RAY WAS IN a very good mood when he got his first staff meeting under way at 0800 next morning. He’d breakfasted with the kids, Mary, and Kat. How anyone could stay glum around kids was a puzzle Ray didn’t want to solve. They attacked breakfast with an innocent abandon that left the table a wreck, the adults exhausted, and Ray swearing he wanted only one kid so he and Rita would never be outnumbered worse than one to two.
“Think those odds are good enough?” Kat asked, trying to persuade David he didn’t need five spoonsful of sugar on his cereal.
“Grandparents, I hear grandparents make great auxiliaries,” Mary put in. “Never had any myself, but it’s in all the books.”
“How about a squad of marines?” Ray suggested.
Mary shook her head, “Not fair to the troops, sir. A good officer never sets her troops up for defeat.”
Somehow the kids learned about the day’s mining project and wanted to go. Ray promised they could “if there’s transport for all of you,” which gave Mary an out. His security chief looked torn between “No way, José,” and “Whoopee.” The meal had been so absorbing that Ray was back to the HQ before he recalled the game the kids had been playing as they trooped in.
Mary had asked what kind of animal they’d like to be. Rose piped up she’d want to be a flower. Jon wanted to be a warm, woolly sheep. David had growled and made a leaping grab for Jon that left him shrieking, “I want to be a wolf.”
Ray had commended the lad for staying at the top of the food chain. Now the words and the memory of a dream came back to haunt him.
In the staff meeting, Barber was already seated to Ray’s right. Mary brought Cassie. “If I’m promoted to minister of mining or something, she’ll take security.” Doc Jerry sat next to Kat, no longer with murderous intentions toward the middie.
“Anything new concerning last night’s talk, Doc?” Ray asked.
Jerry rubbed grainy, sleepless eyes. “Nothing, nada, and zip. I’ll keep hammering on it today. Don’t know when I’ll make a breakthrough. Don’t know if I’d recognize one if it bit me.”
“You want the middies out of your hospital?”
“I don’t really need all that space. Besides, who knows when what they know will be something I need to know? I’ll work up local patients a bit more thoroughly today, see if I can get a local baseline. See how close the kids fit or scatter from it.”
“Will you need the kids?” Mary asked.
“Probably not. You got something special for them?”
“Take them for a walk in the country.”
“Just make sure they don’t leave breadcrumbs. Lets them find their way home every time. Or so I’m told.”
“Glad you’re not speaking from experience, doctor,” Ray quipped. “Looks like everyone has their day planned. Chief, I assume you have plenty to do.” Barber nodded. “Then let’s get busy doing it,” Ray said, starting to stand.
“How are you planning on spending your day?” Barber asked.
“Taking a nap. Relaxing in a nice, warm bath. Sitting at your elbow every minute of it figuring out what needs to be done.” The chief laughed at Ray’s opening wish, then nodded agreement as reality thrust up its ugly head.
There was a knock at the door. “Enter,” Barber said.
A yeoman did. “Sir, we’ve got some locals here to see you.”
Jeff poked his head in. “Annie’s with me. Her folks sent her out with lunch for all and a couple of kegs of beer,” then added quickly, “and as a kind of observer for the green side of things.” He paused, glanced over his shoulder. “Oh, and we picked up the padre. He’d just finished Mass as we went by the church. Wanted to see his grandson.”
Ray drummed his fingers on the table. “So the success or failure of our mining effort will have a planetwide audience.”
“Naw,” Jeff said, “just pretty much this continent.”
Was Mary up to a PR blitz while juggling a mine? Hardly seemed fair. “Looks like I ambassador today.”
Outside, Ray found two mules and loaded trailers. Annie was in a blue plaid dress, maybe a tad more revealing than the usual local, and perched on the seat of a large, one-horse cart. From its bed came wondrously good smells. There were also two kegs of her pop’s beer. Ray made a mental note to see that Mary had most of the work done before the kegs were tapped. The padre’s rig was a smaller version of Annie’s drawn by a shaggy pony. Rose took one look and begged to ride with the priest. David and Jon demanded rides in a mule. Mary loaded them both in the lead one, then climbed in herself. With the kids chattering nonstop, Ray seated himself in the second mule beside Cassie. He wanted a few words with the woman who might soon be his chief of security. Twenty marines, half drawn from the old miners, the other from Dumont’s squad of ex-street toughs, were the work team.
