Deadman Switch

by Timothy Zahn

  I gritted my teeth and complied. For a dozen heartbeats nothing seemed to happen; and then, with a flurry of leaves and branches audible even over the loud drone of the insects, the four laskas shot out of the bushes, heading downslope at a dead run. For a second it looked like the insects were going to pursue; but they were apparently content with merely driving the intruders away. For a minute longer they swarmed around the thunderhead before gradually disappearing again into the thick vegetation surrounding him.

  Slowly, Lord Kelsey-Ramos straightened back to his feet. “All right,” he said, his voice tight. “Gilead?—what’s the thunderhead doing?”

  “He’s watching us,” I told him, forcing my own voice to stay calm. It wasn’t over yet, I reminded myself, a hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach. We still had to make it back to the car … and on the way we would have to pass within view of the rest of the thunderheads on the surrounding hills. “I can’t tell—wait a minute,” I interrupted myself. A subtle change in the thunderhead’s sense— “He’s gone,” I reported. “He’s left his body.”

  “Uh-huh,” Lord Kelsey-Ramos grunted. “Not unexpected, if I understand what’s going on. I think it’s time for a dignified yet brisk retreat.”

  “Stay there, sir,” Kutzko put in, his voice the tone of command I’d heard him use so often before. “I’ll come up and get you in the car.”

  Lord Kelsey-Ramos hesitated, then nodded. “All right. I don’t think we’re in any real danger … but then again, we don’t know how desperate they are to keep this a secret, either.”

  “To keep what a secret?” I demanded. It was abundantly clear that Lord Kelsey-Ramos had seen something significant in the scene we’d just witnessed; equally clear was that whatever it was, I’d missed it completely. A dash of humility to add to the tension and danger already knotting up my insides. “I don’t understand.”

  Lord Kelsey-Ramos sighed, the sound just audible over the phone. “No, I don’t suppose you do,” he said, a strange sadness beneath his own tension. “The problem with you religious types is that your view of reality has some built-in limitations. There are things in this universe that only someone with a deceitful, manipulative mind can properly comprehend.”

  I was still searching for a reply to that when Kutzko brought the car to a bouncing halt, stopping between his employer and the still-vacant thunderhead. Lord Kelsey-Ramos ran for the vehicle; clenching my teeth, I got my feet under me and did the same.

  No attack had come by the time Kutzko started us down the hill again. I tried to watch the scattering of other thunderheads over my shoulder as we came within sight of them, but we were too far away and jolting too wildly for me to read anything of consequence. All I could get was the sense that they, too, were watching. “What now?” I asked.

  Lord Kelsey-Ramos took a deep breath, the tension flowing out of him to leave a tired anger in its place. “We head back,” he said wearily. “Head back, and tell Admiral Yoshida and the rest of the commission just how the thunderheads have been using us all these years.”

  I felt my stomach muscles tighten. “I still don’t understand.”

  He turned grim eyes on me. “Don’t you see? That—” he jerked his head sharply back at the hillside behind us—“was a demonstration of the thunderheads’ natural defense mechanism. A mechanism they simply adapted for their system as a whole.”

  And, finally—finally—it was clear. “The Cloud,” I breathed. “It’s nothing but a gigantic version of that plant barrier.”

  Lord Kelsey-Ramos nodded bitterly. “And we’re the stinging insects that live there. The insects they’ve lured in to defend them.”

  Chapter 31

  TEMPERATURES THE PREVIOUS NIGHT had dipped toward freezing, a sure sign that winter would be arriving in this part of Spall. Even now, four hours after sunrise, the air was still respectably chilly—a fact that clearly weighed upon the minds of the engineers working hard to prepare the new housing area that was being added onto the compound. I watched them as I walked, finding it a little hard to remember the encampment as it had been at the beginning. From a single Pravilo ship and a handful of soft-wall structures, its occupants grudgingly investigating the babblings of a pair of pravdrugged Watchers, it had now become a veritable city of offices, labs, and prebuilt individual houses.

