Orion Shall Rise (54 page)

Applause spattered about the mess hall. After dinner it became a tavern which had acquired a name, the Boot Heel. (Nobody knew how, but everybody knew why: Northwestern engineers had an immemorial saying, ‘The instructions are printed on the heel.’) The bar was a shelf under a selection of bottles and a beer keg; you helped yourself, tossing money into a jar on the honor system. Ornate lamps took over from fluorescent panels, for a festive look and romantically shadowed comers. Pine scent blown into the air
joined the ventilators to keep down stenches of burning oil, tobacco, marijuana, hashish. Only a handful of drinkers were still on the benches at this late hour. The one day off that workers got was staggered through the week, and many did not take it, nor vacations either; Orion possessed them.

‘Who was that song for?’ asked the young woman. Earlier, when the room was filled, Plik had given his numbers various dedications, generally ribald.

‘Why, you, my dear. Who else?’ he purred around a sip of volcanic local whiskey.

Lisba Yamamura contracted her brows as she helped herself to sherry. ‘Um-m-m, in that case you called me “Vineleaf,” and pretended we’d been acquainted a fairish time.’

‘Poetic license,’ said Plik.

She gave him a sidelong glance. ‘Or licentiousness? I think it was a piece you wrote for some other woman, back in Yurrup, and translated into Unglish while you were washing dishes.’ He had gotten daytime employment in the kitchen, where they were always short-handed. Most evenings he sang for drinks and tips and did rather well, since entertainment was hard to come by.

Plik cocked his head at her. She was on the stocky side but her face piquant, with its hint of Asia, and she was lively and bright, a technical reference librarian. ‘No, not really,’ he maintained. ‘That is, I admit the original composing was done there, and uses certain literary conventions, but never until now have I found a lady worthy of the sentiment.’

‘Well –’ She smiled and snuggled. ‘I’ll be conventional too and pretend I believe that. You’re kind of a charming rascal.’ His lips wandered across the fragrance of her blue-black hair. ‘And a foreigner. That’s exciting. We’re so isolated here.’

‘You aren’t working tomorrow, are you?’

‘No, I don’t have to.’

‘The same for me. We could keep busy nevertheless.’

‘Eager, aren’t you?’

‘I’ve been lonely.’

‘Your friends –’

‘Oh, my co-workers and the chaps in the bachelor section are kind, interested, but, let’s be frank, alien to me, as well as being male. Iern and Ronica invite me to their room for a drink and chat, but not often. Nearly all their time necessarily goes to their own
work, or to each other. Wairoa, since his release … Wairoa observes.’

‘Captain Karst? I heard –’

Plik grimaced. ‘Why should he care about me? He has bigger mice to whom he can play cat.’

Lisba drew a little away from him. ‘What do you mean? The Maurai?’

He hiccoughed and drank afresh. ‘No, they’re the hounds on his track. He’ll double back to their kennels if he can and gnaw their pups to death. The mice are ordinary people, helpless and hapless, millionfold. And, to extend the metaphor, if the world burns, he’ll crouch before it and purr.’

She disengaged entirely. ‘I don’t like your implication,’ she said.

‘I beg your pardon.’ His speech had turned overprecise. ‘Perhaps I misspoke myself. Too much to drink. Maybe we should abandon these glasses half-empty and –’

‘No, wait, mister.’ She sat stiff and glared at him. The rest present could not hear their low voices, and grew chattersome themselves, determined to ignore what went on. Privacy was another thing valued in the Union, scarce in the Orion complex. ‘I want to know just what you did intend by that crack. Mikli Karst is kind of a hero around here, you realize, considering what he’s done for the project. If he’s evil, then the bunch of us are; and I deny that.’

‘Oh, so do I, so do I,’ Plik hastened to say. ‘We needn’t discuss his individual morals.
You
honestly believe you’re doing what
is
best for the world. That’s enough.’

‘No, it isn’t.’ Her nostrils flared. Though the light was too dim for certainty, it seemed she had gone white. ‘You’re claiming I – my colleagues and I – we’re such blind fools we’d serve a cause that could bring on a new Doom. You’re showing the same hysteria as
is
built into the Maurai and – Well, I thought better of you. I truly did.’

