Dorthy slowly moved her hand to her belt, rested it on the knife.
Beyond the edge of the ramp, far below, a cluster of towers was lined in flowing colourless shimmer. Discharges snapped to and fro between the spikes of their tops, spinning faster and faster until a cradle of light nested there, blurring, widening. The howl of her receiver rose in pitch. Despite herself she cried out, as somewhere above delicate purpose moved into equilibrium. Poised, ready…
The new male charged her and she brought the knife up, its blade thrilling. Light flared everywhere as the creature fell on her; the blade entered its body easily, eagerly. Dorthy was knocked down, the weight of the herder pulling her wrist sideways, sharp pain merging with the great soundless nova that swelled through her clamped lids. Their thready blood vessels were for an instant outlined against vivid red light.
And then it was over.
She was lying twisted under the solid weight of the new male herder; its blood soaked her chameleon cloak from crotch to neck. Her wrist was bent at an angle and it hurt as she dragged the knife free. With an effort she pushed away from the body and scrambled to her feet. Poor Kong.
The light was nothing but the red light of the scattered phosphors. Far below, the towers stood in shadow again.
Cries and hoots resonated all through the great structure of the keep, distress calls and messages from one group of new males to another, inquiring, suggesting, informing. Dorthy almost blundered into half a dozen of the creatures, but they were so spooked that as soon as they saw her they all precipitately fled, some running away down the long curve of the ramp, others swinging up through tangled black vines, lithe for all their confusion. Twice Dorthy took to the network of vines herself to avoid other new males as they communed with their fellows across the high gulfs.
Her wrist still hurt, and her hand was covered in drying blood. But the analogue within her mind was slowly seeping away, water into sand. Her fear that it would become fixed and dominate her own self—the technical term was breakout—slowly receded as she descended. Belatedly she thought to switch on her receiver, and instantly Andrews was yelling in her ear.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m all right.”
He said, “You’re maybe a level above me. Do you want me to come up?”
“No. Wait there.” Dorthy walked the edge of the ramp until she saw a terrace a few metres below and worked her way down, dropping among angled roots. As she clambered down the thick rope of a vine, Andrews said, “That was some fireworks display. The whole structure lit up from top to bottom.”
“I know. I was right in the middle of it.”
“What did they do?”
“I—” but the knowledge eluded her, or at least the precise reason. “I think that they had learned enough to use the keep, and my presence triggered their instincts. Was a threat. Danger, preservation…I’m sorry. It was clear, now it keeps slipping away when I try to think about it. It was too different to last.”
“We must sort it out later,” Andrews said. “Let’s get off this thing before you set off something else.”
“That’s just what I’m doing,” Dorthy said, sliding the last metre to the ramp. Just at the point where it swung out of sight Duncan Andrews, his chameleon cloak thrown back, waved to her. He and Dorthy met halfway.
As they went on down, Andrews said that he’d seen some of the new males running upward. “You understand that I kept out of sight. What happened, exactly?”
“They don’t like being invaded.”
“But they didn’t object to Ramaro’s remotes,” Andrews said “I’ve been trying to raise him. Angel isn’t answering either. Do you think they’ve blown the communications net?”
“Yes, if it wasn’t shut down. The new males, your caretakers, used the carrier wave to drive an impulse against anything working outside the keep. That’s why I asked you to switch off your radios. I don’t know what else they did.” She began to explain about the new male that had captured her, the thrall it had laboured under.
Andrews was incredulous. “Something was controlling it? As if it were a remote? And what was controlling it? Ah, of course, the intelligence you sensed.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I think it was.”
Andrews scratched the top of his head. “But why—”
He stopped, because one of the remotes had come into view. Or what was left of it. The burned hulk lay at the edge of the ramp, smoke still pouring out of the crumpled vane complex. The midsection had blown apart.
“Looks like the fuel cell blew,” Andrews said, after squatting to examine it. He straightened, said, “I’ve a bad feeling about Ramaro and his crew. Come on.”
