James P. Hogan (27 page)

“I take it you are Rikku,” he said. Rikku nodded. “My name is Shakor. Melvig Bahoba directed me here. I presume you know him?”

Rikku closed the door and moved into the room. “Yes. The forester south along the ridge.”

Shakor inclined his head to direct Rikku’s attention to Gallier’s wall board, on which he had scrawled a $sign with one of the pens from the tray below, and smiled faintly. “I’m interested in the Dollarians,” he said. He didn’t push himself by insisting on shaking hands, but settled back on the stool after the courtesy of standing. “I was intending to go to Etanne to try and join them, but I don’t know anybody there. I’m told that you are already in touch with them and on your way there. I wondered if maybe I could join you – a way of introducing myself to them, as it were.”

His voice was quiet and pleasant, but projected a strange quality of confidence that intrigued Rikku, while at the same time putting him more at ease. Rikku moved away from the door and propped himself against the edge of Gallier’s desk, facing the wall in one corner, and folded his arms across his chest. “People don’t normally just walk in there,” he said. “A period of detachment and preparation is necessary first, to free the mind from dependency on artificiality and distractions. That’s why I’ve been working here.”

“I’m aware of that,” Shakor replied. “And to that end I have been living the life of a solitary itinerant here on Plantation, with no fixed lodgement. I’m hoping that would qualify me.”

Rikku uncovered his hands enough to make an empty gesture. “Something like that wouldn’t be for me to say. They make the rules.”

“I know. But I assume they have someone here on Plantation that they make contact through.”

“Mm… yes,” Rikku conceded, giving nothing away.

“Then that’s all I ask – to meet this person and put my case directly. A better way of going about things than knocking at doors on Etanne.”

“I don’t have a way of initiating anything,” Rikku cautioned. “They always contact me.”

“That’s all right. I’ve been waiting long enough. If you could just let me know when you hear from them, so that I can be there, too, that would be sufficient.”

Shakor seemed personable enough, and his manner was open and direct. Rikku could see no reason why he should refuse. If the irregularity of the situation violated some rule that the Dollarians operated by, that would be between them and Shakor. His willingness to bring them another potential recruit could surely only count to his credit. “How will I let you know if you don’t have a fixed place?” he asked.

“Can you get a message to Melvig Bahoba?”

“Yes, that’s no problem.”

“I’ll pick it up from there. And thanks for agreeing to help. It means a lot.”

“I’m happy to help a spiritual brother.” Rikku eased himself back to sit more comfortably on the edge of the desk and regarded Shakor curiously for a few seconds. “What took you to Bahoba’s?”

“Oh, as I said… I’ve been all over.”

“So how did you hear about me?”

“Melvig told me. I guess he and Jor-Ling talk to each other.”

“I thought maybe it was from that robot he’s got working there,” Rikku said. Bahoba’s robot wasn’t especially a secret among people up on the ridge. But they tended not to talk about it outside their own circle to avoid drawing hordes of visitors up there. There seemed little point in not mentioning it now, since Shakor could hardly have been there and gotten to know Bahoba without coming across it.

“You mean Tek,” Shakor answered.

“It just appeared there, on some kind of research field trial or something, didn’t it?”

“I couldn’t say. Melvig isn’t exactly the kind of person who minds other people’s business.”

“Jor-Ling says that it’s got an interest in the Dollarians, too, for some crazy reason.”

“So Melvig told me. But I never talked to it. It isn’t there anymore.”

Rikku’s eyebrows rose. “I didn’t know that. Where did it go?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think Melvig knows, either. It seems to have been sudden.”

“To Etanne, do you think?”

Shakor shrugged. “I really don’t know.” He seemed about to say something else, when a new thought struck him. “Do you have any idea when you’ll be going there, Rikku?”

“It should be anytime now. In fact, when Jor-Ling told me there was someone here just now, I thought that might be it.”

