Balshazzar's Serpent

III: FESTIVALS OPEN & HIDDEN

The women were not used to any strangers, and they shied away from her. Eve knew that she was going to have to do something to break through that wall or it was going to be a pretty lonely wait.

Clearly the puzzle was in why these people were here at all. This wasn’t a colony, or, at least, it wasn’t initially set up as a conventional colony, nor had it collapsed from an advanced state like so many others. Eve was absolutely certain that this wasn’t a bottoming out but the best life these people could manage.

Although many women were out in the fields working with the men, clearly the party left back in the village was part of the cultural division of labor they’d set up. If the sexes were equal in the fields, though, why only women and girls here?

The answer soon became obvious when she followed the women from the cleanup to a large covered area behind the barn. It was a little different than the other structures, with a thick thatched roof and sturdy stone and wooden pillars holding it up, but with only a gauze-type netting around it, possibly more salvage, which allowed air in but kept the inside enclosed and somewhat protected from flying insects and wandering animals. The dogs could probably get in, but, she noted, they were definitely trained not to.

It was a kind of nursery and day-care facility all in one, and for such a small population it was very full indeed. Although many of the new mothers had been field workers and carried at least one baby in a kind of backpack when they’d come in, clearly this treatment was meant for only the youngest, or perhaps certain children. There were many more here, watched over by very obviously pregnant young women, most of whom were far younger than Eve but somehow looked older in the face and particularly the eyes, and clearly they were not first-timers since their swollen breasts were being used for wet-nurse duty on a host of little squealing ones.

The kitchen staff became the day-care types; none of these were obviously pregnant, and some would be unthinkably young for that, and it was they who took the older children, from toddler stage onward, and played with them mostly outside, and tended to their needs. Cotton diapers held with some sort of homemade pins or special ties were for the small infants and for the sleepers and others who might be inside. The toddlers to perhaps four- or five-year-olds who made up the rest of the nursery were stark naked when playing outside, although if one or another started to go they were quickly whisked over to a pit latrine to be conditioned to do the right thing.

Still, two of the younger girls, perhaps no more than ten or eleven, had the unenviable duty of mostly standing around with a homemade broad scoop made from some sort of gourd and an equally homemade whisk broom to clean up accidents. It still stank, but so did the whole place. Eve made a mental note that some kind of odor conditioning should be included in all that training they gave them. These women were born and raised here; they were almost oblivious to the stink. It was certain that you could get used to it, be able to tune it out more or less, but to somebody whose experience was in breathing filtered air in a closed environment where cleanliness was next to godliness this took some getting used to.

Eve decided that if anyone was going to speak to her it would probably be one or both of those miserable girls on the kiddie poop-scooper patrol. Kids either tended to shy away from anybody they didn’t know or become very open. At least these two weren’t going anywhere for a while.

They looked at her when she approached but didn’t say anything nor return her smile. “Hello,” she said, sounding as friendly as she could. “I’m Eve. I couldn’t help noticing you two drawing a less than fun job here.”

One of the girls turned and shrugged. “Beats changing and cleaning diapers,” she noted pragmatically. “Besides, somebody’s got to do it. Otherwise the babies would be steppin’ in it and all. They don’t care.”

The other girl nodded seriously. “Can’t waste nothin’ here. It’s our duty, just like we was out in the fields. Put the part back people can’t use, and it’ll feed the soil and grow stuff people can.”

So that wasn’t a latrine over there, it was a compost heap of sorts. Feces, from the youngest baby crap to the oldest person in the village, was mixed and returned as fertilizer. Eve found the idea both practical and unappetizing. She made a mental note to eat nothing here that hadn’t been thoroughly cooked.

The whole area was filled with lots of nasty looking flying things of varying sizes from gnat through butterfly, but they were neither of those nor anything in between. They served the same purpose as insects, or so it seemed, but they looked very strange and grotesque to Eve, and when they landed on skin or particularly decided to crawl up the sleeve of the robe, they caused itching.

“Do any of these things bite?” she asked nervously.

“Some of ’em, yeah. Mostly give you little pinprick sores or maybe a little rash. They can’t do nothin’ to people, though. Our blood kills ’em, and they only usually bite if they’re protectin’ themselves,” the first girl told her. “In fact, I’m surprised they’re swarmin’ here. They usually don’t like our smells. Must be somethin’ you got on.”

