Strings

by Dave Duncan

  He babbled on. “So you have the rest of the day off, Your Largesse, at least as far as Operations is concerned. Quinto and Usk show up tomorrow, then decision time for Tiber. I wouldn’t have called you now, but we seem to have mislaid a couple of meters of deputy director, and I wondered if you might have seen any, er, lying around?”

  Smartass! “You could ask System.”

  “Ah, well, I did. Never mind, but if you do happen to…lay your hands on him, tell him the media are on their way. Nice room you’ve got there.” Baker Abel vanished.

  “Saints have mercy!” a male voice groaned from under the bedclothes.

  “He’s a kindergarten dropout. I swear it.”

  Cedric rolled over with grunts of pain. “Oooh! Pity the poor cripple, beautiful lady. I’ll never walk again.”

  Nothing wrong with his hands, though. Alya removed them and rasped a fingernail over his cheek. “Sandpaper! And you have work to do.”

  He wailed. “Sadist! I hadn’t finished—I just took a rest at halftime.

  “Tough.”

  “You’ll make me wait until tonight?”

  “Abstinence makes the lust grow stronger.”

  Tiber was due just after midnight the next day. Tonight would be his last chance.

  Evidently Cedric had pandered to his ambitions when ordering his Cainsville wardrobe. He returned from his own room bedecked in ranger denims, grinning and strutting like a kid with a private moonship as he escorted Alya to breakfast. She wondered what the real rangers would think, and concluded that a deputy director need not care about their opinions.

  When they reached the cafeteria she saw no rangers around, but she did notice people sending Cedric nods and small smiles of acknowledgment. His performance against Eccles Pandora had apparently met with approval. She was surprised, for he was still the boss’s grandson, who had been brought in over everyone else’s head. Yet he was doing astonishingly well. Was it possible that Hubbard Agnes had been serious in giving him the job? What other destiny did that sinister madwoman have in mind for him?

  They ate and then still had time to spare before the lev arrived with Eccles and the rest of the media stars. Cedric suggested a quick inspection of the equipment. He was bubbling with excitement over his coming exploration. In Alya’s opinion, considering what she knew of planet Nile, he was nutty as a palm grove.

  “De Soto Dome,” Cedric told the golfie, adjusting Alya in the crook of his arm, where he preferred her.

  “Access to de Soto Dome is restricted at this time,” he was told.

  Cedric frowned.

  “Devlin’s probably being careful,” Alya said. Someone in Cainsville was a murderer—or so Fish had said. “The last skiv was booby-trapped, remember.”

  “Right, so it was! Override!”

  In a moment Cedric’s easy grin vanished. The reply had been through his earpatch, and Alya did not know what it said. She could guess.

  He pouted. “I was told my grade was the highest there was. Little did they know…Well, let’s think about arranging the party.”

  He should have been thinking of that anyway, Alya decided. He was obviously annoyed at being refused by System, but the extent of his authority over it had always seemed extraordinary to her. Indeed, she suspected that the rating he had been granted might have come automatically with his nominal rank of deputy director and was an oversight that Hubbard Agnes would surely correct as soon as she discovered it.

  Alya left him jabbering to a comset and went back to her room, feeling oddly unneeded. Her intuition seemed to be content with the way things were progressing. Tiber still felt right, and none of the other names did. Cedric was no longer important.

  Moala had not returned. She had gone off in full war paint the previous evening, admitting with much giggling that she had somehow contrived dates with no less than three handsome young rangers—because of the language problem, she claimed. That was not a very credible excuse when System could translate anything. Alya had advised her to choose the largest and let him worry about the other two, but she was curious to know how things had turned out. Moala would certainly tell her, in brightly embroidered detail.

  And Jathro’s continued absence was odd. Alya settled herself before the comset and called him. There was a noticeable delay before he appeared, looking annoyed and even more self-important than usual.