Unity intelligence had assured Ray that Earth’s Society for Humanity was press-ganging the dregs into their desperate defense. That was half true; Mary’s ex-miners got their draft notice with their downsizing pink slips. The street kids like Dumont woke up stoned and hung over to discover they’d signed themselves in—even those who couldn’t sign their own name. Ray’s mistake had been assuming that they were easy sweepings.
Mary and her miner friends had been madder than hell…and done something about it. Their last shift at the mines, they walked off with anything that wasn’t welded down. Ray found out too late that his proud 2nd Guard Brigade was facing a lot of stuff that wasn’t in the latest Jane’s All the Worlds’ Weapons Systems or in their database of hostile system signatures—and which they really should have avoided.
The rest was history, a history that he and Mary and Matt wrote in blood. They’d ended that war, to the shock of some and the relief of most. Now, Ray chuckled to himself, they were working for him and he’d get a chance to see what they could do for him. “I thought Mary’d bring more miners,” Ray said to Cassie. “What’s she doing with Dumont’s kids?”
“They’re in makee-learnee status. Mary promised Dumont she’d teach his kids the trade. What Mary promises, she does. This drill, each miner has a shadow. Dumont’s kids learned fast in the war. Expect they’ll learn even better today.”
On horseback, Jeff led them west. Mary followed, Cassie right behind. Annie and the padre’s carts fell in line. Miners and trainees hopped aboard mules and trailers. The padre offered Dumont a ride. The young tough looked like he’d rather be anywhere but beside the old man of the cloth. Apparently Ray had taken the seat the kid had selected for himself. With a nasty glance Cassie’s way, he took the priest’s offer.
“See how the kid gets along with the priest,” Cassie muttered, one eye on the rearview, the other keeping Mary’s trailer a proper distance ahead.
Ray leaned back, relaxing into the mule’s jerky motion, his back already starting to ache. The morning was pretty enough, high clouds marking off an otherwise passionately blue sky. A gentle breeze dried the sweat as fast as the sun drew it out of Ray, cooling him nicely. The hills were dotted with trees, Earth green as well as red, blue, and gray. They added a pleasant pattern for the eye and an intriguing scent to the air. Familiar and strange merging into a palette that excited and called forth hope in Ray. On a day like today, it was easy to forget someone had tried to knife him. And someone else may have tried to burn Refuge’s central archives. Back to business. “Cassie, you got any problem taking over security if I put Mary in charge of running the base and feeding the manufacturing?”
“You do what the good Lord calls you to,” the woman said.
Right, Cassie had been the one Mary had to pry out of a street mission or something back home after her leave. “Reverend Jonah might be a problem.”
“I think I can get along with the rev, Colonel. He’s an easy man to understand, if you know what he’s saying. Our Blessed Savior calls us to love one another. Sometimes that’s hard to understand for those without faith.” Cassie turned to Ray, looked him straight in the eye. “Just cause we’re calling you to repent don’t mean we don’t love you.”
“Cassie, somebody tried to knife me outside the Residence.”
“Mary told me.” Cassie’s eyes were back on the trailer ahead of her. “She also told me there’re a lot of folks unhappy with the way things are. Greens, Havenites down south. Hell, Jeff’s sister seems to want everything we’ve got, and is none too happy with you holding back on her. Think she might have decided that the embassy would be better off with a new ambassador?”
“Everything’s possible,” Ray agreed.
“Soon as something comes up, the nonbelievers want to blame it on the believers. You know, I heard tell, back on Earth, some Roman emperor wanted to get some urban development going at his capital, so he started a fire. Then the fire got out of hand. Burned a lot more than he expected, Started blaming it on the believers. Sounds just like a politician. Nero was his name, or something like that. He was supposed to have fiddled while the city burned. Don’t politicians ever change?”
Ray shrugged. He’d burned a few politicians. Now he was one, doing what he could to change the breed. “I make you chief of security and you’ll be a politician, too,” Ray pointed out.
“Hum,” was her only answer.
Nikki joined some workers headed for the east fields. She didn’t want to see Daga today, not once she found out about Jeff and Annie and the starfolks mining. It did her no good.
“Nikki, we need you for a wall walk.” Daga’s voice rang cheerful, as usual. Behind her was Jean Jock. Not nearly enough behind him was Sean. Walking a wall was usually a two-person job, one on each side, silently picking up stones the frost and wind had knocked from the wall over the winter months. Sean was a good one for wall walks. He had the muscles to make picking up stones easy. In the usual silence, you couldn’t say something to make him mad. Four people for a wall walk was a lot. Then it dawned on Nikki, maybe this wasn’t about walking a wall at all, but seeing what Annie and Jeff were up to.