Mental note number two: forget bath oils, deodorants, etc., when landing in primitive areas. They won’t do much good beyond the first ten minutes anyway, and they might attract bugs.

There was one particularly large black bug that seemed a loner but flitted around as if curious. One came suddenly close to Eve’s face and she saw that it was a teardrop-shaped black creature larger than her thumb with countless legs folded up underneath it and wings that moved so fast they seemed nearly invisible but which gave off an almost mechanical hum. What was startling, though, was the head, on the broad top of the teardrop. It looked almost like a face, with two larger than proportional oval eyes with black pupils, a kind of twisted proboscis, and a wide slit of a mouth that seemed to be smiling. She swore that the thing looked right at her with the same studied intensity as she examined it, and then it opened its wide mouth to reveal some nasty, undulating growths that passed for teeth, cocked its head, and sped off.

“We call ’em hummers or sometimes humbugs,” the first girl told her, noting the exchange. “They’re always curious but they don’t do nothin’. Nobody’s even sure what half these critters eat, but some of the little ones there, the pinheads, they took to our grain, so we got natural pollinators.”

“You seem very knowledgeable about farming,” Eve told her.

“It’s what we do,” the girl replied matter of factly. “Kinda boring but it beats starvin’, I guess. It’s a little dry here so we grow mostly wheat and maize, with some veggies down by the creek, and we breed some animals and use ’em for different things. The extra we trade with the villages around who grow other stuff, and we get rice and cotton and stuff like that from the wetter parts of the land. It kinda all works out, I guess.”

It was true that they seemed to have hit on a world that was just right for survival, at least on this level. There seemed no sign of sickness; she hadn’t heard so much as a cough. Alien diseases were almost always too alien to pass between interstellar species, and most people had already been genetically protected in decades and centuries past before they were even allowed to go out to the stars.

Still, this was a hard life far from the complex super hospital of The Mountain or many of the more modern colonies, and there were cancers from the sun and from things in the environment you might never have thought of, and lots of lesser but still deadly dangers. She still hadn’t seen anybody that really looked old, just young people who looked far beyond their years.

“Can I ask your names? You know mine but I don’t know yours.”

The first girl shrugged. “I’m Madi, and she’s Ilee.”

She nodded. This was some progress, anyway. “I am very interested in your life and culture here, but I guess you and your people aren’t as curious about me.”

“Curious got nothin’ to do with it,” Madi told her simply. “We don’t believe in askin’ questions ’bout things that’re none of our business.”

“We are still learning your ways,” Eve responded carefully. “We don’t mean to pry, even though we are curious. But if we don’t learn about you we won’t know what is proper or improper in your eyes. We weren’t raised with your ways, so we haven’t any idea what the rules are. Can you understand that?”

That kind of threw them. It simply hadn’t occurred to them that somebody might have to pry just to find out that they shouldn’t pry. When you were a provincial ten-year-old faced with such a conundrum and smart enough to know it, there was only one thing you could do: shift the focus.

“Well, we didn’t ask you to come,” she retorted, as if this was sufficient.

“But we had to come. God guides us to where He wants us to be. We deliver his message to any who want to hear, but nobody has to come hear it. The word is our seed. If it takes and grows, either in a people or even a few individuals, then we rejoice. If it doesn’t, but falls on poor soil and dies out, we know that they heard the word and rejected it, and we feel sad, shake the dust from our feet, and go, never to return.”

“My daddy said he heard a preacher or priest or whatever once,” Ilee noted. “He says the guy never stopped trying to get everybody in the whole universe to believe the same stuff and that he was a real pain and a pest. Your god don’t do that?”

Eve smiled. This was something of a breakthrough, even with a ten-year-old. “No. We think God wants some people to hear and others not, but that it’s a choice. Many, maybe most people have heard the message over thousands of years and either didn’t accept it or didn’t really follow what it meant. We are looking for the few that can.”

“But you was born to believe that stuff,” Ilee pointed out. “You don’t know if it wouldn’t be just crazy stuff if you was us and we was you, right? You never had to choose.”

