by Timothy Zahn
The last thing I saw were those lights, beginning their descent …
Chapter 20
FROM SOMEWHERE BESIDE ME came the quiet sound of someone shifting position in a chair.
Eyes still closed, I let myself come fully awake, stretching still-groggy senses as best I could. From the sound and its echo I could tell that I was in a small, metal-walled room, and that my unknown companion and I were the only ones here. Outside the room … probably a corridor, with others there. Which meant I was in some kind of small building or ship, possibly the one I’d glimpsed attacking us in the buttes. Commodore Freitag’s Pravilo force, arriving sooner than I’d expected them to? Or had we indeed found the smuggler we’d been seeking?
And then I paused to evaluate my own condition … and realized with a shock that I’d been asleep for at least two days.
There was no doubt about that. The acid feeling in my stomach, plus the emptiness there, was certain proof that I’d skipped more than a couple of meals, while the general lack of hunger and the tenderness in my right upper arm indicated intravenous feeding had taken place.
And from the odd taste in my mouth I could guess that during those lost days I’d undergone pravdrug interrogation.
My unknown companion shifted again … and there was no point in putting off the confrontation any longer. Mentally bracing myself, I opened my eyes.
Seated across the small room, watching me closely, was Kutzko.
Relief flooded across my tension … and then I looked deeply into Kutzko’s face, and the relief was replaced by shame.
Stone-faced, he tapped the phone on the molded table beside him. “Kutzko, sir,” he spoke into it. “He’s awake.”
He got an acknowledgment and turned the instrument off, and for a long moment we eyed each other. “Would—?” I broke off, worked moisture into a desert-dry mouth. “Would it help,” I tried again, “if I said I was sorry?”
He regarded me coolly. “I once killed a man in front of you,” he said. “You remember?”
How could I forget? He’d been a corporate saboteur, surprised in the act by Lord Kelsey-Ramos, and he’d been practically on top of me when Kutzko had blown three needler cartridges into him. “I remember,” I said with a shiver.
“I said I was sorry. Did it help you?”
I sighed. “Not really.”
His face didn’t change, but his sense seemed to soften a bit. “You could have let me in on it,” he said. “Could have let me help.”
I shook my head. “I couldn’t let you put your neck on the block like that for me,” I told him.
“Why not?” he countered.
“Because—” I broke off at a sound from the door beside him. The panel whispered open … and Randon Kelsey-Ramos strode in.
For a half dozen heartbeats he just gazed at me. “I trust,” he said at last, his voice cold, “that you’re pleased with yourself.”
I swallowed. “Not really, sir,” I said.
“No?” he asked, eyebrows raised sardonically. “You mean that spiking through half a dozen major laws—not to mention making your friends look like a lot of smert-heads—you mean that’s not really what you were trying to accomplish?”
I gritted my teeth. I’d heard Lord Kelsey-Ramos shrivel people this way before, and Randon definitely had the proper tone of voice. And yet, somewhere under the anger I could sense something that didn’t quite fit. “You know why I did it, sir,” I said quietly. “And I make no excuses. I knew the consequences, and I’m ready to accept them.”
“Ready to accept the consequences, are you?” he shot back. “Ready to accept charges of fraud, grand theft, kidnapping, aiding and abetting a prisoner escape, and a half dozen smaller charges? Ready to accept a sentence of psychological blockage or even total reconstruction? Let me tell you straight out, Benedar, that the only reason you’re not in a jail cell back on Solitaire is that I laid myself and Carillon down on the line for you.”
“I appreciate your support, sir,” I said between suddenly stiff lips. Back on Solitaire—did that mean we weren’t, in fact, on the planet? That we were already in deep space, tunneling through the Cloud with Calandra at the Deadman Switch?
My heart froze; but an instant later my fear evaporated. I knew, after all, the sounds of a ship on Mjollnir drive, and I knew the subtle ways Mjollnir-space pseudogravity differed from the real thing. We were still planetside; and if we weren’t on Solitaire—
“Well, I’m glad you appreciate something about this mess,” Randon growled sarcastically.
