Spinneret

by Timothy Zahn

For a long time Saleh stared into Msuya’s unblinking eyes, knowing deep within him there was no way the man would be stopped. Saleh had originally chosen him to lead the mission to Astra because of his intensely pro-Third World stance, a bias Saleh had hoped would act as a bulwark against the West’s usual ability to get more than its fair share of things. But the plan had backfired. Whatever motivations of justice Msuya may once have had were gone, submerged beneath his utter hatred for Colonel Meredith. With or without Saleh’s permission he would find a way to destroy the colonel … and if Saleh stood in his way he might well precipitate a power struggle within the Secretariat itself, a battle that could cost Saleh his position and simultaneously wreck any chance the world might have for international peace and unity.

  But if Saleh officially backed his proposal, the Secretary-General was covered. A success in reclaiming Astra would reflect favorably on him; a failure would be Msuya’s responsibility alone. The inherent communications time lag would give Msuya effective autonomy. If he chose to act on something their new Astran spies reported, there would be no chance for Saleh to exercise his supposed veto power.

  And Msuya knew it. He was offering his political future against a chance for vengeance.

  Dropping his gaze to the papers before him, Saleh sighed. “All right,” he said, picking up a pen. “You’ll take the Trygve Lie and go to Astra, sending the Hammarskjöld home when you get there. You will keep within the boundaries set in this paper, observing and collecting information only. No action of any kind without my written permission first.”

  “I understand,” Msuya nodded.

  Sure you do. The meaningless words still tingling on his tongue, Saleh signed the page and tossed the batch of them across the desk. “Have my secretary give you a copy,” he growled. “I’ll arrange for the Hammarskjöld to rendezvous with you periodically to deliver supplies and bring back any information you gather. In an emergency the Ctencri could probably be persuaded to deliver a message.”

  Msuya smiled tightly as he stood up. “Don’t worry. I’m sure there will be no emergencies.” Turning, he left the room.

  My new frontier, Saleh thought dully, staring at the closed door. My quixotic hope for the restless and hopeless; the world I personally helped begin … and now I must simply sit by and watch while you live or die. For the first time in his life, he began to understand the permanent melancholy in his grandmother’s face that had always bothered and frightened him as a child.

  His grandmother had been a midwife in a small Southern Yemeni village … a village with a fifteen percent infant mortality rate.

  Chapter 26

  SUDDENLY, IT SEEMED, IT was autumn.

  Not like autumn in Pennsylvania, of course, Hafner thought as he climbed up one of the hillocks bordering the Dead Sea; not even like autumn in southern California. Here there were no maples or oaks to scatter colored leaves around like God’s own currency thrown freely to rich and poor alike. On Astra the only signs of fall were a drop in air temperature and a gradual reduction in the number of daylight hours. Turning, Hafner squinted at the cone of Mt. Olympus in the near distance. Odd, he thought. I can’t even force myself to see it as a natural formation anymore. I wonder why I couldn’t see it as anything else before:

  Carmen’s voice drifting up from below interrupted his idle reverie. “Aren’t you supposed to plant a flag or something when you get to the summit?”

  Turning back, he grinned at her. “You come up with an Astran flag I can live with and I’d be pleased to plant it,” he called. “Most of the designs I’ve seen so far would be more suitable for burial.”

  “You’re an aesthetic snob,” she said, laughing. “Come on down; lunch is ready.”

  He scrambled back down the gentle slope and joined her on the spread-out blanket. “At least we won’t have any problem with ants,” Carmen commented, handing him a sandwich. “Eat hearty; it’s the first batch of processed algae from the Flying Hothouse.”

  Cautiously, Hafner took a bite. It was pretty good, actually, though not quite up to normal California standards. The texture was about right, and it took no real effort to believe he was eating actual ham. “Not bad,” he nodded, the words coming out mushy around the food. “Especially with, what, only a week of work?”

  “Closer to two—you’ve been spending too much time underground lately. Of course, the processing’ll go much faster now that all the bugs are out of the system.”

