Forge of the Elders, page 23
To hear Deshovich speak, thought Admiral Ghasil Mubakkir, was a sensual delight. He had a way of spacing words, pausing at unexpected intervals, that compelled. His voice was deep, with a hint of velvet which massaged and reassured, although it could turn cold and toneless when that served. Now he indicated the opposite bulkhead where a chair could be unfolded. He occupied another which would have been hideously uncomfortable beneath his great mass under ordinary circumstances. With an inward sigh, Mubakkir reflected that these were hardly ordinary circumstances. He dropped an unreturned salute and attempted to relax from the reflexive military posture he'd assumed on knocking at the door of the one real passenger accommodation inboard the Beria, the cabin which, by rights, should have been his own.
"No vodka, thank you, sir."
The cabin wasn't spacious, nor particularly cramped. Deshovich appeared to fill it (the admiral didn't have to guess his mass at two hundred kilos, it was on the manifest), leaving room for two chairs, a small table on which a bottle stood with two glasses, and the cot, covered by a rumpled quilt, which had served as an acceleration couch during a liftoff that must have seemed unendurable to the man.
Mubakkir conspicuously kept his gaze from lingering over a curvaceous form the bedclothes failed to conceal, apparently still fast asleep. He unfolded a chair because it was easier than refusing and sat, trying not to crease his snow-white uniform trousers. He was known throughout the services for remaining crisp and spotless even in the heat of maneuvers where others found themselves soot-blackened, oil-stained, and streaked with sweat. It set an example for subordinates who whispered that if the Old Man were ever wounded in battle, he'd somehow manage to bleed neatly.
"I'm on duty."
The fact was that he never availed himself of luxuries within easy reach of his rank. As a rising young Third World officer in the corrupt navy of a decaying world power, it had given him an edge on the competition. It had nothing to do with his religious background. Mubakkir had one God, Marx, and at the moment Deshovich was His prophet. The admiral was no saint; he merely felt he was lucky that his one vice, in which he indulged himself fully, was also his solemn obligation: command.
"Don't mind if I do," Deshovich laughed heartily. Despite his great size, he conveyed an impression of fastidious dexterity. His thick hair and gray-shot beard were trimmed. His black silk pajama suit was cut as nicely as the admiral's uniform. "Until my own duty recommences, I'm simply cargo," he laid a hand across his middle, "bereft that I won't experience the weightlessness I was rather looking forward to. Well, leaving nine tenths of Earth's gravity behind represents considerable relief in itself. It also serves to keep things—bottles, glasses, one's skeletal calcium—in their places. I'm grateful to our Bureau of Suppressed Technologies that, instead of the better part of a year, the voyage will last only days. To think that America might have had cold fusion decades ago!"
"It gored too many well-fed oxen," Mubakkir agreed, "petrol cartels and power collectives, so they buried it and discredited its discoverers."
"So much for free enterprise!" The Banker laughed again. "Is this what gravity will be like when we arrive? Tell me, Comrade Admiral, what have you learned of events at our destination?"
Mubakkir watched him pour four fingers of Stolichnaya, sprinkling black pepper over the liquid surface. The gesture was pure affectation, he was too young to have lived through the harsh times when it was needed to counter the poisons of inept distillery, but it served a purpose, just like the admiral's sparkling uniforms, warning underlings and rivals that, despite generations of détente, glasnost, and perestroika, Deshovich's guiding spirit, summonable at need, was that of a Djugashvili.
"We lack detail, sir. According to reports from the mission commander, an Aerospace brigadier named Gutierrez, the interplanetary expedition of the American Soviet Socialist Republic arrived at the asteroid 5023 Eris less than a week ago and has already suffered five fatalities in an original complement of only forty-two. A Russian national on loan from Moscow University appears to have been murdered."
Deshovich took a sip of vodka, puffed his cigar only to find that it had gone out, relit it, and took another drink. "Careless of Gutierrez. Still, I suppose these things are to be expected under the circumstances . . ."
"Yes, sir: humans in space for the first time in half a century, in three refitted eighty-year-old NASA shuttles . . ."
