“That Chung is coming here? I don’t particularly care for the woman.”
“No, but you’ll be able to go back to Camp Zero with her. How about that?”
“It’s funny, but it doesn’t mean a thing to me anymore.”
“You’re still recovering. It’ll catch up with you.” Sutter looked at the bulky but fashionable chronometer strapped to her wrist. “I guess we can go see Duncan now, if you want.”
Dorthy drained the bitter dregs of her coffee and allowed herself to be led through the camp, nearly a dozen bubbletents in the wedge between high cliffs, with a landing body and a couple of thopters squatting to one side. Wind howled between the rock walls. “Isn’t the Navy worried about letting equipment fall into enemy hands?” Dorthy asked.
“We’re hoping to get a bead on them before they get a bead on us,” Sutter said.
But Dorthy saw that that wasn’t the whole truth. “Come on, what else?”
“I guess it’s no secret. There’s a kiloton bomb buried here, enough yield to burn the caldera clean any time the computer controlling it decides it’s being threatened. Pretty damned paranoid machine, too. Shit, I try not to think about it, you know, the price tag of knowledge. If it wasn’t for the stuff in the lake down there, I’d be out with McCarthy’s team, in the forest. Yeah, he finally got to come out here. Hussan, too. They’re having the time of their lives out there. But I guess you know all about that.”
“I wish Arcady and I had run into them,” Dorthy said, and followed Sutter into the lock of the bubbletent.
Andrews was larger than she remembered, his red hair longer and in disarray, his coveralls rumpled, sleeves bunched high on his muscular, freckled arms. He kept scrubbing his hand over his face as he listened intently to Dorthy’s description of how she and Kilczer and the twins had followed the herd, watched it merge with the others, how the camp had been overrun and only she and Kilczer had survived. Seated beside Andrews at the table, fat Major Luiz Ramaro scowled down at a sheaf of holograms, occasionally scribbling something on the grey screen of the memotablet and paying Dorthy only minimal attention. When she described how she and Kilczer had found the chrysalis, their realization that the critters were the children of the herders and what the critters were turning into, Ramaro waved a hand languidly and said, “But this is well known. I hope your other revelations are more original, Dr. Yoshida. You forget we have many people working here now.”
“Let her tell it her own way,” Andrews said amiably. “Go on, now, Dorthy.”
So she told about finding the new male herders, the caretakers in Andrews’s terminology, building boats, how Kilczer had knocked out one of the males when they’d stolen a boat, her attempts at probing it.
Andrews questioned her closely on this, but again Ramaro was dismissive. “To know their language would be useful, but this talk of hidden knowledge seems to me to be idle speculation.”
“It’s there,” Dorthy said. “It’s real.”
“I do not doubt that you sensed something,” Ramaro said coldly, without looking up from the memotablet, “but as for what it means, well, I must question your interpretation. Why are the caretakers even now reading their way around the spiral of the keep if they possess vast untapped wells of knowledge? What are they learning?”
“You tell me,” Dorthy said. “Isn’t that your department?”
“I wish it was so easy. The written language, at least, is very complicated. There are at least sixty-four graphemes, and I have catalogued more than a thousand ideograms as well. You are Japanese, so I do not have to tell you how difficult such a written language can be. Depending upon the context, a single ideogram may represent half a dozen disparate notions; and I have no Rosetta stone besides, only vague speculation on your part. I do not know what they read, down there in the keep, but I doubt that it is for entertainment. For knowledge, certainly. And if knowledge is hardwired into their heads, why do they read?” he allowed himself a little smile, his lips pushed out to make a little snout under his snub nose.
“I don’t want to argue,” Dorthy said. The plastic surface of the little table was gritty under her sweating palms. Her dislike of Ramaro was at least as strong as his dislike of her. The touch of his mind was like immersing her hand in a pool murky with oil. She said, “Large areas of the herder’s mind—new male, caretaker, call it what you will—were locked away. Perhaps those in the keep are receiving the key. But it was there, all right. That’s why I have to disagree with the consensus opinion about what the herders are. Maybe I should tell you the rest, so you understand.”
