The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (120 page)

He and Tam far above the settlement, somewhere so high that all of Medea dropped sharply away from their feet. They hung there holding each other suspended by … what?

Then the fall.

Nikki found the light control, sat on the edge of the bed and measured the drop. It was the height of two hands from the top of the bed to the floor. He touched the floor with fingertips, then increased the light. The floor was hard, sturdy. It was made of long strips of intricately stained material patterned like the tidelands of a wide sea. He'd never seen a sea except in holograms … repros.

And in the dream.

Then, as each hair on the back of his neck and scalp prickled and raised, the patterns, the stains, the strips disappeared.

Once more, he awoke on the floor, rubbed his elbow and sat on the edge of the bed. The bed felt more
immediate,
its covers more resistant to his pressing palms. He knew that he'd better be careful. Sometimes it was difficult to tell one reality from another, but Medea was playing tricks on him.

In the morning, he used Tam's map to locate the small commissary used by floater personnel and found her there seated at a corner table, alone. Only one other table was occupied—three older men in gray singlesuits. Eyes turned toward him with curiosity at the new face. Tam already was eating her early. He called it “breakfast” and she turned to him, startled.

“Why'd you say that?”

He scanned her, saw only curiosity and mild amusement.

“It surprises you?” He sat across from her and signaled the autocook for service.

“Perhaps it shouldn't.” She sipped her juice. “Language is your life. But that's such an
old
word. We were calling it ‘early' three generations and two planets ago.”

“Four generations and three planets ago we were sipping
juice
at
breakfast
whether breakfast was eaten early in the wakeday or late.”

“But I haven't heard that…”

“Some words have more inherent wisdom than others. Juice…” He pointed to the glass in her hand. “… is, after all, a fluid naturally contained in plant or animal tissue.”

The autocook took this moment to disgorge his food onto the table. He began eating and, presently, took up his own glass, tasted it. Acid … faint sweetness.

“This concoction we're drinking is damned near anything but what we call it.”

She examined her glass against the light.

“But what if it's a pretty word? What if…”

“What if we stop playing with words to avoid more important things? Have you discovered what went wrong with that simulator?”

“They've torn it down completely and can't find anything wrong with it. Nothing.”

She put her glass down too hard, was surprised to find her hand trembling.
Why does his question anger me?

Nikki drew in a deep breath. It was what he had expected.

She was accusing now. “But there
was
something wrong and you knew it. How?”

The answer came to him as though he had worked out the details during the night.
I knew because she knew.
And she had concealed this knowledge even from herself. The knowledge was there just the same.

When a thing was true and beautiful he recognized it. The false and ugly betrayed themselves to him with the same clarity. This was a thing about himself which he'd never before put into quite this framework. He found it a heavy burden, as though peering through flesh to entrails.

She pressed him. “How?”

“It's what I was trained to do. I have this…”

The commissary speakers blared: “Tam! Nikki! Fly time!”

She was halfway to the exit hatch before he left his seat. Something about Medea conditioned the older colonists to a quickness that jarred against his comforting, steady Shipstyle pace. Nikki caught up with her in the hallway and they jogged side-by-side through the warren passages.

“Fly time.”

It came to Nikki that he was headed toward his first flight out into Medea's unpredictable wildness. One day of training—vague training where many of his questions were left unanswered or diverted. The message of Medea was clear to him: Anything he learned here he had to learn on his own, trust his own senses. The realization elated him. That was what a poet did: he learned quickly to stop asking verbal nonsense and to begin detailed observations of everything and everyone around him.

Tam pulled up outside a hatch marked READY ROOM. Her breathing was no more labored than Nikki's. She was glad to note that Nikki's youth gave him no physical edge on her. But his ability to see things which she could not, this filled her with disquiet. She feared it.

“That voice on the speaker was Tom Root,” she said. “You'll meet him in a minute.”

Nikki remained silent, watchful. His silence upset her.

“Root has extraordinary skill in the air and equal skill in the lab,” she said.

“You're defending him as though I were attacking,” Nikki said “Why?”

She blinked, then: “Root's an accomplished cell surgeon, biochemist and meteorologist. I don't have to defend him. I'm just warning you. He doesn't say much but when he talks, listen.”

She cracked the seal to the Ready Room and Nikki breathed a deep lungful of unprocessed Medean air. It was somehow different from the sample he'd inhaled the day before: a taint of ozone in it and undercurrents of lubricants, but there was no escaping a dominant sweetness, thick and aromatic. His lungs drank deeply. For eighteen years his body had been prepared, conditioned, cajoled to deal with the variant Medean environment. He associated bitterness with hostility and was reassured by that aromatic sweetness.

He followed Tam through the hatch, felt his body tingling on alert. They emerged into a low room with no wall opposite them. The opening led directly out onto the hangar floor, and Nikki's attention went immediately to the display board across the hangar. The board projected a numeral twice the height of a man—a large number “1” edged in flame red.

Nikki knew that signal:
Heavy radiation; both suns in flare.

Tam tugged at his elbow, directed him to the near wall on their right, through an opening into a small locker room. She indicated a locker and he saw his name on the door tab. It seemed strange there, alien to him: “Nikki.”

Her voice prodded him. “Hurry it up!”

Wondering if he would ever adjust to these demands for speed, he opened the door and read the instructions inside for Code One dress: field pants, shielding slicker with hood, glasses, gloves. The gloves went onto his hands like a second skin. He objected only to the glasses; they filtered out this new world that he'd only just glimpsed. He slipped them into his slicker pocket.

“Hey, poet!”

It was Tam from the next bank of lockers.

“Yeah?”

“Hop it. Less than three minutes to lift.”

“What's the rush?”

