Juanita Coulson - Children of the Stars 04

by Past of Forever

  “How did these so-called N’lacs...?”

  “Search!" Praedar’s basso thundering choked off the Saunders’ arguments in midbreath. The Whimed’s crest was a crown, but he was very much in control of himself and the situation. “Visit. Observe our site. Investigate our findings in situ, as we have had the courtesy to do for your work.”

  The challenge stunned the Saunders. They gaped at him, speechless. Rei Ito sidled past Saunder Aides, moving in close on the argument. “That’s a very interesting proposal.” She looked around, soliciting seconds, and got them. The Saunders were becoming aware that dozens of scientists had gathered to watch the show. Like the news hounds, they awaited the Assembly hosts’ response.

  “Really, this has been a most unseemly...” Feo began, back-pedaling.

  “Come on. It’s a fair point. They’ve visited your dig twice now, Saunder, and you haven’t been to luxury’s planet even once.” ^

  “Bad for xenoarch,” Imhoff put in. “You ought to put up or shut up.”

  Feo and Hope were shoulder to shoulder, looking harried at the barrage of comment from all sides. Dan said, “For the family rep, you may have to accept Praedar’s invitation.”

  His cousin shot him a bitter glare. “You’re enjoying this.”

  Dan shrugged. “Whether I am or not, there’s justice here. Well? As Ito said, it’s an interesting porposal. Have you got the guts to confront our evidence in the field?”

  The Saunders were in the middle of the room, but they were cornered. Hope threw up her hands in a gesture of defeat and Feo spat, “Oh, all right!” He bowed mockingly to Praedar. “Irast, we are at your service.”

  Praedar had never appeared more alien—his crest softening yet spiky, eyes oil-on-water colors, his lips parted in a feral smile. “Anticipated. When?”

  The Saunders weren’t going to be let off with vague promises. Their rival insisted on specifics.

  Affecting an offhand manner, Feo said, “Oh, that’s difficult to say. We have to wrap up the Assembly, of course, then we have some publications to tend to...”

  Dan broke in. “Let’s not let the appointment drag on too long. That’s happened too often, in science and in our family. Feuds and duplicated efforts have wasted both parties’ time. With common sense and cooperation, two expeditions could produce a unified picture of this ancient civilization, instead of quibbling endlessly over details.”

  “Logical,” Ito agreed. She didn’t give the Saunders any chance to rebut. “What’s the date? You have the cream of science pubs here. We can all put it in our journals and vidcasts...”

  Was the Pan Terran news hound getting even for Feo’s cracking the whip on her? Whatever her motive, at the moment she was Praedar’s ally. Other reporters took up her theme, pressuring the Saunders relentlessly.

  “Three weeks,” Feo said suddenly, surprising everyone, especially his wife. Hope gawked at him as he went on. “That will entail considerable interruption of our work. However, there apparently is no other way to end this ridiculous stand-off.”

  Ito turned expectantly to Praedar, ready to record his reply. “We await you,” the Whimed said. A relieved murmur ran through the crowd.

  “Good. Kimball and I will accompany them, if you don’t object,” Ito announced.

  Praedar didn’t. Dan suspected his kindred did, but were afraid to make any more of a scene.

  Praedar nodded. “I am content. Whatever you learn on T-W 593, you will witness what has occurred and know that the history of the N’lacs holds significance for all humanoid species. Truth will be served.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Nontriumphant Return

  Dan knew the trip home was going to be far tougher than the outbound ride. He longed to cut short the formal affair, retreat to the ship, and launch. Praedar, though, was still building bridges with influential people at the Complex. So his team wore their bright smiles, shook hands, and continued to chitchat into the small hours of the morning. A number of new acquaintances like Imhoff and Jarrett took the trouble to talk to Dan at length. They all expressed hopes of meeting him at the next Assembly and told him not to take his critics’ comments too much to heart. Dan answered them noncommittally, painfully conscious of his uncertain future and that of the expedition.

  When the social finally ended, there was no rest. The team had to rush to change from their formal clothes, collect their personal luggage, and head for Port. The original schedule had set them up for a predawn window. However, traffic kept stalling. Dan wondered if that was yet another petty tactic by his cousin. The hours stretched on. Pilot and passengers boosted meds, trying to stay alert. Clearance came almost at midday.

