Arc Riders (8 page)

“That’s happened to him before and he goes back out?” Chun asked.

“Oh, he’s crazy, of course,” Carnes said with a faint smile. She took a sip of water. “To function in the environment, you
have to be. A war zone, I mean. Watney is… beyond the norm. He wants to die very badly, but he
won’t
, even when almost anybody else would’ve let go.”

The ARC Riders looked at the face on the display. The features were of a chiseled regularity that was handsome beyond doubt,
but not really attractive except on a statue. Watney’s mouth was unusually broad, though the lips themselves were thin. The
face appeared calm; the pale blue eyes were windows onto a soul that blazed like the core of a reactor.

“There’s one thing, though,” Carnes added. “The Watney I know wouldn’t be working for the Japanese. He hates Orientals more
than almost anything else in the world.”

She gave the others a lopsided smile. “He hates them almost as much as he hates himself.”

Circa 50,000
BC

T
hough the sun was bright in a clear sky, the snow was so dry that wind scudded veils of it over the drifts.

“You know,” said Weigand in a voice that was several shades too calm, “I’ll be thankful when we make a few more trips back
here and the settings precess into warm weather. I’d really like to lie back in the grass and let the clouds sail by.”

“I can’t hop forward a few months,” Roebeck said. She was manipulating her controls and didn’t bother to look up. “At 50K,
the minimum setting is a hundred years.”

“Less a month or two,” Grainger joked. “Myself, I get nervous when the trees are closer together than the people are. It isn’t
a situation we got familiar with on Sunrise Terrace.”

He sobered. “I guess we’ve lost Dor,” he said in a flat voice. “We can’t go back to when it happened since we were there already.
And when we fix the problem, that whole timeline won’t have happened. He’ll be gone with it.”

“First we have to cure the problem,” Roebeck said as she worked. “Tim, why don’t you and Pauli set up a weather screen outside
the hatch. We’re going to be here awhile before I’m comfortable with the settings. Some extra space will come in handy.”

“I’ll take the other side,” Chun said. “If Pauli sets the fields, at least one of them is going to be repelling warm air right
out into the blizzard—like last time.”

She opened a locker set into the floor of the vehicle. Grainger reached into the opening and began handing up what looked
like bricks of gray putty.

“Nan?” Weigand said. “Could I—we can’t displace the capsule, but maybe I could take a suit up the line? I’m really getting…”

“Sure,” Roebeck said, though Carnes saw the team leader’s neck muscles stiffen. “Back in an hour, right?”

“Right,” the blond man agreed with obvious relief. To Carnes—because she was a stranger—he said apologetically, “I’m not claustrophobic,
you know, but being cooped up for too long…”

“Can I come with you?” Carnes asked suddenly. If Weigand hadn’t brought her directly into the conversation, she wouldn’t have
spoken.

Roebeck’s expression went blank. Grainger raised an eyebrow in amusement.

“Look, I’m here,” Carnes said as she rose to her feet. “If all I learn is how not to be in the way, that’s something.”

Chun stepped into the hatchway, carrying a good dozen of the gray blocks. Grainger followed with a similar load. They’d pulled
on gloves but otherwise wore only their tightfitting coveralls.

Heating—and cooling, chances are—in the fabric itself
, Carnes realized.

Roebeck nodded. “Quo?” she said. “All right if she takes your suit? I think it’ll fit without major adjustment.”

“Go ahead,” Chun said, turning her head. “It’d take hours to put together a suit from the spares, and
then
it wouldn’t fit.”

“I’d like to go also, Nan,” Barthuli said.

“I may need you later,” Roebeck said.

“We’ll be here three days, wouldn’t you guess?” Barthuli said. “We’ll be back in an hour.”

Carnes joined Weigand at the suit locker. He tilted up the faceshield of the suit Chun had worn, then opened the one-piece
breastplate. The pivot point was along the left side; Carnes couldn’t see any sign of hinges even when the unit was fully
open.

“The first thing to remember,” Weigand said, “is that a displacement suit is a tool. The controls are extremely simple so
that the suits can be used fast in an emergency. If you tell the suit to do something that will get you killed, the suit will
do exactly what you told it. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I do,” Carnes said. She met and held Weigand’s eyes until he nodded with a slight grin.

