Susannah continued her murmurings with Ghirra over the resetting of the leg. McPherson remained riveted to their every movement. But Megan slid upright, alerted by the gloat in Clausen’s voice.
“Oh?” she asked, she hoped casually.
“It’s here, like he said it would be.”
“It, Mr. Clausen?” inquired Weng without diverting her focus from the anesthesia.
The prospector grinned. “Lithium.”
The word fell among them like a lead weight.
There we go, thought Megan. The Sawls’ eviction notice.
“What we came here for, remember?”
“What you came here for,” Megan amended.
Clausen’s grin slipped toward impatience. He had expected a livelier reaction.
“Look.” He hauled the mud-caked pack up onto his lap and unbuckled a side flap. Several chunks of glittering rock tumbled out. He caught one and held it overhead like a victory cup. “Lepidolite. An excellent lithium ore. Pretty little sucker, eh?”
The rock was pale translucent lilac, like a summer dusk. It was studded with crystalline outcroppings of quartz mixing with flat plates of silvery mica. As Clausen twisted it in the light of the battery lamp, deeper hues of rose and lavender appeared in veins along one side.
Megan thought of the sparkle-eyed goddesses in the FriezeHall.
And so, another world falls to the miner’s shovel. No wonder the bastard’s so cheerful!
The familiar inevitability of the moment was like a stone dropped on her chest. Always she indulged in private optimism, hoping that the prospectors would find nothing to interest them, and always they did. Clausen would call it progress, so sure of his right by might that the dissolution of entire cultures by his hand was taken as a necessary part of the forward movement. Perhaps it was also proof to him of his superiority, that he survived and they didn’t.
It doesn’t really matter now what he sees here and what he doesn’t, she thought heavily. The outcome is preordained. She was going to have to tell Stavros. Better he should hear it from a sympathetic party than be forced to suffer this inhuman gloating. There would be enough of that in the days to come.
Clausen juggled the sparkling rock from palm to palm. “I think it’s a big strike, too. I’ve got to get back out there, of course, with instruments, to measure the size of the lode before I make an official filing, but I located at least one decent vein showing in the side of a ravine below our crash site. Pretty good for working in the dark!”
Weng nodded, still intent on the operating table. “This is good news, Mr. Clausen.”
Clausen regarded her ramrod back with amusement, then threw up his close-cropped head and laughed aloud. “Why, you bet your ass it is, Commander!”
“Shhh!” hissed McPherson, and then she groaned aloud as Susannah grasped Danforth’s thigh top and bottom around the break and wrenched it into alignment. Megan felt the crunch to the very roots of her teeth. It was too much. She rose swaying from the bench.
“Excuse me,” she mumbled and fled from the hall.
Ghirra stepped back from the table with a look of relief on his tired face that slowly drained away to dismay as he saw the glittering rock held high in the prospector’s hand.
29
Aguidran made her office at the head of the long wooden table that occupied one end of the RangerHall. It was the one relatively clear space in the Hall, the rest resembling the cargo hold of an old sailing ship on the homeward leg of a long voyage. Tall racks stuffed with gear hugged the walls. A jungle of ropes and strapping hung from the lowish ceiling. Piles of sacking and big wooden cabinets fought each other for floor space.
The Master Ranger sat in a wide leather-bottomed chair while Stavros hovered at her back. On a rough-edged sheet of the grainy paper the Sawls used for everyday, she scrawled a hurried sketch of the wreck site: a brief plateau surrounded by steep ravines and rock slides in the southern mountains, the Grigar.
Grigar. Stavros dissected the word instinctively. Lagri-egar. Lagri’s Wall.
Aguidran paused, studied her work, then drew a circle to indicate the downed Sled. She angled the paper and used a blank corner to begin a detail of the Sled itself. Clausen could have supplied a more technical assessment of the Sled’s position and condition, but Stavros could not imagine getting close enough to him to ask. A quick glimpse had been bad enough, as the prospector glided into the Caves grinning like a ghost come back to haunt.
