Hidden Variables (45 page)

Then I shone my torch on the central clump of plants, and knew that our search had changed its character. The stems along a two-meter stretch were broken off at the base.

I knew that no native animal was large enough to make that opening—and such life as there was on Quake should be long since deep down in the cooler earth. I hurried forward. Ten paces in, close to the center of the clump, I found them.

Rebka's description of the twins, added to the ID pack images, should have given me a complete picture of them. But it's always hard to convert meters and kilos to flesh and blood. When I first saw them, sitting back to back in the clearing they had made and touching all the way from hips to shoulders, my first thought was how small they looked. I am not a tall man, but they would not have come higher than my shoulder.

My blundering approach must have been noisy but it had been lost in Quake's summer turmoil. The Carmel twins were unaware of my presence. Rushed as I was, I stood for a second before I entered the air curtain that marked the edge of their camp. Within that two-meter radius I knew that it would be cool and comfortable, even if the temperature outside went up another fifty degrees. The danger came from below. The ground beneath my feet was shaking and trembling, moving every few seconds with an upward flexing like the clench of a birth contraction.

The girls were twins, and identical twins—but they were not identical in all ways. The moment that I saw them I knew that the one closer to me was Jilli. Some subtle difference—
was
it an air of dependence?—had been captured by the ID pack.

I stood there much too long, mindlessly watching, until finally I forced myself to move forward, in through the air curtain.

Both girls turned in alarm at my sudden appearance. They must have decided that there were no large animals on Quake, but I wasn't risking the beam of a construction laser. I spoke as soon as they saw me.

"Don't panic. I'm here to help you."

I kept my voice calm, but there was no mistaking the terrible fear that showed on both their faces. Elena turned and began to grope in the case by her side. I sighed and lifted the stunner. It wasn't going to be easy.

"Don't move, either of you, or I'll have to put you both to sleep for a while. That won't help anybody—we have to get up that slope and out of here as fast as we can."

While I was speaking I groped in my jacket with one hand and pulled out my official ID pack. I tossed it forward to lie on the ground in front of Jilli. She picked it up.

"Look inside that," I said. "I'm here on official business." Still neither of them spoke. "On behalf of the Government of Dobelle," I went on, "and on behalf of the Office of Species Protection, I arrest you as suspects for the genocide of the Zardalu species. You will be taken to the planetary center on Ehrenknechter, formally charged there, and transported for testing and interrogation on Sol."

That was the formal piece, but I added, "Unless you both want to die here when summertide hits, we'd better get out of this crater. Let's go, the sooner we do it the better our chances are."

I didn't expect resistance. There was no rational way in which they could hope to disarm me, or if they did there was no chance that they would survive on Quake. But neither girl moved.

Finally Elena spoke. She did not look at me, but she took Jilli's hand.

"We won't go," she said. "Leave us alone here. If we die, that ought to be enough punishment. We'll take our chances here."

I looked at Jilli. She nodded agreement. I was in trouble, and it was of a type that I had never expected. I could make both sisters unconscious easily enough—but could I get them back to the lip of the crater without assistance? The heat was getting worse and worse, even though they were not aware of it inside the conditioned air of their camp. And I was slowly becoming aware of Quake's higher gravity—not much more than Egg, about ten percent, but that would be important if I had to carry anything up the steep slope.

"You don't have the choice," I said. I still kept my voice as gentle and reassuring as I could. "If I have to, I can take you both in unconsciousness. You know what this is?"

I waved the stunner, and both sisters nodded.

"I don't want to use it unless I have to," I went on. "It would take time to get you up there, and we don't have time. Make me do it that way, and you'll make my chances of living through this a good deal less."

Jilli put one hand up to her face. I couldn't stand the look in her eyes. It was despair, final and hopeless, the knowledge that something worse than death was coming to her. I swallowed my own bile and stood there, waiting. Around us, frequent thunder marked the passing of precious seconds. Unless they could be persuaded quickly, their final decision would be irrelevant.

Jilli looked around at her sister, questioning. "It's not just us, Ellie," she said. "We can't make it more dangerous for him. He hasn't done anything to us."

I didn't see Elena Carmel's expression change, but her twin could read signs that were invisible to a stranger. She turned back to me.

"You can put away your gun. We'll come with you."

They began to break camp, but I stopped them.

"No time for that. Just bring what you absolutely need."

Two nods, in unison. They picked up one bag each and we stepped outside the air screen.

Away from the protective curtain of cool air, perspiration seemed to burst out of our skins. Static conditioning areas were easy, but we had no way of providing a mobile one that could move along with us. I motioned for them to go ahead of me up the slope. It would have been better if I had led them back along the way I came, but even now I couldn't be sure there would not be a change of heart. Close as we were to our deadline, it was still better to take a few extra minutes to make sure that I reached the hover-car with the Carmel sisters safely in tow. As we climbed the rough slope, I noticed that Jilli and Elena moved side by side, closer together than I would have chosen. If one fell, both might slip back down.

By the time we reached the top I was feeling crushed. Rebka and I had gone a long time without rest or sleep. The combination of higher gravity, fatigue, heat, tension and troublesome old memories was beating me down. I longed for a chance to collapse into the hover-car chairs. The cuts on my legs had opened again, and I could feel the blood trickling down into Rebka's borrowed boots.

The relief on Rebka's face when we appeared over the top of the crater lip lifted me a little, enough to grin at him as he swung to the ground and helped the two women inside the hover-car. They looked at him, once, then turned their eyes down. He was the Inquisitor, the Tormentor, pursuing them remorselessly across the space between the stars.

If I could read their look, Rebka could analyze it in detail. He was thoughtful for a second.

"Sit there, in the back," he said. "The worst is over now."

