"Me? Forget what?"
"You know." Sig picked up a fork and began to eat. "Not another word," he said with his mouth full, " 'less you want a thick ear."
Hag's dark-complexioned face showed injured innocence. But he too picked up a fork and started to eat.
Josh went across to where Dawn was staring at the wall, turned her round, and brought her to the table. He sat her down and took a seat next to her.
Topaz Karpov was on his immediate right. She pushed two plates of food toward Josh and Dawn, and smiled at him shyly.
"She's not really like, brain-dead, is she? I thought she was, at first."
It occurred to Josh that those were the first words that Topaz had ever spoken to him, except in answer to a direct question. "No," he said. "She's not brain-dead."
He felt almost guilty, talking about Dawn as though she wasn't there. That's what Aunt Stacy did.
"Dawn is autistic," he went on. All the others were listening closely.
"What's that mean?"
"It means she's different. She doesn't speak much, but she hears everything, and I think she remembers everything. What made you change your mind about her?"
"She said, 'Lions and tigers and bears,' after you said 'Animals with internal skeletons and backbones.' " Topaz craned around Josh, to look more closely at Dawn. "She's beautiful, you know. Can Dawn read and write?"
Josh felt like a fool. He had taken Aunt Stacy's assessment, without bothering to check for himself. "I don't know."
"Can you read, Dawn?" Topaz asked.
She might as well have been talking to herself. Dawn went on eating and took absolutely no notice.
"Total retard," Rick Lasker muttered, after a few silent seconds.
Josh heard that comment with oddly mixed feelings. Somehow it seemed all right for him to resent Dawn—after all, he was saddled with her, and he was the one who had to drag her around with him like a baby. But that didn't give strangers the right to insult her. He was saved from having to react to Rick, because Amethyst Karpov suddenly sat up straight and said, "Shut up, all of you."
"Amy!" Sapphire said. "You don't—"
"Shut up, and listen. Can't any of you hear it?"
They could. It was the whine of engines from outside.
"He's leaving us!" Rick cried. "He can't."
There was a rush for the door, halted briefly by Sapphire's urgent shout to her sisters: "Face masks!"
Sig, leading the way, jerked the door open with one hand while he was still fiddling with his mask with the other. He halted on the threshold, until the others crowded behind him and shoved him out of the way.
Josh came last in the group. He had paused to bring Dawn along, decided to leave her at the table, and hurried after the others. They had all stopped close to the doorway. He pushed his way through them, and was enormously relieved to see that the lander stood exactly where they had left it, in the middle of the cleared circle.
Bothwell Gage certainly hadn't left Solferino. He had emerged from the building to the right, and he was waving his arms excitedly in the air. The sound of engines was louder. It came from a cargo aircar, settling down fifty yards behind the orbital lander.
While they all watched, the bigger vehicle rolled steadily forward and came to a halt. The engine whine ceased. The carpet of dense purple vegetation beneath, flattened by powerful downward jets of air, sprang back upright.
A strange and profound stillness fell on the clearing.
The contrast between two people could not have been greater. Josh knew that if Bothwell Gage had been left in charge on Solferino, Sig and Sapphire between them would have eaten the helpless biologist alive.
With the new arrival, though, it was obvious in the first two minutes that nothing like that would happen. They later learned that Solomon Brewster was employed as a scientist and settlement manager, but with his height, deep chest, and huge arms, he looked more like a street bruiser. His hair and eyebrows were pale blond, contrasting with dark and penetrating eyes. Josh saw Sig Lasker make a quick evaluation and come to attention. Sig was going to take the man very seriously.
The new arrival glared at the group as though they had no right to exist. His first words were, "What the devil are you doing here? I wasn't expecting anyone for another week."
"A fortunate accident of timing." Bothwell Gage tried a smile, which was not returned. "I was on Solferino two years ago, with the first exploration party. Now I happen to be on my way to Merryman's Woe, and the Foodlines staff coordinators decided that it would be economical and convenient if I accompanied this group as far as Solferino."
"Convenient to whom?" Brewster scowled. "Not to me, that's for sure. Come on. You and I need a minute or two of private talk."
The two men disappeared into one of the buildings. Josh and the others had no idea what was said there, but when they emerged again, after much more than a couple of minutes, Bothwell Gage seemed to vanish into the background. Josh didn't even notice him leave, although later in the day he saw that the small lander was gone.
"I'm going to be responsible for training all of you in addition to my other duties," Brewster said, as soon as the group was settled inside the building. "Let's start with names. Mine is Solomon Brewster. My friends call me 'Sol.' You can call me 'Sir.' What's your name." He pointed a thick finger at Sig.
"Sig Lasker."
"Sig Lasker, sir. Is that your full name?"
Sig hesitated. "No."
"No, sir."
"No, sir."
"Better. What is your full name?"
"It's Siegfried Lasker."
"All right. You." The finger jabbed at Hag.
Hag swallowed. "Hagen Lasker. Sir."
"And you, the next one?"
Rick looked miserably at his twin brother. "Alberich Lasker. Sir, I'd rather be called Rick."