"Honorable John McCain, Honorable Orrin Hatch, and Honorable Robert Dole, for three pioneers of the American Sovietization." He shook his head. "No, Admiral, I meant the property claim being made by these aliens—"
"Not aliens, sir." Mubakkir shifted on his chair uneasily. "Molluscs, referred to politely as `the Elders,' from another version of Earth, who came to the asteroid across lines of alternative probability. Imagine a long-tentacled squid in an automobile-sized snail shell—"
"You imagine it!" Deshovich raised a hand, palm out. "I haven't had breakfast yet."
Mubakkir blinked. "5023 Eris is carbonaceous chondrite, sir, promising for settlement. The Elders have equipped it with an atmosphere under a sort of canopy supported by giant treelike plants. The reports mention thick vegetation and abundant moisture."
"The sort of thing giant snails might like," Deshovich grunted.
"Yes, sir. In any case, one of them was killed, too, on illegal orders from the American KGB, by a Marine major later breveted to full colonel in our KGB, to investigate the very murder she'd committed!"
Deshovich shook his head, half amused, half disgusted. "I've spoken with Intelligence about that. Some of them are now searching the Tunguska region of Siberia for pieces of an alien spacecraft which may have exploded there in 1908."
Mubakkir suppressed a rueful grin. Elsewhere, he knew, heads had rolled rather more dramatically for issuing that illegal order. One purpose of this mission was to mend fences with these living fossils who, despite a quaint, incomprehensible ethical philosophy, had brought along thermonuclear matter-energy converters like kerosene lanterns to a picnic. An economically crippled United World Soviet needed technology like that—and anything else its leader could pry loose.
Sensing the admiral's distraction, Deshovich cleared his throat. "You've taken over from American Mission Control?"
Mubakkir nodded. "We're timing our replies so the expedition will think we're transmitting from Earth."
"Excellent. By the way, Admiral, if you wished to dispose of something aboard this vessel, how would you go about it?"
"Sir?" Mubakkir tried not to look surprised at the change of subject. "An air lock, I suppose. At this acceleration, it would—"
"Air lock, you say?" With a broad hand, Deshovich reached to flip back a corner of the duvet. Beneath it, her features obscured by a fall of dark, silky, waist-length hair, lay the naked body of a young girl, flesh white with the pallor of death. Between her hips and knees, the sheet was soaked with blood. "My secretary seems to have had an accident during dictation. Get her out quietly and have this cleaned up."
The admiral swallowed hard, but said nothing.
"And summon me another girl from the pool. A blonde this time, I think."
TWENTY-SIX Absent Friends
Less than a week, he thought, and already five graves.
Lieutenant Colonel Juan Sebastiano stared grimly at the low mounds of carbonaceous soil covering the earthly remains (if "earthly" was the word) of five members of the expedition of which he suddenly found himself second in command, that of the American Soviet Socialist Republic to the asteroid 5023 Eris. The only thing missing to set the appropriate tone, he thought, was the oppressive drizzly overcast of their first couple of days here.
Their hosts, however, the giant molluscs who claimed this place by virtue of previous occupancy, had adjusted its atmosphere. Rain would now fall at night when it wouldn't represent an inconvenience. At present, without producing shadows, a diffuse golden glow seeped through overhead to tumble down a series of small craters overlapping in broad natural stairsteps, across the newly spaded ground.
Lush undergrowth surrounded the forlorn gravesite beneath sequoia-dwarfing plants supporting the world-enveloping organic canopy. "Super kudzu," Dr. Kamanov had called them. The asteroid was covered, more densely than any closeups of the Moon or Mars Sebastiano had studied during training, with impact features of all sizes, cloaked in vegetation. They textured the land in unpredictable ways. General Gutierrez had begun using a thesaurus to find synonyms of "hill" and "ridge" for reports which would probably never be transmitted back to Earth now.
Poor old Kamanov.
