“Your word is enough.”
Duncan took it all the same, opened it and pulled out an opened packet of dried meat. He put a bit in his mouth, tugging the veil aside, offered the packet to Niun. “Tsi’mri, you would say. But if they were offering—I took. Food. Water Nothing else.”
Niun accepted it, tucked a large piece into his mouth, put the packet into his own pouch; and by that small action Duncan realized what he had perceived in deeper senses, that Niun himself was almost spent, quick-tiring . . . hungry, it might be. That struck panic into him. He had thought the tribe a reachable walk away. If what they had yet to face had undone Niun, then for himself—
He chewed and forced the tough bits down a throat almost too raw to swallow. “Listen to me. I will tell you what happened. Best both of us should know. The beacons I left when we landed . . . to say that there was no reason of attack—regul came in first, took out the beacons and our ship; humans never heard the message. Regul were determined they should not.”
Niun’s eyes had locked on his, intent.
“Regul attacked,” Duncan said, “and city defenses fired back; humans came in and were caught in it, and believed the regul; but now they know . . . that they were used by the regul, and they do not like it. The regul elder tried to silence me; I killed her. Her younglings are disorganized and humans are in command up there. They are warned how they were misled.”
The membrane flashed.
“I told them, Niun, I told them plainly I no longer take their orders, that I am kel’en. They sent me with a message to the she’pan: come and talk. They want assurance there will be no striking at human Worlds.”
“They ask her.”
“Or someone who would be her voice. They are reasoning beings, Niun.”
Niun considered that in silence. There was—perhaps—a desire in Niun’s expression that he would never have shown a human.
“The landing site,” Duncan urged at him. “They will be waiting there for an answer. An end to this, a way out.”
“The hao’nath,” Niun said hollowly. “Gods, the hao’nath.”
“I do not think,” Duncan said, “that humans will go outside that ship. At least—not recklessly.”
“Sov-kela—the comings and goings of ships, the firing over An-ehon—are the tribes deaf and blind, that they should ignore such things? They are gathering, that is what is happening. And every tribe on the face of the world that has seen cities attacked or passings in the skies—will look to its defenses. An-ehon is in ruins; other cities may not be. And now the hao’nath know it centers on this plain; and that its name is ja’anom.”
City armament. Duncan bit at his lip, reckoning what in his dazed flight he had never reckoned . . . that some city in the hands of a desert she’pan might strike at warships.
That through the city computers, messages could pass from zone to zone with the speed of comp transmission, not the migration of tribes.
He had rejected everything, everything security might have tampered with: cast gear into the basins, kept only food and water, only the things he could assure himself were safe and light enough to carry. He made a tent of his hands over his mouth, a habit, that warmed the air, and stared bleakly into the dark before him.
“Your thought?” Niun asked.
“Go back; get to that ship—you and I. Put machines on our own side. And I know we cannot.”
“We cannot,” Niun said.
Duncan considered, drew his limbs up, leaned against the dus to push himself to his feet. Niun gathered up the pack and also rose, offered a hand for support. Duncan ignored it. “I cannot walk fast,” he said. “But long—I can manage. If you have to break off and leave me, do that. I have kept ahead this far.”
Niun said nothing to that; it was something that might have to be done: he knew so. He doubled the veil over his lower face, left the visor up, for the wind had slacked somewhat: there were stars visible, the first sky he had seen in days.
And after a time of walking: “How far?” he asked.
“Would that I knew,” Niun said. A moment more passed. They were out on open sand now, an occasional burrower rippling aside from the dusei’s warding. “Cast the she’pan for the dusei. The storm, sov-kela . . . I am worried. I know they will not have stayed where I left them; they cannot have done that.”
“The tents—”
“They are without them.”
Duncan drew in a breath, thinking of the old, the children, sick at heart. He shaped Melein for the dusei, with all his force. He received back nothing identifiable before them, only the sense of something ugly at their backs.
