The Disinherited

by Steve White

  "The excavations must be extensive," he said at last. "In fact, the installation must take up most of the satellite's interior. The average density is much lower than it should be for a body like that." Planetology was his specialty, and nobody argued with him.

  "The real puzzle," George Traylor rumbled, "is what the hell it's doing here. Who built it?"

  "Could it be the Korvaasha?" Rosen sounded skeptical even as he posed the question.

  Varien, who had seemed lost in thought, looked up. "Hardly. This system has only one displacement point, at the end of a displacement chain entirely unknown to them. And even if they could have gotten here, why would they have built an outpost on a gas-giant moonlet and ignored this?" He waved a theatrical hand in the direction of the life-bearing planet they orbited, on which absolutely no trace of past occupancy had been observed. "And finally, the mind boggles at the thought of them abandoning a system they've occupied; it runs counter to their entire mentality."

  "Are we, in fact, absolutely certain that the base is abandoned?" Arkady Kuropatkin sounded glum. The mind-set of the professional security officer is not an optimistic one.

  "Come, Arkady Semyonovich," Colonel Aleksandr Ilyich Golovko chided. He was the senior Russian officer, and thereby DiFalco's second in command. "You've heard Aelanni's reasons for supposing it is. And ever since we arrived here we've had every available scanner activated at full power, and we've detected no activity of any kind in this system."

  "Still," Aelanni said thoughtfully, "there's only one way to be absolutely sure." She looked at her father and DiFalco in turn. "I want to take Pathfinder back to that gas giant and investigate the satellite in depth. This needn't delay the disembarkation here; the preliminary landings and tests can proceed while we're outbound, and of course we'll transmit confirmation that the base is deserted as soon as possible."

  "Agreed," DiFalco said. "With one proviso: I'm coming." He turned to Golovko. "Sasha, you're in charge in my absence. We'll be in continuous contact." The exiles' "government" was still an ad hoc affair. The old Management Council of RAMP had been expanded to include Raehaniv members, while the military CO continued to wield what amounted to ongoing emergency powers.

  Varien wasn't a member of the Council. His position was a curious one: an advisor whose advice was always followed.

  The whole thing would have to be regularized eventually, of course. But for now it seemed to work.

  Varien was nodding emphatically. "Yes. It is essential that we learn all we can about that base without delay. I don't take seriously the notion that it could still be occupied, or that it was ever connected with the Korvaasha. But the fact remains that it is a high-technology artifact in a system with no connection that we know of to any high-technology civilization. We can never be secure here with such a mystery in our skies!"

  DiFalco and Aelanni looked at each other and then at the blue planet that would have to wait a little longer.

  * * *

  Rosen had been right; the satellite's surface was little more than a shell around the installation through whose endless passageways they now floated, speaking in hushed voices as though in the presence of ghosts.

  They had been prepared to use Raehaniv weaponry to gain access to the silent base, but that had been unnecessary. A vast spacecraft hangar deck had stood open to vacuum, and Pathfinder had maneuvered gingerly into the satellite's airless interior. By then there had been no further room for doubt that the base was abandoned.

  "Abandoned" was, in fact, precisely the right word. There was no indication of violence or destruction, from battle or any other cause. The occupiers had simply packed up and left, stripping the base of everything moveable with single-minded tidiness and leaving it infuriatingly bare of any clues to their identity.

  Some things could be inferred, though. One look at the dimensions of rooms, doors and so forth had satisfied Aelanni that the builders had not been Korvaasha; everything was too small. They must have been on the same order of size and shape as humans. And they had possessed the technology of artificial gravity—that much was clear from the installation's layout. As to their other capabilities there was little evidence, save for one fact. There was no sign that there had ever been any way to close the hangar deck's cavernous opening, and yet various indications led the Raehaniv specialists to conclude that the deck had not been designed for airless operations. The builders must have used some kind of nonmaterial barrier that allowed space vehicles to come and go but kept air in—a thing beyond Raehaniv capabilities.