Nikki was not interested, but a grandmother took her elbow and shooed her off to repair the wall. It was something the old left to the young. Nikki went where she was shooed.
Ray was glad Mary stopped in the shade of a great oak tree. He hobbled over to Annie’s cart; she, busy unloading food, was quickly surrounded by three short helpers. The priest joined and kept the kids so distracted they hardly noticed when Mary sent her detachments off.
Jeff was soon back from checking the mineral content of the stream flowing over the slide’s impromptu dam. “Mary was right. That stream’s rich, but not nearly as much here as lower down. Most of the good stuff is coming off that one,” he pointed, hat in hand to shade his eyes from the sun, at the hill Mary had chosen. “Guess I better find her.”
“Mary,” Ray said, tapping his commlink, “Jeff says you picked the right target. Beer’s on him,” Ray chuckled.
“Figured,” Mary answered.
“All of it!” Cassie yelped on net as Annie did beside Ray.
“I can afford it,” Jeff agreed. “We get what you say is in that hill and I’ll buy ’em a brewery.”
“I heard that!” Cassie and Dumont shouted together on net.
“We’ll see,” Ray said, and clicked his commlink off.
“Neat gadget you’ve got there,” Jeff said, coming over.
“One of many,” Ray agreed.
“What’s Mary gonna do?” little David piped up.
“Find us a copper nugget, big as your hand,” Jon answered.
“Yeah, but how?” Rose asked softly.
“Me, too,” Annie added. “How?”
Ray settled himself down on the ground, found a comfortable position for both legs, then slaved his pocket reader to his commlink and tied it in to Mary’s central station. It showed a 3-D view of the hill they were tapping. The kids oohed and aahed as they collected themselves where they could look over Ray’s shoulder. Even Jeff lifted an eyebrow. “If Mary’s going to take the mountain’s copper nicely, she has to get to know the mountain very well,” Ray told Annie.
Glancing around, she put down a basket of bread and came to stand behind the kids, rather close to Jeff. The priest had gone off; Ray had last seen him trailing Dumont up the hill. A shadow for a shadow? Ray wondered. With no chaperon in sight, Annie slid closer to Jeff. He slipped an arm around her waist.
“What’s that?” Jon asked as the air reverberated with a low thump and the ground shook. The map of the hill in Ray’s hand began to fill with colored lines a moment later.
“One of Mary’s big machines just sent shock and sound waves through the hill,” Ray started, then saw in the faces of his young audience that he was missing them. “Mary made some noises, and now she’s listening for the echos in the mountain. Did you ever make an echo?”
David and Jon nodded. Rose shook her head, “But I saw people make them on TV.”
“Good,” Ray agreed.
“Some places make echoes. Some don’t,” Jon noted.
“By listening with machines with very big ears, Mary can tell things about the mountain by where it does and doesn’t make echoes.” Jeff told the kids, and asked Ray in the same line.
There were more thumps, more lines appeared on the viewer. “Right, the noise and echoes tell Mary where the mountain is solid and where there are very tiny caves in it that her nanominers can use.”
“They’re really small machines,” David told the adults. “Smaller than my baby brother,” Jon said. “But they’ll get copper and all sorts of things out of the mountain,” Rose finished. After five minutes of thumps, the map looked filled in. Ray waited, expecting what would come next.
Five straight red lines appeared. “Mary will drill some holes where you see the red lines. There’re not a lot of cracks in those areas. She’ll set off small explosives to create more cracks,” Ray finished with a glance at Annie. “I imagine they’ll do the drilling where there’s no grass.”
“I don’t expect anyone thinks she’ll not harm a few blades of grass,” Annie said practically.
“Oh, no,” all three disagreed. “Mary said she wouldn’t hurt a single blade,” Rose said. “She won’t,” David assured them.
Jeff could not suppress a smirk. “Maybe we can get these kids to make your report to the Greens?” Annie deftly turned herself out of the arm he had around her waist, swatted him with her apron, and went back to unloading her wagon. Jeff followed, mouthing apologies Ray suspected were as ancient as language.
