by Ian Stewart
"There's never been any suggestion of drugs," said Jay.
Charles gave him a look of mild exasperation. "She owns a space vessel, we know she's carried semi-legal contraband in the past. She might be smuggling drugs to Belters."
"I suspect the abbots and whatever their equivalents are in Zen, Confucianism, and Tao take adequate steps to ensure that their orbital monasteries are free of illegal substances," Dolores muttered. Sir Charles glared at her, and in her mind's eye six psychically receptive Afghan hounds froze in horror. "Sorry, Sir Charles. I was jumping to conclusions. We can't make assumptions about hypotheticals." He acknowledged the apology with a brief tilt of his head and the hounds relaxed again.
"I agree," he said magnanimously. "Belters and drugs . . . well, probably not—though I insist that we make sure. Better safe than sorry."
When the others had left. Sir Charles remained behind in the conference room. Bah. It had been his discovery anyway . . . And it was hardly his fault that she'd gone off in a huff and couldn't be contacted when the press got wind of the Find of the Century. The problem was, Odingo's record was unlikely to be anything like as bad as he'd just painted it. She'd had a lot of bad luck, even if some of it was self-inflicted. Too reckless, too impulsive . . . she'd never have made a good field archaeologist. It would, of course, be convenient if Odingo was involved in something shady . . . and if they could prove it.
It wasn't good enough.
It was going to need some help.
He sat for a long moment in front of the room's master node, thinking. There were dangers in becoming personally involved: he had a reputation to protect. But that, of course, was exactly why he had no real choice but to get involved. His early brush with Prudence Odingo was on record, and the vidivids would dig it out in seconds. The whole Sphinx question might get reopened if Odingo gained the kind of credibility that he could foresee. Especially given the usual credulous approach that the media adopted toward pseudoscience, mysticism, and the irrational.
So there was no question in his mind that Prudence's reputation had to be ruined; and if assiduous detective work couldn't find any skeletons in her closet, then he would just have to put one there.
"If my calculations are right," said Jonas—not for a moment doubting that they were—"then we'll soon be within sight of Guadeloupe. Half an hour or so, I'd guess." For the dozenth time he took a quick look at his camera to make sure it really was fully charged. He wanted plenty of footage of the landfall.
He and Cashew were leaning against the Tanzroujfs rail, staring out to sea. Bailey Barnum was belowdeck, catching up on some sleep before the Big Moment, though it was about time he poked his head out. It had been a satisfyingly difficult voyage, extremely vidivisual, the climax being a major electrical storm creating waves that had tossed the tiny vessel about like the proverbial matchbox. Nobody had slept a wink that night, but they'd gotten some brilliant shots of waves breaking over the ship's prow, with Bailey prominent in the foreground doing his impression of Nelson at the Battle of the Nile . . .
He'd been violently sick immediately afterward, but that bit would be edited out.
Cashew looked up toward the crow's nest, where one of the crew was peering through a modern reconstruction of a telescope. He wore old denim cutoffs and a red bandanna. "Guess? The master navigator has to guess?"
"The seas are still quite high. Cash," Jonas protested. "I can't predict the height of the waves, though I have managed to factor the tides in. But it'll be at least twenty minutes before we have any chance of sighting land, and by then I'll be up the mast next to that bugger with the red headcloth that you're so fascinated by."
"Red headcloth? Oh, you mean Clifton." Cashew knew all of the crew by name, together with their life stories, family history, and career prospects; Jonas had never quite managed to sort out who was responsible for what. "He's the one whose father had those awful problems when he was working halfway up that power station chimney in Lesotho."
"Yeah, him," said Jonas, wondering what power station chimney she was referring to. He checked his Suzuki-73 again, then his watch, squared his shoulders, and set off for the rigging that led to the mast top.
Cashew watched while he climbed. Ordinarily, Jonas had a dislike for heights—not a phobia, just a preference to stay well behind a rail or a window when the ground was a long way down. But he'd do anything to get a good shot, and he scampered up the rigging without a qualm even though the ship was swaying lazily from side to side.
Clifton leaned down and gave Jonas a hand up into the crude basket of the crow's nest. Jonas sighted through the camera's long-range lens at the horizon.
