No other doors. That put severe limitations on Tsong Zee temporal technology.
“Why?” Rhys asked Javar. “You’re a scientist. Have you not attempted to open other doors?”
The Tsong Zee’s mouth pulled up at its extreme corners. “We had more pressing concerns. The technology we developed is geared to a specific purpose. The Tribes have grown in the past two thousand years. We must have a reliable way to transport them homeward. That was our purpose and we have fulfilled it in this... fleet of ships.”
“The implications of what you’ve just told me are that time is not completely relative within your two-door corridor.”
“That is correct, Speaker Rhys,” said Javar. “When we travel to Exile, time elapses at the same rate at one end of the corridor as it does at the other. If we were, as we previously suggested, to transport you and your assistants to Exile, we would be gone for whatever amount of time it took to reach Exile for the time-jump back, visit the planet and reposition the ship in orbit around Tson for the jump to the present. The ends of the corridor are not fixed—they slide—but its length, its duration, is set.”
“Then the entire transition would take hours—days even.”
Javar canted his head. “As you see, taking you to Exile is highly impractical as well as pointless.”
Rhys held out his hands, palms up. “What then? You said you had evidence to offer...”
Javar signaled his apprentice, who carried to him a satchel of soft, verdant material. From it, he lifted a sense-cube of almost blinding azure.
“This artifact,” he said, “is from the world of Exile. We are aware that you have found similar things here on Tson. That is no surprise to us, of course, for the technology originated here with our ancestors. Compare this to what your scientists have found. Perhaps it may stand as some form of proof.”
He handed the sense-cube to Rhys, who set it on his lap, brow furrowed. After a moment of hesitation, he placed his fingertips against the block’s shifting surface.
“Forevermore!” Rhys ogled at the cube, then shot his assistants a brilliant, if tentative smile. “This is fantastic!”
It was fantastic, for the merest touch told him volumes. Add to that the shifting, shimmering, transient flow of color and texture, and he suddenly knew the name of the star and the names of each of its planets. There was mention of distance he could not put into Human terms, yet knew to be a measurement of the amount of space between the sun and each of its worlds. He saw the frozen, wind-scoured surface of Exile as it was presently; he saw it as the Tsong Zee knew it—an uncompromisingly bleak ball of muted, sagey greens, siennas, and umbers rolled out beneath a sky of faded aquamarine. Any colors on Exile were found in manmade goods—buildings, ships, vehicles, clothing. Those colors all spoke of Velvet and, in Exile’s pigment-starved environment, they stood out in alien relief.
He passed his hands over the surfaces with a tingling sense of awe, eager, now, for the touch of new knowledge, knowing he had been pulled one step closer to belief in the Tsong Zee claim. He could no longer pretend to see in them the Wellsian invaders Beneton so feared.
“Mahor,” he said. “That’s the name of your sun. And the planets are Bruka, Tson and Kamorg-Exile. The length of a Kamorg year is 498 days.” He turned the cube experimentally. “Ah, grand! This is one of the ships that brought you to Kamorg—carried you through space and time.”
He afforded the watching Tsong Zee a heartfelt smile. But in a moment, his smile faltered and he pulled his hands away, cringing from the multi-sensory legend. He looked to Javar who gazed back intently.
“This is the ship that failed. The one that carried the Tribe called Gondatrura—the Walkers.” Rhys tucked his hands under his arms as if he could drive the chill of that knowledge from his fingers.
An amazing medium, this, a medium that conveyed emotions as well as images, words, even scents and textures. It made Human script seem flaccid and pale, just as Velvet—no, Tson—made Kamorg seem that way.
“Not looking good for the home team, eh, Boss?” Rick Halfax’s expression belied the glibness of his murmured words.
Rhys sighed. “At this moment, I’m not sure who the home team is.” And that, he had to acknowledge, was not a good thing.