“I sensed you,” Niun said. “And trouble. I thought to turn back in the storm; but there was no getting there in time to help anything . . . and this . . . the dus gave me no rest. Well it did not. Even the wild ones. I have never felt the like, sov-kela.”
“They are out there,” Duncan said. “Still. They met me on the way.” An insane memory came back, an attempt to reach them, to show them life, and choices. Survival or desolation. He shuddered, staggered, felt something of his own dus, a fierceness that blurred the senses. Both beasts caught it. Somewhere across the flat a cry wailed down the wind, dus.
Melein, Duncan insisted.
Their own beasts kept on as they were heading; it could be answer; it could be incomprehension. They had no choice but to go with them.
Chapter Seven
Luiz appeared in the doorway of Flower’s lab offices, leaned there, his seamed face set in worry. “Shuttle’s down,” he said. “Two of them. They’re coming in pairs.”
“The dispatch is nearly ready.” Boaz made a few quick notes, sorted, clipped, gathered her materials into the pouch and sealed the coded lock: Security procedures, foreign to her. She found the whole arrangement distasteful. In her fifty-odd years she had had time to learn deep resentment for the military. Most of her life had been wartime, the forty-three-year mri wars. Her researches as a scientist had been appropriated to the war in distant offices; on Flower they had been directly seized. She had to her credit the decipherment of mri records which had led them here, which had led to the destruction of mri cities, and the death of children; and she grieved over that. A pacifist, she had done the mri more harm with pick and brush and camera than all of Saber’s firepower and all the ships humans had ever launched; she believed so; and she had had no choice—had none now that she was reduced to writing reports for security, reckonings of yet another species for military use.
She had had illusions once, of the importance of her freedom to investigate, the tradeoff of knowledge for knowledge, for a position in which she, having knowledge, could sway the makers of policy; there had been a time she had believed she could say no.
She put the pouch into Luiz’s hands, looked beyond him to the other men who had come into the lab: Averson, Sim Averson, a balding fellow who walked as though he might break. He came, and she offered her hand to him. Three years Averson had worked aboard Flower before the Kesrithi mission, which made him one of the seniors of the present staff, a sour, fretsome fellow who took his work in Cultures and his library more seriously than breathing, and lived for the increase of data and systems to his personal credit in libraries back home. Averson had taken naturally to specialization in regul, as slow and methodical as they, pleased with the mountains of statistics which regul tended to accumulate. He had taken over Aldin’s office with a sour intimation of satisfaction, as if Aldin’s death had been fate’s personal favor to him . . . appropriated Aldin’s notes and materials and immersed himself in more cataloging. It likely did not occur to Averson now that the military might have interests wider than specific questions, that what he did might have moral implications . . . or if it did, it did so at a distance outside Averson’s more vivid concerns. He looked now only annoyed, roused out of his habits and his habitation and his work.
“Be careful,” Boaz urged him. “Sim, something’s wrong up there.”
Dark eyes blinked up at he
r, somewhat distantly. Averson had grown into the habit of looking down. He shrugged his bowed shoulders. “What can we do? When they ask, we come, however inconvenient it happens to be. My tapes, my programs, everything disarranged. I told them. Of course it’s wrong. I’ll be a week putting things in order. Can I explain this to them? No. No. Security has no comprehension.”
“Sim, I mean that there’s something wrong with the regul.”
Averson’s brow fractured into different wrinkles, distant recognition of a fact both germane and foreign to his research: he was slow of habit, but not slow-witted.
“I queried about the overflights,” Luiz said. He folded his arms and set his back more firmly against the doorframe . . . his knees troubled him; he had gotten old, had Luiz, fragile as Averson . . . . We have all grown old, Boaz thought desperately. None of us will live to reach humanity again, not with all our functions intact. I will be near sixty, Luiz seventy-five if he makes it through the jumps again: Koch seventy at least; and some of us are dead, like Aldin. “Koch went silent on me in a hurry. Now he wants you up there. And files on the regul. Boz is right. Something’s astir up there with our allies.”
