The other possibility was that he was unconscious, and some alien intelligence was playing with his mind to such a degree that he just thought he was having dinner. That didn’t make him feel any better because he was fully aware of the tastes, the smells, and the sounds. While Lyvia Rholyn was attractive to the eye and had a nice figure, she wasn’t exactly his type. Any alien intelligence that could simulate all that and orbit a shield system in three layers was potentially deadly.
But … if it were that deadly … why bother to play with his mind at all?
He took a swallow of the Cooran.
The server reappeared with his salad and a thick creamlike soup for Lyvia.
Roget glanced out the window toward the square. A couple was walking toward them, and the woman had a leash in her hand. On the end of the leash was a small dog. Roget smiled. “That’s the first dog I’ve seen.”
“We had one when I was growing up.”
Roget watched as the dog—seemingly a long-haired red dachshund, not short-haired and black and tan like Hildegarde or Muffin—made his way past Dorinique, almost strutting as he did. “Are pets less common?”
“Less common than what or where?” Lyvia raised her eyebrows.
Roget shrugged. “That’s the only one I’ve seen.” He took a bite of the salad, with a dark greenery that didn’t taste that unfamiliar, for all its deep coloration. The nut fragments were good, but not a taste he recalled, and the cheese crumbles were similar to, but more tangy than, a blue cheese or gorgonzola.
Lyvia took several spoonfuls of her soup before replying. “They’re expensive to license, and having one without a license can be a criminal offense.”
“For a pet?”
“Animal companions require care, attention, and feeding. They can’t speak for themselves, and that requires protection.”
“I suppose you protect the wild animals as well.”
“From people.”
“What about food animals?”
“We don’t have any, except for some chickens. All nonreplicated meat is tissue-cloned. It’s less wasteful that way, and it’s easier to balance the ecology.”
“Oh…” The Federation had simply made natural meat horribly expensive. Most restaurants used high-level replicated protein.
“It also tastes better if it’s cloned and grown properly, and uses less energy than replicator technology.”
“I wouldn’t think that energy was a problem for you.”
For just an instant, a hint of surprise appeared in Lyvia’s gray eyes. “Energy supply isn’t the problem. Excessive use is. It disrupts the ecology and the climate. Any form of energy use creates heat somewhere along the line. Enough usage…” She shrugged.
Abruptly, Roget understood. “Dubiety’s closeness to the sun.”
“Exactly.”
There was something there … but Roget couldn’t quite grasp what it might be.
“How is your salad?”
“Quite good. Is it vat grown, too?”
“I wouldn’t know. Some is free grown, and some is hydroponic. There are many mixed systems on Dubiety.”
“As well as on other Thomist worlds?”
“You are persistent, you know?”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“Leave those kinds of questions for tomorrow … if you can.”
In the end, while he enjoyed the food and the company, he learned little more during the rest of dinner, except about the general geography and layout of Skeptos.
By the time Roget finished a small lemon tart, he was doing his best to stifle yawns and look attentive. Lyvia paid for the meal and ushered him back to the guesthouse.
Once inside, she stopped at the reception area. “I’ll pick you up for breakfast here at seven o’clock local. In case you oversleep, I’ll have the comm buzz you a half hour before. After you eat, we’ll head over to the MEC. You can bring the stunner you’re carrying if it will make you feel better.”
“You don’t miss much.”
“The idea is not to miss anything, Keir.”
Roget smiled. That he understood, but he was so tired that he’d definitely missed more than he should have. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
She nodded, then turned and left.
Roget started up the ramp. Although he heard a door close on the second level, by the time he was at the top, the corridor was empty. He thought he could detect a faint fragrance, but that might have been his imagination. He paused. As he thought about it, Lyvia hadn’t worn any noticeable fragrance or perfume, but he’d caught whiffs of scent from other women he’d passed. So it wasn’t his sense of smell.
When he stopped outside his quarters, he had to think for a moment to recall his code before entering it. The door opened and he stepped inside, letting it close behind him. He studied the living area. Nothing looked any different. He walked into the bedchamber. The closet door was open. While they’d eaten, Roget’s pale blue singlesuit and underclothes had been cleaned and hung in the closet, or folded and put on the open shelves on the right side, the one nearest the fresher. They also now held locators. Of that, he had no doubts.
He used his implants to trigger the camouflage, and the suit blended with the back of the closet. The power readings registered full. He deactivated the camouflage.
After shaking his head, not sure he understood what all that meant, he stood there for a long moment. There wasn’t any doubt that the Federation had set him up, somehow, but for what? How could they not have known a high-tech society existed beneath the Haze? Was he just a probe to get a reaction? Or an excuse—when he didn’t return—for military action against Dubiety?
All he could do was play along and see what developed. He walked back to the living area and the corner desk, retrieving the holojector controls and then picking up the sheet of directions. He had to puzzle out the letters, but those were mostly understandable, based on old American, and that wasn’t all that different from Federation Stenglish.
So far as he could tell, the system offered access to something like a hundred fixed program screens, plus an ordering option that he couldn’t use because he didn’t have a line of credit or system access or whatever. He began to experiment but finally lowered the controls in frustration.
