Life Force, page 18
"I've wondered about an accident in space," Genna said. "It doesn't make sense to think that Milyukov actually got to Beauty. If he did and achieved his purpose, there'd have been a great cry of protest from the Reznor people there. If he got there and was caught, they wouldn't dare hold so important a man."
"You'll be working with Jeff Soutine. He's a fine pilot, among other things. You'll have time to learn a few things from Jeff during your early travels so that you'll be ready when you arrive on Beauty. Incidentally, Jeff, not you, and mark this well, is the senior man. You're to do as he tells you and consult him before you make any move."
"Thank you very much," Genna said sarcastically. Shardan did not smile. He rose and that was a signal for her to go.
With a swiftness that dazed her, she found herself aboard a sleek Intel cruiser, well armed, powerful, luxurious. She met Jeff Soutine there for the first time, shook hands, was told to buckle up, and within an hour they were in deep space.
She had had a chance during the takeoff and the first trans to examine Soutine. He seemed an ordinary looking man at first, not too handsome but definitely not ugly, just a man with brownish-black hair, a face that could be forgotten easily—rounded, calm, brown-eyed, with a nondescript nose. He moved well, however, making her realize that his relaxed pose hid the quick reflexes of an athlete. He did not speak until the ship was deep into space.
"You'll find a set of small books marked SECRET-SECRET in your cabin. Study the manual of field operations first, then, when you've memorized that, start on METHODS OF INDIRECT INTERROGATION."
"Yes, sir," she said.
Soutine's eyes narrowed as she inflected the "sir." She felt a slight chill of apprehension.
"Just do it," he said.
She went to her cabin and began to read. The material was absorbing. She soon realized that she had been kept at the Intel home office as a pet, that she had no conception of covert operations, and she determined to remedy that. She would prove to that cold-eyed bastard Soutine that she was not some bit of fluff.
After three hours of concentrated reading, she was tired. She showered, dried and stood nude in front of a mirror to dry her hair. When the door opened, she whirled. Soutine's eyes measured her from face to knee.
"I would appreciate it if you'd knock before entering in the future," she said coldly.
"We're orbiting Ingleside," he said. "Our destination is on the nightside. We'll sleep here until local morning."
"Thank you," Genna said.
Soutine walked to the bed and began to remove his clothing.
"What do you think you're doing?" Genna demanded.
"Following orders." There was a faint smile on his lips, the first hint of expression she'd seen. "The chief told me to spend as much time with you as possible, teaching you."
"Get out of my cabin," Genna said.
Soutine kicked off his slip-ons. Nude, his body showed that he was well conditioned. "Come," he said, crooking a finger at her.
"You arrogant bastard," she hissed, picking up the nearest object, her hair dryer, and throwing it. He dodged it easily and in a series of quick, fluid motions he seized her arm with one hand as she tried to hit him in the face, and pressed the fingers of the other hand into a secret place at the front of her neck. She cried out, for the pain was quick and severe.
"Come," he said. "Although I doubt I'll be able to teach you much about the subject of study for tonight."
The pain was so intense that she could not scream. Then he was pushing her forcefully down onto the bed and the pain was gone. After one repetition, as she struggled, she decided that she wanted no more pain. Incredulously, she allowed him to take her. Her retribution could come later. She was a citizen of a sovereign and civilized nation, a member of the Pax Five Community of Independent Nations. There were still laws, and Earth's laws applied to her citizens, no matter where they were in space.
"You can go now," she said, when he'd finished.
"I like it here," he said. He dozed with his hand clasped around her wrist and when she tried to remove her hand he awakened just enough to squeeze her wrist painfully. When he took her again, it was with as much dispassion and straightforward purposefulness as it had been the first time. To her shame, she responded and, at her movements and obvious interest, Soutine laughed sardonically. The contempt in his laughter drove all passion from her, leaving only hate.
When, at last, she was allowed to sleep, she seemed to die a small death. She awoke to Soutine's voice, but it was coming from the communicator. "Get it out here, sweet pants. Now."
