In the outer corridor, Stavros had to twist aside sharply to avoid slamming into Megan.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, his legs dancing to be off after Aguidran. “You’re supposed to be…”
“I couldn’t take it up there,” Meg interrupted. “What’s going on?”
“You shouldn’t have left him alone!”
“He’s got a bum ankle. He’s not moving around much. Why’s everybody running around all of a sudden?”
“I’m on my way to find out,” he called as he sped off toward the entry stairs.
A small but noisy crowd had gathered at the cave mouth. Stavros counted half a dozen priests, Ashimmel among them, several of Aguidran’s couriers and the Master Ranger herself, towering over the others, listening with stem eyes while they all tried to speak at once, like a gaggle of kindergartners. Only Ashimmel remained quiet, standing a bit aside, puffy-eyed as if she had just been awakened. She had not even taken the time to don her embroidered regalia. Stavros thought she looked older, less substantial in her civilian tunic and pants. It was no mystery to him why priests throughout the galaxy assumed some kind of fancy dress.
He took up an unobtrusive post along the wall near the opening. He had nearly managed to isolate from the pandemonium the one phrase that seemed to be on everyone’s lips when Aguidran hushed them with a bellow and elbowed her way out onto the ledge. Ashimmel did likewise, standing with the Master Ranger but pointedly not beside her. The other priests drew up in formation behind their guildmaster, and the crowd fell silent, waiting.
Puzzled, Stavros stared out across the plains. The ravaged Dop Arek stared balefully back. Below, the tent city still sported its brightly colored streamers, cheerful arms waving in the breeze while an army of FoodGuild apprentices bustled about cleaning up. The planted terraces were now solid beds of waist-high yellow stalks beginning to uncurl their segmented leaves. The larger open fields were showing rows of amber spikes. The little vegetable plots bristled with new growth. Even the far gullies and rises of the plain were softening under a pale lemon fuzz. The air was warm and fragrant, the sky a clear watery green shading toward azure overhead. The salmon sun was approaching zenith.
What the hell are they staring at?
He studied the intent faces and understood from their unfocused gaze that they were not looking at all, but listening. Then Aguidran’s head jerked up and swiveled to the northeast, toward the mountains that bounded the plain, which the Sawls called the Vallegar, or Valla’s Wall. Stavros listened and heard it also, a low slow grumble of distant thunder.
Megan nosed in beside him, swallowing a yawn. “So what is it?”
He nodded northeastward. “Thunder.”
“Bad?”
“I doubt they’d make this much of a fuss if it meant a little summer shower.”
Megan chewed her lip and joked half-seriously, “So which Sister do we have to root for this time?”
“Rain coming would be Valla’s fault,” he replied blandly.
The crowd stirred into motion as Aguidran issued brisk instructions to her couriers. One jogged back into the Caves. The others sped out along the stairs and ledges to alert the weather watch. Aguidran folded her leather-clad arms and turned to face Ashimmel.
Megan eased herself down the wall and sat. “The crops’ll never survive the kind of rain they come up with around here.”
Stavros crouched beside her. “And if that crop isn’t harvested, we may all starve.”
“Well…”
He shook his head emphatically. “Liphar told me the last of the seed stores went into the ground this time. The previous harvest, before we arrived, wasn’t good.”
“Bad weather.”
“Correct.”
“Rash, though, to use up all the seed,” Megan commented.
“It was either that or risk a harvest too small to feed everyone,” he defended, as if it were his own harvest.
“They need more land under cultivation,” said Megan.
Stavros nodded impatiently. “Fine, Meg, but think of it this way: they’d have to not eat part of a harvest that barely feeds the population as it is, in order to have more seed left over to expand the planting.”
Megan rubbed her forehead. Her eyes were pink with exhaustion. “Susannah understands all this growing stuff better than we do. Maybe she could help them out.” She dragged both hands down across her eyes. “Speaking of which, there’s plumbed gas in Physicians’. Did you know that?”
Stavros’s mouth tightened. “Suspected it. I’d seen it… elsewhere.”
