by Allen Steele
And then someone who’d been sitting quietly in the gallery all this time rose to his feet and came forward. A big guy, about a head taller than me and twice my size, with long blond hair and a thick beard to match. In a surprisingly mild voice, he informed me that his name was Mike Kennedy, and that he worked for Mr. Goldstein. Would I come with him, please?
XVIII
A hoverlimo was parked out in front of Government House, only the second ground vehicle I’d seen on Coyote that didn’t have an animal hitched to it. Kennedy opened the rear door for me, and I wasn’t surprised to find Goldstein seated inside.
“Mr. Truffaut, good morning.” In hemp jeans and a light cotton sweater, Goldstein was more casually dressed than when I’d seen him the night before. “I trust your arraignment went well.”
“Yes, sir, it did.” I climbed into the back of the limo. “No small thanks to you, I assume.”
“Think nothing of it. I try to…” His voice trailed off, and there was no mistaking the look on his face as he caught a good whiff of me. I tried to sit as far from him as possible, but even so he pushed a button that half opened a window on his side of the car. “I endeavor to accommodate my employees,” he finished, his voice little more than a choke, then he leaned toward the glass partition between the passenger and driver seats. “Could you turn on the exhaust fan, please, Mike?”
Without a word, Kennedy switched on the vents. Cool air wafted through the back of the limo. “Sorry,” I murmured. “Three days without a bath…”
“No need to apologize. Can’t be helped.” Goldstein tapped on the glass. The limo rose from its skirts and glided away from Government House. “I’m afraid I’m still a little overcivilized. There are still settlements where people take baths only two or three times a week…that’s a Coyote week, nine days…and then in outdoor tubs just large enough to sit in.” He paused, then added, “I’ve had to do it myself, from time to time.”
“Of course.” He’d made it sound as if going without a bath for more than a day or two was an act of barbarism. For him, perhaps it was. “At any rate, thank you. I appreciate your acting on my behalf.”
“Think nothing of it,” he replied, waving it off. “You’re working for me now…and you wouldn’t do me any good if your residence were the stockade, now would you?” He smiled. “Soon enough, I’ll have you at an inn here in town. Nice place…hot running water, two meals a day…and there are clothes in your room that Mike has bought for you. You didn’t have a chance to give me your sizes, so we had to guess a bit, but…”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine. Thank you, sir.” I was gazing out the window beside me. This part of Liberty had apparently been built more recently than the neighborhood around the stockade and Government House. I caught a brief glimpse of shops, open-air markets, tidy parks surrounded by redbrick bungalows. Very few vehicles, although I spotted a teenager seated on a hoverbike, chatting with a couple of young ladies. More often than not, though, I saw hitching posts to which both horses and shags had been tied up.
“Look over here,” Goldstein said, and I craned my neck to gaze past him. A collection of adobe and wood-frame buildings arranged around a quadrangle. “The Colonial University. Established a few years after the Revolution by some of the original colonists. It’s grown lately, thanks to endowments from Janus.”
“I’m sure they appreciate it.” My new boss never seemed to let a chance to brag about his munificence slip by. Not that I could blame him; if I owned what was probably the only hoverlimo on a world where most people rode horses, I’d probably do the same. I was about to ask whether any schools had been named after him when something in a field across the road from the campus caught my eye.
The moment I saw it, I knew exactly what it was.
“Stop the car!” I snapped. Kennedy hit the brakes, and before Goldstein could stop me, I opened my door and hopped out. For a few moments I stared at the field, utterly surprised by what I’d found.
Four bases, with white powder lines running between them, a small mound within the center. Bleachers behind the first and third bases, and a tall chain-link fence forming an open-sided cage just behind home plate. Small wooden sheds on either side of the cage, with wood benches inside each one. And from the top of the cage, a blue-and-gold pennant that rippled in the morning breeze:
Beak ’Em, Boids!
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I murmured. A baseball diamond. Of all the things I’d least expected to see on Coyote…
“Oh, that?” Goldstein had followed me from the limo. “Belongs to the university team. The Battling Boids.” A disinterested shrug. “Next week they go up against the Swampers, or whatever they’re called…”
“The Fighting Swampers.” Mike Kennedy gazed at us from the open window of the limo. “From Petsloc U.” He pronounced it as pets-lock.
