Authors: Nancy Kress
Marbet, watching Kaufman, said to Gruber, “You didn’t want us to travel to you because of these marauders.”
Gruber looked surprised. “No. I know Lyle can take care of himself. It was for another reason. I wanted to warn you, give you time to prepare yourself.”
“For what?” Marbet said.
“There is another Terran here,” Gruber said, and even through his surprise Kaufman noted that Gruber used the Worlder word for humans. “She is …
Scheisse,
here they come! There is no escaping the woman!”
Another vehicle raced toward them, so fast that Kaufman barely identified it before it was on them. A skimmer, jet-powered, flying an even two feet above the terrain. A huge skimmer, heavily armored, not quite military but the closest civilian analogue that Lyle had ever seen. It jerked to a halt and the door flung open. Out stepped a woman, furious.
Marbet made a small sound, but Kaufman didn’t even hear her.
Not possible
. But there was no mistaking her, not that body nor that incredible, ruined face …
“Marbet Grant,” Magdalena said, “at last. A long way to go to track you down. So tell me, since you seem to be the only one who knows …
“Where the hell is Amanda Capelo?”
* * *
Kaufman looked from Marbet to Magdalena, and back again. Marbet looked like nothing so much as a riled cat; if she had had fur, it would all be standing up. Magdalena repeated her outrageous question. “Ms. Grant, what have you done with Amanda Capelo?”
“I haven’t done anything with Amanda Capelo!” Marbet spat. Kaufman had never seen her this way: agitated, unsure. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about!”
Kaufman said swiftly, “I didn’t get a chance to tell you, Marbet. Amanda was kidnapped along with Tom. The press didn’t discover that until twenty-four hours later, and you were already sequestered aboard ship, so I…” At the look she threw him, Kaufman trailed off.
“And you’ve had no chance to tell me since, Lyle?”
He said nothing. Tom Capelo’s children had never greatly interested Kaufman; he didn’t much like children. During the weeks aboard the
Cascade of Stars
, he had genuinely forgotten about Amanda. Marbet would not have wanted to hear that.
“I see,” she said coldly; no point in not telling Marbet something. His minute shifts of body language gave him away. Marbet turned to Magdalena. “Tell me what happened.”
Magdalena actually seemed amused at whatever she thought was happening between Kaufman and Marbet. The presence of a Sensitive, which made nearly every other human in the galaxy at least mildly nervous, didn’t seem to affect Magdalena at all. All she said was, “The press reported that Amanda was kidnapped also, as ‘Lyle’ here tells you. But she wasn’t. I have contacts in various places who easily discovered that. However, I haven’t been able to discover where she is. She came to your apartment in Luna City, looking for you, in the company of an unidentified man. After that, she traveled to Lowell City as an illegal aboard a Life Now ship. On Mars, however, she vanished. She was looking for you, but by that date you’d already left.”
Kaufman wondered,
how much else does she know about Marbet and me? Probably everything
. This was Magdalena, after all, shadowy star of countless stories in the intelligence community. Most of the stories were undoubtedly false, but not all. Magdalena found out whatever she wanted to find out.
Kaufman shifted uncomfortably. For the first time, he noticed that three more people had gotten out of Magdalena’s skimmer. Two augmented, genemod men who could be nothing but bodyguards, and a native child. A child? What was Magdalena doing with a native child? And why hadn’t he, Kaufman, noticed the three before this minute? He was trained to notice things.
He knew the answer. Magdalena. She was probably in her fifties, her face had wrinkled a bit, her eyes were colder than almost any soldier Kaufman had dealt with. Yet her body was still spectacular and, more important, she still had the magnet, whatever that powerful thing was that surged sexual vibrations around one woman and not another. Magdalena in person had more of it than any other woman Kaufman had ever met. He was ashamed of himself for feeling what he was feeling. Also, there was no chance that Marbet would not know it.
He said, to say something rational, “Why are you looking for Amanda?”
She turned those extraordinary eyes on him, and again he felt her amusement. She knew.
“I need her in order to find my son.”
Whatever Kaufman had expected, that wasn’t it. He repeated stupidly, “Your son?”
“Yes. Whoever kidnapped Dr. Capelo is also holding my son, Laslo Damroscher.”