“Oh, look—one of the red lines is turning yellow.” Jon’s announcement kept the youngsters focused on what they considered the best show. Ray checked; yes, the drilling had started. He surveyed the hill and spotted a dust plume rising from behind a mixed bunch of green and blue trees. More excited oohs were his reward for pointing it out to the kids. Jeff also must have been successful. He returned with his reward, a large bucket of fried potato wedges. Annie followed with a much lighter handful of condiment. For the next half hour Ray divided his attention among three dramas: Mary’s mountain preparation, the kids’ reactions, and Annie’s courtship. All were amusing.
“Fire in the hole. Fire in the hole,” echoed over the hill. “Stand clear of trees and anything else that might take it in its mind to fall on you,” Cassie announced dryly on net.
Ray suggested the kids count off the seconds until the explosions. They were at twenty, after a bit of an argument about what came after ten, when the ground trembled beneath their feet for a long second, then went back to being terra firma. The children jumped, startled when the explosion came, then launched into a dance. “Mary said she wouldn’t knock even us down. And she didn’t,” they chortled.
“What’s ‘fire in the hole’ mean?” Nikki asked.
Daga shook her head. The others just stared back dumbly. Then the earth started doing a jig where they hid, watching. Nikki had not understood a thing of what was going on around them, and was growing more and more scared with each passing minute.
The thumps had been the first to jar Nikki’s nerves, and they were none too good after hiking out here, listening to Jean Jock and Sean ramble on about the heads they’d knock to keep the fields their own. Every time Daga opened her mouth, Nikki shushed her, scared her friend would tell the others about how she could make mountains disappear. Daga didn’t much care for Nikki’s shushing, and took to swatting Nikki even before she opened her mouth.
Of course, Daga never said anything about the box.
It wasn’t just the boys who bothered Nikki. Three strangers, familiar to the others, joined them. Wrapped in hooded cloaks that must have been horribly hot, they said not a word. The woman seemed to be the leader; at least she set the course, and the two men followed. Even Sean deferred to her. Daga said nothing when Nikki asked who they were.
When Nikki pointed but that her sister Annie was parking Da’s rig under a great oak, and they must be where they were going, the three had stopped in the shadow of a Popsicle tree. Nikki listened to the wind whistle through the long, hollow sticks that gave the tree its name and waited for someone to say something. The three just stood, watching the starfolks as they disbursed over the next hill. The woman pointed and the three, closely followed by Nikki and the locals, silently took up their observation post in a shallow depression beneath a pine tree.
There they waited.
The thumps were the first things to get their attention. “Like they’ve got a giant over there, pounding around on the mountain,” Daga joked. The two locals laughed as they usually did when Daga said outrageous things. The woman stranger turned to Daga, seeming to seriously consider her ridiculous comment, then went back to observing.
Nobody had an answer when Nikki asked, “Well, what is it?”
Then they let steam out of the mountain. At least that was what Sean said it looked like. He’d been around when Jeff’s brother Mark had been prospecting in these hills. He’d seen the steam-driven hammers they brought in to drill holes and stuff. “They’d get a roaring fire going under this big cylinder, and have big, thick hoses leading off from it, with steam hissing and sizzling out of them wherever it could. I saw a guy get boiled just for standing too near one,” Sean insisted.
“Go long with ya,” Daga insisted.
“Maybe they’re setting up a thing, like you know?” Nikki whispered to Daga.
“Why would they be doing all this if they had something like, you know?”
“Maybe they want to aim it right,” Nikki shot Daga the dirtiest look she could manage.
“What are you girls babbling about?” Jean Jock wanted to know. The woman stranger flashed Nikki a look that chilled her.
“Nothing,” Daga answered. “Nothing at all,” she said, shooting Nikki back just as mean a look. “They don’t have anything like it,” Daga whispered.
“You hope,” Nikki said, looking purposely over her shoulder, as if to see a bunch of marines setting up a hill leveler behind them. Daga looked, too.
“See, nothing.”
“They have a ship up in the sky,” Nikki reminded Daga, almost hoping something would go wrong, something would show her friend there were things to be afraid of.
“What are you two girls gabbing about?” This time it was Sean. He wouldn’t be put off with a “nothing.”
Then the earth started dancing.
Nikki and Daga took off running, the young men right behind them. Even the strangers hauled up their cloaks and hoofed it like mad. Nikki swore she wouldn’t stop running until she got back to the fields. If they wanted to stop her, they’d have to kick her feet out from under her, like the boys sometimes did in football when the umpire wasn’t looking.
