Delta Pavonis (10 page)

"Let's see, anything else?" she asked.

"For one thing," Forrest said, "you need a bath." Fumiyo looked like a battle casualty.

"Well, that's about it for the innards. We can dry the hide, and bones will keep. What do we do with all this?" She waved at the litter of disjointed limbs, ribs and skinned tail. "Leave it for the scavengers?"

"I'll show you what we do with it," said Hannie, grabbing up a meaty haunch and hauling it to the fire. She had whittled a green stick to a point and she skewered the joint on it, then suspended it over a bed of coals, supported by a pair of forked sticks she had foresightfully erected an hour before.

"That's disgusting!" someone said.

Hannie smiled. "Nobody's forcing you to share."

The others watched queasily until the first wave of scent reached them. Then it seemed that everybody was whittling sticks and snatching up hunks of meat. Packs were opened and they tried to find anything that could be used for seasoning, but all they could come up with was powdered salt tablets from their medkits.

"How do we know when it's done?" Dierdre asked Hannie. She was embarrassed at the way she was salivating.

"Well just have to keep testing," Hannie said, thumbing the edge of her knife.

In the end, it turned out that seasoning was unnecessary. The smoke bestowed savor and their own appetites and flavor-starved taste buds did the rest. They all ate until they felt utterly, atavistically, caveman satisfied.

"I'm gonna pay for this in some future life," Ping said, gnawing the last shreds from a rib, "but it's worth it."

"As good as any synthetic I ever ate," Forrest said. "Sort of like a cross between lobster and poultry. Any idea what it was, Colin?"

Colin shook his head, licking his fingertips. "It's nothing I ever saw. Probably some unknown species."

"We'll have to give it a fitting name," Dierdre said. "Deliciosaurus or something like that." She felt guilty and replete. It was wonderful. Whatever else she could say about her brief time as an explorer, it certainly hadn't been dull or without its rewards. What was next?

They spent the morning getting holo recordings of the big mammalian fauna, staying within a kilometer of the tunnel. The cold was cruel, but they were willing to suffer for the experience. Here the party stayed close together, with both beamer-wielders flanking.

Despite their size and their upcurving tusks, Dierdre found the mammoths endearingly comical and friendly-looking. She knew better than to let this sentimental judgment affect her behavior. She had taken enough foolish risks and knew that trying to pet a mammoth would be one too many. It was tempting, though, especially when she saw several fuzzy infants peeking shyly from beneath their mother's belly fur.

"I wonder how they taste?" someone said.

"Cut that out!" Forrest declared. "One carnivorous orgy per expedition is enough. Besides, we still have some lizard meat left from yesterday. Now we're going to go get some views of those rhinos. We stay more than a hundred meters from them, though. The African variety were almost blind, but we don't assume that these are. The African type would sometimes charge an intruder on sight, and we definitely assume that these will."

They found the wooly rhinos to be more aesthetically pleasing than the holos they had all seen of the hairless African and Indian rhinos. The sloping, brutish heads were the same, but the flowing reddish fur waved gracefully as the animals moved, and the extremely long nose horns were slender and elegant.

Returning to the transporter, they passed by a rock overhang. Like everything else, it was covered with snow. Someone gasped.

"Freeze, everybody," Forrest said, in a calm voice. "All right, who saw something?"

It was Govinda who had gasped. "Everybody look up and to the right, real slow. That big bump on top of the rock isn't part of the rock."

They all looked. Dierdre felt the hair on her scalp stiffen. An enormous cat lay on the overhanging rock, regarding them with lambent yellow eyes. A broad ruff of white fur gave the face something of a tiger's shape, but the muzzle was wider. The wideness was accentuated by a pair of outsized canine teeth, easily eight inches long. The cat lay half-curled on its side, head erect, and only its thick, fluffy tail moving, swatting the snow that lay on the rock.

"Get pictures," Forrest said quietly. "Nobody run, and get good pictures. It doesn't look threatening; probably it's eaten recently."

"It's beautiful!" Fumiyo said. "But I didn't expect they'd be white."

"Adapted for snow," Colin said, holoing steadily. "It may be a different color in summer. Besides, this isn't a smilodon, the one you always see pictures of. Its shoulders aren't bulky enough. But it's a relative."

"It has stripes," Dierdre noted. "They're faint, but you can just make them out. I had a longhair back home marked something like that."