“But it wasn’t just for me that you’re fighting Governor Rybakov,” I said, trying to interpret the sense I was reading from him. “In fact … you’re not really having to fight them at all. Are you?”
“I fought them when you were first recaptured,” he ground out. “And I may have to do it again. At the moment … it turns out that you may be more asset than liability. It all depends.”
“On what, sir?”
He grimaced. “On whether or not you and Paquin were hallucinating out there.” He took a step toward the door. “Come on.”
I glanced at Kutzko, read nothing useful there. “Where are we going?” I asked Randon, swinging my legs carefully over the edge of the bed and sitting up. A rush of dizziness came, faded.
“To see your pet thunderheads, of course,” he said. “And you’d better hope the study team out there has come to the same conclusion about them that you have. Otherwise—” he looked me straight in the eye—“I will have to fight for you. And decide how much fighting you’re worth.”
Turning, he headed out into the hall. Swallowing hard, I followed.
The three of us emerged from the Pravilo ship, and I found that we were in the center of a hastily thrown-together encampment about two hundred meters from the four buttes where Calandra and I had been recaptured. A row of mul/terrain cars like the one we’d borrowed from Shepherd Adams was to our left, and fleetingly I wondered what sort of trouble he was in over this. “Where’s Calandra?” I asked Randon.
“Still locked up,” he said shortly, turning us toward the vehicles. A Pravilo sergeant was waiting at the wheel of the nearest car, clearly expecting us. Randon got in beside him; Kutzko ushered me into the back seat and then joined me.
A couple of minutes later, we were at the buttes.
The encampment at the ship should have prepared me, but I still found myself gaping at the sight that greeted us as we bounced through one of the gaps and came to a halt. The hollow where Calandra and I had set up our camp was crammed full of shiny equipment racks, a half-dozen young techs working busily among them. From the central monitor-type station three flat cables snaked to the edge of the thunderhead city, connecting there to what was probably several square meters of sensor bands and patches liberally plastered across the three nearest thunderheads. Besides the techs at the monitors, there were probably another ten people crouching by the thunderheads or milling about generally, with another five or six Pravilos lounging at various points around the perimeter. One of them—like the driver, clearly alerted in advance—was waiting for us. “Mr. Kelsey-Ramos: gentlemen,” he nodded. “This way, please.”
We followed him to the group around the thunderheads, and as we approached an older man straightened up. He glanced at Randon and Kutzko, then focused on me, his sense a combination of interest and distaste. “Mr. Benedar,” he nodded, his voice and manner reasonably civil. “I’m Dr. Peres Chi, in charge of this so-called thunderhead project of yours.”
“You don’t believe they’re intelligent,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
His lips compressed momentarily. “Humanity has been waiting to run into another intelligent species for better than four hundred years now,” he told me stiffly. “We’ve put a great deal of thought into the question of identifying and communicating with one, should we ever be lucky enough to run across it. I’ll tell you flat out that these—” he waved a hand back toward the thunderheads— “don’t match up with any of
the established guidelines.” He took a deep breath. “Having said that … I’ll admit that we really don’t yet know what to make of them.”
I shifted my eyes over his shoulder. In full daylight, the sense of intelligence and attention was even more apparent than it had been in the dead of night. But it was oddly shifted. Those thunderheads furthest away seemed the most alert, while those closest to us—including the monitored ones—seemed virtually lifeless. “What exactly have you been doing with and to them?” I asked Chi.
He glanced back himself. “Just what you can see. Metabolic monitoring, full electromagnetic scans for any sort of brain waves, real-time layerscans for organs or organ-like structures. All perfectly non-destructive.”
“I’m surprised you had all that equipment lying around Solitaire,” Randon put in. His interest was genuine, I sensed; apparently, he was seeing the setup for the first time, as well.