  “I am in conference, Your Highness.” The view around him was masked, but Alya could see a corner of the table at which he was seated. It was not rectangular—probably pentagonal, for the director and her four horsemen. Most likely Hubbard Agnes had the same sort of office in Cainsville as she did at HQ in Nauc.

  “I am so sorry to intrude,” Alya responded. “Do let me know if I can help in any way. Rinse your socks, maybe. Com end.”

  She glared angrily at the blank screen. Two-anna conniver! Slimy tub thumper!

  Now what? Well, it was about the time that Cedric would be welcoming Eccles and a trainload of reporters from all the other networks and media, a real invasion. Alya did not particularly wish to watch.

  Kas!

  She had been neglecting Kas. This would be early evening, Banzarak time. She placed the call.

  He answered at once, as though he had been waiting for her there, in his familiar, shabby old office with its book-strewn desk and battered leather chairs of unknown antiquity. She saw at once the ravages of strain on his face, and she could have believed that his beard was grayer than it had been two days before.

  Was it only two days? It felt like a lifetime.

  “Little sister!” His smile was forced. “How do you fare?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Kas, darling! I’m fine.”

  “The doubts have gone?”

  “Yes! Yes!” She could barely recall the anguish that had racked her when they parted. “Oh, yes. I’m fine. It’s beautiful, Kas!”

  “You’ve seen it, then?”

  “Tiber. It’s called Tiber. And yes, I’ve seen it, briefly. Glorious! So many butterflies!”

  “No more regrets?”

  “Only about you…and Thalia and the kids.” How could she have been so selfish as to forget them? Thalia was a distant cousin; she also had the buddhi. So did all their children, so far as could be told. They would still be suffering, feeling the siren call of an open door, a safer, finer world available. “Kas, is there no chance that you, too—all of you?”

  She thought he shook his head—she could not be sure. Then he said, “This is your kismet. Maybe next time.”

  “But this—” She recalled what Jathro had predicted about Hubbard Agnes after her folly at the press conference. Jathro, a shrewd politician for all his sleaze and pomposity, had said then that the director could last no more than a week before the hounds pulled her down. Alya had been overlooking the scheming and intriguing that must be under way. “This one may be the last, Kas dear.”

  He coughed meaningfully—there could be listeners on such a call. “I saw you on Thursday.”

  Kas was no mean twister himself when he wanted to be. He must have been sorely puzzled, though, by Alya’s appearance on the holo. None of her brothers or sisters or cousins had ever gone public like that.

  “Oh…I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Then I am sure it was the right thing to do. I would only worry if I thought you were trying to be logical.”

  She laughed. “Beast! But—I think it was because I had to meet someone.”

  “Tall, dark, and handsome?”

  But she dared not try to explain about Cedric. He was not relevant anyway. His grandmother had other plans for him. “Tall, fair, and looks lost?” she tried.

  “Then I can guess. He was impressive, Alya. Don’t stop to think, whatever you do.”

  Her mind whirled. Kas…and Cedric. Damn! Maybe that long string of innocence was important, after all. She wished she dared confide in Kas.

  “But is this farewell?” he asked. “I’ll get the others—”

&nbs
p; “No! I’ll call again.” She thought quickly. “Thirty-six hours from now?”

  “We’ll be waiting,” he promised.

  There was more, all told in hints and half truths in case of listeners, mingled with unimportant precious things. The hibiscuses were dying, Kas said. She told him she had been given a flower with two heart-shaped red petals. Afterward she sat and wept for a while. The future could wait; the past deserved tribute.

  “So that’s SKIV-Four,” Frazer Franklin pontificated. “Can you tell us exactly what that means?”

  “Well, ‘SKIV’ stands for ‘self-contained investigatory vehicle,’” the tame expert explained. “The ‘Four’ simply means that it will support four people.”

  Everyone knew that, Alya thought. Not wanting to leave her room with her eyes still red, she had turned to WSHB to see what was going on. The expedition ought to have been on the move already, but obviously there was some delay, and the anchor was filling in. His guest was a vague, dried-out ancient. Not impressive.