They followed the spiral down, meeting no more new males, crossed the wide plaza. The mindset that Dorthy had picked up was almost gone now, sunk with hardly a residue. She hurried after Andrews. The causeway stretched level before them.
“Organics,” Dorthy said, as they walked high above the scummed water.
“Huh?” Andrews was fiddling with his receiver. “Why the hell doesn’t Angel answer?”
“It mines iron from the bedrock, but it can’t stockpile organic components. So when it needs them it has to farm them.”
“What are you talking about? Hell, I can’t get anything.”
“The keep. It’s growing, changing. Or the new males are changing it, shaping it. You were right; it is alive, in a way.”
But Andrews wasn’t listening. He had stopped near the end of the causeway, was pointing up. Dorthy looked up, too, past the irregular forested terraces that rose to the sheer cliffs, the peaks of the rimwall black against the starry sky. Except for one point near the top, a ragged flower of fire as small as her thumbnail in the distance, red petals glowing around a dimming bloom of yellow.
Andrews set off across the meadow at a run, the lights of the keep throwing his shadow ahead of him. Dorthy, exhausted, trailed behind, her chameleon cloak flapping at her ankles; long before she reached the trees Andrews had vanished into them and she followed him through the near darkness beneath the forest canopy by use of her Talent as much as sight and sound and touch, finding him at the edge of the little glade where the thopter stood. He was embracing Angel Sutter.
The tall woman was saying, “I didn’t dare switch it on. You didn’t see? You really didn’t see?”
Dorthy said, “It’s the base, isn’t it?” Exhaustion had loosened all her joints. Her throat tasted of iron.
Sutter half turned from Andrews. It was so dark that Dorthy couldn’t see the woman’s expression, but she felt her despairing fear clearly enough. Sutter said, “I was watching through field-glasses, trying to see what you were doing. It was as if the whole place was stirred up, like a termite nest.” She was remembering the time when, a child, she had after much effort prised away one of the concrete-hard pinnacles. The furious creatures that had boiled out then, white, blind, alien. She said, “Then there was this crazy fireworks display—”
“I saw some of that,” Andrews said.
“And then,” Sutter said, “the place where the camp is, was, simply exploded. I saw the flash reflected on the towers of the keep, it was so bright. And when I looked around it was gone. There was just a kind of molten river where the ledge was. A laser, I think it was a laser; there were ionization tracks spitting across the sky for maybe a minute afterward.”
“An X-ray laser,” Andrews said. “A very big X-ray laser; maybe even gamma. Too fast for the bomb to react; it would have vaporized the camp in a picosecond. And at any rate, that damned computer was programmed to ignore light displays in the keep, otherwise we’d have gone up long ago.” He was looking over Sutter’s shoulder, at the high cliff, the dimming fireflower. Abruptly he broke away and ducked into the thopter’s bubblecabin, began to rummage through the dead channels. Dorthy cast off her bloody cloak and sat on the ground, picking at the flakes of dried blood that gloved her right hand. At last, his frustration clear and bright, Andrews switched off the set an
d sat still, a shadow in the shadowy curve of the cabin.
“We’d better go,” Sutter said quietly. “Jesus Christos, it’s like we opened Pandora’s box.”
“Let me think,” Andrews said from within the cabin. “Dorthy, did those caretakers know about the ships we have in orbit?”
The danger from the stars. “I think so,” she said.
“Damn. I was hoping…” He ducked out of the cabin, began to pace around the little clearing. After a minute he said, “It doesn’t make sense. Why would they destroy the lesser danger? Even if it is closer to them. That laser could certainly pick off orbital command. Damn. It’s as if the caretakers wanted to provoke us, bring an attack down on their heads.”
Dorthy remembered the brief glimpse she had had of her captor’s burning imperative, the whole world aflame.
“Maybe they’re crazy, Duncan. Maybe that’s all there is to it,” Angel Sutter said.
He stopped pacing, sighed. “It is hardly an elegant solution.”