  “Yeah.” Hafner took another bite. “Speaking of being underground, you haven’t told me yet what you thought of the Spinner cavern.”

  She shook her head. “I wish I had the words to do it properly. It’s the most fantastic thing I’ve ever seen. Does that artificial sun actually track across the sky?”

  “Sure does,” he nodded. “Gives us a cycle of twenty hours of daylight to ten of night, presumably matching that of the Spinners’ home world. And the sun isn’t a hologram, or at least they don’t think so—the light intensity is too great and matches a G3 star spectrum too closely. No one knows yet what it is or how they get it to move. Ditto for the clouds and stars, by the way.”

  She shook her head again. “I see now why you and Cris and the colonel were so dead-set on keeping the place out of the wrong hands—human or otherwise. I’ve been thinking—well, never mind.”

  “You’ve been thinking we were all going megalomaniac?” he prompted.

  “Well … maybe a little. But I think I understand now.”

  “Good. Maybe it’ll help you in your trade negotiations. How are they going, by the way?”

  “Oh, business is booming. I’ve got six contracts in the stack, just waiting on the raw metal deliveries. I calculate that in a couple of years we’ll have a shot at passing the U.S.’s GNP.”

  “And with a fraction of its population. The old oil barons will turn over in their graves.”

  Carmen was silent for a moment. “Maybe we should start figuring out how we’re going to share all that wealth.”

  He frowned at her, trying to place that tone of voice. “You’ve been talking to Perez, haven’t you?” he asked. “All that stuff about the New Mayflower.”

  “The who?”

  “Oh, he hasn’t sprung that one on you yet? He wants us to buy the Aurora or Pathfinder and outfit it for shuttling immigrants here from Earth.”

  She sighed. “That sounds like him: great with people but no head at all for economics. We could probably rent M’zarch troop carriers a lot cheaper than buying one of our own.”

  Hafner made a face. “Well, I hope one of you experts is thinking about where we’d put this flood of fo—flood of people,” he corrected himself hastily.

  “We recognize the problems,” Carmen said, giving him an odd look. “We’re not going to rush into anything half-cocked. What kind of flood were you going to call it?”

  Silently, Hafner cursed his tongue. “A flood of foreigners,” he admitted reluctantly. “Perez wants to recruit people mostly from the poorer Third World nations.”

  “And?” Carmen prompted, her voice studiously neutral.

  “Well, face it—if that happens we original Astrans are going to wind up as a pretty small minority here. Those of us who came here because we wanted to are going to be flooded out by people looking for the ticket window to the galaxy’s gravy train.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” For a moment Carmen gazed out at the waters of the Dead Sea, her forehead furrowed in thought. “I don’t know what to say,” she sighed at last. “It will change Astra—there’s no doubt about that. We’re four small villages that are going to become huge cities, and those of us who’ve sweated through the rough times are likely to get lost in the crowd, But we can’t simply live here alone like—well, like the oil barons you mentioned. After all, it’s not like this is profit from something we’ve done ourselves.”

  “Why do we have to bring all of them here, though?” Hafner grumbled. “Why not just give the money to them right where they are or something? Hey—that may be it.”


  “May be what?” Carmen asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

  “The answer to our dilemma.” The thoughts were coming thick and fast now, and Hafner fumbled a bit as he tried to keep up with them. “It’ll be like foreign aid—better yet, like a new Marshall Plan. We can funnel a portion of our profit to the poorer countries, probably in the form of credit with the Ctencri, maybe tie the amount to inverse GNP per capita so that it goes to the countries who need it most—”

  “And how do you guarantee it goes to the people who need it most?”

  “—with a clause to prevent—um? Oh.” The grand scheme seemed to explode into soap suds in front of him. “Yeah. Well … we could write something into the agreements, I suppose.”

  Carmen smiled sadly. “Half the countries that need that sort of aid already reject help that has any strings attached. Besides, the contract hasn’t been written yet that someone couldn’t find a loophole in.”