“But you didn’t see fit to tell us.”
He nudged her silent. Aguidran’s conference with Ashimmel had flared into heated debate. Ashimmel was completely awake now, arms waving and gray curls flying as she stalked about the cave mouth inside of a circle formed by her priests, with Aguidran at its center. The long sleeves of her tunic flapped like pinion feathers as she jabbed her hand alternately at the sky, then down at the planted fields. The Master Ranger stood her ground calmly, talking through the priest’s harangue in a voice of iron, ticking her arguments off on her long brown fingers like so many items on a shopping list.
Stavros eavesdropped intently. “Something about going or not going,” he translated. “Ashimmel insists on staying in case the storms return.”
“Sounds logical,” Megan ventured.
“Yes, but you know, it isn’t like Aguidran to be unreasonable. I can’t quite understand where she means them to go, but it seems to involve a lot of people.”
“A lot?”
Stavros frowned. “Like… everyone?”
“Everyone?”
He nodded, as mystified as she, and continued to listen. “Sounds like something they’d normally do but now Ashimmel doesn’t think it’s the right time.”
“Everyone,” repeated Megan. “Well, what they do, they do tend to do en masse.”
“Shhh. Wait. I think they’ve agreed. Oh.” He shrugged. “They’ve agreed to wait awhile and see if anything comes of the thunder.”
The argument ended abruptly. Ashimmel looked dissatisfied as Aguidran moved away to squint fiercely at the Vallegar and listen. Then, with a final frown, the Master Ranger turned on her heel and mounted the stone stairs into the Caves. Ashimmel followed more slowly, after murmured discussion with the other priests. Several of them settled themselves cross-legged at the edge, their eyes fixed on the northeastern horizon.
Stavros leaned back against the rock and felt a corner of the folded map bite into his hip. He sighed. The Sled. The damned Sled.
“And now can I have two seconds of your undivided attention?” demanded Megan.
He looked at her blankly. Between one moment and the next, he had forgotten she was there.
“Here’s the bad news: Emil’s found his lithium.”
Stavros didn’t move. “What’s the good news?”
“There isn’t any.”
He blinked, then shut his eyes and was glad to be near to sitting down. “Already? But how?”
“Leave it to Emil Clausen to go prospecting in the middle of a hurricane.” Megan bowed her head. “He came back with big chunks of it in his knapsack.”
“Lithium.”
“Some ore he seemed happy with.”
“Shit.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more.”
“Shit, shit, shit!” He pressed his hands to his temples. Work, brain! This is it! What do we do now?
“Wish to hell there was something we could do,” Megan muttered.
He looked up at her, because she sounded in earnest.
She shrugged. “Well, it has been done, you know, once or twice.”
“What?” he demanded, impatient with her cautious approach.
“Getting a world declared closed to development. Urhazzhle, for instance, or the Double Moons. But in those cases, life signs had been detected long before the landing parties arrived on the scene. A friend of mine”—Megan smiled ruefully—�
��from the Bad Old Days spearheaded the case for Urhazzhle. The lawyers got a head start on the commercial interests, for once. But both of those were advanced civilizations, thriving planet-wide, not like this.” Her shoulders drooped as she leaned back against the wall. “Remember Feingold’s Star, the fourth planet’? Nah, you’re too young. Well, CONPLEX found something they wanted there, too, and had an indigenous population of half a million moved to the next planet closer to the sun, where they promptly became wards of the corporation because the planet was too hot and dry for them to practice their traditional agriculture. In some CONPLEX report I read somewhere later, the rapid decline of that population plus their alcoholism and high crime rate is laid to the natives’ ‘failure to adapt’ appropriately. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.”
But Stavros felt an absurd resurgence of hope. “You mean, if the Sawls could be shown to be sufficiently advanced…?” Picturing the BathHall in all its glory, he stared at her so piercingly that she smiled, resigned and sad.