It was a challenge that she was well aware of. “Well, everyone has doubts from time to time if they’re right. But if we’re right, things have a way of showing it. Many of our people have had real problems after they’ve seen some of the worst things people can do to each other. We’ve come on worlds where raiders have pillaged and destroyed and left only horror behind. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, dead. There are some natural disasters, too. It’s real hard to keep faith alive when you see the torn bodies of dead babies.” She wondered if, considering the setting and the ages of the two girls, she was being too graphic.

“You seen that?”

“I’ve seen the pictures of that, and heard of it from the people who are older than me but who went to those places like I’m here now. Some could not go on and left us and settled on other colonies because they could not maintain their faith. We’re all challenged by something sooner or later that makes us doubt. That’s because there’s evil in the universe, and even in each of us, as well as good. Most folks don’t really believe in evil; they believe that bad things happen by accident or because people go bad from things in their own growing up and the like. But there is evil. Real evil.”

Ilee frowned. “So what kinda god lets babies be killed?” she asked skeptically. “What kinda god lets evil go on? I’m not sure I like your god.”

“Me, neither,” Madi added.

“We think we’re being tested,” Eve told them. “There are big rewards if you pass, but the test is very, very hard and most folks flunk. But it’s got to be real tough or it isn’t a good test. Going back to farming, let’s say God planted all of us, but He only wants to pick the very, very best. If He doesn’t let evil go and keep testing us, then how will He ever know? We wouldn’t be choosing, we’d be like toys who had to do whatever their owner told them.”

The two girls looked out at the field, where some toddlers were giggling as they tried kicking away a crude ball covered in a tough, leathery skin that was almost as big as they were. “Yeah, but babies…” Ilee muttered, thinking of it.

Eve was afraid she’d used the wrong analogy in her conversation, but what could she do? She had to take whatever wedge this closed-mouthed society gave her. She wondered, though, if maybe she should have tried it with some of the older women. After all, these girls were younger than the age most people began any religious instruction on The Mountain beyond the very simple ideas of good and bad. Dead babies related to their experience, but it was hard to explain to a ten-year-old why God might allow it.

The more she thought about it, the more depressed she got, too. For all the facile responses and quick retorts on the question of a moral universe, she wondered if she could explain that to anybody.

It was tough to explain what you don’t understand yourself.

The big man’s name was Gregnar, it turned out. He might well have had a last name, but family names were not used, or so it seemed. At least, every single person Robey asked for a family name responded “Smith” with something of a grin. The idea that he was being put on didn’t bother him nearly as much as the lurking fear that maybe they really were all named Smith.

As he watched them work in the fields, interacting with one another, joking, occasionally cursing, and particularly after he pitched in on some heavy lifting, he began to form a theory about these people and this world.

For one thing, it was amazing what you could learn from a culture’s curse words. Not just their origins, but references to God or gods or other such entities, pleas, attitudes, you name it. This group had the full panoply of great cussing; while he heard nothing new, he thought that, in one afternoon, he’d managed to hear every variation he’d ever encountered before. While the Doctor would be disappointed—he was a collector of new ways people could cuss—Robey hoped that the monitor team up above had tender ears. This was an earthy group, to say the least. Still, there were some unique exclamations, like “By the twin Rocks of Eban!” and the like that might prove useful. He hoped the computer aboard ship could find a match for one of them, if they weren’t just newer local ones.

Putting the cursing together with the attitudes towards outsiders and the reaction that was so dramatic at lunch—“Found!”—these people had to be fugitives, or, rather, the descendants of fugitives. That was why this place was off the old commercial charts and had no other references. The genhole gate, of course, was charted, but it was one of tens of thousands and there wasn’t any indication that it wasn’t just the latest in an exploratory chain that had not yet been developed.

They had certainly come from more than one world and one culture. The curses and the variety in names coupled with the apparent universal use of a form of English showed that they’d had wide exposure to different cultures and attitudes and that they’d had to settle on a language that was probably not native to any of their ancestors but was practical to know simply because it eliminated that divide when setting up a new colony.

What had they been running from that had thrown them together like this? And what were they still scared of?

The dark skins and generally similar features didn’t really mean much; there would be a lot of intermarriage in just the early stages and there was no way to check every village and make sure that there weren’t more dramatic differences. Still, it looked like there was one dominant group and it pretty well was absorbing the others.

