Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra (9 page)

“And then?”

“Nothing after that.”

“What happened?”

“The wormhole closed. No more signals could be sent through the conduit, so to speak.”

“No doubt they're still sending signals,” offered Pizzle, “but without the wormhole it takes a whole lot longer. We just haven't received them yet.”

“Maybe the signals stopped because they all
died!”

“Possible,” Crocker allowed, “but highly improbable.”

“But why? You said anything could happen. Anything!”

“Theoretically yes. But you have to figure that once they reached the planet they knew what to expect. Colony ships are prepared for the unknown. Empyrion is uninhabited by any thinking creatures, and has little second-order animal life—certainly nothing to worry about. The probes would also have verified atmosphere, weather patterns, and climatic trends. There were no surprises there.”

“Microorganisms, viruses, bacteria—what about those? Maybe they got down there and succumbed to a killing virus.”

“Maybe, but I don't think so. They would not have disembarked until the environment dome was raised and the air and ground beneath it sterilized. Only then would they have actually set foot on the soil.”

Treet remained silent. He had exhausted all his objections for the moment. He looked around at Pizzle, who sat nodding. “It's just like the IASA colonization manual recommends.”

“Right by the book. All contingencies foreseen.”

Crocker looked at Treet's unhappy face. “Look, it's going to be all right. Believe me. I read the transcripts. By all reports the planet is an absolute paradise. You'll love it. When we get there you'll see what I mean. An absolute paradise.” Crocker spun in his huge, padded chair as an electronic chime sounded. “Now if you two will excuse me,” he said, “I've got a little housekeeping to do.”

Treet stood. “Thanks, I feel so much better,” he said without meaning it. “See you later.”

Pizzle rose and followed Treet out of the cockpit. They clambered into the connecting gangway and through the forechamber along to the passenger compartments. At Pizzle's door they paused, and Pizzle yawned. “I'm going to get some sleep. Maybe you'd better, too. It might be a long night.”

Treet glanced up quickly. “Huh?”

“We're spying tonight, remember? You said if I went with you to talk to Crocker, you'd help me spy tonight. Well, I went with you, didn't I?”

“But you were on his side. You were supposed to be on mine.”

“His side? There were no sides. You had some questions and we got answers. What more do you want?”

Pizzle had him there: what more did he want? Why was he still not satisfied? “All right,” Treet agreed reluctantly. “I'll help you spy.” He turned and went into his stateroom.

“Good,” called Pizzle after him. “I'll come and get you when I'm ready.” He watched Treet disappear into his room and the door sigh shut behind him. “Loosen up,” he called. “You'll live longer.”

Pizzle's idea of spying
was to hide in some cramped place and wait long hours for the quarry to show up. He reasoned that unless separate supplies had been stocked in the mysterious stranger's cabin, which he doubted, then the man must eat when the others were sleeping. So far he had seen no evidence that anyone had been surreptitiously using the galley, but then as long as the person cleaned up after himself, there was no way anyone could tell.

So Treet and Pizzle crouched in a cramped cubbyhole for dry stores, waiting—an eternity it seemed to Treet—for the stranger to materialize. The galley lights had been turned off so they could observe the mysterious stranger without themselves being observed, and they had been taking turns watching. It was Treet's turn to put his eye to the crack in the partition, and he was ready to call it quits.

“I don't see why you need me at all,” complained Treet, not for the first time. “This is a big waste of time.”

“I need you to verify the sighting.”

“You make it sound like we're waiting for a UFO.” He craned his neck around and saw the metal rims of Pizzle's glasses glint in the dim light. “Phew! It's stuffy in here. I'm getting out before I'm hunchbacked for life.”

“Shh! Quiet, will you? If anybody
was
out there, you'd have scared him off by now.”

“Whoever it is is probably fast asleep in bed, and that's where we should be. Look, why can't you rig up a few motion detectors or proximity switches or something. Anyone messing around in the galley would trip the alarm and you could come running with your little Panasonic holocamera and catch them flatfooted in the act.”

“Yeah, and get nothing for my trouble but pictures of you or Crocker sneaking food from cold service while I'm trying to sleep.”

“Why is this so important to you, anyway?” Treet asked. “This guy just likes his privacy. So what?
I
should be so lucky.”

“It isn't natural, that's why. And I'm curious—that in itself is enough reason for me.”

“Well, I'm not that curious. I don't know why I agreed to this lunatic scheme of yours anyway. I'd feel silly if I wasn't so sore.” Treet shifted his weight and banged his head against a shelf. “Ow! That's it—I'm getting out of here.”

With that he pushed aside the partition and climbed out. “You coming?”

Pizzle glanced at his watch. “Might as well. Time's nearly up anyway.” He crawled out of the cubbyhole on his hands and knees. “If he was coming tonight, he'd have been here by now.”

Treet walked back to his compartment and Pizzle followed, pausing at the entrance to the stranger's quarters to press his ear against the door. Treet cast a disparaging look back at him; Pizzle shrugged and shuffled along to his room. “G'night, Treet.”

Treet stood on the threshold of his compartment with the door open. When he heard Pizzle's door close, he tiptoed back to the stranger's compartment and listened. He heard nothing, so pressed his ear against the door. He was about to turn away when, to his surprise, the door folded back and he stood staring into two jet-black eyes. The eyes—set in an exquisite, bronze-colored face which was surrounded by a fall of shining black hair—regarded him coolly. His first impression was that he'd seen that face before, but in a very different context.

“Miss Talazac!” he said, recovering himself. “I didn't recognize you without your braid.”

“Mr. Treet,” she replied crisply, “is this one of your perverse habits—listening outside people's doors?”