He bridled. ‘The reality is,’ he said, ‘every Orion ship will be able to take out several cities. Who shall control the masters – forever? And what about fissionables brought from space, fusion reactors built on Earth, biotechnics such as created poor Wairoa? You’re loosing a demon, you and yours are, the demon of power.’

‘Power doesn’t have to be misused.’

Plik shook his head, drank, slumped. ‘Your claim is almost a
meaningless noise, my dear. At best, irrelevant. We don’t use power, ever. It uses us, feeds on us, and long after its first purpose is behind it. It exists for its own sake, it is its own God. You believe Orion will set you free. And maybe it will, for a time. But afterward, afterward –’

Lisba rose. ‘Goodnight,’ she snapped.

He caught her wrist. ‘Oh, wait, please! I meant no offense. Let’s say the spirit wasn’t talking but the spirits were.’

She pulled away. ‘And let’s say I got tired of listening to them. Goodnight, I told you.’ She walked out.

Plik stared after her, brought his gaze back to the company that remained, encountered a wryly sympathetic smile, and declared aloud, ‘She can entertain no doubts of her rightness. None of you can. You dare not. I had better keep it in mind.’ He lifted his glass.

4

Fog was the most terrible enemy. This was not a cold country, even when winter strode nigh, and the islands sheltered it from the worst of the wind. Rains were seldom violent either, though scarcely a day saw none. A few times snow had fallen, but thinly, melting almost before it reached earth. Terai could keep going through such weathers until sundown forced him to make shelter.

But then clouds descended, full of chill drizzle. They drowned the world, made him grope through gray formlessness, robbed him of the early and late hours of a daylight that grew daily more brief. Blind beyond a few meters or less, he could not plan his route across whatever heights and depths lay ahead. He must stumble forward at random, yet stay close enough to the water that he could hear its waves lap on rocks, lest he stray irretrievably from their guidance; and the clouds muffled noises, distorted them, blurred any sense of the direction from which they came. More nightmarish still was the dankness, which seeped through garments and into flesh and marrow as no gale was able, made him cough and shudder and wonder if the South Seas had ever been aught but a dream.

He could not camp and wait for it to clear. That would cost him too much of his dwindling time. On his best days, he estimated that he won thirty kilometers of distance, and those victories were rare. Oftenest, terrain slowed him. Necessity kept forcing a halt – to prepare for night, to sleep, to wring what he needed out of the
wilderness and work it into a form he could use, with inexperienced hands and tools of the Old Stone Age. Fog or no, he must make what headway he might.

This coast was a strip beneath mountains, interrupted again and again by their roots, over which he clambered, or by fjords around which he detoured, or by rivers he swam or forded. Yet he had no other path. Striking east in search of easier ground, he would soon have been lost, when the heavens were nearly always hidden; before long, a high-altitude blizzard would have claimed him, if an avalanche, a tumble, or a grizzly bear did not first. Here he at least had the straits for a compass, the wooded lower slopes to sustain him – deer were plentiful at this season – and the chance that he might come upon a settlement or see a fisher boat and get help.

He had passed many marching hours in devising the story he would tell, if and when he met human beings. It had better be a good story, as wild as his appearance was. Gaunt, weathered, scarred, unshorn, unwashed, clad in his rank woolens and in untanned skins lashed together with sinew, that he changed not when they grew putrid but when they grew stiff – rabbit stick in his grasp, crude pouch full of stones for cutting and throwing at his waist, whatever food he had in an equally primitive woven-withe carrier on his back – he would shock the poorest of the savages who roamed this outback.

He was not a savage, though. He was a man of the Maurai, who had a mission to fulfill and a home to return to. Every day he made himself remember that and believe it.

Terai Lohannaso slogged onward through the weeping cloud.

5

Fire crackled cheerily behind mica panes in the door of a ceramic stove. Warmth gusted from vents. A low whirr sounded in the chimney, where a fan captured some of the energy in the flue gases; much of what remained went into a heat exchanger and thence back to the house. Lamplight glowed on wallpaper, curtains, pictures, furniture, carpet, and reflected off window glass as if to deny the night beyond. Lingering odors of dinner, fresh scents of coffee and brandy drifted about the living room.

‘But are you sure Iern’s presence won’t be a giveaway?’ Torn Jamis asked. ‘He’s bound to meet people on his visits – Kenai
is
an
overgrown village, and what’d really make gossip buzz would be that your fiancé did not get introduced around – but somebody on a trip south could happen to mention him when the wrong ears overheard.’

