Rediscovery (5 page)

the dome said suddenly, “Hey, looks like they’re setting up the Recreational Dome—

unless it’s the Living Quarters. It’s a big one, anyway.”

“No, I’m sure it’s not the Living Quarters. I heard the First Officer say we’ll wait for the first party checking out the planet to come back with a report before they do that,” Elizabeth said. “We might be able to just set up down there, especially if there
aren’t
any IBs. Why put up another full-size dome and make air for it when there’s plenty of perfectly good natural air down on the surface there—”

“Good point—though I still wouldn’t bet against IBs,” he agreed. Ysaye, lying

quietly with her eyes closed, heard the scratch of a chair across the floor. She didn’t need to look to know that David had appropriated both her chair and the terminal. Her guess was confirmed when his voice continued from there, a little to the right of her.

“One thing the planet won’t be short on is fresh air—and even if there are IBs, no planet yet has figured out a way to sell the air. You may get that on orbital colonies, or colonies on airless worlds, but natural air is still the one thing that’s free, everywhere.”

“Don’t let the authorities hear you say that,” Elizabeth teased, “or they’ll figure out a way to meter it, and charge us for breathing.”

“What do you think a head tax is?” he asked, laughing.

She joined in the laughter. There was silence for a long while, as Ysaye half-

dozed, then Elizabeth, noticing a change on the screen, asked, “What’s happening now?”

“The system’s setting up the satellite’s instrument package,” he replied. “It ought to be just about ready, and then we’ll start getting some initial meteorological data.

Ysaye was right about one thing; there’s a lot of cloud cover down there. I’m going to have to really work to get some decent maps done.”

“Well, at least I’ll have plenty to do for a while,” she exclaimed, laughing.

“Good! I admit it; I’m a weather junkie.”

“Probably just as well, since it’s your assigned job,” he teased. “And we’ve been in space so damn long—”

“Nothing but simulations to keep me from going stir-crazy,” she sighed. “I am so
tired
of computer models—”

“Well, I suppose they keep us in practice, but they sure aren’t the real thing” he agreed. “Look, the computer’s finished the remote tests. Looks like everything is ready to set up.” He keyed in the “go” entry. The screen started scrolling through the incoming data too fast to read, but neither of them were worried, since it was all being stored for later perusal. The printer slurped in a piece of paper and delivered the first of the weather maps, as a second monitor built up a detailed view of the planet below them, with Dopplered radar showing wind-flows and cloud-density.

He scanned the map, which showed essentially the same thing, translated into

numbers. “Looks like you’ve got a storm building in the mountains,” he said. “We can watch it; it ought to hit later tonight. Looks like it will be a big one. The next couple of orbit swings will pick it up.”

“Give.” Elizabeth tweaked the paper out of his hand. “Goodness, those are

complex patterns down there! Lots of storms. I pity the natives; probably the people on the surface don’t know half as much about their weather as we already do, and wish they did.”

“Then we’ll have something to give them,” said David, turning away from the

screen. “Weren’t you supposed to give a concert to celebrate getting the domes set up or something?”

“With Captain Gibbons in charge?” Elizabeth laughed. “It’s a certainty. He’s

ordered one to celebrate just about everything else. Folk songs this time, I think, which means the burden of performance will fall on me, but not until I get the local weather patterns established. Now that I finally have some real work to do, celebrations will just have to wait! Though Ysaye
was
talking about some new instrument sounds she’s got out of the orchestra synthesizer that she wants to show off; she told me she’s hooked up a flute to it and transposed the wave forms so they come out in the bass register. Maybe she can give her own concert.”

“Hmm.” He was studying the monitor intently. “Well, there’s no hope for it; I’m

going to need the full net in place to get any level of detail at all. There’s just too much cloud cover, and so much snow on the ground that I’m not sure my topographical reads are going to be even close to correct.”

Elizabeth patted his shoulder sympathetically. “I wish I could help,” she replied.

