The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (50 page)

I didn’t think
they would as long as AP kept Bradstreet on the planet. When and if anybody found the treasure they were all looking for, the hotline that had somebody on Colchis would be the one that got the scoop. And in the meantime good stories would see to it that I was in the right place at the right time when the story of the century finally broke, so I’d hotfooted it up north to cover a two-bit suhundulim
massacre and then out here to Lisii. When the pots gave out I made up a curse.

It wasn’t much of a curse—no murders, no avalanches, no mysterious fires—but every time somebody sprained an ankle or got bitten by a kheper, I got at least four columns out of it.

After my first one, headered, “Curse of Kings Strikes Again,” went out, Howard, over at the Spine, sent me a ground-to-ground that read,
“The curse has to be in the same
place as the treasure, Jackie-boy!”

I burned back, “If the treasure’s over there, what am I doing stuck out here? Find something so I can come back.”

I didn’t get an answer to that, and the Lisii team didn’t find any more bones, and the curse grew and grew. Six rocks the size of my thumbnail rattled down a lava slope the Lisii team had just walked down, and I
headered my story, “Mysterious Rockfall Nearly Buries Archaeologists: Is King’s Curse Responsible?” and was feeding it into the burner when I heard the sizzle I’d set up to alert me to the consul’s transmissions. Hotline reporters weren’t supposed to trespass on official transmissions, and Lacau, the consul over at the Spine, had double-cooked his to make sure we didn’t, but burners have only so
many firelines, and I’d had enough time on Lisii to try them all.

It was a ship-in-area request. He’d put, “Hurry,” at the end of it. The circuit ship was only a month away, and he couldn’t wait for it. They’d found something.

I burned the rest of my story. Then I hit ground-to-ground and sent Howard a copy of the header with the tag, “Found anything yet?” I didn’t get an answer.

I went out
and found the team and asked them if there was anything anybody needed from the base camp, one of my shock boards had gone bad and I was going to run in. I made a list of what they wanted, loaded my equipment in the jeep, and took off for the Spine.

I burned stories all the way, sending them ground-to-ground to the relay I kept in my tent back at Lisii, so it would look to Bradstreet like my
stories were still coming from there. I had to stop the jeep every time and set up the burn equipment, but I didn’t want him heading for the Spine. He was still up north, waiting for another massacre, but he had a Swallow that could get him to the Spine in a day and a half.

So I sent out a story headered, “Khepers Threaten Team’s Life—Curse’s Agents?” about the tick-like khepers, who sucked the
blood out of anybody dumb enough to stick his hand down a hole. Since the Lisii team made their living doing just that, their arms were spotted with white circles of dead skin where the poison had entered their blood. The bites didn’t heal, and your blood was toxic for a week or so, which prompted somebody to put up a sign on the barracks that read, “No Nibbling Allowed,” with a skull-and-crossbones
under it. I didn’t say that in my story, of course. I made them out to be
agents of the dead curse, wreaking vengeance on whoever dared disturb the sleep of Colchis’s ancient kings.

The second day out I intercepted an answer from a ship. It was an Amenti freighter, and it was a long way away, but it was coming. It could make it in a week. Lacau’s answer was only one word. “Hurry.”

If I was going
to beat the ship in, I couldn’t waste any more time burning stories. I pulled out some back-up tapes I’d made, deliberately dateless, and sent those: a flattering piece on Lacau, the long-suffering consul who has to keep the peace and divide the treasure, interviews with Howard and Borchardt, a not-so-flattering piece on the local dictator-type, the Sandalman, a recap of the accidental discovery
of the ransacked tombs in the Spine that had brought Howard and his gang here in the first place. I was taking a risk doing all these stories on the Spine, but I hoped Bradstreet would check the transmission-point and decide I was trying to throw him off. With luck he’d tear off to Lisii in his damned Swallow, convinced the team had struck pay dirt and I was trying to keep it a secret till I got
my scoop.

I skidded into the Sandalman’s village six days after I left Lisii. I was still a day and a half from the Spine, but with the ship due in two days they had to be here, where it would land, and not out at the Spine.