Ronica smiled at her stepfather. He was a large man, balding, his beard gray, not unlike Launy Birken in looks and heart. ‘Yes, that’s one matter to brief you two about,’ she told him and her mother. ‘Not to worry as long as we’re careful. Mikli Karst himself okayed the arrangement, the cover. Iern is a Free Merican – from Corado –whom I met on a trip about which I’m not supposed to talk. We do have a few foreigners co-opted into Orion, remember; but officially he’s a visiting scientist, in the ecological study area on a fellowship. His name is Erno sunna Fernan, which ought to let possible slips of the tongue go unnoticed. His accent will pass for a dialect of Unglish used near the Meycan border, under Spanyol influence.’ She inhaled and drank pungency from her snifter glass and sent a wallop of strong coffee after it. ‘We won’t be here much anyway, you realize. But damn if I wouldn’t see my folks and show them my man!’

Iern reached between their chairs to take her hand and
give
it a squeeze. Adoration torrented back and forth. Momentarily her universe left its moorings and soared. After three months and more, he could still do that to her. I’ll
have to get awful old and feeble before he can’t
;
and likelier we’ll
chase around in our wheelchairs, cackling lustfully and shocking our grandchildren
.

‘You’re a dear,’ said her mother. ‘In your hoyden fashion.’ Anneth might be prematurely white-haired, but that was almost the sole concession she had made to time. ‘And I like you, Iern. Probably I’m going to grow very fond of you.’

‘I would be honored, madame,’ answered the Clansman, unwontedly shy.

‘That is, I hope Tom and I will get the chance to,’ Anneth said. ‘We hardly will before Orion has risen. And later – your business in Yurrup – Well, let’s not borrow trouble. The interest rate is exorbitant. How are you enjoying things across the Inlet, now that you’re settling down?’

Glory replied: ‘Oh, wonderful. Fascinating. Even the conferences, reports, all the drudgery that takes up most of the time – it’s getting us into
space
.’

Ronica understood. She had herself been in the simulators, in the course of her work on control systems.

It was natural for Iern to train as a pilot. His past career made him
the most qualified airman ever to enlist in the undertaking. Already, gaining a feel for the vessels he might someday fly, already he had made practical suggestions for improvement, for combing out what bugs the research and development effort was discovering. And then too, his role was as closely intertwined with hers as they themselves were when alone and in the frequent mood. He was there, in her nearness, during the day –

Except in the simulators. Then he leaves me, and doesn’t come back to me right away after he climbs out; his look, his soul, they’re elsewhere. I can’t blame you, Iern, darling, I only envy you – though you’re never more lovable than when you’re full of stars
–
And it’s just a computer-generated shadow show, images on a screen, well-faked instrument readings, roughly faked sensations, to give us an idea of what we must build and do. The ancients were free to keep a huge ground-control apparatus and a tracking network that spanned the planet. We are not. Instead, we must create ships in which the crews can fly free – in which you can, Iern, Iern. And
I by your side?

– They would stay overnight at the house. Before going to bed, they donned parkas and went forth, hand in hand, for the uncommon sight of an entirely clear sky. Here, on the outskirts of town, the dark and the stars were theirs. Cold caressed their cheeks and made breath stream snowpeak-white. Frost underfoot crackled through the silence. The Milky Way shone aloft, and again in an ebon mirror of water. Brilliances crowded around it. And mightily over the eastern range came striding that winter constellation called Orion.

Their number is so small, they with whom I can speak freely
. Here were two of them. Jovain looked across the Captain’s desk and felt how alone he was. He could share his mind with these men, but never his heart. For that, there was nobody.

‘What do you think?’ he asked Bergdorff Pir Verine.

The magnate shifted in his seat. He was on the short side, but a well-known sportsman who had had a distinguished record as an officer in the Italyan campaign. At home he was a decisive administrator of his family holdings in the Lake Zheneve region, and of a brokerage he had founded. Yet now he hesitated. ‘I need more information, sir,’ he said.

Mattas Olvera uttered a thunderous obscenity. ‘What more?’ he demanded. ‘Truthtellers are being persecuted across the Channel. It’s a clear violation of treaty – under the eye and lasers of Skyholm. If we hold still for this, who’ll be next in line at our rear ends? The eastern barbarians?’