Visible outside on the display, Grainger and Chun placed blocks about five feet apart on the drifts. The snow was so deep
that the ARC Riders had to shuffle paths through it by main force.

“The controls are on the left wrist,” Weigand said, lifting the arm to show Carnes the hemisphere and adjacent dimple on the
underarm near the integral gauntlet. The displacement suit’s surface gleamed like enameled metal, but the limb bent as flexibly
as cloth in Weigand’s hand. “Don’t touch them till we get outside and I tell you what to do.”

“I understand,” Carnes said.

“All right,” Weigand said. “Put the suit on. It’s easiest to do that if—”

Carnes gripped the horizontal bar with her arms crossed. She lifted her thighs to her chest, twisted, and wriggled her feet
into the lower portion of the suit.

Weigand laughed. “Yes, that’s the easiest way for somebody your height, all right.” He flexed his long right leg, stepped
into his suit, and used the bar to raise him enough to complete the job with the other leg.

“Now,” he said, “I’m going to close the suit over you. Walk outside in front of me. Don’t do anything until I tell you to.
We’ll talk normally on the laser intercom. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Carnes repeated. She kept her voice calm and low-pitched so that she
sounded
responsible. She remembered being taught to drive by her father, who, for all his faults, had never let her forget the potential
lethality of the vehicle she was controlling.

Weigand closed the breastplate, then the helmet, over her. The interior of the suit formed itself to Carnes’ body about as
firmly as a blood-pressure cuff on the first pump. There was a vague feeling of constriction. Carnes realized that if the
suit slipped as she moved, it would in short order chafe sores in her skin.

The suit had no odor at all, neither human nor from chemicals in the construction. The air she breathed seemed cool, perhaps
only because it was below blood temperature.

“Now walk to the hatch,” Weigand directed. “I’ll cycle it for you; just walk forward.”

Carnes’ view was as sharp as that of her ordinary vision. She knew she wasn’t seeing optically through transparent material
only because her field of view was wider by a few degrees than that of her unaided eyes.

She took a step and bumped the bulkhead with her shoulder. The suit weighed about ninety pounds, which wasn’t a problem because
it was spread so evenly over her body. Its bulk would take a little getting used to, however.

The bulkhead vanished a moment before Carnes would have walked into it. She saw the landscape outside the vehicle as if through
a bubble of smoked glass. She stepped forward again, noticing the greater inertia of her suited limbs, and her foot came down
in snow already disturbed by Chun and Grainger.

“Come on up beyond the line of the generators,” Grainger said, beckoning. “It’ll be pretty sloppy out here by the time you
get back. We’ll have melted the snow, but the area won’t have dried out.”

“I’m right behind you,” Weigand said. “Just keep walking.”

At the words, Carnes turned her head instinctively to look over her shoulder. To her surprise, she could do just that. The
helmet didn’t move. Her head rotated without hindrance from the firm padding and her field of view slid sideways as well.

“Tim and Quo are setting up a sorting field,” Weigand explained as they passed the line of gray blocks. “It’ll repel high-energy
molecules on the inside and pass them in the other direction. We’ll heat the area and it’ll stay comfortable, despite the
winter beyond.”

Weigand’s suit no longer made him anonymous. His size was a giveaway, and the sheen of his right forearm differed from that
of the remainder of the suit’s surface. The piece had had to be replaced in the recent past….

They stopped in the lee of a drift from which poked thick stalks of milkweed. The open pods were now packed with snow. Barthuli
was following them from the vehicle.

“The suits’ default setting will displace them onto solid ground,” Weigand said. “If you displace to a horizon where the ground
is flooded, you’ll be underwater. That’s not a major problem. If you displace into a glacier, that’s where you’ll be:
in
a block of ice, and no way to move to reset. Ice is less dense than flowing water. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” Carnes said, swallowing her impatience. Weigand’s plodding approach made her forget what she had just
seen and lived through. She wondered if that was part of the ARC Rider’s intention.

