"It's a little girl!" Annemari exclaimed in surprise when the tapestries were finally separated from the red and gold organic fabrics of the child's clothes.
"What are you doing here?" Calandra demanded in harsh Kalapriyan. "Khush? Mal sooree, bai-chha!"
The girl shook her head frantically, long dark plaits whipping back and forth. "La soree! La! Ebh-bashir dhulaishtaiyen . . ."
Calandra listened for a moment to the flood of Kalapriyan, inserted a sharp question and got back more questions in response. Annemari chewed her left thumbnail and muttered, "I will not interrupt, I will not interrupt, what the hell is going on here, I will not interrupt," under her breath until the colloquy was finished.
"Well?" she demanded when both Calandra and their eavesdropper at last seemed to be through talking.
Calandra sighed and pressed one hand to her forehead. Making such heavy use of the language implants always made her temples throb. The medtechs on Rezerval claimed a slight adjustment could fix that little problem . . . but then, they'd also described the initial surgery as "minor."
"The girl's Rohini—oh, we never went into that, did we? The Kalapriyans think they belong to two distinct races, although DNA analyses don't support that belief. Castes, maybe; races, no. The Rohini tend to be smaller, though, and darker-skinned than the Rudhrani, and the farther away from the coast, the more the natives make of the distinction. The Trading Society doesn't recognize any distinction in law, and that seems to be having a good influence on the coastal states, but up here in the hills the Rohini are practically slaves. In Udara, anyway. Rudhrani run the government, command the army, have all the good jobs. There was an independent Rohini state—Thamboon—but the Bashir conquered it recently."
"Please tell me," Annemari said in a voice that could have chipped ice, "that you and this child have not been discussing comparative sociology and the history of Kalapriya for the last ten minutes!"
"Hold on. It's relevant. The thing is, evidently the Bashir and his buddies have been rather overdoing the Rudhrani-superiority thing. That, plus a nasty habit of secretly assassinating political opponents, plus the way he's been taking over neighboring states recently—it's a recipe for revolution, Annemari. And this young woman is one of our revolutionaries."
"In the Bashir's palace? Wearing his colors?"
Calandra sighed. "Annemari, you may not have the Rezerval data on Kalapriya packed into your head, but you did study history, no? Or were you too busy with your computing and engineering classes to pick up even the basics of historic political structures and their consequences? One thing tyrants do—male tyrants, mostly, although there were some odd stories about one of the Russian empresses of Old Earth—they become sexual predators. This girl—her name's Khati—was kidnapped from one of the Rohini slums down the mountain by a Rudhrani palace guard who thought she might be a nice present for the Bashir. Now she's his favorite mistress and the palace guard has become the principal assistant to the Minister for Loyalty, which is the Bashir's secret political police."
"And she wants us to help her escape?"
Calandra rolled her eyes. "Annemari, she could 'escape' anytime just by walking back down the mountain. The Bashir's personal guards would just go out and pick up some more pretty girls for him to play with. She's stayed because her position gives her lots of chances to spy on the Bashir and his council, and she passes on the information she gets to her brother, who just happens to be in the underground resistance movement. For which, I might mention, she will be tortured to death if any of the Rudhrani in the palace catch her. Annemari, she didn't come seeking our help; she came to offer hers. There were a few little misunderstandings to clear up first, but I think we've got it worked out now. For starters, she was expecting us . . . sort of."
"What do you mean, sort of? And how could she be expecting us? I didn't even file a flight plan out of Valentin." As a department head from Rezerval, Annemari had used her authority to commandeer a flitter without explanation or discussion of her travel plans. She and Calandra had decided that with no way to tell which members of the Barents Trading Society were involved in the bacteriomat black market, they would do best to get out of the city before anybody figured out what they were doing there . . . and leaving behind as little information as possible about what they intended to do next.
"Apparently it has been the gossip of the bazaars for some weeks that a Diplo was coming into the hills, escorted by an officer of the Society's private army," Calandra explained. "Now I can't explain how they knew we were coming here before we knew, unless the native fortune-tellers have some technology that they have been keeping from us, but—"
"The other Calandra," Annemari said slowly.
