CHERRY WILDER
Born in New Zealand, Cherry Wilder has lived for long stretches of time in Australia and in Germany, and has recently moved back to New Zealand again. She made her first sale in 1974 to the British anthology New Writings in SF 24, and since then, in addition to a number of sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, has sold to markets such as Interzone, Strange Plasma, and elsewhere. Her many books include The Luck of Brin’s Five, The Nearest Fire, The Tapestry Warriors, Second Nature, A Princess of the Chameln, Yorath the Wolf, The Summer’s King, and Cruel Designs. Her most recent books are a collection, Dealers in Light and Darkness, and a new novel, Signs of Life. She is currently at work on a fantasy novel entitled The Secrets of Hylor.
Here she takes us to a long-abandoned space habitat where secrets abound and hidden resentments simmer beneath a seemingly placid and pastoral surface, and nothing is quite what it seems.
The dock at Wingard had the monumental proportions associated with Triad North, the company, and with Winthrop A. North IV, the man for whom it was designed. The Archive shuttle hung in the big shadowy facility like a tiny fish in a dark pool: all the passengers were curious, standing at the ports, as they were directed to a slot.
“Cult classic!” said Elliot March, the hotwit of the team. “Been used for trivid locations. Yo, Dayne—they made two runs of COOP VYRAT, SPACE PIRATE here … .”
“Right here in the dock?” asked Dayne Robbins.
“Aw come on—here and out in the open, on the asteroid.”
“Did they shoot on the Dancing Floor?” asked Taya Schwartz.
“No, Doctor,” said Elliot. “Not in the episodes I saw. You work on the floor any time, Carl?”
“No, we were in the western valley system,” said Carl Curran, “but we had a look at the floor.”
Taya Schwartz did not know that the young media assistant had been on the Wingard habitat asteroid before—she must question him about his visit with the trivid team. She was conscious of the fact that her colleagues were all much younger than herself.
The docking was complete; Mahoney, the shuttle pilot, shot the hatch and they filed out carrying their personal packs. Three android auxiliaries in their service grey uniforms manned the dock; they came bouncing up, full of oxper cheerfulness, saluted Flight-Captain Mahoney, greeted everyone else politely. Taya got their names quickly: Thomas Scott, Philip Grey, Peter Miles.
“Looking forward to your briefing, Doctor!” said Tom Scott, apparently the Leader of the android unit.
“How many auxiliaries on Wingard?” she asked.
“Just us three wishers doing dock duty today and one other, Cliff Watson, out in the green.”
A man and a woman from the holding mission stepped out of the elevator; they were the reception committee. The oxper moved away and the Archive party were greeted by Gregor Hansen and Astra Wylie. They were a notably handsome couple, in their thirties,—their bright “colony” clothes had no service markings. The elevator had a smell of earth, of the countryside—the visitors stepped out into bright sunlight and stood amazed by the beauty of Wingard.
The dock was on the ridge that surmounted a deep bowl of green; they looked down into a valley system, earth-green, with earth trees and exotics, stretching into the countryside. Wingard had once supported a population of 1,000 mensch, 1,000 souls. There were still a few buildings to be seen in the distance. Cottage units and brown habitat huts were clustered in the nearest valley.
“Do the personnel from the mission live down there?” Taya asked the young woman, Astra Wylie.
“Yes, sure,” she said. “That’s our house—the new unit with the red roof by the tankstand.”
The ridge above the valley continued on round and turned into a heavy wall of earth and stone, a miniature mountain range running north from where they stood. It showed the substance of the original asteroid, mined out and brought to this point in space by one of the Triad North companies. Taya Schwartz was able to glimpse a haze of green over the lower portion of the spinal wall: the wilderness area of Wingard, another series of interlocking deep valleys.
The Archive team were accommodated in the Harmony lodge, just beyond the ridge, at the end of the tall white complex that had housed the old Admin, near the dock. Gregor Hansen drove Dr Schwartz, the senior archivist, and Mahoney, the pilot, while Wylie brought the others in a larger electric runabout. Taya Schwartz ran a steady interview all the way checking the known data on the evacuation in 2499, the legal position, the state of the biosphere then and now.
Hansen explained, rather deadpan, that Wingard had gone down because of the life-support crash at Yesod Habitat. A couple of disorders in the water and the air
on Wingard were taken out of proportion—the Terran admin panicked, ordered evacuation.
“And the settlers couldn’t return,” said Taya. “Pretty rough after twenty-five years on Wingard.”
“Hard luck for those mensh,” said Hansen, with some feeling. “We wouldn’t live anywhere else.”
“Some habitats have gone down, been evacuated, after more than a hundred years,” said Mahoney. “Tough thing here was that it wasn’t necessary. Badly handled by Earth admin.”
“I remember,” said Taya. “Winthrop North was sick and in deep financial shit … .”
“I heard you knew him, Doctor Schwartz,” said Mike Mahoney. “Winthrop North.”
Gregor Hansen turned his head to stare at Taya Schwartz, frowning. Winthrop A. North IV tended to polarise opinion; he was the last of his kind as well as the last of his line.
“We studied exo biology at the Pioneer Valley Foundation,” she said. “He was an exceptional person but he had more than a touch of mad millionaire even then.”
Mahoney gave a guilty chuckle. The last president of Triad North cast a long shadow. The notion of an industrialist who went about in space with his own engineers had always been unreal, reckless; North the Fourth seemed to have worn himself out. He had died ten years ago, in his Canadian retreat; sixty years old and a crotchety recluse, like millionaires of old time.
“Old North cared for this place, for Wingard,” said Hansen. “Had his ashes scattered to enrich the soil, like one of the original settlers. I read his plaque in the memorial ground by the Sun Kiln.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Taya.
“How long after the evacuation did Terran Security put in the holding mission?” asked Mahoney. “Was there ever a move to repopulate?”
“I guess there were plans,” said Hansen. “Terran Security settled with North, a year or so before he died. There had been annual checks of this place—the problem with the air and the water righted itself with a little help from the bio engineers.”