All of this was deduction; even though they quickly got used to him and even joked about his “getting dirty with the peasants,” they volunteered just about nothing. Whatever their immediate ancestors had run from, it was something they didn’t want to bring up.

He wasn’t in the same physical condition they were, but they seemed impressed that he could hold his own. Preachers weren’t supposed to have muscles or work with their hands; the fact that a lot of it was good physical conditioning via daily workouts aboard ship and the lesser gravity of this world he’d still not learned the name of, he decided not to explain.

He walked back with them just before sunset. They were a tired group, but they had done a fair day’s work and they were ready to eat and relax. And now Gregnar was willing to talk to him about what came next.

“So you want to preach to us, is that it?”

Robey shook his head. “No, not me. Our leader is a great teacher and scholar and he’s the one we want you to hear. You and as many others from villages in the region as can be reached. If we plant well, then some like me will remain to teach and train. If not, well, you will not see us again. It is our way.”

“But you will spread the news that we exist,” the big man pointed out.

Robey wasn’t sure if he was being threatened or merely sounded out. “No, we don’t work that way. In fact, we’re right now repairing and upgrading the defense system from the old days that should have been a real challenge for us but wasn’t. Anybody else who comes here will have a much harder time. We can’t guarantee security—who can but God?—but we can make it as good as we can.”

Gregnar seemed interested, and as he invited both John and Eve to eat with them, he became more open and friendly. It didn’t take a genius to notice, though, that this openness was strictly one way.

“You have no home but your ship? You have no world that sends you?”

“No. A great many of the faithful built and modified our ship on several different worlds where spaceships could still be built or fixed. It was a freighter, but after the Great Silence broke things down, it was used as the basis for building our community. ‘Home’ to us is Heaven, when we will be reborn in new bodies in the presence of God. Until then, we bring His truths to those who will hear.”

“So how will you do this here?”

“We have many people in the villages around here by this point, so we’ll pick a place that everyone can get to and we’ll put down and set up. Then we’ll move, until we’ve managed to teach everyone.”

“Sounds like it will take you years here.”

“If we had to do it by walking and riding distance, probably, but we have ways to show everything to villages over a wide area if they are too far to get to us and back in time. We have been at this a long time. We will not disturb things for long that do not wish to be disturbed.”

“So where and when will your great leader put down first?”

“Not far from here,” Robey told him. “That is, unless there is an objection from you or others as to where. We had planned on doing it perhaps on the hard flat rocky region about nine kilometers south of here. It is a good location for getting people from many villages in and back, and it will support our ship.”

That seemed to really interest him. “Your ship will land near here?”

“Our interplanetary module will, yes. The starship part was never designed to land and will not.”

“Inter—?”

“Interplanetary. A part of our larger ship that’s a ship in and of itself. It is designed to land on planets and can go between them if need be, but it can not go between stars. It docks with the starship most of the time, and undocks to bring our platform so that people may come. It is impressive to see land, in fact.”

“I would like to see that, yes. I don’t think there will be any problems on the flats. Just don’t come down on or near crops or rivers and creeks or flooded areas. We will need those.”

“Don’t worry,” Robey assured him. “We know what we’re doing.”

Eve, later, wasn’t so sure. As the group cleaned up from dinner and finished off tankard-sized gourds full of dark, heavy beer brewed by the village itself in preparation for going to sleep, she got her companion to one side and switched off filtration. This wouldn’t keep a local from overhearing, but it would make it about as hard for them to understand the talk as they’d had initially understanding the villagers.

“So, it’s all set,” he said, sounding smug and satisfied.

“Yes, but I don’t like it. I watched the women today, and I watched that man you were so chummy with and his companions. They’re up to something.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! They’re closed-mouthed, yes, but I think that’s because they’re the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of a convict ship or rebel captives or something of that nature. They’re still basically hard-working subsistence farmers.”

“That may be, but they’re not ignorant. Whatever they’ve been taught, it’s pretty complete considering I saw no schools. They know astronomy, they don’t have many superstitions about places or things in space, and they seem pretty knowledgeable about the way things are considering there’s no evident reason why they should. Something about this smells.”

He shrugged, obviously not bothered as she was. “Well, don’t worry about it. It’s not our call, anyway. It’s the Doctor’s to decide, and he’s got the staff to really make things go or not go.”

