Diuturnity's Dawn

by Alan Dean Foster

  A well-dressed—indeed, overdressed—middle-aged couple had just entered the far side of this quadrant of the extensive pavilion. Their constant glancing to right and left betrayed no ulterior motives: Striving to see everything at once was a common affliction among fairgoers. Then Marion happened to meet Lawlor’s distant glance. Despite the range, she stared fixedly in his direction, as if trying to impart a question through sheer force of expression.

  “It’s them, for sure.” Lawlor blinked. “What are they doing in here? They’re supposed to be working the health and gengineering displays.”

  “She looks confused.” At a distance, Rabukanu’s eyesight was slightly sharper than that of his companion. “Maybe you were right when you wondered a few minutes ago if something’s gone wrong.”

  “What about Botha?” After Skettle, the engineer was the most admired member of the group.

  Rabukanu fought to see through the noisy, milling throng. “Hard to say. He never looks confused.”

  “Well, something must be up for them to vacate their position.” Lawlor checked his timer. “Elkannah’s late.”

  The other man did not bother to corroborate. “There’s still plenty of time. More accurate to say that he’s not early. Maybe he and Martine had to take a more roundabout route to the communications center. Maybe they were delayed. It’s plenty early. Relax.”

  “Yar, surely I’ll relax.” Beneath his lightweight tropical jacket, strips of explosive material vied for room with a brace of exceedingly stylized pistols. The pockets of his pants held handfuls of tacnites. He forbore from sarcastically pointing out to his companion that neither of them had come dressed for leisure. “What are they doing?”

  “Still coming this way.” The more laid-back Rabukanu shrugged. “Maybe they just want to kill a few minutes.” He wore the unpleasant, sadistic smile of a schoolteacher who enjoys humiliating his students. “As opposed to bugs. Or maybe something’s rendered their assigned position untenable. You know that if that happens we’re supposed to join up and share locations. A number of possible developments might have forced them to make a move.”

  Lawlor scanned the eddying herd of sightseers. “Yar, you’re right.” He could not repress another quick glance at his timer. “I just wish Elkannah would do the communications facilities so we can get to work.”

  “Itchy to lay down a little arson?” Rabukanu’s smile vanished. “Me, too. Know what a fried bug smells like?”

  Lawlor did not reply. Rabukanu had an irritating tendency to repeat himself. It was an old joke among the group, and he didn’t need any distractions right now. Instead, he focused on their approaching collaborators, still wondering what had driven them to abandon their assigned location. Rabukanu’s appraisal of the situation had been reassuring, but a lingering concern continued to nag at him.

  It all happened so fast he hardly had time to react. One minute, their compatriots were strolling toward them; the next, they had been smothered by more than a dozen tourists. Men, women, even a couple of teenage girls. Except they were not tourists. Coagulating restraints glued Marion’s fingers together and her hands to her sides, rendering her immediately helpless. Botha managed to retreat a couple of steps before a shaped shot of soporific mist splashed his wide-eyed face. One sniff, and he collapsed like a broken doll. Moving with far more athletic grace and digital dexterity than any dozen tourists could muster, the party of plainclothes agents wrapped up the two terrorists as efficiently as a swarm of communal arachnids enwebbing a trapped moth.

  Lawlor stood frozen where he had been standing. “How did they know? How did they know?”

  Once more it was left to the sharp-eyed Rabukanu to explain what was happening. “Weapons sensors. I think I can see the bulge of one under one woman’s jacket.” He smiled faintly. “I thought she was awfully well equipped, but I had no clue. Funny—if we were all carrying nothing but the components of the explosives, the sensor probably wouldn’t pick anything up. Elkannah erred on that one.”

  Lawlor found himself disagreeing as he reached inside his shirt and brought out the three-thirds of an explosive whole. “We can’t wait for him and Martine anymore. We can’t wait for anyone.” His eyes were blazing in advance of the fires he was preparing to set.

