“I thought it was some sort of clothing.” Dorthy clutched a cup of coffee with both hands. Even so, the black lake inside trembled.
“No clothing, not so much as daub of mud? A hood of skin, and dark fur? That’s a herder, all right. Well, now.” Andrews sat on a tall stool, leaning an elbow on the cluttered bench as he slowly and methodically picked at the edge of his coffee cup, dropping the shreds of plastic inside the diminishing bowl. There were loose dark pouches under his startlingly blue eyes and a deep line either side of his narrow lips drew his mouth down, yet for all his seeming exhaustion he was preternaturally alert. He said, “There are crazy things happening, all right. No herder has been seen in the forests up here before. That’s partly why I chose this site. Christ, I wonder if they’re watching us.” He tossed the cup at the disposal hatch—it tipped the rim, throwing a dribble of brown liquid as it spun to the floor—and scrubbed at his hair with both hands before clasping them atop his head. “You read anything out there?” he asked Kilczer.
“Nothing that big.” Kilczer was bent over the flickering display, his narrow shoulders hunched. “Man-sized or larger, there is nothing. But machine only works at close range.”
Andrews looked at Dorthy. “Maybe your Talent would be better; that scanner is based on it, after all.”
“It only works at close range, too. Usually.” Dorthy sipped scalding coffee.
“Just go over it again,” Andrews said, “You saw just one?”
As Dorthy recounted the incident again, it came to her that the creature, the herder, had been as frightened as she. Each had run from each, alien from alien. Yet memory of the glimpsed cruelly thin face within its loose folds of skin, the huge deepset eyes, the lines of the long body blurred by shadow, was still unsettling. Somewhere out there. She realized how insubstantial the tent was, a bubble sunk deep in the bloody light of the sun.
Andrews rasped his stubbled cheek with a spatulate thumb, sighed loudly. “Goddamn, if we had the people out here…” Abruptly, he jumped up and peered over Kilczer’s shoulder at the screen, paced around the bench and studded the treacher for more coffee. Pulling the cup free, he said, “Maybe now I can get more resources out here, anyway. The lights and now this. Things are changing.”
“Lights?” Sutter asked. She lounged like some potentate in the deep bubblechair.
Andrews sipped noisily. “At the keep. That’s why I didn’t come back last night.”
Kilczer turned from his machine. “It seems that the city or whatever it is in the caldera turned itself on.”
“The keep,” Andrews said, and explained, “In the middle of the caldera there’s a complex construction of spires and winding ramps, more a kind of vertical maze than anything else. We don’t know what it is—it certainly isn’t a city. I guess with the moat it could be defensive. Perhaps they sank that low before they died out. It happened on Elysium, after all.” Andrews settled on a stool. “Anyway, there’s a team surveying it with remotes. Maybe they set it off, maybe it’s a cyclic thing, but lights came on yesterday, some kind of phosphor. For what purpose we don’t know yet, but Ramaro is working on that. And now a herder wandering around up here. It makes a kind of sense. Dorthy, how do you feel about going to read the mind of one of those things?”
“I’d like to get it over with.”
“Good.” He clapped his hands together, grinned. “That’s good. How about you, Arcady?”
“I would prefer to sleep,” Kilczer said, smiling.
“I wish we had the time. Anyway, you slept up at the base, slept when we flew back: you can’t spend your life asleep. Listen, Angel. While we’re gone you check out the forest, see if you can spot more herders. My guess is that there’ll be more. What we need is an aerial survey, but that’ll have to wait awhile. Don’t wander too far into the forest now.”
“I don’t intend to put even one foot in its shade. You crazy?”
“Come on, put your stuff in the back of the sled and you can outrun anything out there.” He grinned. “At least, I think you can. If you want to complain about the lack of help out here, I’m not the person to talk to. I’ve been doing a lot of it myself. Dorthy, let’s get your kit and go. Arcady, you need a hand with your monitoring equipment?”
As Dorthy packed she heard Angel Sutter’s voice rising and falling in protest, Andrews’s bluff unflappable rumble undercutting it. Then Sutter laughed and as Dorthy came out of the cubicle she was saying, “Up and down the shore, then. But I don’t even want to do that. I suppose you’re going to tell me that if something does attack me, I don’t shoot. Shit.”
