Moon Flower (22 page)

“Two ships from Earth came here before the
Tacoma
....”

Vattorix looked questioningly at Afan-Essya, who held up a hand. “Can you explain
Tacoma
?” Afan-Essya said.

“That’s the name of our ship — the one we came here in. Like my name is Krieg.” Krieg wasn’t in the habit of expressing himself simply for the convenience of foreigners. The conversation was going to have to rely heavily on Afan-Essya.

“Very well,” Afan-Essya said, and conveyed it to Vattorix.

Krieg resumed, “A lot of the people from those ships have gone missing.”

“How are we to understand ‘missing’?” Afan-Essya asked.

“They’re not at the base anymore.”

Vattorix and Afan-Essya looked at each other in a way that said yes, they both followed that, and then back at Krieg expectantly. Krieg waited for them to figure the rest out for themselves, but they continued looking, apparently waiting for more from him. Eventually, Afan-Essya said, “So we take it they have chosen to live somewhere else.”

“Yocala has many nice places,” Vattorix put in. “I would go too if I were Terran, I think. The base with the fence around it is like living in... “he said something in Yocalan to Afan-Essya.

Afan-Essya turned back to Kreig. “Where you keep animals inside fences. Is it ‘farm’?”

“Farm.” Vattorix nodded. “Who would want to be an animal in the farm?”

They weren’t getting it. “They don’t have leave to quit the base,” Krieg said. “There was never any official approval given.”

The two Cyreneans frowned and exchanged some words between themselves. “Are you saying they are escaped?” Afan-Essya asked, looking back. “That they are crime persons? No, they couldn’t be. Not so many of them.”

“Maybe the reason for the fence?” Vattorix suggested.

“The base is not a prison, yes?” Afan-Essya checked with Krieg.

“No, no.” Krieg glanced perplexedly at the lieutenant. “How can I put this? They come here on a contract.... Savvy? It’s like a promise. They’re brought here to do work for the corporation that runs the show. Like a government. The people who make the rules.”

“It sounds like a prison,” Afan-Essya commented. Vattorix nodded his head in agreement.

“Not at all. They’re free to choose what they do,” Krieg insisted.

“Then why can’t they choose where they want to live?” Afan-Essya asked.

“I already told you, because they’re under contract. They have a duty to the corporation.”

Another brief dialogue between Afan-Essya and Vattorix ensued, punctuated by shrugs and rubbings of chins, and ending in an exchange of nods signifying agreement. “Then that is a matter between your corporation and its prisoners,” Afan-Essya told Krieg. “It seems a strange organization for living. But it is not our affair to question the ways of others.”

“I cannot be surprised that they wanted to leave their farm,” Vattorix remarked. He gave the two Terrans a long, dubious look, as if to say that they really ought to try thinking it through.

“Right, it’s our business,” Krieg agreed. Now they seemed to be getting somewhere. “But, as I don’t have to tell you, Cyrene is kind of a big place. It’s a question of finding them.”

“They have the bird-ships and the talking-seeing glasses,” Vattorix said, speaking to Afan-Essya. “I suppose so they must do their own way.” He made it sound like a fact of life that they had to live with, but not a thought that he found appealing.

“But this is where we think you can help,” Krieg said. Callen had briefed him not to make any direct or implied accusation that the Cyreneans might have played an active part in spiriting Terrans away. “There can only be so many places where someone can go. Many of your people must know where the Terrans are. They can’t be living out there invisibly.”

Afan-Essya shrugged as if agreeing the obvious. “Well, yes, I’m sure that’s true,” he replied.

“Then there you are!” Krieg sat back and regarded them triumphantly. This was the key admission that he had been after. He’d had no idea that eliciting it would be so easy. “What we need is your cooperation in tracking them down. The directors of the corporation would be very appreciative.”

Vattorix, however, frowned and said something to Afan-Essya in the unmistakable tone of one asking if he had understood correctly. The Secretary nodded and replied at some length in a worried voice. Vattorix’s expression darkened beneath his shaggy mane of hair, and for a moment he looked as if he might explode in anger. Krieg’s smile faded as the realization seeped in that perhaps this wasn’t going to be so easy.