  His companion looked at him in alarm. “Hey, we can’t start anything on our own! You know the rules. In the event of a general breakdown in planning, we’re supposed to dispose of our materials and make our way out of here and offworld, so we can strike again later somewhere else.”

  “Distractions of evil. Suck bug blood!” Lawlor was backing away from his colleague. “I didn’t spend a year busting my brain and my butt in training just to walk away from this.” Pressing the three sections of the explosive components together, he slapped the resultant compaction against a nearby pillar and doused it with catalytic fluid. The three-centimeter square instantly began emitting smoke. Reaching inside his jacket, he used one hand to draw a pistol while the other fumbled frantically for more squares. While his words had been frenzied, his expression fully reflected his inner zealotry. Catching sight of the pistol, nearby visitors screamed and ducked or ran for cover.

  With a curse, Rabukanu saw that several of the agents who had taken Botha and Marion down were now looking in his direction, pointing and jabbering excitedly. They’d probably already recorded his image, he thought helplessly. For better or worse, the decision to act had been made. He hoped Skettle would not be too upset. Maybe it would turn out to be a good thing. Time was running.

  As the wild-eyed Lawlor stumbled away from him, Rabukanu started digging for his own carefully stored essentials. If they could just set off one or more detonations, they might have a chance to slip away unscathed in the ensuing turmoil. Already, there were indications of general panic among those tourists who were close enough to see what was happening.

  The catalyst would take several minutes to fully bind the tripartite ingredients into an explosive whole. The delay was intended to allow those planting the devices enough time to escape the blast zone, but not enough for possible searchers to find the weapon.

  If only, Rabukanu thought as he prepared a second explosive patch, Skettle could take out the central communications facilities, the general chaos and destruction they had come to Dawn to wreak would manifest itself fully, to the greater glory and preservation of an unadulterated humankind. Fired with the devotion that had led him to give his life to Elkannah Skettle and to the Preservers, he prepared to apply the explosive patch to an exterior wall of the pavilion. Around him, humans and a few thranx continued to scatter. Their screams and stridulations melted together into a dull ache at the back of his mind.

  As if from far away, he heard Lawlor alternately howling defiance at the onrushing agents and spewing frantic warnings into his communicator. Probably trying to alert the others, Rabukanu knew. The crisp electric spang of the other man’s pistol going off penetrated the general tumult like a sore-throated trumpet criticizing a balm of violins. Then he smelled something sweet as chocolate and stifling as a pillow. Reaching for a single tacnite, he managed to drag a stiffening thumb down the short length of the electronic trigger.

  The powerful little grenade was still clutched firmly in his fingers when it went off.

  As Lawlor’s crazed, bloodthirsty alert was received by those of his fellow Preservers who were still at large, they quickly came to the shocked realization that their purpose and presence had somehow been exposed to the authorities. One couple was taken into custody even as they were preoccupied with listening to the broadcast. Another pair were debating whether to try to flee the grounds or proceed with their assignment when they were enveloped by a sphere of silence and a strong dose of the same immobilizing gas that had toppled their comrade Rabukanu.

  Several, however, were able to set in motion fire and destruction, albeit on a greatly degraded scale. Having heavily infiltrated the fairgrounds in response to the padres’ advance warning, well-prepared local police equipped with
sensitive weapons sensors were able to pounce on the perpetrators even before they could reveal themselves. Those few disturbances that did occur were localized, explosive appliqués that were neutralized before they could go off, and there was no widespread panic among the fair-goers. In the midst of rounding up the last of the terrorists and their even more baffled thranx counterparts the Bwyl, fair business proceeded as usual.

  Beskodnebwyl’s two companions had reacted sharply to the approach of the human and thranx agents. In the ensuing firefight, both had been slain before they could make use of the heavy explosives they were carrying. The consequent confusion had opened an almost imperceptible escape route for Beskodnebwyl, who had seized upon it the instant it had revealed itself.

