Stavros felt her presence like a specter at his back. He carried his guilt heavily. There was no appropriate apology he could offer the Master Ranger for having refused to understand that risking his own life also risked Edan’s. Though Aguidran had been witness to his guar-miracle, though she had seen Kav Daven literally walk through storm and fire for his sake, she was clearly mistrustful, not of his intentions, but of whether he was worth the ill wind of trouble that blew around him, sweeping up anyone in range. Stavros was sure it was only for the old Kav’s sake, and because her brother asked it, that she paid him the honor of accompanying him herself.
Or maybe she figures she’s the best equipped to deal with real trouble.
“It’s time to do something about Clausen,” he said, resting on a bench just inside the door. He sensed this was not the time to discuss it but his weakness made him irritable. “Sneaking around with a troop of bodyguards, prevented from using my own equipment.” He recalled Susannah’s words. “One man holding us, the Sleds, CRI, everything hostage. It doesn’t make sense.”
“No. This does not,” agreed Ghirra but his shoulders hunched in a very Terran-like shrug of impotence.
“It would be hard to get the drop on him, though.” Stavros leaned back against the wall. “What we really need is some kind of long-distance weapon: spear, slingshot, blowgun… better still, get the laser away from him. Serve him right to be wasted by his own gun.”
Ghirra listened, missing the unfamiliar colloquialisms but not the ominous dreamy tone. Aguidran watched with a hint of new interest. Stavros thought he detected support in her stance, but reminded himself that he was overeager to regain her good opinion.
“What do you think to do, Ibi?”
Stavros looked a faint plea to Aguidran. “Nail him. Pay him back for what he did to Edan.”
“You say, end his life?”
Ghirra’s insistence forced him to face his own avoidance. Glib euphemism might soften the expression of the act but not the act itself.
“You would kill him?” Ghirra repeated.
Stavros forced his tongue a little closer to reality. “Execute.”
“Murder, Ibi.”
Stavros blinked at him. He had thought this was a translation debate until Ghirra chose to throw his own tactics back at him with such obvious intention. Aguidran shifted, muttering darkly.
Ghirra flung back a terse response that made her stiffen angrily, but she held her peace.
Ghirra turned back sternly. “We want no murder, ’TavrosIbia.”
Stavros glanced at Aguidran again. Maybe YOU want no murder…
“Ghirra, it may be the only…”
“No. It is not ever the only.” His look said, You kill an animal, not a man.
And what if the animal IS a man? But Stavros dropped his eyes, nodded. “It’s all moot anyway, as long as he’s got the laser.” He gathered his aching body and rose. “Enough of this. I came to see the Kav.”
The PriestHall was hot and stuffy, depressingly empty compared to its usual bustle. All the able-bodied priests had put off their scholars’ garb to help care for the wilting food crop. But a low sweet-voiced chanting whispered through the thick columns like a forest breeze. A few sober-faced apprentices, stripped to the waist in the oppressive heat, came and went singly on essential errands. The two long tables in the guild library were crowded with elder priests debating over stacks of ancient books.
At the head of the nearest table, Kav Ashimmel broke off an intense discussion to glare at Stavros as he passed. He heard the word “raellil” muttered in his wake, then Ashimmel’s silencing growl.
I’m going to have to do something pretty remarkable to redeem myself with Ashimmel.
Stavros suffered another crisis of doubt. Why me, old man? I had no messianic leanings before you set your fire in my palms… or did I? Walk on water, Ibiá? Tried that one lately?
He tried to see himself as he had been, a suggestible young man in search of something to believe in, with no special qualities beyond a thirst for miracles and an eagerness to confront powers perhaps beyond his control but not, he thought, beyond his understanding.
Before, I was that. What am I now?
“What’s going on with the books?” he asked Ghirra when they had moved beyond the aura of frenzy at the tables.
“They talk and study to remember the signs.”
“There are still signs they don’t know?”
“These signs must have sure knowing. They are White-Sky and the rain that is fire.”