“The People’s Enlightenment Through the Spirit of Social Collectivism University.” Goldstein shook his head. “Not much of a school, really. More like a small liberal arts college set up by some unreformed social collectivists. But they’ve got a pretty good ball team…”
“Are you kidding?” Kennedy laughed out loud. “Boss, they stink. Half the time, they’re arguing over who’s most politically correct to play shortstop…”
“Never mind.” Goldstein was obviously amused by my reaction to something as trivial to him as a baseball diamond. “If I’d known you were such a sports fan, Jules, I would’ve mentioned this earlier.”
I bit my lip at his condescension, but said nothing. Although I’d read as much as I could about Coyote before making the decision to defect, I hadn’t a clue that baseball was played there. And for those of us who truly love the game, it isn’t just a sport; it’s a fixation nearly as consuming as sex, drugs, or religion, albeit with none of the unpleasant side effects. When I left Earth, I had thought baseball one thing I would be leaving behind. In hindsight, I should have known better. Humankind always carries its culture with it, and no place is truly habitable unless it has baseball.
“I think…” I let out my breath. “I think I’m going to like this place.”
“Hmm…well, so long as we’re here, there’s something else I’d like to show you.” Goldstein touched my elbow. “Take a walk with me?”
It didn’t sound like a request, but after two days floating around in a lifeboat and another cooped up in a jail, any chance to stretch my legs sounded like a fine idea. I nodded, and Goldstein turned to begin walking toward the university. As we crossed the road again, he raised a hand to Kennedy, gesturing for him to remain behind.
He said nothing as we cut across campus. The Colonial University was a little larger than it appeared from the road. Some of the buildings were taller than others, and someone had obviously devoted some time and effort to landscaping. Shade trees lined gravel walkways, with benches and abstract sculptures placed here and there; students strolled between buildings, chatting among themselves, or sat alone beneath trees, engrossed in their books and pads. We sauntered past a kidney-shaped pond, where an elderly woman was holding an open-air seminar with a dozen or so pupils. None appeared much younger than me, and I felt a twinge of envy. Before things had gone sour for me, I could have been one of them. An academic life, shielded from the realities of the larger and sometimes very harsh world.
We’d reached the far side of the campus and had walked up a small hill overlooking the pond, when Goldstein came to a halt near a tree-shaded bench. “Over there,” he said, pointing away from the university. “See it?”
Just beyond a small glade, only a few hundred yards away, lay what I first took to be a fortress. A ring-shaped structure, built of what seemed to be solid rock, its outer walls sloping inward to surround a cylindrical inner keep that vaguely resembled an enormous pillbox of the sort that had once been built by German soldiers during one of the world wars back on Earth. Narrow, slotlike windows were set deep within the keep’s round walls, while wiry antennae jutted from its flat roof. There were no openi
ngs of any sort visible in the outer walls, although an indentation of some sort gave the impression of a gate that I couldn’t make out through the trees.
“The hjadd embassy.” Goldstein’s voice was subdued, almost as if he expected to be overheard. “The original structure was built by us, on land President Gunther ceded to them as sovereign territory. That was shortly after the Galileo crew returned from Rho Coronae Borealis, with the Prime Emissary aboard. Once heshe determined that hisher people would be safe here, though, heshe summoned a ship from home. A few days later, two of their shuttles touched down over there, and then…” He paused. “They created that place in four days.”
“Yeah, okay, but…” Then what he’d just said struck home. “Did you say four days?”
“Uh-huh.” Goldstein nodded toward the bench. “They wouldn’t allow any of us to come near, but when I heard what was happening, I got someone to let me join the faculty members who were observing everything from here.” There was an expression of wonder on his face as his gaze returned to the distant compound. “It was like seeing a flower blossom in the early morning. At first, it didn’t seem as if anything was happening. But after a while, we saw that something was growing…”
“Being built, you mean.”