"This isn't your average puddy-tat," Forrest said. "Now I want everybody to resume moving uphill, very slowly, thinking brave thoughts so it doesn't figure out how scared we are. Keep the beamers trained on it, but don't shoot unless it attacks. If we kill something this pretty, well never explain it to the people back home."

They made it back without incident, only to be met by another menace when they were back at the tropical cave camp. Kurz and the other two teams had arrived. The instant they showed, Kurz began a high-decibel butt-chewing, taking them all in but with special emphasis on Forrest. "I have never experienced such asinine, such insufferably foolish and insubordinate . . ." They all sat on the ground and Dierdre tuned him out until he ran out of steam, as she knew he would. They could all hear the false note in his voice. The ass-chewing was purely
pro forma
. Like Team Red (it had been a while since she had thought of herself as part of Team Red), Kurz and the others had been utterly stunned by the dinosaurs all around them.

When Kurz paused for breath, Forrest began to tell him about the transporter. "You what!?" Kurz yelled in a strangled scream. Gradually, the commander's choler subsided and the two sat down for a tête-à-tête.

Dierdre's head felt congested. These sudden changes from arctic conditions to tropic were doing none of them any good. Someone lanky ambled over to her and sat down. "Sounds like you been real busy, hon."

Dierdre smiled. "Hello, Barbara. It's good to see you." The other woman looked different out of her jungle-girl garb. To Dierdre's surprise, Barbara carried a beam rifle, and it was a heavier-duty model than those borne by Sims and Okamura. The short, coppery hair was the same, though, as was the lazy smile and friendly manner.

"My, my, don't you look salty for a girl barely off the shuttle. Made one of the big epoch-making discoveries, too, I hear."

"I don't know whether it means eternal fame or jail, though," Dierdre admitted.

"That's the choice more often than not, as I understand it." She ran her fingers through her short, wiry hair. "They say old Francis Drake went all the way around Terra, shot up a bunch of Spanish ships, looted some towns, and when he got home he didn't know whether Queen Elizabeth would knight him or behead him. Been out of touch all that time, you see, just like you here. It all depended on English-Spanish relations when he got back. Well, it looks like your fate's gonna depend on how they're feeling up there. I'll be pulling for you."

"Thanks. It's good to know somebody's on my side."

"Fact is, I think the holos you've got will make you instant celebrities, all of you. Survey won't be happy, but they won't dare touch you. God! I never thought I'd see dinosaurs! Aren't they something?"

"They are," Dierdre confirmed. "But today, we saw a sabertooth! There's something about a mammal that's even more impressive, maybe because it's a relative."

"A sabertooth? You mean one of the big cats? Let me see."

Dierdre called Colin over and he began to run the day's holos. People from the other team began to crowd around. They had overdosed on dinosaurs and were fascinated by the Ice Age fauna.

"Mammoths!" somebody said. "How come we never had luck like that?"

"You don't live right," said Ping. "It takes many lifetimes of virtuous behavior to earn rewards like this." Even Kurz's exhausted people laughed.

"Tell me that from jail, Ping," said a squat, black man who had a Bantu accent. They laughed louder.

"It true you people been living on dinosaur meat?" asked a skinny blonde.

"Haven't eaten anything else since we saw 'em," said Sims. "What've you people been eating? Concentrates? That's about what I'd expect. Hell, we go out and kill our own. Some of these civilized types cook theirs, but not me. Eat it raw, I say, and don't bother to bleed the carcass. Why, yesterday I started chewing on a stegosaur's tail, and by the time the signal reached his brain, I'd . . ."

"Somebody shut him up," Forrest yelled. "We've got some important decisions to make."

"Maybe you do, Forrest," shouted a woman of Hannie's general build and attitude. Dierdre decided there must be some place that bred this type. "What I need is a bath."

"Och, and is that no the Lord's truth!" said Bela Szini. "The pond's that way, lassie, and I'll lend ye ma soap, if ye've no brought yerr own. " He came to sit by Dierdre. "We're all proud o' ye, lass, don't mind what Kurz says. Gall such as ye have is a rare gift, and if ye go to prison, we'll keep in regular contact."

"That's good to know. But Barbara gives me odds that I'll beat the charge, whatever the charge may be."

