by David Brin
No, clearly nobody’s been here, he thought. Robert kicked through the wreckage. Nothing remained of interest. Why did I insist on coming? he wondered. He knew his hunch — whether it panned out or not — had actually been little more than an excuse to escape from the caves — to get away from Prathachulthorn.
To get away from uncomfortable glimpses of himself.
Perhaps one reason he had chosen to come to this place was because it was here that he had had his own brief moment of hand-to-hand contact with the enemy.
Or maybe he had hoped to recreate the feelings of only a few days ago, traveling unfettered and unjudged. He had hoped to come here with different female company than the woman who now followed him, eyes darting left and right, putting everything under professional scrutiny.
Robert turned away from his brooding thoughts and walked toward the ruined alien hover tanks. He sank to one knee, brushing aside the tall, rank grass.
Gubru machinery, the exposed guts of the armored vehicles, gears, impellers, gravities…
A fine yellow patina overlay many of the parts. In some places the shining plastimesh had discolored, thinned, and even broken through. Robert pulled on a small chunk which came off, crumbling, in his hands.
Well I’ll be a blue-nosed gopher. I was right. My hunch was right.
“What is it?” Lieutenant McCue asked over his shoulder.
He shook his head. “I’m not sure, yet. But something seems to be eating through a lot of these parts.”
“May I see?”
Robert handed her the piece of corroded ceramet.
“This is why you wanted to come here? You suspected this?”
He saw no point in telling her all the complex reasons, the personal ones. “That was a large part of it. I thought, maybe, there might be a weapon in it. They burned all the records and facilities when they evacuated the center. But they couldn’t eradicate all the microbes developed in Dr. Schultz’s lab.”
He didn’t add that he had a vial of gorilla saliva in his pack. If he had not found the Gubru armor in this state, on arriving here, he had planned to perform his own experiments.
“Hm.” Lydia McCue crumbled the material in her hand. She got down and crawled under the machine to examine which parts had been affected. Finally she emerged and sat next to Robert.
“It could prove useful. But there would still be the problem of a delivery system. We don’t dare venture out of the mountains to spray the tittle bugs over Gubru equipment in Port Helenia.
“Also, bio-sabotage weapons are very short term in their effectiveness. They have to be used all at once and by surprise, since countermeasures are usually swift and effective. After a few weeks, the bugs would be neutralized — chemically, with coatings, or by cloning another beastie to eat ours.
“Still,” she turned another piece over and looked up to smile at Robert. “This is great. What you did here before, and now this… These are the right ways to fight guerrilla war! I like it. We’ll find a way to use it.”
Her smile was so open and friendly that Robert couldn’t help responding. And in that shared moment he felt a stirring that he had been trying to suppress all day.
Damn, she’s attractive, he realized, miserably. His body was sending him signals more powerful than it ever had in the company of Athaclena. And he barely knew this woman! He didn’t love her. He wasn’t bound up with her, as he was with his Tymbrimi consort.
And yet his mouth was dry and his heart beat faster as she looked at him, this narrow-eyed, thin-nosed, tall-browed, female human…
“We’d better be heading home,” he said quickly. “Go ahead and take some samples, lieutenant. We’ll test them back at base.”
He ignored her long look as he stood up and signaled to Elsie. Soon, with specimens stowed away in their packs, they were climbing once more toward the spine-stones. The watchful guards showed obvious relief as they shouldered their rifles and leaped back into the trees.
Robert followed his escort with little attention to the path. He was trying not to think of the other member of his own race walking beside him, so he frowned and kept himself banked in behind a brumous cloud of his own thoughts.
59
Fiben
Fiben and Gailet sat near each other under the unblinking regard of masked Gubru technicians, who focused their instruments on the two chims with dispassionate, clinical precision. Multi-lensed globes and flat-plate phrased arrays floated on all sides, peering down at them. The testing chamber was a jungle of glistening tubes and shiny-faced machinery, all antiseptic and sterile.