“Archive would like to target the year the Dancing Floor was built,” observed Taya, “between one annual survey and the next. A pity nothing was seen by Earth personnel.”
“Well, Doc,” said Hansen. “You said it. Earth personnel. The first holding mission arrived in ’68, bunch of retired Space Service Joes and their wives or partners. They came in on contract for five years, sort of Recreation Leave. They didn’t patrol too much … they missed the meteorite over in the East Greenwall. They discovered the Floor in 2507, thought it had been there a while.”
“And there was no-one out there earlier—hiking, camping, building a holiday hut?” she asked.
“Has someone been talking?” asked Hansen. “Some data was red, at least for a while … .”
“I haven’t heard anything,” said Taya. “Do I need clearance?”
“Wingard had a bunch of Die-Hards, is all,” the young man burst out. “This comes up every time a habitat is evacuated. Some folk will not be shifted … they run off, hide in the bushes, in a cave …”
“Don’t I know it,” said Mahoney. “We had problems at Celestra and Novion.”
Taya wanted to hear more about these Die-Hards but she was patient. They had arrived at the Harmony lodge, once the guest house for a beautiful, thriving habitat, which specialised in bio-farming and dendrology. The lodge was a handsome structure in Wright Renaissance style with vistas of dayplex and pillars that resembled dressed wood. There was no-one in the lobby but when Gregor Hansen shouted a young girl and an even younger boy came racing down the staircase.
He introduced them to the visitors: Marla Jenner, elder child of the other mission family, and his own son Sven Hansen. They had been doing chores in the lodge and minding the systems: Taya understood a lack of personnel, the feeling of rattling around in untenanted buildings on a ghost world.
She was left along with the children while Hansen and Mahoney went to fetch the baggage. She thought of certain trade goods she had brought along and felt in the pockets of her carrying bag.
“Would you like some of these holovox cards?” she asked. “Birds of Earth? Trivid Heroes?”
Marla, the older girl, nodded to Sven, who wiped his hands on his overall then gravely accepted the two brightly glowing packets. Marla quickly opened her packet and made her card with the Kookaburra utter its laugh. Taya had found the soy-nut health bars which both of them accepted. Marla slipped hers into a pocket but Sven took a big exploratory bite and was chewing heartily when the men came back.
Gregor Hansen dropped Taya’s work-pack with an audible crunch and raced to his son, gripping him by the back of the neck.
“What’s he got? What you got, boy?” he panted. “Spit it out! Spit it right out!”
As Sven spat his mouthful on to the dusty tiled floor his father wrenched away the rest of the candy bar.
“Marla,” he said, tense with disgust and anger. “Take him to the washroom and see that he rinses his mouth out good with the bottled water.”
Before the kids were out of sight, heading behind the staircase, Hansen turned angrily upon Taya.
“What was in that candy?” he demanded.
“You can read the ingredients from the label,” said Taya. “It is a soy-nut health bar from the World Space Commissary at Armstrong Base. I eat them myself and give them to my grandchildren.”
“You hand out any more of this rotgut candy to Sven?”
“No, Mr Hansen,” she said. “Is your son not well? Does he have a dietary problem?”
“Soon will have if he takes that kinda junk!” snapped Hansen.
Mahoney looked shocked by the man’s outburst.
“The Doctor wasn’t to know … .” he said.
“To know what?” said Hansen, looking from one guest to another, red-faced, his eyes narrowed with suspicion.
“To know that you disapproved violently of certain types of food,” said Taya. “I’m sorry.”
“We live clean here, Mam. That boy has never tasted any sugar or additives … .”
“Well, he still hasn’t,” she said evenly. “Read the label, Mr Hansen.”
“Why should I believe that shit thing, a printed label from some World Space supply outlet?”
“Why indeed,” she said. “Where is my room, please?”
“Up one flight,” he said. “Mezzanine Number 27. Elevators are nonfunction-ing.”
She picked up her work-case and strode off up the handsome staircase, with dark treads of wood substitute and a banister of black metal rods.
“Doc! Doc! I’ll carry your bag!” called Mahoney.
“Thanks Captain,” she smiled down at him. “I’ll be fine!”
She heard Mahoney trying to take the man from the holding mission to task; when she turned her head at the curve of the stairs the children had come back. Sven was sitting emptily on the bottom step while Marla picked up his mouthful of chewed up candy bar. She was not using paper of course or any kind of manufactured wiper but a bunch of big papery leaves.
Taya Schwartz was stung by memory. The door of room 27 was open to receive her—she staggered into the spacious guest suite. The windows were open and the kids had placed a vase of fresh flowers—yellow daisies and statice—on the desk. She put down her case and sat on the bed, wearily. She thought of soft amyth leaves and of the chocolate she had eaten on a far distant world.
The Archive team, all quartered in Harmony, walked over to the Admin diner at 19:00 hours; the briefing was scheduled for 21:00. Taya was not really pleased with this—she liked to relax alone before a briefing, but there was no food outlet in Harmony lodge. The Admin was well-lit, clean and fresh, with a reggae band on the monitors.
“Hey, this is better,” said Elliot March, under his breath. “Why can’t they have our place like this? What makes the difference.”
“The oxper,” said Taya. “They take care of this building.”
Dayne Robbins, the Medic on the Archive team, was also their commissariat liaison. She was already helping in the canteen along with the oxper Miles and Grey. The food was very good: fresh Wingard vegetables along with the specials they had brought from the Moon. There was a range of tea, fruit boosters and juice. Dayne brought their dessert and settled at the table.
“Problems of interaction,” she said. “Experienced anything?”
“The holding mission are hard-line anti-service, against World Space,” suggested Taya. “Possibly they’re anti-Earth as well: Spaceborn or Never Returns.”
“What?” said Elliot. “How you make that out, Doc?”
“It’s true,” said Dayne. “They can barely interact with the android auxiliary teams. The kids aren’t allowed to speak to them or enter this building. Groups of
service personnel who visit Wingard for any reason—to inspect the dock facility for instance—have a minimum of contact to the Jenners and the Hansens.”
“It wasn’t like that when you were here with the media team, Carl!” exclaimed Elliot.