“It’s not much more than basic biological study gear,” Chi told him. “That plus some variations borrowed from one of the hospitals. Also standard.” He fixed me with a cool stare. “We’re learning a lot more about thunderheads than anyone up to now has ever wanted to … but I can tell you right now that whatever you thought you saw in them, it wasn’t sentience.”
“If those are the only ones you studied,” I said, “I’m not surprised you’re having trouble. Those particular ones don’t seem very alert at the moment.”
The Pravilo officer beside me snorted. “I’ve heard this one before. You tell people you can put a rock to sleep with hypnosis, and when they ask you to demonstrate you tell them all the rocks in sight are already asleep.”
Chi threw him a glance, cocked an eyebrow at me. “Crudely put, perhaps, but you have to admit—”
“There!” I snapped. All three of the thunderheads had abruptly come to life.
Chi spun around. “Where?”
“The thunderheads! Don’t you … ?”
I hissed through my teeth. The brief flash of intelligence I’d sensed there had gone as quickly as it had come. “It was there. It was.”
Chi turned back, eyes flashing with irritation. “Look, Benedar—”
“Why don’t we check your monitors?” Randon suggested. “If something really happened, it should have shown up there.”
Chi looked at him, took a deep breath. “If you insist. I can tell you right now, though, that it’ll turn out to be a false alarm. We’ve seen them before.”
He stalked over to the hollow and the central monitor station. “Give me a composite for the last two minutes,” he instructed the young woman sitting there. “All three subjects.”
She nodded and tapped keys, and three traces appeared on the display. “There you go,” Chi said, waving at them. “Spurious data.”
“Wait a minute,” I objected. “Who says it’s spurious?”
He gave me a patient look. “Just look at the traces. All three virtually identical, and all three beginning and ending at the same time. Doesn’t that suggest that whatever caused it was some external effect—a mild ground tremor, perhaps—and totally unrelated to the thunderheads?”
I bit at the back of my lip. But I’d sensed their intelligence—could still sense it, at least in the further ones—
“Or else,” Randon said thoughtfully, “it means they’re deliberately turning it on and off in synch.”
Chi snorted. “You’re arguing your premise.”
“Or looking for internal consistency,” Randon corrected mildly. “Indulge me a moment, Doctor, and assume they’re capable of something that sophisticated. Why would they want to do that?”
“To shake us off their trail,” Kutzko spoke up unexpectedly, a hard edge beneath the words. I turned to look at him, found him gazing out at the thunderheads … and a chill ran up my back. Kutzko’s stance, his eyes, the way his hand hovered near his needler—I’d seen it before. He was sensing the presence of danger … “They’re trying to make us think that the readings are wrong.”
“Ridiculous,” Chi snorted. “You’re not just postulating intelligence, now, but intelligence equal to humanity’s own. Not to mention a sophisticated social structure.”
I thought back to the sense Calandra and I had had, that this collection of thunderheads was a city. “You implied you’ve had other readings like this?” I asked.
“A few,” Chi acknowledged grudgingly.
“Exactly the same?”
“I doubt it—we really haven’t done the complete analysis on the data yet.” He sighed. “But if it’ll make you happy—Karyn, call up all such events, will you? Give a time line, too.”
The tech did as instructed. Four records appeared on split sections of the display … and Chi hissed between his teeth. “Bozhe moi,” he muttered.
“What?” Randon asked sharply.
Chi pointed. “This one was the fourth we’ve recorded … and the time lapse between it and the third is the same as between the third and second … and between the second and first.”
Randon and I exchanged glances. “So they can go dormant,” Randon said slowly, “but not indefinitely. Something like a water mammal having to come up at fixed intervals for air.”
Chi rubbed his cheek. “Maybe,” he conceded reluctantly. “Maybe. It still doesn’t prove it’s not a natural non-intelligent phenomenon. A normal biologic cycle, perhaps.”
