by Diane Duane
“As regards the commander, anyway.”
Spock glanced over at McCoy. “If I remember correctly, the paradigm was first used by a religious apologist on Earth in the early twentieth century.”
“That’s right. Say somebody comes along,” McCoy said, “and points at a chair and says to you, ‘There’s an invisible cat in that chair.’ Now, you know the person’s nuts. You say to them, ‘But there’s nothing there. The chair’s empty.’ Their response is, ‘And isn’t that exactly how it would look if there were an invisible cat in the chair? See, you’ve proved my point.’”
“Argumentum ex fallacio,” Spock said.
“In your case, Jim—” McCoy had the grace to look just slightly abashed. “Well, come on. The source of all this trouble is that your opposite number’s female. Bearing in mind some of your past behavior—not that I’m casting any aspersions, mind you—what are they supposed to think?”
Jim made a wry face. “This is just another way of saying it’s all my own fault, isn’t it?”
Spock addressed himself with renewed interest to his salad. “Jim,” McCoy said, “they’ll think what they think. You’re not going to be able to change it, so you may as well just get on with what you were going to do anyway. How was the rest of your meeting?”
“Troubling,” Jim said. He paused as a group of six or seven crewmen came into the mess and took a table, then headed for the food dispensers. “I think they’re expecting the balloon to go up with a bang sometime after the talks with the Romulans, but no one seems to be clear about just when, or what will trigger it.”
“I bet half of them are just hoping it doesn’t happen, somehow,” Bones said. “That the Romulans will just back down.”
That thought had occurred to Jim, and it was making him nervous. He drank some coffee. “This time, I think that would be a serious miscalculation,” he said. “Spock, I know perfectly well we run frequent readiness checks on all the weapons systems and the engines, but I want Scotty to use this next day or so to go over absolutely everything defense-oriented with a fine-tooth comb. Tell him to co-opt as much assistance from less busy departments aboard ship as he feels he needs to make sure that everything—everything—is in working order.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Jim finished his coffee and put the cup aside. “We also have some new cryptographic equipment or routines, or both, to be installed in the comm system and the main computer; they’ll be coming over from Sempach. Which reminds me. Those automations Ael wanted you to have a look at? You never did report on those.”
“It was not a very pressing matter, Captain. I wrote you a report, which you may not yet have seen.”
Jim did his best to look unconcerned, but he knew he had been letting his paperwork slip a little lately. “Um. Well, what’s the verdict?”
Spock put aside his empty bowl of salad and steepled his fingers. “I was able to assist them in several areas where newer programming and hardware needed to be restructured to interleave correctly with other, older control programs and routines,” Spock said. “Bloodwing’s personnel have been most ingenious, and I should also say innovative, in compensating for their present lack of manpower. But here and there conflicts had occurred, since some of the newer programming was done by crewmen with less expertise than might have been desired, and the automation reprogramming had extended to almost every system aboard the ship.”
“Almost?”
“There was one notable exception,” Spock said. “The ship’s engines did not appear on the list of augmented systems which I was asked to examine.”
Jim thought about that for a moment. “Well, they didn’t lose too many people from their engineering department during the trouble, as I remember. And tr’Keirianh is a fairly hands-on sort, from what I can make of him. Maybe he’s uneasy about allowing such a crucial system to be automated.”
“It could be, Captain,” Spock said. “It could also be that there was something involving Bloodwing’s engine systems that the commander or the master engineer did not care to have me see.”
Jim took another swig of coffee, considering that briefly. “Any evidence to support such a conjecture?”
“Little, and that circumstantial,” Spock said. “Should another opportunity arise to investigate this, however, I confess I might attempt to do so.”
“Curiosity, Mr. Spock?” Jim said.
Spock raised an eyebrow.
“Well, never mind it for now,” Jim said. “Though if the opportunity arises this evening to do a little discreet inquiry, feel free.” He sighed. “I won’t be down in rec for long. I’ve got to start getting caught up on my paperwork. Meanwhile, when Ael and her people come by this evening to meet the commodore, see to it that each of them has an escort permanently within eyeshot. Security is going to become more of an issue now.”
“I will see to it, Captain,” Spock said. “Have you any preferences as to who should be assigned to the commander?”
Jim considered for a moment. “Now that you mention it…”
The darkness of the caverns, when the lights were turned down to their lowest, often seemed to amplify every sound, every breath. So it seemed very loud to Mheven when her mother spoke up suddenly out of what ought to have been her sleep.
“I hear,” said Rrolsh. “I’m going out.”
Mheven was at first not sure she hadn’t been dreaming the words, for she had been thinking them, on and off, for nearly the past twenty days, since she came back from a mission. Is it really that long, she thought, that we have been down in this darkness? It seems like a thousand years. The sun—she dreamed about that too, golden in an emerald sky, but she knew she was not going to see it anytime soon. Up there, in the light and the air, more light than just the sun’s was raining down on the fertile land. The sky was still filled with ships raining down fire. The crops were all surely burned now, the forest blanketing these hills all charred, if what had happened to the city had been any indication.