“White sky?”
“Sign of Phena-Nar.”
Phena-Nar. The Hot Death. Stavros caught Aguidran’s grim nod.
The PriestGuild was preparing itself in earnest to receive the dire signs of their most fearsome legend: Devastation.
“It won’t happen,” Stavros blindly assured both Ghirra and himself. “Not this time. The Kav has a plan. He’ll make himself heard somehow.”
“I think these Sisters do not listen.”
“He’s done it before.”
Ghirra’s pursed lips denied it.
You think it was coincidence at the Leave-taking, Stavros accused him privately. You… scientist!
But he admitted that the whole concept of getting through to the Goddesses rested on the unevidenced assumption that they possessed communicable consciousness. The intention implied in the intricate strategies of the Arrah offered no proof of the Sisters’ awareness of anything but each other. But he was haunted by that instant of bottomless terror that had driven him to flee death’s release for the agonies of continued existence. He had sensed consciousness then, something searching for him.
Kav Daven lay in a cushioned alcove at the far end of the hall, curtained with heavy embroidered draperies. He might have been dead, embalmed already, so waxen was his finely netted skin and so faint the rise and fall of his emaciated chest.
His young apprentice girl, knitting glumly beside the cushions, flushed with a shy smile of welcome to see Stavros on his feet. Her dark eyes followed him doelike with adoration as he knelt stiffly by Kav Daven’s side.
Stavros took one ancient hand in his own, hoping to feel the dull fire in his palms leap with responsive heat. But the heat stayed steady, simmering. The old priest’s hand was frighteningly cool and thin, bones wrapped with the merest wrinkled tissue of skin.
Ghirra lowered himself to the floor. His hands hovered inquiringly above the Kav’s chest and Stavros thought a faint new life flushed the ashen cheeks.
“Susannah calls this ‘coma’,” said the healer sadly. “She could give him food with the tubes, she says, but the guild will not allow.”
“Ashimmel won’t, you mean.”
“Yes. He will starve if he does not wake.”
Stavros gripped Kav Daven’s wrist and called on the magical fire in his own hands to flow into the cooling body.
Raellil, is it? Then prove yourself! Be good for something!
The old man lay unchanged, his breath the slightest flutter.
Fear seized Stavros, that Kav Daven might die before making it clear to him what he was supposed to do, or how he was meant to do it.
“It won’t work,” said Danforth. “I already tried to talk him into it before, while you were away.”
Susannah watched the dust-sifted path for obstacles that might trip him up as he struggled gamely through the heat. He wore a Sawl scarf wrapped Arab-style around his head. A sleeveless Sawl robe draped his broad shoulders like an aba.
The Ethiopian Prince, indeed! Susannah grinned, impressed.
But the leather pads of the crutches were dark with his sweat, as dark as his glistening skin. He was giving up more moisture than even the parched air could absorb. She worried that he was pushing too hard, too soon, but the gift of the crutches had been the excuse he needed. If he was not hunched over CRI’s terminal, he was hobbling around in the sun.
Damn deadly sun.
They passed a temporary irrigation outlet. The hastily
laid ceramic piping coughed up the barest trickle into the seared fields. Water was being carried by hand to the root crops and succulents in the terraces. Susannah had heard that the FoodGuild had decided to harvest the grains early, to minimize the losses to dessication. The cost would be losing a mature seed crop for the next season’s planting.
“Things didn’t seem so critical before,” she said. “I mean, the situation, the weather and all.”
Danforth stopped, blowing air like an exhausted runner. “You heard Emil’s reaction when Liphar was telling me about the Destructions?”
“Megan says Emil’d be endangering the legality of his claim if he took the Sawl or their Goddesses seriously,” Susannah reminded him.
Danforth readjusted the crutches under his arms and looked down at her seriously. “You know, I’d like Stavros down here as much as you would. This approach is real new to me. I need his head. I either take things too literally or not literally enough. Like, should we really expect the ground to open, and, what do they mean, ‘white sky’?”