“No. I mean it grew. No scaffolds, no heavy equipment…not even construction crews. It just rose from the ground, little by little, so slowly that you didn’t think anything was happening. Then you’d go away for coffee or to have a smoke, and when you came back you’d see that the outer walls were just a little taller than the last time you’d looked. And all of it solid…perfect, like it was a stone plant of some sort.”
“Nanotech?”
“That’s our best guess, yeah…but far more advanced than anything we’ve ever developed. Spectrographic imaging reveals that the walls are comprised of minerals found in the native soil, but that’s as much as we know. It resists everything else we throw at it. Thermo-graphs, sonar, radar, lidar…totally airtight. Even the windows are reflective. Nothing gets in and nothing gets out.”
“So what have you…I mean, what have our people found out? About what goes on in there, I mean?”
“So far, the hjadd have allowed only three people inside. Carlos Montero, the former president, in his role as official liaison. He doesn’t say much to anyone, but that’s to be expected. A Dominionist missionary who…well, he’s not talking to anyone either, but from what I’ve heard, he’s had a crisis of faith.” He paused. “And I’m the third person.”
“You?”
“Only so far as an anteroom, where I spoke with them through a glass window. That’s the farthest they’ve allowed anyone, or so I’ve been told.” Goldstein tucked his hands in his trouser pockets. “I wanted you to see this, to give you an idea of what we’re going after. It’s not just establishing trade relations with another race…it’s getting our hands on technology of such magnitude that something like that is little more than a trinket.”
Before I could answer, he turned his back to the compound. “Come on,” he said as he began to walk down the hill. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Then I’ll introduce you to the rest of the crew.”
XIX
Goldstein had made a reservation for me at a small B&B called the Soldier’s Joy, in the old part of Liberty, not far from the grange hall that had been the meetinghouse of the original colonists. Before he dropped me off, Goldstein pointed to a tavern just down the road from the inn and told me that he’d meet me there in three hours. Then the limo glided away, leaving me alone again in a strange town.
My room was on the second floor, and, while it wasn’t the presidential suite, at least it had its own bath, which was all that I cared about just then. So I took a long, hot shower that rinsed away the last of my travel sweat, then wrapped myself in a robe I found hanging on the bathroom door and lay down on a feather-stuffed bed that felt nothing like a jail cot. I hadn’t slept well in the stockade, and I figured I had time for a midday siesta.
The afternoon sun was shining through the windows when I woke up. Opening the dresser and closet, I discovered three changes of clothes, along with a shagswool jacket and a sturdy pair of boots stitched from what I’d later learn was creek cat hide. There were even toiletries in the bathroom, including a sonic toothbrush and shaver. I got rid of my whiskers and brushed my teeth, then tried on a pair of hemp trousers, a cotton shirt, and a shagswool vest. Everything fit me better than I had expected, even the boots; either Goldstein had an amazingly accurate sense for clothing sizes, or his people had found my specs during their research. I didn’t know which prospect unnerved me more.
In any case, I arrived at the tavern a little less than three hours after promising Goldstein that I would meet him there. I was on schedule, but my new boss wasn’t. Or at least his hoverlimo was nowhere in sight. And the tavern itself was rather run-down. With a weather-beaten signboard above the front door proclaiming its name to be Lew’s Cantina, it was little more than a log cabin with a thatch roof and fieldstone chimney to one side. Just a shack that someone had neglected to tear down.
I hesitated outside for a few moments, wondering whether I’d misunderstood Goldstein and gone to the wrong place. But there was nothing else in the neighborhood that looked even remotely like a bar or restaurant, and he’d told me that he’d buy me a drink once I got there. So I walked across a wood plank and pushed open a door that creaked on its hinges.
Inside, Lew’s Cantina was little more inviting than its exterior. A low ceiling with oil lamps suspended from the rafters. An unfinished floor upon which wood shavings soaked up spilled ale. Faded blankets hanging from log walls. Battered tables and wicker chairs, some of which looked as if they’d been repaired several times. A stone hearth with a couple of half-burned logs. The bar was no more than a board nailed across the top of a row of beer kegs; behind it stood an old lady, thin and frail, who scowled at me as she wiped a chipped ceramic mug with a rag that probably played host to three or four dozen different strains of bacteria.