“I don’t think gas and running water are enough to build a case, Stav. Fusion or spaceflight is more what the courts have in mind, being stuck into using themselves as the standard to judge by.” She paused thoughtfully. “There was one world where the enormous size of the population won the case. I mean, there are regulations, laws on the books that are repeatedly ignored. But who knows what they are or how to find out about them at this distance or even what evidence would be required to prompt legal action’? We’d need a court injunction against CONPLEX and a team of first-rate counsel.” Megan made a mocking grimace. “And you’ll never guess who alone among us is the oh-so-proud possessor of a law degree.”
Stavros didn’t need to ask. “Sonofabitch,” he stated.
They sat for a moment in silence, watching the equally silent huddle of priests, while Stavros waited for his brain to stop pinwheeling about the insides of his head. As his thoughts calmed, he said, “But wait, Meg. CRI might have that information in her library files.”
“If we could get to CRI.”
Suddenly, the working antenna in the Sled assumed a new importance. “Yeah, and we’d have to do our search in secret, too. Can’t tip Clausen off until we’re sure of our case.”
“You’d also have to file a protest before he gets his claim staked, if I remember correctly.”
“Jesus.”
Megan shrugged. “I know. I wasn’t trying to offer you any hope, just discussing the extent of the tragedy.”
Stavros felt the map again, prodding sharply at his hip like a goad. “So he hasn’t staked it yet? Not while he was in contact with CRI?”
“Said he had to determine the extent of it first.”
“What if I could keep him from doing it for a while?”
Megan chuckled bitterly. “Convince Emil to postpone ‘Progress’?”
“Keep him from being able to do it, I mean.” He leaned forward, suddenly eager. “Meg, if the comlink stays ostensibly broken, he can’t report his claim. Meanwhile, we do our research. Is your lawyer friend still around? If we can pull together the rudiments of a case, we can put it to him. Send a drone back to Earth with a message.”
“We’d never get the legal wheels moving in time,” resisted Megan. Then she peered at him sideways. “How could you keep it broken?”
Stavros laughed softly, excited. He was past praying that he was right, that Megan was the one he could trust. She was, after all, the prospector’s natural antagonist. “Meg, I know it’s five a.m. by your schedule and you’re dead on your feet, but I’m making us some coffee, real Nescaf, and then I want you to talk this over with me real carefully. We’ve had our disputes, but basically we agree on the basic issues, the, ah, moral issues. If, and I say if, there turns out to be something legal we can do to save this world for the people who live in it, just how illegal are you prepared to be in order to get those legal wheels in motion?”
Megan sighed, closed her eyes, and he feared she was trying to decide how to refuse him most gently. But finally, a dreamy smile flitted across her face, expressing not just her exhaustion but some flicker of memory that caused her to look up at him with a younger woman’s eyes.
“Stav,” she murmured, “just because it’s law doesn’t make it right.”
BOOK FOUR
“First let me talk with this philosopher. What is the cause of thunder?”
King Lear,
Act III, sc. iv
30
While Susannah went with Ampiar to prepare a bed in the ward, the Master Healer lingered over Danforth, resting his hands lightly on the fevered head and seeming to concentrate while watching Clausen out of the corner of his eye. Danforth lay unconscious, breathing shallowly. Weng packed up the anesthetic kit. McPherson hovered at Ghirra’s elbow, taking in the expression of deep peace on the patient’s ebony face.
“He looks dead,” she mourned.
Ghirra rumbled gently, a wordless negative.
McPherson stared up at him soberly. “Well, he could still die, couldn’t he?”
“Yes,” Ghirra replied simply. “Always we can die, M’Furzon.”
Clausen chortled. “A real philosopher.” He yanked the last of the plastic sealant from his arm with a tight grunt of pain. The wound reopened and began to bleed. Clausen clamped his hand over it and looked annoyed.
Ghirra noticed Clausen as if for the first time. He left Danforth and brought over fresh linen and a bowl of hot water. He eased aside the bulging knapsack as if it too might need his care, and set the water down at Clausen’s side. Then he stood back and waited, as blood seeped through Clausen’s fingers and dripped onto his white-clad thigh.
