The Regiment-A Trilogy

by John Dalmas

  "There are river boats that carry passengers. One leaves the wharf at the foot of Central Street every morning and makes numerous stops along the river. It takes five days to reach the end of navigable water, at Karu Lok-Sanit, where there is a steel mill in the desert foothills. Both iron ore and coal are dug near there, in the Lok-Sanu Mountains. You could get off at any stop you liked, stay a while if you'd care to, and catch a boat on a later day. The boats are owned and operated by the Rivermen's Co-op."

  "When does the boat leave here?" asked Varlik.

  "At approximately six o'clock, I believe. That used to be the time, and I know of no reason it would have changed. Surely no earlier than five-fifty.8

  "And they'd accept Confederation money?"

  "I'm sure they would. Meanwhile, my wife and I would be pleased to have you as our guests tonight. That will allow me to drive you to the wharf before I must go to school."

  Varlik looked doubtful. "We'd like to, but we have to walk back to the hospital to get a few things and tell them what we're going to do. We can probably arrange a ride from there in the morning and not impose on you."

  "It would be no imposition. Let me make a proposal," Ban-Shum countered. "I will drive you to the hospital. You can go inside, get what you need, and I will wait for you. My wife and youngest daughter will soon be home, and will truly be disappointed if I do not have you there for supper and an evening with us."

  Varlik looked at Konni; she nodded.

  "That sounds good, then, Ban-Shum," Varlik said. "Let's finish our drinks and do it that way."

  26

  The ilkan's hoofs raised puffs of dust as it trotted down the riverfront street. On the wharves, smoking engines chuffed, powering cargo booms that loaded or unloaded nets of cargo from holds or decks. Voices called directions and warnings. And over and around it all, the morning's sea breeze brought the odor of kelp beds, adulterated here by a smell of sooty smoke from dock engines and deck engines and ships' funnels.

  "That is the passenger boat," Ban-Shum said, pointing. "The one with the tall slender smokestack and the long deckhouse aft."

  Smokestack? Varlik didn't realize for a moment what was meant, then following Ban-Shum's gesture saw a riverboat, with a thin plume of smoke rising lazily from an erect cylinder amidships. The vessel was some hundred or more feet long with a beam of perhaps twenty-five feet, built to carry both deck cargo and humans. The ilkan trotted even with it and stopped, then Varlik and Konni climbed out with their packs.

  Ban-Shum reached down and shook their hands. "May your trip be all you wish," he said.

  "Thank you for your hospitality," Varlik answered. "And for bringing us out this morning."

  "And thank Ling-Sii and Gon for the meals and for their company," Konni added. "You were all very kind."

  Ban-Shum grinned, his teeth still strong and white. "It was our pleasure to host you."

  He clucked to the ilkan then, turned the buggy in the street, and drove off without a wave. It was like a dismissal by Zusu or Colonel Koda, Varlik thought, watching him go, then turned to the river boat. It occurred to him that he didn't know where to buy tickets, but considering how things were done on Tyss, one probably simply bought them from the man standing at the foot of the gangplank. The man wore a loose white shirt, like Ban-Shum's, only unbleached—they were common among civilian T'swa—but his cap was the only one in sight, suggesting an official function.

  Picking up his own and Konni's packs by the straps, Varlik headed for the gangplank, then realized he didn't know the Tyspi word for "ticket." So he slowed his steps to allow a tall, high-shouldered T'swi to get there ahead of him. He'd listen and watch—see how it was done.

  To his surprise, all the man with the cap said was, "Going back to Tiiku-Moks?"

  "Right." The tall man then handed him a coin or coins and went aboard; apparently no ticket was involved.

  The capped man looked curiously at Varlik and Konni as they stepped up to him. "Where to?" he asked in Tyspi.

  "Up the river," Varlik said. "We've never been there before—never been on Tyss before—and we don't know just where we'll want to get off."

  The man looked them over with unconcealed interest. "All right," he said, waving them up the gangplank, "go aboard. I'll collect from you when you get off. If you have any questions, you can ask me—I'm the mate—and I'll answer them if I have time. But you might get answers quicker from other passengers."