“Ghirra’s been trying so hard to…”
“I know, and he’s amazing, but he and CRI are just not enough between them to resolve all the translation ambiguities in these wipe-out myths, and it’s near impossible for Stav to work up there without CRI. There’s a lot of time being wasted running back and forth in secret. I need that time!
“If I can break down these myths enough to find a real pattern that can be matched to some cyclic effect of the nebula, I could offer these folks some idea of what lies ahead. Maybe the past Devastations have been exaggerated, or they happened for some other reason.” He stood aside for a line of Sawls bearing emptied water jugs back to the Caves. “Or maybe they didn’t happen at all. I don’t know yet. I don’t have enough data. The control factor is still eluding me.”
“Stav will just tell you it’s the Goddesses,” Susannah warned.
“Well, I’d like to go head to head with him on that, you know’? Once you make one connection between myth and fact, you start looking for others. Maybe there’s something in it. But Emil’s not going to give on this, I assure you.”
“He has let up on Weng a little.”
“Mmmm.” Danforth glanced back at the Lander, squinting into the sun. “And if I were you, I’d ask myself why.”
When she discovered the ladder still in place in the main hatch, Susannah climbed it, nervous but determined. It was odd to walk the cool metal corridors after so long, where her footsteps rang and even the sinuous curve of the hull was broken by machined right angles at floor and ceiling.
His door was ajar, spilling a faint glow into the dim corridor. Susannah knocked, then eased the door open and found herself staring into the stubby nose of the laser pistol. Behind the door, Clausen rolled his eyes, lowered the gun and tossed it onto his bunk.
“Change your mind?” He straightened one arm against the wall on the door side of her head, so that his wrist grazed her cheek and her only move away from him was into the cubicle.
“No. But I have to talk to you.”
He pushed away from the wall. “Are you sure? Nobody else does.”
She was surprised that he sounded so aggrieved, or maybe it was just his boredom speaking. He dropped onto his neatly made bunk, relaxing against the pillows and the wall. He watched her with a faint come-on smile. The laser lay like a third presence between them.
Clausen patted the taut blanket. “Come. Sit. As you can see, there’s nowhere else.”
Susannah could not share his relish in this new sex-charged game. The promise of pleasure in his eyes, the desire utterly without need, was disturbing in ways she did not at the moment care to analyze. She stayed by the door.
“Just tell me this,” she demanded bluntly. “If he’s sent off his protest and you’ve filed your countercharges, why do you still want to kill him?”
His smile broadened. “You’ve been talking to Taylor.”
Susannah blinked, “I…”
“What a quandary for you, Susannah, to be both a romantic and a pragmatist at once. Let me guess: You think I should let the legal issues take their own course, set aside my unseemly bloodthirst for revenge and concentrate on getting us the hell out of here with our skins intact.”
Left without her prepared speech, she blurted, “There’s something very weird going on with this world, Emil! Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
“Is that anything like why don’t I care?” His eyes flicked away in irritation. “You really have been talking to Taylor.”
“And Megan and Weng and Ghirra and Stavros…”
“Well. At least you admit to the latter. We have made some progress.” He looked back at her tiredly. “What are you proposing?”
“A truce.” To head off his expression of disgust, she added hurriedly, “Not even permanent. Just for a kind of… summit conference. We do need to sit down, all of us, to make what sense we can of all this, so we can know what to do. We were meant to work as a team, after all!” She looked down. “We’d do it without you if we could, Emil, but all of us agree there wouldn’t be much point.”
“How kind of you to throw me that bone,” he said dryly. He patted the bunk again. “Susannah, sit down for a minute and listen. Really, for a grown woman, you are in such need of schooling.”
Pique strengthened her. She ventured in and perched on the foot of the bed, trying not to stare at the laser, so easily within her reach. More of his games, she realized.