"Anything yet?" Cashew yelled, her voice falling away on the breeze. Jonas guessed what she was trying to say and shook his head.
Ten minutes passed. Bailey stumbled up on to the deck from his cabin in the fo'c'sle, rubbing at his eyes. He'd set his 'node for a prelandfall wake-up call.
"Nothing yet," said Cashew. "You're calling it pretty close."
Bailey grunted noncommitally and shrugged. "No matter. We could always have faked my scene afterwards and edited it into sequen—"
"Land ahoy!" Clifton yelled. Jonas found Clifton's craggy face in the viewfinder and asked him to repeat the cry. With the camera lens on him, Clifton suddenly became self-conscious. He fluffed the first take, but Jonas had faced this particular problem many times in his career, and with quiet encouragement Clifton succeeded at the second attempt—in fact, the yell looked impressively spontaneous.
Jonas turned the camera toward the horizon. Separating sea and sky were two tiny dark triangles, wavering in the heat— the tops of Mount Sans Toucher and the slightly higher Soufriere, situated a few miles to the south. It took him a moment to find them, because they weren't quite where he'd expected. Were his calculations wrong? No, he hadn't looked at the compass for several minutes and he'd lost his bearings, that was all. Guadeloupe was shaped like a slightly asymmetric butterfly. Grande-Terre, the eastern wing, which on a map looked as though it belonged to a swallowtail, was relatively flat. The higher regions were on the oxymoronically named Basse-Terre, farther to the west, which more resembled the wing of a common cabbage white. The capital, unimaginatively also called Basse-Terre, was hidden from sight behind the southern end of the hills.
As the Tanzwuft sailed closer, more detail came into view, and soon Jonas could pick out the long thin shape of La Desirade in the foreground; then behind it the promontory of Pont Chateau, the tip of the swallowtail's wing. The coast of Grande-Terre swept away to the north, but fell back due west on the south side, until it swung south around Marin Bay The separate islands of Marie-Galante and the tiny and totally unoxymoronic Petite Terre peeped above the horizon.
Jonas grunted in satisfaction.
Tanzrouft turned south of Point Chateaux, following the coral coastline past the tiny resort of Sainte-Anne, heading for their agreed destination of Gozier. It probably wasn't where Varin and des Hayes had landed, but Cashew's sources hadn't been able to pin their landfall down any more precisely, and the town had the best facilities for the world's media, who were even now awaiting the climax of the historic reenaction of a key moment in the development of human civilization.
With its Senegalese crew scampering all over the deck in a remarkable display of synchronized chaos, the ship came about into the narrow navigable channel that cut across Gozier's shining coral reefs. Jonas borrowed Clifton's telescope and put it to his eye.
A moment later he removed it, shook his head as if to clear away cobwebs, and replaced the instrument against his eye. He whistled in surprise.
Bailey joined him at the rail. "A good crowd, I imagine."
"Well," said Jonas. "You could imagine a good crowd, yes." He passed the telescope to Bailey.
Bailey raised it, screwing up his eyes to bring the image into clear focus. Despite its deep tan, his face went pale. Jonas took the telescope before he dropped it.
"Trouble," said Cashew, reading th
e signs. "Deep trouble, right?" Jonas nodded. "Nobody there?"
"I can see three people, with two cameras between them," said Jonas. "I imagine two of them are the local newscaster and her assistant. I can't be absolutely sure, but the other one is carrying what looks suspiciously like a Sony microcam. Tourist gear," he explained.
"Goddamn it!" yelled Bailey. "We spent millions setting up this voyage. The publicity at the start was out of this world, never seen anything like it! Every night we've topped the Xnews in a hundred countries! And now, when we finally come to the main payoff—nothing. Where the blue bloody hell has everybody gone?"
6
Gozier, 2210
The two people with cameras turned out to be tourists as well.
Jonas's immediate reaction was a sickening feeling that was becoming all too familiar. They'd been kidding themselves all along. Once you're on the way out, you're on the way out, and it's stupid to think you can pull it back again. It was the first law of media survival. And they'd imagined they could break it.