“Who are they?” David asked, stopping his dance and pointing to a bluff just across the stream. Ray looked where David pointed, catching sight of dull-colored clothes just as they disappeared over the hill.
“Some other Green observers,” Jeff suggested, glancing at Annie. She shrugged.
Ray scratched his chin; the show hadn’t really begun. Maybe he should send a marine to round them up, bring them down here, where he could make sure they got the full story. He glanced at Annie. “Should I get them back?”
Annie laughed. “I doubt you could catch them, from the flash of their heels as they headed over that hill.”
Ray turned back to his reader. New lines appeared on it. Black lines. Ray told the reader to rotate the picture. Soon they were viewing it from a bird’s perspective. “Those are the insertion points, pretty evenly spaced across the hill. The miners will pour the nanos down those holes, and drain them out the bottom of the mountain.”
“How?” David asked. “I know Mary told us last night, but I still don’t get how the little miners know where Mary wants them to go once they have a load of stuff.”
“Gravity is part of it,” Ray tried to explain. “They know to go downhill, just like water knows to flow downhill.”
“Water doesn’t know anything,” Rose said with the sophistication of her city education.
“Who says water doesn’t know to go downhill? It always does,” David insisted.
Ray’s respect for anyone who could teach children was rapidly climbing. Now if he could just find someone to respect. Jeff knelt between David and Rose. “What we’re trying to say is that gravity pulls everything down, water, a leaf, you, Rose, when you hopped off the priest’s cart, the nanos in the hill. I imagine she’s also told the nanos that she wants then to head for the east side of the hill.” He glanced at Ray, who nodded solemn agreement. “Not all the nanos will make it to the tunnel that Mary digs to drain them out. What’s her normal attrition? I mean, how many does she normally lose?”
Ray grinned as even Jeff had trouble finding small words for little ears. “Sometimes as few as one in a hundred.”
Jeff whistled low. “That good. I’ve read science articles from the Landers’ time. They talked about that kind of stuff in the future. I wondered if you ever got it.”
“It’s working up there right now,” Ray assured him.
David’s “wow” was quickly echoed by Rose and Jon.
Mary was bringing the crew down off the mountain. They collected at the base, where Mary personally supervised the drilling of three twenty-centimeter conduits into the mountain—one directly in, the others at thirty-degree angles to the right or left. Once those main taps were almost halfway through the mountain, Mary turned loose remote drillers—ferrets, she called them—to drill ten- or twenty-millimeter holes in a wider pattern.
Ray scowled at the ferrets. They, and the sensors and laser designators Mary had used to defend her pass, were what had put Ray flat on his back by the end of the battle. Live and learn, old man, live and learn. While the ferrets were busy at work, Mary called it a morning and brought the work crew back to camp.
“Chow ready?” she called.
“Waiting for you!” Annie shouted.
“We have stew,” Annie announced as the women and men trooped up to the tree. “We have a turkey sliced thin for what we call sandwiches. And me mother personally prepared chicken to her family’s special southern fried recipe. Potato salad goes great with that, but we also have them fried, baked, and mashed.” Apparently no dinner here was complete without potatoes. Most of the crew was in, but not all. Ray watched two figures, locked in energetic conversation, slowly follow the rest. Dumont and the padre, if Ray made them out. The priest’s gestures were slow, measured. Dumont’s gesticulation was wild, including a rapid series of shaken fists at the blue sky. As they approached camp, their talk became lower, if no less animated.
Ray did not wonder at the topic. Dumont was Mary’s murderer. Without a moment’s hesitation, he had followed an admiral’s order to shoot Sheffield’s gunnery officer, an illegal order if Ray had ever heard of one. The only mitigation Mary could offer for her sergeant was that their basic training had been abbreviated, stripped of anything not relating to how they might kill the enemy. Ray couldn’t throw too many stones Humanity’s way; Unity had pulled some pretty raw and illegal things out of the shadows before he’d succeeded in putting it out of business. And late at night, Ray sometimes didn’t feel all that good about what he’d done, either. Maybe he could spend some time with the little padre himself.
Jeff offered Ray a hand up; he took it. Mary met them with a question. “Southern fried chicken—south of what?”
Annie shrugged. “South of the Covenanters, I guess.”