“That’s entirely up to you,” Andrews said mildly. “It is not a regulation I made. Come on Arcady, Dorthy. Good luck now, Angel.”
“Oh, sure,” the woman said. But she was grinning: Andrews had charmed her just as Dorthy had hoped he would charm Colonel Chung on her behalf.
The tent shrank beside the shore of the lake. The lake shrank within the contours of the forest.
As the thopter rose, turning wide over black water, Dorthy, in the cramped space behind the seats occupied by the two men, leaned forward and yelled to Andrews, “Aren’t we supposed to be going down to the plain?”
“Eventually. But first I must check out events at the rim camp. This damned radio silence makes it hard to keep track of what’s going on, and a lot is going on up there right now.”
Kilczer said, “Wait until you see this, Dr. Yoshida. Is incredible.”
“Come on, Arcady,” Andrews said. “Don’t give anything away. And don’t worry, Dorthy, we’ll get your job done. The herders don’t keep our kind of hours; we’ll find some that are active enough for you at any time.”
Dorthy subsided. Argument was pointless. Besides, she didn’t want to fall out with Andrews. He was supposed to be on her side, her ticket home.
The lake narrowed. Soon they were flying between steep tree-clad slopes, following a twisting river that widened once where a waterfall poured into a foaming pool, narrowed again, enclosed now by steep rock walls hung with masses of vegetation. Fierce random air currents buffeted the thopter as it beat up the river’s course, the vegetation that clung to the rock thinning as mist thickened in the air. Rivulets of condensation ran the plastic of the cabin’s bubble; the spotlight’s beam was milkily blurred. Andrews switched on the cabin heater and leaned over the stick, watching the radar set as much as the limited view outside. Kilczer hunched in his seat, nervous and tired.
Behind them, Dorthy picked through various conversational openings and gambits that would lead to the necessity of her leaving as soon as her job was done, rejecting each in turn as being too obvious or too phatic. Twice, she glanced across at Andrews, wanting to exchange even a banality about the riven landscape below, but he was intent on flying, nursing the stick gently between his big hands, constantly working it with delicate motions as if urging on a live and nervous steed. Dorthy, who had once or twice ridden horses on the coast after her contract had ended, after her final confrontation with her father (but forget that, it was all over, done with, nothing left but the mystery of Hiroko’s riddle, the note she had left when she had returned to the ranch from which Dorthy had rescued her), was on the verge of asking Andrews if he had ever ridden, if they had horses on Elysium, when a flock of wide-winged shapes shot out of the mist, spiralling above and below the thopter like so many wind-driven leaves. An adrenalin spike rammed through Kilczer’s consciousness while Andrews calmly pushed the stick forward and the thopter shot above the creatures, which all turned in one motion, wingtip to wingtip, and vanished into the mist.
“They don’t understand about aircraft,” Andrews said, pitching his voice over the noise of the motors as he allowed the thopter to glide back to its former path, the river just visible through scarves of mist below.
Dorthy rejected one reply, tried to think of something else to say. A minute later, it was too late.
No more trees. The river was a braided torrent split by great boulders. The canyon,
little more now than a deep channel, split, a minute later split again. Then it was gone and the thopter was beating through blood-tinged mist over a scape of tumbled rock as bleak as anywhere on the Moon. And then everything dropped away.
The thopter swooped out from a great cliff that curved away left and right, dropping steeply to humped foothills. Beyond, the land fell in irregular terraces cloaked in dark forest, thinning to a great sloping plain in which, centred like the pupil of an eye, was a circular lake. Only the upper rim of the sun peeped over the misty peaks of the rimwall of this vast caldera; everything within was a confusion of shadow and dull embers of half-light. Except for something in the very centre of the lake.
Dorthy leaned forward as the thopter began to climb again, squinted across Andrews’s shoulder at the great multiple spire, wound with constellations of blazing red sparks, which thrust up from still black water.
“What is it?”
“The keep. See why I had to come back? It was dark a day ago.”
