Moon Flower (39 page)

The raid had concentrated on bringing back Terrans, whom the authorities at the base evidently considered to be still under their jurisdiction, and repossessing the equipment that had been taken from the base. Although some justification for the latter couldn’t be denied, the Cyreneans were astounded by the means employed. Surely there were other ways in which the case might have been presented, they said. The significance of all the plants and the botanical experimental work in progress had apparently been missed completely. Since there had been no return visits to investigate further, it seemed safe to conclude that nobody had divulged the nature of Wade and Elena’s discoveries.

Although the disruption of the work at Linzava represented a setback from the expansive visions that Wade had entertained, it was far from a disaster. It meant, simply, that instead of taking a fast track to an infrastructure to support oil and electricity, the Cyreneans would fall back to the more sedate course already being explored by people like those ones they had met at Doriden, in their own way, and in their own time.

In fact, there were many who were of the opinion that it would be better that way. After all, Wade’s prime motivation had been to forestall Earth’s economic imperialist schemes by setting the Cyreneans on a path to self-sufficiency before they could be lured into a condition of dependence. The reality of any real threat in that direction now seemed doubtful — certainly in the short term. As far as could be made out from the reports finding their way through from Revo, while the lock-in at the Terran base was still being enforced, the new administration that had replaced Callen seemed to have gone into some kind of a funk. Communications with Vattorix had been minimal, with little evidence of significant new activities. If Jerri’s understanding of how these things worked was anything to go by, the
Tacoma
had be at the limit of the maximum time it could be permitted to stay, and there didn’t seem to be enough going on to justify sending another ship to relieve it, let alone expand the traffic. It was as if they had no policy and didn’t know what to do. Nick had heard rumors from Terran sources scattered around that Interworld was contemplating chucking the whole thing and pulling out — which would have been a first. Others said they were reconnoitering elsewhere on Cyrene to see if what they had encountered in Yocala was typical. But nobody really knew.

Nim lifted his head suddenly and looked toward the house. Moments later Sakari came out carrying a wine flask and cups, set them down on the table in front of Jerri, and pulled up a chair. She was tall, long-legged, and sturdily built, with olive skin and long honey-blond hair hanging forward over her shoulders and fastened by clasps. Jerri thought she would raise a fine family if events ever went that way.

“Nick is back,” she said in Yocalan. “He will be out in a moment.” The NIDA pair that Jerri had brought with her had run down and there was no way to recharge it, so they were back to basics. It was probably a good thing, Jerry had decided. She was going to have to learn the language anyway. Sakari surveyed the animals. “Look at that lump of mine, not even stirring. Nim shames us.”

“Roo’s at home,” Jerri pointed out. She stood the cups and held them for Sakari to pour.

“Well, it’s supposed to be Nim’s home too now.”

“I like that... what do you call it?” Jerri indicated the thick, garment, like a cardigan, that Sakari was wearing. “The reddy leafy brown suits you. I haven’t seen it before.”

“It’s called a
kishelin
. Istany made it for me.”

“The woman in the place where we got the bread and cakes?”

“Yes. It was for some designs I did for the walls. And see how the collar gathers for when it gets cold.”

“Those designs with the fish and the shells and the water plants? Did you do those? I thought they were wonderful.”

“Well, thank you.”

A clumping of feet on boards sounded from behind. Nim’s tail added a few thumps, and then Nick sat down looking jovial as always. “Hi Jerri,” he greeted. They made it a rule to speak in Yocalan when Sakari was present. It was all good practice anyway. “I hear you’ve had a busy day.”

“Just helping Sakari get some things. And learning to find my way around. Anyway, who told you?”

“Oh, I get around too, you know.” Nick looked at Sakari. “I talked to the man who owns those rooms. I think it might work out.”

“Very good.”

“It sounds is if you’re really getting settled in, Nick,” Jerri commented.

“Well, not just me Jerri. You’re one of the family too, now. Isn’t that right?” His eyes took on the faintest touch of a more serious light. It was a hint to her to be realistic. But Jerri just smiled and sat back to taste her wine.

“Well, for the duration, anyway,” she conceded.