"I don't blame you. Siegfried, Hagen, Alberich." Brewster glanced from one Lasker brother to the next. "Three characters from a Wagner opera. What is it, your parents are opera freaks? People who give their kids weird names ought to be shot."
The three brothers nodded in vigorous agreement.
"All right." Brewster moved on to Ruby. "How about you?"
"Ruby Karpov, sir."
"Nice and normal. Very good. That's the way to answer." He pointed to Amethyst. "And you?"
While the Karpov sisters squirmed and looked for ways to avoid sounding like a jewelry catalog, Josh breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever his mother's sins, she had not cursed him with an eccentric name. Given her interests and the names from plays that he had heard thrown about since he was old enough to remember anything, he might easily have finished up as Willy Loman Kerrigan, or Hamlet Kerrigan. When his turn came he was able to speak his own name with confidence. "Joshua Kerrigan, sir."
"Very good," said Brewster. He went straight on from Josh to Dawn. "And your name?"
She took no notice of him at all.
"She's called Dawn," Josh said. "I don't think she'll talk to you."
"Talk to you, sir. Anyway, you weren't being asked. What do you think you are, her keeper?" But Sol Brewster's question was almost absentminded. He was much more interested in examining Dawn. "So this is the autistic one."
That statement told Josh several things at once. Since Brewster knew that Dawn was autistic, he probably knew plenty more about the group. That was to be expected, if he was going to be in charge of them.
More important, Brewster had pretended not to know anything. He had deliberately embarrassed the others by making them state their full names when they obviously didn't want them talked about. Even the "very normal" comment when Ruby Karpov gave her name lost its innocence, if Brewster knew what was coming with the other sisters.
Why would anyone do things like that? Presumably, to show who was the boss. But it also suggested a big mean streak.
Josh wondered if Sig Lasker had read that on his first sight of Sol Brewster. It was a wise decision to be careful how you dealt with the
man.
Brewster had apparently had enough fun with names. His attention was now moving elsewhere. "We'll stay here for a few days," he said, "to get you used to Solferino air and gravity. Then we'll travel farther afield. I'll outline the program for each of you tomorrow, but there's some things that can't wait. Like, who made that mess in the kitchen and didn't bother to clean it up? The place looks like it's been struck by lightning."
Josh caught Topaz's eye. Everyone had been eating when the cargo aircar arrived with Brewster on board, and there had been no time to think of clearing dishes. Topaz opened her mouth, but when Josh shook his head she had enough sense not to say anything.
"I don't care who did it," Brewster went on. "All of you can fix it—and soon." He stared at the group again and seemed to come to some decision. "Before you get to clearing up, though, I want to say a few more words. You are probably wondering just what's been going on here in the settlement. I'm sure you could tell that Professor Gage was having a fit when he found this place empty, with nobody to hand you over to.
"That was my doing. I'm in charge here, and a few days ago I made a decision. I took everyone at this installation to orbit, then sent them on to the main Grisel system medical center for detailed evaluation. That's why I wasn't here to greet you. Before you begin to panic, let me assure you that there was nothing wrong with anyone. Quite the reverse, in fact. During the past seven months of operations of this facility, there has been not a single case of sickness. Not even minor ailments. You may not realize how strange that is, with a total of forty-five people present. The on-site medical computers claim it's a one-in-a-billion chance.
"But it goes beyond that. People on Solferino found their old problems disappearing. I'm not just talking about things that might be easily explained, like allergic reactions. Cures like that might be caused by a change in plant and animal allergens. We had half a dozen far more peculiar events. A man with a long-term digestive problem found that he could eat anything with no aftereffects. A woman who had been told she could never have children, married to a man who three times had been declared completely infertile, became pregnant—you can imagine what sort of a shock that was for everybody. I noticed that scars on my own face that I'd had since a skating accident when I was fourteen were fading and vanishing. Other people told me the same thing, the signs of old injuries were disappearing. I finally decided that it was time for people to visit a more advanced medical center when the teeth of the oldest person here started to fall out—and a new set began to grow in."
Josh thought at once of his own teeth. In the general excitement of leaving Burnt Willow Farm, dental treatment had been forgotten.
"So." Brewster stirred in his seat. They had been listening to him in total fascination, and now he looked them over, one by one, as though assessing any medical problems they might each have. "What is it? Something in the water, something in the soil, something in the air, something in the radiation from Grisel? We don't know.
"But I'll tell you this: If you do exactly what I tell you to do while you're on Solferino, you won't come to any harm. And maybe there's more than that. After a few months here, maybe you'll be fixed up to live forever."
Chapter Seven
MORNING on Solferino. It was like the first day at Burnt Willow Farm, when Josh had been so tired and had slept so heavily that when he woke he didn't know where he was. This was even more confusing. He had that early-morning feeling, but the light through the little porthole-like window carried the ruddy glow of late Earth evening.
Josh climbed out of his narrow bunk. Before they went to bed, thin walls had extruded from the floor to divide the single big room of the dormitory into half a dozen separate cubicles. Those dividers must have been soundproof because he could hear nothing, not even the sound of the Laskers' breathing in neighboring cubicles.