“Still, do you mind if I put my reservations on the record?”

Again he shrugged. “Suit yourself. I just don’t see it.”

She nodded grimly. “Yeah, nobody ever sees the one that gets them, and we’re the ones here on the ground.”

The Doctor did not explain his reasons for making decisions. He was an often friendly and sometimes gentle man, but he was a total autocrat. He alone, he believed, was answerable to God; his people were answerable to him as God’s messenger.

And the Doctor decided to come down.

It was an impressive sight to the crowds who watched the ship descend, and there were always crowds since it never could or did sneak onto a planet. These people were poor and hard working but they were not in want; nobody seemed to be hungry, and it was not necessary to have everybody in the fields all the time. Once they saw the descent, or heard of it beforehand, they tended to start moving to where they could at least get a good view of the thing coming down from the stars.

The unconventional and expensive magnetic field drive on the Mount Olivet was notable for its near silence; save for a sonic boom or two, there was no sound at all as an object larger than some small farming villages descended, rock stable, over the landing site and then, slowing to a dramatic crawl, it blotted out the sky as it descended finally to the site itself, extending hydraulic cushioning rods like some bizarre robotic centipede just before it landed. With these “legs,” more than a hundred of them, and a constant monitoring of level by the ship’s computer, Mount Olivet was as stable as a real mountain.

Almost immediately the transformation began from ship to meeting site. A thin tentlike covering wrapped around the legs, producing an internal enclosure that was nonetheless open to the ground and nature as required, and then, off a series of moving stairs and belts, men and women in white work clothes supervised a robotic crew of roustabouts in setting up the entire experience. Onlookers could hear great things going on, and see shapes and lights moving all over inside the “tent,” but as showmanship demanded they were not permitted yet to see what lay within. To find out all the details there, they’d have to go to one or more of the meetings that would be held so long as the Doctor and, if he and his people could be believed, God told him to be there. It was free, no cost, no obligation, but you had to physically attend either at the landing site or, if too far away, go to one of the great tents that was even then being erected, along with transmission equipment.

The smaller scout ships flitted back and forth between the big ship and the remote locations, ferrying personnel, robot workmen (since it had been determined that these people would not take up pitchforks and torches and try to slay mechanical monsters), and supplies from Bibles to more secular pleasures like large containers of what would be revealed to be something these people could not properly make—ice cream.

They had a wide range of basic religious beliefs but the majority in the area seemed to have a vision more Roman Catholic or Anglican in nature, even if crudely formed and modified in the telling without clergy or Bibles. Still, most of them would know what the Doctor was talking about when he spoke, and that was a lot easier than some of their audiences.

There was the building sense of occasion about the region, though, which was also what they hoped for. It was a break from the dull, drab routine of life, something different, and while they didn’t neglect their duties, the villagers in John and Eve’s assigned village as well as other villages in the area tended to start looking forward to the show and adjusting major operations so that, for at least the period when the Doctor was there, they would be able to go see him.

The Doctor’s people tried to reinforce this with gifts of treats and trinkets and offers to arrange for larger groups to travel together. They also began distributing basic Bibles in book form, and were somewhat startled at the apparently high literacy rate. They had some problems with the stilted and poetic style of the Bibles, but most of the villagers over ten or twelve could manage to read them, remarkable in a society that appeared on the surface to write nothing down, and whose ancestors had certainly come from a culture where computers could answer everything and even tell or dramatize and thus where literacy was almost certainly rare.

More mystery. There was no sign of paper production or paper of any sort, so what did they write on and with? And where?

This bothered Eve and several of the newer Arms of Gideon who’d come down for the final prep, but in most cases there was just too much to do to solve minor mysteries that were considered, at best, intellectual curiosities and not things that were important compared to their real mission.

Eve, however, felt that any population that hid much of itself from strangers, even to that degree, was not a group you should turn your back on or take for granted. Not that she was worried that the whole operation was in danger; she had faith both in their ultimate appointment by God and also in her knowledge that they were well equipped to take on the worst technology could offer. Rather, she was worried that whoever was behind these people did not realize that, and that some, perhaps some of her own people, would be harmed or worse if this blew up.

Conferring with the Command Center and also with other Arms of Gideon, however, she found them receptive to her reports if not enthusiastic believers of her suspicions, and they took it in stride. They were pros by this point.

