by John Grant
"Then it was a bit of a waste of time coming here, wasn't it? Whose side are they on?"
THEY ARE ON NEITHER SIDE. MANY OF THE SPECIES IN THE WONDERVALE REFUSE TO BE DRAWN INTO THE CONFLICT ON EITHER SIDE. THE SPINDRIFTERS ARE AMONG THEM. THEY PAY THEIR TAXES, BUT THEY WILL NOT TAKE UP ARMS ON BEHALF OF EITHER THE AUTARCHY OR ANY REBELLIOUS FACTION. THEY BELIEVE IT IS SAFER THAT WAY.
"Or cowardly."
THE AUTARCH WILL ISSUE ORDERS FOR A PLANET TO BE TORCHED ON THE SLIGHTEST PROVOCATION. SPINDRIFT IS A VERY UNIMPORTANT WORLD, AND ALMOST NEVER COMES TO HIS ATTENTION. THE SPINDRIFTERS PREFER TO KEEP IT THAT WAY. THAT'S WHY WE BROUGHT THE Santa Maria HERE TO SEEK REFUGE. HAD WE GONE TO ANY KNOWN FOCUS OF REBELLION WE WOULD HAVE MADE IT SO MUCH THE EASIER FOR KAANTALECH TO FIND US—OR WE MIGHT HAVE BEEN BLOWN OUT OF SPACE BY REBEL FORCES BEFORE THEY DISCOVERED WHO WE WERE.
"But if the Spindrifters won't let us land . . ." Strider began.
THEY WON'T LET US LAND ON SPINDRIFT ITSELF, BUT THEY WILL LET US PUT THE SANTA MARIA DOWN ON THE MOON BENEATH US. FROM THERE WE CAN SEND A PARTY OR PARTIES ACROSS TO SPINDRIFT BY SHUTTLE.
She sat up on her bed and put her legs over the side. "Now you're talking. When can we get to it?"
#
Strauss-Giolitto watched Spindrift coming slowly closer to her. She had only fleeting memories of her childhood on Earth, but she had seen enough holos since then to know what the mother world looked like, and she could see the similarities here. Nevertheless, Spindrift seemed unnatural to her: there was so much free water everywhere, albeit most of it in the form of ice. And the planet seemed altogether bigger than it should be.
She felt a mixture of excited anticipation and fear. This was an unknown world. She knew full well that this was one reason why Strider had sent her as the human component of the first investigatory party: when it came to the crunch, Strauss-Giolitto was among the more expendable members of the Santa Maria's personnel. The Images had been full of assurances that the Spindrifters were non-aggressive, but Strider's opinion was that you could never be sure: Ten Per Cent Extra Free had been negotiating with a nation's military, after all. Sitting alongside her across a narrow aisle, piloting the shuttle, was one of the least expendable personnel—but the presence of Pinocchio increased the probability of the party surviving, and of course the bloody bot was more sturdily made than a human being, so that he himself was likely to pull through even if she didn't. She suspected that in fact he was doing only a part of the piloting, and that much only for cosmetic reasons; also aboard was Ten Per Cent Extra Free, who could easily have run all the shuttle's functions single-handedly . . .
Wondering if the Images actually had anything like hands damped down her nervousness briefly. But then the growing bulk of Spindrift brought it all back again.
Soon afterwards Strauss-Giolitto could see nothing ahead of her through the view-window but blue and white and brown. In her peripheral vision she could still see Pinocchio's knee. Seeing it annoyed her. It distracted her attention. The bot wasn't so bad, she had concluded a while ago, but his knee was very irritating, right now.
The shuttle lurched suddenly, and her restrainer belt tore at her waist and shoulder.
Strauss-Giolitto let out a little yip of fright. She'd been warned this would happen, but that didn't make the abrupt shock of the real experience much easier to take.
Pinocchio turned and smiled at her. "We're hitting the atmosphere," he said. "Don't worry: the shuttle can take almost anything short of a direct impact with the surface. Just get ready to watch the fun."
Then the smile vanished and he turned back to the controls, his fingers moving with unhuman nimbleness over the set of keyboards in front of him, his eyes intent on a bank of monitors rather than on the unfolding scene ahead.