Afan-Essya cautioned, “You are telling Vattorix that his nation is a prison, of which he is the... “he sought for a suitable word, “director.”

“No, you’ve got it wrong,” Krieg protested. “I’m talking about cooperation between authorities that have interests in common. The Directorate at the base; your government in Yocala. We want to see a future relationship that will benefit all of us. Right?”

Vattorix raised a restraining hand before Afan-Essya could answer. He wanted to take this one himself. “Yes, we are the government in Yocala. So what does this mean? It means that our... what was the word you said, ‘duty’?” Krieg nodded. “Our duty is to serve the people of Yocala. What is serve? Serve means we protect their right to decide how they will live. The Terrans from your base choose that they will live as Yocalans. This means they are my people now. My duty is to protect their right to say where they will live. It is not to serve your corporation.” Afan-Essya made to interject something, but Vattorix waved him down and went on, “But you would use your weapons to make the people serve government. Is wrong way up, like house with roof built under bottom. If is so on Earth, then okay, your business. But here, Terrans from base are our people now. So we should protect
their
right against
you
!”

“But they’re in breach of contract,” Krieg retorted.

“Is contract with you, not with us,” Vattorix answered.

“Don’t governments here enforce contracts? Isn’t that supposed to be a big part of any government’s job?”

Afan-Essya took a few moments to communicate the gist to Vattorix. “One that was made here, on Cyrene, yes,” Afan-Essya agreed when he turned back. “But this was made on Earth. No contract like the one you describe would ever be agreed on Cyrene.”

There was an odd look on the Cyrenean’s face that Krieg found puzzling. “How can you be so sure?” he demanded.

“Until you learn to know, there is no way I can tell you,” Afan-Essya replied. “And when you have learned, there will be no need to tell you.”

Callen sat in his office listening sourly to Kreig’s conversation as recorded by the compad that the lieutenant had been carrying in his breast pocket. When it was finished, he replayed a few salient parts and then sat staring vexedly at an image of the center of Revo city on one of the side-panel screens, coming in from a reconnaissance drone. No signatures were being returned by electronic ID or tracking devices. Without help on the ground, there was no way they would ever get a lead in that tangle of streets and alleyways, markets and squares, all teeming with people. And there was no guarantee that Shearer had gone into the city anyhow. With a reception organized and waiting, he could have been whisked away in any direction up or down the coast, inland, or even westward and out to sea.

Very well. So the Cyreneans weren’t going to help. The time would come later when they would regret that decision. But in the meantime Callen had to consider his other options. He thought for a while longer, then touched in a code that would alert Dolphin to call him back when it was safe to do so. The call tone sounded less than a minute later, and the screen presented the face of Dolphin, real name Michael Frazer, current field name Jeffrey Lang.

“Seven this evening,” Callen told him. It meant they were to meet then in a storeroom by the staff kitchen at the rear of the Administration Building. They never let themselves be seen together openly. “There’s going be another defection to the Cyreneans. But this time we’ll be the ones arranging it.”

“Who this time?” Dolphin asked, looking puzzled.

“You,” Callen said. “Lang wants to follow after his friends. We already have you set up with a temperament that will make it believable. I want you to go out there and pick up the trail. There has to be some kind of contact or network among the Cyreneans that knows which way they went. I’ll have an operational profile put together by the time we talk.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The apartment on the top floor above the drapery store looked out over a busy square in the center of Revo. On the far side, steep-roofed buildings of typically Cyrenean solid appearance and vertical accentuation stood over an arched, cloisterlike walkway extending the width of the block, lined with street vendors’ stalls and tables. Apparently the steep roofs were for throwing off the heavy snows when winter came. The upper parts of the structures were staggered back into terraces somewhat like ancient Sumerian ziggurats but with less regularity and symmetry, with many balconies displaying the ubiquitous profusion of plants and flowers. In some places, bridges at various levels connected across the side streets entering the square.

The place belonged to a Cyrenean called Soliki, who was at present attending to his business downstairs. Shearer and his companions had been brought there late the previous night. The Cyrenean who had been waiting with Uberg’s bag by the carriage had traveled with them and seemed to have been assigned as a guide. His name was Chev. He had left again after delivering them to Soliki’s, and said he would be back the next day, when he had further information on the “arrangements.”