“Well, I might just as well go to the concert,” he said with a shrug. “There won’t be anything I can do until we get all the satellites in place. At least it’ll give me something to think about, especially if she’s really got a new sound,” he continued.

“Though so many people have been playing around with synthesizers, and to me they all sound exactly alike anyhow.”

“Not all that much,” she protested, absently, her attention all on the next weather map. She chewed a hangnail as she frowned over something on the paper she either didn’t like, or didn’t understand.

Rendered temporarily useless by the same weather that held Elizabeth fascinated, David continued the discussion. “Well, when you come right down to it,” David said,

“an electronic tone is an electronic tone, and there’s not that much difference between electronic sounds; or what you can do with them.”

“I don’t agree,” Elizabeth answered, though she didn’t look up from her work.

They were both used to carrying on conversations that had nothing whatsoever to do with what they were doing. “With the sounds we’ve programmed in—”

“Sounds,” he said firmly. “Not music.”

“You’re thinking like a prehistoric,” she teased, glancing up at him for a moment and wrinkling her nose. “I don’t accept that much difference between them. You think you have to bang on something, or blow into it, or scrape on it, to make music. What’s sacred about that?”

“You modern musicians!” he said resignedly. “Any kind of noise, clatter,

disharmony—a fine example of folk musician
you
are! I’m surprised they don’t take away your card in the Authenticity Union!”

“Folk musicians wouldn’t put up with a union,” she told him. “And I think we’ve

had this argument before.” She laughed, and went back to her maps, making notations and calling up more data from her terminal, seeming happier than she had in months.

“You’ve got to admit that randomness—”

“I haven’t got to admit anything,” he said, laughing. “I have a perfect right, if I want to, to say no real music has been written since Hardesty—or for that matter since Handel. What came afterward was not, by my definition, music at all. Just noise. Don’t they even teach the elementary tone-row any more?”

“Haven’t you got
any
work to do?” she asked. At his shrug at the cloud-covered globe in the monitor, she sighed. “Well, I learned it. Granted, it was a small private college, but you’ll be happy to know that Juilliard still requires knowledge of the major and minor scales for admission.”

“Hooray! The next thing you know, they’ll be expecting people to learn a simple

ground bass,” murmured David.

“Next thing you know, someone might expect a cartographer to earn his salary!”

“I would if I could,” he pointed out. “There’s nothing I can do right now that the computer isn’t doing better.”

“Well, I’ve got work to do, lots of it, and I’m not going to argue anymore” she

said. “You’re just one of those primitivists who refuse to accept compositions for electronics, like art schools that insist for graduation, before they submit any modern art, a candidate must submit a male or female nude, a still life, and a landscape done in classical style.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” David said, “at least the artist can’t graduate without learning to draw, or hide a lack of talent under a haze of art-babble and angst.”

“Drawing isn’t everything, even in art,” she said, “but I’ll leave that argument to someone else. I haven’t time to go through the whole theory of art right now.” She cleared her throat pointedly, but David did not take the hint.

“Well,” he said, with a creak that told Ysaye he had settled back in the chair, “I’d enjoy music much more if every modern composer had to submit a song in the style of Schubert, a chorale in the style of Bach, a sonata, and a classical symphony before doing anything more modern, and I think most audiences would agree with me. Your modern symphonies are losing their audience because they deliberately write music no one wants to listen to; they’re competing with the past. Of course, in folk music—”

Ysaye drifted off to sleep to the sound of their amiable bickering about music. Or rather, David’s monologue; Elizabeth made nothing more than absentminded noises as she got involved in her work. It occurred to her, in a vague sort of way, that David’s harping on music was symptomatic of the mild craziness that had infected everyone.

Too much idle time; not enough real work to occupy our minds… nonessentials are
getting to seem as important as the job we’re supposed to do…

She woke to the printer’s swoosh as it produced a new map and David’s startled

exclamation.

“What is it, David?” Ysaye asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. “Is something malfunctioning?”

“Something’s wrong here—and maybe it’s another glitch with the computer,” he

told her. “Remember that big storm I said was building on these plains here?” He tossed her the earlier map.

