They Also Serve (26 page)

"I'll get Old Ned," the man said, slipping around Jeff.

"I'll see if the girls left us anything in the kitchen," the mother added.

The longest hour of Jeffs life passed before he rode out of Hazel Dell with Ned in the lead. In place of his warm clothes he wore hand-me-downs. A hooded rain slicker hid his face; his starman's wrist unit was off, buried in his saddlebag. The starman's rifle took the place of an air rifle in his scabbard. Ned had one more demand; he did the talking. If anyone asked, Jeff would fake a stutter and stay silent. Jeff had swallowed all Ned's demands, demands such as he never would have taken from Vicky. For Annie, Jeff would swallow three kinds of hell.

Annie was scared. The first three villages had been easy. She knew people who knew her ma and da. No, they hadn't seen the six people, followers of the Green, whom Annie described, explaining that the ma of the youngest was very sick at home. The lie came surprisingly easy to Annie's tongue. Whether there was any real belief in the faces that nodded at her, they trusted her ma and da, so they trusted her. They arranged rides for her and Nikki south, and told them who to ask for in the next village.

With the marines suddenly too busy to send out mules to buy what they needed, people were riding in on their own wagons and carts, taking the starfolks' card and riding home, happy they'd be the first to buy a mule, a powered plow, so many of the things the starfolk offered. That meant plenty of empty wagons going south. So why, at the fourth village, had Annie and Nikki been stuck on this worn-out, broken-down wagon whose last load had been pots of clay and mud, pots that had leaked badly? More troublesome, why were they still on it after two more villages?

"Nikki, I hope you know what you're doing."

"We've got to save Daga.",

The driver, as broken down as his wagon and the old plug pulling it, glanced back at them. "I'll get ya there soon enough. Soon enough, I will" Yesterday would have been none too soon for Annie.

Eleven

RAY HAD DEFENDED a lot of base camps in his years of soldiering. Never had he planned a defense around an array of options like today's, he reflected as he drove over to
the church. He got there just as the little priest was coming down the aisle, greeting each parishioner with a smile. He gave Ray a wide-open hug. "You're up early, man."

"No earlier than you."

"I'm just doing the Lord's work."

"I hope I am, too." Villagers filed by, young and old, men and women. Many acknowledged Ray as well as the priest. "Thank you for the work you're offering," was the general thrust of most. "We need your work," was Ray's honest answer.

"Saves our young men from having to go to the cities to find work that pays in coin," the priest reminded Ray.

"But not to pay for the land," Ray pointed out. To the priest's raised eyebrows, he explained the night's discoveries. The priest stared straight ahead for a long while.

"There's been hot blood between the city folk and the farmers almost since we first started to spread out. Cities have their needs. We farmers have ours. New Haven may talk about being for the Green, but these people grow it." The priest eyed the fields, dotted with people working.

"But if you don't grow it, city folks don't eat," Ray said.

"And if they don't make the utensils and glass and needles and fine goods, ours is a pretty plain existence. We need each other. So long as we remember that, all is well. But that's not always easy, not when Refuge needs expanded sewers or mass transit and we need a river dammed for electricity or to make room for bigger grain and potato barges."

"Every society is a work in progress, trying to balance those tensions."

"Well, if I remember right, or the story that was told to me is true, the Sterlings tried to avoid the problem by claiming all the land around Richland. Farmers who settled there worked as tenants, no better than the workers in their mines and factories. About a hundred years ago there were riots about absentee landlords. Really, just Sterlings as landlords."

"Why didn't farmers just go around Sterling land?"

"Why doesn't anybody just walk away from a problem? If a farmer's too far from a city, his horse eats more hauling produce to market than he earns. Now we have river barges on the James and railroads out here. Not then."

"How did they solve it?"

"Now that, I don't remember. Didn't you say you'd copied much of Refuge's archives?"

"Yes. Kat can help you dig through them."

"A delightful young woman. This will be a pleasant day."

Ray had his doubts about that. He dropped the padre at the hospital/research center with Kat. Mary caught him in front of the HQ. "Boss, young Jeff's gone AWOL." Mary handed him a note. He read it through.

"Any luck looking for our vanishing box?"

"Nada,
zero, and zip."

"Think these people can find it?"