  Dan was grateful for his years on the starlanes. He needed that experience now. This was an ordeal demanding he operate on automatic.

  Launch. Atmospheric flight. Increasingly higher orbit. Kilometer marks ticking past. Reaching. Feo’s and Hope’s planet shrinking...

  It must have shrunk thus on the N’lac ships’ screens, as they departed from T-S 31I two thousand years ago. They, too, had been going home—to permanent enslavement.

  FTL point, and they were on their way across the light-years, with vector logged and locked.

  Dan wanted to crawl into a hole and brood over the setbacks they’d suffered on his kinsman’s world. He knew his companions felt the same. In a single-stage starhopper, however, privacy was impossible.

  Praedar did his best to pull them out of their depression. He look the long view, putting the Saunder-hosted Assembly in perspective. This wasn’t the first such conference, and it wouldn’t be the last. No, the team hadn’t scored an unqualified success, but it had made some converts. They’d knocked out Feo’s dirty-tricks man, Tavares. They’d squeezed a promise from the Saunders to pay a courtesy visit to T-W 593.

  “Time will prove us right,” Praedar said.

  They tried to believe. And they tried to forget. Most of all, the Terrans and Ruieb-An yearned for sleep.

  Ordinarily, once he’d completed in-flight checks, Dan soaked up as much sack time as he wished during a starhop. Now, weighted by the responsibility for four other lives, his stints in his web were litful, disturbed by bad dreams. When he awoke, he was still tired. Station-tending chores had never seemed so tedious.

  To walk in planetary gravity on his planet; to breathe air filled with dust devils, not the smell of rain forest and rotting vegetation; to see purple foilage, not yellow; to be among friends, human and alien—to be . .. home .. .

  Days crept by, full of introspection and regrets.

  If only ... if only ... if only...

  And then they were going sublight and dropping into real space.

  Dan beamed a terse ETA message ahead and fed figures to the comps. They retraced their outbound passage. In a few hours the ship was descending from high vacuum and blackness, entering a blue-green atmosphere.

  On final orbit, Dan took manual control. This might be his last opportunity to be a pilot for a long, long time. As he lined up on the approach leg, zoom scans showed him a crowd of vehicles and beings gathering at the northwest edge of the mesa. A welcoming committee! A warmer one, he hoped, than what they’d met on T-S 311. He adjusted braking to stop them well short of that waiting mob and went to touchdown phase.

  Praedar’s Project taxied to her slot. The herd of desert trucks and rovers bucketed toward her. The sight boosted the travelers’ morale a lot. They hurried through tie-down procedures, eager to debark.

  Halfway down the ramp, they were engulfed by laughing colleagues and N’lacs amid a chaos of bear hugs. Everyone was talking at once. Whimeds huddled joyfully. Vahnajes bowed and touched gently. Armilly whooped and roared. Childlike, webbed fingers clutched Dan’s, and piping native voices rose above the storm of offworlders’ conversations. Chuss and Meej flung their skinny arms around Dan in an exuberant imitation of a Terran embrace. “Kelfee! Kelfee! You come back in fly-fly! Bring all friends back! You home!”

  A lump filled Dan’
s throat. He said huskily, “That’s right, you fellows. All home home,” and he returned the youngsters’ clumsy hugs.

  Truth from the mouths of funny-faced, goggle-eyed e.t.s! This was home, though not one that Varenka’s New Earth Renaissances could ever love. It took a settler, a true child of the stars, to feel that way about a planet parsecs from Earth. But knowing he belonged here, was wanted here, twisted Dan’s emotions powerfully.

  How long would T-W 593 be home, for any of them?

  “Hey, how did it go?” Sheila bellowed. “Damn you, McKel-vey! You tied us in knots down here! That was the barest-boned naked-ass ETA message I’ve ever heard! Why didn’t you tell us anything?”

  “Yeah!” Rosie cried. “Sadists!”

  Others spoke up, the clamor deafening.

  “Was Imhoff there?”

  “What about Retur?”

  “Did Quas-Jin report on the Saunderhome restoration?”

  Kat shouted, “I took plenty of candid vids. You’ll see them all. ..”