  And that, DiFalco thought sourly, was about all they had: inferences from negatives. They were even having to scrounge for radioactives with which to determine the installation's age.

  His train of thought was suddenly derailed as Aelanni, floating beside him through this wider-than-average corridor, suddenly stopped short with a burst of compressed gas from her EVA stick. "Wait, Eric. The grav scanner indicates a very large empty compartment beyond this." She indicated a wall.

  "That the door to it, maybe?" He pointed at a portal, a little further down the corridor. Like others in this sector, it evidenced attempts at ornamentation—stylized fluted columns flanking it, and a kind of pediment overhead—which were entirely lacking in the rest of the base, with its stark utilitarianism.

  "Let's find out." They drifted through the opening into a space so large that the helmet-lamps of their heavy-duty vac suits could not make out the walls. A short Raehaniv sentence, spoken to Aelanni's implanted communicator, brought the team that had been following them with heavy lighting equipment.

  Light flooded the space, large enough to have been a ballroom and clearly designed for some ceremonial function. Here was more architectural elaboration than they had yet seen, notably a series of decorative bas-relief carvings around all four walls. At first DiFalco thought they looked like infinity symbols, or figure-eights lying on their sides. Then he pushed himself forward for a closer look, and saw them for what they were.

  Planets. Each was a world depicted as two hemispheres joined side-by-side, as if they had swung open at some equatorial hinge. There were no alien map-making conventions to confuse him, just obvious continental outlines.

  "Well, they couldn't take these with them," he observed dryly. "They're an architectural feature. Of course . . ."

  "Eric," Aelanni interrupted in a voice that brought him up short. She pointed at one of the maps. His eyes followed her finger . . . and, all at once, he saw nothing else.

  After a moment, he grew aware that Aelanni was speaking quietly in Raehaniv, and he was sure that a map of Earth was being projected directly onto her vision. "It doesn't seem quite right," she spoke hesitantly. "Peninsulas seem . . . fatter. Of course, it's obviously a work of decorative art, and isn't necessarily intended to be a precise representation. But this . . ." She indicated the Mediterranean—or, rather, where the Mediterranean ought to be.

  He had already noticed. When he spoke, it was like an automaton.

  "Oh, it's precise enough—but not for the present era. This is what Earth looked like during the last ice age, when a lot of water was locked up in glaciers. The ocean level was lower than the strait—we call it Gibraltar—at the mouth of that sea. So there were just those two big connected lakes. There were a lot of land bridges where there are straits now. Like there"—he indicated the connection between Britain and the European continent—"and there." He pointed to a dry Bering Sea that the remote ancestors of the Cherokee had yet to cross—and his skin prickled.

  "Eric," Aelanni spoke as if against her will, "how long ago was this ice age?"

  He turned to face her squarely. "I'd say this map represents the situation around thirty thousand years ago, Aelanni."

  For a long moment they looked unseeingly at each other as the implications sank home. Then, without a word, Aelanni began darting grimly—almost desperately, it seemed—from one of the carvings to another.

  It didn't take long to find the map of Raehan.

  *
* *

  "So that's the story?"

  DiFalco and Aelanni nodded in unison to Levinson's question. "Yes," the woman amplified. "We just finished giving the Council our full report. We have nothing to fear from that satellite. Nothing, that is, but a new set of enigmas."

  "Well," Levinson began hesitantly, "doesn't this at least settle the paradox of two unconnected human races? Whoever built that base must have taken Palaeolithic humans, and other animals, from Earth to Raehan."

  DiFalco laughed harshly. "Yeah. Somebody—identity unknown—may have done it, for some unknown and unimaginable motive. And afterwards . . . where the hell did they go? As far as I'm concerned, we're just as much in the dark as before; we're just more tantalized!

  "Anyway," he continued, "for now we can table the problem. We're alone in this system, and the transfer of our population from orbit is almost complete. The Council got a lot accomplished while we were gone." He smiled. "I was glad they went along with my suggestion for a name for this planet."

  "Right!" Levinson snorted. " 'Terranova.' Very appropriate choice!"