“Is crazy place.” Kilczer was also intent on the panorama, his edginess subsumed by consummate fascination.
Andrews said, “We’re maybe twenty kilometres away. This is as close as we get, for now.”
Twenty kilometres. The size of the basin doubled, tripled, in Dorthy’s perception: the spire must be taller than the Museum of Mankind in Rio, wider at its base than the Galveston spacefield, no mere building but a small mountain. Then it was lost from sight as the thopter turned parallel to the cliff’s sheer face and, just as a bird lifts in flight before sitting on a branch, swooped up and settled on a bare stretch of rock that nestled in a wedge broken into the cliff’s bubbled strata. A pair of bubbletents glimmered in the shadow there.
Even before the thopter’s vanes had stopped beating, someone had reached the craft and swung down the hatch at Kilczer’s side. After he had stumbled down, Dorthy followed, and the man who had opened the hatch held out a hand in old-fashioned courtesy. She ignored the gesture and stepped down carefully to gritty lavic rock. Less than ten metres away was the edge. The tip of the keep glittered across kilometres of misty air.
Andrews came around the curve of the cabin, grinning. “Luiz, how goes it? Dorthy, Dr. Yoshida, this is Major Luiz Ramaro. He’s running this part of the show.”
“Dr. Yoshida. Welcome.” The man, not much taller than Dorthy, and not much older either, his belly making a comfortable swag over the belt of his coveralls, executed a quick bow and then openly scrutinized her. Dorthy stared back, refusing to be intimidated. A round coffee-coloured face with a snub nose and small, live black eyes, like currants in a glazed pastry. A duelling scar seamed his left cheek. After a moment Ramaro nodded as if something had been confirmed and turned away as Andrews asked how the drones were doing, whether there had been any other activity, if any power sources had been found.
“Please, please,” Ramaro said, smiling, “Give us time, Andrews. No, there are no detectable power sources. The lights seem to work like glotubes, releasing stored quanta, although these are but molecule-thin coatings. As for why they have come on now…we are still working on that problem. But let us get out of the wind. Seyoura, you must be cold, no? Andrews, you are staying here long?”
“If we could stay in contact by radio I wouldn’t have come up here at all. No, we’re on our way to catch up with the twins, down on the plains. Dr. Yoshida is going to read the minds of the herders. If they have minds, of course.”
Major Ramaro glanced at Dorthy, his look both shrewd and amused. His voice was dismissive. “So that’s your Talent. I thought as much. Well, good luck, Andrews.”
Dorthy felt a prick of anger but said nothing. Nothing she could say would make any difference, she knew. Clearly, Ramaro was a Greater Brazilian of the old school; the duelling scar identified him as belonging to one of the aristocratic families. Women, to them, were little more than a precious asset, breeding stock, an attitude that dated from a couple of centuries before when most of the women and girl children had been killed by a tailored plague during one of the succession wars. After that, women had been bought and sold and fiercely protected in Greater Brazil, no more so than by the aristocracy, who had squandered vast sums to enrich and extend their bloodlines. Women had been given rights of property disposition and general civil liberties less than forty years ago in Greater Brazil, years after the establishment of the Federation of Co-Prosperity between Earth and the old colonies founded by Russia and the United States of America, and men of the aristocracy like Ramaro were the last bastions of old prejudice.
The little major led them to the nearest bubbletent, cycled them through the lock. Beyond, the dimly lit circular space was crammed with racks of monitoring equipment; half a dozen technicians crouched over screens, their faces livid in relayed blood-red light. Ramaro served Andrews, Kilczer, and Dorthy with coffee, and with elaborate courtesy pulled a rollerchair over for Dorthy—and, after she was seated, promptly ignored her.
Dorthy sipped black coffee, watched an unattended screen that showed the keep rearing out of its still moat, lights twisted around its many pinnacles like necklaces of fluorescent rubies, and listened as Andrews and Ramaro argued about what the keep was for, whether its builders were still alive. Kilczer stood a little to one side, his coffee steaming untouched in his cup as he watched the two men, nodding slightly as Andrews mentioned the herder Dorthy had seen in the forest, reiterated his belief that the enemy had degenerated on this world, that the herders were their barbarian descendants.