Here on Velvet were thousands of Humans who had a vested interest in disproving the Tsong Zee claim to the planet. Many would be only too willing to believe the OROB capable of incredible deceit. In the worst case, admitting the veracity of their claim could be tantamount to packing the entire Human colony into a flight case. At best, it meant sharing a planet both parties had assumed was theirs to keep. But there, on Kamorg, at least according to this history, awaited an even greater number of Tsong Zee, longing to return to their homeworld. Rhys knew a sharp desire to see Human and Tsong Zee sharing its surface—and knew, as he entertained the thought, that he fully believed the Tsong Zee claim.
Or fully wanted to.
His fingertips returned to linger over the sepia-tone world of Kamorg and he wondered if the whole thing could be a grand manipulation—a lie. He stirred, pulling himself up from reverie, and handed the cube to Rick Halfax.
Rick licked his lips, twitched his fingers, and tentatively fingered the thing, looking for all the world like a nervous safe-cracker.
“Wow!” he said after a moment of intense study. “Wow! How far back did you...? Why, it’d have to be millions of years—billions, even.” He turned to Rhys. “We haven’t been able to extend the Shift range anywhere near that far.”
“No, we haven’t,” said Rhys and wondered how to cement a filial relationship between Human and Tsong Zee. The benefits to both races of men in the area of science alone was mind-boggling. Together they could —
He shook himself. Rampant idealism. They weren’t together. They were separated by an armed fleet and the desire to be the sole owners of paradise.
“The city that is... depicted in the cube —” he began.
“Tsonvar,” Javar told him. “Home of Science. The largest of our cities. The center of our efforts.”
“It’s a very... live place. Thousands of people, businesses, places of education. It has roots. It is not the sort of thing that can be simply packed up and moved to another world.”
Javar glanced at his fellows. “We are aware that this relocation will not be easy. It must be a gradual thing. Our ships are designed with the transportation of thousands in mind. We are prepared.”
“All of you?”
Javar didn’t blink. “We are prepared.” He nodded at the cube. “Do you think your people will be convinced?”
Rhys smiled ruefully. “I suspect you know it won’t be that easy. Whether they believe you belong to Tson, or it belongs to you, they won’t be able to just pack up and leave. They’ve been here for over twenty years now. They feel... bound to this world.”
“And the Tsong Zee have been on Kamorg for two thousand years. Do you not think that many of us also feel bound? We will still leave. We will still come home.”
“How many, Speaker Javar? How many will go home and how many will stay simply because their lives are on Kamorg and always have been?”
The Tsong Zee Speaker glanced away. “Some will stay.”
“And the Tsong Zee will be split—again. Not just between worlds, but between epochs. That’s a hard thing to contemplate.”
“But to come home...” Javar murmured, and Rhys could not mistake the emotion in his voice.
He leaned toward the Tsong Zee man. “Perhaps Tson is big enough for two races of people to call it home.”
Every Tsong Zee in the room expressed some opinion about that—loudly.
Javar shook his head, once, in an emphatic gesture of negativity. “No! It would not work. You are not like us. You are different and you cannot deal with us in kind. We hold Tson in reverence. It is in our blood and our blood rises from its streams. You could not possibly understand. Across the centuries, across the miles, Tson’s streams pull at the blood of the Tson
g Zee. You are right to think that some of us may stay behind on Kamorg, but I assure you, they will not be many. And of those who will come to Tson, most feel as Keere does.” He glanced at the younger Tson Zee Speaker. “We have spent two thousand years coming to terms with our own differences, Speaker Rhys. We cannot be expected to come to terms with an alien race of —”
“People,” said Rhys.
Javar closed his eyes. “You are not Tsong Zee.”
End of discussion. Rhys turned the sense-cube in his hands. “We’ll have to show this to our scientists.”
Javar’s eyes opened. “They will find it is the same as the artifacts they have found here,” he said. “It differs only in age.”
“What’d he mean,” asked Rick, when they had adjourned to the office Bekwe had afforded them as a headquarters, “deal with us in kind?”
“I haven’t a clue... yet.” Rhys sighed and handed him the azure sense-cube. “Let’s get this to Dr. Kuskov. See if he can tell us anything significant about it.”
