have a good game of skill myself." Leaning an elbow on the railing, he nodded casually off to the side. "Speaking of nutcases, did you happen to notice the crowd of cardsharps over there?"
Frowning, I turned to look. Cardsharps was the current cutesy slang term for cops among Bilko's gambling buddies; but all I could see over there was Suzenne and a half dozen men in coveralls maneuvering a compact multi-passenger helicopter out of a hangar carved out of the rock. Between us and them, the two uniformed men she'd had up above were standing their stolid guard. "Since when do two men constitute a crowd?" I asked.
"Oh, come on, Jake, use your eyes," Bilko chided. "Those aren't techs rolling out that helicopter. They're cops, every one of them."
I threw him a look, turned back to the techs. "Sorry, but I still don't see it."
"It's your innate honesty," Bilko said. "Take my word for it, they're cops."
"Fine," I said, stomach tightening briefly with old memories. "So they're a little nervous and want to keep an eye on us. So what? Don't forget, we're the first outside contact they've had in 130 years."
"I suppose," Bilko said reluctantly. "It's just that a mix of uniformed and non-uniformed always makes me nervous. Like they're trying to con us."
Suzenne turned and beckoned us toward her. "Which qualifies as working your side of the street, no doubt," I commented as Bilko and I headed across the balcony toward her.
"Hey, I play a clean game," he protested. "You know that."
"Sure," I said. "Just do me a favor and don't try to draw cards with the pilot until we've actually landed, all right?"
Rhonda and Jimmy, who'd been admiring the view from a different part of the balcony, reached the helicopter the same time we did. Kulasawa, who'd wandered off on her own, arrived maybe ten seconds behind us. "We're ready to go,"
Suzenne said. "Rooms are being prepared for you in the guest house across from the Royal Palace. It's not nearly as grand as the name might imply," she added, looking at Kulasawa. "As I said, titles really aren't that important here."
"Of course," Kulasawa said. "Should we have brought some food from the transport?"
"A meal will be awaiting you," Suzenne promised. "Nothing fancy, I'm afraid, but it should tide you over until the more formal welcoming dinner tomorrow."
"And my research equipment?"
"It will be brought to the guest house tonight," Suzenne said. "Along with the rest of the cargo." She looked around the group. "Are there any other questions before we go?"
"I have one," Jimmy said hesitantly, looking warily at the twin helicopter blades hanging over our heads. "You're sure it's safe to fly in here?"
"We do it all the time," Suzenne assured him with a smile. "Bear in mind that the chamber is over thirteen kilometers long and that it's five kilometers from the ground to the sun tunnel. There really is plenty of room."
"And now," she continued, looking around again, "if there are no other questions, please go ahead and find a seat inside. It's time for us to go." The Royal Palace was indeed not nearly as fancy as its name had implied.
Situated near the center of the city I'd seen from the balcony
, it much more resembled an extra-nice government building than it did a medieval castle or even your basic Presidential mansion.
But it had a helipad on the roof, and the guest house Suzenne had mentioned was right across the street, and for me that was what counted. What with the long flight and strain of finding and getting to the Freedom's Peace—plus the two short nights that had gone before—I discovered midway through the helicopter ride that I was unutterably tired.
The meal Suzenne had promised, consisting of a buffet of cold meats, cheeses, fish, bread, and fruit, had been laid out in the common area of the suite we'd been booked into. I wolfed down just enough to quiet the rumblings in my stomach and then went in search of my bed. My room was quiet and dark, the bed large and comfortably firm, and I was asleep almost before the blankets settled down around me. I awoke to sunlight streaming in through a gap in the curtains and a smell of roast chicken in the air that reminded my stomach that the previous night's meal hadn't been much more than a gastronomic promissory note. Throwing on yesterday's clothes, I made a quick trip to the attached bathroom and headed out into the common area.
The remains of another buffet were on the side board where the evening meal had been laid out, with a short stack of used plates on a tray near the door.
Over at the window, sitting across from each other at the long dining table, were Rhonda and Suzenne. A sampling of Rhonda's beadwork was spread out on the table between them.
"About time," Rhonda commented as I stepped into the room. "The rest of us have been up for a couple of hours now."
"I had more sleep to catch up on than the rest of you," I reminded her as I snagged a clean plate and started stacking it with food. "I was the one who spent most of the past two nights sitting up with sick paperwork, remember?"
"Sick paperwork?" Suzenne asked, frowning.
"We had some strange problems at the Angorki spaceport," Rhonda explained.
"Lost or fouled-up permits and such. It took a couple of days to get it all straightened out."
"Just as well it did, I suppose," I commented, picking up a set of flatware and taking my breakfast over to the table. "If we hadn't been delayed, Scholar Kulasawa would have had to find some other transport." I gestured out the window. "And then we'd have missed seeing all this."