The ship was in motion. She dressed quickly and joined Soutine in the control area. Soutine was in communication with a ground controller. Ingleside was a planet of vast oceans and scant land area, blue and beautiful.
"We'll be down at Armstrong Space Port in half an hour," Soutine said. "I want to use about two minutes of that time to tell you just a little about me."
"I don't care about you," Genna said. Ingleside was a civilized, English-speaking world, the second world to be settled. The society was based on the early American Republic, but with the weaknesses inherent in the original American Constitution strengthened. The mostly white, Anglo-American populations of Ingleside's scattered land areas were known for their respect for law and order, personal freedom, individual rights.
"I have a wife and three kids at home," Soutine said. "I'm quite fond of them. My wife is the daughter of a very rich man, and she's fond of me."
Genna, surprised, was wondering if he was now going to beg for forgiveness. She was forming her rebuttal as he continued, thinking that had he asked or been gentle—
"I started at Intel with Shardan, when the agency was formed. We had learned our trade together as agents for the Anglo-European Alliance. My Intel number is four zeros followed by a two. Shardan's number is four zeros followed by a one. Do you follow me?"
"I'm not stupid," she said, and she was feeling slightly ill, for he was telling her that if she voiced a complaint on Ingleside or elsewhere, she would be accusing a man who was intimate with the power elite of the civilized galaxy.
"I have been told as much by Shardan," Soutine said. "Good, then. You see, Darden, false pride has been the Achilles heel of many in our business. Shardan immediately saw that you had great potential, your excellent body and your beauty being potential tools of great power. He told me, however, that you tend to squander your assets without purpose, for ego massage or for personal pleasure. Where were pride and personal pleasure last night?"
Then, as the ship screamed through atmosphere and pivoted for landing, he smiled at her for the first time. "I, too, think you have great potential, and it is my job to help you develop it during this mission."
Without being able to understand, Genna knew that her life had reached one of those points of irrevocable change, and she was lost, confused. She tried to hide the tears that formed and rolled down her perfect cheeks.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Matt was jerked to a sitting position in his bed by the howl of the emergency call. Teddy rolled sleepily up onto one elbow, saying, "Wha'?" The first rays of the sun were reddening in the eastern sky over the plains.
"You stay here," Matt said. "I'll check it out."
But Teddy, in a hastily donned set of coveralls, was right behind him when he ran across the lawn to the pad where Jack Frost was yelling at others to shake a leg. They managed to pile into the explorer just before the G.D. rumbled and lifted the ship, the hatch clanging behind them when they were already airborne.
"What's happening?" Matt demanded of Cassie. Jack was in the cargo area shouting orders.
"It's Ramses and Nefertiti," Cassie said. "They're down. Dawn shots from a satellite spotted them."
"Down?" Teddy asked.
"Ill, perhaps dead," Cassie said sadly.
It was a short flight. Frost was first out, men rushing behind him with litters large enough and sturdy enough to carry a cheetah. When Teddy arrived on the scene, it seemed to her that Jack was trying to pull an old lion tamer's trick and thrust his head into Nefertiti's mouth as he held it open. The cheetahs were lying limply, sides heaving with their panting. Nefertiti's eyes did not open and she put up no struggle.
"They haven't been eating carrion," Jack said, for his lion tamer's pose had been to smell Nefertiti's breath. "But something's haywire." The animal's breath was not that of a carnivore, made rank by decaying meat lodged in its teeth. There was a sour, bovine smell. He took Nefertiti's temperature quickly, then ordered the team to load the cats aboard the ship.
Teddy went back to quarters to dress. Matt followed the running men into the veterinary lab and watched as Jack jumped and jerked around seemingly aimlessly but actually accomplishing a number of quick tests. A stomach pump produced noxious fluids and sodden lumps of bilious green.
"Grass?" Jack yelped. He jumped about some more and rammed a long, flexible viewing tube down Nefertiti's throat. "Bloomin' damned grass," he shouted. "Her stomach is full of undigested grass."
