by John Barnes
"Giraut?"
"Yap."
"Why doesn't Valerie come down and visit?"
The real reason was because she was lying under chemical sedation up in one of the cats; once a day we gave her a scrubber to wake her up, and to give Betsy a chance to work a fully operational brain, but within an hour or two Valerie was always back in hysterics and we had to shut her back down.
"Valerie patched you up after the wreck," I pointed out, "and some people have a hard time looking at their lovers when they're hurt." As I said it I felt myself lying. I knew that however badly Margaret might be hurt, I would never avoid her, and for that matter when Azalais, my entendora before Garsenda, had taken a stray hit from a neuroducer, I had stayed by her bedside constantly for the first few days ... badly hurt people rarely can imagine how little trouble they seem to be to those who love them.
Unfortunately Paul had a perfectly good sense of when he was being lied to, and he trusted me more than he did most of the people who had been sitting up with him. "No one will tell me, Giraut, but I know. It was Betsy that took care of me down here, wasn't it?"
I knew I would hate myself for whatever I said next, so I chose the truth and said yes.
"It doesn't matter," Paul said. "It really doesn't matter. Valerie must have been really frightened, and it's hard for her to face fear, or even just the memory of fear."
He paused for a long time; I thought about what the situation actually was, considered telling him for some perverse reason I didn't want to name, and fought the urge down. It would do no good. He would simply worry about her. And to have Paul worrying about Valerie would be just too much.
"It doesn't matter," he said again, his voice soft and far away. I think he fell back asleep about then, because his voice slurred, and he said no more after that. When I moved around to where I could watch him comfortably, there were tears on his face.
After a while somebody came down to relieve me—actually to relieve Petra—and I went back up the zipline, joined Robert and Susan in the stripped down cat, and set off down the road. There was still no word from Utilitopia; we might as well have been alone on the planet. My two relief drivers went to sleep in the back almost at once, as they were supposed to do; now there was just me, and the faint days-old tracks of the expedition, as I worked my way carefully along, making sure that we suffered no slips at all, but at the same time descended swiftly.
I hadn't covered five kilometers before I realized this job was going to be even worse than I had feared. The tracks we had left behind were often obscured, and many times the procession of four cats spinning out over a gravel bank or descending a slope of loose stone had made the surface considerably more slippery and dangerous than it had been before. Sometimes we had skated down a surface that now resisted climbing; often our climbing had done so much damage to the surface that I now could not follow the same pathway in descent, for fear of losing control. The more I saw of it, the more I had to admire Anna's driving in getting us through it in the first place—the collapse of the path under her had been the sheerest bad luck, and if skill had determined all, we'd have been perfectly safe.
Another few kilometers, and the sun rose, and I had settled more into the rhythm of things and realized that, though terrifying, it was largely controllable. Twice when I could not go over the same gravel we had come in over, I had to cross patches of snow and ice, which I first probed on foot with ultrasound, carrying a long pole in case anything should break through under me. The rock below was solid as far as could be told, though in places the ice was ten or twelve meters thick. Even so, as I would drive over the surface, keeping between the lines my footprints had made going and returning, it was hard not to hold my breath.
Even with all the problems, I was making somewhat better time on the way down than we had on the way up, and by the time Robert woke up and came forward to keep me company, I had passed the previous campsite. He tried the com but we could get nothing, not even a "channel unavailable." It was still many kilometers to the campsite we had used on our first night ascending the canyon, where there had been no problems with the com.
If the gravel slope of the bank we had to go down had not been so badly shredded by the passage of the expedition, we'd never have swung as far toward the cliffs as we did—it was dangerous because the constant melting and refreezing meant that there was a slow but steady rain of rocks from up above—after all, all that gravel and loose rock had come from somewhere. But since we had no choice, we were edging along next to the cliff when Robert very calmly said, "Stop a minute."
I did, thinking he'd seen some safety hazard; instead, he said "Look at that. What is it?"
I had had eyes only for the road, but now that he pointed I was startled myself. We had been running along a palisade of jumbled and broken rock, perhaps four times the height of the cat, that roughly paralleled the main wall of the canyon, and if I thought about it at all I simply assumed that it was the edge of a huge rock step.
But to the left, in front of us, there was an opening, and two astonishing sights. First of all, there was no mistaking the way that opening had been made—laser-cut rock simply looks different from anything that occurs naturally, even after time and the elements have had their way with it. Someone had cut a straight path through the meters-thick rock to the depression it enclosed.
And down that sharp-edged channel, there was a stone wall, twice the height of the cat, with a large arch at its center and a tower on either side of the arch, for all the world like a castle in an old picture book.
Robert and I looked at each other, trying to decide what to say. I saw his fingers dance over the keyboard as he made sure the location was recorded—the cat's inertial navigation was hardly perfect but it would at least get anyone who found the records back to somewhere near this site.
"What's going on? Why are we stopped?" Susan was coming forward from her bunk, rubbing sleep from her eyes. When she saw what was visible through the cat's front window, she gave a little gasp.
