The Duke Of Uranium (23 page)

they could make a pile. There were four gambling-related player assassinations last year, so I’m not just being paranoid. So,

skipping all the familiar steps in the logic, it sounds to me like we’re starting a walking party.”

They all turned to look at the thinner of the older men, expectantly; he shook his head and said, “I’ll be very happy to walk with you all, for the company, and because as a spiritual leader it’s my job to be there to comfort and assist you spiritually after this traumatic experience, and of course if any of you is targeted, as any of you might be, it would be good to have you properly prepared in case the, um, eventually unavoidable should happen. Just in case. But all I am is a teacher of the orthodox version of the Wager—that is, the version taught on the Hive, which is of course the center of the Wager—just down here on Earth to give a few lectures at several conferences while my wife sees the sights, you know—and I don’t have an enemy on the planet. Or any other planet. Or anywhere else. But I shall be happy to walk with you.”

“What’s your name, preach?” Alo asked.

“Paj Priuleter. Actually I was born Rif Priuleter, but after ten years of preaching, as an honor for my record of perfect orthodoxy, I was given the name—”

“You can tell us while we walk,” Vara suggested, and got up and headed east; everyone immediately fell in behind her, the preacher trailing along last.

After half an hour of walking, Jak began to question the wisdom of the djeste. He was getting to know what the surface of a planet was like, and the answer, for this particular part of this planet, was “rough.”

On the Spirit of Singing Port, he had diligently alternated days walking a simulated five miles and running a simulated two miles in full gravity, trying to ensure that he would be fully mobile on Earth. It had seemed like endless hours of work, but as preparations for this, it had been far too light. The treadmill surface had been just the right combination of smooth and sticky so that he neither bumped his feet against anything nor slid for a single instant. The motion of the treadmill had told him at what pace to keep walking. And though for the last twenty days or so he had always made his workouts continuous, he had always known that whenever he wanted, he was just seconds away from a hot bath, a cold drink, and the comfort of microgravity.

Here, he was stumbling along in the predawn cool, tripping and slipping continually, and his only choices were more of the same or to sit down in completely unknown country. He was wondering, too, about all the things that showed up in intrigueand-adventure novels; in school they had said that the Sahara had restablized, postBombardment, as a mix of grassland, scrubland, and forest, and that all sorts of animals were moving into it, their populations exploding in all the open country, but he had no idea what animals

tigers? cobras? if he saw an elephant, would it be dangerous and what should he do about it if it was? He was beginning to realize that although there was probably some useful information somewhere or other in the intrigueand-adventure stories that he loved, he had never paid any attention to it. In the stories, the hero just knew things; it was part of his job; perhaps Jak should have paid more attention to whatever it was you were supposed to know.

Oh, well, it was as useless as wishing that he’d paid attention to Uncle Sib; really you just couldn’t. If he had paid attention to the information in the stories, he’d have found the stories boring, and not read them.

Eventually, they settled into a pattern of Vara walking on point, Shadow and Jak walking side by side at the rear, with the two older men in the middle, with everyone two or three meters apart. At least the way they were proceeding, Jak thought, if Vara steps on a deadly stonefish and dies of poisoning before our eyes, like in African Maelstrom, it will be her and not me. Except that it probably wasn’t going to be a stonefish or any kind of fish

those were aquatic

maybe some kind of snake?

The way his luck was going, they’d be set on by a pack of wildebeests and all eaten, anyway.

As the moon sank into the distant horizon, everyone found more interesting ways for rocks, clumps of grass, and bits of fallen tree to grab their feet, so that they all stumbled along as if they were drunk or exhausted. Every so often Paj Pruileter would helpfully remind them that Principle 155 said that “If you stumble often, watch your feet and look for patient friends,” and that Principle 138 was “Mistakes in an unfamiliar environment are still mistakes and no discount is awarded.” After he had been reminded of each principle three times, Jak said, very quietly, “I really liked it better when he was reciting the Short Litany of terror, and I’m starting to have an idea about how to get him to go back to it.”