Sebastiano drew on an unfiltered, unsanctioned cigarette which his boss's son, Second Lieutenant Danny Gutierrez, had smuggled inboard the McCain, one of three old NASA shuttles that had borne them hundreds of millions of klicks deeper into space than Soviet Man had ever ventured before. He guessed that made them all heroes of some kind. To the ASSR they were no more than expendable veterans of various small conflicts it was politically unpragmatic to commemorate. Or they were incompetent (or overly competent) bureaucrats, or officers who couldn't keep their opinions to themselves, or enlisted personnel who insisted on remaining individuals—in short, nonteam players, well worth disposing of even if they discovered nothing of value out here among the debris of a broken planet.
Or a planet that had never been.
A blue-gray wisp from the cigarette's front end irritated the colonel's nose. It was nothing, he supposed, to what the back end must be doing to his lungs. He'd given up the habit years ago, in fighter school. Since then he'd struggled for physical and mental survival through three brushfire wars, each bloodier, each emptier of meaning and purpose, than the last. But it had taken these five incredibly stupid, wasteful deaths—and certain attendant complications which had only aggravated tensions over conflicting claims to the asteroid—to get him started smoking again.
Kamanov occupied the grave on the far left. Like most members of the expedition, Sebastiano had grown fond of the old man over the year-long voyage and the longer training period before that. More in love with life and fuller of it than anyone the colonel had ever known, as mission geologist Kamanov had been among a small group on loan from the Russians—this was billed as a cooperative venture, after all, on behalf of a new and fragile United World Soviet held together at this moment in history by wishful thinking and gunship diplomacy. He'd been horribly murdered to make a political point which seemed more obscure to Sebastiano with every day that passed.
In the next grave lay Delbert Roo, carried on the expedition roster as a mining-equipment operator, but in reality a KGB enforcer who'd drawn his last breath without learning (except in that last astonished fraction of a second) that there were individuals he wasn't free to terrorize and torture as he wished.
Broward Hake, in the third grave, had been Roo's colleague in thuggery. He was dead due to a regrettable mistake, the .45 caliber pistol bullet that had finished him having been meant for someone else.
Colonel Vivian Richardson, in the fourth grave, had been the mission's original vice-commander and possibly an agent of the Russian KGB—as opposed to the American KGB which was openly represented on the expedition. She'd died the same as Hake, or at least by a projectile of the same caliber, suggesting to Sebastiano that there might be some justice in an otherwise uncaring universe, since she'd been the one who'd shot the man.
At the end of the dismal row was a fifth grave, that of Marine Corps Major Estrellita Reille y Sanchez, a lovely redhead—lovely no longer—who'd started the whole mess against her better judgment, having been given certain unpleasant tasks to perform whether she wanted them or not. Her life had been choked off in its twenty-ninth year as Kamanov's had in his sixty-ninth. In Sebastiano's opinion it had been too soon for either of them. Life was too short, no matter how long it lasted.
There should have been a sixth grave for Semlohcolresh, that irascible old slug. (Technically, he and his fellow monsters—make that "sapient living fossils"—were descendants of Silurian-era molluscs.) There might have been, too, if his culture's burial customs were anything like humanity's. Sebastiano didn't know what the nautiloids, with their exotic philosophy, considered decent under the circumstances, but in any case it was academic. The squidlike body of Semlohcolresh, along with its multicolored Volkswagen-sized shell, had been dissolved into its constituent nuclei in the matter-energy converter his people—and the nightmare menagerie they'd brought with them across cosmic lines of probability from countless versions of Earth—used to power their colony here.
"Colonel?"
Behind him Sebastiano heard a footfall, then the polite, apologetic cough of someone he outranked. It was Major Jesus Ortiz, newly appointed captain of the Hatch. Sebastiano dropped his cigarette, slowly pivoted his bootsole on it, and turned from contemplation of the graves.
"What's up, Maje?"
"Could you come back to the Dole, Juan, ASAP? Mission Control's on the horn and they don't sound happy. The general's asking for you. He looks worried."
The Banker! Sebastiano shuddered. It can only be the Banker!
But he nodded and, following the major, headed in the direction of the campsite where the shuttles rested in a triangle which, more and more, seemed to him like the circled wagons of frightened pioneers in hostile Indian territory.