Smug bastard. Smug as a sunning crocodile, Stavros thought.
He beat his fist gently on the stout back of Aguidran’s chair. She looked up, frowning, her concentration disturbed. He backed away abashed, and paced a little.
Perhaps it was time to give Megan’s notion of low profile some serious consideration. For instance, his absence from Physicians’ was sure to be noticed, by Weng at least, though perhaps not by Clausen.
No. He’ll notice. He’ll want to know where his damn gear is stowed. Fuck ’im. I’ll tell him I had to sleep sometime.
Aguidran growled privately and rubbed out a line to redraw it in a sharper curve. Her visual memory was keen and her hand practiced at conveying scale and spatial relationships. But her diagram of the Sled suffered from a lack of comprehension of the machinery. Stavros squinted at the drawing sideways, trying to coax the rough charcoal lines into three dimensions readable to his brain. The stubby triangular body of the vehicle was apparent enough. Despite its bent or perhaps missing stabilizers and its crumpled tail fin, it seemed miraculously intact.
Sonofabitch managed a cleaner landing than should have been possible in weather like that!
A relay runner appeared at the table with several minutes’ worth of verbal messages and a rare written letter to deliver. Aguidran pushed her drawing aside with a grunt of relief to listen to the runner’s recitation and dictate replies to him at a memorizable pace. The letter she set aside. Stavros suspected something of a confidential nature, the only reason he could think of to eschew the convenience of the runners’ prodigious trained memories.
When he could reclaim her attention once again, Stavros convinced the Ranger to attempt a rendering of the rear section of the Sled, where the all-important communications equipment was housed in its transparent blister. Pulling over another sheet of rag paper, Aguidran tried gamely if impatiently. But without knowing the function of the intricate shapings of rod and mesh and wire, it was impossible for her to clearly delineate their form. The sketch rapidly degenerated into a smudged-out study in abstract. Aguidran crumpled the rough, spongy paper into a ball and lobbed it into the darkness behind her. It landed with a dull plop among the dead ashes in the fireplace. She gave Stavros a look that implied several cycles’ worth of more pressing matters that required her attention. Stavros relented, nodding his gratitude. He eased the site drawing out of the scattered stacks of lists and notes and allowed the Ranger to attack the mountain of paperwork that had piled up while she was away on the search. It occurred to him that she probably hadn’t slept either since she returned.
He looked around for a perch that was out of the way but still within the circle of light from the overhead lamp wheel. Short backless benches with flat leather pads lined the long sides of the table. Stavros pulled out a bench and sat, laying the drawing in front of him to make sense of and memorize. The two benches next to him were occupied by three youngish guildsmen, no longer apprentices but still required to put in their time at copying and bookkeeping. Two more sat opposite, and all five shared a huge inkwell that squatted in the center of the table like a glass sea urchin. One muttered to himself as he counted. The girl next to Stavros chewed the end of her quill and occasionally glanced around at the others as if measuring the extent of their progress against her own. In the shadow of the inkwell sat five equal stacks of flat stone counters.
Unh-huh, thought Stavros, and wondered idly what the bet was. First to finish? First to finish a page? First to run into a snag and be forced to disturb the Master Ranger? Stavros y
awned. He was having difficulty concentrating. The trestled table drew his eye down its enormous length, out of the pool of lamplight, through the darkened jungle of equipment toward the cool glow of daylight that leaked up from the cave mouth to peek in at the entrance arch. The table was a double arm’s reach wide. Its thick planks had been planed and sanded and oiled until the seams were visible only in an abrupt change of the grain. Stavros smoothed its golden surface with a reverent finger and recalled his love affair with the winch.
Perhaps I was a tree in a former life…
He imagined a guild meeting, with the hall alive with torch- and firelight, with everyone of the guild’s ninety-odd full members comfortably seated and the storage racks and ceiling hooks groaning with the load of apprentices eager to observe the goings-on and dream about the day when they could claim a place at the table.