Even more expressionless than usual, in the dim light, the Rubahy beside him asked, “That’s human humor, isn’t it? You’re expressing a purely ironic intention, not one you intend to carry out?”

“Yeah, Shadow, that’s right.”

“I thought so. Pity.”

It was darker for the few minutes after the moon set, when the light mainly came from the dozen or so orbiting cities above the horizon, but Jak could still see. He had specked that the strange little knobs that popped up and whistled and went away into recesses again were little animals going in and out of holes; perhaps they were what was drawing the attention of the big winged creatures circling above the little party.

Jak kept thinking about a more immediate question; he hated to second-guess leadership. After all, Principle 88 was “Ostentatiously obey, and quietly disobey, anyone with power.” Nonetheless, as they came to the top of a ridge, and he looked back to see that the wreck was still in sight and still burning, he specked that they could have covered no more than three kilometers so far, and they had been at this more than an hour.

“Was there a particular reason for picking east?” he finally asked, out loud.

“Well, I was figuring that Fermi is most of the way across Africa,” Alo said, glancing back and stumbling.

(Paj said “Principle 155” but didn’t elaborate.) Alo seemed to badly need the rest, and sat down on a

boulder, after first looking all around it—Jak specked that he was not the only person who had read far too much intrigueand-adventure fiction.

After he caught his breath, Alo went on. “I was figuring that there’s a few dozen big north-south roads and a lot of smaller ones all through here, with usually an aqueduct running under the roads and irrigated land around it, so once we found farmland, we’d find a road, and once we found a road, we’d just follow it till it joined a bigger one, and so forth until we found someplace with a town. I didn’t want to use my purse to call anyone for obvious reasons.”

“I could use my purse, though,” Paj said. “And I wouldn’t have to mention who was with me. Just a party of survivors. There hasn’t been any activity back behind us, and nobody seems to be even coming out to investigate.”

“You could at least check where we are,” Vara said.

Paj talked to his left hand, then held it up. “If I understand correctly, we are in an ‘anchored erg,’ whatever that is, and if we walk due south for three days, we’ll find farmland. That’s the closest and easiest.”

Vara made a face. “I begin to see a flaw in Alo’s plan.”

Alo sighed. “Me too. All right, we’re not any of us exactly backwoods experts, are we?”

Shadow coughed politely and said, “Actually, I had quite a bit of training in it, part of the warrior schools, you know.”

“Then why didn’t you say something?”

“I thought you knew where you were going, you hadn’t made any serious errors yet, and anyway, I can walk for a very long time without food or water, so it wasn’t me that would be suffering.”

Jak sat and admired the logic in that, in an abstract sort of way; somehow it didn’t precess him at all.

Maybe he was growing tolerant.

Everyone else, he realized, was sitting quietly trying to get up the courage to make a decision. “Well,” Jak said, “the situation is this. Probably not more than one of us is a target. Paj Priuleter is not a target. Other than Shadow, none of us will live more than a couple of days out here without help, and in any case we’re not going to manage to walk to human settlements anytime soon. So I’m willing to gamble the possibility that it’s me that the malphs are after, and that calling for help might get me killed, against the certainty of dying out here if we don’t. Anyone else willing to take the bet?”

Shadow on the Frost nodded emphatically. “I think it’s a good bet, and well put.”

Alo shrugged. “I think I’d be dead in less time than anyone else. Sure, let’s gamble.”

Vara sighed. “I wish we’d thought of this back at the wreck. Okay, Paj, call for help, and let’s see what turns up.”

Jak looked around. The circling birds seemed to be coming lower, but not as if they were going to land.

As he watched, a vivid orange light spread along the horizon beyond the wreck, and then a smear of gold light poured out across the blue landscape, putting it into vivid color and relief almost at once. Two trees by the wreck, now tiny and far away, were still ablaze; other than that, the grassland around them was as still as if the world had just begun with that dawn.