  Now he found himself staggering through a service corridor, surrounded by the portentous hum of machinery, bleeding green from one side. Both his left truarm and foothand had been shot off, and he had only barely been able to slap a brace of traumagulents over the gushing injuries, followed by strips of self-adhering surgical chitin. Much more running threatened to reopen the life-threatening wounds. If he was not to bleed to death, he needed to seek medical attention soon.

  Not a problem, he told himself sardonically as he skittered along down the dark, conduit-strewn tunnel. He found comfort in its shadowy confines, a reminder of more congenial burrows back home. All he had to do was present himself at the nearest medical facility in Dawn, and they would fix him up. Him, a thranx, obviously damaged by weaponry, on a day when the most important public activity on the planet had been rent by a fusillade of gunfire. Not a problem at all.

  It was over, all over. Everything he and the rest of the Bwyl had worked so long and hard to achieve. Finished. When the mostly human authorities had begun taking his compeers into custody, he had at first been bewildered, then frustrated. That had long since given way to anger. Though the Bwyl’s human counterparts were also being killed or captured, it was clear that somehow, the local authorities had been alerted to their mutual presence and intent. Who would do such a thing, and why? Not one of the Bwyl. There were no traitors among his dedicated, adoptive clan.

  No, crr!!k, it had to be someone with a thorough knowledge of the overall strategy, someone who had access to both the Preservers and the Protectors as well as the authorities. Someone who could be sure of a favorable, even laudatory reception among the species traitors on both sides. Who? Who had not yet been slain, or captured? Who had the wherewithal to call forth such a general alert, and to possibly profit from it?

  Skettle.

  His now-deceased companions had been right to challenge his initial disbelief. Weakened but resolved, Beskodnebwyl of the Bwyl knew he had one last duty to carry out before he could begin to devote any time to the admittedly increasingly remote possibility of preserving his own life.

  18

  In the short time people had spent on Comagrave, much progress had been made in deciphering the elegant, elaborately ideographic Sauun script, though much remained to be done before complex thoughts could be translated in detail. The discovery of the gigantic mausoleum offered up thousands of new inscriptions for study. Meanwhile, researchers utilizing the camp’s two smallest aircars undertook to carry out a preliminary census of the silent sleepers. Preparing a simple mathematical model based on dimensions and density observed within one sizable portion of the crypt, they came up with an initial figure of between two and five billions. If not the entire planetary population at the time of final suspension, it was certainly a substantial portion of the total. And over every new discovery, over each new revelation, hung one single foreboding, dominating question.

  Why?

  Though he had been nominated to lead the expedition and oversee the excavation because of his organizational and leadership skills, Cullen Karasi was also a formidable analyst. Poring over raw data, dissecting and repositioning with the aid of several exoarcheoanalytical programs he had helped develop himself, he felt the key to the mystery of the mass Sauun deepsleep was not nearly as problematic as initially believed. Given sufficient time in which to work, he was confident he would have solved it already. But the need to supervise everyone else’s labor slowed his own efforts significantly. He felt like a sprinter forced to muddle along in the middle of the pack during an especially dull marathon.

  Even so, he was close to the answer. He knew it.

  So when Riimadu volunteered the unpaid assistance of a professional, well-trained crew of excavators, Cullen jumped at the offer. Though some of his own people expressed hesitation at allowing the AAnn an intimate look at the work in progress, Riimadu assured them that the crew would operate entirely under human supervision and would strictly follow camp regulations. Furthermore, they would do no work on their own or without first obtaining human authorization. Besides which, there were only four of them. Eager to make as much progress as possible as quickly as possible, the humans’ initial uncertainty quickly vanished when they had the chance to observe the AAnn team in operation.

  As for Pilwondepat’s vociferous objections to the presence of still more AAnn at the site, these were dismissed as without foundation. “I’d be just as happy to have four, or forty, trained thranx assisting here, if they were made available and were willing to work under the same guidelines,” Cullen told him. Needless to say, the thranx exoarcheologist was less than delighted with this response, but there was nothing more he could do.