Nick grinned and tilted his head in a way that said he wasn’t going to argue. “You really think he’ll come back, Jerri? But how could that happen?”

Jerri looked out at the river and up at the first stars of evening. The
Tacoma
’s orbit wouldn’t bring it overhead tonight, but she had seen it that morning. “I couldn’t tell you how, Nick,” she replied. “But it shouldn’t come as any surprise to you by now. On Cyrene, you just know these things.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The two troopers brought Shearer to the cabin that Callen used as his office during the day. One of them opened the door; the other motioned Shearer through. They withdrew, closing the door behind him.

Shearer sat down in the chair on the opposite side of the narrow metal desk. The routine was familiar by now. Callen made a play of scanning over the notes displayed on a flatpad lying in front of him. He looked weary. Shearer had formed the impression that he really didn’t care whether he won or lost the fight he would be going back to. Superficially he seemed a shadow of the man that Shearer had met before the voyage out. And yet, in another way, Shearer sensed a deeper, more profound man.

“This job description that was posted for an assistant to go and join Wade on Cyrene,” Callen opened. Shearer raised his eyebrows and waited. “Why did you apply for it?”

“To get away,” Shearer answered. “What chances were there for working in real science back there? Nastier bombs? Better technology to boost profits a tenth of a point? The project I was on was being wrapped up. The only gain it stood to offer was in knowledge.”

Callen looked dubious; but there was also a hint of genuine curiosity on his face. “And what do you consider to be real science?” he asked.

Shearer shrugged. “What I just said. Pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Wanting to know what it’s all about — how the universe works. Where it came from and what it’s there for. But nobody in your world wants to hear about things like that.”

“Why do you call it my world?”

“Okay, then, your kind of people. They created it, and your job is to defend it for them. How do you like the results?”

“And what makes knowledge so important? Why should anyone want to know?”

“Humans are born wanting to know. It takes professional educators twenty years to kill it and turn them into what the system wants. Or if you won’t fit, you’re weeded out. Nobody’s going to change it now.” Shearer showed his hands briefly. “So you get away. That’s what I did.”

Callen stared for a second or two, but didn’t seem inclined to pursue it. “So what makes you think the universe is there for any reason at all?” he asked, picking up Shearer’s other point.

“Look around. Open your eyes. How could anyone think it’s not?”

“I thought scientists didn’t have time for ideas like that.”

“You’re talking about technicians that the system has bought. They peddle the kind of world that suits it, and tell everyone they’d better buy into it because that’s all there is. Real science just follows whichever way the evidence seems to point. You don’t decide in advance what kind of answers you’ll accept and what you won’t.”

“So what’s the reason?” Callen challenged.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you think you’d find it on Cyrene?”

“Maybe.... I don’t think it was to produce Interworld Restructuring.”

Callen’s mouth twitched. He shifted his gaze back to the notes on the flatpad and flipped the image to a new sheet. “Wade disappeared from Revo base shortly after filing the application.”

“If you say so.”

“Things like that don’t happen on the spur of the moment. Why would he file for an assistant if he was planning on disappearing?”

Callen was obviously cross-checking answers. Shearer could see himself getting tangled up in contradicting details for no good reason if he let himself be drawn in. “He’s here. You can talk to him. I was in California. I can’t second-guess his motives,” he said.

“But you were in contact before he disappeared.”

“His messages never went into it. We’d worked together before. That seemed good enough for me.” As Callen would no doubt be able to verify — and very probably already had.

“I put it to you that you had already agreed it between you,” Callen said. “Even at the time Wade departed from Earth. You both have the same political views. You’d worked with him since arriving from Florida. The intention was for you to join him at the first opportunity.”

Shearer spread his hands in feigned innocence. “He just filed for an assistant.”

“Oh, come on. He was stuck with procedures. The spec had your measurements like a suit.”

“Okay.” Shearer held up a hand. “So we think alike, and we work well together. Where I was at, I was going nowhere. This could have been a whole new start. What’s so strange?”

“What did you think you’d find there?”

“I had no idea. All I’d seen were the regular releases, same as everyone sees.”

Callen checked his notes and moved to a different angle. “The work you were doing at Berkeley involved a new kind of quantum wave. Want to tell me about it?”