“No—but these are new guys,” said Carl Curran. “The first holding mission were older folk, veterans from World Space taking it easy on their Recreation Leave. Don’t know where they found these two families.”
“I know that,” said Mahoney. “They came from the planet Arkady. The southern continent—has an official name now—”
“Oparin,” said Taya Schwartz wistfully.
She left the others in the canteen and sat in a pleasant window in the lounge, looking out over the green valleys while she went over her material. Presently Hal Jenner, the senior member of the holding mission came and introduced himself. He was a well set up man in his forties, with dark eyes and thick dark brown hair clubbed back with a strip of green cloth. His manner was relaxed and genial: compared with his younger colleague, Hansen, he was a diplomat. He explained, first of all, that he had been checking the road into the inland that morning.
“One of the androids reported a fallen tree,” he said. “I had to take care of it.”
“You had to move the tree?” Taya couldn’t resist it.
“Well, no, just tidy a little,” said Jenner.
“That would be Cliff Watson, out there,” she said. “I’ve worked with auxiliary personnel several times and found them reliable colleagues.”
Hal Jenner caught his breath.
“How many people on Wingard, Mr Jenner?”
“Four adults in the holding mission,” he said, “Hansen and Wylie, my wife Fern and myself, our two children Marla and Dan, and Sven Hansen, makes seven all told. Then there are the folk at the Old Mill—three souls, former colonists. You’re bound to hear of them—our little family of Die-Hards. Those are all the people. Then World Space sends in their units of androids, four at a time, replaced every half earth year, from Armstrong Base.”
Taya had already registered in the hard-nosed young Hansen a more friendly attitude to the original settlers. None of these people had been members of World Space—they had been carefully recruited from Earth, from Arkady and from the employees of Triad North.
“You’ve made contact with the Die-Hards, Ranger Jenner?”
Hal Jenner laughed.
“Yes, sure Doc,” he said. “There were reports from the first resettlers, those World Space veterans. They swore there were a few settlers still out there, old folks like themselves, two women and a man, living in the wilderness. We didn’t believe them overmuch—”
It was a slip.
“Why not?” she asked. “Because they were from World Space?”
“Well it turned out they weren’t lying,” he said. “I seen the old fella first. What you’d expect. Skinny old man with a beard down to here. Name of Gunn, Ben Gunn. Asked for medical supplies, water filters and so on. We took down a good
load—food, all kinds of good stuff we thought they might use. There they all were, Old Ben and his two old gals, one called Vona? Other one Kirsten, maybe.”
“Would it be possible for me to speak to them?” she asked.
“They are very shy,” said Hal Jenner. “They have a deep need to be left alone—and we understand that better than most people. You could send a message on their systems … .”
He shrugged his shoulders a little hopelessly.
“So your family and the Hansens were recruited on Oparin, in Arkady.” Taya pursued, changing the subject.
“We had the wilderness and rough farming experience,” he said eagerly. “Gregor and I are both Rangers, Arkady rank. The women are trained Medical Technical Assistants.”
“Will you ever consider expanding the numbers of the holding mission—repopulating?”
“No!” he said firmly. “Why should we? Our new specialised projects with the trees and vegetables are flourishing. We’re working on a quite different scale from the original Wingard settlers. Besides it’s not up to us entirely … this is a matter for E.A.A.—Earth Asteroid Administration; they have the resettlement rights for all Triad North habitats.”
“You are extreme separatists,” she said, holding his gaze. “Ranger Jenner, how can you work for an Earth Utility?”
“It’s worth it to live on a clean world,” he said. “We keep a close watch on the E.A.A. So far we haven’t caught ’em cheating on the deal. They don’t bother us too much.”
“Is it a bother to receive the Archive team?”
“No Mam!” said Jenner with a broad smile. “The Archive facility operates from the Moon and from other manned planets and habitats. Completely separate from World Space and it’s private foundation, not linked to the World Security Organisation or any of its segments.”
It was time for the briefing. She followed Jenner into a small conference room which looked pleasantly full—there were the two families from the holding mission, the four members of the Archive team. At the back, separated by tables and chairs, were all four oxper. Cliff Watson had come in from the outback.
Taya spoke last. Elliot March explained the work of Archive—mapping resources throughout the Solar System and near planets. He was careful to explain what every member of the team did: he himself was responsible for admin and for flora and fauna, wild and cultivated. He would work closely with Ranger Hansen. Carl Curran was the cameraman and media specialist; Dayne Robbins was their medic and commissariat assistant. Dr Taya Schwartz was a specialist in extraterrestrial artefacts.
Carl gave a very brief rundown on his work and Dayne simply praised the quality of the Wingard vegetables. When Taya took the floor she had a short round of applause from the oxper. The big projection screen worked perfectly: she changed the order of the picture and hit them with a shot of DanFlor III in full sunlight.
In a meadow filled with bright green grass and ringed with dark scrubby bushes, tall as a hedge, there was a strange construction. Three tall wooden pillars looped with swags of rough green fabric, like fishnet, stood at the edge of a prepared space, fifty meters by a hundred. The space was slightly depressed in the center, a shallow bowl, paved with eighty-centimeter slabs of moulded stone, a bright sandy yellow. The paving stones were closely packed, fitted together; there were no sharp angles or corners; the stones had rounded edges.
“This is the Dancing Floor which Montezuma Antonio Rivez, the great exo-biologist, found upon Habitat Three,” she announced. “It was the third example to be discovered; this was the year 2465. This type of artefact had already been given the popular name of a Dancing Floor.”
The name came from the report on the first artefact to be found—on Europa, the moon of Jupiter, in 2440. There were two stations of space personnel on Europa at that time, in carefully insulated “cities,” Paris II and New Hyatt. The exploration of the underground seas and their biology was highly competitive.
A surface patrol from Paris claimed to have watched the building of a strange artefact by a team of eight aliens rated 5.4 on the RK Index, the Rivez-Klein scale of humanoid visual affinity. The builders had a small vessel, roughly the size and shape of a World Space Class Upsilon Transporter, not clearly visible behind a ridge. They worked behind a highly developed air dome on the level site of an older Earth station.