Only Cashew seemed able to accept the reality She had stared at the tiny group on the dock, shook her head in a baffled parody of denial. "It's not where they've gone that matters, Bailey," she said softly.
"Eh?"
"It's why." No, that wasn't right, either—she knew why. They all did. They'd been preempted. A really big story had broken.
The question they were all groping for was: what?
The Tanzrouft docked amid a stricken silence, the crew's voices hushed, all hopes of instant fame eradicated. Jonas noted with no satisfaction at all that the tourist camera was actually a Marcos B5; he'd failed to observe the wraparound wrist tag. Cashew asked one of the other two tourists if any major news story had broken recently. All he could say was: "Que?" Nobody else on the dock spoke a word of English. There wasn't much chance of solving the mystery until they got properly hooked up again to the Xnet, and that would have to wait until they reached their hotel.
Bailey started arguing the fare with the solitary taxi driver. He didn't speak English either.
They marched into the hotel and got themselves reconnected via the public node in the foyer, only to find that the microwave link to Miami was down for maintenance until the morning. They made the most of it by ordering two bottles of Best Old Grouse and three glasses, and locked themselves in their suite.
Jonas turned on the W and skipped channels, but the most exciting thing he could find was a baseball game between the Talinn Tigerlilies and the Kabul Freedoms.
Next he accessed the newsnet, pulled up the day's lead items.
Not a word about the stunning conclusion of the Tanzrouft's epic voyage. . . and not much joy on anything else, either.
"Mmmph . . . Tornadoes in Indonesia, nobody killed . . . Prince Rupert of the Mozambian Republic had abdicated in favor of his pet crocodile Rasputin . . . some vacuum-drunk spacer's come back with fake alien toys, probably knocked them up in the ship's machine room . . . the Pancontinental Weather Control Commission had failed to agree on the shape of the negotiating table again—bloody pointless when we don't have any functioning weather-control technology, but then, I suppose it's best to be prepared ... No elections anywhere; now, that is unusual ..."
He deactivated the node and sank back into the sofa, nursing his glass.
Somewhere around midnight a disheveled and very drunken Cashew Tintoretto remembered that she and Jonas had a bet. She shook him awake and pointed this out. She also pointed out that an emersion of Callisto was due within the hour.
They staggered back down to the dock and clambered aboard.
A crewman was guarding the telescope, but he recognized them immediately and tactfully moved to the far side of the deck.
Jonas tapped into the navsats to pinpoint their position. Then he accessed his navigation programs from the Xnet, to work out the local timing for the anticipated emersion. Because they'd been able to see the dock, there was no point in testing whether they had arrived in the right place. Instead, Jonas would use Jupiter's moons and his navigational algorithms to calculate their position, and see how closely it agreed with where they actually were.
A hundred yards, that was the bet. Child's play.
Cashew sighed. It was hard, from this side of the Atlantic, to imagine how Jonas could possibly be wrong. He was such a whiz at coding math . . .
They waited. Finally Jonas began counting down the seconds. "Should be emerging round about. . . now!"
They stared at the CCD image.
"Don' see anythin'," said Cashew. The seconds passed. "Hey, whassat?" A bright speck had appeared against the black of space, growing visibly brighter.
"Callisto."
"Oh. So I've lost the bet?"
"What did you expect? I'll just work out where we are, to make sure." He talked urgently into the tiny microphone. "Mmm, something's screwy . . . According to my calculations we're not here—we're somewhere else."
"I'll prove you're not here," Cashew muttered under her breath.
"Huh?"
"Ancient joke. Straight guy an' funny guy. Funny guy says T'll prove you're not here.' Straight guy says, 'Whaddya mean, I'm not here? Course I'm here.' Funny guy says, 'No, you're not.' Straight guy says, 'Yes, I am.' Funny guy says, 'Are you in Paris?' 'No.' 'Are you in Ams'erdam?' 'No.' 'Are you in Ouagadougadougou?' 'No.' 'Well then,' says the funny guy, 'if you're not in Paris, Ams'erdam, or Ouagadougadougouwossit, you mus' be somewhere else.' 'Of course I'm somewhere bloody else,' says the straight guy 'Right,' says the funny guy 'And if you're somewhere else, then you're not here!'"