  Hafner pursed his lips tightly. She had indeed been talking to Perez, he decided; talking and listening. “It’d still be better than trying to bring the starving millions here,” he growled. “Most of them don’t have any skill except farming, and they sure as potholes aren’t going to continue that line of work here.”

  “I know,” Carmen sighed. “And I don’t know how we’re going to get around that. All we can do is keep working on it.”

  “Yeah.” Hafner looked down at the half sandwich still clutched in his hand. “So much for our nice, quiet lunch away from the universe,” he said, shaking his head. “Look, why don’t we sort of back out and come in again, okay? Let’s just enjoy our algae and the lovely gray-brown scenery and forget about politics for a while.”

  “Sure. I’m sorry I brought up the subject.” Carmen smiled wanly and took a bite of her own sandwich. “So … what sort of gossip do you hear lately?”

  They talked about people, the rate of progress of the Earth scientists, and other relatively innocuous subjects for the next hour; and when Hafner escorted Carmen back to the Spinneret camp and her waiting vehicle, she professed herself satisfied with the break from the pressures of her work.

  He pretended to believe her … but as she drove off toward Unie he felt his own cheerful expression sag into a grimace. Just too dedicated to her job, he thought, shaking his head as he trudged toward his crackerbox apartment to await his early-evening shift. Probably won’t be able to really relax until this whole immigrant thing is resolved. Perez will see to that, I’m sure. The thought of the Hispanic infecting her with his own excessively liberal philosophy was more than a little annoying, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it.

  Except perhaps to offer an alternative to his grand immigration scheme. So far, Hafner had heard nothing that corresponded to his Marshall Plan idea being tossed around during mealtime discussions; and if it truly hadn’t occurred to anyone, he really ought to point it out to Colonel Meredith. Despite Carmen’s skepticism, it seemed to him the plan had potential merit.

  Changing his direction, Hafner headed toward the tunnel entrance. Meredith, he knew, was currently in the tower … and Hafner suspected he’d welcome someone to talk to.

  The same three-squiggle pattern showed up over eighty times in the main control room alone … and the pattern of lights and switches associated with it was more than a little suggestive. All right, Loretta thought, tapping at the fist-sized walkabout terminal of the Ctencri translator humming quietly off to one side. Call this “on” or “active” or “functioning.” Correlate … ?

  She pushed the proper button and watched the translator screen list eight more combinations involving the three-letter pattern and their possible meanings. Activate, standby—off? Ah—then that tilde would indicate inversion of meaning. Let’s see where else the tilde shows up. … Punching in the order, she was rewarded a moment later with an overhead schematic of the semicircular control panel, the tilded labels flashing in red. Referring occasionally to the picture, she walked slowly around the room, looking closely at each of the switches and indicators so identified. The next step would be to choose one or two of them and play through the data file of the last cable production again, watching for anything that might give a clue as to their function. Loretta hadn’t done too well so far with that particular method; all the obvious correlations had long since been tabulated, and she lacked the engineers’ knack of pulling seemingly unrelated sounds and activities into a coherent whole.

  From underneath the control panel came a dribble of muttered Russian. A moment later, Victor Ermakov crawled stiffly out and unfolded into a standing position. “It is thoroughly ridiculous,” he grumbled, waving a multimeter for emphasis. “Half the circuits are inert, with no current flow and infinite resistance—and the other half show an absolutely steady current, with no discernible modulation. How do you control something with unchanging current?” He turned to Meredith, sitting quietly next to one of the Gorgon’s Heads. “Colonel, the digger is still at work, isn’t it?”

  “It was as of five minutes ago,” the other said. “That’s when it dumped its last load into the hopper.” He pointed to the blue section of the control panel beneath which Ermakov had been working. “I saw the pattern change.”

  The Russian scowled at the board. “I’m beginning to think Arias is right, that the Spinners aren’t using conventional electronics here at all.”