Shakor seemed pleased at that. He nodded in a way that said the important things had been covered, and the talk could turn to lighter matters. Rikku was still intrigued by this strange character who had appeared out of nowhere, and what had led him to seek such a path at what was usually a settled stage of life.

“What attracts you to the Dollarians?” he asked.

“Oh, many things….” Shakor’s eyes roamed over the room, as if he were collecting his thoughts. “It all gets to seem so shallow and trivial after a while, doesn’t it? Machines; these tiny islands of ours in the middle of nowhere; the pointlessness of this day-in, day-out existence…. I suppose it’s the thought of having the chance to glimpse a bit of what they knew back then, in the old world.”

“Yes!” Rikku agreed with enthusiasm. “That’s it! The deeper reality! To know the universal principle of life.”

Shakor eyed him penetratingly, seemingly evaluating his reaction. “And then I’ve heard it said that they are involved with much of the criticism that’s going around of the way things are being run now. That interests me, too. All our futures are at stake.”

Rikku knew of the concerns that were being voiced, of course, and they seemed to make sense. If the Dollarians had any connection, he wasn’t aware of it. No doubt they had their reasons. As Shakor had just said, everyone’s future was at stake. The politics didn’t interest Rikku.

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “But I’d say they were right anyway. How can you let the population grow without imposing some limits in our finite situation? And right now, we have new material assets sitting out there that are priceless, and they’re sending them to Hera! That doesn’t sound to me like the kind of leadership whose rationality we should be entrusting ourselves to.”

Rikku realized belatedly that the other might not see things that way and regretted having committed himself to a view one way or the other. It wasn’t his main preoccupation, after all. He hoped that they weren’t going to get into an ideological dispute at this stage of a relationship which only a moment ago had felt so amiable and comfortable, and braced himself to be challenged to defend his position.

But Shakor merely smiled acquiescently and seemed happy not to take it further.

“Interesting,” he replied.

By the time
Aurora
and its daughter miniworlds caught up with the first materials and supplies raft, the raft had drifted approximately a quarter of a million miles from its planned course. Representing an angular error in the order of a half arc-second at this distance, it amounted to a phenomenal success in navigational precision. The raft had been programmed to cut out leaving a reserve of power in hand, and the first action as the Constellation formation drew close had been to send a signal reactivating its drive to accelerate it up to a velocity matching
Aurora
’s. The fusion drive employed by the raft had been an early Sofian design – the first to be used for a major, long-range mission – and its mounting platform had been retained to serve as a base for the replacement baryonic-annihilation system that would power
Envoy
. The smaller mass of
Envoy
, coupled with the high thrust of the newer drive, would give it the performance capability needed to boost itself ahead to Hera.

Currently, work was almost complete on fitting the upgraded probe with a complement of instrumentation and robotics to carry out the desired tasks of reconnaissance and reporting back from Hera. To avoid excessive trafficking back and forth to Constellation, which despite the raft’s accurate positioning was still several hours’ flight time away, the remainder of the raft’s structural members and a portion of its cargo had been used to construct a local station from which the conversion of
Envoy
could be carried out, and where the equipment produced for it could be assembled and tested. The station was called
Outmark
. Future intentions were to incorporate the discarded fusion drive from the raft to enable
Outmark
to be maneuvered closer in to Constellation, and expand it into a technological research, education, and manufacturing center, where much of the existing industrial activity would be relocated. Also – as would eventually be required for each of the other progeny worlds, too – the drive would provide the necessary means of braking when the flotilla entered the final leg of its approach to Hera.