"The who?"
"Remember, I told you in the clinic? When you dropped out of contact, Calandra, I went looking for you."
"Yes, yes, I know. And you found 'Thecla Partheni' traveling from Tasman back to Rezerval, to the Cassilis Clinic."
"That was what the travel records showed," Annemari agreed. "But I had also asked Evert Cornelis to make some private enquiries; he has an aunt, or something, whose husband is fairly high up in the Barents Trading Society. And she told Evert that Calandra Vissi had arrived in Valentin and made quite a social splash—something about a banquet and a ball in her honor. And the ball was after you, as Thecla Partheni, had taken passage from Tasman to Rezerval. At the time I couldn't understand it—and once I found you, and you confirmed that you hadn't set foot on Kalapriya, I thought it must be some silly misunderstanding. Because nobody else could be traveling as you. Could they?"
Calandra shrugged. "They couldn't use my papers or travel chits, because they wouldn't pass the routine retinal and DNA scans . . . but Valentin and the other Society enclaves along the coast try to keep the technology interface with the natives as small as possible, to reduce the chances of accidental cultural contamination. We never left the spaceport area, so you wouldn't have seen what the rest of Valentin is like. But supposedly there are only a few well-guarded Society facilities outside the port that have any nonnative technology at all. The Trading Society families make rather a fetish of living under primitive conditions—you know, no climate control, wearing nothing but organics, using the local beasts to pull wheeled transporters, all that sort of thing. They claim it's to reduce the chances of cultural contamination, but by now I gather it's developed into a sort of inverted snobbery—they feel superior to most Galactics because they can put up with the hardships of life on Kalapriya. So if somebody got outside the spaceport area and then claimed to be me, yes, she might well get away with it; they certainly wouldn't run a retinal scanner over her, anyway . . ." Her voice trailed off and she frowned with concentration.
Annemari touched the neckline of her intellitunic. The fabric softened and draped lower as if she'd been tugging at it from discomfort. "You're telling me that we personally have just introduced more cultural contamination than the entire Barents Trading Society has committed on Kalapriya in the last four generations?"
"We knew that would happen when we took a flitter to get here as fast as possible," Calandra pointed out. "Anyway, you're not responsible for the tanglers and the other pro-tech weaponry the Bashir has been buying. So I wouldn't feel too guilty. Seems to me this world has been well and truly technologically contaminated already. I don't think smart fabrics, or even flitters, are going to mess up the culture more than a hill-country megalomaniac armed with military surplus galactic weaponry. What interests me is . . ."
"Yes?"
"You didn't tell anyone on Rezerval where I was going, did you?"
"No. I wanted to get some information before I made it official." Annemari made a helpless gesture. "Instead, all I'm getting is more and more confusion."
"Then the only people who knew my name and destination," Calandra said, as if thinking aloud, "were the Tasman underworld gang who captured me. So they're the only people who could even have thought to impersonate me on Kalapriya. And the one thing
we know for sure about them is that they're smuggling 'mats off Kalapriya. So they're probably smuggling pro-tech weaponry the other way."
"Somebody in the Barents Trading Society has to be involved too," Annemari reminded her. "Probably several people."
"Yes, but nobody in the Society could impersonate me; it's a small clannish group and everybody knows everybody else. Don't you see, Annemari, this fake Diplo has to be one of the Tasman gang! And the officer who's escorting her is either part of the smuggling group, or in danger of his life. Because she has to be coming here to cover or destroy evidence; why else would they risk such an impersonation?"
The girl Khati touched Calandra's hand and whispered something.
"Hai, hai," Calandra said, nodding absently. Then she stopped and paid attention to Khati's increasingly urgent whispers, only saying "Hai" or "Vedya" at intervals.
"Khati thinks we should get out of here," she told Annemari. "Her friend in the Resistance was sent to guide the other 'Calandra' to some place called the Jurgan Caves, in what used to be Thamboon, where she would find evidence of the Bashir's bacteriomat smuggling. Khati says the Bashir shut down everything in Udara when the gossip about the envoys was heard and if we stay here we won't find anything."