  And somewhere in all that influx of money and personnel, I could sense that something had gotten lost. The pure, almost childlike excitement of scientific discovery was all but gone now; in its place was the equally strong but far darker motivation of being part of an important, life/death problem.

  Dr. Eisenstadt, though he wouldn’t admit it aloud, could feel that loss. Many of the others didn’t. For some, bigger and more important and better funded was always the definition of progress.

  The house I was looking for was just inside the original security fence, about as far from the main work areas as it was possible to get at the moment. Like all the other houses in the cramped and inadequate space, there wasn’t a great deal of land surrounding it; but as I neared the front door I could tell from the faint whiffs of familiar vegetation that there was enough room between house and fence for at least a small garden. The muted sound of metal implements on dirt accompanied the smells, and I changed direction to circle around that way.

  Shepherd Adams was on his knees in the middle of a small section of turned dirt, poking with a fork trowel around the roots of three knee-high plants. He looked up as I came around the corner of the house, and for that first unguarded instant his sense was full of unfriendliness, vague bitterness, even betrayal. “Mr. Benedar,” he nodded, his voice tightly neutral.

  “Shepherd Adams,” I nodded back, fighting to hold my ground against the strong feelings radiating from him. “I’m sorry to intrude on your privacy—”

  “I have little else these days except privacy,” he countered.

  There was just a hint of irony in his voice; a chink in the armor he was trying to throw up around himself … “Gives you an idea of what it would be like to be a monk,” I offered. Another flicker in his sense— “As you once considered becoming.”

  He snorted gently, another chunk of the armor coming down. Adams simply wasn’t constituted to hold onto grudges. “I’d forgotten how little one’s thoughts are one’s own in the presence of a Watcher,” he sighed. “It’s a hard reminder of how open we always are to God.”

  I looked at him, read the quiet pain there. “I’m sorry,” I said softly. “Sorry for … everything.”

  He favored me with a bittersweet smile, a portion of the anger within him turning back against himself. “You mean for your part in exposing the Halo of God as a lie?”

  I flinched at the bluntness. “A mistake, Shepherd Adams. Not a lie.”

  He grimaced. “Was it? I’ve spent the last month wondering about that. After all, we both know the Halo of God wouldn’t have grown as large or as quickly without the mystical allure we presented—the chance to actually stand here on the very physical manifestation of God’s kingdom.” He dropped his eyes away from mine. “Who’s to say I didn’t deliberately blind myself to the inconsistencies in that claim?”

  I shook my head. “For whatever it’s worth, I looked very hard for signs of perverted ambition when we first met—and Calandra looked even harder. Neither of us found any.”

  His lip twitched. “Calandra never really trusted us, did she?”

  I thought about Calandra’s admitted loss of faith. “She has a hard time trusting anyone these days,” I told him.

  He nodded. “I suppose it comes of being a Watcher living after the darMaupine’s fiasco.” Lowering his eyes, he tapped one of the plants with his fork trowel. “Know anything about valeer plants, Gilead?” he asked.

  The name was vaguely familiar. “They provide one of the spices you use in cooking, don’t they?”

  He nodded. “I found these growing inside the fence after Dr. Eisenstadt’s people decided they didn’t need me and buried me out of the way
back here. Tricky sort of plant to harvest, actually—something we discovered the first time we tried it.” He gestured at five fat leaf-like structures at the top of one of the plants. “These are the spice pods,” he identified them. “What happens is that, as winter approaches, the plant’s entire supply of nutrients—its life-force, if you will—is drawn into the seeds in these pods. By the time the process is complete, the plant has become a dead stalk, and at that point the next wind just blows it apart, scattering the seeds all over the landscape. The trick for the gardener is to wait long enough to get the maximum yield, yet not so long that the wind destroys the harvest.”

  I looked at the plant, seeing the analogy he was making. “Perhaps it’s now time for the Halo of God to scatter,” I suggested.

  “Oh, they’ll scatter, all right,” he sighed. “But not as viable seeds. They’re too young, most of them, to withstand something this hard.”