  "Well, it is," DiFalco insisted. "it means 'New Earth,' which this certainly is . . ."

  " . . . and it's a word that comes easily to Raehaniv-speakers. I know, I know. And of course you being Italian"—"One-quarter Italian," DiFalco muttered, unheard—"couldn't possibly have anything to do with it!"

  "Of course not," DiFalco replied blandly. Aelanni smiled dutifully; child of a culture whose local languages and national identities were centuries in their graves, she was still getting used to this kind of byplay. That the Russians used not just a different language but even a different alphabet was still beyond her comprehension.

  "Oh well!" Levinson gave a resigned sigh which turned into a yawn. "It's been a long day. I'm going to crash. See you two tomorrow." He walked down the hillside toward the cluster of new buildings, leaving the night to the other two.

  They still hadn't adjusted to the beauty of Terranova's nights. The planet—unique anong known life-bearing worlds, according to Varien—possessed a ring. It wasn't as spectacular as that of Sol's Saturn, of course; just the fragments of a moonlet whose orbital decay had brought it within the planet's Roche Limit. In fact, it was invisible in daylight. But on a clear night in these latitudes, it was a sparkling faery-bridge arching overhead. Both moons—neither as massive as Luna, but both closer and with higher albedos—were visible tonight, revealing a landscape of mountainous grandeur. (More massive than Earth, Terranova had a hotter interior, hence a more active geology.)

  On a more prosaic level, the planet's biochemistry presented few dangers to humans. They could eat the local life forms without ill effect, though several vitamins were missing; Terran and Raehaniv food crops would always be necessary as dietary supplements.

  DiFalco looked at Aelanni's profile in the double moonlight. She was holding up well, but like all the Raehaniv she would take longer than the Terrans to think of this world as home, if she ever could. The higher gravity, colder climate and whiter sun were little more than novelties to Terrans; to Raehaniv, bred of a warm world of deep-yellow sunlight and 0.87 G gravity, they were burdensome.

  He wanted very much to speak of her high fine courage in words that would convey all that he felt—but, as always, he achieved nothing but a renewed realization that he was not, and would never be, a poet. She spoke first, and it was of other things—of the mystery that lived in the outer reaches of this system.

  "Do you think we'll ever know the answer?"

  "I can't say," he spoke almost gruffly. "All I know is that we can't worry about it now. We have too much to do, and too much depends on it."

  They walked, arm in arm, toward the infant town.

  Chapter Ten

  Even in these times it was good to be home. And Tarlann, while as cosmopolitan in background as most Raehaniv, had for most of his life thought of Sarnath as home.

  He had left Norellarn that morning by suborbital shuttle—Norellarn, where only a tropical village had stood before the coming of the orbital tower and where today's megalopolis had no roots in the soil from which it thrust its gleaming modernity skyward. Of course, the centers of all Raehaniv metropoli were like that. And many of the older cities had fed the flames of the Fourth Global War. But Sarnath had stood for almost six thousand of Raehan's years, wearing the clothes of one civilization after another (and having those clothes ripped from it by one conqueror after another); in its older districts the works of those civilizations were visible like geological strata. An apartment building that had been a luxury hotel in the last innocently manic days before the First Global War might rise from a foundation that had been the base of a temple when the Khaemiriv Empire had ruled half this continent with iron swords and built on the foundations of its own bronze-age predecessors. In the shadow of soaring towers of crystalline metal and transparent plastic, crooked old streets opened unpredictably onto plazas laid out by forgotten princelings, and eccentric bridges spanned the Lural River while aircars flitted overhead. A kind of historic erosion had worn a dozen architectures down to a curiously harmonious unity that was uniquely and recognizably Sarnathiv, giving the city the kind of character that can only come from millennia of civilized occupancy.