  “For how long?”

  “Well, if needs be, almost indefinitely. I admit recycled solids and water don’t sound appetizing, but as long as you have power, then you can distill…”

  Alya changed channels—and got more filler.

  “Impossible to tell. Certainly one stone hand-ax is not very impressive evidence on which to presume sentience.”

  “And this cuthionamine lysergeate that we’ve all heard so much about—it can produce homicidal mania?”

  “Oh, very definitely. The regression to an innate stone-working behavior is more speculative, but there have been reports of…”

  She tried yet another channel and was rewarded with a shot of de Soto Dome and the skiv.

  “…sometimes known as ‘beetles’ because of the three sections.” The female voice was nasty, like fingernails on silk. “The front is the driver’s cab. The middle section is the living quarters, and the rear portion the working part—the lab, and so on. Of course they’re modular, and in this case that rear part is quite small, because they’re only going out to retrieve the, er, body. Those tongs on the back are very remarkable tools—sensitive enough to pick up a hecto coin, yet strong enough to lift a house. Now, if we could get a close-up…”

  Alya went back to WHSB.

  “And we do seem to have some action now,” Frazer remarked with ill-concealed relief. But the great dome remained deserted. In the center the metal object plate of the transmensor was as blank as a skating rink, while the giant three-module skiv brooded alone in a stark puddle of light beamed down from the impossibly high roof. The only action that Alya could see was that one of the gantries was trundling back into the shadows, as if to leave room.

  Likely Frazer had been tipped off, for suddenly the window was open. The object plate had become a circular void, pure darkness. Nothing more happened.

  “I expect they’re adjusting Contact,” Franklin commented off-stage. “As you can see, the surface of Nile is dark. That’s normal—the sun never penetrates the—Ah…did you notice that, Jimmy? There’s quite a wind blowing down there, and I’m sure that was a cloud of dust we just saw coming up through the pit.”

  Open the champagne, Alya thought.

  “More likely a cloud of spores,” someone else said. “There’s a circulation—spores and dust carried upward to fertilize the cloud tops, and the fallout—”

  He was cut off by a burst of excited chatter from Franklin as a ramp ran out from the edge of the pit and settled down into the dark. There was no mistaking the swirl of dust.

  Covering another pause in the breathtaking activity, Franklin began asking his expert witness about decontamination. Nothing simpler, he was told—the Institute was meticulous. The dome would be opened afterward to a stellar corona and washed with high-energy plasma and hard radiation.

  Alya switched channels.

  But every station seemed to be carrying the same picture, and variations on the same talking heads.

  At last the skiv began to move. Looking very much like a giant insect on its outstretched wheels, it flexed over the lip of the pit and rolled smoothly down the ramp. She sent a silent blessing after Cedric. She could imagine few things she would enjoy less than a visit to such a hell planet, but he was probably having the most exciting experience of his young life. She wished that her intuition would guard other people as well as herself. She told herself that he could come to no harm, that such feats were commonplace to the wizards of Cainsville.

  And then there was a tap at the door and Moala was back, bubbling over with good humor and bursting to recount all her adventures. Alya was surprised at how good it felt to have some female company, and Moala was always good company. She was much less stupid than she liked to pretend, and could certainly not be one-tenth as debauched. But she told a good story, and after recounting her arduous experiences with a hairy-chested ranger named Al, she went on to invent sequels, introduce new characters, and turn her evening into a continuing saga of unbridled lust. How much came from her own imagination and how much from other sources Alya could not guess, but the end result was both mind-boggling and side-splitting. Moala especially approved of hairy chests.

  At last, though, she ran out of either breath or invention. “But you?” she asked. “That big young man of yours—never have I seen one so tall! Did you let him bed you again? Is he good? And tell me exactly what he looks like.”

  Alya fought a tough withdrawing action before a barrage of questions, admitting to having been intimate with Cedric, but refusing to discuss his anatomy, stamina, or technique.