There was a deathly silence over the white clay settlement that reminded me of someplace else. It was a little after five. Afternoon nap time. Nobody would be up till at
least six, but I knocked on the consul’s door anyway. Nobody was home, and the place was locked up tight. I peeked in through the cloth blinds, but I couldn’t see much. What I could see was that Lacau’s burn equipment wasn’t on the desk, and that worried me. There was nobody home in the low building the Spine team used as a barracks either, and where the hell was everybody? They wouldn’t still be
out at the Spine, not with a ship coming in tomorrow. Maybe the ship had come and gone two days ahead of schedule.

I hadn’t burned a story since the day before yesterday. I’d run out of tapes and I hadn’t dared risk taking the time to stop and set up the equipment when it might mean getting there too late. Over at Lisii I had been careful every once in awhile to let my stories pile up for two
or three days and then send them all at once so that Bradstreet wouldn’t immediately jump to conclusions when I missed a deadline. He was going to catch on pretty soon, though, and I didn’t have anything else to do. I wasn’t going to go tearing off to the Spine until I’d talked to somebody and made sure that was where they were, and I couldn’t go at night anyway, so I sat down on the low clay step
of the barracks porch, set up my burn equipment, and ran a check on the ship. Still on its
way. It would be here day after tomorrow. So where was the team? Curse Strikes Again? Team Disappears?

I couldn’t do that story, so I whipped off a couple of columns on the one member of the Howard team I hadn’t met—Evelyn Herbert. She’d joined the team right after I went north to cover the massacre, and
I didn’t know much about her. Bradstreet had said she was beautiful. Actually that wasn’t what he’d said. He said she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, but that was because we were stuck in Khamsin and had drunk a fifth of gin in endless bottles of Coke. “She has this face,” he said, “like Helen of Troy’s. A face that could launch…” The comparison had petered out since if there was anything
on Colchis to launch neither of us was sober enough to think of it. “Even the Sandalman’s crazy about her.”

I had refused to believe that. “No, really,” Bradstreet had protested sloppily, “he’s given her presents, he even gave her her own bey, he wanted her to move into his private compound but she wouldn’t. I tell you, you’ve got to see her. She’s beautiful.”

I still hadn’t believed it, but
it made a good story. I burned it as the romance of the century, and that took care of yesterday’s story. But what about today’s?

I went around and knocked on all the doors again. It was still awfully quiet, and I’d remembered what it reminded me of—Khamsin right after the massacre. What if Lacau’s hysterical, “hurry!” had had something to do with the Sandalman? What if the Sandalman had taken
one look at the treasure and decided he wanted it all for himself? I sat back down, and burned a story on the Commission. Whenever there was a controversy over archaeological finds, the Commission on Antiquities came and sat on it until everybody was bored and ready to give up. Everyone took them far more seriously than they deserved to be taken. Once they’d even been called in to settle who owned
a planet when a dig turned up proof that the so-called natives had really landed in a spaceship several thousand years before. The Commission took this on with a straight face, even if it was like the Neanderthals demanding Earth back, listened to evidence for something over four years, as if they were actually going to do something, and finally recessed to review the accumulated heaps of testimony
and let the opposing sides fight it out for themselves. They were still in recess ten years later, but I didn’t say that in the story. I wrote up the Commission as the arm of archeological justice—fair but stern and woe to anybody who gets greedy. Maybe it would make the Sandalman
think twice about massacring Howard’s team and taking all the treasure for himself, if he hadn’t done that already.

There still weren’t any signs of life, and what if that meant there weren’t any signs of life? I went the round of the doors again, afraid one of them would swing open on a heap of bodies. But unlike Khamsin, there were no signs of destruction either. There hadn’t been a massacre. They were probably all over at the Sandalman’s divvying up the treasure.

There was no way to see into the high-walled
compound. I rattled the fancy iron gate, and a bey I didn’t recognize came out. She was carrying a photosene lantern, bringing it out to be lit before the sun went down, and I was not sure she’d heard me banging on the gate. She looked old.

It’s hard to tell with beys, who never get bigger than twelve-year-olds. Their black hair doesn’t turn gray and they don’t usually lose their black teeth,
but this one was wearing a black robe instead of a shift, which meant she had a high station in the Sandalman’s household even though I didn’t remember her, and her forearms were covered with kheper bites. Either she was exceptionally curious, even for a bey, or she’d been around awhile.

“Is the Sandalman here?” I said.