When she turned in for the night, Dierdre finally allowed herself to contemplate what she had accomplished. For all she knew, she had totally ruined her career as a planetside explorer. On the other hand, short as that career had been, it had been eventful. It appeared that she had been the first to do something unique in human history. She tried to remember the names of people who had scored unquestioned firsts in human exploration: Columbus, well, there was some question about that; Magellan, Peary, Orville Wright, or was it Wilbur? Gagarin, Armstrong, then a whole raft of them as space had opened up, and landings on new bodies had become common occurrences. Derek Kuroda, the first to discover an unquestioned alien artifact. And now, she thought smugly, Dierdre Jamail; first human being to travel by matter transmission. She wondered how many generations of schoolchildren would be forced to memorize her name. Even if they jailed her, at least she would have that. With that thought, she went to sleep.

SIX

Late the next day, Dierdre watched as Derek Kuroda himself arrived. She had heard of him all her life, so it was a surprise to see how young he looked in person. Of course she knew that he was barely middle-aged and modern medicine kept even the elderly looking relatively young; still, it seemed that a hero of a previous generation should be more venerable.

Kuroda stepped from his shuttle, closely followed by his wife, Antigone Ciano. After them followed a gaggle of scientists and bureaucrats, practically tripping over one another in their haste to get at the new discovery.

"Where is it?" Kuroda said, without preamble. He wore his red hair long, in the fashion prevalent when he made his famous discovery. Dierdre guessed that he did that so that people would be sure to recognize him from his old holos. She had more reason than most to know that explorers share a streak of vanity.

"It's cramped in there, sir," Kurz said. "We'll have to take you in a few at a time."

"I want a look at this thing and then I am taking charge. All of you are off of this expedition as of now. You bypassed me and the whole Survey structure to make this discovery public. You violated every rule in the bylaws."

"There is precedent," Kurz said blandly.

Kuroda's face turned fiery red. "Where's the discoverer?"

Dierdre stepped forward with a fluttery stomach. "I found it."

"Congratulations," Kuroda said. "And tried it out, I understand. Consider yourself under arrest. I ought to arrest the lot of you."

Dierdre's trepidation vanished and she could actually feel the anger climbing her spine. "Hey, don't blame us for sunspot activity, Mr. Kuroda! That's what put us out of touch. If we bent a few rules, it's because we heard all about you when we were kids and we admired your methods so much."

"Tell him, Jamail!" someone said. There was applause and encouragement from behind her.

Antigone laid a hand on Kuroda's arm. "Calm down, love. You should never chew out armed people."

"Take me to see this thing," Kuroda said, tightly.

Dierdre, still seething, felt someone take her arm. "Come along with me, dear," Antigone said. They walked a little behind the others.

"Am I really under arrest?" Dierdre half-whispered. "Hell, I don't even know how to act arrested!"

"Oh, that's just Derek being dramatic. He has no authority to arrest anybody. There are others who can and will, but you're already a big media heroine, so don't worry. You won't need a defense counselor, you'll need an agent to handle all the holo contracts that'll be coming your way."

Dierdre found it a little hard to imagine all those people up there talking about her. She didn't feel any different. "It's still not fair! He's taken Steve and Kurz and the rest of us off our own expedition!"

Antigone smiled. "They'll be reinstated before we come back down this hill. Derek loves conspiracy. He and Forrest and Kurz will be deep in some plot before long. Your judgment was questionable, but since you decided to run an outlaw expedition, you played it brilliantly. One thing Island Worlders always admire is gall."

As they neared the cave, Antigone took Dierdre's arm again and pushed to the front. "The discoverer gets to guide us in," she proclaimed. "Even I have that much holo savvy. Get your recorders going."

"Let me brush my hair first," Dierdre whispered.

"Forget it," Antigone advised. "We can doctor the holos later."

Shoulders back, hoping she looked heroic, Dierdre led them in. She began some memorable words, but they choked in her throat when she turned into the transport chamber and saw a woman standing with her back turned, studying the controls. She was small, with short, blonde hair.

"Who're you?" Kurz said. "This woman isn't with my team. We posted guards around this site."

"It wouldn't have done any good," Kuroda said. "Hello, Aunt Sieglinde."

"Hello, Derek." The woman turned around and Dierdre studied her. So this was the legendary Sieglinde Kornfeld-Taggart. It seemed to be Dierdre's day for meeting celebrities. Only fitting, she thought, since she now seemed to be something of a celebrity herself.

