“How do we know it’s a radio telescope?” one of the technicians objected. She thrust a pen into the loose net that bundled her long fair hair. “It could be anything, maybe a solar power generator—”
“Or a sports field,” someone else said, to general laughter.
“Please,” Ramaro said. “It should be obvious that a radio telescope built by the enemy would look like one we ourselves built. The physics demand conservation of form.” He looked around, sternly disapproving of the sudden outburst of hilarity, the release of tension.
Andrews pulled at his nose, his habitual gesture of contained excitement. “Has this convinced the people upstairs that we should be investigating that particular hold rather than continue to fool around here?”
“We must proceed cautiously,” Colonel Chung said. “For now, no further attempt will be made to explore any hold but this. The events here will have to provide you with sufficient stimulation, Andrews.”
“I’m not interested in filling in details; I want to get to the bottom of all this. Look, we don’t know why the enemy chose to planoform a world of such an impoverished sun, nor where they came from, nor how widespread they are through this arm of the Galaxy.” As he enunciated each point he pressed down a finger of his left hand with the forefinger of his right. “Nor why the colony around BD twenty is so hostile, not even what the enemy really is: I will bet that it is not the herders in any shape or form, however. We’ve made no steps to contact whatever is living at this other hold. Perhaps they are as hostile as anything around BD twenty. Perhaps that goes for any technologically active colony we might run into. But so far we have not tried. Until we do, we can sit around making guesses, but we cannot substantiate them.”
“You are not here to make contact,” Colonel Chung said. “You are here to study, that is all. Please, Andrews, leave the logistics of this expedition to those in charge of it. I have received no indication that this discovery will change the direction or pace of research here on the surface. We must be cautious. If hostilities are initiated, I need hardly remind you that it will be most difficult to study anything at all here.”
For a moment, Dorthy almost grasped what it was that orbital command could do if it chose, a general vision of burning, gone in an eyeblink. Were they planning to bomb every hold if hostilities broke out? It would be their style.
“Please, Duncan,” Ramaro said. “Calm yourself. Have patience.”
Andrews smiled. “You know very well that I’m short of that particular grace, Luiz. But I’ll abide by the decision—what other choice do I have?” He didn’t really mean it, Dorthy saw. “Now let’s get a proper look at this thing,” he said, and tapped at the holostage’s terminal, shifting through various false-colour shots. Around him, the group broke into an unfocused discussion of what the telescope could be for, communication or listening, why it was fixed instead of movable, how much of the sky it could scan.
Colonel Chung drew Dorthy aside. “You must be glad to have done your job, Dr. Yoshida. There will be room to ride back with me. Perhaps you can find something to turn your hand to at the camp.”
“What do you mean? Wait. You’re telling me that I can’t get off this planet?”
“No one can get off, at least for the moment. Until the situation is secure, orbital command will not risk sending down anything that could be used by the enemy to get into orbit.”
There was a hollow roaring in Dorthy’s head. “This is some kind of mistake. You told me that when I had finished here I could go.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Yoshida, it’s out of my hands. I cannot make orbital command send a shuttle down, I can only follow orders. If it is of any comfort, we are all in the same situation down here. Provided that you are occupied, I am sure that the time will pass quickly. You are an astronomer, are you not? Perhaps you could study this latest discovery.”
“No,” Dorthy said. Her throat hurt. “No,” she said again, loudly, aware of the technicians and scientists turning to look at her all around the cluttered, dimly lit space. She couldn’t give up now, not after all the days of desperate danger and deprivation tramping through the wilderness of the hold, not after the farcical tragedy of Arcady Kilczer’s death…again Dorthy saw his mild face, felt the flow of his patient, inexhaustably inquiring mind. He wouldn’t have chosen to sit in limbo at Camp Zero with the puzzle still to be solved. “If I can’t get off this world I’d rather stay here,” Dorthy said. “You want to find out about the enemy—I’ll use my Talent. All right?” She saw that Andrews was staring at her, his face expressionless. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“I would strongly suggest that you return with me,” Colonel Chung said.