Averson blinked slowly. “Metamorphosis. We reckoned . . . a longer time required.”
“Stress conditions,” Luiz surmised.
“Possibly.” Averson chewed at his fingernail and frowned, staring at nothing in particular the while he followed some train of thought.
“Sim,” Boaz said, “Sim, watch out for security.”
Averson blinked at her, drawn back from his musing.
“Don’t trust them,” Boaz said. “Don’t trust what they do with what we give them. Think. Think before you tell them something . . . how ignorant men could interpret it, what they could do with it. They aren’t objective. We daren’t trust that. People want statistics to justify what they want to do. That’s the only reason we’ve ever asked.”
“Boz,” Luiz protested, with a meaningful glance at the intercom. Flower’s operations staff was all military.
“So what do I care? What can I lose? Promotion? Assignments in the future? None of us are going to be fit for another after this one; and it’s dead certain they’re limited on replacements for us.”
“Influence, Boz.”
“What have we been able to influence? Between Saber and the regul, invaluable sites have been blasted to rubble, the greatest cities of the world in ruins, an intelligent species maybe reduced beyond viability . . . and we observe, we take notes . . . and our notes provide information so that regul and mri can kill each other. And maybe we can join in. Duncan took his own way out. I look at this and suddenly I begin to understand him. He at least—”
A shadow fell in the corridor doorway. Boaz stopped. It was Galey, from Saber, with another man. Vague surprise struck her, that Galey should have come down: an old acquaintance, this man . . . a freckled young man when he had set out from Kesrith, full of promise; a man in his thirties now, with a perpetually worried look. Youth to man to senior by the time he could get back to human space again, Boaz thought; mortality was on them all. The thought began to obsess her.
“Dr. Averson?” Galey inquired, came with the black man into the main lab. He proffered Luiz a cassette, had it signed for, passed the tab to his dark companion. “Lt. Harris,” Galey identified the other. “Running shuttle up for Dr. Averson. Orders explain matters. Myself and my crew, we’re staying on down here; cassette explains that too, I think, by your leave, sir, doctor.”
There was a moment’s cold silence.
“What’s going on up there?” Boaz asked.
“Don’t know,” Galey said, and avoided her eyes. “Sir?” he said to Averson. “We have a limited access here. Better move as quickly as possible.”
Luiz handed over the dispatch, received a signature in turn, from Harris.
“Suppose,” Boaz said, “you see him settled, Mr. Galey.”
Galey gave her that perplexed stare he could use; she did not relent. “Doctor,” he murmured, and took his leave with Harris, shepherding Averson along with them in some haste.
“My tapes,” Averson was saying. “My records—”
The door closed.
“Blast!” Boaz spat, and sat down.
“There’s no help for it,” Luiz said.
“His whole life,” Boaz murmured, shaking her head; and when Luiz looked puzzlement at her: “Theirs, mine, yours. Spent on this thing. More than just the years. We can go home. But to what? What’s the chance Stavros is still governor on Kesrith? No, new policies, a new governor—the whole situation years without our input. And what do we bring back? What do we tell them about what we’ve seen out here, a track of dead worlds—saying what? No one’s asking the right questions, Emil. Not we, not the regul . . . no one’s asking the right questions.”
Luiz wrapped his thin arms about him and stared at the floor. “We can’t get out there to ask the questions.”
“And now we’ve got the military.”
“We’re vulnerable here; That’s what’s on my mind. Boz, whatever’s afoot, I’m going to request all but essential personnel shuttled up. Fifty-eight people is too many to risk down here.”
“No!” She thrust herself to her feet. “Flower has to stay here, right here; we have to make it clear to them we’re staying.”
“We have to wait for Duncan as long as there’s hope of waiting. That’s our purpose; our only purpose. The Xen department has to understand that. There’s no chance of doing more than that, and there’s sure none of making gestures of principle with fifty-eight lives. Forget it, Boz.”