For the most part, the characters in any of the dramas or comedies, or whatever they were, talked too fast for him to follow what they said. The news presentations were somewhat better, but he lacked most of the local referents for what he did understand to make much sense. One “popular” science program dealt with astronomy—and was far more clear … but told him little. At first. Except that several of the images were of the skies as they would have been seen from Dubiety—and they were crystal clear. Were they a virtual creation, or did their technology allow them to see in or around or through the orbital shields?
The holo projection was crisper than anything he’d seen, even in Taiyuan. Yet his implants registered nothing. Could Lyvia have somehow disabled them? On an impulse, he walked into the projected image, and his detectors registered immediately. When he stepped out of the image, he could sense nothing.
How did they do it?
He collapsed the image and just sat down in the desk chair. Maybe if he got some sleep, things would make more sense in the morning. Maybe …
12
23 LIANYU 6744 F. E.
Roget’s second week at the FSS continued just like the first had ended, except that the anomalies he investigated were all different—with one exception. The FSS system kept flagging the Virgin River anomaly. Roget had run a profile on the river readings going back a hundred years, and the thermal spike was well out of normal ranges. He’d taken more samples, and by Wednesday night he had located the general area of infusion as being close to where a dry rocky wash—Middleton wash—met the Virgin River.
According to the maps and history, the area to the north of Middleton wash had once been an intensely commercial shopping area. It had been partly slagged i
n the wars, then reclaimed and returned to something resembling the original topography, with several permitted low-impact exceptions. After more than a millennium, even in the desert climate, there were no overt signs of its ancient past. The wash itself had been dry on Wednesday. Roget still wondered if something buried beneath all that stone had come to life, if the natural geothermal systems had created a subterranean pathway down the wash, or if some other factor were involved. He couldn’t help but wonder if it had anything to do with the death of his predecessor—whose body had been found on the other side of the Virgin River from the wash on the way to one of the cinder cones left from a prehistoric volcanic area.
Then, that could be coincidence, much as Roget didn’t like to believe in or accept coincidences.
Thursday morning, Roget had his listing and schedule waiting for Sung.
The head monitor settled at the main screen, then spent almost ten minutes scanning various subscreens before turning his attention to Roget’s proposed monitoring schedule. He finally turned. “Middleton wash? There’s nothing there.”
“There’s nothing we can see, but that’s where the thermal spike enters the river. I’d like to pin this down so that we can either find a human cause or identify it as natural with hard proof. I’m spending a lot of time checking that anomaly, and I don’t want to still be doing it come summer.”
Sung laughed. “All that exercise is good for you.”
“It probably is. I just don’t want it to be a waste of time.”
“There’s always something.” The head monitor shook his head. “Go ahead. It can’t hurt, and you’re not swamped now.”
“Thank you.” Roget rose from his small console, turned, eased the bicycle away from the wall, and wheeled it toward the door. He’d given up on trying to check it in and out of supply and had signed it out for a month, leaving it in the corner of the office overnight.
The corridor outside was empty, although he half expected to run into Marni Sorensen, as he had several times over the last week. But then, that had usually been in the late afternoon when he’d just returned to the FSS building at the end of a long day, and they had never exchanged more than quick pleasantries.
Once past the building security gates and outside, he rode down to the main tram station where he waited a good fifteen minutes before the next tram arrived. After taking the tram out so far as the Red Hills station, the last stop before the final Green Springs station, Roget carried the bicycle from the tram and then unfolded it on the platform. He was the only one who got off. That was scarcely surprising since there were only a few houses on the east side of Red Cliffs Drive, and they were tiny and shabby, with the stucco more pink, from the years of bombardment by red sand, than white.
As was usual, the sky was clear, and the sun beat down on Roget as he pedaled less than a hundred meters northeast of the station. Once there, he discovered a narrow walking or biking trail running along the north side of the wash. He rode only a few meters down the trail before he dismounted and laid the bicycle at the side, then slowly clambered down over and between sandstone boulders and chunks of black lava. While he knew there were extensive lava beds in the area, the lava looked out of place along the wash, weathered as it appeared.
When he reached the bottom he surveyed the area, but all he saw was rock and red sand. He scuffed the sand with his boot heel, digging a small depression. He struck rock after some ten centimeters, and all the sand was dry. He walked downhill for another ten or fifteen meters and tried again, with the same result.
Climbing back uphill left him even hotter and sweatier, even with the cool-weave fabric of the white monitor’s uniform. Before he raised the bike to resume riding, he blotted his forehead, then studied the north side of the wash. The red stone and sand looked as desolate as anywhere around and outside St. George proper.
After taking a swallow from his water bottle, he pedaled slowly and carefully down the trail for half a klick until he came to a side path leading uphill. He stopped. Less than fifty meters uphill on the winding path was a waist-high stone wall and an iron gate. Roget left the bicycle beside the trail and hiked up the path. As he neared the gate, he could see a long and low sandstone building farther uphill. The south-facing wall that extended from each side of the gate was of finished and polished black lava, so smooth that it looked like onyx, but the edges between the polished front and the mortar were rough and lavalike.