While Shearer stood at the window in the spacious kitchen and stared out at the town, Soliki’s wife, Antara, clattered around the wood-fueled range, preparing a stew-and-pastry dish of some kind. She was a buxom woman with a reddish, chubby face, and wore an open loose, vestlike bodice over a loose white shirt, and a full calf-length skirt. At the large table occupying the center, their daughter Evassanie, who looked to be in her early-to-mid teens, was kneading bread dough. In addition to a loose single-piece garment hanging to the knee and open sandals, she was wearing one of the Terran NIDA mesh caps on her head. She had become instantly fascinated with it, and hadn’t taken it off since Uberg invited her to try it out an hour or more previously. To let her explore her newfound interest, the three Terrans were still wearing theirs too. Jerri was seated at the other side of the table, cleaning and slicing a mix of vegetables that she had offered to help with, and Uberg on a seat by the wall next to a wooden dresser filled with dishes and knickknacks. Nim had found a spot on a rug near the range and was dozing, chin on paws, every now and again opening an eye and moving it from side to side to keep check on the unfamiliar surroundings.

Shearer’s general impression confirmed what he had read and heard about Yocalan culture being at a stage roughly comparable to Europe in the eighteenth century. Jeff said it was estimated to have taken only somewhere around the equivalent of two hundred years to progress from the Cyrenean counterparts of Aristotle. And yet the remarkable thing about it was that, as far as Shearer had been able to make out, anyway, the Cyreneans didn’t seem to posses any marked aptitude for analytical thought or what would normally be viewed as “scientific” thinking. It seemed an odd contradiction. He commented on it again to Uberg as he stared absently out at the town skyline with its towers and domes rising behind the facade opposite,

“That’s true,” Uberg agreed. “You won’t find elaborately developed systems of formal logic like the ones the medieval Scholastics wrestled with. But it also means that the Cyreneans didn’t spend a thousand years splitting hairs before realizing that deductive arguments are only as good as the assumptions and can’t tell you anything about reality.”

“Excuse me, what does law-abiding numbers mean?” Evassanie broke in. “I can’t make anything of it.”

Or at least, that was how Shearer’s NIDA set translated it. By now, he thought he knew what had happened. “Formal,” in the mind of someone like Uberg, in the sense he had meant it, would have a strong association with rigid systems of rules as pertaining to logical and mathematical derivations. In a Cyrenean mind, however, the notion of sets of rules would more naturally connect to civic laws regulating personal behavior. So what Shearer had heard was the net result of Uberg’s utterance being processed twice through the NIDA loop: from Uberg into whatever Evassanie had heard, and from that back into an interpretation in Shearer’s own style of English. All things considered, it didn’t do a bad job at all, he had decided. But the system developers back on Earth still had some work to do.

There was also a problem with proper nouns, they had discovered, so he didn’t know how “Scholastics” would fare. Earlier, Evassanie had mentioned Cyrene’s moon, Calypso, which Shearer’s NIDA had translated as “Rumba,” and the misunderstanding had taken several minutes to clear up. Jerri’s and Uberg’s units had given them no problem. All they could think of as an explanation was that Shearer had gone through a dance-craze phase as a student in Florida, and somehow it had left him with different neural associations and connotations. Even more interestingly, when Shearer tried to replay and follow more closely what he had experienced, he realized that he had not actually
heard
the NIDA “ghost” voice saying “Rumba” at all, but hadn’t
seen
a glimpse of his former dance teacher demonstrating it. So it seemed that when unfamiliar patterns of alien conceptual linking prevented the NIDA system from finding an appropriate audio match, it was somehow able to compensate by stimulating a visual association instead.

While Jerri entered into an exchange with Evassanie to answer her question, Uberg went on, “On the other hand, Cyreneans have an uncanny ability when it comes to intuition. Where we would spend hours, days, or who-knows-how-long arguing and analyzing all the incidentals and details of an issue, they have an instinct for going straight to the heart of it and knowing what to do. I can’t explain it. It’s not an intellectual process as we know it. Maybe there’s the answer to your question.”