“As your ancestors descended to barbarism after traffic between Earth and Elysium ceased, five hundred years ago?” Ramaro smiled, his eyes almost disappearing behind his rounded cheeks. “My opinion is that the enemy are hiding,” he said, as much to Kilczer as to Andrews. “Hiding, or waiting to be recalled from sleep. Perhaps even now they are being awakened, and the lights are a part of the process. It is possible, Andrews.”
Dorthy wondered if he’d been told about the burning intelligence she’d twice glimpsed, but kept quiet. This wasn’t her argument. And besides, she had taken an immediate dislike to Major Luiz Ramaro.
Andrews said, “Possible, if you can explain why they would do such a thing. Transform a whole world and go to sleep? Why? This isn’t a colonyboat, taking years to travel from star to star.”
“We must remember that they are alien.”
“That’s hardly a basis for speculation, now. It explains everything and nothing.”
Ramaro shrugged. “What is certain is that there is an entire planet to be searched, most of it poorly mapped, almost all of it untrodden, untouched. We need half a hundred teams such as this to make any impact on the problem.”
“I’ve told the people upstairs just that so many times…” Andrews scratched at his stubbled chin. “And suppose the herders are coming up here. What do you say to that?”
“It is my opinion that they are animals only, intelligent as an ape or a dolphin, no more. At most they might be caretakers, servants, awaiting their masters. Wherever they are.”
“It’s opinion like that which keeps research here at a minimum, Luiz. As long as upstairs believes that there may be a chance of stumbling across something inimical, they withhold the resources we need. If we suggest that all is clear, they will commit themselves to a full survey, believe me.” Andrews leaned a hip negligently against a console. “Well, whoever of us is right, it appears we will learn a great deal from the herders. One way or another.”
Dorthy, her anger finding sudden focus, said, “You assume I can probe these creatures to a greater extent than I can probe human beings, Dr. Andrews. Besides, you don’t seem eager to put it into practice.”
Andrews raised a bushy eyebrow. “I’m sorry, Dorthy, all this must be dreadfully boring. But I just want to check that things haven’t overtaken my plans.”
Ramaro said, slightly turning away from Dorthy (whether from deliberate insult or unconscious dismissal she couldn’t tell), “You should give up your lakeside camp, scen
ic though it is, and come up here. We learn new things every day, every hour, and it will save you considerable commuting time.”
“Ah, now, I have a fondness for that camp,” Andrews said, smiling. “It was where we started out, after all. Besides, there is the biological program to consider. The ecosystem is as finely balanced as the optics of one of your probes. I do not think we should abandon that aspect of our research.”
Snubbed, feeling the tingling that heralded one of her attacks (or perhaps it was simply anger: she hoped so), Dorthy set down her coffee and went over to one of the technicians to ask where the toilet was. After she had used it, she splashed cold water on her face, dabbed it around her forehead. Strands of her black hair had come loose and she tucked them inside her barrette, bent again and rinsed out her mouth, rinsed away the bitter taste.
When she returned to the dimly lit space outside, Andrews turned from his study of a sheaf of holograms spread on a bench, sections of intagliated wall or floor, Dorthy saw. Kilczer held one up, tilting it this way and that. “Sorry,” Andrews said.
“You and Major Ramaro have done?”
“He’s over there, checking out the telemetry of a remote probe that’s thrown some sort of fit. Look, I can take these with me. I really do want the herders checked out.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not about to throw some fit of my own. I just want to get it over with, get back to my own work. All this seems a little unreal.” As she said it, she felt a sliding sensation of disquiet, as if the tent, with all its consoles and benches and personnel, had slid metres across the windy shelf of rock towards the abyss. Suppose, she suddenly thought, suppose Andrews is wrong, the herders aren’t anything at all to do with the enemy. What will orbital command do with me then, send me home or set me looking elsewhere?
Kilczer was saying, “To me also this is unreal. Now that I am here it is less real to me than when I was waiting at Camp Zero to come out.”
Four Hundred Billion Stars Page 7