A draft slipped down the long low cavern to lift the corners of his paper. It brought warm air and earth smells from the cave mouth, and the faint echoes of the continuing celebration at the foot of the cliffs.
Concentrate, Ibiá. Is the Sled salvageable?
A senior ranger came through the archway with a FoodGuild clerk. They stepped around fat bundles of rope fiber, deserted beside coils of half-twisted rope when the call to Planting had come, and stopped at the table. The FoodGuilder dropped a sheaf of mud-stained papers by Aguidran’s hand and left. The ranger stood mopping his brow while she dipped her pen to scratch a series of numerical entries into a cloth-bound ledger. Stavros left his bench to fish the sketch of the antennas out of the ashes. The arch of the fireplace was as tall as he was. From the center of a big frieze over the mantel, the Sisters beckoned him with their jeweled eyes.
I know what you want, he answered them, but you can’t have it, not yet. Belief does not come that cheaply.
He turned his back on them and flattened the wrinkled paper against his thigh, then spread it out on the table in the light.
Okay. So Clausen said he’d contacted CRI when the storm cleared, so there’s one functioning antenna at least, the omni probably, not the high gain, or he would have tried picking up the power beam to fly the damn Sled out of there and we would have heard about that.
He gazed at the larger drawing once more. Lacking Aguidran’s knowledge of the surrounding countryside, he needed a larger frame of reference to fit the site map into. He would need more complete directions to the wreck. He gathered his courage and went back to Aguidran to explain his problem. She returned him a steely glare, but pointed with her pen to a boxy wooden cabinet halfway down the hall, hemmed in almost to disappearance by overflowing storage racks. She snapped a number at him, then turned away to listen as the patiently waiting ranger gave his report.
Stavros went to the cabinet and pulled open its man-high double doors. The interior was divided into several hundred numbered pigeonholes. More than half of them contained what appeared to be slim rolls of fabric. Stavros located the number Aguidran had given him, toward the middle right of the cabinet. He slid the roll from its cubicle and carried it to the table. Unknotting the faded ribbon ties at either end, he unrolled the fabric gingerly. Spread before him was a yellowing map, carefully inked on vellum and attached to a cloth backing, with flaps that folded around to protect the delicate edges. The backing had been neatly mended in several places. The map was so worn that the vellum had entirely lost its curl. It lay perfectly flat.
He left it on the table and returned to the cabinet to ease several other rolls partway from their slots. From their varying colors and states of repair, he judged them to be of vastly differing ages, some dark and threadbare with use, others as fresh as if they had been inked the day before. He pulled one of the older ones at random from the top row of pigeonholes and brought it back to the table.
It lay very limp in his hands. He opened it carefully and spread it flat. Two large circles greeted him, side by side, filled with various markings that could indicate features of terrain.
A world map? he thought, with some astonishment. And hemispherical at that. By his memory of it, it was not until the advent of spaceflight that the inhabitants of Earth had been unalterably convinced that the apparently flat ground they walked on was actually a section of arc. He studied the double hemispheres again. Every area was complete in its detail. Particular attention had been paid to a slanted quasi-equatorial band, and two isolated points, one low in the southern latitudes, circled by the squiggle marks of mountains, the other in the middle of a vast body of water in the northeastern quadrant. Stavros thought it peculiar that he had heard no tale-chants or histories of the intrepid Sawl explorers who had brought back such a wealth of detailed knowledge about their planet. Even more intriguing was the focus on those two widely separated points. Lagri was said to make her home in a mountainous desert far to the south. Valla Ired, it was taught, lived in the great northern ocean.
Would they actually put that down on a map? This way to the godhome? It would have struck him as comical if there weren’t something bland and understated about the map that treated those two markings as just another bit of fact.