“The others aren’t following any such cycle,” I told him. “It’s only the ones you’re studying. The rest are watching us.”
“So you say,” Chi countered. “Can you prove it?”
Randon snorted. “Oh, come on, Doctor. He pointed out to you the exact moment when those three reacted. What more proof do you want that he’s seeing something real?”
Chi glared at him. “I’m a scientist, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos,” he said evenly. “I deal in facts—provable, scientific facts. Watchers like Benedar deal in feelings and interpretations and beliefs. Faith, not science. I understand the political reasons you want to make him a hero in this, but I have no intention of letting those reasons get in the way of my work.”
For a long minute Randon just looked at him, and I watched as Chi went from righteous indignation to discomfort to the distinctly nervous feeling that perhaps he shouldn’t have spoken quite so sharply to the heir of the Carillon Group. Randon let him squirm another moment, then turned to gaze again out over the thunderheads. “Tell me, Doctor,” he said calmly, “why would something as plant-like as a thunderhead develop intelligence in the first place?”
Chi blinked at the unexpected question. “I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
“They’re not mobile, are they? I’ve seen the original survey team reports—their roots go pretty deep into the ground. Surely they aren’t able to pull them up and move elsewhere.”
“No, of course not. That’s why the whole idea of them being intelligent—”
“Is ridiculous,” Randon finished for him. “Yes, we know. And yet, they’re aware enough to know that you’re studying them. True?”
He hesitated. “We don’t yet have any hard evidence of that.”
“So check me on it,” I suggested, beginning to feel annoyed with the man. “Have Calandra brought here—I presume she’s being held somewhere nearby? We’ll watch one of your test thunderheads and see if we can both spot the exact moment when it returns again.”
Chi made a sour face. “The collusion between two Watchers would hardly—”
“Wait a minute,” Kutzko interrupted him, turning to me with a frown. “What do you mean, when it returns again? Returns from where?”
“It was just a figure of speech—” Chi began.
“Quiet,” Randon said. “Well, Benedar?”
I opened my mouth … closed it again. It had been just a figure of speech … hadn’t it? No; it hadn’t. “I don’t understand it fully myself,” I said at last. “But the thunderheads don’t feel dormant so much as they feel … empty.”
The word seemed to hang in the air, held ther
e by the thick silence that had settled into the hollow. Even without looking I could tell that the techs around us had all ceased their work and were listening.
Chi could tell it, too, and it perhaps kept him from being as sarcastic aloud as he would otherwise have been. “Well,” he said at last. “That’s a rather interesting interpretation. To say the least.”
Randon ignored him. “Are you suggesting that it’s not the thunderheads themselves that are sentient? That they’re just playing host to some kind of non-physical consciousness?”
“It doesn’t have to be that sharp edged, sir,” one of the techs spoke up, a bit hesitantly. His eyes flicked to me, as if seeking moral support. “It could be that the thunderheads are indeed sentient, but that they’ve learned how to … well, to allow their spirits to disassociate from their bodies.”
Chi glared at his subordinate. “If you don’t mind, Allix,” he growled, “I’d like to try and handle this without resorting to mysticism. Religious upbringing,” he added with thinly veiled contempt to Randon.
The natural person has no room for the gifts of God’s Spirit; to him they are folly; he cannot recognize them, because their value can be assessed only in the Spirit … “Dr. Chi—”
Randon silenced me with a wave of his hand. “So why is it so ridiculous?” he asked Chi coolly.
The other blinked in surprise. “Why? Mr. Kelsey-Ramos—well, all right; for starters, it makes no sense from an evolutionary standpoint—”
“Why not? Especially given that they can’t move physically, why shouldn’t they have found a way of getting around on a different plane?”
“You’re talking mysticism—”
“I’m talking different levels of reality,” Randon snapped. “Mjollnir space used to be considered mysticism, too, you know. Superluminal travel, electric currents creating artificial gravity—the whole thing’s patently unreal by all the rules that were known half a millennium ago.”