“No!” Dorthy had the satisfaction of sensing surprise behind Chung’s cold mask. “It isn’t me you want to protect, it’s my Talent. That and the scandal the Navy wants to avoid if I’m killed. Well, the hell with that. I’ll stay here unless you knock me on the head and carry me out.”
“Very well,” Colonel Chung said impassively. Although she was badly shaken by Dorthy’s rebellion, she would lose face if she showed it. “But I hope you will not regret this, Dr. Yoshida.”
Dorthy turned away, and saw that Andrews was smiling now, a quick wry flicker, whether of approval or amusement she couldn’t tell. Then he bent towards the hologram of the radio telescope again, talking in a quiet voice to Ramaro. Dorthy held the edge of a console and thought: trapped.
Almost every day a group of new male herders emerged from the high pass through the rimwall. Never fewer than three, sometimes as many as a dozen, they carried tall staffs that, with their hoods of naked skin and dark fur, made them resemble robed medieval pilgrims as they strode down the rocky, misty slopes. When they came in sight of the keep they often stopped and built a campfire that they lit with a spark carried in a clay ball, and sometimes spent several days there, hunting small game and joined by other groups before at last moving on, descending the forested inner slope of the caldera by a well-trampled path through the low trees, crossing the straight causeway and dwindling into insignificance against the high shoulders of the keep’s buttresses, its soaring peaks strung with a galaxy of lights. Squatting before the wall bordering the road or pathway that spiralled to the top of the keep, patiently tracing the lines of text there, the new males did not look like an army preparing to repel invaders, a point Andrews made much of. They looked like innocent unhurried scholars. The first group to have arrived were only now, two weeks later, halfway up the long spiral, where the text covered the wall from top to bottom.
Dorthy spent the next two weeks trying to fathom these strange creatures, studying the patterns of their arrival (but finding nothing that couldn’t be explained by simple Poisson distribution) and venturing out to probe them with her Talent. She wanted to prove her point to Andrews, show the herders for what they were, not precursors of some greater glory but prodigal sons slowly coming into their own. She couldn’t explain her sudden outburst against the offer of safety at Camp Zero. Before her adventure she would have railed against the broken promise, to be sure, but she would have accepted it with the same resignation with which, as a child, she had accepted her father’s sequestration of her earnings during her indenture at the Kamali-Silver Institute. Angel Sutter thought that she was crazy, had said so the very next day.
“Maybe you’re right,” Dorthy said, with a small smile.
“If I was in your position I’d have left like that.” Sutter snapped her fingers. “I thought you were for getting out right from the beginning, the fuss you were making in the camp.”
“Things have changed,” Dorthy said uncomfortably. She looked away from Sutter’s frank, probing gaze, at the table where half a dozen technicians were eating on the other side of the brightly lit commons. It was change of shift on the round-the-clock watch of the keep.
“Things sure have,” Sutter said.
“I don’t know exactly why,” Dorthy confessed. “I’d like to convince Andrews th
at he’s wrong about the new males, the caretakers, but I could just as easily walk away from it, to hell with him, to hell with all of you, right? Except, what else could I do?”
“Changing Duncan’s mind once he’s fixed on something isn’t easy, honey.”
“Perhaps I’m trying to justify what happened to me down there, the deaths of the twins, of Arcady…” It sounded silly when she said it, trivializing those deaths, and she blushed. Besides, at bottom she felt that it was not precisely the truth—that it was instead the portal to a deep, darker, as yet unfathomed truth.
Sutter pressed her lips together. “Listen,” she said, “I don’t mean anything by this, but I’d guess you and Arcady slept together. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to…”
For a frozen moment Dorthy felt as if everything was falling away from her in every direction. She said slowly, “Yes, it’s true, but I don’t think it meant anything to either of us. We were simply thrown together, that’s all. It didn’t happen until we reached the lake, you know, where the camp was. I suppose we both thought we were going to die, not make it across the rimwall. Things didn’t seem to matter.”
“Oh, honey, don’t mind me. I’m just plain damned nosy, that’s all. I don’t know if it’s good, for you to stay here after all this. Even Duncan isn’t completely happy about it, much as he likes having you and your Talent working for him again.”