Whatever it was south of, the north had lost out. Jeff helped Annie tap a keg. “One glass, and a small one at that!” Mary shouted. “We got work ahead of us and I’ll have none of my good metal going back into the ground because you had to belch.” That brought good-natured grumbling that turned to happy noises when Mary promised no limits once the day’s work was done.
The kids ate like they’d never eaten before, then dashed off to see what was happening. Mary assured Ray that the gear was both kid-proof and unable to hurt them. David was back in a few minutes, announcing that they had found a pond, and could they go swimming? Jeff and Annie galloped off after the kids to make sure they hadn’t gone in alone. Mary assured David that the day was hot and everyone would want to swim later, but only after all the work was done.
Jon and Rose came dashing back ahead of their elders dispatched to corral them. “We found a cave. Can we explore it?”
Mary shook her head. “Caves can be dangerous. There might be a bear hiding in the back.”
“What’s a bear?” Rose asked.
“Something big and hairy that eats little girls who ask too many questions,” Jeff said. Having finally caught up, he grabbed Rose from behind and whirled her over his shoulder as she shrieked and giggled.
“It’s not really a cave,” Annie explained. “Just a bit of an overhang left from the landslide that dammed the stream.”
“I’ll look at it later,” Mary said. The kids found that half promise acceptable. After lunch they joined the workers as they trooped down to the minehead to see what had happened while they ate. A trickle of muddy water was flowing out of all three tap pipes, gathering in a catch basin that one of the trailers had turned out to be.
“A lot of work for dirty well water.” Jeff raised an eyebrow to Mary.
She only grinned. “Jeff, you come over here and throw the switch yourself. Nanos are programmed to hold on to their load until we tell them to let go. Why don’t you do that yourself.”
Jeff’s eyes lit up until Mary lifted a flap and he found himself facing a massive keyboard. “What do I do?” he squeaked.
“Don’t worry. One of the kids could do it.” Which got shouts of “Me! Me! Me!” from all three. Annie held them off while Mary walked Jeff through a dozen or so keystrokes. Then Jeff, Mary, and Annie held the kids up to watch as the muddy water in the tank changed. Multicolored sand precipitated to the bottom, and an oily film collected at each corner of the tank where vents drew them off. The resulting water was crystal clear.
“I’m thirsty. Can I have a drink?” Jon asked.
“Not of this.” Mary was quick to pull back a hand dipping into the water. “I’ll want to run it through the filters several times to make sure we get all the nanos out. You wouldn’t want to drink a nano, would you?”
“Would it take rocks out of me?” David asked.
“Of course,” Jon cut in. “The rocks in your head.”
David screwed up his face in surprisingly deep thought at that cut. “I wouldn’t mind, if it would take my headaches with it.” Caught off guard, even Jon agreed with David.
“If only it was that easy,” Annie whispered.
For the first time that day, Ray thought about the doctor’s report of last night. If it was just something in their heads, maybe they could come up with a solution that easy. After all, Ray had all that industrial capability waiting to go to work. Maybe they could build a full medical center.
After that, watching the nanos’ work was about as interesting as watching paint dry. Mary ran a quick analysis; she already had a trend curve of time vs. expected recovered nanos. Her results were a tad below her optimum, but every planet was a bit different, she told all.
“Can we go swimming now?” David pleaded.
Mary shrugged. “All the work is done. It’s just a matter of waiting. Why not?”
Jeff shook his head in disbelief. “No shoveling. No backbreaking work. No moving mountains to stripped soil, leave mud holes all over. That’s not work!”
“I’ll take it any day,” Annie said. “So will me ma.”
“Well, sonny boy,” Mary winked at the two, “try that without my gear and know-how. It’s easy to lose nanos, and they are not cheap to replace. People who know what they’re doing and have the right gear can make the hardest jobs look easy.”
Jeff was properly chastised. “How expensive is your gear? No. Can you make that stuff in your factory?”
Ray shook his head. “Nanos are built up one atom at a time. We didn’t bring that technology. Probably would take us a couple of years to make the tools that made the stuff to make the gizmos to make them.” Ray paused to see if Jeff had followed him.
“I see. We lost some of the Landers’ tech, like fusion plants and radios. We had to concentrate on growing crops to feed us. Prioritize or die.”
“You got it. We could make these things in our own lifetime if we had to. Our factory is multitasking.”
