“You got it. Also: we can’t get a good look at their ship from this angle. No way to gather military intelligence.”
“Where’s the hole that the nukes come out of?” I asked.
“Don’t bother looking. You can’t see it. It’s tiny compared to the scale of the plate. It’s closed by a shutter when it’s not in use. You won’t be able to see it until it opens.”
“It’s going to open!?”
“Maybe it’s better if we just watch the speely.” Sammann reached in and turned up the volume a bit. The sound track was a roar of ambient noise: whooshes, hums, buzzes, and drones at many different pitches. There was the occasional human word or phrase, shouted over the roar, but people spoke rarely, and when they did it tended to be in terse military jargon.
“Bogey,” someone said, “two o’clock.”
The image veered and zoomed, the big triangle expanding until its edge had become a straight division separating white from black. In the black part a grey blob was discernible: just a mess of pixels a few shades brighter than black. But it got brighter and bigger. “Incoming,” someone confirmed.
The murk of noise took on new overtones. People were conversing. I thought I heard the cadences of an Orth sentence.
“Prepare for egress!” someone commanded, in a voice that meant business. For the first time, the speelycaptor turned away from the window and refocused to show the interior of the space capsule. This view was shockingly crisp, clear, and colorful after the endless dreary shot of the pusher plate. Several people were floating around in a confined space. Some were strapped into chairs before consoles. Some were gripping handles, the better to keep their faces pressed against windows. One of these was definitely Jesry. In the middle of the capsule was the big man with the hairdo. He didn’t look good. Weightlessness had made his hair go funny. His face was swollen and greenish; I could tell he was nauseated. He looked tired and uncaring—maybe from anti-nausea drugs? His impressive clothes were gone, revealing all sorts of things about his physique that no one except for his doctor really needed to know. A couple of people were striving to fit him into an outlandish garment consisting of a network of tubes in a matrix of stretchy fabric. It seemed that this project had been going on for a while, but just now they threw it into high gear and one of the others pushed himself away from a window and flew over to help jerk the thing on. The Warden of Heaven (I didn’t know for a fact that this was he, but it seemed unmistakable) woke up enough to become indignant. He glared at the camera and lifted a finger. One of his aides drifted into position to block the view, and said, “Please give His Serenity some—”
“Some serenity?” cracked Jesry, off-camera.
Testy words were exchanged. The authoritative voice commanded them to shut up. The argument was replaced by technical conversation pertaining to the suit that they were building around the Warden of Heaven’s body. One of the console-watchers called out updates on the approach of the bogey.
Jesry said, “You’re about to become the first person ever to converse with aliens. What is your plan?”
The Warden of Heaven made some brief and indistinct response. He was farther from the microphone, he wasn’t feeling well, and he’d seen enough of Jesry by this point to know that the conversation wasn’t going to end well.
The speelycaptor swung round to point at the Warden again. They’d finished putting the tube-garment around his body and were building a space suit over that, one limb at a time.
Off-camera, Jesry answered: “How do you know that the Geometers are even going to recognize that concept?”
Another muffled, noncommittal response from the Warden (who, to be fair, couldn’t talk well because they were mounting a headset on him).
“Geometers?” I asked.
“That’s what people at the Convox have been calling the aliens, apparently,” Sammann said.
“I would try to go in there with a mental checklist of basic observations I wanted to achieve,” Jesry went on. “For example, do they take any precautions against infection? It would be quite significant if they were afraid of our germs—or if they weren’t.”
The Warden of Heaven deflected Jesry’s suggestion with a humorous remark that his aides thought was funny.
“You ever look at bugs under a lens?” Jesry tried. “That’d be good preparation for this. They look so different from anything we normally experience that it’s easy to be kind of stunned and bewildered by their appearance at first. But if you can get past that emotional reaction, you can see how they work. How do they transmit their weight to the ground? Count the orifices. Look for symmetries. Observe periodicities. By which I mean, how often do they breathe? From that, we can make inferences about their metabolism.”