Still, the place reeked of alien bird. Fiben’s nose wrinkled, and once again he disciplined himself to avoid thinking unfriendly thoughts about the Gubru. Certainly several of the imposing machines must be psi detectors. And while it was doubtful they could actually “read his mind,” the Galactics certainly would be able to trace his surface attitudes.
Fiben reached for something else to think about. He leaned to his left and spoke to Gailet.
“Um, I talked to Sylvie before they came for us this morning. She told me she hasn’t been back to the Ape’s Grape since that night I first came to Port Helenia.”
Gailet turned to look at Fiben. Her expression was tense, disapproving.
“So? Games like that striptease of hers may be obsolete now, but I’m sure the Gubru are finding other ways to use her unique talents.”
“She’s refused to do anything like that since then, Gailet. Honestly. I can’t see why you’re so hostile toward her.”
“And I find it hard to understand how you can be so friendly with one of our jailers!” Gailet snapped. “She’s a probationer and a collaborator!”
Fiben shook his head. “Actually, Sylvie’s not really a probie at all, nor even a gray or yellow. She has a green repro-card. She joined them because—”
*’l don’t give a damn what her reasons were! Oh, I can imagine what sort of sob story she’s told you, you big dope, while she batted her eyelashes and softened you up for—”
From one of the nearby machines came a low, atonal voice. “Young neo-chimpanzee sophonts… be still. Be still, young clients…” it soothed.
Gailet swiveled to face forward, her jaw set.
Fiben blinked. I wish I understood her better, he thought. Half the time he had no idea what would set Gailet off.
It was Gailet’s moodiness that had started him talking with Sylvie in the first place, simply for company. He wanted to explain that to Gailet, but decided it would do no good. Better to wait. She would come out of this funk. She always did.
Only an hour ago they had been laughing, jostling each other while they fumbled with a complicated mechanical puzzle. For a few minutes they had been able to forget the staring mechanical and alien eyes while they worked as a team, sorting and resorting the pieces and arranging them together. When they stood back at last and looked on the completed tower they had made, they both knew that they had surprised the note-takers. In that moment of satisfaction, Gailet’s hand had slipped, innocently and affectionately, into his.
Imprisonment was like that. Part of the time, Fiben actually felt as if he were profiting from the experience. It was the first time in his life, for instance, that he’d ever really had time to just sit and think. Their captors now let them have books, and he was catching up on quite a few volumes he’d always wanted to read. Conversations with Gailet had opened up the arcane world of alienology. He, in turn, had spoken to her of the great work being done here on Garth, delicately nudging a ruined ecosystem back toward health.
But then, all too common, had been die long, darker intervals, when the hours dragged on and on. A pall hung over them at such times. The walls seemed to close in, and conversation always came back to the War] to memories of their failed insurrection, to lost friends and gloomy speculations over the fate of Earth itself.
At such times, Fiben thought he might trade all hope of a long life for just an hour to run free under trees and clean sky.
>
So even this new routine of testing by the Gubru had come as a relief for both of them. At least it was a distraction.
Without warning, the machines suddenly pulled away, opening an avenue in front of their bench. “We are finished, finished… You have done well, done well, you have… Now follow the globe, follow it, toward transportation.”
As Fiben and Gailet stood up, a brown, octahedral projection took form in front of them. Without looking at each other they followed the hologram past the silent, brooding avian technicians, out of the testing chamber, and down a long hallway.
Service robots swept past them with the soft whisper of well-tuned machinery. Once a Kwackoo technician darted out of an office door, favored them with a startled look, then ducked back inside. At last Fiben and Gailet passed through a hissing portal and emerged into bright sunshine. Fiben had to shade his eyes. The day was fair, but with a bite that seemed to say that brief summer was now well on its way out. The chims he could see in the streets, beyond the Gubru compound, were wearing light sweaters and sneakers, another sure sign that autumn was near.
None of the chims looked their way. The distance was too great for Fiben to tell anything of their mood, or to hope that somebody might recognize him or Gailet.