  Sarnath's peculiar ambiance of sophisticated urban continuity, together with its economic importance, had made it the natural capital city for Raehan's world government. Inevitably, it had become the focus of much of the Tareil system's financial activity. Varien, born in Trelallieu (though of mixed ancestry like nearly everyone else), had moved the headquarters of his enterprises to Sarnath when Tarlann was still a boy. It was among the narrow streets and picturesque taverns of the Old Town's university district that he had undergone the adolescent discovery (unique in all history, as it always is) that the world was not precisely as he had been led to believe as a child.

  Now he was back in Old Town, walking incognito—he had always managed to keep out of the public eye—along a street which ended at a seawall overlooking the estuary of the Lural, on whose opposite shore the modern towers blocked out half the sky like a wall of faceted light. It was a fine spring night—the seasons had returned to normal, as the planetary weather had cleansed itself of the atmospheric detritus of the Korvaash nuclear strikes—and he could almost imagine himself a young man again. Almost.

  Even Old Town had changed. It had not escaped the creeping squalor that seemed to be growing over all of urban Raehan like a fungus as more and more resources were diverted to feed the conquerors' forced-draft heavy industries. The social fissures that were opening as real want began to encroach on Raehan's lower income levels were a matter of indifference to the Korvaasha. Indeed, Tarlann often wondered if they secretly welcomed any source of divisiveness among their subjects. Even if they had never thought of it on their own, it might well have been suggested to them by those who now swaggered past in the orange coveralls of the Implementers of the Unity.

  The first Raehaniv collaborationists, Tarlann reflected as he stepped aside as was required, had been motivated by classic Raehaniv rationalism—or, at least, able to frame their motivations in rationalistic terms. After all, were the Korvaasha not utterly indifferent to human life? Had they not shown that the continuity of human society concerned them only insofar as that society supported the industry which now served them? And so, the argument ran, would humans not be better off under a puppet government of their own kind than under the direct rule of aliens whose language contained no such concept as "mercy"?

  And yet, Tarlann thought as he stepped off the curb into the stinking runoff of a sewage system whose new energy allocation was more and more overloaded, the well-meaning intellectuals of the early days had been elbowed aside and pushed out by thugs like these two who strode past in such a way as to take up the entire sidewalk. The human type that had supplied the totalitarian regimes of the Global Wars era with secret policemen and concentration-camp guards had never disappeared, as people had fondly imagined after
the Unification. It had merely bided its time, awaiting better days; and now it had returned to Raehan, wearing an orange coverall and restrained only by its alien masters' requirement that productivity not be impaired.

  He stepped back onto the sidewalk after the two Implementers had moved on, dourly contemplated the filth on his expensive shoes, and proceeded along the street toward Dormael's wineshop.

  * * *

  The taproom was narrow but extended far back from the street entrance. Only a few furtive customers clustered around the small tables under the low ceiling with its age-darkened beams.

  Dormael approached, smiling. He had the look of the original Khaemiriv-speaking people of this city: short and stocky on Raehaniv standards, getting fat in middle age.

  "Ah, Tarlann! Welcome! It's been a long time."

  "Yes," Tarlann drawled. "I've been in Norellarn. Ghastly place. What a relief to be back in civilization! Speaking of which . . . I trust you have, ah, entertainment tonight?" His left eyebrow rose with his inflection.

  Dormael's expression grew even more unctuous. "But of course! Please come this way." As he turned to usher Tarlann through an inconspicuous door in the rear wall, he signalled almost imperceptibly to one of the drinkers and received an equally subtle acknowledgment.

  They proceeded along a narrow, crooked corridor, Tarlann's assumed personna slipping from him as he walked. (He sometimes wondered if he overdid the languid foppishness. Not all the Implementers were stupid brutes, after all. A few of them were clever brutes.) The final doorway on the right gave access to a small, functionally furnished room. Dormael let him in, then departed without a word. As he entered, a lean middle-aged man rose from a table.

  "Greetings, Tarlann! You can talk; I've been able to use my equipment freely in here, and I guarantee this room is secure."

  "Then it's secure." Tarlann gave the forty-five-degree bow that was the equivalent of a firm and enthusiastic handclasp. "I was worried, Tharuv. After your last escape . . . well, never mind. How is Arduin?"