He left them to their own thoughts while he secured the door and turned the car around for the return journey—with more experience, he would have done that while I was gone and saved us some precious time. Then he handed the controls over again to me and went to sit opposite the Carmel sisters. I would have preferred to take a few minutes rest, but we had no choice. We were too late already, half an hour past my own mental deadline for the return. I set the forward motor. Too fast for full safety, I hurled us across the heaving, smoldering surface, back towards the foot of the umbilical.

* * *

Fatigue and tension; they can combine to produce strange effects. I felt as though there were three of me in the hover-car. One was piloting us back to our starting point, automatically skirting dangerous spots on Quake but still trying to hold as close as possible to a straight line on the ground. The second man inhabiting my body was listening to the conversation behind me between Rebka and the twins. Their voices seemed to cut in and out, disappearing completely when the way ahead of us required total attention. The crust of Quake was full of new fissures and fractures that had appeared since our outward trip.

Who was the third man? He was a shadow, a pair of eyes and ears looking out on Quake—the Quake of long ago, the garden planet that existed before Perling threw a planetary ball across the inner System. The third man watched and listened, while a young, auburn-haired woman danced and skipped her way across the sunny plains, smiling wide-eyed at the noon eclipse and breathing in the fragrance of dawn and evening. By careful concentration, he could banish the drab reality of the present.

I would like to have stayed with the third man, but the other two intruded. First it was a stream of lava, dull black-red across our path. I had to swing a kilometer left to clear it. Four more minutes had been lost. And I had to hear what was being said behind me, because part of the young woman that danced across my sight was Jilli Carmel, the happy Jilli who had looked at me from the ID pack.

"There is nothing that I can do about that part of it," Rebka was saying. Somehow or other he had broken through the dark despair that had climbed out of the crater. The two women were talking to him, low-voiced and intense.

"You must go back to Earth with me," he said. "I have no latitude in that area. Perhaps if you were not human, or I were not human, I could take greater risks. But we must let you prove conclusively, to every species on the Council, that you were controlled only by fear and early experience when you killed and fled on Lasalle. I have seen the record of your childhood. I know what drove you to act as you did."

Not true, said a small part of me. You told me that you couldn't understand why they fled, any more than I could. Rebka was playing his own game, making the conversation behind me follow some predetermined pattern that he had established.

"We were terrified," said Jilli Carmel softly. "They came so quietly. I had the beam disperser close to me, and I fired it without thinking. There was nothing that Ellie could do to stop me—it was all done in a second."

"But I would have done just the same," said her sister. "I woke up a second after you, that was all."

"And then we ran," said Jilli simply, as though she and her sister were one person continuing a monolog. "We ran away, and jumped to Kirsten."

"But we knew someone would be pursuing us," said Elena. "Someone from the Council. So we kept going until we reached Dobelle. This planet seemed safe, there was no one here to betray us to you."

There was a long silence. In front of us we faced the long, slow hill that led to the foot of the umbilical. I strained my eyes through the smoke, but we were still too far away to see anything. I did not mention it to anyone behind me, but the deadline had passed fifteen minutes earlier.

"I don't understand," said Rebka at last. "You killed by accident, when you were still half-asleep. You killed beings who looked like those who had killed your own parents. Our tests would have shown that, as soon as we began them. The Council will not offer punishment for an accident. We would have given you a rehabilitation treatment, but only to cure the things that caused you your fear." His voice was baffled and disturbed. "We are not monsters on the Council. We would never do more rehabilitation than is necessary for your own good."

Another long silence. I concentrated on steering us across a charred and smoking landscape and waited for some response from the Carmel twins. There was no time to spare for my third self. We were just hours away from summertide maximum, and it took full attention to move us safely across the tide-torn, dragon-haunted surface of Quake. The ground moved constantly, hot vapors breathed from fissures in the rock, and the sky above was a rolling mass of fine ash and bright lightning. We skimmed through occasional downpours of warm, sulphur-charged rain that steamed as it touched the hot earth.

"For our own good," said one of the girls at last. Her voice was bitter and accusing. "You'll give us rehabilitation necessary for our own good. That is exactly what we are afraid of. We don't want your treatment, any of it."

I couldn't tell which of the twins had spoken, and I had my hands too full with the controls to risk turning round to look.

"It wouldn't hurt you," said Rebka. I felt sure that he was staring at them with his intense, deep-probe look, trying to see through into the working of their souls, as he had done to me. "How could you think we would hurt you? Doesn't the Council have a good reputation? We want to make you stronger, saner people—you will be much happier after treatment than you could be before it."

"You can't guarantee that." Again, which twin was speaking? I thought it was Elena. "That means you'd remove our problems, doesn't it? Make us 'saner'—but we know what that would include."

"It would mean that you'd remove the thing that is more important to us than anything else," said the other sister. "You wouldn't consider it at all—except as one of our 'problems' "

"We would remove
nothing
that was right for you," said Rebka. He was beginning to sound baffled—even irritated, which would never do for a member of the Species Protection Council. "We'd make only minor changes, enough to let you live normal balanced lives—without those terrible childhood memories."

"Of course. Normal, balanced lives. We knew that's the way the Council would work." The voice was low and intense.

"But you see, we're
not
normal," said her sister. "Your treatment would make us like other people. Does the Council have other human members?"

"No. We have only one of each species—but every species is represented," Rebka's voice was puzzled now. "Why do you ask that?"

"Because to us there is one species that is not considered by the Council—its needs are ignored. No other species has
twins
—and we are different from you."

"You'd change us"—I felt sure that was Jilli speaking. "You'd make it so we were not dependent on each other, the way that we have been all our lives. Did you know that one other pair of identical twins was given Council treatment? They lost their closeness."

There was a sudden grunt from Rebka, like an in-drawn breath of pain. The sisters kept up their attack.