“Not at all.” Treet received the strong impression that she had expected him to be there. “I was just … well, curious. We wondered about you—I mean, about the person inside. We hadn't seen anyone, and it's been several days. We thought something might have happened to you.”

“You need not have concerned yourself. I am, as you see, quite all right. If you will excuse me—” She made a move to pass by him, and Treet stepped back.

“I'm sorry if I disturbed you,” he said, more for something to say than from any real regret.

She turned and faced him, holding his eyes with her own, her face expressionless. Treet felt ridiculous, as if he were floundering in shallow water. He wanted to look away, but her eyes held his and he could only stare back blankly. “I'm sorry,” he murmured and the spell was broken.

She turned from him without a word and moved silently off along the gangway toward the galley. Treet watched her slender figure glide away. He realized his scalp was tingling all over and his palms were sweating.

He thought to himself: There goes one weird lady… or a vision.

Treet
did not see her again for five weeks. What she did in her compartment, how and why she avoided all the others, he could but wonder, and did often. Why did she hole up like that? Why did she refuse to join the others? Certainly it was not because she feared them—the only woman on a ship full of men, that sort of nonsense. No, whatever the reason, it wasn't fear. Treet's manly intuition told him that Yarden Talazac would be more than a match for any male.

He did not tell Pizzle about the midnight meeting. Somehow he knew that Talazac would not want him to mention it. At the same time he felt silly carrying around his secret—especially since Pizzle continually nagged him to rejoin his espionage program. Treet refused, knowing somehow that she would not be caught again. Actually, he decided, she had not been caught at all. She had revealed herself to him alone; it was of her choosing.

But why? Why him? Why in that way?

Treet wondered about these things in idle moments, and he attempted to fix her face in his mind but could not. Every time he tried to remember what she looked like, he drew a blank. All he saw on his mental screen was a stock representation of a human face—vaguely Asiatic, or perhaps Polynesian, no distinct features, just a sketch. This both puzzled and frustrated him. Why could he not remember what she looked like?

He told himself that, after all, he'd only met her twice, and then fleetingly. But he also reminded himself that he had no difficulty remembering faces of people he'd met just as briefly: the Cynetics nurse who had helped him up when he awoke from the drug, the elevator attendant, the driver of the cart—all of them he could see in his mind's eye as clearly as if they stood before him.

But, Yarden … all he had of her was an impression: smooth, honey-colored skin, a deep darkness that was eyes or hair, slim, molded limbs, and a sense that she floated rather than walked. That was all.

Trying to remember her became something of an obsession with Treet. And when he wasn't wracking his brain in the futile attempt to conjure up a picture of the phantom woman, he thought about their meeting and tried to recall every word and nuance that had passed between them that night, to understand the meaning behind it. In this he was largely unsuccessful too. Despite his efforts, and long hours musing on it, he could discover no hidden purpose or explanation. Pure chance, it would seem. And yet, was it?

Treet was reasonably certain that very few things happened by chance where the mysterious Miss Talazac was concerned.

Another
mystery occupied him as well—the mystery of wormhole travel. In the second week of the flight he had picked up Pizzle's book and begun reading, tentatively at first because the book began at the seventh chapter—Pizzle hadn't printed up the whole thing—and much of the terminology was astrophysics jargon. Clearly Belthausen's
Interstellar Travel Theory
was a book written for a select group of academics. There were, Treet decided, probably not more than seventy people in the whole world who could fully appreciate what Belthausen was getting at. That Pizzle should apparently be one of them surprised him.

But with little else to do besides eat and sleep and play Empires with the gnomish Pizzle, Treet made reading Belthausen a religious duty—struggling mightily with the interminable paragraphs made up of awkward sentences running on for pages freighting words whose meanings could only be guessed at or approximated in context and then only on second or third reading.

Belthausen was no William Shakespeare, but he seemed to know what he was talking about. Treet sensed as he read that the man grasped whole realms of possibility and feasibility that heretofore had been only hinted at, if considered at all. If he labored to bring his ideas into clear focus—and the signs of monumental labor were everywhere visible in his ungainly book, at least to the professional eye of another writer—it indicated that these were fresh ideas, concepts born of deep insight and creativity whose birth had cost the author something. He might not have been the Bard, but he wasn't chipped beef either.

So with increasing admiration, Treet slogged along, feeling like a foot soldier trudging under full field pack, following a commander whose orders he could scarcely comprehend. Along the way he also learned something about wormholes—among other things.

And what he learned disturbed him utterly.

Treet
lay on his couch with the printout of Belthausen's book propped on his pillow while he sat cross-legged, tearing open rubbery capsules of dermal nutrient he'd found in his sanitary stall and smearing the viscid green emollient into his skin. It wasn't a proper nutrient bath, but considering he was several million miles from the nearest public spa, the little capsules were the next best thing.

So, smoothing the sticky substance over his face and chest and arms, he read, for the fourth or fifth time, a passage about time distortion in connection with wormholes—one of the more disturbing sections of the book for Treet—when he became aware that his scalp was tingling again. He stopped reading and tried to think where he had experienced that sensation before. With a start he remembered: Yarden!

At the same instant he glanced up and there she stood, framed in the open door of his compartment. He jumped up, opened his mouth to speak, but could not. What does one say to a vision?

“Mr. Treet,” she said, less a greeting than the recitation of a known fact. “May I come in?”

For a moment Treet could only stare at her. Then he realized he had been addressed and asked a question. “Y-yes! Please come in. I wasn't expecting anyone. I … would you like to sit down?” He whirled around and picked up the foam chair at the terminal desk.

“Thank you, no. I sit entirely too much as it is. I imagine we all do.”