When the pavement was completed there was a pause of ten Earth-equivalent hours while the moulded paving stones set or were dried. The patrol, comfortably encamped behind their own ridge, held their position and kept watching.
Then as the bulk of the gas giant was at its closest to the moon, Europa, they beheld the construction team dancing, they swore it, on the big paving stones. The builders/dancers looked even weirder, their RK index even greater, without their work clothes. They leaped with uncanny grace from stone to stone, in a certain pattern. The paving stones lit up as the dancers stepped upon them. The watchers believed that this light came from some device within the stones, or possibly from the footwear of the dancers. They put forward the notion that the dancing floor, as they called it, was some kind of communication device.
The patrol, already overdue, returned to their Paris base and broke the news of their exciting discovery. But a mischievous concatenation of circumstances—bad karma said some—ensured that the dancers and their floor were never confirmed.
“Yes,” said Taya, answering a question. “That is correct, Ms Jenner—it was a seismological disturbance, an earthquake. The area could not be searched for a long time. There was no sign of a wrecked space vessel and only a few fragments that might have been paving stones. The men and women from the Paris patrol on Europa were not fully believed. They were partially discredited as witnesses because of interstation rivalry.
“They were accused of ‘zonking’—drinking alcohol, taking illegal drugs. They were ranked—lost service credits—for not calling in. The team explained this by saying that reception was very poor. They suspected that the builders of the Dancing Floor had a strong electronic presence and would have been immediately aware of any other signals, including the use of trivid equipment. They had
attempted some holoks when they first arrived but the alien air dome spoiled the prints.
“All that remained of this alleged encounter was the name ‘Dancing Floor’ which went into use, however, in reports and later in the media. The same way as ‘flying saucer’ entered the world languages long ago.”
So there was no original footage on the Europa floor but a good simul and some originals of the second artefact, found on Ceres in 2455 by a survey team sent out by Rivez and Klein from their newly formed Archive Foundation at Armstrong Base. They had their own satellite in the asteroid belt and picked up the Dancing Floor on Ceres.
One member of the Paris team from Europa, the retired Lieutenant Cole, C.P.V., was available to accompany this survey team. The structure was confirmed by this officer as another example of the alien artefact as built on Europa.
“This Space Service Lieutenant,” said Hansen, “was old, retired, and had been discredited back then on the Jupiter satellite. Could he give good confirmation, Doctor?”
“In my opinion, yes,” said Taya. “If we recap we can see the progress of the Rivez-Klein investigation: the destroyed artefact on Europa, Dancing Floor I, 2440, then the Dancing Floor on Ceres, 2455, and the example we have before us on the screen: Dancing Floor III discovered in 2565 by Monty Rivez and Hanna Klein on Habitat Three.”
She took a question from Tom Scott.
“Yes. Leader Scott, that arrangement of three wooden pillars, looped with green stuff resembling fishnet is unique to Dancing Floor III. It seems to be a copy of a classical ruin on Earth—maybe copied from a holok or photograph of a painting.”
“Doctor Schwarz,” said Hal Jenner earnestly. “Any idea what was going on? What they were doing this for?”
“No, Ranger Jenner,” she said. “There have been many theories—the original idea of a communication device is not borne out by anything in the stones themselves. I go along with a spiritual or religious ritual. We have the general picture of a team or teams from a highly developed space-travelling race moving through the Sol system and building these artefacts on uninhabited asteroids and habitats. There were unconfirmed reports of sightings of some vessel that might be a mother-ship beyond the asteroid belt. Rivez and Klein believed there might be other undiscovered examples. Dating is important, it would help. The last artefact to be discovered is the Dancing Floor here on Wingard.”
Taya brought up its picture on the screen and the oxper reacted as humans might or should have done, recognising a local treasure. They clapped and called out, hey that’s it, there’s our floor. But the holding mission could not react with pleasure because the oxper did, and they were the artefacts of hated World Space.
Taya could not go on without calling the holding mission.
“Ranger Hansen,” she asked, “what do you feel about this artefact on your habitat home, this Dancing Floor?”
“What do I feel? …” Hansen was puzzled or pretended to be. “Well, I suppose it’s impressive. Alien artefact. Not seen any before.”
Jenner saw what she was driving at and rallied the settlers, including the children, with a glance.
“Heavens, we like it, don’t we guys? Yay-Hay-Hay for our Dancing Floor!”
He clapped and the others echoed the strange Oparin cheer.
“Doctor Schwarz,” broke in Elliot March, “has this floor been validated? I mean there were cases on Earth and on Arkady … .”
The question made the mission folk bristle but Taya was amused by Elliot’s provocation.
“Yes, there have been attempts to copy these artefacts in several locations, including the planet Arkady,” she said. “Sometimes these were crude hoaxes, fakes, but the one near Riverfield, Arkady, was an artwork, part of a festival display. Also, the replica in New Mexico is a careful attempt at a re-creation, using all known data and a new silicon matirx. The Dancing Floor here on Wingard has been sampled by an oxper team three years ago and accepted as genuine by Archive, the Rivez-Klein Foundation.”
Taya went into her wind-up and into the Archive team’s biggest PR exercise. Yes, she was certainly looking forward to seeing the floor tomorrow. And she had all the help she needed—Cliff Watson would drive the trekker. In two days the team would have completed its program. On behalf of the Archive Foundation she wished to invite all the inhabitants of Wingard, the people here at the meeting, to a picnic in the green on the third day. A viewing of The Dancing Floor, number four, Wingard’s own. She understood that the day was Midweek, with a work free afternoon … . Hal Jenner accepted at once, quite heartily enough, on behalf of the holding mission, and the auxiliaries were pleased.
The meeting ended not with supper from the Commissary but with herb tea and home baked cookies brought along by Ms Jenner. The program for the rest of the archive team was settled for the next day.
Taya made sure that the central system outlet in her room at the Harmony Lodge was activated. She combed sleepily through the forests of memory and the endless data banks in search of one called Weltfic, a name which made German archivists laugh. She tried her Kamalin special assisted free association test and came up with two words flint and silver which sent her back to minerals and palaeontology as an association for that elusive name, Ben Gunn.
