Rogue Powers (36 page)

Now, as best Lucy could see through her window, the caravan was stopped by some pack of three-meter high, six-legged, befanged, warty, moss-colored, slavering horrors. The Z'ensam brought up their guns and weapons and calmly wiped the monsters out. There was a further delay while the massive corpses were shoved off the roadway, and then the caravan moved on.

Lucy had come to realize that the Nihilists must have been constantly patrolling the perimeter of the Guardian Contact Camp, killing or shooing away any and all animal life. Otherwise, the hungries would have wiped out the humans long ago. No doubt the need to cordon off the area around the landing zone had caused the delay between landing and First Contact. One little mystery cleared up.

There were certainly enough others to take its place. What drove the Z'ensam to venture out on the Road, to move from where they were to a town that might have been abandoned a week ago or a hundred years ago, to live there for a time, and then move on? They certainly had a high enough technology to settle down and build real cities and stay in one place. They didn't
have
to be nomads. But when Lucy asked why they didn't settle down, C'astille couldn't understand why anyone would want to do that in the first place. Trade had something to do with the constant travel, but that seemed more a holdover from pre-technical times than out of any real need. The towns had started as trading posts, but the Z'ensam didn't need trading bazaars anymore. Their machine-powered and animal-powered transports could carry as much and as fast as modern rail or road-cargo handlers on Earth. Why move the entire population to the goods when it should have been easier to move the goods to the population?

Lucy gradually discovered that there
was
a small number of settled folk, who lived pretty much permanently in a few larger cities. They seemed to be there to operate the manufacturing concerns too large to be made portable, to serve as brokers and to operate the communications centers, to use and operate the research libraries. All the permanently populated towns were such "company" towns or "college" towns. What slight central government there was emanated, more or less by default, from the cities, though no one much bothered with claiming territory or jurisdiction.

The settled Z'ensam had stepped off the Road and stayed in one place for much the same incentives that would tempt humans to accept hardship posts—wealth, power, the desire to escape from old ways, perhaps research into some subject. Some actually grew to like the settled life, but that was rare. Few accepted it for a lifetime. It would have been easy to form a comforting parallel with the settlement of Sumer, the birth of cities, primitive nomads inventing agriculture and settling down. Such had been the human dawn of civilization, but the simple nomads with which Lucy lived on the Road had radio, electricity and explosives far more powerful than gunpowder. They were skilled in chemistry, knowledgeable of astronomy and masters of bio-engineering. Lucy had learned nothing of their cultural lives, but there had to be such. Theirs was a mature, sophisticated civilization.

Lucy's wagon started up again with a slight jerk. She glared at its interior, tired of trading one prison for another. The Guards might have locked her up on the
Venera,
on
Ariadne,
kept her confined to base on Outpost, but at least they had never locked her in an small, utterly blank room on wheels with nothing to read, nothing to do, no one to talk to. After some wheedling, and a lot of drawing and explaining, she had managed to get a table and chair built. Neither quite fit her proportions, but it was a big improvement over squatting in a corner to eat, and made keeping her journal easier, too.

If only something worth reporting would happen. C'astille came sometimes, but not often enough to ease her boredom. The rest of the Z'ensam kept their distance. The higher-ups, the Guidance and the First Advice of this crowd didn't entirely trust her, didn't quite believe she had told C'astille the truth. Why believe there was to be a terrible war among humans, and the Nihilists were in an unholy alliance with M'Calder's enemies? There was no proof of that, yet. Until there was, the Refiners would harbor her, but they would keep their distance, and keep her existence a secret from outsiders. Potentially, she was of great value to the Refiners. But that potential had yet to be proved, and no one really liked looking at the weird little two-legged monster.

It seemed strange to be bored to tears while in the midst of a wholly alien culture travelling in an alien land— but Lucy was a prisoner again, able to do little more than stare out the window, and that got old mighty fast. There was nothing to do.

Her few possessions—a rather worn and dirty looking pressure suit, a sleeping bag, a toilet kit, a few pair of work overalls that served as changes of clothes, her laser pistols, some emergency rations, a first-aid kit—were neatly stacked up by the rear wall. There hadn't been much else in the lander worth the carrying—and lugging even that lot around while wearing a pressure suit hadn't been a picnic.

She worried about keeping sane. That was what the journal was about. Every day she carefully noted down everything that had happened, forcing her mind to focus on present reality, to keep track of the passage of time. She knew she'd be in real trouble if she ever lost track of how many days and hours it had been. So far it had been just over 3000 hours. About four months, Earthside.

It seemed like a lot longer than that. And she was just about out of pages in her journal.

Worst of all was the open-endedness of the situation. She had to wait it out here until the League arrived. The League would need her, because she could speak to the Z'ensam and supposedly knew their ways. But what she came to realize was that
she
needed the League. There was no return to the relative comfort of
Ariadne
for her, not if she wanted to live. There were less elaborate ways
to suicide than flying back to the executioners. The League
ought
to come, logically. But Lucy could dream up a half dozen reasons why they never would. In which case she would live here, among the Z'ensam, and die among them. Perhaps she could survive a week longer, or a year, or a decade, or fifty years. She didn't know.

There was one bright spot—the Refiners were planning to move into a small crossroads village tonight. They expected to arrive at it toward evening, and settle in to five there for perhaps ten or twenty days while they repaired the wagons and waited for another Group that was headed toward the town from the opposite direction. The two Groups had struck a trade deal over the radio, and planned to carry out its provisions in the village.

