Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (18 page)

These were his notes made before he began to search the survey scans of The Clivorn for something to explain its name—a cave or cairn or artifact or even a pass or trail. But the clouds had been too dense until that day when he had thought he’d seen that line.
Seen!
He winced. Did he hope to do Science with his feeble human senses?

“—transistorized tar pits of the galaxy!” said a hoarse voice.

Evan whirled. He was alone with the tape.

“Computer of Mankind!” sneered the voice. Evan realized it was the voice of his predecessor, the anthrosyke Foster, imperfectly erased from the old tape beyond his own notes. As he jumped to wipe it Foster’s ghost-voice said loudly, “A planetary turd of redundant data on stellar processes on which no competent mind has looked for five hundred years.”

Evan gasped. His hand missed the wiper, succeeded only in turning the volume down.

“Research!” Foster was cackling drunkenly. “Get their hands
dirty?
” A blur of static; Evan found himself crouching over the console. Horrified, he made out the words. “Shamans! Hereditary button-pushing imbeciles!” More blur, and Foster was mumbling something about DNA. “Call that
life?
” he croaked, “the behavior of living beings?. . . In all the galaxy, the most complex, the most difficult . . . our only hope . . .” The voice faded again.

Evan saw the spool was almost finished.

“Scientific utopia!” Foster guffawed. “The perfectly engineered society. No war. We no longer need study ourselves, because we’re perfect.” A gurgling noise blotted out the words. Foster had been drinking alcohol in his Laboratory, Evan realized. Out of his mind.

“And I’m their court clown.” There was a long belch. “Learn a few native words, bring back some trinkets . . . good old Foster. Don’t rock the boat.” The voice made indistinct groaning noises and then cried dearly, “On your hands and knees! Down on the stones, alone. Simmelweiss. Galois. Dirty work. The hard lonely work of—”

The spool ran out.

Through the whirling in his head Evan heard brisk heeltaps. He stood up as his door opened. It was Deputy Pontreve. “Whatever are you up to, Evan? Did I hear voices?”

“Just my—local notes, sir.”

Pontreve cocked his head.

“On that mountain, Evan?” His voice was dry.

Evan nodded. The thought of their leaving flooded back upon him.

“Dr. Pontreve, sir, it seems such a pity not to check it. This area won’t be surveyed again.”

“But what can we conceivably hope to find? And above all, what has this
mountain
to do with your specialty?”

“Sir, my cultural studies point to something anomalous there. Some—well, I don’t exactly know what yet. But I’m sure I got a glimpse—“

“Of the mythical Time Gate, perhaps?” Pontreve’s smile faded. “Evan. There is a time in every young Scientist’s life which crucially tests his vocation. Is he a Scientist? Or is he merely an
overeducated Technician?
Science must not, will not, betray itself back into phenomenology and impressionistic speculation. . . . You may not know this, Evan,” Pontreve went on in a different tone, “but your uncle and I were at PreSci together. He has done a great deal for you. He has faith in you. I would feel it deeply if you failed him.”

Evan’s heart shrank. Pontreve must have helped his uncle get him here. Appalled, he heard himself saying:

“But Dr. Pontreve, if Uncle has faith in me he’d want me to have faith in myself. Isn’t it true that useful discoveries have been made by men who persisted in what seemed to be only a—hunch?”

Pontreve drew back.

“To speak of idle curiosity, which is all you really suffer from, Evan, in the same breath with the inspired intuition, the serendipity of the great Scientists of history? You shock me. I lose sympathy.” He eyed Evan, licked his lips. “For your uncle’s sake, lad,” he said tightly, “I beg of you. Your position is shaky enough now. Do you want to lose everything?”

An acrid odor was in Evan’s nostrils. Fear. Pontreve was really frightened. But why?

“Come out of this now, that’s an order.”

In silence Evan followed the Deputy down the corridors and back into the Commons. No one was in sight except three scared-looking Recreation youngsters waiting outside the gameroom for their nightly duty. As he passed, Evan could hear the grunting of the senior Scientists in final duel.

He slammed on into his quarters, for once leaving the view opaque, and tried to sort the nightmare. Pontreve’s pinched face roiled with Foster’s drunken heresy in his brain. Such fear. But of what? What if Evan did disgrace himself? Was there something that would be investigated, perhaps found out?