“Running away from it didn’t seem like much of a solution either, especially as I couldn’t get any farther than Camp Zero. I’d still be on the damned planet, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything there except sit with my thumb up my ass, under Chung’s frosty eye.” Dorthy sipped her bitter coffee and added, “You won’t tell anyone about what I said, will you?”
“I may be nosy, but I don’t go running my mouth off,” Sutter said, smiling. “Except when I feel I have to. The way we’re shut in here, gossip is like a poison, you know?”
And it came to Dorthy clearly then, the thing, the obvious thing that despite her Talent she hadn’t seen before, that Sutter and Andrews were lovers, had been ever since Sutter had arrived at the lost lakeside camp.
If Dorthy had not already guessed, it would have become quickly obvious, for both Angel Sutter and Duncan Andrews accompanied her on the expeditions across the slopes of the caldera, and within the circle of the alarm system they rigged to give at least nominal protection against the new male herders there was not very much privacy. Dorthy found that she did not much mind their discreet lovemaking only a few metres from where she lay; for all that she valued her own privacy she had long been used to eavesdropping unintentionally on others, was able to look away from it. Nor was she particularly jealous, as she had been of the twins. That nerve had been dulled.
Besides, she was glad to be out of the camp, away from the cramped commons and the imposition of other minds on her own, the continual feathering brush of emotions as distracting as a moth beating at a light. And there were the long inner slopes of the caldera to explore, the scrub forest of trees, tangled loops never rising more than half a dozen metres above their stubby trunks, which in their obvious otherness were less disturbing than the pine forest through which she and Arcady Kilczer had had to climb. She remembered him with a qualified wistfulness not substantial enough to tip into mourning. He had not touched her deeply enough to draw on those wells (twice, they had only made love twice). She was beginning to wonder if anyone ever would.
She walked the caldera forest with a continual edge of adrenalin thrilling her blood, buoyed by Andrews’s jaunty confidence, Sutter’s keen awareness of the interconnections everywhere, the patterns of the patchwork ecosystem slowly unravelling. There was always the danger that, as they stalked the arriving parties, they would blunder into a new male that had gone off hunting. The belt-trees did not grow closely together, but the spaces between them, on the lower slopes, were colonized by tangles of thorny bushes or stands of tall grass, or stuff like pulpy organ pipes that gave off a faint blue phosphorescence and a cutting whiff of ketones. A herder could easily stalk the trio of humans, if it had a mind to. Although they hunted the lower slopes, the new male herders usually camped at the edge of the forest, high among mist and tumbled bare rock, and Dorthy had to make her way slowly and cautiously on her belly until she was close enough to begin probing the creatures, Andrews behind her with a rifle as welcome insurance—he had abandoned all pretence of obeying the guidelines laid down by orbital command, insisting that, after all, the caretakers were no more than dumb servant brutes.
And despite all her attempts, Dorthy found nothing that contradicted him. The minds of the new arrivals were little different from the mind of the new male she and Kilczer had captured, with the exception that the blinding compulsion to climb to the keep, the geas that had been the centre of every impulse, was purged, vanished as a pricked soap bubble vanishes, leaving only a faint residue. Calm, almost fulfilled after having crossed the rimwall, the new male herders lounged quietly around their campfires, the thin skim of their conscious minds still and placid over tantalizing depths Dorthy could only strainingly glimpse, too deep and dark to be reflected clearly at her centre. She would surface from Sessan Amakuki with an aching sense of frustration and make her way back to where Andrews waited, shake her head and tell him that there was nothing new to report.
He took this with equanimity. Although he would have liked to have learned more, each of Dorthy’s failures made his hypothesis stronger, aided his campaign to break orbital command’s interdict and have the new males who were painstakingly reading their way around the keep’s spiral more thoroughly investigated.
Angel Sutter, less patient than her lover and less experienced in the complex dominance games of the Navy, couldn’t understand why Andrews didn’t simply order opening of the keep to full exploration. “Ramaro might be in nominal charge, but you’re senior to him, you outrank him.”