  “You think it’ll be harder on them than Aaron Balaam darMaupine was on us?” I countered, suddenly angry at his defeatist attitude. “The Watchers have been considered little better than dormant traitors by much of the Patri and colonies for the past two decades. Yet we survive.”

  He smiled bitterly. “You were old and established, and faced suspicion and hatred. We are young, and face ridicule. Which do you think the human spirit can more easily withstand?”

  I knew the answer to that one. All too well. “Don’t underestimate them,” I said instead. “They may be stronger than you think.”

  His gaze drifted to the security fence. “I should be out there with them,” he murmured. “Preparing them for this.”

  I took a deep breath. “You may be of more value here.”

  He shrugged. “I’m of no use at all. Shepherd Zagorin seems to be—” He broke off, eyes shifting back to me as his brain belatedly noticed the tone of my comment. “Has something happened to her?”

  “No, she’s fine,” I assured him. “She’s still handling all the contact work, but she seems to be acclimating to it well.”

  He snorted. “There’s no need for her to be doing all of it alone,” he growled. “They fixed my heart and brain weeks ago—I’m perfectly capable of taking some of that load off her.”

  “I know, sir. That’s why I’m going to ask you to contact the thunderheads for me.”

  His sense was startled, then cautious. “Why me?”

  “Because I can’t use Shepherd Zagorin.” I braced myself; this was likely to be painful. “What do you know about what’s happening?”

  His forehead furrowed slightly. “The thunderheads are intelligent, with what seems to be a complete society, though we don’t yet understand how it works. There’s also a fleet of sublight spaceships a little under a light-year from Solitaire and due to reach us in about seventeen years.”

  “Did you know the Patri is planning to destroy that fleet?”

  The skin around his eyes tightened, his sense turning to horror. “God save us all,” he murmured. “But … why?”

  “Because we’re afraid of them,” I said simply.

  He licked his lips, and I could see him struggling with the enormity of it. “How do they intend to … do it?”

  I grimaced. “A hundred ninety-two of Collet’s biggest rocheoids are going to be fitted with Mjollnir lacings and tethered to tugboats equipped with Deadman Switches,” I told him, my stomach tightening as it always did at the thought of it. “Zombis will be put aboard, and the thunderheads will guide them to points directly in front of each of the ships. Too close, of course, for the aliens to veer or take any kind of countermeasure.”

  For a long moment Adams was silent. I watched, also in silence, as he slowly forced his horror back. “How will they know how close they’ll have to get?” he asked.

  I nodded, “The same thought occurred to me. Apparently the thunderheads know more about this than they’ll say.”

  “They know who the Invaders are, then.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I’m certain of it,” I agreed. “But they won’t tell us anything.”

  He thought about that. “What is it you want to ask them?”

  “I want to know how to communicate with the aliens,” I said. “If we can talk to them, maybe we can figure out what’s going on here, as well as what side of this confrontation we should be on.”

  He gazed steadily at me. “And what makes you think there is a side we should be on?”

  I blinked, the question catching me off-guard. “We have to take a stand on this somewhere.”

  “Do we?” he demanded. “‘Blessed are the peacemakers’—or had you forgotten that?”

  I clenched my teeth against a rush of anger … anger tinged uncomfortably with guilt. “Are you suggesting I’ve forgotten the goals of my faith?”

  “Have you?” he asked bluntly.

  The emphatic denial I’d planned died in my throat. “If eight years in Lord Kelsey-Ramos’s business world didn’t break me,” I ground out, “a couple of months here certainly didn’t.”

  A faint, sad smile touched his lips. “The business world of Lord Kelsey-Ramos is one of the acquisition of money and the stabbing of competitors in the back,” he said quietly. “Here, you’ve been offered a chance to use your talents to explore a part of God’s universe. Which world do you think it would be easier for you to fit comfortably into?”

  “Neither,” I retorted, feeling uncomfortably on the defensive. To even suggest I could be so easily seduced by the secular world was utterly absurd, even insulting. “And anyway, that’s beside the point. The point is that unless we can find an alternative, the Pravilo is going to snuff out a great many intelligent lives.”