The shuttle was being buffeted about more seriously and more frequently now. Despite her restrainer belt, Strauss-Giolitto gripped her armrests. The shuttle was skipping around the planet's upper atmosphere, losing speed all the while. Even so, the plastite of the view-window began to glow a dull orange. Plastite was virtually unbreakable and had a melting point of an almost unbelievable number of thousands of degrees Celsius, but that didn't mean much to Strauss-Giolitto right now.
Things got a lot worse before they got better. Thank God I didn't suit up, thought Strauss-Giolitto a few minutes later, eyes streaming, after she had emptied at least one previous meal into the plastic dispose-all provided for exactly such eventualities. Even Pinocchio seemed to be taking matters a lot less lightly than he had before; the grimness of his face was born not entirely of concentration. Strauss-Giolitto suddenly fathomed that he, too, had never previously come down through a dense atmosphere.
"You think we're going to make it, Skip?" she said hoarsely, hoping the weak joke would make her feel better.
It didn't. Pinocchio made no response, and she had a nasty few seconds before she realized that this was because his attention was focused entirely on what he was doing.
THIS IS PERFECTLY CUSTOMARY, MARIA STRAUSS-GIOLITTO, came Ten Per Cent Extra Free's reassuring voice in her mind. PLANETFALL IS NEVER AN EASY BUSINESS. ATMOSPHERES RESENT BEING INVADED.
Right now Strauss-Giolitto resented atmospheres.
Still the relentless pummelling of the shuttle went on. How long was it going to last? The plastite was a brighter orange now. Even if the plastite itself was impervious to what it was being put through, what about the points around the sides of the view-window? What were they made of?
She put her face in her hands so that she didn't need to keep on looking, but that only made it worse. Brute instinct, overriding logic, told her she should keep watching the view-window so that, if it did unexpectedly explode in towards her face, she would have a chance of running away and hiding. She wished she could run away and hide now, but there was nowhere in the confined cockpit to run to.
With an abruptness that was almost as shocking as anything that had gone before, it was over.
The shuttle was moving—still at a high velocity—through a clear blue sky. They had come in over one of the polar icecaps; the curve of the planet ahead of them was briefly orange and then, as the plastite rapidly cooled, a glaring white that stung her eyes.
Pinocchio visibly relaxed.
"You were worried there a while yourself, weren't you?" she said lamely after a while. The shuttle's drive was virtually silent; she could hear the whine of the air streaming past as well as all sorts of creaks and groans from here and there on the craft as its components cooled.
"It was something unique to my experience," the bot admitted. Only a short while ago, his head would certainly have buzzed. Since the Images had shaped him over it was senseless to continue with the pretence that he was just a halfwitted valet. Strauss-Giolitto's attitude towards him hadn't changed entirely—he was still just a bot, dammit, rather than a creation of the Lord—but she had at least come to regard him with some affection, as though he were a sort of incredibly intelligent housepet. They could get along together, so long as she remembered to bite back the more tactless of the remarks that came to mind.
One of the screens in front of Pinocchio lit up, and his attention promptly shifted away from her again. She wished she could see what the screen was showing him, but she was side-on to it. Out of its speaker came an incomprehensible noise, full of soft clicks and harsher whistlings.
After a few moments Ten Per Cent Extra Free intercepted, and the words began to sound to Pinocchio and Strauss-Giolitto as if they were in standard Argot.
." . . welcome you to our world, strangers, but you must understand that we have to take precautions." Even in Argot the voice sounded alien. It had a light touch of ethereality to it. She imagined this might be how a ghost would talk. "Our Images tell us that you are what you seem, but even an Image could be misled. You will therefore follow these navigational instructions precisely."
There followed a string of information that was as incomprehensible to Strauss-Giolitto as the earlier babble had been. Pinocchio see
med to understand it, though, for his fingers began moving swiftly over the keyboards again.
"I have assimilated all that," said the bot after a minute or two. "Would you like me to give a systems computer download to you so that you may check for error?"
"No." The voice from the screen sounded horrified. "You might infect our own systems. If you deviate slightly, we shall assume honest error. If you deviate greatly, I shall contact you again and re-dictate the navigational and landing instructions. Otherwise I shall not speak to you until you are over the Gate to the Sky."
The light from the screen, which had been reflected on Pinocchio's face, died.