Rick turned the vivid object over in his hands. “What you were asking Javar about the exodus—you seem to be thinking it’s going to have a profound effect on their society. More profound than they’ve anticipated?”
“Possibly.”
Yoshi, who had been absorbing everything in silence, suddenly entered the conversation, her expressive face radiating concern. “Think what it might do to their families, their infrastructure, their economy. If there is a complete society on Kamorg, won’t the loss of so many people cause it to fragment? What will hold it together? Who will fill in the missing pieces?”
“Yeah, but, Yoshi, how many people really want to go back to the old Motherland? I mean, it’s been two thousand years, for God’s sake. None of them know Tson by personal experience. They’ve only read about it in those stones or seen it in museums. How many Humans do you know that go to museums with any sort of frequency? How many do you know that really care what Earth looks like or develop an incurable urge to return?”
“You have a good point there, Roddy,” said Rhys. “But the situation’s completely different. I think we have to look at the historical equivalents. For example, the Jewish nation on Earth. Every time they got ripped away from the land of Israel, they made it back again, sometimes generations later. Many of them left hell to return, but many left behind a paradise. It didn’t matter that home was a barren desert, rife with danger and conflict. It had a legendary significance—a prophetic pull that transcended practicality or merely material considerations. We’re looking at a Pilgrimage, Roddy—an Hejira. You may be right in thinking that some of these folks won’t want to migrate back to Tson. But we’ve no idea how many of them are ‘believers’ who will do anything to get to the Holy Land. Tson is Jerusalem, it’s Mecca, it’s Bahji... t’s Mount Carmel.”
Rick glanced at him, startled.
“Ironic, isn’t it? That’s what the first colonists called that mountain they set down by—Carmel. Almost as if...”
Yoshi was nodding. “Almost as if they sensed it was a Holy Place... for someone. Do you think the White Shrine is in one of the mountains in that chain, sir?”
“Possibly.”
“Only there’s no way to find it.” Rick held up the cube. “Too bad old Kalkt didn’t put his Keys on these.”
Rhys shook his head. “Too chancy, that. Those can be lost or destroyed in a million ways. What were the chances, really, of an entire Tribe of people being annihilated like that?”
Rick exhaled loudly. “Kismet?”
“And here we are,” Rhys murmured, “another obstacle in their path. Another hindrance —”
His brow puckered. Why a hindrance? Why not a help? He shook himself, feeling traitorous. He’d been brought in to help the Human colonists and here he was trying to think up ways to aid the Tsong Zee. Was it necessary, he wondered, for those two ends to be mutually exclusive?
o0o
“What does the governor intend to do?”
George Eising, Assistant Vice President of the Beneton Group, was nervous. He did his best to hide this from his CEO, but it was difficult. He forced his hands to relax on the padded arms of his chair, but he could not force the perspiration that beaded on his upper lip to ooze back into his pores. That inconvenient reflex put him in a catch-22: if he wiped the sweat away, he would draw attention to his anxiety, if he did not wipe it away, his body would do that for him. You did not let Harris Beneton see fear.
He glanced around the table at the faces of the five other board members, wondering how they managed to hide their own anxiety... if, indeed, they had any.
Looking across at Vice President Woodrow Carson, he could doubt the man had ever felt anxious in his entire life. The “in” joke on the board was that “Wood” was more a description than a name.
Tearing his eyes from the other man’s impassive face, Eising put his hand to his mouth and pretended to look pensive.
“The governor,” said Beneton, “seems content to do nothing. He’s made an advisor of that Tanaka witch and some... nutter anthropologist named Llewellyn.”
“Good God,” murmured Carson, “even his name is offworld.”
“Gaelic, actually. Between them, they’ve got Bekwe spouting philosophy and sitting on his hands. I couldn’t make any headway with him at all. They want to negotiate with the Orcas. They’ll negotiate away everything we’ve worked for if we let them, which, of course, we won’t.”
The two junior members nodded, while Eising rubbed his upper lip, looking thoughtful. “What’s our next move?” he asked.