The roads were of packed earth, shot through with pebbles, the substance of the asteroid. It was time for the misty morning rain. They went skimming down from the lodge on the eastern road and drove by a pass through the central divide, something between a ravine and a conduit. There was a sign post which said Sun Kiln.
Cliff explained there was another disused pass further north and two closed tunnels on the east wall and the west wall—the settlers had used them to check the outer skin of Wingard. Nowadays the oxper did an occasional fly-past or used their viewers.
They drove on enveloped in green: beech and berioska from Arkady and wild apple trees. The wilderness area of Wingard was beautiful, full of vistas that might have come by chance but might have been designed, like the fake ruins of eighteenth century estates on Earth or the swathed pillars built near the Dancing Floor on Habitat Three. There was a stonework bridge over a grassy ravine and a tall building like a silo, covered with vines.
Cliff Watson, who was a boyish oxper, with black hair and brown eyes, kept up a running commentary. She came in with her question:
“You know the settlers, the Die-Hards who still live out here, Cliff?”
“Why sure, Doc,” he grinned. “Old Ben and his two friends, Vona and Kirsty. They live in a place called the Old Mill, though it never was a mill I don’t believe. Got it done up very comfortable. They even have their own trekker and they’ve been known to drive about a little. Guess they had the whole place to choose from, when everyone else was lifted out.”
“What do they live on?”
“Got a fine garden, couple goats, bunch of bantam-fowls. They don’t eat much meat except a little of the turkey jerky and fish we bring them from the Commissary.”
“Could I get to meet them?” she asked. “I don’t want to intrude on their retreat but they might just have seen some activity in connection with the Dancing Floor.”
Cliff looked a little flickery with embarrassment.
“Well, truth is they don’t have any regular contact even with us wishers from the auxiliary teams,” he said, “but I could ask them.”
“Take them some data,” she said.
She handed over printouts on the Archive foundation and on herself.
“Now there’s something,” said Cliff, changing the subject. “Bit of a meteorite came down, side of the hill, over there. You can see where it burnt. The people at the Mill, they saw it come down about four, five years back, gave the auxiliary network a report.”
The morning rain had stopped right on time. Taya examined the scarred hillside through her surveyor’s goggles.
“I’m anxious to log the time when the Dancing Floor was built, Cliff,” she said. “What have we got? A period of nearly fifteen years since evacuation, when Wingard was all but deserted.”
“Sure,” he replied. “Few clean-up operations, observation trips, from Armstrong, even from Earth. Oh, these Building Team fellows, they had all the time under the sun to fix up their artefact!”
“Is that what you call them? Building Teams?”
“BTAs,” he grinned. “Building Team Aliens. Just our name …”
He swung the sturdy vehicle round a curve in the road and fell silent. There was the Dancing Floor among its fringe of trees, doubly lit by the sun, for it was lined up with Wingard’s eastern row of reflectors on the central ridge to their left.
The road ran at a safe distance from the stones and there was a wooden shelter shed, a viewing place for the floor. Taya was glad when Cliff let her off with her equipment and went on with his routine patrol. He was carrying pig feed, among
other things; a family of wild pigs had been introduced illegally years ago and no-one had the heart to cull them out. They had the place to themselves, Cliff pointed out, except for the birds and the pollination insects. The settlers had had a few goats and chickens but there were no other “wild animals.”
She found a good place for her little four-foot tower which incorporated all the measuring and recording devices she preferred. Her first step, always, was to make trivid footage and some holok stills of the floor and its surroundings.
The Wingard floor was a little more compact than the one on Habitat Three and she knew, from scrapings taken by the earlier auxiliary team, that the composition of the stones had altered very slightly. More natural white sand, plus a yellow dye, coupled with the matrix gel, a weird semiorganic substance like some of the river-crystals found on Arkady. She took her readings, then walked out on to the floor.
Taya Schwartz had seen the “Giant Steps” on the moon, examined the blue caves on Itys. She had been among structures so weird and ingenious in the Australian desert that she had been loath to admit they were earthmade, in other words, a hoax.
As a young girl she had seen the wonders of Earth for the first time, had wept to see the works of humankind. The ruined cities of America, the temples of Mexico, and, beneath their protective air domes, Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and Abu Simbel saved from the flood waters.
She had flown to the Fire Islands, as a child; she had walked the white streets of the city of Rintoul, the Golden Net of the World. Her childhood friends and teachers had had huge fringed eyes, soft hooting voices, strange hands, with two proto-thumbs in apposition. Nothing alien was alien to her—rather she was an alien herself, born and bred on Torin, in the sign of the Sea Serpent. Now she stood deeply impressed by the beauty and mystery of the dancing floor.
She slid a palm-sized memory card from her tower—although she knew the patterns by now—and walked on to the floor. She stepped on to a stone in the center of the row of double stones which formed the northern border of the floor and began to move through the routine. She always experienced a great feeling of lightness and agility when she performed this exercise. There were longer leaps which she could not accomplish and it was believed, through contact with the Europa witnesses, that the dance had contained twirls and twists and figures for two or more dancers. There had been clear markings upon the stones of Habitat Three for several dance patterns.
Taya completed the simplest routine which brought her right across the shallow bowl of yellow stepping stones to the southern border, with a couple of side trips to east and west. She went slowly and completed the “dance” in eighteen minutes with one rest and a couple of repeats. By this time she was certain that she was being watched by two persons, two humans, standing in the trees not far from the shelter shed.
She walked carefully back to the center stone and looked directly at the watchers. One of the women turned and fled, running off along the road, “into the green.” Taya could see her bright shirt flying and the dust raised by her sandals.
The second woman came striding through the trees and the moving leaf
shadows. She was as tall as Taya herself, a good-looking fair woman in her fifties. They were both wearing practical zipsuits but the grey of the newcomer seemed a little better kept than Taya’s well-worn blue cupro. They met and shook hands in the center of the floor.
“Small system!” said the woman. “Vona Cropper, Dr Schwartz!”