An iron sign on the gate read: DELBERT PARSENS, SCULPTOR. On the top of the posts on each side of the gate were figures sculpted out of hard red sandstone. On the left was a woman in a long flowing dress with an antique apron and wide collars, cradling an infant. On the right was a man in a waistcoat and trousers with his sleeves rolled up. The sculptures were so similar to the one on the stone pedestal outside The Right Place that Roget knew the same sculptor had to have done all three. Presumably, that was Parsens.
He opened the gate and stepped through the wall, then closed it behind him. He followed the path uphill. Even before he reached the building, Roget could hear the sound of a hammer and chisel echoing through the warm morning air. The path circled eastward around the low structure whose eaves were barely above Roget’s head. The lower level looked to have been quarried out of the solid stone. At the east end of the building, at the top of three stone steps, he came to a doorway. A wooden sign in a niche cut out of the redstone wall to the left of the door announced: STUDIO OPEN. PLEASE COME IN.
Roget lifted the small sign and turned it over. The reverse read: STUDIO CLOSED. He replaced the sign as it had been. Then he looked to the north side of the building. A narrow road angled back toward Red Cliffs Drive.
The door squeaked as Roget pushed it open, but the sounds of hammer and chisel did not slow or stop. Once inside, he stood on a wide landing. In front of him was a ramp down to the long studio. A wiry blond man, stripped to the waist, looked up from the block of redstone, then lowered the hammer and chisel and waited.
Roget walked down the ramp.
“Do you want to commission something, or are you just looking?”
“Looking, I’m afraid. I didn’t know your studio was even here.”
“Even most folks in St. George don’t know that, and my great uncle built it close to a hundred years ago.” The clean-shaven sculptor’s voice was soft. His blue eyes did not quite meet Roget’s.
“I saw one of your statues somewhere … near the Prophet’s house. At least, it looked like the ones on the gateposts.”
“You must have seen the one outside The Right Place.”
“You took this over from your great uncle?”
“His daughter Felicia. Been working here for twenty years or so since then.”
“Where do you get the stone? Isn’t it hard to come by?” Roget knew only a few quarries were permitted anywhere.
“I can cut stone on the east end of the property, and there’s another quarry toward Silver Reef. Neither’s the best, but I’ve got a limited permit here, and the Silver Reef quarry is one of the few permitted outside the protected and proscribed areas. I don’t need many huge blanks. Most of the large blocks I do are for repairs and replacements, and those don’t come along all that often these days. Once in a while I do a large sculpture, but mostly folks want smaller pieces.”
“You do a fair number of … religious works.” That was a calculated guess on Roget’s part. “Are those mainly for local people?”
“Not necessarily local, but Saint-inspired,” admitted Parsens.
“You were fortunate to be able to inherit this. I take it that you’ve made some improvements.” Roget gestured at the heavily tinted windows on the south side of the studio.
“I’ve made some, but those windows were already here. Felicia was the one who really made the improvements.” Parsens paused. “Could I interest you in one of the smaller pieces?” He gestured toward a glass-fronted case on the west end of the studio.
“You could interest me,” Roget said, “but monitors g
et transferred a lot, and we don’t get that big a weight allowance in moving. I tend to pick up projection print art. I did want to see your work, though.” He nodded toward the roughed-out form beside the sculptor. “Might I ask?”
“It’s a replica of an old work—John D. Lee. He was a rather controversial Saint during the founding period. Not sure I would have chosen it, but,” Parsens shrugged, “when it’s a good commission, you do your best.”
Roget could sense a certain unease, but not whether that was because of the subject of the commission or for other reasons. He didn’t want to press. “I won’t keep you, but I appreciate your time.” He nodded, then turned and headed back up the stone ramp to the door.
As he walked back around to the path down to the wash trail, he studied the building closely. Although it wasn’t obvious, there was a lower level, not under the studio, but under the western side. Yet it would have made more sense to have the lower level on the east where, with just a little work, obtaining natural light would have been easier.
Roget returned to the trail and his bicycle where he mounted and pedaled down along the wash, investigating the bottom at four other locations. All he found was dry sand and drier hard red sandstone. When he reached the Virgin River and the parkway, he took two measurements—one upstream of where Middleton wash joined the river, and one fifty meters downstream.
Then he went on to his other monitoring assignments. Again, he didn’t get back to the FSS until after five. He wheeled the bike through the security gate and down the corridor to the office. He had to unlock the office and set the bicycle in a corner before he could unlock the system and upload his readings for the day.
The residential and commercial monitoring results were the usual mixture of false positives, probable mechanical failures, and carelessness. The thermal spike from the reading taken just downstream of Middleton wash was the most pronounced of any of the river readings taken over the past two weeks. The system offered a 64 percent probability that a geothermal plume of heated water was entering from beneath the stream bed, with a likely temperature of some thirty degrees, well above the river’s twenty-degree norm.
Haze and the Hammer of Darkness Page 10