Two hours later, all except Shadow were moderately uncomfortable (and no one had asked him; what he could endure and what he found pleasant were probably separate issues). Small biting insects infested places that otherwise looked inviting to sit. The temperature was rising rapidly with the rising sun, and they had no water; far off to the east they could see a little brown creek, but it seemed silly to try to walk to it when the copters were supposed to arrive soon, and anyway Jak and Alo both remembered from casual reading that often there would be some reason you couldn’t just drink from open water, although both of them had to admit they couldn’t remember just what.

Taking pity on them, or perhaps just tired of hearing two people who knew nothing discuss it at great length, Shadow summarized: “Several things can be wrong with that water or the area around it, and at least some of them will be present at almost any standing water in country like this. Disease, mineral toxins, various poisonous animals, muck deep and soft enough to drown in, and possibly large predators, especially around dawn. That would be a great deal of risk for a drink of water, and quite a long walk in order to take such a risk, when help is coming—how soon, Paj?”

The preacher looked at his purse again. “Supposedly thirty minutes.”

“So if we’d kept walking,” Vara said, “we could all be dead around the creek by now.”

“More or less,” Shadow said. “We might have been lucky enough to miss that part of the experience. But we wouldn’t have been any better off.” In the dawn light the Rubahy seemed to belong more; he was like some fantastic monster out of the dim memory of the species, perhaps a residual trace of the dinosaurs left in the squeaking rodent hindbrain of humanity, with his flat expressionless face, mighty jaws, and overall look of a feathered reptile. Jak thought to himself that anyone who had looked closely at them could not call them “terriers”—”raptors” perhaps, but there was nothing doglike in reality, whatever the pictures might suggest.

The helicopters came out of the southeast, very fast and not very loud, popping above the low hills on the horizon and racing in toward them quickly. They all stood up and waved, and the helicopters circled in to land on the flatter ground below them. As they descended the hill, Alo commented, “Well, so far, at least, they haven’t opened fire on us

“

Vara grunted. “All that shows is that if anyone is after one of us, they’re smart enough to make it look like an accident.”

“If there is anyone after any of us,” Shadow said quietly. “It occurs to me that those who travel into space are a relative financial and political elite, and murder is fairly common among the elite in both my society and yours. Four out of five of us had some reason to fear it, true? So very likely in the twenty or so dead passengers, there might have been fifteen who were possible targets. If there was a deliberate killer, perhaps the killer has lost interest because the victim is already dead.”

“‘Principle 120: Never neglect the null hypothesis, however dull it may be,’” Paj Priuleter said. Jak thought that it would be just spiteful and petty to kick him, now.

“Precisely,” Shadow on the Frost said, and Jak noted that although they don’t have the muscles for facial expressions, the Rubahy have no problem with being quite clear in their vocal expression—the Sahara around them felt momentarily polar.

By the time the survivors got down the hill to the helicopter, the soldiers or pokheets or whatever they were had already set up a table with a terminal on it, and an officer sat at the terminal, apparently to process them in time-honored bureaucratic fashion. “From transponder signal, we think we have a correct roster of you survivors,” he said, “and another crew will be going over to the crashed launch to confirm that you are not among the dead, so don’t worry, we should have all records pertaining to you immediately available. Now, let me just run through our role—Paj Priuleter, is he here?”

He asked Paj a few questions, seemed satisfied with the answers, and motioned him into the largest of the three helicopters. Then he asked, “Alo Fairrara, is he here?” and did exactly the same process with exactly the same questions; then the same for Vara, and finally even for Shadow on the Frost, before reading off, “Jak Jinnaka. I presume you must be Jak Jinnaka?”

Some odd tension in the officer’s voice, asking not quite the form of the question that Jak was expecting, with everyone too alert for any sign that he might be catching on, almost gave him enough warning to get away. He hesitated for just an instant, not because he was suspicious yet but just because something felt different, and that instant caused two of the soldiers to pull handcuffs out of hiding. Jak reacted before he even knew they were handcuffs; he kicked the table upward, hard, as the best diversion he could manage in the second he had to do it, and turned and ran.