"How did you get in here, Dr. Kornfeld?" Kurz demanded.

"I can usually go where I want to." She turned to Kuroda and his party. "Get your recordings and touch nothing. There's very little to see in any case. Then everybody assemble outside. I need to address the exploration teams before the Survey brass arrives and starts to mess things up."

"Bossy, isn't she?" Dierdre whispered.

Sieglinde looked at her. "You're Jamail, aren't you?"

"That's right. And I don't see what's the big mystery about how you got in here. You must've landed at the ice-age end of this thing and come through."

Sieglinde gave her an oddly pitying look. "No, I've been reckless in the past, but never suicidal."

Dierdre didn't understand what the words meant, but they filled her with terrible dread. This woman, acknowledged to be one of history's greatest geniuses, had deduced something about the transporter that the rest of them had missed.

The newcomers all had a look at the alien device and agreed that there was, indeed, very little to see. They filed out and assembled near the mouth of the cave. Last out was Sieglinde.

"We don't have much time," she said baldly, "so listen. I'm Sieglinde Kornfeld-Taggart. You've heard of me, I want everybody who's gone through the transporter to step forward." All of Team Red stepped out. She looked appalled. "So many! God, what a pack of young idiots! All muscles and glands and not two rational brain cells among the lot."

"Aren't you being a little rough, Sieglinde?" said Kuroda, with a seeming 180-degree rotation of attitude. "After all, this was a pretty ballsy—"

She ignored him. "Did any of you stop to speculate on how this thing does what it does?"

"Actually," Kurz said, "we were sort of hoping that you could explain that."

"I'll find out, never fear," she promised, "but I've already come up with some speculations and you'd better hope that the most likely one is wrong."

"Uh-oh," Forrest said. "What's that?"

"Are you familiar with wave-pattern theory?" They all looked at one another and shrugged.

"It's twentieth-century stuff, early twentieth at that. Schroedinger and de Broglie established that matter has wave nature. This thing may read the wave-patterns of your body, clothes and all, encode the data and transmit it through indeterminate n-space instantaneously, just as I've been doing with message data for years. The receiver reads the data and reconstructs the matter. In this case, your bodies. But get this: if this theory is correct, your body is destroyed, then reassembled from data. Your memories are intact, because they are part of the electrochemical structure of your brain. All of it has wave pattern, so it all gets transported, conditionally."

They digested that for a while, then: "Wait a minute." It was Dierdre who caught the implications first. "Do you mean that we're not the originals? We died the first time we went through the transmitter, and now we're just replicas with the same memories?"

"It's a possibility," Sieglinde said. The protests were loud and in some cases jeering, but suddenly everyone was terribly uneasy.

"But, Dr. Kornfeld," Ping said, "wouldn't we know?"

She shook her head. "No. How could you?"

"What did you mean by 'conditionally?' " Forrest asked.

"I meant we have no way of knowing whether this apparatus is one hundred percent efficient. For all we know, you weren't reassembled with everything in place, including your minds. Although I have my doubts whether they were much good to begin with. It never occurred to you, huh?"

"They can't all be great geniuses, Sieglinde," Antigone said.

"They could at least behave like high-grade morons." She gestured toward Dierdre. "Jamail here at least has some excuse. She found an alien artifact and decided it was worth staking her life to find out what it did. Stupid, but understandable when you consider that these young fools are all gloryhounds."

Thanks a lot, thought a chastened and now thoroughly frightened Dierdre.

"Dr. Kornfeld," said Sims, "we figured the aliens used it, so why not us? Whatever else they were, they were pretty intelligent. Would they have used it if it wasn't safe?"

"Maybe they only used it to transport materials. Maybe they used it themselves, but they were hive creatures and individual identity didn't matter. Maybe they were already electronic intelligences. Maybe they just didn't care. And we don't know how old these things are or how much deterioration they might have suffered,"

"But aren't we all just the sum of our memories?" Fumiyo asked, desperation in her voice. "As long as those are intact—"

"They may not be," Sieglinde shot back. "Even if they are, so what? I wouldn't want to die right now even if I knew that a copy of me would be made, complete with all my memories."