TWENTY-SEVEN Laika
The Banker! The idea sent chills down the spine of General Horatio Gutierrez. It could only be the Banker! "I don't know, Juan." He shrugged, attempting to appear calm. "They just said to have all hands stand by for a message from `the highest authority.' "
Surrounded by an array of switches and lights bewildering to anyone who lacked the training they shared, he watched Sebastiano lower himself into the lefthand seat, a position the colonel normally occupied aboard the McCain. This was the Dole, flagship of the expedition. Sebastiano adjusted the microphone tube of his Snoopy cap, the communications carrier he'd just jammed over his head.
Juan looked like a daredevil astronaut, Gutierrez always thought. His teeth shone white against a dark complexion. Almost as tall sitting down as the general was standing up, he sported a diabolical strip of Castillian beard and a nose that was pure Aztec. The confident movement of his slender fingers across the controls spoke of a competence rare these days in America or anywhere in the world—except, it was rumored, Switzerland, South Africa, NeoIsrael, and maybe the PRC. Who could ever tell about the PRC?
Standing behind him, Gutierrez twisted his neck for the fifth time in as many minutes to peer at the portside audio panel, waiting, he realized sourly, like the little dog to hear his master's voice. Through a window he saw a glint of copper rising in a graceful arc from one of many antenna penetrations in the fuselage to a great pseudotree which supported, and finally became, the atmospheric canopy a kilometer overhead. It would be some time, however, before his chance came to listen or to speak, and even then, given the vast distance involved, no real conversation with Earth would be possible. From Earth's viewpoint, it was an ideal situation: Gutierrez and his people were in a position only to receive orders and acknowledge them.
Three hundred million kilometers, he thought. At the moment, nearly two astronomical units lay between Earth and the asteroid, meaning it was twice as far from humanity's home to 5023 Eris as it was from the Earth to the Sun. At a walking pace of six and a half klicks an hour, he figured, stabbing buttons on his calculator watch as if literally killing time, it was a stroll of 5,308 years, almost the totality of written history—human history; from now on he'd have to add that modifier. Running at top speed, the fastest man alive might have shortened it to 1,416 years (the span since Moslems had begun praying toward Mecca), had he been able to keep the pace and had there been someplace to set his feet in all of that vast black emptiness. An auto cruising at 100 KPH might have made the trip in three and a half centuries, an airliner, ten times fleeter, in only thirty-five years.
Three hundred million kilometers. Lightlike energies crossed the vacuum at 300,000 klicks a second. It would require seventeen minutes for signals to arrive at the asteroid from their point of origin and seventeen more for an answer to be heard on Earth, making it an astonishing thirty-four minutes from "How are you?" to "I'm fine, thanks, and yourself?"
Three hundred million kilometers. In a sense, time and place had chosen one another. This was as close as Earth and Eris ever got. That wouldn't always be so—very little is ever always so—the two bodies whirled about the Solar primary at their own individual velocities, like hands on an analog clock. Given that model, it was now 03:15. Before now, and in time to come, when they were on opposite sides of the giant fusion furnace at the center of the system, the distance would double to four units and it would be a quarter past nine. Had this been the case at present, another target would have been selected for the ASSR's first (and now probably last) interplanetary mission and things might have turned out differently.
For the tenth time, Gutierrez checked the row of toggles on the audio panel, making sure the system would relay signals to speakers throughout the ship, to others set up in the campsite outside, and to the remaining pair of shuttles. His attention was focused forward but he could hear, and feel through the deck, the flight deck filling up with curious and worried comrades.
In a corner by the life-support controls, Arthur Empleado of the American KGB kept to himself. Or maybe others were avoiding him. Dark as Sebastiano, older, not nearly as well-muscled nor as tall, he'd begun to acquire a paunch. In another five years his widow's peak would disappear and he'd be bald. The general thought he looked naked deprived of the goons who'd been his shadows the past year. One of them didn't want any more to do with him. Two were dead. A third nursed a ruined knee inboard one of the other spacecraft, which housed a makeshift infirmary.