One of the aides cut Jesry short by telling him it was time to pray. The suit was all on now except for the helmet. The Warden’s head—unrecognizable under the earphones, the mike, the heads-up goggles—poked up out of a huge, rigid carapace. He held hands with his aides as best he could through the bulky gloves. They closed their eyes and said something in unison. A loud metallic pop/crunch interrupted them. “Contact,” someone called, “we have been grappled by a remote manipulator.”
The speelycaptor swung past a crew member checking his watch and aimed back out the dirty window to focus on the bogey. This was a skeletal craft, altogether mechanical, no pressurized compartments where a Cousin might ride along: just a frame with half a dozen robot arms of various sizes, and thruster nozzles, spotlights, and dish antennas pointed every which way. One of its arms had reached out and grabbed an antenna bracket on the outside of the capsule.
Things happened fast now. The helmet had already been clamped down over the Warden of Heaven’s head, and crew members had shooed away the aides and were manipulating the suit’s controls. Through the bubble the Warden’s eyes could be seen moving back and forth uncertainly, responding to inscrutable hisses and creaks from the suit as its systems came alive. His lips moved and he nodded and gave thumbs-up signs as communications were tested.
They pushed him through a pressure hatch at one end of the capsule, closed it behind him, and turned a wheel to dog it shut. He was in the airlock.
“Why’s he going alone?” I asked.
“Supposedly that’s how the Cousins—excuse me, the Geometers—wanted it,” Sammann said. “Send one, they said.”
“So we sent him?” I asked incredulously.
Sammann shrugged. “But that’s part of the Geometers’ strategy, isn’t it? If we were allowed to send a whole delegation, we could hedge our bets. But if the whole planet is allowed to send only one representative, whom do we pick? That tells them a lot.”
“Yeah, but why—?”
Sammann cut me off with an even more exaggerated shrug. “You seriously expect me to be able to explain why the Saecular Power makes the decisions it makes?”
“Okay. Sorry. Never mind.”
Hisses and clanks and terse utterances from the crew signaled the opening of the airlock’s outer door. A small arm unfolded itself from the Geometers’ robot probe and reached toward the ship, out of view of this window. When it drew back, a few moments later, it brought the Warden of Heaven with it. The arm’s steely hand had gripped a metal bracket that projected from the suit’s round shoulder—a lifting point. The Geometers understood our engineering, and knew a bracket for a bracket.
The bogey disengaged from the capsule and fired a puff of gas to get itself drifting away, then, after a few seconds, ignited larger thrusters that accelerated it toward the icosahedron. The Warden of Heaven waved back to us. “Everything is okay,” he announced over the wireless. Then his voice was replaced by a harsh buzzing tone. A crew member turned it down. “They’re jamming us,” he announced. “His Serenity is on his own.”
“No,” said an aide, “God is with him.”
The speelycaptor zoomed in on the Warden, being drawn backwards toward the icosahedron. He was getting harder to see, even at maximum zoom, but it looked
like he was gesticulating, tapping his helmet and throwing up his hands in confusion. “Okay, we get it!” Jesry said. “You can’t hear.”
“I’m worried about his pulse. Way too high for a man his age,” said a crew member.
“You’ve still got telemetry?” Jesry asked.
“Just barely. They jammed vox first. Now they are attacking the other channels…nope. Lost it. Bye-bye.”
“The Geometers are some kind of military hardasses,” Sammann said, perhaps unnecessarily.
The video went on with little further commentary until the robot probe and the Warden had shrunk to a tiny cluster of grey pixels. Then it cut out and went to black. Sammann paused it. “In the original, what follows is four hours of basically nothing,” he said. “They just sit there and wait. Your friend Jesry baits the Warden’s toadies into a philosophical debate and crushes them. After that, no one wants to talk. There is only one event of note, which is that after about one hour the jamming stops.”
“Really? So they can talk to the Warden again?”
“I didn’t say that. The jamming signals are turned off, but they can’t get any data from the Warden’s spacesuit. Most likely what it means is that the suit had been shut down.”