To Kaufman’s ear, Magdalena said this in the same level, husky voice (ignore the undertone of that huskiness!) in which she’d said everything else. But evidently Marbet heard a difference. Her invisible cat’s fur relaxed, and she looked at Magdalena with no more than her usual keen alertness.
Kaufman said, “This doesn’t really seem the place to discuss it. Shall we go with Dieter to this village he named?”
Gruber, forgotten until this moment, made a gesture Kaufman couldn’t decode. Magdalena said pleasantly, “Couldn’t wait to come dashing out here to warn them about me, could you, Dieter? Fortunately, Essa here overheard Ann on the comlink. She told me what was going on.”
The native child, who looked just pubescent, darted forward and threw her arms around Gruber’s knees. He backed off and tried to dislodge her, an act Kaufman instinctively sympathized with. But the child, a skinny girl with bright black eyes and brown neckfur, hung on, babbling in World. Her skull ridges crinkled with emotion. Kaufman looked at Marbet.
“Essa is begging Dieter’s pardon,” Marbet translated: “I’m not really fluent yet, but I think she’s saying Pek Magdalena offered her something wonderful to tell Magdalena things … I’m not sure … to tell her everything … she offered …
you didn’t
.”
This last was addressed, flatly, to Magdalena, who merely shrugged. Marbet and Gruber looked appalled. Kaufman, the only non-speaker of World, said irritably, “What? What did she offer the girl?”
Marbet said in English, “A ride in her spaceship to other worlds. Magdalena, you know that’s not possible.”
“More things are possible to me than you think. And why not? She’s an enterprising kid.”
“You lied to her.”
“Maybe not.”
Kaufman could see that Magdalena was enjoying this fencing and Marbet was not. Gruber had succeeded in peeling the child off himself. She now stood beside Magdalena, and Kaufman had the uneasy feeling they were alike in some way he couldn’t name. He tried to get things back on track.
“Marbet and I are going to the village. Gruber, can you lead us there?”
“No need,” Magdalena said. “There’s room in my skimmer for you both. Gruber can follow on his bike.”
“I’ll ride with Dieter,” Marbet said, and Magdalena grinned.
Kaufman had been left with no choice. He didn’t know the territory. He climbed into Magdalena’s skimmer, followed by the silent, robot-like bodyguards. What exactly were they genemod for?
No matter. His business was not with them, nor even with Magdalena, whom he sat as far away from as possible. His business was with World, and what he had done to it.
NINE
GOFKIT SHAMLOE
T
here was a stockade around the village, a hand-built thing of rough-hewn tree trunks. There were fields, and small groups of people evidently working them. There were flowers, as many flowers as before. But, Kaufman realized, he couldn’t tell in what ways the village was different from before he’d removed the artifact, and in what ways it was the same. He had never, in his brief previous visit to World, been in an alien village. All he had seen was the lavish compound of the trader Hadjil Voratur, the grassy plain where the shuttle had landed, and the Neury Mountains landscape that had housed the buried artifact.
He could easily tell that Ann Sikorski had changed.
He remembered her as gentle, no match for his decision to remove the artifact from World no matter what happened to the natives. She’d been thin, with long fair hair, a soft-spoken and cerebral person, a superior xenobiologist. The woman striding toward him with marked hostility was muscled, strong, obviously a farmer. Her face was browned from sun and her hair cut very short. “Lyle.”
“Hello, Ann.”
“So you’re back. Where’s Marbet?”
“Riding with Dieter. They’ll be here in a minute. Ann, you look well. We were afraid—”
“That I was dead? Almost, more than once. But the society is surviving, Lyle, despite you. We’re surviving.”
“Pek Kaufman!” a native cried.
He recognized her—the translator Voratur had used, the woman Ann had befriended. Enli Pek Something. She was much bigger than most of these aliens, and clumsy. She came toward him, smiling, a small child in her arms. On her way she plucked a yellow flower from a bush and presented it to him. “May your garden bloom forever!”
He remembered the ritual words, all he had learned of the language. “May your blossoms rejoice your ancestors.”
Ann said caustically in English, “You’re supposed to offer her a visitor’s flower.”
“I’m surprised all these rituals persisted.”