Still, with virtually everyone from The Mountain caught up in the excitement of a new set of what the Doctor called “Classes,” the only attention being paid to the locals was to insure that they could get to the pavilion, or see it on giant screens, and get fed and have sufficient facilities including vast pit toilets, and all the rest of the mechanics of it.

Eve, brushed off by Festival Security, and with nothing specific to do in the setup, decided instead to keep her eye on Gregnar and some of his buddies.

The first thing to do was to solve the mystery of her count. More than once she’d counted everybody in the village, from the squealing babies in the nursery and on mothers’ backs to the field hands and animal handlers, and the number had always come up around a hundred and twenty, give or take a couple. And yet, during the days, there would be times when she’d take the count and there would be up to a dozen people missing. Even allowing for not seeing a few in the fields, it seemed an excessive number to be gone, and the number always seemed to be men. Certain specific men, in fact, including, now and again, Gregnar himself, or two of his best buddies, Alon and Krag, who were pretty much cut from the same cloth both physically and mentally.

Eve could hardly be inconspicuous, but she was beginning to know the area well enough to know where in the fields she could place herself and be likely to see without being seen and to hear without being overheard. The trio of men’s pattern varied very little, with all three going out to the most active spot where planting, harvesting, or irrigation was taking place on an intensive scale; then one of them, usually Gregnar, would remain while the other two would begin walking the circle in opposite directions. One time it would be Alon going left and Krag right, the next time the reverse, and every once in a while Gregnar would replace one or the other of them. She followed one once completely around the village, realizing that at some point he probably did notice she was there but not really caring, and it seemed like a routine patrol. The man would examine the areas, looking apparently for breaches in the irrigation canals, checking winches, even checking crops and soil, and then keep going. It took one about an hour to get halfway, or opposite the main day’s workplace, and there he generally waited until his compatriot coming the other way would reach the same spot. They’d stand or sit, talk for a bit, then head off again in opposite directions, this time apparently checking on anything the other reported. In another hour, more or less, they’d be back at the main work site and from that point they would both confer with Gregnar, then pitch in as needed until the lunch call.

In the afternoon, they’d do it again.

There had seemed little reason to keep tracking them, except that twice—once just the day Mount Olivet landed, the next the day before the start of the Festival and the classes—the two men didn’t return in an hour, or even an hour and a half. And yet two, maybe two and a half hours later, each would wander in from the opposite direction as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary.

Where had they gone?

Not into the village. By now there were Arms of Gideon about and they, too, had enough sense of routine that they would have noticed something out of the ordinary, like two of the men coming in when they normally did not.

It had been Alon and Krag this morning breaking their routine; she decided that, if Gregnar decided to replace one of them in the afternoon rounds, she would follow.

She also reported this to Security, who essentially brushed her off. “You’re seeing demons in the bushes,” the Officer of the Day, a particularly arrogant bastard named Cordish, told her. “Still, if it’ll make you happy, go ahead and follow. If you find any trap doors into the Fifth Dimension, let us know.”

“Maybe if you’d do a little field work instead of relying on your computers and scans you might actually find out a few things,” she retorted. “But you should inform the Doctor that something is not right here and let him evaluate the evidence.” That was standard operating procedure and standing orders.

“Do not tell me my job,” Cordish snapped. “The Doctor has much to do today preparing for tonight. He doesn’t need paranoid fantasies interrupting his mission. If you find something, then come back.”

If I do find something, and you haven’t tipped the Doctor, then you’re in for a trip to Hell without leaving the body, she thought, but knew there was no purpose to pressing things. She’d managed to get the message across properly and, not incidentally, to have it both on a security recording and on her own backup just in case things went bad and Cordish decided to shift the blame.

She sought out John Robey, who, like her, had been reduced by the frenzy of activity and organization to mostly helping out, and quickly told him what she’d found.

Robey was skeptical that it meant anything, but willing to take a look. “Probably sneaking off to a still or something,” he told her. “But, just in case, I think you’re right to be overcautious. We can handle more than these people can hand out, but it won’t stop some of ours being hurt if we have to. We just don’t know enough.”