Shearer drew a long breath. He must have been asked this dozens of times, both before leaving and during the voyage out. It could get involved. He had learned to try and keep things as short as possible. “The formal quantum wave equations give two sets of solutions. One kind are called ‘retarded,’ which have been used in physics for over a century. The other kind —’advanced’ — involve negative energy and travel backward in time. Traditionally they are treated as an artifact of the mathematics and not attributed any physical reality.”

“But some years ago, Wade came up with a theory that they’re real.” Technically inclined or not, at least Callen had been doing his homework.

“Yes,” Shearer said.

“And his work at Berkeley was aimed at trying to prove it. Which you continued.”

“Yes.”

“And was it getting anywhere?” Callen’s expression said that he doubted it. Why else would the project be shut down?

Shearer made a face. “Obviously the people funding it didn’t think so. We were getting results, but they were judged inconclusive. Right on the edge.”

“What do you think?”

“I’m probably the last person you should ask. People who want to believe see things that aren’t there. Trying to eliminate wishful thinking is what half of science is all about.”

Callen sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers for a moment, as if contemplating an outlandish question. “Was Wade continuing with that same line on Cyrene?”

It took Shearer by surprise. His first reaction was to stall while he collected his thoughts. “There’s nothing like Berkeley there. They’re only starting to dabble with steam engines.”

“You arranged for some specialized hardware to be shipped from his private lab. Then he managed to lift enough gear from Revo to outdo Edison — including a ten megawatt fission module, for heaven’s sake!” Callen leaned forward and shook his head, as if none of this should need spelling out. “But he didn’t wait for you to arrive, did he? Suddenly he vanishes from Revo to go and join Elena Hukishido, who had gone there on the same mission but disappeared a couple of months before he did. Her field was biophotonics. And the person who stayed back until you arrived, and who had a conduit already set up for you, was Dominic Uberg, a plant biologist.” Callen sat back, inviting Shearer to consider his case. “So what were they on to out there, Mr. Shearer? The intelligence agency that backed the Berkeley project thought it might give them a means of seeing into the future — which a report written by you did nothing to dispel. It must have been something very exciting.”

Now Shearer thought he saw what was behind all this. Callen was going back to a bloodbath involving high corporate politics and outraged Brobdingnagian egos of a kind that Shearer was grateful not to have to deal with. Callen was scouting all the angles to prepare his position. In the bizarre way that events had turned out, he was sounding Shearer out, in effect, as a potential ally to his cause. But there was no way that Shearer could oblige. He and Wade had agreed adamantly — and could only hope that noting had transpired since on Cyrene to confute them — that there could be no revealing of what the work at Linzava had established. For after the bonanza that the Heim discoveries had unleashed, the news of yet another new realm of physics being opened up would trigger a rush of commercial speculators that would dwarf everything that had happened on all the other colony worlds put together. Callen was so close... This had to be killed in the bud.

“Sure — he was interested in continuing working on his theory if he could,” Shearer said. “A man doesn’t forget something like that. It was a passion with him — and still is. But it didn’t go anywhere.” He paused pointedly. “And if you want my frank opinion, I’m glad it didn’t.”

Callen’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “How so?” he asked.

“Come on.” Shearer got a kick out of throwing Callen’s own phrase back. “That wasn’t why you set me up, or something Interworld was interested in.” They had been through the questions of Shearer’s application being rushed through, and the role played by Jeff Lang, in an earlier session. “You’ve just told me you’d read the funding agency’s assessment. Interworld was panicking because the buzz coming in from Revo was that Wade was organizing a network of relocated Terrans to help the Cyreneans stop their planet from being turned into another industrial plantation. But it’s already a lost cause, Mr. Callen. You admitted that yourself when you ordered the gates on the base to be closed. That planet will entice away everyone they send there. Three missions are going to have to be written off. Interworld’s first big bust. How are the company’s damage control doctors going to spin that in the stockholder reports?” Shearer shook his head in a way that said he was glad it wasn’t he who was going back to it. “They’re going to want heads. It’ll be blood all over the walls back there. I don’t think I envy you in your position... on top of everything else.”