“But should we?” Annie asked.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” Ray said as Cassie brought up a mule to give him a lift to the swimming hole. The pond was a good kilometer across and two or three long. On the right side—the side against the hill Mary was mining—the trees were undisturbed, a tall and multicolored stand of ancient growth, species of many different origins sharing the space in peace. Their long shadows threw cooling shade over the pond. The left side was a different story. A yellow gash showed where earth and plants had lost their battle against gravity, probably aided and abetted by rain and wind. Thick trunks had been washed into the water flow, helping to build the dam that created the pond. Other downed logs, surrounded by brush, were pushing up new life. Ray tried to estimate which of the four potential evolutionary tracts was winning, but he wasn’t sure which plants represented which of the three animals he’d been shown. Overall it looked like an even mix, with Earth green taking about a quarter.
Ray’s head began to throb, probably the glare of the sun on the lake. He looked for a place in the shade. Work clothes were coming off, tops, bottoms. The miners and street kids had no regard for nudity. Annie started backpedaling.
“What’s the matter, you never been skinny-dipping?” Jeff asked, shirt off, shoes coming off.
“Yes, with girls.” Annie was still backing.
“And the boys never came around?” Jeff asked slyly.
“No, but if they did, we made it clear to ’em they were not welcome.”
“And they listened!”
“Young women have ways of making it very clear to even very dumb boys what they want, Jeff. I don’t want this. I’m going back to the wagon.”
“Annie, there’s no one here,” Jeff pleaded.
“No one?”
“Well, from Hazel Dell.”
“Father Joseph is here.”
“He’s off talking to one of the marines.”
“He’ll be back. I won’t be.” She headed back to camp.
Jeff tried to follow. One shoe off, he stepped on a rock, ended up hopping for a few steps, then fell. “Annie, help!”
Ray suspected he’d get no quiet on the shady side of the lake. As a senior officer, he also didn’t want to be a witness to anything he couldn’t look the other way fast enough to avoid. The damn canes made that difficult. He limped for the other side. Shouts and laughter came from the lake; someone was being dunked. Ray wished Rita was here and they had the lake to themselves. He could wish for a lot of things. What he had was what he had.
His headache was worse. Ahead, he could hear the chatter of young voices. Right, the kids had found a cave, or overhang, or something. Ray chuckled; they’d headed for it before a swim. He’d never understand people half his size, no matter how many kids he and Rita had. There was a trail leading up the side of the erosion. Broken twigs and bent back limbs showed where the kids had passed.
At one point he almost stopped. It was crazy for a grown man on canes to chase after kids, especially with a headache coming on. However, on second review, his headache was receding, and even his backache was less than he’d expect after a day like today. And someone had to check on the kids. The swimming party was fully engaged at the moment; it looked like he was delegated the children. It might be good practice.
He found the overhang. Childish voices came from its deep shadows. There was a turn in there; it was a cave. “David, Jon, Rose!” Ray called out. The children suddenly got quiet. “Come out, kids. Are you sure there’s not a bear in there?” Ray had no idea what might live in a cave on a planet with multiple evolutionary tracks. The kids didn’t make a peep.
Ray was tired. He’d walked more in the past few minutes than Rita usually made him do on the exercise machine back home. He ought to sit down and rest. Movement drew his eye to the cave. Probably just a reflection of the sun off the water below. The swimmers were creating quite a few waves. Ray wondered what in there was keeping the kids so quiet. Probably was cooler; it sure was hot out here. He started in, careful to get his canes in place before risking each step.
The cave turned ninety, degrees just past the overhang. The walls looked smooth. Ray studied the ceiling; it was four meters up and even. Considering how Mary had knocked around the next hill over, anything that wanted to fall was down already. There weren’t any loose rocks around his canes. If both hands hadn’t been busy with sticks, Ray might have scratched his chin in thought. The passage made another ninety-degree change in direction, turning deeper into the ravaged hill. Ray doubted there would be enough light for him to hobble safely. “Kids, I really can’t go much farther. You’re going to have to come out.”
He reached the turn. The children huddled around a column reaching from floor to ceiling, each facing a side. Touching it with both hands, they leaned forward, forehead resting against the stone. The side facing Ray pulsed in an inviting, blue luminosity. Without thought, canes and feet covered the distance to the shaft. Even as part of him was drawn, moth-like, part of him stood back. Is this safe? What’s drawing me? Are the kids in danger? What’s happening?
