“Gotta get the case together now,” Stavros said. “Gotta send the damn thing out, fast! You hear that, CRI? Clausen’s back from the hills I You know, the man who pays for your juice?”
He felt immediately guilty. CRI had been designed to be all things to all users. It was unfair to accuse her of taking sides.
“Shall I expect to hear from Mr. Clausen shortly, then?” the computer asked neutrally.
“Maybe so,” he replied, thinking, By the Goddesses. I hope not!
Weng and Danforth were sleeping when Clausen stormed into the Underbelly, dragging an exhausted McPherson in tow. He shoved her in the direction of the Commander’s curtained cubicle of crates. Bleary eyed, she stood outside the curtain, knocking on the crates and calling softly, glaring sidelong at Clausen as he shook Danforth roughly until the black man stirred, grumbling, out of deep, sweated sleep.
Weng drew the curtain aside dazedly. “What… ah, Lieutenant. You’re back.” She was wrapped in a wrinkled silk robe. Blinking into the glare of Clausen’s searchbeam, she looked pale and unusually disheveled from the heat.
McPherson sagged against the crates. “It’s Stavros, Commander…”
Weng stiffened. “Hurt?”
McPherson frowned, confused. “No, he’s…”
“The omni’s missing from the Sled,” Clausen snapped. He unbuckled his laden pack and stood with it slung across one shoulder, awaiting Weng’s response.
“During the storm…?”
“Removed. Weng, as with tools.” He advanced on Weng’s worktable, swept her precisely ordered papers to the floor with a vehement arm and swung his pack into the middle of the cleared space. “Ibiá’s stolen it, as I suspected. McP, bring in that other gear.”
He began to unload bits of wiring and circuitry from the pack’s side pockets, spreading them out on the table.
McPherson hesitated, looking to Weng for a cue. Weng’s delicate chin, lifted at Clausen’s destruction of her paperwork, settled stubbornly. But she gave McPherson a stiff nod, and the little pilot retreated into the darkness.
In his bed by the landing strut, Danforth struggled into sitting position. He exchanged a groggily covert glance with Weng over the prospector’s back. “What the hell’s going on?”
“However, the kid’s not as clever as he thinks.” From the center of the pack, Clausen lifted a large chunk of electronics. He set it down carefully in front of him and smiled at it as if it were a newly won prize. “Hook this up to the dish and we’ll be in business.”
Danforth could not restrain his interest. “To replace the receiver?”
“Right. Didn’t think of that, did he.”
Weng bent to retrieve her papers from the ground. She held them to her chest for a moment, watching Clausen fuss over his trophy. “What makes you so confident of Mr. Ibiá’s responsibility in this matter?”
Clausen glanced up with a feral grin. “Experience, Commander. Plus a little gift I have for knowing who’s on my ass. You need that in my business.”
Weng sucked her cheek and stared back at him silently, tucking a strand of silver hair back into her disordered bun.
“What I can’t figure is why, Commander,” said McPherson, returning with a second bulging pack.
“Doesn’t really matter why, does it, Weng?” Clausen grabbed the pack from McPherson’s listless grasp. “We have ourselves a saboteur and the only thing that matters is stopping him.”
On a calmer, cooler evening. Clausen’s grin might have seemed unnaturally fevered, but Danforth found it frighteningly in tune with the sweltering, suffocating dark.
“Gotta find him first,” McPherson remarked, slumping onto a crate.
Weng seemed to discover anew the clutter of papers clasped in her arms. “Go to bed, Lieutenant,” she said with pointed kindness.
“No way,” countered Clausen. “I need her artful little fingers right here.”
“Mr. Clausen, such tired fingers can hardly be artful.”
Clausen leaned over his assortment of parts. “We’re both tired, Weng. What do you think this is, kindergarten, we should all go take a nap?”
“I think it is an expedition of which I am still in command.”
Clausen’s eyes flicked up from his work, a reflex checking for the weapon he considered to be the only possible backup for such bravado. He smiled mockingly at Weng’s empty hands.