He slipped on his shoes, went to the window, and stared out. He was facing the rising sun—was that direction still called "east" on Solferino? Grisel, peeping over the horizon, showed as a thin crescent of a gigantic red disk. He watched the bloated sun creep higher, thinking of what Brewster had told them. Maybe he ought to be outside, breathing the planet's health-improving air deep into his lungs.
Was it safe to do that yet, without a breathing mask? Gage had said it might need a few more days.
As Josh had that thought, he saw a movement on his left. Someone—was it a girl?—had appeared briefly before heading beyond his field of view.
If that was Dawn, and she had gone outside without her mask—
Josh hurried from the cubicle and ran to the building's main door. He reached in for a mask from the dispenser, but the machine apparently knew more than he did. It wouldn't release one.
"A mask is unnecessary," said an impersonal voice. "Your biological parameters are within the acceptable range. Do you need a mask for some other individual?"
Josh didn't bother to answer. He continued out through the door. The machine was smart enough to figure out that no answer was equivalent to a negative.
Everything, buildings and fence and cargo aircar, had a drenched, soggy look to it. The stalks of the low-growing plants were bent over and heavy with moisture. Either it had rained in the night, or dew here was heavier than anything Josh had encountered at Burnt Willow Farm. The air was breathless, without the slightest hint of a breeze.
He began to hurry to the left, where he had caught that fleeting glimpse of a girl's figure. Before he had taken half a dozen steps, a sweet and familiar aroma filled his nostrils.
He stopped, rigid with astonishment. Triple-snap. He had last encountered that on the grubby back streets of an Earth city. Of all the smells that he might have expected on Solferino, it seemed the least probable. He saw Sapphire Karpov, leaning against the wall of the building. She was staring blank-eyed at the rising sun, the little twisted cylinder dangling loosely from between her lips. What was going into her lungs was anything but health-giving.
Josh made a rough, throat-clearing sound to announce his presence.
She turned slowly, the cylinder drooping from the corner of her mouth. Her scowling glance told Josh that whatever truce might have been in operation the previous evening was now over. Close up, he could see a faint scar that he had never noticed before, running from the left side of her mouth across her cheek and toward her ear.
"Yeah?" Sapphire peered at him through slitted eyes.
"Where did you get that snap?"
"None of your damned business." She took a long, luxurious draw, inhaling to the bottom of her lungs. "But as a matter of fact, I brought it with me. It wasn't easy. I've got to be careful with these, 'cause I'm down to my last dozen."
"What happens afterward?"
"I don't want to think about that." Sapphire removed the tube from her mouth and stared at it. "Maybe the last hit will kill me. That's what you hear all the time, snap is a killer and triple-snap is worse. Maybe I'll kill myself. Withdrawal symptoms are supposed to be a bitch. Maybe I'll kill you, just for the hell of it. And that big hairy creep Brewster, too. Him and his asking all our names. He was rattling our cage on purpose last night. I'd like to kill him—just like I ought to kill my goddamn father." She took another deep draw and shuddered from head to toe as it hit. "Oh, hell. I don't know and I don't care. Bug off, Joshua Kerrigan. I've not got a thing to say to you. Or maybe I do—just one. Keep your dirty paws off Topaz. If you don't, you'll find out if Solferino will cure crushed nuts."
"Topaz?" The switch in subject bewildered Josh. "I've not said one single word to her."
"You think I didn't see you two sniffing round each other last night? You think I didn't notice her bringing you food? If you believe I'm gonna let you mess with my little sister, you'd better think again."
"She didn't talk to me."
"I saw her doing it."
"What I mean is, it wasn't me she wanted to talk to. She was interested in Dawn, not in me. Oh, jeeks." Josh remembered the original reason he had come outside. "Have yo
u seen Dawn—this morning?"
"Sure." Sapphire again sagged back on the wall, her eyes closed. "She went out the gate."
"The door of the building?"
"Nah. Not the door, you dummy. The gate. The gate in the fence."
Josh hadn't even noticed a gate. But there it was, slightly ajar. When he went toward it, he saw the sign, keep closed. But that wouldn't have meant a thing to Dawn.
Or would it? He remembered Topaz's unanswered question, "Can you read, Dawn?"
He opened the gate and went through, nervous about what might be on the other side. He found himself in a dark world of red gloom and purple shadows. It was as though the two-inch stems of the clearing, released from human constraints, grew here to giant size. They were as thick as his wrist and reached up above his head to form a canopy about eight feet high. The top layer was translucent, ribbed and continuous, like open paper-thin umbrellas. The plants competed for light, filling in every square inch of space except in places where a rounded balloon shape somehow cleared everything within three feet of it. There, shafts of sunlight speared down to illuminate an ankle-deep ground cover of succulent sickly-yellow stalks. They reminded Josh of fat, slow-writhing worms. He flinched as he stepped on a bunch, but they proved to be crisp and brittle. When he moved to peer at the exposed side of one of the balloons, fat stalks snapped beneath his feet. He felt a spurt of juice wet the calf of his leg and smelled a pungent, peppery odor.
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