Ramaro shrugged. Andrews said, “Please, Dr. Yoshida. What happened to Arcady?” Behind him, technicians watched various consoles; screens softly glowed with red light, like windows on a furnace.
So Dorthy continued her tale. The travails of their journey up to the lake, the capture of the boat and the herder. The waterfall, where they had had to abandon the boat. The ascent. And the herder’s sudden rush, the suicidal leap that had taken Kilczer, too.
Andrews shook his head. “That’s a terrible thing to happen, when you had come so far. I’m sorry, Dorthy.”
Ramaro said, “He should not have entrusted the rifle to a woman, perhaps.”
Palms flat on gritty plastic, Dorthy pushed up from her chair, leaned across the table, and said, “I can use a fucking rifle, and it happened so quickly no one could have done anything to stop it. Keep your nasty little judgements to yourself.”
“You really could not tell what the caretaker was about to do, with your Talent?” Ramaro did not lift his gaze to meet hers.
“The counteragent had worn off. No, I couldn’t.” Dorthy sat back, her anger turning inside her like a smooth steel shaft.
“Dorthy, Luiz,” Andrews said. “However it turned out, it is done with. But what else do you have to tell us, Dorthy? Why do you think we are wrong about the caretakers?”
“Because of what that one did, don’t you see? Once it had decided that there was no way out of its predicament, it committed suicide. Just as the enemy do at BD twenty.”
Ramaro said, “And that is all?”
“It does seem a little tenuous, Dorthy,” Andrews said, pinching the bridge of his large, shapeless nose between thumb and forefinger.
She saw that neither of them wanted to believe her. Too much depended upon the new male herders being no more than harbingers of the real owners of the planet. For if they were not, if they were the enemy, it would be too dangerous to remain so close to the keep, the survey team would be pulled out. “It’s what I felt,” she said stubbornly, knowing it was the wrong thing to say.
“You see, Duncan?” Ramaro said to Andrews. “It is what I tell you. Women prefer feelings to facts. They pass judgements too easily.”
Dorthy ignored this. “What you call the caretakers are the enemy. The new males have arisen because of us, and now they’re learning all about their inheritance, down there in the keep. Once they come into it, how are you going to stop them?”
“There is a bomb,” Ramaro said, shuffling together the holograms. “I have work, Duncan. Seyoura Yoshida, I wish you well on your journey back.” After picking up holograms and memotablet, he strolled off among the consoles crowded together in the dim circular space of the tent.
“He has a point,” Duncan Andrews said. “I can’t pull the plug on a programme this size on so little evidence.”
“How many herds were there, on the plain, before all this started?”
“Oh, perhaps a thousand.”
“And how many critters in each herd?”
“I know what you are going to say. The average was around a hundred, as I recall, so it makes a nice round figure of a hundred thousand potential caretakers.”
“Or enemy.”
“To be sure. Of course, not all the critters survive the change or the journey up here afterward.” He became animated, pulling at his elf-locked hair; it was growing out curly from the uniform crewcut. “The change itself is an i
ncredible thing, takes less than ten days. They spin their cocoon and then sort of liquefy inside. There are nodes of preadult cells all through this soup, and these form the new body. Damned quickly, like a speeded-up cancer. A lot simply don’t make it, presumably because it is such a forced change. So let’s say that twenty-five hundred will eventually arrive here. Suppose they are the enemy”—he held up a large hand—“which of course I strenuously deny.” His smile was of old. “However, let us assume that they are. It does not matter. If they initiate hostilities, there is a bomb—”
“I know. Angel Sutter told me about it.”
“A little crude, don’t you think? But effective. You see, it does not matter if the caretakers are the enemy, or if they have arisen in order to revive the enemy. Either way, if they initiate hostilities—isn’t that a lovely phrase? It is the way the people upstairs speak. Initiation of hostilities will set off the bomb, and that will flash-burn everything in the caldera. Bad luck on us, but we are volunteers, and you will be gone long before it becomes even a remote possibility.”