Yeah, this was definitely the wrong address. Yet just as I started to turn toward the door, someone in the back of the room called out.
“Hey! Your name Truffaut?”
I looked around, saw three people seated around a table next to an open window. Two men and a woman, with a pitcher of ale between them. I nodded, and the guy seated on the other side of the table beckoned to me. “You’re looking for us. C’mon over.”
As I walked across the room, the fellow who’d spoken rose from his chair. “Ted Harker,” he said, offering his hand. “Commanding officer of the…” His voice trailed off, as if unsure how to finish. “Well, anyway, just call me Ted. We don’t stand much on formality. Have a seat. We’ve been waiting for you.”
Ted Harker? The name sounded familiar, although for the moment I was unable to place it. A young guy in his late thirties, with long black hair tied back behind his neck and a trim beard just beginning to show the first hint of grey. “Thanks,” I said, shaking his hand, “but I thought I was supposed to meet someone else here…”
“Morgan?” This from the woman seated next to him. A little younger than Ted, with short blond hair and the most steady gaze I’d ever seen. Like Harker, she had a British accent. “Yes, well…figures he’d put you on the spot like this.”
“Typical.” The second man at the table, same age as Ted, with an olive complexion and a Middle Eastern lilt to his tongue. “Bastard has his own agenda.”
“C’mon, now. Speak no evil of the man who signs our paychecks.” Ted motioned to an empty chair, then turned toward the bar. “Carrie? Another round for the table, please, and a mug for Mr. Truffaut here.”
“Jules. My friends call me Jules.”
“Pleased to meet you, Jules.” The woman smiled at me as I sat down. “I’m Emily. First mate.” She didn’t mention her last name, but neither did she have to; when she lifted her beer mug, I noticed the gold band on her ring finger. First mate in more ways than one.
; “Ali Youssef. Helmsman and navigator.” The other man extended his hand as well. “I take it you’re our new shuttle pilot.”
“That’s what Mr. Goldstein…Morgan…hired me to do.” I looked at the three of them. “So this is it? The entire crew?”
Ted shook his head. “We’ve got two more. One of them is using the facilities just now…she’ll be back in a minute…and the other is arriving with the ship. And we’ll have two passengers as well…”
“More than two,” Ali interrupted. “I spoke with Morgan earlier today, and he told me he’s bringing someone else.”
“What?” Ted stared at him in disbelief. “Well, that’s bloody wonderful. So when was he going to tell the captain, pray tell?”
“Don’t look at me.” Ali shrugged as he took a sip from a glass of ice tea; he was the only person at the table not drinking ale. “I just happened to see him on the street, and he told me…”
“Morgan’s going along?” That was news to me; he hadn’t mentioned it during our previous conversations.
“He has to. After all, he’s the one who’s trying to make a deal.” Emily let out her breath. “At least we don’t have to deal with Jared again.”
“No. He backed out at the last minute. Said one trip to Hjarr was enough for him.” A wry smile from Ted. “Just as well. I had enough of him on Spindrift.”
Spindrift. As soon as he said that, everything clicked. “Oh, good grief,” I said, feeling my face go warm. “So you’re…I’m sorry, but I didn’t recognize you. You were on the Galileo.” Before he could answer, I looked at his wife. “And that would make you…”
“Morgan didn’t tell you?” Emily glanced at her husband. “Nerve of that guy.”
Theodore Harker. Emily Collins. First officer and shuttle pilot respectively, they were two of the three surviving members of the Galileo expedition. Like everyone else on Earth, I’d heard about their encounter with Spindrift, the rogue planet that turned out to be a starship carrying the remains of an alien race called the taaraq. Along with a third member of the expedition—it took me a moment to recall his name; Jared Ramirez, the astrobiologist—they had landed on Coyote fifty-three years after the Galileo’s disappearance, bringing with them the hjadd Prime Emissary. And they were in the same room, seated across the table from me…and I hadn’t even heard that they’d gotten married.