“Because something happened to the Warden of Heaven or…”
“Most people think he got out of the suit. Since it was no longer necessary, it was turned off to conserve power.”
“That implies…”
“That the Hedron—as people are calling it—has an atmosphere we can breathe, yes,” Sammann said. “Or that the Warden was dead on arrival.”
“The Warden of Heaven’s dead?”
Sammann started the speely playing again. The time code in the corner had jumped forward a few hours.
“New signal from the Hedron,” announced a tired crew member. “Repetitive pulses. Microwaves. High power. I’d say they are illuminating us with radar.”
“Like they don’t already know where we are!” someone scoffed.
“Cut the chatter!” ordered the voice I’d come to think of as the captain’s. “Do you think they are acquiring us?”
“As in acquiring a target for a weapons launch,” Sammann translated.
“It’s definitely that kind of a narrow-beam signal,” said the other, “but steady—not homing in.”
“Activity on the base plate!” Jesry called. “Dead center.”
The image once again wheeled to the huge circle-in-triangle. Then it zoomed. A dark mote was visible in the center. As the zoom went on, this grew and resolved itself as a circular pore.
“Give us some distance!” the captain ordered.
“Brace for emergency acceleration…three, two, one, now,” said another voice, and then everything went out of whack for a minute. People and stuff flew around. Loud clunks and hisses sounded. Everything that was loose ended up plastered against the bulkhead closest to the icosahedron as the capsule accelerated away from it. The woman holding the speelycaptor did her share of gasping and cursing. But soon enough she got it pointed back out the window. “Something is coming out of that port!” Jesry announced, and once again we were treated to a long, veering zoom-in. But this time the hole wasn’t crisp-edged and black. It was pinkish, its boundaries ill-defined. The pink part was moving; it separated itself from the base of the icosahedron. It had been cast off. It was adrift in space. The hole irised shut behind it.
“That doesn’t look like a nuke,” someone said.
“Understatement of the year,” Sammann muttered.
“Move in on it.”
“Brace for acceleration…three two, one, now.” There was another messy scene as the capsule reversed its direction and began heading back toward the icosahedron. Yet again we had to wait as the indefatigable woman with the speelycaptor made her way back to that tiny, filthy window and re-acquired the shot.
She gasped.
So did I.
“What is it?” asked one of the voices. They couldn’t see what she—what I—could see because they weren’t peering at it through magnifying optics.
“It’s him,” said the woman holding the speelycaptor. “It’s the Warden of Heaven!” She refrained from mentioning one important detail, which was that he was stark naked. “They threw the Warden of Heaven out the airlock!”
Sammann stopped it. “That has become the hip catch phrase of the moment,” he told me. “Technically, though, it’s not an airlock. It’s the port where they spit out the little nukes.”
The Warden at this point was still small and poorly resolved, but he had been getting bigger, and I had been steeling myself for what he would look like close-up. “I can keep playing it if you want,” Sammann offered, none too enthusiastically, “or—”
“I’ve seen enough gore for one day, thanks,” I said. “Don’t you explode or something?”
“There was a little bit of that. By the time they got him back into the capsule—well, it was a mess.”
“So the Geometers just—executed him?”
“This is not known. He might have died of natural causes. They found a burst aneurysm on autopsy.”
“I imagine they found a lot of burst stuff!”
“Eew!” Cord said from up front.
“Exactly—so it’s hard to say whether it blew before or after he was thrown out.”
“Have the Geometers sent out any communications since this happened?”
“We’d have no way of knowing that. This speely was leaked. Other than that, the Powers That Be have managed to control information pretty effectively.”
“Is everyone looking at this speely? Does the whole world know about it?”
“The Powers That Be have shut down most of the Reticulum in order to control propagation of this speely,” Sammann said. “So only a few people have seen it. Most people, if they’ve heard anything, have only heard rumors.”
“That’s almost worse than facts,” I said, and told him about Magister Sark. “When did this happen?” I asked.