Taya found that she did know the woman but where or when they had met eluded her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t quite …”
“Must have been twenty years ago—You delivered a paper at Humboldt County. I was on Earth leave.”
“I’m sorry to send your friend running off!” said Taya.
“Kirsty, Kirsty Allen, is very shy.”
They walked back to the tower and Taya found herself handing out trade goods again. A set of all the floor dance routines on palm cards. Then she dug into her satchel and they sat in the shelter shed and drank lemon lift. She felt a certain distrust that she could hardly explain—had the holding mission infected her with their separatist thoughts?
“You live at the Mill, then,” she said. “I asked Cliff Watson to request an interview. Any chance of that?”
“Oh we know the archive team are here,” said Vona, stalling. “We’re cybernauts. Not into face-to-face. Where you staying, Doctor?”
When Taya mentioned the Harmony Lodge the woman handed over a card of her own with lengthy site numbers.
“No need to call. Just leave a channel open.”
Taya began to talk about gardening, the range of vegetables they were able to grow down in the eastern valleys. Had they done well at the Old Mill with the new types of water storage crystals? No, they were only hearsay to the cybernauts—Taya opined that she might come up with a bag of the little devils. Worked well on the moon, in the planter domes. She slipped in her question about the meteorite over yonder on the ridge—had Vona or her friends seen it?
Vona laughed and went off into a graphic account of the night the meteorite came down. Put on a real show for them—a clear bright evening, only Ben saw it coming and called them out to the platform. Their whole place shook. Of course they put in a report through the oxper—time rushing on, was it five, six years ago now? And they went down next morning to take a look at the site and to check on the Dancing Floor, see that the impact hadn’t moved the stones any. All there was to see was the big burn mark over yonder.
So the Floor had been built some time earlier, persisted Taya gently, any chance of finding out the year? Any chance the Mill dwellers could have missed the building of the floor? Unlikely, said Vona, they often came this far down the valley. But the Die-Hards—she used the term with a grin—only came to settle in the Mill about ‘68, ’69, when the first holding mission came in. Before that they had been living on the western side of the Divide in one of the houses but when the new folks arrived Ben decided to move further away. The Mill was really a tourist lodge from the old days; they had it done up pretty good by now.
“And the Dancing Floor was already there,” said Taya.
“Just beautiful!” said Vona. “Of course we knew at once what it was. We didn’t put in any report. Just waited until the new oxper units began to patrol. One day they brought some of the Veterans down this way for a drive.”
Taya sighed deeply.
“I respect everyone’s need for privacy, even for a family life in solitude, here on Wingard. But there’s too much separatism. These new young families from Oparin, on Arkady. I feel as if the whole system was polarised, flying off into fragments … . I wish we could come together more.”
She felt that it was a feeble plea for togetherness; she was still holding back, out of habit, appeasing people to get her precious information. Vona Cropper looked at her with a kind of pity.
“There’s plenty of cybernauts out there. Place buzzes with talk, with ideas.”
They parted with a handshake; Vona Cropper went striding off down the dirt road, among the trees. Where Taya must not go. Hell, what would they do to her if she simply followed? Stood outside the phoney “Old Mill” shouting and pleading to speak to an old man and his two old girl-friends.
Taya went on with her measuring but the work had become drudgery. Something about the Die-Hard women, the one who ran off, the one who fronted up and talked to her so blandly, had aroused her mistrust. After a break she took the detector wand and went round the floor: the fragment and debris count was higher than she would have expected.
She walked east, towards the dark scar from the meteorite, and the wand picked up an unusually large piece of metal-coated ceramic. It had been buried almost thirty centimeters down and laid bare, she guessed, laughing, by a pig rooting for wild yams. Part of an electronic grid? She bagged it up carefully, controlling her excitement. Hunches and wishes were part of any research project; this could have come from the Dancing Floor team, the BTAs.
The trusty wand picked up the vibration of the trekker coming back along the road; she was glad to drive off with Cliff Watson. Nope, he hadn’t seen the two women, Vona and Kirsty; he left the information pinned on their door where they’d be sure to get it.
“What is it with all these mensch, Cliff?” she burst out. “Die-Hards? Separatists? Wingard has a positive ecology! It was designed by Win North and his team to hold a thousand interactive, living, sharing beings, humans and androids, visitors from other worlds … I remember he said once …”
Her voice betrayed her, she began to choke up from pure loneliness and longing for days gone by, but she brought it out: “Taya, I thought of that one as a way-station, a stopover on the way to Old Earth. Who can you think of from your planet, Torin, who might take the long journey, the way you did, as a young girl?”
“That’s great,” said Cliff. “I mean with the sharing and the way he included some of us poor wishers and mensch from other worlds. I’m telling you, Doc Schwartz, people think we have no feelings but it’s deep-time bad to be shunned the way we are here.”
They were nearing the pass which led to the Sun Kiln.
“Have we time to visit the memorial ground by the Kiln?” she asked.
“Why sure!” said Cliff. “We have no time problem, Doc. I can call in.”
In fact, she guessed, he had already done so; oxper could communicate head to head. The journey through the pass was another reminder of the fact that they were on an artefact, a constructed habitat. Then they were in the afternoon sun, boosted this time by the reflectors on the western slope. The Sun Kiln was a solid group of ceramic-faced cones, smokefree, with high-wide collectors reaching right up above the divide. It was not far from the “homestead” valley where the holding mission families lived.
Trash was burnt in the kiln and it was used as a crematorium. The names of settlers whose ashes had enriched the soil were engraved on stones in a low wall beside a lawn of low-growing grass, the type adapted for earth cemeteries. Only a few persons rated a plaque of hardwood or metal in the grass; there was a special new wall lower down for the veterans from the first holding mission. Right up near the kiln, on the slope, there was a large new plaque of wood substitute and anodised silver duralloy.
WINTHROP ARGENT NORTH IV
2443-2502, Christian Era Dating
His ashes enrich the soil of Wingard.
“How was this done Cliff?” she asked. “Was it a big official ceremony?”