"Ha-ha."
"Hey, just trying to cheer the loser up!"
Jonas scratched his head, screwed up his nose, and made funny little noises. "No, Cash, there's something really screwy. Maybe the Xnet has the wrong coordinates for this place." A thought struck him. "Or maybe it's observational error. Don't forget the protocol. We've got to make two more measurements and then average. It'll all come righ—"
"Oh, come off it, Jonas!" Cashew clambered up on to the crate in triumph, caught her foot on some strapping, and toppled into a coil of rope. Jonas helped her out of the tangle. He knew that, drunk or not, he could run software, and this software was telling him that he wasn't within a hundred yards.
He was out by twenty miles. "I don't believe these figures."
"I've won the be-et, I've won the— How much do you get paid in a week, anyway?"
Jonas had to face up to facts. "Okay, Cash, you win." He entered the transaction into his wristnode. "I've cocked it up somewhere, God knows how. Must be the algorithms, though they worked fine in Goree ..."
Unless,
It was crazy, it was the drink talking.
Had to he.
"Unless," he said, staring at the sky.
"Unless what?"
He swallowed hard. "Unless . . . Jupiter's moon's aren't where they're supposed to be."
Cashew giggled. "Yeah, Jonas, sure. Either you've screwed up, or Jupiter's gaddamned moons have moved. So, naturally, it must be the moons. Forget the law of gravity, it's been torn up and thrown inna bin jus' to shave Jonas bloody Kempe's pathetic face. Ish a fucking mir'cle, the hand of God. Hallelujah, brothers! Jonas, you'll say anythin' rather'n admit you made a mish-take."
Jonas nodded glumly, and they struggled back to the hotel.
When Cashew woke up, an overhung Jonas had been rerunning highlights from the previous day's news and had finally found out what story had preempted them.
"Aliens?" Bailey couldn't believe his ears. "Aliens?"
"Yeah," said Jonas. "Aliens. The vacuum-drunk spacer with the fake alien toys. We passed the story over last night because it didn't look strong enough."
"You're telling me that we sailed uninsured and without modern navigational aids across the entire goddamned shark-infested Atlantic and we've been upstaged by some goofball who claims to have encountered aliens!"
"Bailey, there are hardly any shar—oh, forget it."
&nb
sp; Bailey was disgusted. "Hasn't anybody told the program controllers that aliens were done to death years ago? Haven't they watched all six hundred and ten episodes of The U-Foes along with the other seventy million dimwits?"
"It's a very popular series, Bailey—"
"I know it's a popular series. Cash! I'm just buggered if I can see why!"
"It's technically slick," said Jonas. "Excellent camerawork, very suspenseful storyboard . . . atmosphere. Big budget, that's the main factor. Not strong on common sense or logical coherence, I admit . . . Anyway, Bailey, this Odingo woman isn't claiming she's seen aliens, or that her cat has been abducted by them and come back as a chameleon. She just claims to have dug up some alien artifacts." Jonas switched the W to memory mode.
"Same difference," said Barnum. "She's still goofy, and her popularity is riding on the back of years of U-Foes hype. Those idiots out there"—he waved a hand in the general direction of the window—"are receptive to aliens in our backyard. They think it's real!"
"The story was stronger than we thought. Let me show you why." Jonas had broken into the middle of the program and had missed a few minutes of the early chat. He looked at the screen and stroked his beard. Cashew recognized the faraway look in his eyes. "Maybe the aliens are real this time."
"And maybe my Great-Aunt Matilda gave birth to a two-headed alligator," yelled Bailey. "Artifacts? Crap! One look and you can see they're phony!"
In a long shot, Prudence Odingo looked very alone in a vast studio with minimalist furnishings. When the producer switched to a close-up she seemed more self-possessed, but the interview clearly wasn't going her way and she was none too pleased about it.
"Who's that? Delia Ricardo?"
"Don't think so. Cash—wrong eye shadow. No, it's got to be Nathalie Courtney with a new hairdo. The woman being interviewed is a spacer named Prudence Odingo." He turned up the sound.
"A hundred thousand years old," Courtney said slowly "How can you be sure of that? Got sell-by dates stamped on them, have they?"