  Joe added, “And I bought all the recorded wafers of the sessions I could, so you’ll have the flavor of the program..

  “Was Jumapili’s update on the Eridami dig...?”

  “How did Bill handle Jarrett and the effigy aces?”

  Realizing Getz wasn’t with the other returning travelers, his top student exclaimed, “Where is he?”

  Apprehension replaced elation. The stay-at-homers’ fears were obvious. “Not another accident, another death!”

  Praedar ended the suspense. “Dr. Getz resigned. He has joined the Gokhale Institute.”

  “What! He can’tl”

  “He did,” Joe Hughes said flatly, and he snapped his fingers by way of illustration.

  “I understand the trigger,” Kat put in. “Jarrett ripping his data to shreds, as we figured he would. Bill might have simply opted out of the presentations, saying he’d decided his paper wasn’t quite ready. He could have resigned later on. The fact is, he deserted us, right in the middle of the Assembly.”

  Nodding, Praedar said, “His action, coming at such a crucial time, hurt our group’s credibility with the sponsors.”

  Getz’s students were devastated. Several wept. Others swore. Baines growled, “What a guy! Never mind about the team!” Someone else yelled, “Traitor! That’s what he is!”

  “He never did fit in...”

  “Everything for his project, nothing for us.”

  Getz’s most loyal student said defensively, “That’s not fair. We don’t know what caused him to...”

  “Don’t we?” Baines countered.

  “If McKelvey hadn’t pushed him so hard...”

  Joe shook his head. “It’s looking more and more as if Dan was right about those glass elements. And Bill knew he was.”

  Dan didn’t have time to relish the praise. He was busy helping cooler heads restrain quick-tempered types. When things calmed down a bit, Praedar told Getz’s students, “Your instructor did not appear concerned for your situation. You are welcome to stay with the expedition. You have been good team members. This dig offers opportunity to young xenoarchaeologists. You may discover you wish to work with specialties other than xenoeffigies.” “Y-yes,” the most senior student said. “We... we appreciate that. I could study with Armilly...”

  Another volunteered, “And I’m interested in fluidics. I took my minor in frontier-world glass manufacturing. Maybe I can assist Dan.”

  “Good.” Praedar dismissed that topic and jumped to another. “How has excavation progressed in our absence?”

  Joe said, “You must have plenty to show us.”

  Sheila grabbed the cue. “Oh, we do. A real mixed bag. Some good stuff, some dead ends, some itchy snags.” Chuss and his fellow N’lacs wrinkled their noses and shuddered. Sheila went on. “But we want to hear what you did at the Assembly first. Give!”

  As the stay-at-homes nagged, Dan eyed them warily. How were they were going to react when they got another nasty kick in the shins? And they would—the story of their representatives’ triumphs and failures.

  Ruieb-An said. “Is ... urr... need-ful re-tum. .. urr... all speci-i-mens to lab-or-a-tory...”

  The reality of that ended all demands and counterdemands for the time being. The recent travelers got off light. They readjusted to gravity while their colleagues transferred exhibit cases and luggages to the vehicles. That done, everyone piled aboard and the caravan started for N’lac Valley.

  Dan gazed across the familiar landscape of dark mountain ranges, thickets of tendrilled trees, and dutos riding thermals. Clouds of oony spun aside in the the vortices left by the trucks, then regrouped in crimson, humming swarms. The scene should have put him at ease. It had all the right sights, sounds, and scents.

  But...

  Something was wrong.

  Hardly aware he was doing so, he was scratching the backs of his hands, his nape, his thighs, and his arms. He had company. N’lacs and offworlders all were scratching, the N’lacs more frantically than expedition members. With difficulty, Dan mastered the impulse. A few minutes later the scratching urge disappeared as suddenly as it had begun, and he realized that his impression that something was out of kilter with the landscape had vanished when the bugs-under-the-skin irritation stopped.

  Weird! This wasn’t like his instinctive reaction to an alien environment. Anyway, the N’lacs had felt the peculiar urge, too.

  “Well, now you’ve had a taste of it,” Sheila said. Chuss, looking badly spooked, hung onto the back of her seat. The blonde patted him reassuringly. “That itch has been driving us nuts ever since you left.”