"We have a lot of distance to make yet today," I started to point out, but she and Robert were already grabbing up cameras and recorders, and clearly I wasn't going to win this argument. Besides, it would be a chance for me to uncramp a couple of muscles, and it looked like the stone was probably warmed enough by the sun for this little spot to be pleasant, at least more pleasant than where we'd been the past couple of days.
On the other side of the arch, we found the city—really no more than a small town, but something about it made you call it a city anyway. Most of the buildings clung to the walls of the natural depression, something like pictures I'd seen of Cliff Dweller houses on Old Earth, but there were a couple of long stone buildings, their roofs long since fallen in, in the middle, and a wide round basin that I suspected must have been a fountain. Susan systematically scanned the whole thing once and then turned back to me and said, "Sorry, but this was something we couldn't afford to lose. We can go now—I just had to make sure there was enough of a record to get someone back here."
We hurried back to the cat; it had only been a matter of minutes, but no matter how justified the delay, it had still been a delay. Once again, we began to pick our way down the slope as fast as possible.
"What do you suppose it is?" Robert asked.
"Maybe some crazed hermits from St. Michael?" Susan didn't sound convinced. "It seems uncomfortable enough for them. But why would they be trespassing on our continent? They've got plenty of bare rock in their own. And the way those stones had fallen in from the roof—that wasn't originally vaulted or domed. There must have been timber supports or something like that in there, and I didn't see anything."
"Which would mean?" I asked, never taking my eyes from the track ahead, but glad enough to have some distractions from the thoughts I had been alone with for hours.
"Well, maybe the supports were too valuable to leave behind, so whoever took them along. Or maybe they were made of something that decayed before we happened along."
"Nothing there has decayed for millennia," Robert objected. "It's all been frozen. The Pessimals have been losing ice since the asteroid strike, but only from high peaks and surfaces that get a lot of sun. Nothing in that little pocket valley was warmed up enough to even start to decay, especially nothing like timber. If there were clothes, or even bodies, in those houses, or caves, or whatever you call 'em, at the time of the asteroid strike, they'd still be in there, probably in decent shape."
Gravel skittered under the treads and both of them fell silent, watching as I jockeyed the machine slowly around a corner. Surely both of them had been handling cats longer—
But probably not over anything like Sodom Gap, I realized. Oh, well, if I wanted an excuse to not drive for a while I would have to say I was tired—and I wasn't.
"Of course if the supports had decayed before the planet froze..." Susan said, and let it hang there in the air.
"But Nansen has been frozen since—well, we think it's been frozen since it cooled down after the Faju Fakutoru Effect formed it out of the bones of a gas giant," Robert objected. "But I suppose if it wasn't always frozen—"
"You two are hinting at something," I said, "and my brain doesn't have room for puzzles right now."
"Maybe the site was old before it froze. Maybe we've found out what the source was for the bugs that pre-terraformed Nansen."
On any other occasion I might have jumped or started or something; as it stood, I kept my hands on the controls and my eyes on the road. "That would be pretty impressive, if true."
"That would blow a big hole in Selectivism," Robert pointed out. "Make lots of trouble for Saltini. Bring in thousands of offworld experts, if it really is the first nonhuman archaeological site, and I'd like to see him try to enforce Market Prayer on that many Council of Humanity employees. It's not as important, right now, as getting down to com range, but it sure could change things in Caledony."
"Change things in all of the Thousand Cultures," Susan corrected. "It's almost funny; we might have just found something humanity has been looking for for a thousand years, and unfortunately we have something much more urgent to get done. But I suppose—"
I never did find out what she supposed, because Robert let out a shout just as I snowplowed our cat to a rapid stop—no mean feat if I do say so myself, on that steep downgrade.
Coming up the trail in front of us was another cat—and one I recognized even before I was able to get a glimpse through the glare off the windshield and confirm that Bruce was driving.
EIGHT
"I thought four portable springers might be overkill," Bruce said, "but they pointed out I wouldn't want one that was broken when I got here, and we really needed both a big one to bring the main party home and a specialized medical one for Paul and uh, the um remains, and they're not normally field equipment and we have no one who can fix them, so I had to bring two of each. Which means I'm afraid we don't have a lot of bunk room."
He looked exhausted, and from the way Bieris hung on to me I sensed she was in terrible shape as well. "Could you run the springers in, say, eight hours, if you could sleep till then?" Susan asked.
"I probably could run them in my sleep, which seems like a magnificent idea right now," Bieris said. "These aren't locally built jury-rigs; these are standard Occitan models that the Council of Humanity brought over."
"Then you and Bruce take the bunks in our cat, I drive lead cat, Robert drives yours, and Giraut sits up with me to point out the trail. We can be back up to the camp in about eight hours, and everyone can be home in ten." Susan wasn't the type to waste words once a decision was made, so she headed for the cat we had come in.
"She's right," I said, because I saw Bruce was about to raise some fuzzy objection. "Susan and Robert both just got up after a full night's sleep less than three hours ago. And I won't be good for much else but I can certainly tell Susan where the trouble is. If Robert stays close to our tracks there should be no problem. Both of you look half dead—now get into those bunks, you can tell us what's up when we get there. How long have you been awake, anyway?"