THERE WERE NO ERRORS, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
#
The Gate to the Sky proved to be the spaceport Strider had observed from the Santa Maria. True to its word, the Spindrifter reopened communications with Pinocchio and guided him precisely through the landing. Strauss-Giolitto had a further urge to retch as a long runway ahead approached the craft at impossible speed. When they made first contact with the ground it was just as bad, because the shuttle jerked and bucked as if it were trying to throw itself off the hard surface and go tumbling into a blaze of destruction. Strauss-Giolitto's thoughts were drowned in the indescribable racket as the shuttle's retro-jets and brakes cut in and slowly, slowly prevailed.
At last, after what seemed like an infinitely extended screaming slither towards certain death, the shuttle came to a halt.
Strauss-Giolitto was so drained of all emotion that it was a long time before she could properly understand that she, a teacher from City 22, was the first human being to land on the surface of this alien world—the first of all human beings to be on a planet outside the Solar System. She felt there ought to be a bit of flag-waving and an out-of-tune brass band, but instead all she heard were the surreptitious little noises of the shuttle settling itself.
"May we disembark?" said Pinocchio to the screen.
And then the wonder of it all hit Strauss-Giolitto. She'd been thinking about brass bands, wasting valuable seconds when she could have been discovering what this new world was like. She'd been resenting the residual taste of vomit in her mouth. She'd been . . .
She shook herself, and began staring through the view-window eagerly, lapping up everything she could see.
Which proved to be disappointingly little. The sky was still that unnatural blue, unlike the familiar orange-blue of the Martian heavens, but she had seen pictures of pre-nuke-war Earth; she even knew that those huge, seemingly heavy masses of white were clouds, even though they were nothing like the wisps that occasionally appeared in the atmosphere of Mars. Very far in the distance she could see oddly purple-seeming mountains, but aside from that there was just a broad expanse of yellowed featurelessness with, tiny at its far end, a cluster of box-like buildings. The Spindrifters might have given their spaceport a romantic name, the Gate to the Sky, but from here it looked entirely functional, drab and desolate. Presumably spaceports all over the Universe looked very much the same.
"You may exit your vessel only if you are clad in full spacesuits," the alien voice was instructing in its eerily whispering voice.
"I'm a bot," said Pinocchio. "I have no suit."
There was a pause.
"That is acceptable to us. But your companion must be suited."
Strauss-Giolitto, still absorbing the fact that, whatever the scene through the view-window looked like, she was on a world new to humanity, only half-heard this. Pinocchio reached across the aisle and prodded her shoulder, then gestured towards the wall-chest where her suit was stored.
"About our Image?" said the bot to the screen.
"Images are always welcome on Spindrift." The voice gave a little whinny which Strauss-Giolitto guessed must be the best Ten Per Cent Extra Free could do to represent a Spindrifter's equivalent of a laugh. "We couldn't keep them out anyway, even if we wanted to."
She unclicked her restrainer belt with difficulty; the experiences of the past hour or so had made her fingers numb without her realizing it. As she stood, little cramps shot through her calves and groin area. She moved behind Pinocchio's seat and at last had sight of the Spindrifter.
The Images had said that the Spindrifters were humanoid, and at first glance that seemed to be the case. The face looking out from the screen was vaguely elfin, with slanting eyes and a pointy chin. But then you noticed the differences. The other features were more or less as in a human, but only approximately. The thing in the center of the face was obviously not a nose: it was an organ that lazily coiled and uncoiled as the Spindrifter spoke. The feature that looked superficially like a mouth was clearly constructed quite differently from a human mouth: it had four lips, set in a sort of pouting diamond shape. A high crest of what seemed to be stiff black hair ran from the top of the forehead towards the rear, while the rest of the face was covered with short black bristles. And those human-seeming eyes were utterly black, as if in looking into them you were looking into the voids of space.
Strauss-Giolitto turned away. She was both repelled and fascinated by the face; that there was a twinge of sexuality in the fascination did not help at all.
She suited up thoughtfully. Pinocchio was still discussing procedures with the Spindrifter. She sat down alongside him again, not wanting to look any more at the face in the screen. God made us in his likeness, she thought, but am I his likeness, or is that creature? No, it's not a creature: it's a sentient being, the same as I am. And the Images said the Spindrifters are humanoid, like me, so I suppose they are. Humanoid, but at the same time very different. How many likenesses does God have?