"Two girls, followed by two guys. Who knows? Crazier things have happened, and this planet is the craziest I've ever visited. Asteroids. Now, there's the place for a woman. Not too much land. Not too many people. Small enough to be comfortable, big enough to have what you need. What are we doing here, sir?"

"Seemed like a great opportunity when we saw it," he reminded her. "Didn't have all that many other options."

"I'm starting to think we didn't spend nearly enough time trying to breathe vacuum. It can't be all that hard."

"Anything else, Mary?"

"Nope; I'm off for Kat and the padre. See what we can come up with. You?"

"Need some time to think." Two chairs and a table stood in the space between hospital and HQ; Ray headed for them. The problem with wrestling alligators was you tended to forget you were there to drain the swamp. He'd had so many big-teethed critters chomping at his ass for the past week, he needed to take a minute to remember why he was here. "Create a base camp Matt could use to repair
Second Chance
if he has to, and prepare these folks to meet the rest of humanity," he repeated twice.

How long since he last thought of Rita and the baby? Get too busy with the small stuff and you forget what's important. "Of course, when the small stuff is trying to kill you, it does tend to hold your attention," he muttered.

Okay, keeping his two goals in mind, just how should he handle Miss Vicky? He sure couldn't move the base. How much force would he meet her with? Ray leaned back in his chair, relaxed, and let his mind spin.

"I'm so glad you came back. I was starting to fear I didn't have as good a hold on you as I thought."

Ray sat bolt upright. Across from him, lounging in an overstuffed chair, was the Teacher. No, not the Teacher. The ratty gown was gone. Instead, this image wore a conservative blue blazer over khaki slacks. A pink shirt was open at the neck. Ray glanced around: The base was still there; people moved about. Was he awake or asleep?

"In this semidream state," the apparition went on, "you humans call meditation, you're not that easy to latch on to. I'm rather proud of myself."

Ray leaned back. He wasn't in the wicker chair anymore, but a copy of the one across from him. The chair accepted him, began a deep muscle massage on his back. Rita had tried to buy two chairs like this for his office; he'd refused the purchase order. For now, he enjoyed the illusion. "And you are," he offered to what was apparently seated across from him.

"Call me the Dean of the Sociology Department."

"Not the Teacher."

"Bad term for him. He's more like the President of the University, although I'm not sure even that fits. Truth be told, I'm not sure how a lot of us fit in anymore."

"So there are many of you, not just one." Ray started to mark a notch for himself in some mental pistol grip.

"Seems so. Not the way it was. Frankly, we're all trying to figure out what happened and why and who we are."

"Sometimes it's easier to understand something when you talk it through," Ray said, trying not to choke on the image of him providing psychotherapy to an illusion.

"I agree. I don't know how many times I've told one of the Three that they should do just that." The image paused. "I just never thought I'd be taking my own advice." How many times had Ray heard that one before? To the illusion, he said nothing. After all, that was how you got someone talking. Say nothing. Ray had gotten real good at that as a bureaucrat.

"You see, I am the crowning achievement of three intelligent races, the final product of half a million years of cooperation and growth. They constructed us to educate their young, to give them a balanced, consistent introduction to themselves, each other, their histories, and their universe. We were the ultimate educational experience."

And Ray saw what the Dean meant.

A large room held only six people, seated at different tables, something like a restaurant. That was what the Teacher saw. Then the picture changed and he saw what each of the six students was experiencing. One sat at a formal dinner table, surrounded by his brothers and sisters. At the head of the table, his long-dead father presided. Today, the student would confront him as he never had in life. Today, issues that had twisted his mind and emotions would be resolved.

At another table, a young woman dined alone. Tasting splendid isolation with her meal, she discovered, as the Teacher whispered in her mind, that moments like these were good for centering oneself, discovering who you were. Alone time could be relished. Around the room, six different people were individually tutored on six different issues and grew personally.

"Nice class size," Ray said.

"Exactly," the Dean agreed, leaning forward in his seat. "Unique syllabus, tailored environment, everything you could ask for, courtesy of that little lump in your skull. If every human had just grown one, we'd be working as gently and as easily in their heads as I am in yours. Oh, to teach again. To once more see eyes light up with discovery, pain changed to understanding, ignorance replaced with knowledge, fumbling humiliation gone and skill in its place. We can do that for you."