“No, Mam,” he said. “Little shuttle flew in via the last company Go-Down on Mars. Couple of old Triad auxiliaries flew the shuttle and left a report in the dock. The habitat was deserted. Small party from Terra scattered the ashes and laid down the plaque.”
Taya stood with bowed head in the strange sunset light. She drew out her amulet with a yellow beryl from the mines of Tsagul and remembered when it had been given to her, the Only One, the human child, by Nantgeeb, the Great Diviner, the Maker of Engines, and by Taya Gbir, her daughter and Taya’s namesake. She held it, sending out a prayer to all the universe for coming together, for sharing, for all that Winthrop North himself had wished. And truth came, piercing her darkness like a strong beam of light … .
She concealed her excitement, if that was the right word, until she was back at Harmony. She cleaned up and changed and automatically went into the ordering of her research material, the most basic routines, before dinner. When Elliot and Carl beeped she left a message on her own system, deliberately showing her hand:
Wingard is a Way-Station for visitors in the true Pioneer spirit.
Taya walked along with the team, the kids, and it was Carl Curran who gave her another piece of the puzzle.
“Here’s the strip I took, back then with the film team, Doc,” he said. “The floor and the valley wall where the meteorite hit. I’d say the Dancing Floor had a narrow escape. Y’see that burnt area?”
“All greened over now,” said Taya, peering at the excellent clear strip in its viewer. “Can I get a copy of this, Carl?”
“Why, this one is for you, Doc!” he grinned. “I already made you this copy.”
The deep, blackened scar on the eastern wall reached down into the valley, seemed to come within fifty meters of the Dancing Floor. Now it had all been greened over.
“See anything of the folk from the Mill, Carl? The Die-Hards? Two women and a man, all older people?”
“Well,” he said, “we knew they were there but they were a real no-contact group.”
Elliot came in with a report on the Holding Mission projects: absolutely triple A. The Oparin families, Hansen/Wylie and the Jenners, were the best test-gardeners he had ever encountered. Dayne came to eat with them and they were a cheerful work group, winding up their plans, kidding around with the oxper, Phil and Tom, thinking of tomorrow’s picnic at the Floor.
Taya felt bad for holding back, for not being able to take them into her confidence at once. They were good kids, she knew it, the fault was in herself; she had a kind of generation loyalty. But there were two parts to her discovery, a coming together of two ideas, in the classic mode of scientific breakthrough. She passed Carl’s little film strip to Mike Mahoney.
“We’re in for some surprises at this picnic,” she said. “Take a look at this film of Carl’s, everyone.”
“What is it?” asked Mahoney, urgently.
“The Dancing Floor tests out as very new,” said Taya. “Suppose it is very new? Notice how close the burn marks for the so-called meteorite five years ago come in Carl’s strip. It has all been greened over now. The scar on the eastern wall is small — maybe it was minimised too. The team built the Dancing Floor and suffered mechanical failure at take off. That was a crash site.”
“Shee-it!” said Elliot, taking it up at once. “And you think they coulda done a cover-up that big?”
“Who we talking about here?” asked Dayne.
“The Die-Hards of course!” said Elliot.
“But, Holy Rome,” exclaimed Mahoney, keeping his voice down as they were all doing, “where would they put the debris, the — the remains? Could they just bury all that?”
Taya chuckled, finding another piece that fitted.
“Oh there’s a place right there,” she said. “The old tunnel on the eastern outer wall, not a long way from the crash site. The settlers used it when they patrolled the outer surface of Wingard.”
“It’s crazy,” said Dayne. “There are only three of them. Why not report the truth to an oxper team? They must know this would be a great find — for Archive, for all exo-biologists.”
“Their privacy is more important to them than anything else in the universe,” said Mahoney. “Die-Hards, pardon me, are plagged, insane — I’ve seen ’em before.”
“Or maybe they believe — their leader believes — he owns the whole game,” said Taya, sadly. “Wingard belongs to him … .”
Elliot March stared at her, the blood draining from his face.
“Doc!” he gave the smart kid’s cry of despair. “Why didn’t I think of that!”
She gave him a slight frown, enough to stop him blurting out her hypothesis.
“We won’t move on the tunnel or any other thing,” she said. “I’ll get them to the picnic.”
“How will you do that?” asked Mike Mahoney, who seemed to have figured things out.
“It’s called pressuring these days,” said Taya. “But it has a good old-fashioned name: blackmail.”
Back in at the Harmony lodge she found a gift outside her door: passionfruit wine from the Jenner family in a white ceramic bottle. She took a drink and looked out at the eastern valley system, silvered under the augmented light of the moon. There was an alteration in the sound of the systems and a voice said:
“I got your message.”
It was at last the voice of an old man. She felt a tightness in her chest and thought of the vacation in Maine, the warm nights in New Mexico.
“How are you doing?” she asked. “How is your health? You’re seventy years old now.”
“Which makes you seventy-three,” he said. “They got a shot of you, the girls. Looking good, dancing, for Goddess sake. Age is having trouble wearying you or custom staling —”
“Shut up, you old cheat!” she said fondly. “We know what came down and where you hid the remains. I’ll have a report or I’ll make a report.”
“I knew something like this would happen,” said Winthrop A. North. “What put you on to me?”
“I recalled your friend Vona a little better. I saw her at Humbolt as part of your PR team.” She said. “I make a guess that Kirsty ran off today because she is someone I know really well, maybe one of the secretaries, Christina? The man I knew took no chances and could have remained virile for a long time.”
“Lot of educated guessing …” grumbled the Resurrect.
“The oxper found me that databank, Weltfic,” she said, laughing, taking another mouthful of the passionfruit wine.
“I knew there was something in that name, Ben Gunn. You were leaving clues. Ben Gunn is an ex-pirate marooned on Treasure Island by Captain Flint. The heroic villain of that old-time blue-water romp is Long John Silver, a reference to your middle name.”
“Oh pirates are always good,” he said. “There was that trivid team, few years back — space pirates now.”
“Oh North,” she cried, “have you got any treasure for me, for Archive, for Rivez, truly dead, orbiting Ceres in a Snow White capsule, or for Hanna Klein, one hundred and three years old in a veterans home in Florida-on-Terra?”