She didn’t answer. She hung the lantern on a hook off to the inside of the
gate and watched as the pool of photo-chemical liquid in its base caught fire.

“I need to see the Sandalman,” I said more loudly: She must be hard of hearing.

“No one in,” she said, her dished face impassive. Did that mean the Sandalman wasn’t there or that she wasn’t supposed to let anybody in?

“Is the Sandalman here?” I said. “I want to see him.”

“No one in,” she repeated. The Sandalman’s
other bey had been a lot easier to get information out of. I had given her a pocket mirror and made a friend for life. The fact that she wasn’t here probably meant the Sandalman wasn’t either. But where had they gone?

“I’m a reporter,” I said, and stuck my press card at her. “Show him this. I think he’ll want to talk to me.”

She looked at the card, rubbed her dirty-looking finger along the smooth
plastic, and turned it over.

“Where is he? Out at the Spine?”

The bey turned the card back over to the front. She poked at the hotline’s holo-banner with the same finger, as if she could stick it between the three-dimensional letters.

“Where’s Lacau? Where’s Howard? Where’s the Sandalman?”

She held the card up sideways and peered along its edge. She flipped it over, looking at the letters,
and turned it sideways again, slowly, watching the three-dimensional effect go flat.

“Look,” I said. “You can keep the press card. It’s a present. Just tell your boss I’m here.”

She was trying to pry the 3-D letters up with the tip of her black fingernail. I should never have given her the press card.

I opened up my knapsack, got out a bottle of Coke, and held it out to her, just this side
of the gate. She actually looked up from
the press card long enough to grab for it. I took a step backward. “Where are the dig men?” I said, and then remembered it’s the bey women who run things, if you could call running errands for the suhundulim and drinking Cokes running things, but at least they were up most of the day. The male beys slept, and the females ignored them and any other male
who wasn’t giving them a direct order, but they might notice a female. “Where’s Evelyn Herbert?”

“Big cloud,” she said.

Big cloud? What did that mean? This wasn’t the season for the big desert-drenching thunderstorms. A fire? A ship?

“Where?” I said.

She reached for the Coke bottle. I let her almost get it. “Big cloud where?”

She pointed east to where the lava spills formed a low ridge. The
flat basin beyond was where they landed the ships. What if some other ship had responded to Lacau’s message? Some ship that had already been and gone, team and treasure with it?

“Ship?” I said.

“No,” she said, and made a lunge through the bars for the Coke. “Big cloud.”

I gave it to her. She retreated to the front steps of the main house and sat down. She took a swig of the Coke and turned
the press card over and over in her other hand, making it flash in the sunlight.

“How long has it been there?” I said.

She didn’t even act like she’d heard me.

On the way out to the ridge I convinced myself the bey had seen a dust devil. I didn’t want to believe a ship had been and gone with the treasure and the team. Maybe if it was a ship, it was still there.

It wasn’t. I could see the half-mile
circle of scorched dirt where they always landed the ships even before I got to the top of the ridge, and it was empty, but I went on up. And there was the big cloud. A plasticmesh geodome in the middle of the basin. The consul’s landrover was parked on the far side of it and several crawlers that they must have used to bring the treasure down from the Spine.

I hid the jeep behind a hump of lava
and
then crept around behind the rocks until I could see in the front door. There were a couple of suhundulim guarding the tent, which was the best proof yet that there was a treasure. The Commission’s only ruling said that the archaeologist’s government got half of everything and the “natives” got the other half. The Sandalman would be making sure he got his half. I was surprised Howard hadn’t
posted a guard, too, since the ruling said any tampering with the treasure meant forfeiture of the whole thing by the offending party. At Lisii the guards had practically sat on those poor skeletons and clay shards to make sure nobody sneaked a shinbone in his pocket and hoping somebody would so they could claim the whole treasure by default.

I’d never get past the Sandalman’s guards. If I wanted
a story I’d have to go in the back door. I crept as far back as the jeep and then down the ridge, keeping as much rock between me and the guards as I could. I didn’t take my burn equipment. I wasn’t sure I could even get in, and I didn’t want somebody confiscating it on the grounds that burning a story was tampering. Besides, the black lava was honeycombed with sharp-edged holes. I didn’t want
to risk dropping my equipment and breaking it.