  With the aid of the skilled AAnn, exploration proceeded apace. Results were passed along on a regular schedule to planetary administrative headquarters. There they were compiled for forwarding to the specific Terran institutions that were supporting the dig. Everything was going so smoothly that when Cullen’s people began to fall sick around him, coughing and breaking out in red blotches on their faces and upper bodies, he was particularly anguished. The more everyone else’s work suffered, the more it slowed his own.

  Bhasiram, the camp physician, diagnosed the rapidly spreading contagion as an upper respiratory disease caused by exceedingly fine spores arising from the excavation. Dust masks were of no use. Nothing in her arsenal of antibiotics had any effect on the condition, which one camp wag christened “Sauunusitus.” While not fatal, it was exceedingly debilitating and beyond the frustrated Bhasiram’s ability to cure. Hospitalization was required to restore the strength of the afflicted. Pilwondepat and the AAnn were not affected.

  It was clear that work at the dig could not go on until a cure, or at least a suitable prophylactic, was found for the spores. Working in sealed masks and breathing canned air was a possibility, but the necessary equipment was not available on Comagrave and would have to be imported. Neither solution was satisfactory. It was therefore proposed that the AAnn, who were by now familiar with the site, would remain to maintain it without in any way advancing the work until their human supervisors could safely return. Though they expressed sorrow at the need for the humans to temporarily leave the dig, the AAnn agreed to care for it in their transitory absence. Riimadu CRRYNN would stay behind to oversee. In the absence of any immediate availability of human vehicles, the AAnn also thoughtfully offered to bring in several of their largest cargo carriers to ferry the afflicted and their as-yet-uninfected companions on the long journey back to Comabraeth.

  As soon as he got wind of the proposal, Pilwondepat stormed into Cullen’s quarters. It required a considerable effort on the thranx’s part not to stridulate wildly as he entered. Even so, with antennae waving and mandibles clacking, he still presented a highly agitated figure. An insectophobe would have been intimidated. The head of the excavation team was not.

  “Something I can do for you, Pilwondepat?” Cullen inquired pleasantly. Though he had not yet succumbed to the insidious spores, the noticeable splotch of scarlet that marred his left cheek was not a blush.

  “Do for me? Do for me! Crllhht!” The need to speak in Terranglo forced the insectoid exoarcheologist to keep his thoughts as well as his words under control. “I can’t believe you are
going to turn this unprecedented scientific discovery over to the AAnn!”

  “We are not turning over anything to the AAnn.” Having previously experienced the thranx’s ire, Cullen was not disturbed by Pilwondepat’s latest outburst. The supervisor knew it was merely the latest in a long series of attempts to freeze Riimadu out of the ongoing research. “Since arriving to assist us, they have conducted themselves in an exemplary manner. They’ve done exactly as they were told, and no more. Would that I had another dozen humans on staff who took instructions as well.”

  “That is precisely my point.” Antennae whipped forward. “Don’t you remember any of our discussions? Have you forgotten all that I’ve told you about AAnn methodology and technique? They rely foremost on cunning, and deception.” Both antennae straightened. “It’s patent they have certainly deceived you.”

  Cullen’s civility gave way to annoyance. “Until and unless they act in a nonprofessional manner, neither I nor any of my people have any quarrel with them.” He continued packing away his personal effects. These would remain behind until he returned from Comabraeth, properly equipped to work among the drifting spores. “Other than academically, I’m not interested in the personal animosities that endure between your people and Riimadu’s. You’re both of you here thanks to the magnanimity of the local government.” Setting aside a container of clothing, he added pointedly, “That permission can be withdrawn at any time.”

  Pilwondepat brushed off the quiet threat. “Would you say that infecting you and every member of your team with imported bacteria designed to drive you away from the site constituted acting in a nonprofessional manner?”

  Cullen gaped. “You’re joking, aren’t you?”

  “Do I sound like I am jesting? Do I look like I am jesting?”

  “I wouldn’t know, not being versed in the more subtle overtones of thranx enunciation and gesture. You can’t be serious, Pilwondepat.”