Clausen’s smile let go of its seductiveness. “Now tell me why I should care. I’ll win in the end anyway. Even if the planet burns itself to a crisp and your precious Sawls with it, I still win. The mining robots don’t need temperate weather or even an atmosphere to get their job done. Do you understand?”
“Sure, I understand,” she replied briskly, refusing to look defeated. “But how do you win if the planet gets you first?” She reined in her impulse to grab the gun. “Weng’s worried enough now to talk openly about aborting the mission.”
“Over my dead body,” he said, but he seemed to actually consider for a moment. “So Ibiá’s agreed to your conference plan?”
“Not yet,” she admitted. “And he was sure you wouldn’t either.” Sawl-like, she spread her hands. “But, Emil, what have you got to lose?”
“Not a goddamn thing,” he replied with a smile so unreadable that Susannah wondered suddenly what she had set in motion.
34
Stavros crouched at the corner of the cave mouth, where the overhang dropped in a ragged slash to meet the ledge. There was deep shadow there, and concealment. Liphar hunkered beside him, with one ranger taking up her post behind them, another on the interior stairs and a third shading his eyes with casual watchfulness against the harsh sun flooding the far side of the entrance.
“Christ, what a mess,” murmured Stavros. He lowered himself disconsolately to the floor and leaned against the rough rock. The glare hurt his eyes. Healing, his shoulder ached. The brutalized skin and tissue were struggling back to life.
What am I doing out here? he asked himself. Easier, so much easier, to hole up in the womblike dark of the StoryHall, sleep and ponder, make love to Susannah as often as I can find the strength…
He leaned forward for a better view to the west. His head edged out of the shadow and the three rangers moved as one to stop him. Liphar grabbed him and pulled him back. Stavros did not argue.
“Much worse than I expected, Lifa.”
Liphar grunted his assent, his fingers telling the blue bead on his wrist.
The plain was burned dry. The russet foliage that had flourished in the flood ravines was reduced to sooty powder, mingling with the seared earth to dust the entire landscape with a single ashen tinge. The air was utterly clear, without a hint of moisture. The western horizon was a knife-edged curve against a sky like polished jade.
The grain crops stood like a multitude in trance, their wilted leaves like limp arms hanging beside bent and broken stalks. Dried m
ud choked the plantings in the terraces, the crust between the rows was broken by sharp radial cracking around the roots.
“There’s nothing left,” Stavros grieved.
Liphar wet his peeling lips. “Some there is.”
“But it won’t last long.”
“Not long, no.” He touched Stavros’ arm and pointed across the plain at the flat green sky above the Vallegar. “This is what I want you look.”
The baked sky-glaze changed color along a distinct line like a cloud front several degrees above the saw toothed profile of the mountains. But the change was slight, not green sky crossed by white cloud; rather, green meeting paler green, just enough to be noticeable.
“Will come here, this,” said Liphar solemnly. “Get more hot, very bright. White-Sky.”
Stavros looked more closely. “That’s White-Sky?”
Liphar nodded faintly. Grim acceptance was his most recent defense, learned perhaps while waiting out the long, blistering hours in the sun of Clausen’s interrogation pit. Stavros suspected that the young man was even indulging himself in a certain priestly satisfaction at seeing his guild’s worst predictions proven true, one after the other.
Abruptly, the remote poetic beauty of the myths seemed a barrier to hope or progress. Fact or fiction, they were not specific enough to inform useful action. If Kav Daven’s charge to him was to deal with the crisis of an impending Devastation, Stavros knew only that his knowledge was insufficient.
Kav! If you’d only tell me what…!
He wondered if it was finally time for him to learn to live with despair as a daily companion, as the Sawls did, as they had done for what would very likely prove to be eons. But there was another approach.
How would Taylor explain White-Sky?
He shifted, leaning forward again but only to the edge of the concealing shade. A mere half mile away, the Lander glinted dully through its coating of ash. Two, maybe three, figures moved about the scorched clearing. Aguidran’s watch reported that Clausen was keeping himself in plain sight lately.
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