“Whatever the truth is, we can’t do anything,” Sutter said. “It isn’t our job to fight. That’s what the fucking Navy’s for.”
“Precisely why it is my fight,” Andrews said, “because I know just what the Navy will do. Would you like to know a secret? Dorthy, do you know what I am going to say?”
“Why they built the blockhouse at Camp Zero? No, I don’t exactly. My Talent is running down.”
“Listen then. Listen, both of you.” His voice was quiet in the darkness. “The Navy has a contingency plan in case the enemy looks like they’re breaking out of control here. The blockhouse is the bolthole should it go into effect, and after what happened here I think it’s likely it will go into effect. And very soon. Those creatures out there aren’t going to stop at this. They’re building up the keep, changing it, finding out about us. Perhaps the destruction of the camp was a test, I don’t know. We’re their enemy, the invader: they are the response. Have I got it right, Dorthy?”
“You agree that they are the enemy, then,” Dorthy said.
“Does it matter?”
Sutter asked, “Just what is this contingency plan?”
“They have a ship in close orbit around the sun, a stripped-down freighter, a robot. It has phase graffles on it.” When neither Dorthy nor Sutter said anything, Andrews continued drily, “When a phase graffle is turned on inside a gravitational singularity, it doesn’t hook a ship into contraspace; the differential is too great. What happens instead is a sort of blowout—for an instant the energy levels between urspace and contraspace are connected. This star happens to be a mite unstable—in fact there was a minor flare when we first arrived, nothing more than a half per cent increase in activity over five or six days though, a minor hiccough. But the graffles will rip up the star’s structure. There’ll be a big, nasty flare full of free radicals and hot particles. It’ll lick out across two million klicks, and it’ll sterilize this world. The blockhouse is the funkhole, do you see. Chung and everyone else will sit there until the flare dies down. Fifty days, maybe sixty. Long enough to roast the entire surface. Then the ships will come down and take everyone off.”
Dorthy said, “And the Navy really thinks that that will deal with the enemy?”
“To be sure. But look at that thing out there. The caretakers have had a couple of weeks in it, learning, finding out. In two more, what will they be able to do? You tell me. We don’t even know all of what they can do now. That’s no city, I was wrong about that. It’s a weapon. The whole thing is a fucking weapon.”
Angel Sutter laughed. “So they have to be dealt with straight away, isn’t that how it should be? Jesus Christos, Dorthy’s right. The herders are the enemy.”
“I don’t know if I am right,” Dorthy said.
“I don’t want to stand around here debating it,” Sutter said. “Duncan, we should clear out of here before they realize they’ve overlooked us. Damn you, come on! We’re too close here.”
“Just over the rim,” Andrews said. “I still haven’t said all I want to say.”
Andrews took the controls and flew the thopter low over the dark forest towards the rimwall. Dorthy, squeezed into the back, watched the lights of the keep diminish, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.
Ahead and above, the rimwall’s ragged edge seemed softened, and as the thopter rose Dorthy saw that rivers of mist were beginning to pour down the cliffs, and felt, as they passed into this blurred whiteness, the taut wire of Angel Sutter’s anxiety relax a little. Andrews hunched over the stick, flying by radar. After a while he said, “We’re across. I’m setting us down.”
“Just keep flying, Duncan,” Sutter said. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“Not here, perhaps,” Andrews said, and in that instant Dorthy remembered what she had seen in her captor’s mind after it had been freed from its thrall. The residue: the clue.
The thopter settled near the source-stream of the river that Dorthy had followed back to the pass in the rimwall. So long ago now. Mist hung low over wet, shaly rock; the setting sun was a blurred colourless eye far below. Wind fluted around the bubblecabin as Andrews called up the biological team in the forest farther down the outer slope and told Jose McCarthy what had happened. “You’re to go back at once, tell Chung,” he said, and cut off the man’s crackling protest. “There is nothing you can do, truly. I wish to God that there were. We will return to Camp Zero in two days. Make sure Chung understands that. Two days.” He switched off the radio and Sutter punched the clear plastic beside her.