“New flares. Bloom started early.”

“But don't we…”

He heard a locker slam shut, Tam's quick steps. She wasn't waiting for what she considered idle conversation.

Nikki followed her out into the hangar and finished sealing his slicker just as the ceiling doors spread their metal jaws. Awe absorbed him. There, stained and dented but humming smoothly, their floater hung framed against a wildly banked background of clouds. The colors! Morning light of two suns played reds, purples, silver … umber … orange.

Sentries at the opening's perimeter scanned the surrounding area for demons and, as Nikki turned to follow Tam's peremptory summons, he caught the flicker of a demon in the dim light. In what seemed part of the same flicker, a sentry raised, fired and lowered his weapon. None of the other sentries paid the slightest attention to this.

What incredible speed these people develop.

Nikki was daunted by this thought as he followed Tam out into the hangar, his attention once more on the floater. It nearly filled the open area and the hangar was at least fifty meters on a side. The reddish-orange bag hugged the ceiling while ground lights played against it. The crew's nest, a web of plasteel and transparent bubbles, scraped the floor, oscillating back and forth like an animal impatient against restraints.

“Root.” It was Tam's voice.

Nikki turned from looking up at the bag and the suspension lines. Tam had her head into a side hatch to the nest. She pulled back and a man's head appeared in the opening: red hair beginning to go gray, a sense of wiry quickness about the eyes. The face and body were thin. Nikki was struck by the fact that Tam called this man Root to his face, but called him Tom when Root wasn't present.

“We haven't time for introductions or any other nonsense,” Root said. “Get in here, both of you.”

It was a Shiptrained voice, almost devoid of emotion.

Nikki followed Tam up into the nest. The metal edges of the hatch were cold even through the gloves. It was dim inside, cramped quarters. Root already was strapped into the seat at the bow bubble. Tam was securing herself in the seat at Root's left. Nikki recognized a console on Root's right identical to the one he'd used the day before. He slipped into the seat, brought the web harness over his shoulders and around his waist.

“Just the three of us this trip,” Root said.

“That means we have to be both crew
and
observers,” Tam said. “Got that?”

Nikki looked over his shoulder, saw that Tam was addressing him. “Got it.”

She was already busy at her console. Nikki knew he should do the same, check the instruments, renew his acquaintance with this control board he'd seen for the first time only the day before. Instead, he took a moment to study Root as subtly as he could.

Why do I feel apprehensive?

The older man was not as tall as Nikki, but there was a sense of enormous energy about him. He moved with confident sureness, agile but reserved. Root was not a man to reveal all of his resources. And his voice … there was a haunted sense about it … a feeling of familiarity.
Where have I heard that voice? He reminds me of somebody.

Forward of Root was the large transparent bubble which gave the whole nest a wide-angle view of terrain. It showed the hangar floor and the display board with its Code One warning. The nest's transparent ceiling curve was dominated by the suspension lines and the bulging undersurface of the floater bag. Directly in front of Root was his instrument hookup and the omniviewscreen which, Nikki belatedly realized, was reflecting his own face for Root to examine.

I don't trust him,
Nikki realized.
And he probably knows it.

It came to Nikki then that Root was a man with secret plans which would not be diverted even if they projected pain or death for others.

To cover the momentary feeling of entrapment which this realization brought, Nikki said the first thing that came into his mind.

“I thought floaters usually ran with a crew of five.”

“
Floater
,” Root corrected him. “This is it. None of the others is operational. Too unreliable in these winds. The other crews have gone to choppers.”

Tam glanced quickly and uneasily in Root's direction, said: “We're a special little crew here.”

Nikki turned to his own console, ran the preliminary check which Tam had taught him. Immediately, he noted that all communications to Central and Ship were not responding. He tested
HOOKUP
and got a flashing red
OFF.

“Why aren't we hooked up to Central?”

“No time for storytelling now,” Root said.

The nest lurched, scraped and bumped hard on the hangar floor, then lifted slowly through the open ceiling. The giant bag above them began to angle off to the right as soon as it cleared the dome and the nest barely missed the lip. The colony outbuildings, wildly colored by the early light, were passing beneath them within seconds.

Root's fingers flew over the controls, adjusting sway, changing the bag's surface contour to form a great, sweeping sail.

“This might be a rough ride,” Tam said.

She sensed potential conflict between Root and Nikki, was confused by her own ambivalent sympathies.
I'm too old to be a mother hen,
she told herself.
The project's too important for colony survival. Nikki has to make it on his own.

Root began activating bag jets, metering precious fuel. The nest took on a bouncing, swaying motion which swept broad expanses of cinder crags and ocher ponds across the bow bubble's view.

“Nikki.” It was Root.

“Yes.”

“If you get sick, throw up in that waste box to your left. Try not to; we're going to need all the help we have and besides, it's distracting.”

He's deliberately goading me,
Nikki thought.
I'm damned if I'll get sick.
And belatedly:
Maybe that's the reaction he was triggering.

There was deliberation about Root's behavior, about every voice tone. The man had said: “
You're a nuisance here but try not to be too much of a nuisance.
” Something more ominous lay just under the surface.

Danger … constant danger.
That was Ship's warning and Nikki told himself never to forget it.

The nest was flying swiftly now at about a thousand meters above undulant sandhills with fans of gnarled scrub in the depressions. The ride was a twisting bounce with a sharp lurch at each end. Hellfire lights rimmed the horizon.

Nikki had experienced rough rides on Ship simulators, but nothing quite like this. And why were they isolated from Ship and from Central? If Root had been doing this for some time, there might be important data that weren't in Ship's banks. Was that possible? Nikki could not ignore a sense of contraShip evil in everything Root did.