“We won’t be riding the same car back,” whispered Gailet. And she motioned down a long parapet toward the landing ramp below. Sure enough, the tan military van that had brought them had been replaced by a large, roofless hover barge. An ornate pedestal stood in the open deck behind the pilot’s station. Kwackoo servitors adjusted a sunshade to keep the fierce light of Gimelhai off their master’s beak and crest.
The large Gubru was recognizable. Its thick, faintly luminous plumage looked shaggier than the last time they had seen it, in the furtive darkness of their suburban prison. The effect was to make it seem even more different than the run-of-the-mill Gubru functionaries they had seen. In some places the allochroous feathers had begun to appear frayed, tattered. The avian aristocrat wore a striped collar. It paced impatiently atop its perch.
“Well, well,” Fiben muttered. “If it ain’t our old friend, the Somethin’ of Good Housekeeping.”
Gailet snorted in something just short of a small laugh. “It’s called the Suzerain of Propriety,” she reminded him. “The striped tore means it’s the leader of the priestly caste. Now just you remember to behave yourself. Try not to scratch too much, and watch what I do.”
“I’ll imitate yer very steps precisely, mistress.”
Gailet ignored his sarcasm and followed the brown guidance hologram down the long ramp toward the brightly colored barge. Fiben kept pace just a little behind her.
The guide projection vanished as they reached the landing. A Kwackoo, with its feathery ruff tinted a garish shade of pink, offered them both a very shallow bow. “You are honored — honored… that our patron — noble patron does deign to show you — you half-formed ones… the favor of your destiny.”
The Kwackoo spoke without the assistance of a vodor. That in itself was no small miracle, given the creature’s highly specialized speech organs. In fact, it spoke the Anglic words fairly clearly, if with a breathless quality which made the alien sound nervous, expectant.
It wasn’t likely the Suzerain of Propriety was the easiest boss in the Universe to work for. Fiben imitated Gailet’s bow and kept silent as she replied. “We are honored by the attention that your master, the high patron of a great clan, condescends to offer us,” she said in slow, carefully enunciated Galactic Seven. “Nevertheless, we retain, in our own patrons’ names, the right to disapprove its actions.”
Even Fiben gasped. The assembled Kwackoo cooed in anger, fluffing up threateningly.
Three high, chirped notes cut their outrage off abruptly. The lead Kwackoo swiveled quickly and bowed to the Suzerain, who had scuttled to the end of its perch closest to the two chims. The Gubru’s beak gaped as it bent to regard Gailet, first with one eye, then the other. Fiben found himself sweating rivulets.
Finally, the alien straightened and squawked a pronouncement in its own highly clipped, inflected version of Galactic Three. Only Fiben saw the tremor of relief that passed down Gailet’s tense spine. He could not follow the Suzerain’s stilted prose, but a vodor nearby commenced translating promptly.
“Well said — said well… spoken well for captured, client-class soldiers of foe-clan Terra… Come, then — come and see… come and see and hear a bargain you will certainly not disapprove — not even in your patrons’ names.” Gailet and Fiben glanced at each other. Then, as one, they bowed.
The late morning air was clear, and the faint ozone smell probably did not foretell rain. Such ancient cues were useless in the presence of high technology anyway.
The barge cruised south past the closed pleasure piers of Port Helenia and out across the bay. It was Fiben’s first chance to see how the harbor had changed since the aliens had arrived.
The fishing fleet had been crippled for one thing. Only one in four trawlers did not lie beached or in dry dock. The main commercial port was almost dead as well. A clump of dispirited-looking seafaring vessels listed at their moorings, clearly untouched for months. Fiben watched one of the still working fishing trawlers heave into view around the point of the bay, probably returning early with a fortuitous catch — or with a mechanical failure the chim crew felt unable to deal with at sea. The tub-bottomed boat rose and fell as it rode the standing swell where sea met bay. The crew had to struggle since the passage was narrower than it had been in days of peace. Half of the strait was now blocked by a towering, curving cliff face — a great fortress of alien cerametal.