  Loretta shrugged. Francisco Arias had tried to explain his theory to her, but his mastery of the more arcane branches of physics didn’t include the ability to translate them into laymen’s terms. All she’d taken away from the session had been a headache and the fact that too much of the Spinneret equipment was superconducting cable material for it to function along normal electronic lines. He’d then launched into something about subatomic forces and field waveguides that had lost her completely. “He did seem very sure of himself,” she commented.

  “He always does.” Ermakov shook his head and turned again to Meredith. “Colonel, it’s becoming clear that I’m going to have to literally invent the tools I need to study this equipment. Have you any data at all on the subatomic structure of the cable material, or on any general nuclear theory about the forces that may be involved?”

  A thoughtful frown creased Meredith’s forehead. “Possibly,” he said slowly. “But I’m not sure what kind of access I can let you have to it.”

  For a scientist, Ermakov was an uncommonly good spy; Loretta had to give him that. His ears seemed to prick up at the mention of classified information, but his next comment was as casual and ingenuous as could be. “Well, it’s your decision, of course,” he shrugged. “But the more insight I can get into the Spinners’ science, the faster I’ll be able to understand their engineering.”

  “I’m aware of that.” From the ceiling came the hum of the elevator motor. Loretta glanced at her watch, noted that it was still an hour before the next supervisor was due to relieve Meredith. She looked back up to see the colonel get to his feet and walk around the elevator cylinder to where the door would appear. Unconsciously, her muscles tensed … but it was only the geologist/supervisor Dr. Hafner.

  “Colonel,” Hafner greeted the other, nodding in turn to Loretta and Ermakov. “I wonder if I could talk to you for a moment? It’s about a possible alternative to mass immigration.” Meredith shrugged. “Sure.”

  Hafner launched into a description of something he was calling the new Marshall Plan; tuning him out, Loretta turned back to the control board. All right: tilde means negation. Then on the digger board this might mean “empty hopper”; then—let’s see: does this sequence show up anywhere else—?

  “I trust you’re doing better than I am,” Ermakov murmured from beside her. He had his multimeter on the edge of the control panel and was busily switching around the probe leads. “Incidentally, I wonder if I could borrow your tape player and some of your tapes this evening.”

  Loretta’s throat tightened, and she had to consciously force the muscles to relax. The tape player was h
er clandestine radio link to the UN ship overhead, the necessary electronics for transmission and scrambling concealed inside the plastic covers of two of the cassettes. “I suppose so,” she said, trying to match his casual tone and wondering what had happened to his own radio.

  “Thank you. I’ve been talking about music lately with Major Dunlop and he expressed a wish to listen to some Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. I’ll come by your apartment when we’re through here and pick it up for delivery to him.”

  “Fine,” she said through stiff lips. Dunlop. The officer the UN people said had fired stunners at a group of workers in Ceres and been severely reprimanded by Meredith for his actions. A man she remembered being described as a vain, hard-nosed type who preferred gunboat to all other forms of diplomacy.

  And Ermakov was about to lend him her radio.

  The Russian completed his adjustments and disappeared again beneath the control panel. Loretta moved away, staring at the gaudy Spinner colors without really seeing them. She hadn’t even realized Ermakov and Dunlop had been talking together, let alone planning … what? What could the two of them have cooked up that Dunlop needed to talk to the UN ship about? The scientists’ mission here was supposed to be the strictly passive acquisition of Spinneret data … unless Ermakov had special instructions she was unaware of. A sudden dread hit her between the shoulder blades and she glanced behind her, half expecting to see that Meredith had put such an obvious two and two together and was summoning soldiers to arrest her for espionage.

  But the colonel was still talking with Hafner, apparently oblivious to both Ermakov’s scheming and her own associated guilt. Weak-kneed with relief, she turned back and resumed punching in computer commands with shaky ringers.

  Ermakov didn’t bring up the subject again, and as they were leaving the cavern four hours later, she permitted herself to hope that he’d either forgotten his request or changed his plans. But as she walked past the tunnel guards and out into the early-evening gloom he quietly fell into step with her; and a few minutes later he left her apartment with the player tucked under his arm.