“Your next move is to keep doing what you’ve been doing: apply public pressure to the situation. Give the religious leaders some more to scream about. One little group of fanatics is not enough. There are a lot of people out there with a lot to lose. Find them and organize them. Wood, I want you get us some more support inside the Governor’s office. I also want some sort of military option.”
“Military option?” repeated Eising, losing his studied pensiveness. “What military option? We don’t have any weapons.”
Wood Carson ignored him. “I’ll come up with something.”
“I’ve no doubt,” said Beneton. “Meanwhile, I will attempt to do our governor’s job for him.”
o0o
Gedde Kuskov shook his head, his eyes still glued to the stream of data playing across his handcomp’s small monitor. “Similar... in fact, almost identical in terms of the molecular structure of the coating medium. But the core material is substantially different. Is this alleged to have originated on—what was it—Kamorg?”
“Yes.” Rhys started to cant his head, then caught himself and nodded. “Javar said this was created on Kamorg as a—a sort of history lesson. According to him, every man, woman and child on Kamorg has one something like it.”
“That would explain the differences. It’s much more recent than anything we’ve found here.” Kuskov glanced back at the computer display. “About, oh, twenty to thirty years old. Fascinating.”
He broke off to hum tunelessly over the computer’s continuing readout, then put the machine down and picked up the sense-cube again.
“It’s much more detailed, much less... emotive. The artifacts we found on Velvet are quite primitive by comparison. I suppose that just could be a loss of detail due to age and weathering. That might explain the drabber colors in our finds here. We could subject this one to some extreme physical stresses and see if it loses definition.”
Rhys sighed. “If only we had a picture of the people who created these old tiles.... They’re pretty clearly depicted in this,” —he pointed at the cube balanced on Kuskov’s palm— “but your artifacts—”
Kuskov was shaking his head. “Nary a clue,” he said, then frowned. “Unless...”
“What?” asked Rhys.
Kuskov moved to a nearby shelf and reached down a plastic container. Out of it he took a shard of near-black sense-tile.
“When I ‘read’ this, I... sensed dep
ictions of people in it. I saw human beings. Maybe that was only because I’m Human. I had no idea what Tsong Zee looked like...”
“Do you think if you did, you might have seen Tsong Zee?”
Kuskov was nodding vigorously. “This isn’t so much a visual medium as it is an imaginary one. It gives you a set of stimuli and your mind provides the visual imagery—like a book of fiction. If you don’t tell readers what color the heroine’s skin is, they’ll imagine that for themselves. Of course, subtle pointers can be used to steer them in the right direction. Tell them someone has blonde hair or blue eyes and chances are they’ll automatically see a light-skinned person.”
Rhys reached for the black shard and held it between his two hands, concentrating all his attention on its multi-dimensional contents. Descriptions. There had to be some descriptions.
There were. The softness of someone’s green eyes, the bright gold of her hair, the glisten of sun on her skin. “She” could be a ringer for Parsa... or for Danetta Price. He sighed audibly.
“Totally subjective. Totally, totally subjective.” He handed the shard back to Kuskov, irrationally despondent.
“That would stand to reason,” said the archaeologist, “if the Tsong Zee created this for their own consumption and not for ours.”
Joseph Bekwe looked like a man who had just seen a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. “But Rhys, you just said the descriptions in the azure cube were clearly of Tsong Zee. Wouldn’t that indicate that it was made just to impress us?”
Rhys was shaking his head. “I saw Tsong Zee in the cube because I expected to see Tsong Zee in the cube. Dr. Kuskov saw Humans in the black tile because he lacked another frame of reference.”
“He’s right,” said Kuskov hefting the shard, “the imagery is subjective—I see people. Now that you’ve shown me Tsong Zee, I realize the subject of the shard could just as easily be them.”
“Then this evidence is no evidence at all,” Bekwe insisted.
“Now, I wouldn’t say that,” Rhys objected. “It’s the same process. It’s from Kamorg. It’s virtually new. All of that establishes a connection between the Tsong Zee and Velvet.” He looked to Kuskov for support and got it by way of a string of eager nods.
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