“And when that fails?” She stalked to the door, looked back at him. “We’ll lose the mri, you know that. How do we win, in a waiting game with regul?”
“We apply pressure . . . quietly. It’s all we can do.”
“And can’t they figure that out? It’s their game. Our generations are a fraction of theirs. Our whole lifespans are nothing to their three centuries. If you’re right, if there is an adult developing among them, they can even out-populate us in the long run. And if there isn’t one now, there will be, sooner or later, this year or the next. Sooner or later, Saber will give up and pull us out. We’re mortal, Emil. We think in terms of week and months. The regul will get the mri in the end. Do you see Saber tying itself up here for longer than a few months? And do you think regul wouldn’t wait fifty out of their three hundred years to have their own way with the mri? And we can’t. Fifty years . . . and we’re all dead.”
Luiz gazed at her, his dark eyes shrouded in wrinkled lids, his mouth pressed to a fine line. “Don’t you go on me, Boz. We’ve lost too many to that kind of thinking. I won’t hear you start it.”
“Four suicides and six on trank? It’s Galey’s sort who go that route . . . the young, who had illusions of a life after this mission is over. You and I, we’re too old for that. We at least have a past to look back on. They don’t. Only the jumps. And more of them to face on the way home. The drugs may not last; we were handing out doubled doses at the end. And what after that? You tell me what that voyage will be like with no drugs.”
“We’ll find something.”
“We can try.” She made a shrug that was half a shiver. “This world, Emil, the age, the age of it—one vast tomb; the seas dried up, the cities frozen and waiting for the sun to go out—and all space about empty of life. Dear God, what is it to be young among such sights as these? It’s bad enough to be old.”
Luiz came and took her by the arms, gathered her to him, and she held to him until the shivers stopped.
“Emil,” she said, “promise me something. Talk to the staff. Let me talk to them. We can hold Flower here, right where we sit, with all her staff. No lessening the stakes, no making it easier for them, regul or human.”
“We can’t. We can’t make gestures, Boz. Can’t. I don’t know what Koch has in mind up there or down here, but we can’t cripple our own side by making independent moves. We have to protect our peopl
e and we have to be ready to lift on the instant the orders come. We’re the other star-capable ship and we’ve no right to gamble with it.”
“We’ve no right not to.”
“I can’t listen to you.”
“Won’t.” Boaz turned aside, drew a long breath, glanced back again. “And what answer does Koch have for us?”
Luiz drew the cassette from his pocket, stared at it as at something poisonous. “I’ll lay bets what answer he has; that those overflights aren’t ours.”
“Play it,” Boaz said. She closed the door. “Let’s both hear it.”
He looked doubtful, frowning, but after a moment walked around her desk to push it into the player.
Gibberish filled the screens, codes, authorizations, Saber’s emblem. Boaz came and sat on the edge of the desk near Luiz, arms folded, heart beating hard with tension.
“. . . request Xen staff cooperation with military mission,” the tape meandered to its point, “in on-site recon if this should prove necessary. Your base is base for this operation; request your staff conduct advance briefings prior to start of mission. Mission head is Lt. Comdr. James R. Galey. All decisions mission Code Dante to be made by Comdr. Galey, including final selection among Flower staff volunteers for mission slot. Suggest staff member D. Tensio. Your full cooperation in this matter urgently pleaded. Mission is recon only, stress, recon only, effort to comprehend nature of civilization and establish character of city installations. Failure of Flower cooperation will jeopardize search for alternative solutions.”
She flung herself off the desk edge and started for the door.
“Boz,” Luiz called after her.
She stopped. The tape had run out.
“Boz,” Luiz said, his wrinkles drawn into lines of anguish. “You’re fifty-two years old. There’s no way you could keep up with those young men.”
She looked down at herself, at a plump body that resisted diets, that ached with bad arches and wheezed when she had to carry equipment in standard gee. She had not been good to herself in her life: too much of sitting at desks, too much of reading, too much of postponing.
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