Ray didn’t know. Reaching out, he touched the column. It was surprisingly warm, like Rita’s body as she lay in the sun. Good memories flooded Ray, leaving him awash in happiness. Comfortable reflections washed through his mind’s eye, relaxing him as he rested his forehead upon the column.
Then the memories changed. Recollections of the Academy and early schools spun through his mind, followed by images of structures shooting gracefully into the sky. Waterfalls and giant purple trees marked off the spaces between high-reaching spires. Ray knew, without doubt, that this was a place of knowledge, a center of learning. The view changed. The buildings still reached for the sky, but the towers were smaller, more sized to the individual. Trees still grew, and water burbled over and down a fountain. Older heads lived here, people who found time to reflect, to grow wise. This was a home for grandparents.
And the picture in Ray’s mind changed again. The towers this time were more subdued, chunky. There were places to climb, to reach out, to tumble down without being hurt more than young bodies needed for their learning. Small pools of water collected here and there where little hands might splash and play without risk. The house enclosed the grass, water, trees, not so much in walls as in a protective womb. A home to raise children in.
Now the pictures flashed before Ray faster and faster, but leaving behind a clear feeling of understanding. That was where the people gathered to rule themselves. Here was where they went to celebrate birth, death, hope.
The architecture changed. Now it was more grounded in the earth. Where one reached for the sky, this cherished stone and soil, luxuriating in the darkness of the cave. Again, Ray saw the place for learning, for the wise and for the young, for joy and sorrow and expectation.
And again change came over what Ray saw. The dispassionate part of him wondered which of these architectures went with which evolutionary line Kat had shown him, for surely he was seeing the flowering of those species, the best they had grown into. The column was their testament. The relic that proclaimed they had passed this way. Was it a welcome to those who came after them, or a declaration to humanity to stay away? While the soldier in Ray couldn’t help asking those questions, that part of him who felt more than saw what they presented knew the answer even as he asked it. This was their hello. We’re here. We are like you. Come and join us. Be one with us.
Ray remembered the dream. “We are all one, under the skin of our differences,” the Gardener said. Now he stood before Ray, smiling, even as more and more scenes from different worlds played through Ray’s mind. He saw worlds with one sun, two suns, three. Worlds where gravity was low and whirligigs flew with gentle grace. Worlds where everything was heavy and life inched its way more carefully than he did on canes.
The Gardener nodded. “They’ve all been here. Come to smell my flowers, to rest beneath my trees. Here they took a moment’s respite from their cares and struggles. Those of the Three came here, and I showed them what nature could be, left to herself.” The Gardener smiled, but there was a gash over his eye. The arm that had swept possessively to take in all that Ray had seen, now ended above the elbow. The Gardener didn’t seem to notice.
“This is a place where grown-ups played, where they came to discover again how to be small, and open and ready to learn. I’m only here to take care of the grounds. But they are beautiful, untouched grounds.” As Ray listened, the voice sputtered. The Gardener was missing a leg. Splotches appeared on his skin.
He glanced down. “Never had this happen, not in all these years. Don’t know why.” He looked up, captured Ray’s eyes with his own. “I’ve taken care of what I can. There’s nothing more I can do. Seems there’s less every moment. Remember my lesson.”
“Yes,” Ray said…to an empty cave. The column was cool to the touch now. The children whimpered softly.
“What happened to the nice old man?” Rose asked. “He reminded me of Momma’s grandfather.”
“He reminded me of someone, too. I think we’d better go.” Ray tried to herd the children for the exit.
“What happened to the old man?” Jon repeated.
“I don’t know,” Ray answered. “Come, kids, let’s go. Mary’s been shaking up the hills. It could be dangerous.”
The hairs on the back of Ray’s neck were up; fear flooded his gut. Something was wrong here. Ray wanted to run.
“He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to us,” David insisted.
Ray hobbled for the entrance. “Come with me, kids.”
They did as they were told. Once in the light, Ray collapsed; the children huddled around him. Ray had no words to explain the depths of his fear. Unable to frame the questions, that failure did not shake him of his certainty that they were important. The sun brought back warmth. The laughs and shouts from the swimmers brought back hope. The children withdrew a fraction of an inch into themselves.
“I will miss him,” Rose whispered.
“We all will,” Ray assured her. Ray was a hardheaded, rational man, a commander of line beast. He feared no monster lurking under his bed. He paid attention to what was real, what he could touch, measure, shoot. So why was he telling a little girl that he would miss a phantom of his dreams?
Because I will.