“Mother,” Mheven said to the unseen presence across the room, “you’re half asleep. You know they’ve been scanning the surface constantly. Anyone who goes out will be caught and interrogated, and they’ll discover where we are. Then all this will be for nothing.”
A faint sound of bedding being discarded drifted across the darkness of the cavern. Mheven sighed and fumbled for the little battery lamp.
At her touch it glowed up to its preset level: low. No one down here wasted power. Since the destruction of the concealed solar arrays in the last spate of bombing, there had been none to spare. Mheven looked across the low-ceilinged little rest-cave and saw what she expected: the water trickling down its dank walls, the supplies of food and water and materiel stacked up in their crates at the back of the cave, and the beautiful, drawn, tired, aging face of her mother popping suddenly out of the cold-tunic she was hurriedly pulling over her head. That grim face looked at her; those eyes, fierce and eager, looked into hers.
“You can’t hear it?” she asked.
“Hear what?”
“I’m going out!”
Her mother scrambled up out of the bedroll and headed for the sleeping cave’s entrance, which had someone’s blanket hung up over it as a screen against the lights always burning on the other side. Mheven sighed and pulled on her own tunic. Kicking her bedroll aside, she went after her mother.
The main cavern, even with the tiny lights that were all the group now allowed itself, was still spectacularly beautiful. There had been a time when people had come from all over this part of the Empire to see these caverns, a natural wonder as astonishing in their way as the fire-falls at Gal Gath’thonng on ch’Rihan; possibly the biggest natural caverns in all the Empire’s worlds, but no one knew for sure, because no one had ever completely explored them in all the time the planet Ysail had been colonized, a matter of several hundred years. The caverns stretched beneath the smaller of the planet’s two continents, Saijja, from the cliffs of Eilmajen in the east nearly to Veweil
in the west, and they were so deep and complex that they had never even been completely mapped. Scanners could not reach so deep, not even the powerful ones used from space.
The refugees had picked this spot for their labors because it was one of the deepest caverns and because it was unknown to outsiders. Though in more peaceful times tourists had constantly been passing through one part or another of the Saijja Caverns, there had always been parts of the cavern complex that no tourist had ever been shown: the spelunkers’ secrets, the private delights of those inhabitants of the planet who made it their business to come here every chance they got in leisure time, exploring a frontier that was not infinite but that would certainly take thousands of years to discover fully.
This one, the greatest cavern to be found for several hundred miles in any direction, was called Bheirsenn—“bright in the night,” in the local dialect. When the lights were on, it was bright indeed; a vast bubble of air trapped in the depths of the planet, roughly a mile and a half in diameter, ceilinged in terrifyingly huge and glittering stalactite chandeliers of limestone, calcite, and quartz crystal. That impossibly distant ceiling shone bright as a hazy sky when the great high-intensity lights were on. They were not on much lately, what with the power crisis, but even with the lights dimmed, the distant pendant crystalline stalactites glittered faintly like faraway galaxies, like the points of stars. It was a space difficult for even the most ground-shy Rihannsu to feel claustrophobic in, one of awe-inspiring beauty.
And it was also a perfect place for making weapons of all kinds, especially bombs. From the great main cavern, hundreds of smaller caves budded off in clusters and chains, a labyrinth that only those who lived there could ever master. Working separately, the technicians and the people whom they had trained occupied small, dense-walled stone rooms in which they could work with deadly explosives and other dangerous technologies without being concerned about triggering a cataclysm. The whole group, totaling about five hundred people, had been down here for almost a year now. They had slipped away with their families and even their pets when the government had declared Ysail to be a “primary resource world.” Others, at a distance, might have been fooled about what this meant, but the Ysailsu knew all too well. The Empire had seized all the industry on their planet. Then, when there was bitter protest at this, they had sent ships from Grand Fleet, carrying troops from the army and intelligence, to round up the population of a couple of cities and send them off to work camps, expecting the rest to settle down and do as they were told.
It had not worked out that way, for over the centuries the Ysailsu had developed what the Empire considered an irrational attitude: they thought they owned their world. The small population of the planet rose in nearly simultaneous rebellion. Immediately after that, the Empire began bombing it—very selective bombing, of course, concentrating on the cities and taking care to do no harm to industrial resources. The Ysailsu, though, partaking in full of the legendary stubbornness of their parent species, had decided that if they could not profit from the industries they had spent hundreds of years building, then neither would the Empire. Led by a group of thoughtful and angry guerrillas, the Ysailsu took all the food, water, spare parts, power sources, and supplies of every kind that they could find, and went to ground in the caves en masse. They scattered themselves across the underside of their smaller continent, made themselves at home, and began blowing up their factories themselves.
All this, as well as the smoking cities and the ground shuddering with explosions, now seemed as distant to Mheven as a dream. The workers and fighters down here did not hear or feel the explosions. The caves were far too deep. There was no way the Empire could find them, and even if it did, no way it could reach them without dropping atomics on them, and since the Empire theoretically wanted to use the planet for something else later, even they would not have been that crazy.