For Lucy, it meant she would get a break from the endless days cooped up in her rolling cage. And perhaps these new Z'ensam would take more of an interest in her.

The kilometers rolled past, and Lucy returned to her window to watch the scenery. A huge bird zipped across her field of view. At least Lucy called them birds, because they flew. She had noted dozens of flying species. Like most of the life on this world, they were six-limbed, but with the middle pair of legs modified into wings. The flyers of Outpost didn't look quite as graceful as Earth's birds, but they were strong and agile on the wing. Air pressure here was about twenty percent higher than Earth sea level, which must have been a help.

There was one particular breed of flyer that Lucy especially liked. Things about the size of a big house cat, with gaudy, brightly colored wings that reminded her of giant butterflies. They were not the most graceful of flyers, and Lucy named them stumblebugs.

The Z'ensam seemed to keep them as pets, or at least the Z'ensam tolerated the stumblebugs and let them follow the Group from camp to camp.

The stumblebugs' front paws could serve for hands about as well as a squirrel's could, and Lucy enjoyed feeding them bits of food, getting them to swoop down and grab a morsel from her hand, or even land and waddle up to get a treat. They seemed to have the vocal skills of the comical parrots Lucy had kept when she was a kid, and she even managed to teach one or two of them to say a few words in English in exchange for a bite of food.

She named them and played with them, and, like many other lonely people, found pleasure and solace in the company of her pets. None of the Z'ensam seemed to approve of her spending time with the stumblebugs, but Lucy didn't let that bother her; she needed some pleasure to keep from going mad.

The line of wagons and lorries turned off the road into a small village. Good. They had arrived on schedule. Lucy was eager to get out and stretch her legs.

Suddenly, she heard a triple thump three times on the outer wall of the wagon. That was C'astille's signal that the hungries had been shooed off and it was safe to come out. Eagerly, Lucy climbed into her pressure suit and cycled through the lock. It was good to be out of that rolling prison, if only for a few hours, and if only in a shabby pressure suit.

It was a lovely evening, clear and still. As she hopped down from the airlock, Lucy was almost glad to be behind the glass of her suit's helmet—it kept out the overwhelming smell of mold and rotting plant life. Shielded from the stench, she could almost imagine it as a perfect night for a stroll back in Sydney—the air cool and clean, the stars shining brightly down, God up in heaven and everything in its place. A huge shape, hard to see in the twilight, shifted its stance and turned toward her.

"Hello, Lucy."

"Hello, C'astille. English tonight?"

"It is that you need less of the practice than I have need of."

"I don't know about that—but I certainly have more need of your language than you have of mine."

C'astille paused for a moment before answering, trying to sort out the difficult statements about knowledge and relative needs that Lucy had crammed into one sentence. C'astille could make herself understood in Human—no she must remember it was
English,
one of many Human tongues—but she could not yet manage the compression, the conciseness, with which Lucy spoke.

"I have less need now. There will be a time when my skills in Human talk will be of great value. So let me practice it tonight."

"Of course, my friend. I was only teasing you."

C'astille only grunted at that. Teasing wasn't a part of Z'ensam humor, or even a Z'ensam concept. What worried C'astille was that she had come to
understand
teasing. Was she beginning to think like a Human? How could she do that, when she couldn't even make
sense
of Humans?

Lucile Calder stepped away from her wagon and walked toward the center of the clearing. Around her, the bustle of unpacking and setting the village to rights went on. Light began to glow in the low one-story structures, and there were snatches of conversation—and of song.

A pack of Z'ensam children rushed past, chasing each other around the clearing in a game of tag that any human child would have recognized at once. The kids here had long ago gotten used to the halfwalker monster in the Group, and some would even gather round once in a while to hear stories about Earth and space. For the most part, though, they paid her as much mind as the adults did. Lucy barely realized how little she knew about Z'ensam family life.

All she really knew was that a child's name began with the prefix O'. C'astille was very proud of the fact that she had stopped being O'astille at a very early age.

Lucy looked through the scuffed plastic of her bubble helmet at the sky, the stars—Nova Sol A outshining all the rest, beaming down far more brightly than a full moon, casting crisp shadows. The night sky was lovely and clean, dark, studded with the glory of the stars.

She knew she belonged up there, and was but gradually coming to accept that she might be trapped where she was for all time. Strange to think that all humans, less than two centuries ago, were so trapped, and never realized that there were any other worlds, that they were in any sort of trap at all.

And strange to think that this was the first generation of Z'ensam which knew for certain that there was more than one world. But the Z'ensam didn't seem to have invented flying machines. Perhaps they weren't interested in getting off the ground.

"Would you travel there, C'astille? Would you be willing to go through the sky?"

Her friend moved closer to her, bumped her long, rough flank against the pressure suit, and placed a long, four-fingered arm on Lucy's shoulder. C'astille looked up at the darkness. "Willing? That is a weak word. The mightiest traveler of the Z'ensam, the heroes who have crossed every overland route, the seafarers who have spanned the globe—none of them has ever found a Road, a way, as long as your shortest journeys. I
yearn
to go that way, and see everything, everywhere, all the worlds the Humans have found and all the ones they have not."

"You'll get there."

"Yes. As passengers on your ships. But one day we will have our own ships, and grow our own star roads. But come. I must eat, and see to it that our chemists have grown enough of that dull stuff we force you to live on."