The Gubru battleship seemed to shimmer in a faint -haze. Water droplets condensed at the fringes of its ward-screens, rainbows sparkled, and a mist fell over the struggling trawler as it forced its way past the northern tongue of land at last. Fiben could not make out the faces of the chim crew as the Suzerain’s barge swept overhead, but he saw several long-armed forms slump in relief as the boat reached calm waters at last.
From Point Borealis the upper arm of the bayshore swept several kilometers north and east toward Port Helenia itself. Except for a small navigation beacon, those rough heights were unoccupied. The branches of ridgetop pines riffled gently in the sea breezes.
Southward, however, across the narrow strait, things were quite different. Beyond the grounded battleship, the terrain had been transformed. Forest growth had been removed, the contours of the bluffs altered. Dust rose from a site just out of view beyond the headland. A swarm of hovers and heavy lifters could be seen buzzing to and fro in that direction.
Much farther to the south, toward the spaceport, new domes had been erected as part of the Gubru defensive network — the facilities the urban guerrillas had only mildly inconvenienced in their abortive insurrection. But the barge did not seem to be heading that way. Rather they turned toward the new construction on the narrow, hilly slopes between Aspinal Bay and the Sea of Cilmar.
Fiben knew it was hopeless asking their hosts what was going on. The Kwackoo technicians and servitors were polite, but it was a severe sort of courtesy, probably on orders. And they were not forthcoming with much information.
Gailet joined him at the railing and took his elbow. “Look,” she whispered in a hushed voice.
Together they stared as the barge rose over the bluffs.
A hilltop had been shorn flat near the ocean shoreline. Buildings Fiben recognized as proton power plants lay clustered around its base, feeding cables upward, along its flanks. At the top, a hemispherical structure lay face upward, glimmering and open like a marble bowl in the sunshine.
“What is it? A force field projector? Some kind of weapon?”
Fiben nodded, shook his head, and finally shrugged. “Beats me. It doesn’t look military. But whatever it does sure must take a lot of juice. Look at all those power plants. Goodall!”
A shadow slipped over them — not with the fluffy, ragged coolness of a cloud passing before
the sun, but with the sudden, sharp chill of something solid and huge rumbling over their heads. Fiben shivered, only partly from the drop in temperature. He and Gailet couldn’t help crouching as they looked up at the giant lifter-carrier that cruised only a hundred meters higher. Their avian hosts, on the other hand, appeared unruffled. The Suzerain stood on its perch, placidly ignoring the thrumming fields that made the chims tremble.
They don’t like surprise, Fiben thought. But they are pretty tough when they know what’s happening.
Their transport began a long, slow, lazy circuit around the perimeter of the construction site. Fiben was pondering the white, upturned bowl below when the Kwackoo with the pink ruff approached and inclined its head ever so slightly.
“The Great One deigns — does offer favor… and will suggest commonality — complementarity … of goals and aims.”
Across the barge, the Suzerain of Propriety could be seen perched regally on its pedestal. Fiben wished he could read expressions on a Gubru face. What’s the old bird got in mind? he wondered. Fiben wasn’t entirely sure he really wanted to know.
Gailet returned the shallow bow of the Kwackoo. “Please tell your honored patron we will humbly attend his offer.”
The Suzerain’s Galactic Three was stilted and formal, embellished with mincing, courtly dance steps. The vodor translation did not help Fiben much. He found himself watching Gailet, rather than the alien, as he tried to follow what the hell they were talking about.
“… allowable revision to Ritual of Choice of Uplift Advisor . . , modification made during time of stress, by foremost client representatives… if performed truly in best interests of their patron race…” Gaflet seemed visibly shaken, looking up at the Gubru. Her lips pressed together in a tight line, and her intertwined fingers were white with tension. When the Suzerain stopped chirping, the vodor continued on for a moment, then silence closed in around them, leaving only the whistle of passing air and the faint droning of the hover’s engines.