“And I will not allow mistreatment of my crew,” she continued icily. “Lieutenant, you have your orders.”
“Yessir!” McPherson saluted gratefully and escaped, offering Danforth a wanly affectionate pat of greeting as she slipped by him into a farther corner of the Underbelly.
Weng approached her appropriated work table and began collecting her papers into a single thick sheaf. “Now, Mr. Clausen. If you will grant me the favor of allowing me to get dressed, I myself will assist you with this assembly.”
Clausen ended his heavy-lidded stare with an insouciant shrug. “I would welcome your assistance, Commander.”
Weng neatened the edges of her stack of papers, gathering it to her like a shield as she retired behind her curtain.
Danforth watched from his bed while Clausen went to work, his stubby fingers probing the central chunk of circuitry with careful confidence.
“Crazy motherfucker,” he commented finally. “Probably hasn’t a clue what he’s getting himself into.”
“Taking on CONPLEX is never wise,” Clausen agreed.
“Actually, I meant taking you on,” Danforth replied casually. “I notice it’s never occurred to you that he may be aiming this at me.”
Clausen chuckled nastily. “Professional jealousy, I suppose?” He held a small bit of wire and plastic into the beam of his lamp for closer study. “You ‘pure’ scientist types have such grand ideas about your place in the scheme of things.”
“But I have you around to ride herd on my illusions. I’m grateful for that, Emil. I truly am.” Danforth kept his tone light, hoping that in the darkness, the prospector would be unable to read the real depths of the ambivalence he felt showing on his face even as he worked to erase it from his voice.
He wanted the comlink restored as desperately as he wanted to stand up and walk again, but his dismay at the disappearance of the omni was tempered with curiosity and a touch of reluctant admiration. He longed to know what was in Ibiá’s mind that could drive him into open sabotage. It was too easy to dismiss his actions as merely crazy. Danforth knew there was more to it.
He wondered if Ibiá realized, so fresh from the womb of the university, that this single gesture of defiance had most likely earned him permanent exile. He might find a safe port in the Colonies and work enough to keep himself fed, but Earth belonged to the corporations, and as Clausen had said, crossing them was never wise, or healthy.
But that, Danforth decided, is Ibiá’s problem.
“Send the drone out as soon as I complete transmission of the text.” Stavros yawned convulsively. He wished he had not turned his nose up at the instant coffee when he had raided the ship’s stores in preparation for his siege. The equivalent Sawlish brew, even in Liphar’s long-simmered version, just did not pack the same caffeine wallop. He shook his head, doglike, blinking at the scribbled and madly annotated mess of notes confronting him and the hopefully more coherent message on the screen.
He had given up trying to perfect the legal case himself when word of Clausen’s premature return was brought to him. It seemed to him finally that legal language was beyond even a linguist’s interpretation, and he was running out of time rapidly.
In the end, he opted for a straightforward description of Fiix and its inhabitants, including an outline of CONPLEX’s intentions as he saw them. He ended the statement with a desperate plea for help. He would have to leave the lawyering to the lawyers, and hope that Megan was justified in her assertion that there was at least one lawyer left with morality enough to react to his report with indignation and outrage, plus a willingness to take on the case.
He found it frustrating and anticlimactic to have struggled this far only to be forced to hand over his efforts into some distant stranger’s hands. He could not repress a nagging sense of futility.
Too little, too late, too small, too weak…
He had to take some more immediate action.
Once again, he let thoughts of murdering Clausen mill about in his brain, wondering how he could even manage it. He had no weapon, and Clausen had already proven himself superior in a hand-to-hand situation.
The next transmission completed, Stavros blanked the screen.
“You are requesting a court injunction against CONPLEX?” The computer sounded incredulous but Stavros put that down to intervening static and ignored it.
“The message is top priority, with the seal to be broken only upon proper voice-print identification of the recipient.”
“Authorization?”