  He nodded, but I could see that the issue of my path was merely being shelved, not abandoned. “So why won’t they let you talk to the thunderheads?”

  With some effort, I forced myself back to business. “They probably would, actually, if that’s all I was going to do,” I told him. “But I’m going to have to do more than just talk. I’m going to have to reveal to the thunderheads that we know a secret about them.”

  Adams’s frowned. “What kind of secret?”

  “One that shows they aren’t the poor, picked-on victims they’ve been pretending to be. That they deliberately drew us to Solitaire system in hopes of embroiling us in this dispute with the aliens.”

  “Interesting,” Adams murmured. He pondered for a moment. “You don’t think revealing that will make trouble?”

  I shook my head. “The thunderheads almost certainly know by now that we know it. And in the two weeks since Lord Kelsey-Ramos figured it out they haven’t shown any signs of being particularly worried.” Which, if that was true, meant that its use as a lever might well be vanishingly small. But there was nothing left for me but the grasping of such straws.

  For another moment Adams gazed at me, his sense a kaleidoscope of indecision and thought and the weighing of possibilities. Then, abruptly, it cleared; and he nodded briskly. “All right. Are you ready?”

  The quickness of the decision surprised me. “Well, yes, but you aren’t. We’ll need to get some of the drugs they’ve been using to prepare Shepherd Zagorin.”

  “And you have access to these drugs?” he asked pointedly.

  “I can get them,” I insisted. “We can’t risk the kind of trouble you had the first time.”

  “Why not?” he countered. “I lasted several minutes then, and with my rebuilt heart and cerebral circulatory system I shouldn’t be in even that much danger this time.”

  I felt my stomach muscles tightening up. I couldn’t ask him to do this—not now, not unprepared. But he was right. The first batch of rocheoids were already being prepared, and the schedule called for the rest to be finished within another month. The longer we delayed, the less likely anything we learned would be able to stop the holocaust. “All right,” I sighed at last. “There shouldn’t be anyone at the Butte City at the moment.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said dryly. Laying his
fork trowel aside, he shifted to cross-legged position and closed his eyes.

  I felt a rush of heat to my face, feeling like an idiot. Of course there was no need for us to physically go to where the thunderheads’ bodies were. Sitting down in front of Adams, I took a careful breath and tried to clear my mind of extraneous thoughts. Adams slipped into his meditative trance … reached what seemed to me to be the proper point … “Thunderheads?” I invited.

  The response was immediate. “I am here,” Adams whispered hoarsely. “What do you wish?”

  I braced myself. This was it. “I wish information,” I said. “I’d like you to teach me how to communicate with the aliens who are approaching this world.”

  Eisenstadt had made the identical request before; and, as with that time, there was a long moment of silence. I kept my eyes on Adams, watching for any signs of physical distress. “There is no way to talk … to them,” the thunderhead answered at last.

  Predictably, the same answer as last time. “Then perhaps we humans will choose to leave this place,” I told him. “Perhaps those in authority over us will decide they don’t like being lied to and manipulated by others.”

  I’d half expected the thunderhead to feign innocence; but perhaps I’d underestimated the creatures’ sophistication. “Your race has gained much from … this place,” he said through Adams. “You seek certain miner … als for your machines. They are worth lives to you. You will stay and fight for … what you want.”

  “I’d advise you not to underestimate the strength of human pride,” I warned him. “You see, we now know all about your natural defense strategy, with the stinging insects and all. We know that you’re playing the exact same game with us, right down to luring us here by creating the mineral wealth of Collet’s rings for us.”

  “We do not create,” he said calmly.

  “Semantics,” I snorted. “Perhaps you’d prefer the word enhanced. Regardless, we know all about it. Must have been quite a project: an entire planetful of thunderheads focusing their organic lasers on the rings for years at a time, slowly boiling off the lighter elements and leaving the heavier metals behind.”