"More than one full day," Bruce mumbled, as he staggered toward the cat and the bunk. "A bit over one Light more or so—"
At least forty-two hours? And a rescue expedition that seemed to have been outfitted from Brace's farm and the back door of the Embassy?
I think Susan, Robert, and I all figured out at that moment that some terrible things must have happened, but we could also see that no good would come of standing around talking about them. At least there were springers, and apparently somewhere to spring to.
As the bright blaze of the moon came up above us in the west, we started back up the trail. Susan was a good driver, good enough to know that you went faster by being cautious, so I had very little to say to her. Bruce and Bieris didn't wake or stir in the back. They had lain down almost without speaking, fully dressed on top of the covers, and been asleep before Susan and I had belted them in.
The moon climbed steadily, waxing as it went, and soon all but the brightest stars were gone. Arcturus itself was no longer impressive, but merely a red star brighter than most I thought idly that the canyon would have made a fine subject for Bieris to paint, all silvers, blacks, and blues with the jagged edges of the rock stabbing up into the void, but no doubt if things worked out there would be time for her to come this way again, and if they did not it would not matter.
I had assumed that there would be some kind of catching up on news when we got back to the encampment, but again that was not to be. The main springer took so little time for Bieris to set up that the group was barely awake, dressed, and packed before she pronounced it ready; Bruce stepped into it and disappeared. A moment later he came back, accompanied by half a dozen CSPs—a medical team, I realized. They carried yet one more portable springer, a medical lift one— "Won't have to worry about whether the ones they carried took any damage from vibration," the officer said brusquely—and they were down the zipline to Paul in a matter of minutes.
I found myself standing around in a state of bewilderment, along with everyone else, checking for the tenth time that I had my lute and guitar and duffel bag, reminding Betsy to make sure Valerie's instruments were properly packed, carefully not looking into the crevice as the medic team uncovered the frozen corpses and sprang them ... where? No one had even told us where we were going.
Paul was already in a hospital somewhere, I realized, and I would be gone from here before I drew a hundred breaths. I looked around, maybe trying to find some image I could take with me, but all there was to see were the parked, shutdown cats, slowly cooling, the bright lights of the med team in the crevice, and the uneasy line of people. The moon shone on the rocks, and far off to the east the first glints of dawn were beginning. It was a beautiful sky, and a beautiful place, but nothing in it stirred me to compose in the old, automatic way.
The zipline whined again, and soon the medic team was back up. "Nothing more to stay for, is there?" the medic officer said. "And the springer checked out, and we've had a test trip in it. All right, then, everyone line up with your gear, and we'll send you through in batches of three or four."
I'm not sure why, but automatically I shuffled to the back of the line, and Margaret joined me there. "Bad trip?" she asked.
"Frightening. Hard work. It's hard to believe the worst is past us now."
Just ahead of us, Susan darted out of line, ran to the stripped-down cat we had descended the canyon in, and came back a moment later carrying several record blocks under her arm. "This is the stuff we took at the ruins," she said, turning to me. "Somebody's going to want it."
Then her group went in, and vanished; and the last of us except the medic team got into the springer, and the Embassy appeared around us, with Ambassador Shan himself waiting to greet us. Aimeric and Carruthers were with him.
We stepped forward into the rest of our group, and porter robots took our stuff and carried it off somewhere. Behind us we could hear
the medic team arriving.
"If you will all follow us," Ambassador Shan said, "we'll go to a meeting room where I can tell you something of what has been happening. I'm afraid a very large part of it is bad news."
There was no sound as we went down the hall; we were no fit sight for an Embassy anyway. There seemed to be an astonishing number of CSPs around, and most of them looked busy.
They gave us hot drinks—unnecessary, really, for we hadn't been hungry or cold—and had us all sit down, and when the Ambassador spoke, it seemed that he tried to leave out every word he could, to simply give us the undecorated truth.
"First of all: The Council of Humanity has dissolved the Caledon Charter and has placed the city of Utilitopia under martial law. Elements of the former government—mostly groups of PPP police—are continuing resistance in isolated pockets, but the city is in our hands and we expect to end the last resistance before sunset. The Reverend Saltini himself has been arrested and is being held offworld while awaiting trial.
"Secondly, during the outbreak of civil disorder and fighting that led to this situation, there were a great number of deaths and injuries in civilian areas—just at the moment several utility buildings are serving as temporary hospitals to accomodate the overflow, and serious cases, including your friend Paul Parton, have been sprung to the facilities at Novarkhangel in the culture of St. Michael, where they are being given the best possible care. A few critically injured patients, and some victims of neural abuse, are in Noupeitau, where physicians with a more extensive experience with both whole body and neural trauma are available. In a few moments we'll make com lines available for you to try to contact your friends and families, and we'll give you every assistance we can with that.
"Finally, I must tell you with a heavy heart that the disorders began with a physical attack by an armed mob on the Center for Occitan Arts. The building was virtually gutted, and in the fighting there Thorwald Spenders was killed while preventing the mob from attacking people who had taken shelter in the Center.