“And all the other holds? What’s happening there?”
“We know only from satellite pictures, of course. But it seems that the herds are withdrawing from the plains, the various keeps are switching on in readiness, as here. I wish I knew how all this activity is coordinated.”
“If they all start trouble, you’ll have more than a little local difficulty to deal with.”
“Ah, now, don’t worry about that. The Navy has that in hand as well.”
Dorthy remembered the touch of fear she’d felt in Colonel Chung; this time it was not fear, precisely, but an uneasiness she couldn’t quite pin down behind Andrews’s smile.
He said, “Look now, we must talk again, Dorthy.” His expression became solemn. “I want you to tell me about your adventures, about poor Arcady, the twins.”
“Arcady buried Marta Ade; he couldn’t find any trace of the other one.” She couldn’t remember his name, plucked it from Andrews’s mind. “Jon Chavez.”
“We’ll look for the bodies; I wouldn’t like them left out there. That’s no resting place. Yes, we will talk, when you are fully recovered. I’ll find time, certainly. In the meanwhile, perhaps you could prepare a formal report, Dorthy. These things have to be gone through, I’m afraid.”
His concern was genuine, she saw, and there was tenderness, too, mixed with his scepticism about her belief that the herders were the enemy. It came to her, part pure intuition, part uncontrolled leakage of her Talent, that he was not truly ruthless; there was a streak of sentimentality that diluted his ambition. A helpless dreamer. That was why he got so involved, why he was down here when he could have overseen the whole thing from orbital command, safe above the atmosphere. His inability to delegate responsibility was not so much due to ruthless egotism, as she had first thought, but because he had been inculcated with the sort of idealist notions that the children of old, established money were taught, and one of these was that one should be able to do all that one expects one’s underlings to do. It was because of this close involvement that he was unable to treat objectively any challenges to his ideas.
All this came to her in a moment, but Dorthy thought about Andrews and his concern and his closed mind off and on while she waited for Colonel Chung to arrive, while she waited for her release; and in the meantime dictated a formal report together with all she could recall of her two probe attempts, of the herder group, and of the captured male who had committed suicide. There was not much else to do. The technicians who guided and monitored the remotes kept away from her and she from them, and Angel Sutter descended into the caldera with Andrews for a couple of days, and then was busy with her specimens. But Andrews afterwards kept to his promise and found time to listen as Dorthy went over her climb through the forest again, again not mentioning that she and Arcady Kilczer had slept together despite the slow befuddlement brought on by a flask of illicit liquor that Andrews insisted they share, oily clear stuff that burned all the way down to the pit of her stomach. Dorthy had spent a little time in the command tent watching unattended screens despite Major Ramaro’s disapproval, and one had shown the new males as they traced with painful slowness the cursive script that intagliated a high wall, dark as shadows in the bright red light of the keep. It was a scene that filled her with disquiet, a brooding dread, but she couldn’t quite explain this to Andrews and he, good-humouredly and predictably, would have none of it. No one believed Dorthy, not even Angel Sutter.
So she waited for Colonel Chung, reading the plays Sutter had had printed, sometimes helping the biologist in her little laboratory, and, for a lot of the time, sleeping. She still had not fully recovered from her ordeal.
She was asleep when Colonel Chung finally arrived. Sutter woke her, and she dressed quickly and crossed the bare windy rock to the command tent. The colonel stood in a little knot of people, Ramaro and Andrews either side of her, studying a holostage as view after view of the keep blossomed there. Andrews smiled at Dorthy as she joined the group; Ramaro was explaining something to Colonel Chung. The stage showed a close-up of script that ran along a wall in a metre-wide band. Ramaro pointed. “There, and there. We’ve a ninety per cent confidence limit now that Alea is the name of the species which planoformed P’thrsn.” He looked at Andrews, who merely raised an eyebrow.
“Meaning?” The colonel didn’t acknowledge Dorthy’s presence with so much as a glance. She had a brittle air of nervous impatience.