She filed away the question to be thought about later. Now they were here on Spindrift she was keen to be out of the shuttle. She was also already keen to be out of her spacesuit. There's always an offputting smell inside a suit—the combination of hi-tech, vestiges of urine from the last time you used the suit for any extended stretch of time, and your own body odor, both stale and fresh. The net result is a constant reminder that you are in a profoundly enclosed small space; it becomes very easy to start feeling claustrophobic.
Especially since all you can usually hear are your own breathing and the pumping of your pulse. Strauss-Giolitto's pulse was pumping faster than usual.
"Audio," she said to the suit impatiently.
At once her own noises were blotted out by the voices of Pinocchio and the Spindrifter, who seemed to be coming to the end of their conversation.
Yes, they were.
The screen faded, and the bot glanced towards her. "We're to get out on to the tarmac—or whatever it is—and wait for Polyaggle to reach us. She'll take us to decontamination. She seems to be controlling this spaceport entirely on her own." He shook his head. "It seems very strange to me."
It took them several minutes to usher themselves through the locks and out into the open. The Spindrifters were clearly nervous of infection from the visitors; Pinocchio was equally concerned about contaminating the air in the shuttle with elements from Spindrift's atmosphere, which was likely to be laden with bacteria, some of which the human nanobots might not recognize as detrimental until it was too late. There was no sense in taking plague back to the Santa Maria.
Strauss-Giolitto suddenly realized she was due for another bout of decontamination on her return to the starship. She gulped unhappily. Most often decontamination was followed by a couple of days' diarrhoea, because the process tended, willy-nilly, to destroy large parts of the colonies of symbiotic bacteria in the human gut.
A small vehicle, not unlike a cabble but without the protective dome, was floating across the spaceport towards them.
"Have you noticed something?" said Pinocchio, moving away a few paces and tapping with his toe at some mossy weeds growing from between a crack in what did indeed seem to be tarmac.
"Not until you pointed it out," said Strauss-Giolitto. She gazed around her. Several hundred meters away the prow of what looked like an old-fashioned chemical-fuelled rock
et protruded from a walled enclosure—a landing-bay, she guessed. There were smears of what appeared to be rust on the rocket's hull. "People don't come here very often," she said.
"And this spaceport was built a very long time ago," said Pinocchio.
"By whom?" said Strauss-Giolitto.
The bot shrugged.
The vehicle must have been moving more quickly than it had seemed to, because it was very soon beside them.
"Are you there, Ten Per Cent Extra Free?" said Strauss-Giolitto softly.
I AM INSIDE THE SUIT WITH YOU.
She squirmed slightly. It seemed a very intimate arrangement.
"Good," she said. "We're going to be needing you."
OF COURSE. Was there a trace of smugness in that singing voice, or was Ten Per Cent Extra Free merely stating the obvious?
Standing upright in the hovering vehicle was the owner of the face they had seen in the screen—Polyaggle, Pinocchio had called her. Strauss-Giolitto sucked in her breath. The elfin quality of Polyaggle's face was carried through to her body, which was slight, almost like that of a prepubescent child, and at the same time obviously fully mature. From ten meters away one might almost have believed she was a true human with a bizarre taste in hairstyles. Naked, she was very evidently female.
The Spindrifter flipped herself with some grace over the far side of the vehicle and beckoned them towards it. She seemed to be even lighter than her body-shape suggested, like a trained dancer.
"Please don't get into this until I am some distance away," she said. "I don't want to come too close to you. I shouldn't even be this near."
WISE, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
Strauss-Giolitto nodded. There could be possibly dangerous microbes on the surface of her suit. It would have to be thoroughly sterilized and then probably, after she had removed it, destroyed. The same went for her clothing, and Pinocchio's.
"The cabble"—Ten Per Cent Extra Free translated the alien word using a term familiar to them—"has been programmed to transport you to decontamination. You will be guided through that unit automatically. The process will take about fourteen . . ." This time Ten Per Cent Extra Free was unable to make a translation. He can't have worked out the local units of time as yet, thought Strauss-Giolitto. She hoped it wasn't going to be fourteen hours, or days, or . . .