“Suits can’t displace geographically,” Weigand continued. “They can’t hover at the junction of now and becoming, the way transport
capsules do, though they can be set completely out of phase for concealment. And they operate on a one-for-one duration with
base time—that’s the time horizon from which you displace in the suit. If you go forward a year and stay a week, you return
a week later than you left.”

“I understand,” Carnes said. It struck her that the suit itself wasn’t simple: the controls were. The parameters of use were
deliberately limited because it would be impossible to work within more sophisticated ones while wearing gear as confining
as the suit was.

“Most important,” the ARC Rider said, “it’s really easy with a suit to displace to a horizon where you’ve already been. You
don’t have a capsule’s database to request confirmation. If you do that, you’re gone.”

“I understand.”

Chun and Grainger had gone back inside the vehicle. They’d laid their blocks in an ovoid, with the capsule’s hull forming
a chord across the base of it. The snow within slumped as it warmed and compacted.

“Now, I could carry you along simply by holding you in contact with my suit,” Weigand said, “but we’re going to treat this
as a training exercise. To prepare the suit for displacement, press the tit twice. Do that now.”

Carnes deliberately thumbed the raised control. At the second touch, a pale orange mask overlaid the top half of her field
of view. On the mask was the opaque legend 50
K
.

“We’re going upline,” Weigand said. “The equipment won’t displace farther back than here anyway. To do that, you’ll put pressure
on the top of the hollow spot. You’ll see the display shift. Try that now.”

“Try 10,000
BC
,” suggested Barthuli, who was also adjusting his suit controls. Presumably to Weigand—the suits were impassive, even though
Carnes was beginning to recognize individual characteristics—the analyst explained, “There’s no European penetration, and
we’re well clear of both ice sheets and any likely operational area. And I’ve never been there.”

“One forest is a lot like another forest,” Weigand grumbled, but he added, “All right, Minus 10K. I just want a place that’s
warm enough I can wiggle my toes in the dirt.”

Carnes pressed the concavity as if it were a rocker switch. 50K vanished, leaving only the mask. She jerked her thumb away
from the control.

“No, keep going,” Weigand ordered sharply. “There’s a disjunction where the log scale changes.”

Carnes obeyed. Numbers, initially in the high forties but descending, chased themselves across the orange field like the altimeter
of a diving aircraft. On the landscape beyond the display, a thirty-inch depth of snow was melting into a pond. Water drained
out along the path the three people in armor had tramped beyond the enclosure. The runoff froze as it gurgled down the track.

When the display had scrolled to -11,000, Carnes relaxed her pressure on the control. Even so, she overshot to -9851 before
she managed to raise her finger completely. Without asking Weigand, she pressed the opposite curve of the dimple. The numbers
dropped to -10,066 in the first spurt. She brought the display home with a series of quick taps, each adding a year.

“All right,” said Weigand. He must have been reading an echo of her display, because he didn’t ask whether she’d succeeded
in the initial exercise. “Now change the scale by pressing the hand side of the hollow once.”

The legend - 10
K
shrank to a quarter of its former size and displaced to the upper left-hand corner of the field. A large zero was centered
on the display.

“Bring it up to 50.5,” Weigand ordered. “That’s noon on the last day of June.”

“What are you going to do if there’s a thunderstorm?” Barthuli asked.

“Get wet,” Weigand snapped.

As a matter of pride, Carnes ran the display to 50.5 without having to backtrack. She took her right hand away from the controls
so that she didn’t touch anything by accident.

“We’re all ready,” Weigand said, a statement and a warning. “To displace, you’ll press the tit twice more. Do that now.”

Barthuli vanished as suddenly as the lightning flashes. Weigand remained, his right thumb poised on his own controls.

Carnes pressed the bump twice. The mask and the landscape both vanished. For a minute and a half that seemed much longer,
she was alone with her thoughts in soundless blackness.

Then there was light and life.

Circa 50,000
BC

G
rainger entered the cabin of the transportation capsule and glanced at the display. “The major’s going to want to join the
team,” he said. “I think she’d be an asset.”

“She’s at least forty years old,” Chun said as she seated herself beside Roebeck and took off her gloves. “From her period,
there’ll have been a lot of irreversible damage done.”