Is that real resentment I’m hearing? Stavros felt a lingering guilt that he was forcing CRI to bow to the imperatives of her basic programming. No matter if the computer’s ephemeral sentience preferred otherwise, his instructions must be obeyed. “My authorization,” he replied dully. “As Communications Officer, I am authorizing the sending of a message drone.”
“Without Captain Newman’s prior knowledge or approval?”
“Yes, CRI. I do have that authority.”
“Of course, Mr. Ibiá.”
“Signal me when the drone is off.”
Stavros laid his head among his scattered papers.
Officer… he mused, yawning.
How far removed by time and distance that responsibility to Earth and her authorities now seemed. How illusory the formal rank had been, always a fiction in his mind till now, when it had become real in a way he could not have predicted, at its most useful when it meant the least to him, a tool against all it stood for.
He argued the case in his mind. Could the lawyer really know, never having set foot on Fiix, never having talked to a Sawl or watched the Sisters battle from the safety of a cave mouth?
In the waking dream of his exhaustion, Valla Ired and Lagri appeared in court as witnesses for the complainants.
Stavros sat up suddenly. “CRI!”
“Mr. Ibiá?”
“There’s something else! I want you to run through the remote sensing data to see if you pick up any geographical features of interest in either the desert highlands in the southern hemisphere, or the northern ocean.”
CRI was silent a moment, as if puzzling over this sudden shift of emphasis. “Could you be more specific, Mr. Ibiá?”
“No.” He was reluctant to admit the purpose of his request. “It’s a long shot and I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. Anything anomalous, I guess.”
“I will see what I can do, Mr. Ibiá, though I might suggest that you consult with Dr. Danforth… or is this inquiry also to be entered in a coded file?”
“No, leave it open.”
It’ll do as a cover, he thought, as his eyes drooped. Besides, Danforth might have something useful to offer.
“I’ll wait for your signal.”
“Yes, Mr. Ibiá.”
The heat made him overpoweringly drowsy. “CRI?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks.”
The computer did not reply.
16
Megan slouched in the doorway of the empty infirmary.
“This leaving early is a disaster. All my craft guild contacts are too busy at the market to help me gain access to the local records.”
“Too busy to get sick, too… a little peace at last!” Susannah transcribed figures from the tiny screen into her notebook and slipped a new blood sample into the analyzer. “What about Tyril?”
Megan grunted. “Problem with her is, she doesn’t understand the statistical need for a broadened data base. She claims I won’t learn anything here that I can’t learn when we get back to DulElesi. History, I said, history! Says she, it’s the same where ever you go. Listen to the chants.”
“Surely you can make her understand the difference between myth and history.”
“Nothing sure about it,” Megan replied. “All this doomsday talk going around is no public exercise in metaphor. Here’s an interesting point, though-Tyril also claims, as if it were no way unusual, that all the known settlements on Fiix are the same age, which we are, of course, as yet unable to determine.”
“All of them?”
“So she says. What brought it up was my remarking on the seeming lack of dialect differences between DulElesi and Ogo Dul. Stav would have a proper theory for this, but normally, geographically isolated settlements develop as distinct linguistic units.”
“So they aren’t so isolated.”
“Or haven’t always been isolated… keeping in mind Weng’s theory about a former, more advanced civilization.”
Ghirra came yawning from the inner room. He noted with relief the wrinkled but empty field cots, and padded up to look over Susannah’s shoulder at the glowing numbers on the analyzer screen.
“Got quiet all of sudden,” she reported, smiling up at him. “Xifa said to let you sleep.”
“What is this you do now?” he asked.
“Blood and tissue analysis, for my population survey. I asked anyone who came in to be treated if they’d mind a few extra tests. Well, actually, sometimes it was simpler not to ask, just do the tests. Back home, they’d have my license for that.”
“I’ve been trying to get her to take a tour of the market with me,” Megan complained. “All she wants to do is work, work, work.”
Susannah laughed. “Not true. Now that Ghirra’s up, I declare myself off-duty…” She glanced at the Master Healer. “If that’s all right?”