Andrews smiled gently. He was sprawled on trampled grass, looking up through the braided loops of the tree that marked the centre of the camp—Dorthy’s sleeping bag on one side, his and Sutter’s on the other. He had hung the little box of the alarm system caster on one serrated loop, and it winked quick green light over his face, indicating that the perimeter was undisturbed. He said slowly, “To be sure, I could flatly tell him that I was going to walk into the keep, but as soon as I left he’d make a panic call to orbital command and request permission to shoot me for violating contact procedure. They’d allow it, too.”
“Come on,” Angel Sutter said.
“It’s true enough,” Andrews said. “Don’t you agree, Dorthy?”
On the other side of the little heating unit on which Sutter was simmering a stew of honeyed chicken and black beans made from raw ingredients she’d specially dialled up from the treacher in the camp, Dorthy said, “Why not? But you know that I’m biased against that fat, prejudiced bastard.”
“My,” Andrews said, and raised an eyebrow. “Assuming all that to be an accurate assessment of his character, it’s not why Ramaro would have me shot without compunction. The reason is that he is a career man. When the Navy was created he simply moved sideways from the Greater Brazilian Peace Corps, and he sees it as an opportunity to advance himself. The thing of it is, he likes hierarchies, feels comfortable in a defined position. The youngest son of minor aristocracy—I know the type well, we have enough of them on Elysium, heaven knows. You don’t believe me, Angel.”
“I’m from the Guild, which has just as rigid a hierarchy as the C.P.G.B.,” the tall woman said, “but I’m not about to have you shot. Not yet, anyhow.”
“Ah, but you were in the survey arm, a scientist. What do you hope for, after this?”
Sutter tipped back her head and loosed her low, rough laugh. “What a question! I don’t know, maybe section head. That would be nice. I get kind of tired sometimes, doing the shit-work of collecting.”
Andrews smiled, “You see, no ambition to speak of. Now Ramaro”—he raised a hand w
hen Sutter good-humouredly started to object—“Ramaro has a gut full of ambition, although in the end it too is limited. He will stay in the Navy, even if he gets to the top of it, God forbid the thought.”
“And what about you, Duncan,” Dorthy asked, “what are the limits of your ambition?”
“Why, to conquer the galaxy, of course. I had thought I’d made that plain.”
“Sometimes I get the feeling you’re not joking when you say that,” Sutter said. “What about it, Dorthy? What are this guy’s innermost thoughts? Go on, put that Talent to good use.”
Dorthy, crosslegged on her silvery sleeping bag, said, “He’s too shifty even for me to work out.”
She had actually asked Andrews about this on a previous trip, while they were waiting for Sutter to return from collecting specimens, asked him why he was so fired up, why he drove himself as he did. For he worked harder than anyone else in the camp, reading reports when he wasn’t out in the field, with Angel Sutter or with McCarthy’s team on the other side of the mountain, or running sample tests in the laboratory. Absorbing it all. He drove himself hard, yes, and expected as much from others. Only Sutter seemed impervious to his demands, shrugging them off casually, wickedly deflating his more grandiose claims.
When Dorthy had asked the question, he’d said, “Because I’m rich, you mean?” They were sitting next to the grounded thopter in weak red sunlight, the sun near the edge of the rimwall now, close to setting, but because of the high mountain border its light still slanting down from a high angle. Andrews tipped his head back, dull light like dried blood on his red hair, in mock consideration. Dorthy, her Talent almost faded after another useless session, couldn’t follow his thoughts. At last he said, “The funny thing about money is that you own it, but it also owns you, once you have a certain amount. Poor people always think that they’re slaves to money, but they have little enough to lose; really, they’re slaves to habit. Past a certain amount, a very high limit of course, it demands more from you than you demand of it. That’s the situation my father is in. He’s possessed by it—although he enjoys all the stuff that goes with it, the meetings, strategies, wars. To be sure, wars. Corporate raids, that kind of thing. People even get killed. I am the eldest son, you understand, I get to inherit all that, but not for a long time. Maybe another century, maybe two. We have agatherin—well, we grow it, so of course we do—and we have very good medical programmes. In the meantime…Well, you know of what they’re beginning to call the Golden, on Earth?”
Four Hundred Billion Stars Page 19