Occupancy of
Outmark
had commenced as soon as the external hull was pressurized. With the amount of work involved in both the completion of the station itself and the conversion of
Envoy
, the shifts were soon busy around the clock and had abated little since. Launching of
Envoy
was now due in just under two weeks, and Lund Ormont decided that a show of recognition in the form of an official visit from the Directorate would be in order to acknowledge the efforts of the troops. His other, less-advertised reason was a desire to make a personal contribution to boosting morale by countering the negative press that
Envoy
had been receiving from some quarters. Several voices within the Directorate had called for an information campaign to refute the more extreme of the claims that were going around, but Ormont had vetoed the suggestion. The facts and figures were readily available for anyone with enough serious interest and who was capable of understanding them, he insisted. The Directorate’s business was making policy decisions according to the dictates of evidence and rationality, not staging a public-relations circus.

Despite the length of time for which it had now been operational,
Outmark
still had a bare and unfinished look about it, Ormont thought as he and his party of a half-dozen came out of the Final Assembly & Test Shop, where they had seen some of the subsatellites that would be deployed from the
Envoy
orbiter. Escorting them were Vad Cereta,
Envoy
project coordinator, and Wesl Inchow, the chief instrumentation engineer. In the final stage of their shuttle flight from
Aurora
, the visitors had seen the cache of cargo from the raft that hadn’t been used for
Outmark
floating in space, along with the dismantled fusion drive. The proportion of the total that had gone into
Envoy
really wasn’t that great, belying the exaggerations that were being made and substantiating further that the underlying motives were political.

They followed a lane marked by tape showing the path where the floor was gravitationally activated. On either side, piles of tied-down stores stood beside unlaid plates and open sections where the synthesizers were waiting to be installed. From the beginning, priority had been given to work directly related to
Envoy
. Tidying up
Outmark
could wait until later. An opening through the wall brought them into a brightly lit space of fitting bays and bench areas where figures in white coveralls and lab smocks were busy at assorted tasks. Here and there, faces turned, and people nudged and murmured to each other as the director in chief and his party entered.

Cereta led the way over to a corner where a jumble of desks, work tables, and viewscreens stood crammed together beside an open space. As the party approached, one of the dozen or so people working in the vicinity got up from a screen and came forward to greet them. Several yards away, a stepladder six feet or so high with steps on both sides had been positioned in the center of the aisle running beside the desks and worktables. Metal panels blocked the space between the desks and the ladder on one side, beneath the ladder itself, and between the ladder and the rear of some electronics racks on the other side, with the result that anyone wanting to go in that direction would have to climb over. But that wouldn’t have been so easy, either, for another panel was clamped above the platform at the top of the ladder, leaving a space below it no more than six inches high. Several among the group stared at it with puzzled expressions as they drew up around Cereta in front of the open area.

Several rows of upright metal crates of lightweight frame construction took up most of the space. The crates stood a little higher than a man and measured on the order of three feet along a side. They were divided into tiers of cubical cells, each about large enough to accommodate a clenched fist, giving a capacity that worked out to 1944 cells in a crate. It wasn’t that Ormont was some kind of calculating prodigy who could assess such things by eye. But knowing what the itinerary for the tour would be, he had done his homework.

The crates at the back, by the wall, were lined closely together and filled; those around the open part of the floor, partly so. The occupied cells contained intricate electromechanical assemblies of chips, actuators, and appendages built around shells in several colors. More were stacked on shelves at the rear. The ones inside the cells and on the shelves were retracted into a compact configuration for storage. Others, complete or in various stages of dismemberment, with their sensing probes and attachment latches extended, lay scattered on the work benches. They suggested some strange kind of alien arthropod, and were known, appropriately, as “spiders.”

Cereta turned and extended an arm to indicate the crates. “If you don’t know what these are, you shouldn’t be working in the Directorate,” he told the group. He was short in stature, with two remaining patches of hair fringing a smooth head, but bright-eyed and ever-alert with the kind of energy that gave the impression of somebody who devoured problems for breakfast. The transformation of an inert stockpile of materials into a functioning habitat in what had seemed an impossible timescale to most people had in no small part been Cereta’s doing. If he had agreed to mount an official publicity campaign, Ormont reflected, Cereta would be the kind of person he’d want running it.