Ysaye frowned at it; it looked perfectly normal to her, at least, it looked like the storm patterns she’d seen in simulations. The clouds formed the usual swirls of a storm in a satellite photo; she had seen the same pattern on dozens of worlds and thousands of simulation runs. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing,” he said. “But it isn’t there now. It just vanished.”

Ysaye shook her head. “Computer glitches don’t erase storms. You’ve misread the

map, that’s all. You probably need a nap, too.”

“Look for yourself,” he said, handing over the new map.

Ysaye glanced first at the time on it; she had been asleep for a little over two hours. Elizabeth came to sit on the blanket beside her and look on.

“He’s right,” Elizabeth said, tapping the map with her finger, “see that low

pressure area right there? The low’s still there, but the clouds are gone. There’s no sign of a storm; no rain, no snow—nothing.”

“Maybe on this planet, a low doesn’t mean a storm,” David said uncertainly.

“There’s nothing else it
could
mean,” Elizabeth said, looking extremely puzzled,

“unless this planet is completely unique in the Galaxy. Maybe all those mountains change things—or that monster glacier. Or all the snow.” But she sounded doubtful.

“Anything is possible,” Ysaye replied.

“True. Still, I wonder where that storm went. We’ll wait and see whether the low’s on the next weather map.” She shrugged. “Well, at least I’ll have something to report.

‘Lost: one storm.’ It is rather a big thing to mislay.”

“God help me. Don’t say that. You know regulations; we’ll probably have to set

up a special lost and found bureau for missing weather patterns,” David joked. “I can see it now. Reports in triplicate, and entries on the notes of every meeting. Lost: one tropical depression, two hurricanes…” He pretended to tear out his hair.

“That’s ridiculous—” Elizabeth giggled.

“Well, you certainly seem to have mislaid this one,” he pointed out.

“I didn’t lose it,” Elizabeth said indignantly. “My job is to report and predict the weather, not make it. Maybe it’s a computer malfunction. Maybe the computer reported a low where there really wasn’t one, and the storm clouds were just—just an odd

formation in dispersal. Or else the storm was all set up to come roaring down out of wherever these storms roar down out of, and something made it just—go away.”

Ysaye crawled over to the terminal, pulled off the cover, and starting running

diagnostics. “Maybe,” she said absently, “someone down there has solved that old problem: ‘Everybody talks about the weather and nobody does anything about it.’”

She paused for a moment, as her own words struck an odd chord within her.
Did I
just dream something about that?
She tried to remember, but the dream, whatever it had been, was gone.

David looked down at her soberly.

“You think so?”

Ysaye shrugged. “We’ve said it before; anything is possible. Including natives

who have technology that doesn’t match anything
we
think of as technology.”

David frowned at the now-blank screen. “Well, if someone
did
change the weather

—whoever it might be, if he has that kind of power, I’d like to meet him—or her, or them.” He paused for a moment, as if he was having second thoughts.

“Or, then again,” he said softly, “maybe I wouldn’t.”

In the garden of the Dalereuth Tower, three young girls walked together; two of

them closely, as if they were best friends, and the third a little apart. All three bore the red hair and the strong aristocratic stamp in their features of the Comyn, the hereditary autarchy of the Domains. Comyn is what the scions of the seven families were styled; and they were looked upon with awe and envy, for each family bore a special Gift, or power of
laran.
Not every member of the Comyn had this Gift in strength—or even had it at all—for their blood was thinner these days, and the powers seemed to be dying out.

Towers that had once sent messages and even messengers across vast distances now stood dark and empty. That was what made these three girls so precious—both to their Families, and to the Tower.

Melora and Rohana Aillard, aged ten and twelve, were cousins, but were as alike

as sisters; the third girl was Leonie Hastur, a little taller, a little fairer, a little older than the others. And very much more conscious of her rank and the strength of her
laran.
Her pride was evident in even the way she carried herself, head high, and not with eyes cast downward with the maidenly modesty that society preferred.