“Okay,” he said. “The Die-Hards will come to the picnic. Don’t blow my cover, Taya, old lover. We have treasure beyond your wildest dreams … .”
The picnic had wound down a little, after the races and the games. Sprawled groups on the green, among the trees, on the southern edges of the dancing floor in perfectly adjusted weather. A party was seen approaching along the road from
the Mill; an old green trekker came on slowly with Vona Cropper striding ahead. She waved cheerily to the assembled company and went at once to the sound system, back of the floor and talked to Cliff Watson and Peter Miles who were working there.
“Greetings to the Archive team and all the inhabitants of Wingard.” She was smooth but very serious. “This artefact, the Dancing Floor was built almost six years ago: the vessel that carried the construction team crashed soon after take-off. We were able to give a little assistance — there was a blessing that came out of this sad time. This music was mixed and assembled from many sources by all those at the Old Mill.”
The music was slow, oddly melodious, like some of the neo-classical nature-wave concerts Taya had heard in California. The two women, Vona and Kirsty, took their places at the head of the Dancing Floor, on the row of larger stones where the dance began. The central stone was empty. Taya caught her breath and was drawn to her feet, with many of those watching. One of the children uttered a faint cry. The old man, “Ben Gunn,” came to the floor leading by the hand the one who would lead the dance.
The Dancer was very thin and slight, giving an impression of frailty. It was swathed in a loose white shirt, hiding, perhaps, the strange shape of the upper body; the strong muscular legs were its most “humanoid” feature. The Dancer, following every cadence of the music, raised a pair of long arms, with fringed extensions on the “hands.” It held gently to one side, its small, oval head, decorated with a quiff of pale hair. The Dancer led the dance, and the humans from the Mill followed, with an appropriate humility.
And in all those watching — all, all of them, Taya, was sure of it — there was a response so keen and sweet that it would remain with them forever. Here was a coming together, here was a curious grace, beauty so strange that it could break the heart.
Taya saw it all with an astonished recognition. There it was at last, the lightness, the agility, the travelling leaps, the patterns upon the stones. Yes, it was a solo performance — the folk from the mill repeated a few of the steps but remained in the background. Perhaps they were there, she guessed, to encourage the Dancer, to give comfort.
Then as the dance was done and as the music faded there was hand-clapping, muted cheers and sounds of praise from all those watching. The Dancer stood still in the centre of the floor and Kirsty, in her yellow shirt, ran out with a package which it held between its two hands. It came lightly across the floor to where Taya stood.
She scanned its shape, the pale mask of the face, the texture of skin and hair, the eyes, like small gemstone clusters. She took the package it offered: a woven kit-bag of trivid cassettes.
“Tay-ah.”
The voice was soft, whistling, issuing from a pale lipless mouth.
“Dancer!” she replied softly. “Thank you! We thank you! The Sol system thanks you and your comrades.”
The mission families and their children, the auxiliaries, the Archive team all took her tone so readily that she knew the Dancer had worked its magic upon them. They replied softly, with love. The floor and the trees and the distant slope of the eastwall echoed with their sighing “Thank you — thank you —”
Then the Dancer backed away, bowing, holding out its hands and it was seen to be tired, drained of energy. The two women from the Mill hurried out, gave it support and led it gently back towards the trekker. Only the old man remained, directly opposite Taya Schwartz. Out of pure devilment she raised her surveyor’s goggles and stared closely at the face of Winthrop A. North IV.
Someone had said or written, long ago, that people don’t so much change as they grow older, they grow more like themselves. Sure, he had aged, perhaps more than she would have expected, with his healthy life, upon Wingard. But the smile he gave her was a familiar smile. He raised a hand in something between a wave and a salute; Taya returned the gesture. The Dancing Floor glowed between them like a map of the years. Then he too turned aside and rejoined his family; the trekker drove away up the dirt road to the Old Mill.
The other inhabitants of Wingard were in a euphoric state, she heard a child, Dan Jenner, crying out: “We saw him dance! We saw him dance!” Taya went to the sound system of the oxper vehicle and did something that she hardly needed to do, with these cautious settlers, here upon Wingard.
“The presence of this being, the Dancer,” she said, “and the dance we saw belongs to Wingard. It is your secret, perhaps forever. We don’t want this precious survivor disturbed. I’ll evaluate the trivid cassettes taken by the family at the Old Mill and prepare some for you all to see, Ranger Jenner.”
She consulted briefly with the Archive team who were as happy as she had ever seen them. Knowledge, not publicity, was the mark of the good archivist. In time there might be sensational revelations of one kind or another, some things always got out, especially secrets of the Universe.
Taya drove back with the auxiliaries and sensed at once that there was something else, beside their usual cheerfulness and the excitement of the dance. She had asked them to keep a sharp look-out: their senses were keener than human senses.
“I didn’t expect this,” she said. “I believed that the people from the mill would tell us about the building of the floor and the crashed BTA vessel. I expected, maybe, a chance to examine the crashed vessel, hidden in the tunnel on the east wall.”
“We kept a sharp look-out, Doctor,” said Tom Scott. “Observed the survivor, the Dancer, you called him.”
“What is it, Tom?” she demanded. “What did you find out?”
She looked around and there were smiles on all their faces.
“Surprise for all us poor wishers,” said Cliff.
“Matter of the skin texture, the hair, oh everything,” said Peter Miles.
“The Dancer is something we don’t have a word for,” said Philip Grey. “Can’t say he’s an android ’cause that comes from a word for man, for human. Hope this won’t upset anyone. This survivor is the auxiliary of another species.”
“You’re sure of this?”
“We got through to that wisher, head to head, Doc,” said Tom Scott. “He has a weird range of data, had to fall back on images some of the time. He gave us names to call him.”
“Don’t tell me,” said Taya Schwartz. “Let this be your secret until I’ve evaluated the trivid material. I’m suffering from overload.”
They laughed softly.
“He sure was pleased that we existed,” said Cliff Watson. “The Mill folks had told him about oxper, androids, but he found it hard to believe.”