Was it possible that a Scientist could have been
bribed?

That would account for the fear . . . and the “miracle.”

Evan gritted his jaw. If so, Pontreve was a false Scientist! Even his warnings were suspect, Evan thought angrily, twisting on his airbed in vain search of something tangible to combat. The memory of Ava Ling’s fragrance raked him. He slapped the port filters and was flooded with cold light.

The planet’s twin moons were at zenith. Beneath them the mountain loomed unreal as foam in the perpetual racing mists. The Clivorn was not really a large mountain, perhaps a thousand meters to the old glaciation line, but it rose from sea level alone. Torch-glows winked from the village at its feet. A fish-calling dance in progress.

Suddenly Evan saw that the clouds were parting over The Clivorn’s upper crags. As only once before, the turrets above the glacier’s mark were coming clear. The last veils blew by.

Evan peered frantically. Nothing . . . No, wait! And there it was, a faintly flickering dead-level line around the whole top. Say two-hundred meters below the crest. What could it be?

The clouds closed back. Had he really seen anything?

Yes!

He leaned his forehead against the port. Pontreve had said,
there comes a time in every Scientist’s life
. . . in a million barren planets he might never have another such chance. The knowledge of what he was about to do grew in his guts, and he was scared to death.

Before he could lose courage he flung himself back and slammed his sleep-inducer to full theta.

Next morning he dressed formally, spent a few minutes with his Terms of Grant codex, and marched into Pontreve’s office. The appointment ritual went smoothly.

“Doctor Deputy-Administrator,” Evan’s throat was dry. “As accredited anthrosyke of this Mission I hereby exercise my prerogative of ordering an all-band full sensor probe of the terrain above five hundred meters indicated by these coordinates.”

Pontreve’s pursed lips sagged. “An all-band probe? But the cost—”

“I certify that my autonomous funds are adequate,” Evan told him. “Since this is our last on-planet day, I would like to have it done soonest, sir, if you would.”

In the full daylight bustle of the Labs, before the ranked Technicians, Apprentices, and Mechs, Pontreve could say no more. Evan was within his rights. The older man’s face grayed, and he was silent before ordering his aide to produce the authorization forms. When they were placed before Evan he stabbed his finger on the line where Evan must certify that the scan was relevant to his Requirements of Specialization.

Evan set his thumbprint down hard, feeling the eyes of the Tech-staff on him. This would take the last of his fund. But he had seen the Anomaly!

“Sir, you’ll be interested to know I’ve had more evidence since—since our meeting.”

Pontreve said nothing. Evan marched back to his lab, conscious of the whispers traveling through the wing. The probe would not take long once the sensor configuration was keyed in. He told his assistant to be ready to receive it and settled to wait.

Endless heartbeats later, his man came back holding the heavily sealed official canister before him in both hands. Evan realized he had never touched an original before; all-band scans were in practice ordered only by the Chief, and then rarely.

He took a deep breath and broke the seals. It would be a long decoding job.

At shiftover he was still sitting, stone-faced at his console. Noonbreak had sounded, the Labs had emptied and filled. A silence grew in the staff wing, broken finally by Pontreve’s footsteps down the hall. Evan stood up slowly. Pontreve did not speak.

“Nothing, sir,” Evan said into the Deputy’s eyes. “I’m . . . sorry.”

The eyes narrowed and a pulse twitched Pontreve’s lip. He nodded in a preoccupied manner and went away. Evan continued to stand, mechanically reviewing his scan. According to every sensor and probe The Clivorn was an utterly ordinary mountain. It rose up in rounded folds to the glaciation limit and then topped off in strikingly weathered crags. The top was quite bare. There were no caves, no tunnels, no unusual minerals, no emissions, no artifacts nor traces of any sort. At the height where Evan had seen the strange line there was perhaps a faint regularity or tiny shelf, a chance coincidence of wind-eroded layers. The reflection of moonlight on this shelf must have been what he’d seen as a flickering line. Now he was finished as a Scientist.

For an anthrosyke to waste his whole fund on scanning a bare mountain was clear grounds for personality reassessment. At least. Surely he could also be indicted for misuse of ship’s resources. And he had defied a Deputy-Administrator.