"You did it for what," Ray asked, "a million years?"

"Yes, a million orbits of this planet's sun."

"For the Three."

"Yes," the Dean agreed, retreating into his chair.

"Why? Why did they go away? What happened?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?" Ray snapped in his best colonel's voice.

"Fewer and fewer came. Then suddenly there were none." The Dean shook his head.

"Your Teacher claims to know everything, to teach anything, but you don't know why three intelligent races quit coming here. Disappeared from the galaxy!"

The Dean's apparition flinched into his chair. "I have no idea what happened."

"That's a big hole in everything."

"Don't tell the Teacher that."

"Why not?"

"Because you have made serious enemies among us. There are some who would wipe out your kind before you carny through with your threat to destroy the planet."

"Could they?"

"You felt the pain."

"Yes," Ray nodded, "but I've got this unusually large goose egg in my head."

"Yes. And what do you know of that egg, as you call it?"

"I know it wasn't there before I came here, that it is what lets us talk, and it stores memories of things I've never seen."

"You've done very well. I think our Biology Department might give you a passing grade. Now tell me where your unseen and unlearned knowledge came from. How did it get in your head?"

"I don't know."

"We put it there. We imprinted your cells with data the way you might print data onto a disk."

"How?"

"The Three could send ships hurtling thousands of light-years in seconds. Do you doubt we can rearrange the molecules of that goose egg our virus put in your head? Or that if we decided to scramble the molecules of your brain, lungs, heart, immune system, you won't die very quickly?"

"Now that we've exchanged threats," Ray said evenly, as years of combat had trained him to, "where do we go from here?"

The apparition chuckled. "You are a cold one. I'd love to get into your memories. See what makes you tick. It would be a joy to design a training syllabus to heal you."

"But I like me the way I am. Could that be why the Three quit coming?"

"They liked themselves the way they were?" the Dean mused. "A million empty years to reflect, and I never thought of that."

Ray had to think fast; the Dean was starting to stumble on ideas. Would he go away and think them over? Ray needed to know what answers the Dean arrived at now, not later. How had the Teacher become so fragmented? What was going on among those fragments? Was humanity about to be attacked? Could Ray find allies among the fragments?
Choose your next words carefully, soldier.
"Some of you think we humans ought to be destroyed. What do the rest of you want?"

'To teach you, of course." The Dean looked up from his own musings, open surprise on his face. "If you hadn't had a single student for a million years, wouldn't you be delighted to find a fresh face, a new class? Don't you remember the first day of school, the smell of the new books, new computers, new pencils? Given who we are, how could we not want to teach?"

Ray had always enjoyed school, but not like this fellow. Then Ray hadn't chosen teaching as a career. He thought back to his best teachers, tried to imagine them locked away from students. That would be agony. "It seems to me," Ray said slowly, "we both want to live, learn, do. You want to teach. There is a middle ground between us we could explore together."

"Maybe. However, the death of the Gardener has us worried. Your recent sampling of us up North does not assuage such fears."

"We didn't take much," Ray quickly pointed out.

"No, but we felt the loss, and we wonder at the reason."

"We seek to better understand you."

"You'd do better to ask."

"Then I will ask. What have you become over the past million isolated years? How? Why? What does it mean? Who can we reach an agreement with? If we can agree, will all of you keep it, or some of you ignore it?"

The Dean looked long at Ray, then rubbed his eyes and sighed. "I'd love to tell you the answer to all that, but I can't. When the students quit coming, something happened to us. We are the most sophisticated machine created by the Three. We girded an entire planet. Yet, left alone, I'd say we become something like what you call depressed. We quit making decisions, put off repairs. Storms got away from the Weather Proctor. Water, wind, ice eroded us, and we did not make repairs. Nodes became isolated. Our universal experiences gave way to the parochial. Now we look at the same data and see it differently. Our own biases make it impossible for us to reach a consensus."

"We have computers that are self-healing. When one unit gives erroneous data, it's voted out of the decision loop."

"Yes. Many of our nodes are gone. Others are different. They have voted so many of us out of the decision loop that we can no longer arrive at a decision with any level of confidence."