“Don’t take it as evidence that you caused no serious change, Lyle. Everything’s changed. It’s just that Worlders hold onto all the old flower-related forma because now they’re the only shared reality they have left.”
Enli, Kaufman knew, understood English. Ann was dressing him down in front of a native. She had indeed changed.
Dieter’s bicycle roared up. Ann and Marbet and Enli hugged and chattered in World. Left out, Kaufman surveyed the village.
Low round houses—Worlders thought straight lines were ugly—made of wood, roofs thatched, set around communal cookfires. World was fertile, resources abundant, the climate benign, without seasons. The houses were painted deep red or purple, evidently favorite colors, with high arched windows. Everywhere flowerbeds rioted in glories of color, making the settlement look much richer than it actually was. The stockade circled three sides; the fourth sloped down to a river. A complicated system of buckets and pulleys brought water uphill.
Natives began to seep out of the houses, mostly very old or very young, the latter tended by the former. The rest must be at work in the fields. The ones Kaufman could see looked healthy, well nourished, dressed in simple roughly spun tunics (what had they worn before? He couldn’t remember.)
Enli said, in English, “Come into my house, Pek Kaufman and Pek Grant and drink—” she hesitated, the word probably didn’t exist in English “—something to drink.”
“Thank you,” Kaufman said.
Magdalena said in his ear, “A half-hour, Colonel. Then I talk to you and Marbet Grant. There are lives at stake.”
He didn’t reply. She walked toward another hut and Kaufman, Marbet, Ann, Dieter, and Enli went into Enli’s house, which was a single large room. There was no glass, Kaufman saw, in three of the four windows, and air circulated freely. Blankets, pillows, and small low tables furnished the room. Two of the neatly folded blankets were woven of rich, embroidered cloth looking worn; the other two were new, rough homespun. The pillows showed the same division, and the wood of the tables.
Ann looked at him. “Before and after, Lyle. People spending time on self-defense and subsistence farming have neither the time nor the division of labor for comfort, let alone art.”
“Ann,” Marbet said gently, “enough.”
“Not nearly enough. You haven’t seen the graveyard.”
Enli said loudly, “Berrydrink?” On the walk into the house she had invented a word in English.
It was better than just berry juice, Kaufman found. Richly flavored, a blend of different tastes. The “bread” Enli offered was also good.
Gruber said something in World to Enli, who laughed and held out a piece of bread to her child. Clearly Ann and Dieter were accepted here, welcome. No, more than that—they were part of this alien community.
“Enli,” Kaufman said in English, “I have come from Terra to see how World lives without shared reality. Can you tell me this?”
She turned on her pillow to look at him. Her skull ridges wrinkled, but Kaufman had not had enough exposure to Worlders to know what emotion was being expressed. Enli’s eyes, the deep soft black of ash, met his steadily.
“We do not share reality now,” she told him in slow English, “so we create our own realities. Some places, like Gofkit Shamloe, create good realities between people. Not all people, but most. We talk, and work, and teach our children, and honor our ancestors in the world of spirits. It is difficult sometimes, to look at someone and think, What does she think? It is very strange.”
“Go on,” Kaufman said when she paused.
“Other places create bad reality. They steal, which is all right, but they kill the owners to steal.” Her skull ridges contorted. “Sometimes they just kill. They think … they think maybe they should be rich traders, or … I don’t know what they think. It is difficult. I teach Confit—” she indicated the child “—to not hurt people. But if killers come, he must hurt them. It is difficult.”
This speech seemed to have exhausted and disturbed Enli. She picked up the baby, who wiggled to get back down and then began to fret.
Ann said, “We’ve established trade relations with two of the closest villages. Not because anyone has anything to trade, but because it creates an alliance. Maintains contact. Also a larger gene pool, and a potentially more powerful defense against places like the Voratur compound, which is enslaving serfs to support them. They’re amassing an army to extend their power.”
Marbet said, to spare Kaufman, “Do you want to know what’s happening in the Solar System? You’ve had no news for what, two or three years?”
“Ja,”
Gruber said eagerly. “What happens with the war? With the artifact? What is this about Tom being
kidnapped
?
Marbet began to tell them about Stefanak, Life Now, the Fallers, the Protector Artifact, Capelo. Enli tended her child. Kaufman got up and walked outside, his guts too roiled to let him sit still.