“This is my insis-tence, Suzhannah,” he replied, his grand tone undercut by a mischievous smile.
Megan unearthed a small camera from her pack to record their explorations. She took her pictures unobtrusively and hid the silver rectangle in the folds of her sash.
“To tell you the truth,” she excused as they fought their way through the throng around the Glassblowers’ stall, “I don’t think the Ogo Dulers would notice it unless we offered it for sale.”
The market was in full bloom. In the visitors sector of Traders’ Branch, the goods of DulElesi were laid out across four brightly lit tiers: soft rugs and knobby woven wools, dyed leathers and embroidered bolts of linen, delicate eating and sewing implements of bone and wood, polished buttons and flutes, sturdy unbleached papers with lacy edges, inks arid hand-colored picture books. Even the Potters had managed, despite the hail damage, to mount an impressive showing of their richly glazed stoneware. The Glassblowers looked on with saddened pride as the remains of their own depleted wares sold like hotcakes.
The congestion along the columned streets thickened to near immovability as the craftsmen of Ogo Dul jammed in to finger and compare, bringing samples from their shops, offering their openings in the intricate game of bargaining. The street lanterns flared above the crowds with a daylight brightness that reinforced the sweated excitement of the market, reducing the dark sky and darker water to zones of foreboding mystery.
“The haggling is done in great good humor,” Megan observed, “but does the hilarity seem maybe a little desperate to you?” She thought the boisterous joking hid an impatient edge, that the milling sea of heat-damp faces glistened with unnatural emphasis.
“I do notice onlookers laying bets on some of the bigger trades,” said Susannah under her breath. “I don’t blame them for being edgy, with all this heat and worrying what’s going to be left of their fields when they get home.”
“Mmm.” Megan wished the message drone to Earth could wait for picture evidence of the vitality of Fiixian civilization. “How do you think the Sawls will do in the interstellar market place?”
“I guess that sort of opening up is inevitable, isn’t it.”
“Eventually, sure—if they don’t get their planet taken from them first.” S
he watched the traders’ quick hands and sharp eyes. “A little regulated commerce isn’t always a bad influence, and I think with the right merchandising guidance, the Sawls’d learn to hold their own in no time, with very little effect on their present way of life, which is already heavily influenced by notions of exchange.”
Susannah smiled sideways. “Is that you advocating change and progress?”
“At this point,” the anthropologist replied grimly. “I’m for anything that might help them to survive.”
They crossed a bridge into a sector of local shops. The dark canals were choked with loaded chresin, lanterns bobbing at bow and stern. The smooth marble railing of the bridge was warm to the touch. Shoppers taking a break hung over the balustrade in search of a stray breeze.
Beyond the bridge, the portico was lined with food stalls, stocked with smoked and salted fish, cured seaweeds and other edibles unrecognizable in such wizened form. The DulElesi FoodGuilders crowded around offering baskets of their mountain herbs and dried mushrooms. Beyond the fish market, local curd cheeses were being weighed against the hard cloth-bound wheels of cheese from across the plain, and a lively debate progressed over open sacks of grain and seed and crates of dessicated berries.
“Let’s head up top,” Susannah urged. She had brought her last unused spiral-bound sketchbook, some soft drawing pencils and a new gum eraser, determined to trade them for some new and exotic bit of apparel.
Megan followed, insisting that she find someone from DulElesi who knew them, to carry out the bartering. Miraculously, they met Tyril in front of a fabric stall on the fourth tier, with her baby asleep in a sling across her back. She was deep in conversation with the proprietor about the finer points of a certain weaving technique, but waved when she saw Megan and put aside her shop talk to join their tour of the market.
And the women went shopping, thought Megan with a private chuckle.
They jostled through the crowd, pointing and admiring. Megan fingered the silky rugs longingly. Her long-ago first paycheck, brought home to a rented room devoid of furniture, had gone as down payment for a fine rug.
Reign of Fire Page 13