Crazy… thought Mheven, concerned, watching her mother make her way into the dim light of the main cavern, heading for the little makeshift workspace where Ddoya had his “office.” Ddoya tr’Shelhnae was as much of a leader as their group had, the one to whom everyone brought their problems, the one to whom the once-a-tenday gathering turned for suggestions and direction. He had been a doctor once, and he was one of the original group of guerrillas who had convinced the population to use the strength that the Element Earth had given them as they descended into it and sheltered in it. Earth—the quietest Element and maybe the most taken for granted, but possibly the most powerful. He had more than a little of that Element in his own makeup, Mheven thought. He was a quiet man, slow, thoughtful, but eloquent; as with the ground when it quaked, when Ddoya spoke, you paid attention.
Her mother headed across that big space toward him, where a little light shone in his workspace. Elements only knew when the man slept; Mheven sometimes suspected him of having a clone or two stashed in one of the caves. Now she could just make him out, small, burly, and dark, sitting in his workspace, bent over something, as she hurried along in her mother’s wake. Various other people were up and around, heading here and there in the cave, about their business. They watched Mheven heading after Rrolsh, and even in the dimness she caught some smiles from them. Living here was like living in the bosom of a large and unavoidable family, or a small town. Everybody knew everything about everybody soon enough, and everybody knew that Rrolsh had something rare: the visionary gift, which sometimes made her a little strange.
Mheven blushed but kept on going after her mother and finally caught up with her at the “door” of the workspace, which was just another blanket, one of four thrown over a cubical pipe-metal framework. It was fastened up at the moment, and Ddoya looked up at the two of them from the round, silvery thing he was holding in his hand.
“This isn’t your shift, as a rule,” he said. “Is there some problem?”
Mheven blushed again.
“Ddoya,” Rrolsh said, “I heard something. Something’s going to happen.”
“What?”
Rrolsh looked frustrated. “I don’t know for certain,” she said. “But it’s imminent.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I could wish,” Ddoya said, “that our distant ancestors had left us some instructions about what to do with such talents as yours when they crop up, for I’m sure I don’t know what questions to ask you to help you be more definite. Nonetheless, we’ll go on alert, if you feel the need, Rrolsh. I haven’t forgotten that last incident with the government courier.”
Rrolsh sighed and shook her head, looking suddenly weary. “It’s not that close,” she said. “Or…it’s not that serious. I can’t tell which. I only caught a feeling, a word…”
“Well, let it rest for the moment,” he said. He looked past her at Mheven. “Meanwhile,” he said to her, “we have another attack group going out in a few days. We should send some of these with them for testing. But I’d like you and your people to double-check these first.”
Mheven was one of the group’s engineers. Once her forte had been medical machinery, which was how Ddoya had recruited her. Now she had acquired a rather more destructive specialty, and what he held intrigued her. She held out her hand, and Ddoya passed the object to her. It was a flattened ovoid of silvery metal, about the thickness of her hand.
“Implosion charge?” Mheven said, turning it over.
“Combined implosion-disruption,” said Ddoya. “Remember the old dissolution fields that the warships used to use?”
“The ones that would unravel a metal’s crystalline structure.”
“That’s right. An overlooked technology, but surprisingly suitable to being packed down small, these days, with the new solid-phase circuitry. This one goes off in two stages. The dissolution field propagates first, and then the imploder collapses the deranged matter. One of these”—he took it back from her carefully—“will scoop out a spherical section from a building, or a bridge, or a ship, something like twenty testai in diameter.” He smiled grimly.
“How many do we h
ave?”
“Five so far.”
“I want to go along,” Mheven said.
“Check with Ussi,” Ddoya said. “She’s coordinating. Was there anything else?”
Mheven shook her head.
“No,” her mother said. “Ddoya…thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. I know it’s difficult for you, and you bear this burden, and work as hard as any of us, as well.”
A few others, faces Mheven recognized but was too tired to greet, were drifting over. Mheven sketched a wave at them, linked her arm through her mother’s, and started back toward their rest-cave.
“I embarrass you,” said her mother.
“Not seriously.”
“I wonder what it was like, in the old days,” Rrolsh said, sounding wistful. “When there were talents in the ships, and telepaths, people for whom seeing more than one world, hearing more than spoken voices, was normal.”
“Maybe someday we’ll find out again,” Mheven said. Hope was good. Any distraction, sometimes, was good for turning one’s mind from the idea that one might be living in a cave making bombs only until something went wrong, everything was found out, and they were all hunted down and killed. “Maybe someday the Empire will just give up and—”
Her mother stopped and stood still. Mheven turned to her, and in the dimness she could just see her lips move. Then Rrolsh let go of her and turned back the way they had come. She went straight back to Ddoya, who, with the two people to whom he was talking, looked up at her, surprised.
“I heard it clearly this time,” her mother said. “I heard it! Just a whisper in the darkness. It said lleiset.”
The others looked at each other, not knowing what to say.
Freedom…
Ddoya turned the new charge over and over in his hands, then looked up at her.
A soft queep from a small console on the floor beside his chair brought all their heads around. Eyes widened. Ddoya, in particular, looked at the thing as if he expected the little square console to stand up and bite him in the leg.