The stomachs of both cats contained an astounding mass of grass. Jack's team worked swiftly, pulling the clods of grass from the cats with the aid of pumps and flexible tools that looked like automated rakes.
"Get helmets on both of them," Jack said, and it was done. Intravenous feeding was started. An hour later the vital signs of both cats were stable. Jack took advantage of Nefertiti's immobile state to scope her womb and there were two nice little cheetah embryos forming, already moving with new life.
"Grass," Jack moaned, leaning tiredly on the operating table. "A cat might chew a little grass, but pounds of the stuff?"
A meeting with the entire animal staff found no answer to that question. The finest animal behaviorists in the galaxy had never encountered or had never heard of a carnivore eating so much grass that stomach and bowels were impacted with the indigestible mass.
Matt told Teddy about the mystery over a late breakfast. Teddy made no comment, but it was obvious to him that she was thinking.
"Are you all right?" he asked. Since being wounded she had often seemed to go off into a world of her own, her eyes apparently looking at him, but her thoughts far away. He didn't like being lonely, and that was exactly how he felt with Teddy directly across the table from him but so far away.
"I'm fine," she said. "Never better."
"Let's take a day off."
"Can't, Matt. The Ark's due tomorrow and there's a lot of planning to be done to get her off-loaded in about ten different spots around the globe. And the tanker will be here in a week or so with whales."
"Well, even I can get a little excited about whales," Matt said.
"Only the plankton eaters. The marine people think there's enough plankton, krill, and small fish such as sardines to support a pod now. I'd like to see the release."
"Suits me," he said. "If you're going to be busy, Earl has asked me to give him a hand with a new gadget of his. He wants to give it a field test and I guess today's as good a day as any if you won't take time off and play with me."
"Give Earl a hand," she said.
Matt left her seated at the table, finishing her second cup of coffee. When he looked back one last time he saw that her face was blank, with that faraway, thinking look. His impulse was to go back, take her in his arms, not let her out of his sight until she was Teddy again.
There were not many things that Teddy was unwilling to discuss with Matt, but she had mentioned nothing about her little dizzy spell after watching the cheetahs at their first kill. She was afraid he'd worry, be an old, mothering pest, and insist that she go for another round of tests with Wells Smith. The incident preyed on her mind. She had to discuss it with someone. She left the dining hall and sought out Kerry Hertz in the botany wing. When Kerry saw her, she tossed aside a paper she'd been filling with notes and smiled.
"Any startling discoveries lately?" Teddy asked.
"Dead bloody end," Kerry said. "Plants are plants, whether they are Earth plants or Beauty plants."
Teddy didn't know exactly where to begin. She looked around at a very exotic collection of specimens.
"There's something on your mind," Kerry said.
Teddy plunged in. "Do you remember what Jack said after he attacked that little zebra? He said: 'We wanted to know why.' I thought it was peculiar, but that it was probably just the result of Jack's embarrassment and confusion. He's a rather excitable man. I thought he'd just lost it for a few minutes in his eagerness to teach fear to the zebras. But when Nefertiti killed the gazelle the other day I was—" She laughed uneasily. "I guess I was being a bleeding heart, or at least unrealistic. I was angry at the cat and full of pity for the dying animal. And it was as if that feeling was shared. I was not alone in my revulsion."
Kerry looked down at her feet.
"I've checked records, notes from every department, looking for another such incident," Teddy said. "I didn't find any."
No, Kerry was thinking, because I didn't have the courage to report a very significant incident.
"There's something out there," Teddy said. "And it can influence the actions of both man and animal. It made Jack attack the zebra. It caused the elephants to avenge the death of one of their own—"
"That could have been natural behavior," Kerry said.
"And it agreed with me in regretting the death of the gazelle Nefertiti killed," Kerry went on. "To the point where it influenced the cheetahs to stop eating flesh and to gorge on grass instead."
Kerry had heard the alarm, had inquired, and when she found that it was an emergency call for a veterinary team, she had lost interest, thinking it was just another sick animal, or a difficult birth on the plains. She questioned Teddy about the cheetahs. Then she made her decision.