"I wouldn't call tanglers exactly 'nothing.' "
"No, but we do want to tie it in with the 'mat smuggling, don't we? And if the others get there first they may destroy the evidence. Why else would one of the Tasman gang team up with a Barents Trading Society officer to trek upcountry? And I think Khati had better come with us. The Bashir is bound to find out she came to our quarters, and once we leave her life won't be worth a Kalapriyan tul." Calandra spoke to Khati again in Kalapriyan. The girl shook her head at first, then as Calandra said something else she bowed low, almost prostrating herself.
"She wanted us to pick up somebody else from her group who's made pilgrimage to these caves, to act as a guide," Calandra explained to Annemari. "I told her it's all right, that I have the location of the caves in my head. Of course I can't explain implants and download chips. So—well, it seems that the caves are holy to some religious sect that's mixed up with the resistance—she seems to think I'm holy by extension." Calandra shook her head. "I've been called a lot of things in my career, but being a minor goddess of the Inner Light Way is definitely a first."
"Let's hope," Annemari said, "her faith in you is sufficient to keep her from going hysterical on her first trip in a flitter, O blessed lady of the Inner Light Way."
Chapter Seventeen
Somewhere between Dharampal and Thamboon on Kalapriya
The morning sunlight flashed off the High Jagirs, turning their snow-covered peaks into a fantasia of gold and crystal. Below, the shadows covered a world of rocky cliffs and deep green forest; above, there was nothing but an endless blue so pale and thin that it made Maris even colder to look up at it. As Gabrel sighed with satisfaction at the vista opening before them, she reflected that it would probably be hours before any of that sunshine reached the hillside where they were making their way up something that might be laughingly referred to as a path. The disadvantages of dirtside living never ceased to amaze her; imagine having to wait for hours just to get the lights turned on!
"There's Bald Wizard," Gabrel pointed out a slightly rounded peak to the right side of the range, "and Old Snow Lady beside him." Maris supposed that the double cones of the second mountain's outline made the reason for the name obvious enough. If you thought like a man.
"And there," he said with a reverence that Maris found intensely irritating, "there is Ayodhana herself." He indicated a distant peak that dwarfed the others into mere foothills.
"If we have to walk all the way to the top of that mountain, we'll maybe get there some time next century," Maris grumbled. "Might as well go back to Valentin now." Valentin had been looking better and better to her during the long hours of night climbing. She had a blister on her right heel, and she felt as filthy as she had before that lovely bath in Harsajjan Bharat's house, and there were permanent wires of pain running from her feet up through her hips—and for what? All that walking to get them into the middle of nowhere? Valentin might be primitive, but it had houses and food stalls and places to sleep that didn't have sharp rocks sticking into your hip bone.
"Nobody climbs Ayodhana," Gabrel said, sounding shocked. "She is the sacred mountain."
"Yeah, and these caves yer friend wants us to go to—they're sacred too, right?" Maris pointed out. "And that doesn't seem to've stopped the Bashir from turning them into some kind of weapons locker, or whatever."
Gabrel looked sick. "I'm afraid it's not exactly—"
Chulayen interrupted him and said something in a low, agitated voice, pointing back the way they had come. "Hai, hai," Gabrel agreed before turning back to Maris. "We need to keep moving. There are tribesmen in Dharampal who know these trails much better than Chulayen does. If they realize we haven't gone straight back to Valentin, they'll have trackers out checking the trails. But if we can cross into Thamboon before they catch up with us, the Vakil won't send anybody over the border. Probably."
"And what if it's not the Vakil tracking us, but that ugly bastard from Udara?"
"That," Gabrel said, "is an extremely good reason to keep moving."