He made a mental note to study this map further and question Aguidran when she could find the time. He rolled it carefully and replaced it in the cabinet, then went back to the table and the map the Master Ranger had directed him to.
He found it cryptic in the extreme, he being more at home with circuitry diagrams than with cartographies. The double hemispheres had been far easier to orient himself in, but that, he reflected, was because their layout was familiar to him from Terran world maps. This other he found deliciously exotic. As the days progressed and he slipped closer to accepting Sawlian reality as his own, an object like this, with its obscure symbolisms and hen-scratch notations could still bring him up short and remind him he was living inside an alien culture. He studied the yellowing chart for a while, then gave up. He gathered it up and brought it to the head of the table.
Aguidran took it from him brusquely but handled it with great care as she cleared a space for it among her layered papers. She called an instruction to an apprentice who was clambering noisily around the storage racks among the ropes and tarps and stacks of blankets. He set down the keg he was struggling with, climbed down and brought her a sheet of crinkly paper from a file of wide drawers beside the map cabinet. Aguidran smoothed the translucent paper over the map and traced out the route she had taken, starting with the several circles that marked the Caves. Her wide mouth quirked in an afterthought and she added a smaller circle for the Lander. Her dotted line wove through canyons and ravines and up into the mountains. A circuitous route, thought Stavros, wishing the second Sled had not been washed away. But then, we’d have working antenna and… And then what? He wasn’t quite sure. He wasn’t ready to think that far.
Aguidran went back over her line of travel, inking in landmarks such as the Red Pawn and the Talche, called the Knees, a low range of knobby mountains directly east of the Caves. She drew a broad serrated oval to represent the Dop Arek, then labeled the mountain ranges like the Talche and the Grigar in her spiked script. Next to the Cave circles, she wrote “DulElesi” with a final flourish. Her calligraphy had all the big-bellied curves that she did not, but Stavros was sure that such hinting at concealed softness was illusory. Each letter finished with a sharp serif or downturn that more than reinforced her external image. But her writing was clear and strong, far easier to decipher than the ancient crabbed markings on the original map. Aguidran regarded her work with amused pride, then flicked an impatient hand at Stavros, and sat back and stretched.
Stavros took the map and the tracing and wandered back to his bench. The route now defined made the salvage trip a reality. Based on McPherson’s preliminary report, he figured they’d need two and a half days to get there, maybe a day for the salvaging, then the return. Six days, if they didn’t try to bring back the Sled. He hoped Aguidran or maybe the Engineers’ Guild would lend him some men to manage that miracle. He laid the tracing on the t
able and leaned over it, squinting thoughtfully. Though the Ranger’s route dipped to the south, it snaked back to the east again. The crash site was actually due southeast. Stavros guessed he might be able to save some time if he cut east across the southern rum of the Dop Arek instead of struggling through the rougher terrain directly to the south.
Of course, Clausen is going to want to come along. That thought filled Stavros with dread, but he could see no way around it. Sure beats leaving him behind to run rampant in the Caves… He’ll probably want the Sled made a priority, too, so he can haul it in and get it fixed, he guessed. Tough shit. Communications are my duty, first and foremost.
As he maundered on about Clausen, his nose sinking lower and lower toward the map, the slap of running feet broke the hall’s industrious silence. A young courier from one of the relay teams charged through the main archway, took a flying leap over the bundles of rope fiber and sprinted the length of the hall to skid to a halt at her superior’s elbow. She spilled her report breathlessly, and Stavros had the satisfaction of seeing genuine surprise touch Aguidran’s weathered face. She made the runner repeat her story more slowly, then pushed back her chair abruptly and strode muttering from the hall, trailing the excited courier behind her.
Stavros hastily folded his copy of the map and shoved it into his waistband. He took two long steps after them, then caught himself and ran back to roll up the old map and stow it away in its numbered slot. The journeymen at the table noted their guildmaster’s hurried exit with mild interest and returned to their work.
The Wave and the Flame Page 26