  “Then I will borrow him and see,” Moala said complacently. She peered sideways into the holo. “There he is, no?”

  And there he was, yes. As long as the window was open, then signals could relayed from the skiv, and at the moment the comset was showing the inside of the cab as if through a viewport behind the occupants. Devlin was driving, with Eccles Pandora beside him. In the rear seats, and only visible if one stood close and peeked in at an angle, were Baker Abel and the unmistakable shape of Cedric. This would be the third consecutive day that 4-I had dominated the world’s news, and Alya could not recall ever seeing a planetary excursion given such massive coverage; certainly not for a Class Three world.

  Despite its cantilevered wheels and complex suspension, the skiv rolled and pitched. The view in the headlights showed the surface of Nile to be a jumble of boulders and ridges, largely hidden by the bloated globes and spires of fungoid vegetation, with only the steeper pinnacles emerging as completely bare rock. Some of the growths were as large as houses; some were shaped as grotesquely as floating seaweed. Any touched by the skiv exploded like puffballs into dust, which was whipped away by the wind, although Devlin had to keep using wipers to clear the sticky stuff from his windshield. Beyond the lurid, scabrous jungle, where the headlights could not reach, world and sky were black. The only thing similar on Earth would be a view from a submarine.

  Somehow Alya had come back to the WSHB channel, and Pandora was piping a commentary in her sweet voice, occasionally flashing a question at Devlin.

  Their destination lay about ten kilometers from Contact, Alya gathered, at the spot where the first skiv had been parked when the disaster occurred—it had been brought back to Contact by remote control. The detectors were picking up response from that area, from Gill Adele’s suit. So the sentience theory was looking shakier by the minute. Of course, if the suit had been moved—if it were set up on an altar, with offerings laid before it, for example—then a further search for stone-age beings might be justified.

  Alya wondered if Cedric was regretting so much breakfast, with all that bouncing. And—

  And the scene rippled.

  Pandora’s childish voice faded and returned, marred by a faint background crackling. Devlin must have seen the danger right away on his instruments, for he ripped out a screaming oath that stopped whatever his companion was saying. He revved the motors, spun the wheel, and the cab tilted almost
on its side. Spires and trellises of fungus flashed by the windows, or erupted in blizzards of dust. The view shimmered again.

  Then the scene was WSHB’s Nauc studio, with Frazer Franklin registering concern. “We have a minor transmission problem there, as you may have noticed. We…” He paused, raising a hand to his ear in a dramatic but completely unnecessary gesture. He let the suspense grow. “Apparently the problem is a little more serious than just—”

  Alya knew how much more serious, but she was surprised to discover that she had her arms tight around Moala, who was in turn hugging her.

  “System!” Alya shouted. “Have you direct transmissions from that skiv on Nile?” She wished Cedric were there, with his higher rating, but apparently hers was adequate. She had expected a refusal. Instead she was shown the cab again. If it had rocked before, now it was leaping, while the bloated jungle danced insanely before the plunging headlights, whirling from cellar to sky and back again. The motors’ roar was audible under Pandora’s screams. Could any machinery withstand such pounding for long? The transmission rippled, twisted, then stabilized again.

  Cedric! Oh, Cedric!

  Moala was shaking her. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s the string!” Alya said, fighting to keep panic out of her voice. There was nothing she could do. Nothing anyone could do. “The string’s become unstable.”

  “Why?” Moala yelled, sounding prepared to go in search of whoever was responsible for the problem and make him stop it or rue his folly.

  “Insh’ Allah!” It is the will of God.

  Another gravitational field was interfering, some other mass approaching the line of the string. If it were very small and moving very fast—an asteroid, for example, close to either Earth or Nile—then the effect might pass in a few minutes, without damage. If it were larger, like a star, then the string was going to be broken. A broken string was never found again.

  Alya began shouting orders at the set, switching views, jumping from the commercial channels to Cainsville’s own System and back again.