"All right, Sieglinde," Kuroda said, "you've got them all good and scared. I don't think anybody's going to be tempted to use these things again until we thoroughly understand them."

"Good. Who's been through the most times?"

Everyone pointed at Dierdre. "Uh, I guess that's right. I made seven transits."

"Then you may already be a fourteenth-generation copy of the original Jamail. You just may be getting a little fuzzy around the edges. You stick close to me. If the worst has happened, then you've suffered the most damage. In fact," she turned back to Kuroda, "I want all these people who've used the transporter under my charge. I'll be setting up a lab here, and another at the Pleistocene end. They can be my lab assistants for the duration. I want access denied to everyone else without my express permission."

"Dr. Kornfeld!" said one of the scientists. "May I remind you that you are not a part of Survey and have no position or authority whatsoever?"

"I have more prestige than anybody since Isaac Newton. Do you think anyone in our scientific community would seriously dispute this with me?"

"Some will try," Antigone said, "but it won't do them any good."

"Wait a minute," Kurz protested. "Forrest and his people are part of my team and we haven't finished our preliminary—"

"Yes you have," Kuroda broke in. "Right now our biggest, most thorough planetside exploration so far is being readied. In a few days, this archipelago will be swarming from one end to the other with detail teams. It'll be mapped, holographed and studied more thoroughly than Earth ever was. You people just stay camped here until we can figure out what to do with you. I'll do what I can to keep us all out of trouble, but I'm not making any promises." He turned and headed back toward his shuttle.

"Derek," Sieglinde called, "where are you going?"

"I'm going to play tourist and find some dinosaurs while I have the chance. Do you think I'd miss an opportunity like this?"

Over the next few days, the first-in team had plenty to do. To their great chagrin, it had nothing to do with exploring. Sieglinde put them to work assembling her lab, which was flown in in sections and put together on the spot. The sections were bonded together while Sieglinde supervised the transport of her instruments. When not on construction detail, they were clearing landing areas for Sieglind's shuttle craft as well as for Survey's. Since she wanted as few people on-site as possible, they had to do nearly everything.

There were compensations. Being at the center of the priority-one project, they got first call on the best equipment, prefab accomodations, and rations brought down directly from orbit. They were no longer part of a shoestring operation.

In the evenings, when they were not too exhausted to speak, they talked endlessly of their unique condition, coming to no coherent conclusions in the process.

"What it comes down to," Colin insisted, "is the question, 'what constitutes us?' If all our memories are there, the sum of our life experiences, then were still us, right?"

"I don't think the me-ness of me is changed any," Govinda said. "But then, I guess I wouldn't know."

"If memory's all that counts," Dierdre said, "then we're all dying all the time, because we keep adding new memories and forgetting older ones, so we're different people from day to day."

"The philosophical implications are mind-boggling," Colin agreed.

"If you think the philosophers are gonna have a field day," Govinda said, "wait'll the religious types get hold of it. Poor old LeFevre's worried sick because he thinks maybe his soul didn't make it through the transporter. He's been pestering Sieglinde, asking her whether a soul has a wave pattern."

"Maybe Dierdre here has fourteen funerals coming," Colin pointed out. "Think your family can afford it?"

"As if we didn't have enough to worry about," she said.

When the lab was finished, Sieglinde put them through a rigorous testing program. She had accessed all their medical records and put Fumiyo in charge of her medical lab. She set up an instant communication system linking all the top physicians, hospitals and medical research facilities within the Delta Pavonis system. When the medical data were in, she began personal interviews.

"How about it, Doc," Dierdre said as she entered Sieglinde's office, "are we us?"

"Sit down. Everything checks out so far, but then I didn't expect any radical physical change. Personality is something else." The room was dim. Sieglinde's face was faintly lit by her screen, from which she was reading something. "Why couldn't you have been a paragon? Your record's so bad it's going to be difficult to spot any deterioration."

Dierdre leaned back in her chair, luxuriating in the building's air conditioning. "If you think my record's bad, wait till you get to Hannie's. She tells me she was a violent criminal before some doctor at Ciano Clinic got her brain chemistry sorted out."

"Yes, she's going to be an interesting case. Have you spoken with your family?"

"Yes. My mother's worried and my father says it's just like me to find an utterly new and unique kind of trouble to get into."

Sieglinde gave her one of her infrequent smiles. "I'll speak to them later. Also to some of your classmates."