Clausen grinned at Weng across Danforth’s still form. “There’s always a bright one in every bunch, eh, Commander?” He offered Ghirra his bleeding arm. “You win, friend. I’m all yours.”
Susannah and Ampiar returned with a light cloth stretcher as Ghirra finished cleaning and wrapping Clausen’s arm.
“This guy’s not bad,” the prospector noted to Susannah as she passed. “You ought to take him on as a trainee.”
“Interesting,” Susannah returned curtly. “That’s just what I’ve been hoping he’d do with me.”
Four pairs of arms were required to shift Danforth’s limp weight onto the stretcher. Ampiar pushed aside the linen curtain as Ghirra and Susannah carried him into the ward, McPherson in close attendance.
“She’d rather have him charged up and ordering us all around again,” Clausen commented not unkindly. He slid from his slab, supporting himself on his stick, and hobbled after them. Weng followed more slowly, observing the details of the hall.
Clausen stopped briefly to peer through the open archway at the end of the big stone bench. He saw several apprentices stripped to the waist, stirring vast clay caldrons with long wooden poles, bathed in clouds of steam. He shook his head and limped onward. In the ward, the newborn chastised its mother with a screeching wail that was quickly hushed as she returned it to her breast.
As Weng moved through the linen curtain in Clausen’s wake, her attention was drawn to a second archway just to the other side. The opening was low and narrow, nearly hidden in the curtain’s stiff folds. She lingered as the others went ahead into the ward.
A faint light burned inside, a small oil lamp on a wooden table in the center of the room. Weng went in and stood looking into the shadows at tier after tier of polished wooden shelves sagging under the weight of enough books to fill a small Terran library.
Along one wall, the shelving gave room to a long waist-high counter. A confusion of glass glimmered in the darkness, cylinders and tubing and long-necked spheres, and tall jars with etched labels. Thick books lay open among the glimmer. Weng crossed the room noiselessly to squint at the dimly lit pages. Columns of faded Sawl numerals marched across yellowed vellum, numbers and letters in vertical array, like mathematical formulae turned on their sides. Weng reached with careful fingers to turn a page. More numbers, some embedded within g
eometric figures: circles, triangles, six—and eight-sided polygons. Gently, she lifted the front half of the book, keeping one finger at the original mark, to open it at the beginning. She leafed through it intently. There was a long passage of text, then more numbers. Fastened to the third page, carefully bordered by thin silken bindings, was a brown and spotted fragment from a far older volume. It contained a chart and notations, so precisely and regularly formed that it might have been a scrap of a printed page. The figures in the chart were again laid out in vertical columns, but in noticeable eight-part groupings. Weng frowned at it, turned her head to study it sideways, and frowned again.
“Why can’t he be downstairs with the rest of us?” McPherson’s querulous complaint drifted in from the ward along with renewed infant wails. Regretfully, Weng opened the book to its original place, took a last look around and glided out of the room.
Danforth lay on a clean pallet in the middle of the ward.
“He can,” Susannah was saying, “when you can supply better round-the-clock nursing care than Ghirra can up here, and still manage the rest of your duties.”
McPherson glanced uneasily down the row of beds at the new mother and her attendant midwife, and grimaced her acceptance.
“The Sled, McP., the Sled.” Clausen hobbled around among the shining tiled pallets. “And my lithium. We’ve got to get right back out there. The distraction will do you good.” He raised his face to the slice of sunlight streaming through the wide glass panes of the clerestory. Reflections illuminated the arched ceiling, groin-vaulted in a nearly gothic manner. The prospector rubbed his new-grown beard. “Nice room, this,” he murmured to Weng as she rejoined them. “I’d like to see what else they’ve been hiding up here.”
“Our first efforts must concentrate on equipment recovery,” Weng stated, ostensibly for McPherson’s benefit. “As soon as we’ve all had some sleep. We must trust Dr. Danforth’s recovery to Dr. James and to our friends here.” She smiled graciously around, catching Ghirra’s eye. He dipped his head imperceptibly in return.
The Wave and the Flame Page 27