“Jesus Christos, what is this shit?” Her voice cracked with disbelief.
“I’m going to eat something,” Andrews said flatly, and opened the hatch. Cold wet air blew in as he climbed out.
Sutter jerked around, fixed Dorthy with her fierce glare. “You know what this is about, right?”
“You won’t change his mind,” Dorthy said.
“Jesus Christos, don’t I know that. Maybe I should just take the thopter up now, you think?” But after a moment she followed her lover out.
Dorthy turned the heating element of her coveralls all the way up, slapped her arms across her chest in the freezing wind. Most of the dried blood on her right hand had scaled off, but there was a black rim around the ragged end of each fingernail. Beside her, Andrews seemed not to notice the cold; he’d been born on a cold shore, after all. Wind tugged at his sandy hair as he ate emergency rations from a self-heating can. Hazed by mist, Sutter prowled the barren slope above the thopter. Dorthy watched her and picked at the blood crusted under her fingernails, around her fingerjoints. After a while Andrews said, “Come on. Try a sip of this.”
Dorthy sucked on the metal straw. The little flask held oily bootleg rum; it burned her throat and she coughed and spluttered. “Thanks,” she managed to say.
“How are you feeling?”
She held up her blood-flecked hand. “Wishing a little water would clear me of this deed.”
“You can still pull out now, if you want. Really.”
She asked, “Why are you doing this?”
“You know, when the Federation came into being, it was supposed to be for the advancement of everyone.” His face had a pinched, pensive look. “I suppose you’re too young to remember. There was a lot of sentiment in those days; Earth had helped Elysium out of the barbarism we’d fallen into—well, in Namerika, at least. I’m old enough, you know, to remember the tail end of the Interregnum, when we’d lost all contact with Earth for more than four hundred years. And it was mostly the same with the other colony worlds. And then the ships came from Earth, and here was the Universe suddenly open before us because of the phase graffle; of course we were grateful. No need to sleep away a dozen years or more on a one-way ticket: here was a way open for commerce, for real exploration. Sentiment, idealism, birth of the Federation for Co-Prosperity of Worlds: those were great days, Dorthy, great days. But it began to wear pretty quickly, soon became clear that the Federation mostly benefited Earth, and Greater
Brazil in particular. We had the raw materials and Earth took them in, gave precious little back. And as for the Universe…well, here we are on the cutting edge of exploration, and we’re no farther from Earth than Earth is from Elysium. Two new worlds colonized, that’s all, two in fifty years. The Americans and Russians managed more with their rinky-dink arks and colony boats crawling along at less than light-speed. I hear a lot about moderation, about caution. Usually the Age of Waste is brought up as an example. But the real reason is that if people started diving off the edge of known space in all directions, setting up wherever they found acceptable real estate, Earth would lose control.” He smiled. “I would guess that you are hardly in the mood for a lecture on politics. I apologize.”
“I didn’t know that you were into politics.”
“Anyone with money has to be. Real money, I mean. Even criminals need to keep a politician in their pockets these days. I am treading water, as it were, but my father is a long way down indeed. Anyway, here I am, hoping to prise up the lid that the Navy has clamped down, hoping to let out whatever the enemy has. Shake up the system, see what falls out. They want to contain it, seal it off. I want revelation. And you?”
“You’ll need my Talent, even if you don’t need me.”
He laughed. “I need anyone I can get.”
“I’ve never really believed that people are wholly explicable, you know. Even though that’s my job.” Not since Hiroko, and what she did after she had been rescued from the ranch. After Dorthy had rescued her…or at least that’s what she thought she had been doing at the time, crouched in the bush in the hot night, evading her father’s search parties, slipping through the net. On the cold alien mountainside she said, “Besides, there’s something I haven’t told you, something I saw in the mind of the new male that captured me. This was after it had been released from whatever was controlling it; the control had gone, but it had left an image. I think that it meant me to find it.”
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