“Perhaps, the people,” Ramaro told her. “It’s our best guess, less than fifty per cent confidence there. You have to remember that many of the referents depend upon the context for translation, and in almost every case we are still unsure of the context. That much has not changed since your last visit, I’m afraid.” The red light of the hologram threw his round double chin into relief, made livid the seamed scar on his plump cheek. He was doing a good job of concealing his dislike of having to defer to the command of a mere woman. “All in all,” he said, “I’d consider we’ve done very well, Colonel. I wish I knew what the team upstairs is making of it all. It is frustrating.”
“I’ll second that,” Andrews said.
Colonel Chung turned from the holostage. She looked tired, Dorthy thought. “There can be no relaxation on security,” Chung said. “It is perhaps unfortunate, but we must do our best down here.”
“Second-guessing what they want upstairs,” Andrews said.
“I would have thought you’d enjoy that,” Colonel Chung said. “The brief reports I have received from orbital command have indicated no dissatisfaction with your work, at any rate. But I am alarmed to learn that activity in the keep continues to rise.”
“Those herders are no threat,” Andrews said. “Believe me. They’re not the enemy, just the caretakers. The enemy will come along, though, but I think we’ll be ready for that.”
“One way or the other,” Colonel Chung said. “Before this change you believed them to be, what, the ragged barbarian descendants of the enemy? And now you have had to alter your theory.”
“Well,” Andrews said, smiling, “that’s science.”
“Because,” Colonel Chung continued implacably, “you have learned a little more. There is still much that is not understood. Major Ramaro is able to assign probabilities to the few translations he has made. What probability do you give this caretaker theory, Andrews?”
“It isn’t that kind of theory, simply a best guess. These creatures have shown no sign of deploying any kind of advanced technology despite the time they’ve spent in the keep. If they were the enemy, they surely would have moved against this camp by now. But from what you tell me, the equatorial hold would appear to be a quite different matter.”
Colonel Chung nodded. “It is indeed. Let us discuss it.” She reached into her uniform coveralls and pulled out a data cube. Addressing everyone in the group, she said, “This was transmitted yesterday from orbital command. After Dr. Yoshida apparently scanned or sensed the mind of s
omething immensely intelligent as she descended in a dropcapsule, something to the east of Camp Zero, orbital command redeployed one of the mapping satellites to cover all the holds in that direction. One is located precisely on the equator; originally it had nothing in it analogous to the structures found in this and most of the other holds—no keep, nothing at all. Until five days ago.”
“Christ,” someone said.
Ramaro glanced around sternly, then took the data cube from Chung and plugged it in.
Dorthy craned forward.
A dark-textured circle on the red desert surface, seemingly ringing a black hole. “This was made from ninety klicks up, and the transit velocity was considerable. Nevertheless, the detail is fascinating.” Colonel Chung reached out and with one finger, its long nail scraping plastic, pressed a pair of keys on the holostage terminal. Flick. Now the circle was larger, clearly a forested crater, its centre perfectly circular, perfectly black. “I will not show the infrared scans at the moment. The signature of the slopes is the same as that of the forests in the other holds.” Flick. Not a hole at all, but a deep bowl ringed by forest, a deep, symmetrical, black bowl with something small and white at its centre.
It was tantalizingly, impossibly familiar to Dorthy, a dizzying moment of déjà vu. And then she remembered. “Arecibo!” she exclaimed.
Everyone looked at her.
She explained, “On Earth. There’s nothing left of it now; it dated from the Age of Waste and was destroyed in one of the wars. But it was a big, fixed radio telescope built in a natural valley.”
Colonel Chung cleared her throat. “Precisely,” she said. “A radio telescope. There appear to be buildings close by, in a canyon or cleft in the rim of the crater”—she poked a long-nailed finger into the hologram—“but resolution is not good enough to show any detail and they are mostly obscured by trees, which is perhaps the reason why they did not show up on the long-range scans that were made for mapping purposes.”
Four Hundred Billion Stars Page 18