Evan felt quite calm, but his mind strayed oddly. What would have happened, he wondered, if he had found a genuine Anomaly? A big alien artifact, say; evidence of prior contact by an advanced race. Would it have been believed? Would anyone have looked? He had always believed that Data were Data. But what if the wrong person found them in the wrong, Unscientific way?

Well, he at any rate was no longer a Scientist.

He began to wonder if he was even alive, locked into this sealed ship. He seemed to have left his cubby; he was moving down the corridors leading to the lock.

Something was undoubtedly going to happen to him very soon. Perhaps they would begin by confining him to quarters. His was an unheard-of malfeasance, they might well be looking up precedents.

Meanwhile he was still free to move. To order the Tech-crew to open the personnel lock, to sign him out a bubble-sled.

Almost without willing it, he was out in the air of the planet.

Delphis Gamma Five, the charts called it. To the natives it was simply the World,
Ardhvenne.
He opened the bubble. The air of
Ardhvenne
was fresh. The planet was in fact not far from the set of abscissae Evan knew only as terranormal.

Beneath his sled the sea arm was running in long salty swells lit here and there by racing fingers of sunlight. Where the sun struck the rocks the spray was dazzling white. A flying creature plummeted past him from the low clouds into the swells below, followed by a tree of spray.

He drove on across the bay to the far shore by the village and grounded in a sandy clutter of fishnets. The sled’s voder came alive.

“Dr. Dilwyn.” It was Pontreve’s voice. “You will return immediately.”

“Acknowledged,” said Evan absently. He got out of the sled and set the autopilot. The sled rose, wheeled over him, and fled away over the water to the gleaming ship.

Evan turned and started up the path toward the village, where he had come on his field trip the week before. He doubted that they would send after him. It would be too costly in time and decontamination.

It felt good to walk on natural earth with the free wind at his back. He hunched his shoulders, straining the formal labcoat. He had always been ashamed of his stocky, powerful body. Not bred to the Scientist life. He drew a lungful of air, turned the corner of a rock outcrop, and came face to face with a native.

The creature was his own height with a wrinkled olive head sticking out of a wool poncho. Its knobby shanks were bare, and one hand held a dub set with a soft-iron spike. Evan knew it for an elderly pseudofemale. She had just climbed out of a trench in which she had been hacking peat for fuel.

“Good day, Aunt,” he greeted her.

“Good three-spans-past-high-sun,” she corrected him tartly. Temporal exactitude was important here. She clacked her lips and turned to stack her peat sods. Evan went on toward the village. The natives of
Ardhvenne
were one of the usual hominid variants, distinguished by rather unstable sex morphology on a marsupial base.

Peat smoke wrinkled his nose as he came into the village street. It was lined by a double file of dry-rock huts, thatched with straw and set closer together for warmth. Under the summer sun it was bleak enough. In winter it must be desolate.

Signs of last night’s ceremonials were visible in the form of burnt-out resin brooms and native males torpid against the sunnier walls. A number of empty gourds lay in the puddles. On the shady side were mounds of dirty wool which raised small baldheads to stare at him. The local sheep-creatures, chewing cud. The native wives, Evan remembered, would now be in the houses feeding the young. There was a desultory clucking of fowl in the eaves. A young voice rose in song and fell silent.

Evan moved down the street. The males’ eyes followed him in silence. They were a taciturn race, like many who lived by rocks and sea.

It came to him that he had no idea at all what he was doing. He must be in profound shock or fugue. Why had he come here? In a moment he must turn back and submit himself to whatever was in store. He thought about that. A trial, undoubtedly. A long Reassessment mess. Then what? Prison? No, they would not waste his training. It would be CNPTS, Compulsory Non-Preferred Technicians Service. He thought about the discipline, the rituals. The brawling Tech Commons. The dorms. End of hope. And his uncle heartbroken.

He shivered. He could not grasp the reality.

What would happen if he didn’t go back? What if the ship had to leave tomorrow as programmed? It couldn’t be worth sterilizing this whole area just for him. He would be recorded as escaped, lost perhaps after a mental breakdown.

He looked around the miserable village. The huts were dark and reeked inside. Could he live here? Could he teach these people anything?