Fortunately, the next segment of the trail was not as grueling as the rocky slopes they'd covered in darkness. It wound about the shoulder of the mountain, well below the treeline, and almost level as such things were counted in the ranges of the Lower Jagirs—which meant they had to scramble up and down over rocks and around tree roots, but at least it wasn't the constant, monotonous climbing that had made the night walk such a misery. The narrow path passed through alternating bands of shadow and light. There were forested areas where the great trees enclosed them like walls and filled the air with a resinous scent that gave Maris new energy, and there were sudden openings into grassy meadows where the shelves of stone lay too near the surface for trees to flourish. In one of the glades Chulayen held up his hand as a signal to pause. While Gabrel and Maris froze, listening for the sounds of somebody following him, he climbed a few feet up one of the gnarled trunks and came down with his hand full of what looked like dark, sticky chunks of quartz. He said a few words to Gabrel and popped one of the rocklike things into his mouth.
"Sundhu resin," Gabrel explained to Maris. "He says chewing it will give us more energy for the trek and we won't need to load our bellies with food."
Maris had been rather looking forward to a stop for something to eat, and she had not been thinking in terms of chewing on something that smelled—she took another suspicious sniff to confirm her suspicions—like paint thinner. Still, Gabrel was munching away now with every evidence of enjoyment, so she cautiously took the smallest sliver of gunk she could find in Chulayen's open hand and stuck the end into her mouth.
Yep. Paint thinner.
She bit down on the stuff and almost gagged as the resinous texture and sharp taste flooded her mouth.
It would doubtless be considered extremely rude to spit it out again. Once they were walking, maybe, if she could manage to be last in line . . . but right now Gabrel and Chulayen were both watching her.
She chewed, swallowed the bitter saliva that filled her mouth, chewed again. It didn't taste quite so bitter now. A few more bites, and the chunk of stuff she'd taken had disintegrated into fibers, and she felt as if she'd just popped a couple of stimmers. And the taste . . . Her eyes widened, and the men laughed.
" 'S good!" she said in surprise.
"It's also addictive," Gabrel told her as they shouldered their packs and started forward again, "but Chulayen says the only people who get a chance to be addicted are the mountain tribes—it has to be taken fresh from the tree, and whatever active compounds make it such a good stimulant break down within hours. Someday I'd like to get a biochemist up here to analyze the freshly harvested sap."
"Mmm," Maris nodded while sucking the last delicious, tangy resinous f
lavor from the fibers in her mouth. Chulayen, ahead of them, spat his mouthful of fibers onto the trail, and she followed his example. "Synthesize this stuff, you could make a fortune selling it as, I dunno, chewing gum or something. Maybe make a drink out of it."
"That," said Gabrel, sounding shocked, "would be immoral. Didn't I tell you it was addictive?"
Maris had thought that was the point. Nothing like having a monopoly of something that people not only liked but had to have more of. If Johnivans could get his hands on an analysis of this stuff, he'd . . . kill the biochemist, and then . . .
What had seemed simple, clear, and profitable when she thought with her Tasman mind did seem immoral when she thought like Calandra Vissi, who was dead but who seemed to be taking over her head anyway. Maris remembered the kids who'd gone the dreamdust way on Tasman. Not just the ones in Johnivans' gang, but the young prostitutes who used the stuff to make their short lives bearable until the 'dust killed them. Would she have died that way if Johnivans hadn't taken her in?
So what was immoral? Providing dreamdust? Or leaving people in lives so miserable that dying of slow starvation on a constant dreamdust high seemed preferable to reality? Damn, trying to be a real person instead of a scumsucker was complicated. Too bad she wasn't really Calandra Vissi. The Diplo probably knew the right thing to do without having to think about it.
Anyway, she couldn't climb and think at the same time, she was too tired. She rubbed the sweat off her forehead—funny how you could sweat so much when it was so bunu cold—and tapped Chulayen's shoulder, holding out her hand for another chunk of sundhu resin.
Breakfast turned out to be a stale, flat onion pancake, handed out by Chulayen while they were still walking the level—and the sundhu resin, or her hunger, made even that taste delicious. Maris started scanning for likely trees every time they entered a band of forest, pointing them out to Chulayen until Gabrel reminded her that there was no point in stockpiling the resin; what they couldn't chew as they walked would lose its stimulant qualities in storage.
Disappearing Act Page 29