Teddy listened in silence. She assured Kerry that the secret would be theirs. "Thank you for telling me," she said. "I know what it cost you to tell, but it wasn't your fault."
"The devil made me do it?"
"Or Beauty."
"I'm ready to believe almost anything, even an intelligent planet with the brain of a newborn child, learning little by little."
"What if it learns too much," Teddy asked, "and decides that it doesn't like us at all?"
"You're making me want to look over my shoulder," Kerry said.
Teddy was becoming more and more sure in her mind. There'd been one other incident that she'd almost forgotten, had never entered into any record. The first day she and Matt rode on the goats there'd been that unnatural, protesting echo from the cliffs. She had been back there since, and it had never happened again.
She dressed for the sun and sneaked out a side door, found her personal goat and left the compound heading west, circling back to the north when she was out of sight.
The growing herds still seemed to favor the same lush areas of the plain. The hyena pack had killed again, this time a healthy looking zebra colt. The jackals were contesting the hyenas for the remains of the kill.
A vast and aching loneliness settled over her as she rode through the herds, toward the far cliffs. She could not see Africa House. She would not have felt more lonely if she'd been thrust back in time to primeval Africa. She kept looking around, checking behind her. With the two cheetahs in the compound there were no large carnivores on the loose, yet still she felt uneasy. She circled far around the last sighting area of the elephants, shuddering with thoughts of how the Russian had been killed. An hour later, she was approaching the cliffs. She tried to remember landmarks by which to choose, to the best of her memory, the area where she had heard the odd echo.
She dismounted and walked a bit farther, until she was directly under the cliffs, standing among scattered, loose rocks and boulders that had been toppled from the cliffs by natural erosion. She felt both lonely and a bit silly. She swallowed, glanced over her shoulder, looked up to see two vultures soaring high. There would be more bird varieties on the Ark this time, but still no raptors. In another year, perhaps, the small animal population would have grown to the point of supporting birds of prey.
"Well," she said aloud, "here I am, and I'm not sure why I'm here. I'm here, I guess, to talk to you, Beauty, or to whatever or whoever you are. We must seem very strange to you. We come here in our roaring machines and without so much as a by your leave start building things and pouring the life of Earth out onto you. You've been trying to tell us something. You gave us a message when we tried to cut down one of your trees. And you're trying to learn about us, aren't you? You were curious about the emotions felt by Kerry and Earl, or maybe just about our breeding habits. You wondered why Jack wanted to frighten the zebras, and what it was in his mind regarding something killing a zebra. You saw the cheetah kill the gazelle, and you felt, or shared, my feelings. Did you show yourself to me? Was that you, those small, white globes dancing around the kill?"
She shivered and, once more, looked over her shoulder. Then she sat down on a sun-warmed boulder and, letting her eyes rest on the shadows near the top of the cliff, continued. "It must have been difficult to grasp death. I don't think you intended to kill that man over in America. I think you were just trying to warn him not to hurt one of your trees. But you understood death when the Russian shot the elephant, and you influenced the elephants to charge at the slayer and kill in return.
"But you didn't understand why Nefertiti had to kill, probably because my feelings influenced you. You learned quickly that the hummingbirds and the bees were helpful, not harmful. You allow the elephants to eat, as long as they don't kill plants unnecessarily. And you've got still more to learn, because unless you stop us, we're going to fill you with life, Beauty. And it's a pretty odd system.
"Let me draw an analogy. I'm assuming that your plants are just plants. You knew nothing of death. Plants don't really die. Adult plants cease to grow and wither and return to the soil, but their life goes on in seedlings or other form. And yet it's a kind of death, and a simple equivalent of the chain of life in the system we're trying to build here. The dead plants return to the soil and their basic elements are used by the new, in a continuation of life. When Nefertiti kills and eats she's doing basically the same thing, it's just that there's a life at stake. Still, there are those who believe that all life is a part of the same force. It doesn't hold water with me, but the theory is there, and if they're right then the gazelle's life force is continued, not lost, in a baby cheetah, or in the birth of a new gazelle calf."