  Varlik grinned at Konni as they crossed the gangplank. "No tickets, pay when you leave . . . It may not be Standard, but I'll bet here it works just fine."

  She nodded without speaking, camera busy. On Tyss, Varlik had been lax with his own; her big Revax was better and more versatile.

  The tall T'swi who'd boarded just ahead of them was leaning against the rail in the shade of an awning, watching a fishing boat pull away downstream in the direction of the sea. Varlik walked over to him.

  "Good morning," said Varlik in Tyspi.

  "Good morning," the man answered, surprised. "Do you understand Tyspi?"

  "Quite a bit; we both do. This is Konni and my name is Varlik." He reached out and they shook hands. Like Ban-Shum's, the man's palm, though somewhat hard, was not as callused as the warriors'.

  "My name is Lin," the man replied. "I'd thought of speaking to you, but I hadn't anticipated your ability with our language."

  He was a forester, employed on a forestry operation in the Jubat Hills, and had come to Oldu Tez-Boag to visit his parents and a sister. The Lok-Sanu River region had been his home all his life, and he enjoyed answering their questions about it.

  They'd been aboard no more than a quarter hour when they felt the vibration of the ship's screw turning. Longshoremen cast the lines off, deckhands retrieved them, and slowly the riverboat pulled away from the wharf. The current pushed her nose as she angled into it, her screw biting water, and she shoved her way upstream.

  There were more docks just above the city, where they could see wheeled engines, long and squat, attached to trains of wheeled wagons—the railroad, Lin told them. Cargos were transferred from ships and riverboats to the railroad trains, which then distributed the goods throughout this part of the coastal plain. There too were the grain elevators from which, in turn, ships and riverboats were loaded.

  Soon, though, they left the dock area behind, and the shores became farmland, with frequent water uptake structures for irrigation. These too were powered by the chuffing, stationary, smoke-belching engines, or sometimes by solar converters, and in a few cases by livestock plodding around a capstan. There were rowboats with fisherman, and occasional downstream rafts with goods piled on them, guided by T'swa at long sweeps. Wooden barges with smokestacks also passed, some with lumber stacked on their decks, ricks of fuelwood, or piles of stony black soil mounded above hatch coamings. Once they passed a flatboat with a cargo of what seemed to be thick metal rods.

  "Is that steel?" Varlik asked.

  "Yes. The largest steel mill on Tyss is at the foot of the Lok-Sanu Mountains, up the river 480 miles."

  Varlik remembered Ban-Shum mentioning the mill. "Where do they get technetium to make steel with?" he asked. He used the Standard word for technetium; he didn't know any other, and they'd probably borrowed it into Tyspi anyway.

  "Technetium? I'm not familiar with that. But I know little about steel-making; actually nothing. If you go as far as Karu Lok-Sanit, the town where the mill is, I'm sure they can tell you."

  Varlik nodded; he'd try to get his question answered before he left Tyss. There might be more technology here than he'd realized.

  "Lin," he asked, "what powers these vessels? What makes them go?"

  The forester's brows raised. "Come with me," he said, and led them to a broad door in the deckhouse. Inside, the room extended not only to the overhead but part of it well below the deck, seemingly to the bottom of the ship's shallow-draft hull. It was filled with sound and machinery, long piston shafts rising and falling amid the smell of steam and ho
t oil, all ministered to by a wiry engineer, the smallest adult male T'swi Varlik had seen. He held an oil can whose long spout dipped and pecked among moving parts like some depraved giant hummingbird.

  "Khito!" Lin shouted; obviously he knew the man. The engineer paused amid the booming, turning to look.

  Lin pointed at the two Iryalans, gesticulated, bent over and made motions with his arms. The engineer in turn grinned and nodded, dismissing them with a wave. They backed out onto the deck again.

  "That is the engine room," said Lin. "The engines are driven by steam under pressure. Come. I'll show you where the steam is made."

  They followed him a few yards farther aft, where a narrow door stood open to the deck. From it flowed a river of heat considerably hotter even than the outside air. A short steep companionway led down into the ship's bowels, from which came a ringing of steel striking steel. Lin paused only long enough to tell the Iryalans that Khito had said it was all right, then he started down the hellish companionway, Varlik and Konni trailing hesitantly behind.