“While we were going over the pole,” he said. “The capsule landed a day later. Everyone except the Warden was safe and sound. Meanwhile the military had begun moving toward the poles, as you found out.”
“Which makes no sense to me,” I mentioned.
“I’m told that the Hedron is in an orbit that confines its ground track to a belt around the Equator…”
“Yes, and so if you go to the far north or south you can get out from under it—”
“And maybe out of reach of its weapons?”
“Depends on what kind of weapons they are. But the part that doesn’t make sense to me is that the Geometers could change their orbit any time they wanted to. The first few months they were here, they were in a polar orbit, remember?”
“Yes, of course I remember,” Sammann said.
“Then they changed and…”
“And what?” Sammann asked after a while, since I’d gone silent.
“…and I saw—Ala and I saw—light from the nukes that they fired to make that change in their orbit. ‘Plane change maneuvers are expensive.’ For them to change back to a polar orbit now—where they could shoot down on our military forces at the poles—they’d have to fire that many nukes again.” I looked at Sammann. “They’re out of fuel.”
“You mean…out of nukes?”
“Yeah. Nuclear bombs are the fuel that makes the ship go. They can only store so many of them. When they run low, they have to…”
“To go get more,” Sammann said.
“Which means zeroing in on a technically advanced civilization and raiding them. Pillaging their stockpile of nuclear material. Which, in our case, means—”
“Edhar, Rambalf, and Tredegarh,” Sammann said.
“That was the message they were sending on the night that the lasers shone down,” I said, “the night I was Evoked.”
“The night Fraa Orolo walked down off Bly’s Butte,” Cord put in, “and headed for Ecba.”
Part 8
; ORITHENA
The drive south went fast. We did it in four days and three nights. We were almost out of money, so we camped. Yul cooked our breakfasts and suppers. We saved our money for fuel and for lunch, passing through the mass-produced restaurants and fueling stations like ghosts.
During the first day or so, the landscape was dominated by endless tracts of fuel trees, relieved by small cities surrounding the plants where they were shredded and cooked to produce liquid fuel. Then we had two days of the most densely populated territory I had ever seen. The landscape was indistinguishable from that of the continent where we had started: the same signs and stores everywhere. The cities were so close that their fauxburbs touched one another and we never saw any open countryside, just pulsed along the highway-network from one traffic jam to the next. I saw several concents. They were always in the distance, for they tended to be built on hilltops or in ancient city centers that great highways swerved to avoid. One of these, by coincidence, happened to be Saunt Rambalf. It was built on an elevated mass of igneous rock several miles wide.
I thought about harrowing. When Alwash had used that word on me back on the ship, I’d thought it was funny. But after what had happened in Mahsht, I really did feel harrowed. Not in the sense of a weed that had been pulled out and burned, but in the sense of what was left after the harrowing had been finished: a plant, young, weak, survival still uncertain. But standing alone and alive, with nothing around it that might interfere with its growth or that could protect it from whatever blasts came its way tomorrow.
Late on the third day the landscape began to open up and to smell of something other, more ancient, than tires and fuel. We camped under trees and packed away our warm clothes. Breakfast the fourth day was made from things Cord and Yul had purchased from farmers. We drove into a landscape that had been settled and cultivated since the days of the Bazian Empire. Its population had, of course, waxed and waned countless times since then. Lately it had waned. The fauxburbs and then the cities had withered, leaving what I thought of as the intransigent strongholds of civilization: wealthy people’s villas, maths, monasteries, arks, expensive restaurants, suvins, resorts, retreat centers, hospitals, governmental installations. Little stood between these save open country and surprisingly primitive agriculture. Tufts of scrawny, garishly colored businesses sprouted at road-junctions, just to keep the riffraff like us moving, but most of the buildings were stone or mud with slate or tile roofs. The landscape became more sere and open as we moved along. The roads shed lanes, then insensibly narrowed, grew rougher and more tortuous, until without having noticed any sudden transitions we found ourselves driving on endless one-lane tracks and stopping to avoid flocks of livestock so tough and emaciated they looked like jerky on the hoof.
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