  Dan didn’t want an elaboration. Kat and Joe didn’t seem to be in a hurry to hear the details, either. Were they, like him, half afraid further mention might set off more scratching episodes?

  “Any more quakes?” Kat asked.

  “Several.” Sheila’s expression was grim. “And still no epicenter Baines can pin down. No more deaths, though, thank whatever deities are in charge of such things.”

  Trucks and rovers rolled into the valley and collected in the parking area, whining to a stop. Dan heard numerous malfunctions in that dying chorale. He’d have to get back to work on vehicle maintenance. Obviously that had slipped in his absence.

  Offloading kept everyone busy for the next couple of hours. But it took far less time to restore exhibits to their shelves than it had to pack them neatly in the starhopper’s hold. When the chore was done, the stay-at-homers renewed their plea: What had happened on T-S 311?

  Praedar didn’t reply. He stared at Hanging Rock, and for a moment Dan thought the Whimed would go to Chen’s grave. Instead Praedar headed up Dome Hill at a ground-eating pace. The rest tagged after him—except for the N’lacs. Sleeg was squatting near the dud pits. One daunting glare from him, and Chuss and the other young villagers halted and sat beside him meekly.

  When Dan reached the top of the slope, he saw that the home team had made good use of his instructions about operating the dredge. They’d moved a small mountain of sand and rubble. Both domes and the painted ramp were almost completely uncovered now. Another structure had been revealed, too—a low, sand-strewn tunnel connecting the two domes. That ought to make investigating the interiors easier.

  The smaller dome was Praedar’s goal. There wasn’t room inside for everyone. Stay-at-homers waged a brief, noisy argument and verbally drew straws to see who’d play tour guide. Sheila, Armilly, Rosie, and a couple of, others escorted the travelers through the maze of string markers and the door Dan had opened earlier, into the muraled chamber.

  The pictorial history of N’lac enslavement bothered him even more now than it had when he’d first seen it. Something about those fragmented figures, swimming across space and time, gave him a cold feeling in his gut. He turned his back on the images and followed the team to the far side of the room.

  Ruieb-An was engrossed in a batch of recently revealed writings alongside the inner door. Other scientists crowded around Armilly. Th
e Lannon’s remote scan monitors danced with ghostly schematics traced by his electronic probes. “Tunnel go down in hoosh then up sawoosha to there.”

  Sheila talked under his garbled Terran. “We coordinated these advanced look-sees with some exterior surveys. We pulled core samples. The usual—dating, materials analysis. We didn’t try to bore on through, of course. We don’t want to damage anything inside. That’s probably irreplaceable. Armilly’s giving us terrific views of what’s in there, though—frustrating ones. You know. We want to see and touch. Everything’s been hanging fire until McKelvey fixes this lock.”

  “Aaa!" Praedar said. “Our xenomechanician. Yes.”

  The team turned hopefully to Dan. He was happy to be relied on. But he wasn’t sure he could perform the miracles Praedar was expecting. This lock looked different—tougher—than the one at the other door.

  “Xenomechanician, huh?” Rosie said, chuckling. “So that’s what he is. I’ll bet that made the taxonomists at the Assembly scratch their heads.”

  Dan was peering at the door and its mechanism. “The wall’s still intact here. No broken pieces hanging out. That makes putting it back in gear touchier. I may have to remove a section.”

  “It is approved,” Praedar muttered. He leaned over Armilly’s scanners, staring hungrily at those shadowy glimpses of treasures beyond the locked portal. “Do so. We must view.”

  Kat said, “The N’lacs tried hard to maintain a link between the domes. Yet they abandoned them. Now that we’re opening them again, after all these centuries, Chuss’ people seem to be wavering between reverence and terror. Why? What’s in the big dome?” “Machineroo thing,” Armilly offered. He cued his monitors. Outlines of a bulky object filled the screen. Tracers blocked out angles.

  “Big, whatever it is,” Dan said. “Octagonal? And some kind of paneling or cowling running around the base of the structure. Just that one huge glob, right in the middle. Can’t figure it.” “None of us will, until you get us inside,” Sheila growled. “Power thing hummy register and make squiggle chart move,” Armilly noted.