  It led into a chamber like something from a nightmare, weakly lit by two small tubes, one next to the companionway, the other above a gauge of some kind. The heat was terrific; outside was nothing by comparison. The ringing noises had stopped before they'd started down, but the pounding of the engine could be felt and heard, and somewhere a leaking steam valve hissed. A grizzled T'swi, short and stocky and a virtual anatomical chart in holo, stood stripped to the waist, amazingly sinewy, all fat long since boiled away. The man's jeans were so sweat-soggy they stuck to his thighs.

  Shovel in hand, he was watching the gauge. To his right was what seemed a metal wall with two small metal doors, behind him a bulkhead with a barred opening from which had slid a pile of the stony soil, shiny black, that Varlik had seen on passing barges.

  Varlik and Konni stood transfixed, sweating extravagantly, their cameras recording the motionless tableau. Shortly the stoker turned to the metal wall and threw open one of the doors; inside was intense fire, glaring whitely. With a single easy bending stride, he slid his shovel crunching beneath the pile of stony dirt, half straightened, pivoted, and slung the shovelful into the fire, a smooth swinging movement, the heel of the shovel ringing on the baseplate of the door. Then he turned, dug again, and threw again, his movements as if choreographed, until he'd cast half a dozen scoops of soil into the fire. Then he closed the door, grinned at his visitors, and returned his attention to the gauge.

  Lin nodded to the Iryalans and led them back out onto the deck, where briefly it seemed cool.

  "That is where the steam is made for the engine," Lin said, leading them aftward. "And back here is where the force is applied to the water to propel the boat."

  On the fantail he leaned over the rail, pointing downward. "Down there is the propeller. It works on the principle of the screw to push against the water."

  Varlik didn't understand all the words, but he got the general idea. Only one thing demanded explanation.

  "But Lin," he said, "why was the man throwing dirt and stones into the fire?"

  "Dirt?" Suddenly Lin realized, and laughed out loud. "You are right; that's what it is," he said. "Dirt and stones! It's just that we don't think of it that way. We call it 'coal,' and it is flammable, burning hotter than wood and requiring considerably less storage space and handling for a given value of energy."

  He laughed again as they picked their way among crates on the freight deck to the ship's bow, where the breeze of its movement was unbroken, there to watch the shore and the water traffic. Incredible, thought Varlik, that the T'swa could have done these things. How could they have learned, have been so clever?

  Then he remembered something Voker had said: Every Standard practice had been an innovation once. An unheard-of concept, yet now that he looked at it, compelling; it had to have been that way once! Vaguely Varlik got the concept of innovation growing upon innovation over time, leading perhaps from this, or something like it, to the technology of the Confederation. In some remote, long-forgotten past, his own people must have been clever too, must have thought new thoughts and tried things for the first time.

  The realization made him feel slightly ill rather than excited, as old and hidden psychoconditioning was activated, and he pushed the thought away. Within moments he didn't remember it—didn't even remember there'd been a thought.

  27

  Tiiku-Moks, several hours upstream from Oldu Tez-Boag, was the biggest town they'd come to, with maybe three or four thousand people. Well before they got there, they'd left the coastal plain, the river flowing through a gap in a series of transverse ridges that got higher eastward.

  The Lok-Sanu's current had continued smooth and unchanging, a third of a mile wide, and deep enough for shallow-draft traffic. No rivers of size had entered it, and it had occurred to Varlik to wonder where, on such a dry world, the Lok-Sanu got its water. The answer, Lin had explained, was the Lok-Sanu Mountains, Tyss's highest, with many ridge crests rising sixteen thousand feet above the basin at their feet, and peaks to more than twenty thousand. Precipitation was relatively abundant there—snow as well as rain; it was the wettest place on the planet.

  On this particular mid-autumn day, Tiiku-Moks was hotter than Aromanis had usually been. For miles now the river's shores had mainly been forested, with here and there a hamlet fronted by its own wharf, and Tiiku-Moks had the feel of a lumbering town—one with shade trees. Except along the wharves, there were trees enough that the buildings seemed almost to have been fitted in among them.