When they reached the work area just after lunch, Robey was a little more interested. “They’re certainly up to something, those lugs,” he told her. “You could see them whispering this way and that at lunch, and I noticed they didn’t drink nearly as much as usual.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a small controller with a set of tiny switches. Activating it, he threw a single small switch, then pointed the device at a spot in the cornfield. His robe, so snowy white, began to darken, then take on the coloration of the field. It was not a uniform color, but rather a very good one with mottled patterns designed to make it very difficult to see him. He then handed the device to Eve, who activated it with her thumbprint and then did the same.

“Wish I’d had one of these when I tracked them before,” she muttered.

“We’re lucky to have this one. Not exactly standard issue.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“It was volunteered by one of the Security staff guarding the goodies out at the ship,” he told her.

“Volunteered?”

“Don’t ask. Just remember that God helps those who help themselves.”

She handed it back to him. “Don’t lose that. If we have to explain this color later on, we’ll be in more trouble than if this is some alien trap.”

Now they only had to wait.

It was a bit past fourteen hundred on their watches when the three local men, who’d been working different areas, knocked off and walked over to confer. Robey pointed his communicator at them and frowned. “That’s odd. Interference.”

She almost jumped. “What? How is that possible?”

“It’s not, unless it’s either us or something else on our level. You may well have something here.”

“Want to contact Security?” She hated the idea of going through them, but this was at least evidence of a kind that Cordish might accept as suspicious.

“Tried. It’s there, too.”

“I don’t understand. If it’s all over, why isn’t this place suddenly crawling with our people, scans, you name it?”

“I doubt if it’s universal. I think it’s very low level and probably so limited it might not even get picked up by the ship. That implies that one of those three has something that they can turn on or off.”

It was gone as quickly as it appeared, but now the three had stopped their conversation. Gregnar shouted to one of the other farmers that he was going to do a go-round, as he called it, and that Krag would remain.

Robey looked at Eve. “I’ll take Gregnar, you take Alon. Check in every few minutes and let me know if anything happens the moment it does. Got that?”

She nodded. “You want to call Sinai and get us both traced?”

“Not a bad idea, if they’ll go for it. I’ll handle that. Better be off, and this time don’t be seen! Stay well back. He’s off, and so’s my man!”

She slipped through the corn, trying to be quiet, and came to a wide area between rows just near the edge of the planting. The corn was high enough to mask her, and there was a stiff enough breeze that she hoped she wouldn’t be easily heard. The trick would be to keep Alon in sight while satisfying him that nobody was there.

For several minutes, it was easier than usual. Once out of sight of the other villagers, Alon quickened his pace, more concerned with getting somewhere fast than with looking for any shadows. Still, at least twice he suddenly stopped and whirled around, as if to catch anyone who might be following, and on the second of these he took a good two minutes staring right into the corn rows. She froze, and even held her breath for a while although she was certainly too far behind him for that to be a factor. Had she been in her usual white he would definitely have seen her, just one row in, but if he saw her now he certainly didn’t show it.

Quickening his pace, he reached a main irrigation canal, now almost dry because it wasn’t being used, and, without much hesitation, he jumped down into it and began walking out from the corn and towards fields planted only with a cloverlike crop used to refresh the soil and prevent erosion.

That made it tough, since it meant she’d have to come out of her hiding place in order to keep following him. Nonetheless, this was nonstandard enough behavior that it was worth following up—and reporting.

“Brother John?” she whispered.

“Go, Sister.”

“Alon is in the clear, walking away in a canal.”

“Looks like my boy’s not where he wants to be yet. Stay well back, be careful, but see where he’s going.”

By now, Alon was almost a speck on the horizon, only his bobbing head visible. She decided to step out, first looking at the canal and then reporting, “No problem. It’s wet at the bottom but mostly mud. His tracks are pretty obvious. I’m going to go at a slow pace here. It can’t be all that far—where he’s going, I mean. They never are more than an hour and a half late.”

“Well, my boy’s just turned and gone into a pretty tall wheat field here. This isn’t gonna be easy.”

“Be careful!”

“Yeah, you, too. If this isn’t a still they’re going for, then there’s gonna be one hell of a security stink.”

And maybe the answer to this puzzle, she added to herself. Nothing was going to keep her from finding her man, not now.

“Uh oh!”

“What?” she asked, nervous.

“He’s doubling back! He’s short-cutting directly for you!”