  As a river port, its principal function was clearly the shipping of lumber: There were long stacks of it piled along the wharves, as high as men could build them by hand, and numerous carloads were parked on railroad spurs. The Jubat Hills, Lin explained, were the major source of wood for this whole part of the planet—everything upstream as well as down, and the districts all around the Toshi Sea, especially the dry eastern side.

  Lin led them to a low building with the welcome "cool drinks" sign. Like the one in Oldu Tez-Boag, it had wooden paneling inside a thick layer of stuccoed-over adobe bricks. This one, however, was near the docks, and much busier and noisier with conversation than the T'swa cantina the two Iryalans had experienced the day before. The forester told them he had to stay in town for a day of meetings. If they decided to visit the forestry operations, the railroad ran north from Tiiku-Moks through fifty miles of them, with a sawmill village every few miles. Lodging and meals could be found in any village by asking around.

  When Lin had left them, Konni and Varlik discussed it and decided they'd go on up the river. They could take this side trip on the way back if they wanted to.

  Meanwhile, they had another hour to wait before the boat left, so they wandered along the riverfront, slowly, so as not to soak their clothes with sweat. The railroad line, which headed away from the river, was flanked here by a side track with a long string of empty lumber cars waiting for return to the sawmills. But not all the cars were lumber cars, nor empty. There was a flatcar with machinery, perhaps for a sawmill, boxcars with goods, even refrigeration cars with small solar converters on top. Toward the head end were three passenger coaches.

  There were also three gondola cars with long bundles of steel rods visible atop their loads. When Varlik saw them, he felt a momentary thrill of discomfort, went over and climbed the rungs of one to peer over the edge. There was raw steel in bars and bundled rods, on underlying sheets of rolled steel, obviously going away from the river.

  Going away from the river. What would some sawmill village do with three carloads, or one carload, of untooled steel? All the peculiarities, the little incongruities associated with Kettle, the insurrection, the T'swa—the whole business—boiled up for a moment, and he dropped to the ground looking troubled.

  "What's the matter?" Konni asked.

  "I'm not sure. Maybe nothing. But I want to take the train after all. I want to see where these"—he indicated the three carloads of steel—"get left off,
and if I can, see what they're used for. Come on. Let's find out when the train leaves."

  "Now wait a minute!" Konni insisted as they walked. "Give! Something's bothering you, whether you're sure or not. What is it?"

  He walked on a dozen paces before answering. "I'm really not sure. I haven't had time to think about it yet. But steel! Where do they get the technetium to make it with? Would the Rombili ship technetium to a gook world, considering the shortage of the past year?"

  "What would following these cars tell you?" Konni asked.

  Again he kept walking silently while thoughts formed. "Konni," he said at last, "what if the T'swa are making weapons? Suppose there's an arsenal off north here somewhere?"

  "Who would they make weapons for?"

  "For whoever is shipping them technetium. The T'swa export soldiers, why not weapons?"

  She slowed him, holding his sleeve. "But that sounds like a lot of trouble for someone just to get weapons, when they could make them themselves or buy them from us. Especially if they got caught; then they'd really have trouble!"

  "Exactly! Anyone who'd go to that much trouble and take that big a risk isn't only up to something illegal, but something big enough to make it seem worthwhile. Maybe they're trying to arm up secretly. Maybe it's a trade world that's buying them! Maybe the Splenn. Remember the little kids that talked to us in the street, back in Oldu Tez-Boag? They thought we were from Splenn. Why Splenn? Do quite a few Splenn come to Tyss? And besides being one of the few trade worlds with space ships, Splenn's supposedly a haven for smugglers."

  They'd been approaching the railroad administrative office, not much more than an adobe shack near the head of the siding, and stopped talking as they went in. The cheerful T'swa manager told them they had almost an hour, and there would be someone at the coaches, probably himself, to receive fares.

  So they returned to the cantina to wait, replenish their body fluids, and refill the water flasks they carried in their packs. Konni was thoughtful now; clearly Varlik's arguments had impressed her. Then they walked to the siding again, paid their fares, and boarded a coach.